I think Heidegger's notion of the being of beings is meaningless. Some philosophers think Heidegger himself realized that the ambition of fundamental ontology cannot be realized. So he dropped the idea from Being and Time in his later writings. — Jackson

He didn’t drop the idea. In one of his last works, Time and Being, he takes up the Being of beings again:

Heidegger begins Being and Time saying his aim is to answer the question of the meaning of being in general. But by the end of the book, he says he still hasn't quite answered it. He does define Dasein's kind of being as the ontological difference , the in-between , happening , occurrence , the ‘as' structure , projection.

“ Something like "being" has been disclosed in the understanding of being that belongs to existing Da-sein as a way in which it understands.”

“The ontological condition of the possibility of the understanding of being is temporality itself.”(Basic Problems, 1927)

“In Being and Time, Being is not something other than time: "Time" is a preliminary name for the truth of Being, and this truth is what prevails as essential in Being and thus is Being itself.”(What is Metaphysics)

But he leaves us with the following questions:

“The existential and ontological constitution of the totality of Da-sein is grounded in temporality. Accordingly, a primordial mode of temporalizing of ecstatic temporality itself must make the ecstatic project of being in general possible. How is this mode of temporalizing of temporality to be interpreted? Is there a way leading from primordial time to the meaning of being? Does time itself reveal itself as the horizon of being?”

In the 1962 work , On Time and Being , he answers this question in the affirmative, with an addtional feature.

“Time, which is addressed as the meaning of Being in Being and Time, is itself not an answer, not a last prop for questioning, but rather itself the naming of a question. The name "time" is a preliminary word for what was later called "the truth of Being." “ Being and Time is on the way toward finding a concept of time, toward that which belongs most of all to time, in terms of which "Being" gives itself as presencing. This is accomplished on the path of the temporality of Dasein in the interpretation of Being as temporality.”

In the 1962 work, Heidegger ‘grounds' being in temporality and ‘grounds' both time and being in ‘appropriation'. Here he defines being as a letting be of presencing (unconcealing) which stands within the realm of temporality.

her ya go:


“In my view, Derrida's eventual solution to the problem of how to avoid the Heideggerian "we," and, more generally, avoid the trap into which Heidegger fell by attempting to affiliate with or incarnate something larger than himself, consists in what Gasch6 refers to disdain­fully as "wild and private lucubrations."lo The later Derrida privatizes his philosophical thinking, and thereby breaks down the tension between ironism and theorizing. He simply drops theory - the attempt to see his predecessors steadily and whole - in favor of fantasizing about those predecessors, playing with them, giving free rein to the trains of associa­tions they produce. There is no moral to these fantasies, nor any public (pedagogic or politicat) use to be made of them;” Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity)

I don't remember Rorty saying that. And if you cannot cite something, there's nothing to talk about. — Jackson

But I don’t want you to be lonely. Besides, I’m driving home in rush hour traffic, which makes it hard to satisfy you need for scholarly rigor at the moment.

He also misread Heidegger’s notion. of transcendence as the use
of skyhooks.
— Joshs

Not familiar. Where does that observation come from? — Jackson

From “Heidegger, Contingency, and Pragmatism

“There is no validating reality behind our narrative; Being and interpretive narrative arise together. Therefore, Rorty appropriates for pragmatism only Heidegger’s sense of contingency and the transitory condition of human life, along with the ability to radically redescribe Western culture. He sets aside Heidegger’s nostalgia for an authentic world-view that says something neutral about the structure of all present and possible world-views. By doing so, Rorty aligns himself more with John Dewey’s brand of anti-essentialism and anti-foundationalism than with Heidegger’s project.”( Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

He thought Derrida was just being a trickster,
— Joshs

Rorty: "Admirers of Derrida like myself" — Jackson

Yes, Rorty respected Derrida for deconstructing the metaphysics of presence but misread his method as mere poetic playfulness.

Care to speculate on why he misread or deliberately reconstructed Derrida in this way? — Tom Storm

it wasn’t deliberate. Doritos very difficult to understand from an anglo-American philosophical background

I liked Shaun Gallagher’s account in ‘Conversations in postmodern hermeneutics’:

“ I want to show that the conception of the conversation of mankind employed by Rorty and Caputo for
postmodern purposes is not a good model for postmetaphysical/ postmodern thought.”
“ The postmodern idea is not that there is one overarching conversation, but that there is a plurality
of conversations, some constituting relative differends in relation to others. It is still possible that fusions can happen between conversations, not in the sense of unifying or reducing different conversations, but in the sense of creating new and different conversations by linking one to another; or again, not in the sense of a fusion of horizons, but in the sense of a creation of new
horizons.”

Rorty simply gave up and started teaching Literature. He knew Derrida and Heidegger very well, and, I suppose was inspired by Heidegger's privileging of poetry and its special power to ironize the world and thereby make new meanings, determined the answers to such questions were "made not discovered". — Constance

Unfortunately he didn’t. He thought Derrida was just being a trickster, and completely missed the complexity and rigor of his philosophizing. He also misread Heidegger’s notion. of transcendence as the use
of skyhooks. That’s why Rorty mistook literature as the antidote to philosophy, as if literary movements didn’t already share in the metaphysics embraced by philosophical eras.

how can we realize that it is established, since our mind is part of all the things that are subject to change? — Angelo Cannata

To say that the world , language and mind undergo continuous change does not mean the inability to discern ongoing themes and patterns in the flux.

if everything changes continuously, then it is never possible to know what we are talking about, because one second later it has changed its meaning. — Angelo Cannata

One can argue that everything changes continuously, but in such a way that we can think of events continuing to be the same differently. This is the basis of phenomenology and the work of Heidegger and Derrida.

↪Joshs Enactivism (which was the focus of my graduate work) is not an "antidote" to prospect theory but, IME, a complementary model. — 180 Proof

Not all, but some enactivists, those who integrate phenomenology into their work , argue that there are important philosophical gaps between Kahneman’s metaphysical assumptions and theirs.They also believe this about Dennett, Searle , Clark and free energy principle-based neuroscience models. I would just argue that Kahneman’s approach, like these others, is a sophisticated causal model ( reciprocal, dynamical causality), not as far removed for behaviorism as many would like to believe.

↪Agent Smith For a post-Freudian/Jungian (woo), Nobel Prize winning scientific treatment of functional interactions between the un/subconscious and "conscious" meta/cognition, I recommend Daniel Kahneman's excellent Thinking, Fast and Slow. — 180 Proof

For an antidote to Kahneman’s reductionism I recommend anything by enactivist embodied cognitive
theorists.

Overall Dennett’s view seems more a matter of practicality than what laymen truly mean when they say someone who has done evil things deserves to be punished or express satisfaction when something bad happens to a wrongdoer. To quote someone else desert without retribution is just another name for attribution but we don't need the concept of free will for attribution. — Captain Homicide

Caruso and Morris agree with you:

“We contend that the concept of just deserts is inconsistent with Dennett’s reformed consequentialist account of moral responsibility. As Tom Clark writes in response to Dennett:

Whether as consequentialists we should still talk of just deserts is debatable, given the strong deontological, retributive connotations…What you’re advo­cating is the practical necessity of punishment, not its intrinsic goodness, but ‘‘just deserts’’ strongly implies that the offender’s suffering is intrinsically good, which you don’t think is the case. So I think we should drop talk of just
deserts so we don’t mislead people about what we believe are defensible justifications for punishment. (2012)

We believe Clark is correct. Given the canonical understanding of ‘‘just deserts’’ and how it is used to justify various retributive attitudes, judgments, and treatments, Dennett’s use of the term lends itself to easy confusion and gives the mistaken impression that he is setting out to preserve something that he is not.
In conclusion, Dennett’s brand of compatibilism fails to preserve retributivist desert moral responsibility—in fact, it rejects it outright. Furthermore, his justification for punishment, being consequentialist in nature, is completely consistent with the skeptic’s rejection of free will and just deserts. While Dennett himself prefers to retain the notion of just deserts, we contend that this is misleading and potentially inconsistent with his reformist conception of moral responsibility. Drawing from this
analysis, we conclude more generally that Dennett-style compatibilists who deny that determined agents could exercise retributivist free will should forego asserting the
existence of ‘‘free will’’ in humans in order to avoid terminological confusion.”

(Compatibilism and Retributivist Desert Moral Responsibility: On What is of Central Philosophical and Practical Importance. Gregg D. Caruso & Stephen G. Morris)

↪Joshs What are you talking about? He is not a philosopher nor a psychologist. — I like sushi

Someone forgot to tell Roger , then.
Note that this is a philosophy forum and it’s no coincidence Penrose is cited here, since physics is often treated as a source of philosophical wisdom. Penrose himself has offered paychological speculation on the the relationship between qm and consciousness, and philosophical opinion on mathematical platonism.

“Roger Penrose On Why Consciousness Does Not Compute: The emperor of physics defends his controversial theory of mind.”

https://nautil.us/roger-penrose-on-why-consciousness-does-not-compute-6127/

https://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Psychology-Roger-Penrose-Behavioral-Sciences/s?rh=n%3A573358%2Cp_lbr_one_browse-bin%3ARoger+Penrose

“In his 1997 book Shadows of the Mind, Penrose speculated further that free will might result from a dualistic mind influencing the random R process. This was the "interactionist" view of neuroscientist John Eccles and philosopher Karl Popper.”

Anyway, always a delight to listen to Penrose. He is someone who probably won’t be appreciated more widely until after he has gone. One of the few living legends of physics still with us - far outshone Hawkings imo! — I like sushi

I’m glad he is respected by those interested in physics. Too bad he makes such an awful psychologist and philosopher.

are there any sound non consequentialist arguments for basic desert and punishment under Compatibilism or are the ideas simply too irreconcilable to be held simultaneously?

Are there any good sources on the matter that can help me understand the issue? — Captain Homicide

Doesnt P.F. Strawson’s Freedom and Resentment lay out a non-consequentialist compatibilist notion of desert?

https://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/P._F._Strawson_Freedom_&_Resentment.pdf

Can non-sentient things (non-animals) have perspective? If not, what is the "platform" of interactions? What is even an "event" in this non-sentient/perspective world? — schopenhauer1

I like Eugene Gendlin ‘s thinking on identity and interaction in non-living entities:

“We predict that physics must eventually give up pointwise localization in space and time and single, non-interacting particle states. There will always be two or more particles, and their definitions, as well as those of places and times, will be definable only backwards, from interaction... For us the same units do not need to last through a change. If they do, it is a narrower special case. In the old model events must occur within a static multiplicity of space points, time points, and particles. A particle alone is "this one," "the same one" that was earlier there and is now here...In the new model the occurrence forms its own new multiplicity. If a space time-particle grid is desired, it is determined from the occurrence. Nothing in the new model forces us to lose anything from the old, if we want it. But with the new model we do reject the assumption that occurring must be determined and necessitated by the units of previous occurrence.” (Gendlin 1983)

I also like Piaget’s approach:

“… phvsics is far from complete, having so far been unable to integrate biology and a fortiori the behavioural sciences within itsel. Hence, at present, we reasOn in dififerent and artificially simplified domains, physics being up to now only the science of non-living, non-conscious things. When physics becomes more 'general-to use C.-E. Guye's striking expression-and discovers what goes on in the matter of a living body or even in one using reason, the epistemological enrichment.of the object by the subject, which we assume here as a hypothesis, will appear perhaps as a simple relativistic law ot perspective or of co- ordination of referentials, showing that for the subject the object could not be other than it appears to him, but also that from theObject's point of view the subject could not be different.”

I also like Evan Thompson’s view:

"I follow the trajectory that arises in the later Husserl and continues in Merleau-Ponty, and that calls for a rethinking of the concept of “nature” in a post-physicalist way—one that doesn't conceive of fundamental nature or physical being in a way that builds in the objectivist idea that such being is intrinsically of essentially non-experiential. But, again, this point doesn't entail that nature is intrinsically or essentially experiential (this is the line that pan-psychists and Whiteheadians take). (Maybe it is, but I don't think we're now in position to know that.) All I want to say for now (or think I have grounds for saying now) is that we can see historically how the concept of nature as physical being got constructed in an objectivist way, while at the same time we can begin to conceive of the possibility of a different kind of construction that would be post-physicalist and post-dualist–that is, beyond the divide between the “mental” (understood as not conceptually involving the physical) and the “physical” (understood as not conceptually involving the mental)."

It is not so much a matter of "beginning with the subject" in my view, but of forming a distinction between appearance and reality. For Kant, we can know only appearances, but he also was the first to show that we can know what are the necessary conditions for any knowledge of appearances. — Janus

The fundamental premise of phenomenology is that there is nothing but appearance. No veil between what is ( the thing in itself) and what seems to be. The appearance IS the thing in itself.

Modern physics is not anthropocentric, other than in the definitional sense that any human inquiry is anthropocentric in that it is an inquiry by the anthropos, by us. The notion of the human is a "derived abstraction" as are all notions altogether, including those of Heidegger, Derrida, etc. — Janus

Modern physics , to the extent that it accepts a form of realism, assumes a split between what appears to a subject and reality. There is the remnant here of Descartes’ res cogito, which is traceable back to medieval theology as the soul which reality appears before. Anthropos is the knowing , feeling subject, the ineffable internality making the hard problem hard. The empirical notion of the human , as a concatenation of physical bits, implies the conscious experience of the meaning of this concatenation, the awareness of the bits that belong to the real.

By abstraction I mean entities such as objects having spatial extension and temporal duration. They are ideal entities, intended as having no ‘subjectivity’ within themselves but instead only enduring properties. What is abstracted away , and attributes to the ‘subject’, is the pragmatic relevance which allows them to appear as what they are in the first place. Derrida and Heidegger don’t abstract away the relevance in a subject, but begin from the irreducible relation, which is neither subject nor object but the in-between.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is no more respected as it once was. There's been a ton of writing and empirical work on this hypothesis. Most people no longer think strong versions of it are true (i.e. it seems like people's thoughts are not deeply constrained by their native language). But weaker versions of it are still, I think, being debated. — Haglund

When I said that language produces what it symbolizes I didn’t mean that already learned word meanings dictate our understanding of new events aka Sapir Whorf. On the contrary, it is events that produce fresh senses of preciously learned words by interacting with what we already know. That is what Wittgenstein shows. Words only exist in the context of their actual use.

In my view, experiences are just experiences until they are conceptualized, put into words. Until then, they have no meaning. As I see it, art has no meaning, although many disagree with that — T Clark

In college I came up with a way of understanding f the world that I have been elaborating ever since. But it took my 5 years before I was able to write a single word to articulate it. What I had in those first 5 years was certainly conceptualized, but it was not verbalized. I would describe this form of knowing as like an impressionistic sketch.
Word are merely the final stage in consolidating a set of ideas that begin as felt intuitions. I can tell you that these intuitions had a profound effect on me , guiding my thinking implicitly well before I was able to make them explicit with words.

Is that all that language does is ‘say’ what ‘is’? Doesn’t language PRODUCE what is rather than merely express an already extant ‘it’?
— Joshs

No. That's not how it normally works. Ideas form, language follows. It sets ideas free. — Haglund

Who are the authorities on language you’re following here? Certainly not Wittgenstein or the phenomenologists.

I have a undergraduate degree in math and read about quantum physics and cosmology. Interesting, but does not itself tell me much about the world. — Jackson

What does tell you about the world?

My own understanding is that it addresses the question, What kind of thing is the world?
Does the universe have a beginning? Did it come from somewhere?
Metaphysics overlaps with epistemology--and aesthetics--so the clear delineation is not useful to make — Jackson

This sounds to me more like meta-science , a questioning approach that takes for granted the main methodological assumptions operating within the sciences of its day. It seekes only to organize , categorize and clarify within a given set of overarching normative conventions. This is different from what the major continental philosophers throughout history have done, which is overturn these accepted assumptions. For instance, the shift from hypothetical inductive to deductive method as we move from Bacon to Popper. In order to embrace this definition of metaphysics one has to first recognize that there is no fixed definition of what science does or how it does it. There are instead assumptions scientists share with the rest of their culture that informs what they think they are doing.

I was not aware metaphysics had to be about grounding science. Not a definition I would abide by. — Jackson

As a postmodernist, I tend to think of metaphysics as synonymous with worldview, and worldviews are inclusive frames that address all aspects of culture , from the sciences to the arts to ethics and politics. What do you understand metaphysics to be?

Many scholars say Aristotle did not name his text "Metaphysics." Or that it simply referred to what he wrote after the Physics.
In the Metaphysics Aristotle describes the project as "first philosophy." Or, analysis of basic concepts. — Jackson

Yes, I’ve heard that. Given that the meaning of the term varies depending on which approaches in philosophy you favor, maybe the question here should be what would you like the definition of metaphysics to be.

Sorry, did not understand that. Why does metaphysics have to be about science? — Jackson

Is there any metaphysics that does not offer a grounding of the sciences, if not explicitly then implicitly?

The aim of metaphysics is to go beyond physics, beyond science
— Angelo Cannata

That is just not true. — Jackson

Sounds reasonable to me. How about this?

“In seeking a comprehensive account of everything, metaphysics is continuous with science, going beyond particular scientific theories.”
(Metaphysics of science between metaphysics and science, Michael Esfeld)

But affectivity, ethics, this kind of thing is inherently what matters, even if I don't have a language to say what it is. even if I were, as Foucault put it, being ventriloquized by history, there is this foundation of actuality that has a palpable "presence", beyond what a language game can say. Witt said in Nature and Culture that "the good" was his idea of divinity. — Constance

Is that all that language does is ‘say’ what ‘is’? Doesn’t language PRODUCE what is rather than merely express an already extant ‘it’? By language we don’t have to limit ourselves to words. Derrida said there is nothing outside of text , but he didn’t mean
symbolic language. He meant to include pre-linguistic perception , affect and valuation. This self that comes back to itself via a detour through the other is already a kind of pre-verbal language game. Could not the divine or the Good reproduce itself always differently through this enacting of subjectivity?

So, I would say: if you suppose, for example, that the moon is a planet, just to see how this idea works in comparison to the results coming from observation through technical instruments, then “the moon is a planet” is a scientific hypothesis, which means, there is no intention to make it the ultimate, fundamental system of ideas about the moon.
If you say “the moon is a planet” with the intention to build an assertion that should resist to any criticism, any objection, any doubt, so that, if different conclusions come from observation, we should think that most probably observation is wrong, then you are trying to build metaphysics. — Angelo Cannata

As a scientist , one understands the meaning of ‘moon’and ‘planet’ in relation to an overarching theoretical orientation than offers a predictive astronomical account. One’s
technical instruments, how they are used to observe and measure, contribute to the production of the theoretical orientation itself. Even as ‘there is no intention to make it the ultimate, fundamental system of ideas about the moon”, the wider metaphysical assumptions informing the general aasumptions concerning the moon and its connection with astronomical theory is left unexamined by that science. No amount of openness to disconfirmation via evidence will by itself alter that overarching metaphysics to the extent the scientist is not aware of the fact that observation and disconfirming evidence are moves within the frame. Changing the frame is not simply a matter of being beholden to evidential results from
one’s measuring instruments, since those instruments are themselves expressions of the frame.

Yes. They presume a definition of subjectivity as if it is self evident. Is a subject merely a biological entity? — Jackson

Not self-evident as a fact but identifiable as a relational performance. For them any empirical notion of subject as physico-chemical or biological is a derived abstraction. Science presumes
a definition of subjectivity in advocating for objectivity and the real, but does not make this explicit to itself. Subjectivity is not an entity, substance or content, but a pole of interaction.

I mean that the insistence of ideas like, one cannot conceive of a thoughtless world, retain all of their authority. — Constance

But where do they get their authority from , for the later Wittgenstein? I would suggest only through a particular language game in which that sentence is being used. Its authority would thus be contingent and pragmatic.
The above sentence , for instance, would be a tautology that doesn’t actually tell us anything new but can still have a specific and variable use in contexts in which it is uttered. We can’t ‘conceinve ’ what is ‘thoughtless’ just restates the already understood equivalence in meaning between conception and thought. So why do we utter the sentence? There can be widely various contexts in which we may want to make explicit what is implicit

my point stands re anthropomorphizing, and we are apparently in agreement about knowledge outside human experience being impossible. — Janus

I should note that for writers like Heidegger, Derrida and some of the phenomenologists, the notion of the human is presupposed but is instead a derived abstraction. From their vantage framing metaphysics in terms of what is within or outside of human experience is already anthropocentric because it begins from the notion of the human subject. nModern empirical science, including physics, is anthropocentric for this reason. The transcendental starting point for these authors is not yet a human subjectivity Even though it is a kind of subject, it does t lend itself to a dichotomy between what is experienced from a human point view and what is outside of it.

Do you have a reference? I'd be interested in reading more. — T Clark

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5972154/

Babies have to learn everything about the world and how to put it into words. In particular, emotions have to be expressed in socially specific ways. What we call "anger" isn't just one thing, it's a whole bunch of related but significantly different things. That's something else I've experienced directly. — T Clark

Are emotions just expressed is socially significant ways or, as Wittgenstein shows , is their very sense created via these contextual engagements? Putting into words wouldnt merely be relating symbols to already formed meanings but allowing the worlds to form the sense of a meaning.

As I understand it, the picture theory of language was abandoned, but the insistence of logicality was not. For me, no one has ever convinced me that idealism of some kind is wrong. — Constance

I don’t think it would be wrong to say that Wittgenstein’s language games are a kind of idealism, but what do you mean by ‘logicality’? The ‘S is P’ propositional structure? Belief statements?

You may not, but traditionally metaphysics was understood according to that definition. — Janus

Not anymore , or not since Nietzsche( and Husserl, Heidegger , Derrida ,etc)

In "How Emotions are Made," Lisa Barrett describes how children learn concepts, names, of emotions by observing their own internal states, other people's emotional expressions, and the use of words for emotions — T Clark

This is true. I dont agree with the predictive processing f model of emotions, because it hasn’t transcended its behaviorist roots sufficiently. Affect and intention are much more intricately intertwined than pp recognizes. We dont have some general body-maintenance feedback first and then have to decide how to explain its meaning by relating it to a current situation. Emotions come already world-directed. There is never just some generic arousal that then has to be attributed. Feelings emerge from within experiences that are relevant to us in some way. We are never without a mood.

Not that ‘before’ we came along that it didn’t exist, but that the manner of its existence is unintelligible apart from the perspective brought to it by the observer. We can’t get ‘outside’ that perspective, even if we try and see the world as if there’s no observer. (Sorry for the length of this post.) — Wayfarer

This still seems to imply a factual status to the pre-human world. I prefer the idea that we could imagine a perspective within a pre-human universe, but even from
that perspective we find no neutral fact of the matter , but instead the same problem we faced when dealing with human interpretation of the world. That is , any facet of a world taken as what it is ‘in itself’ implies not only a relation with an environment to define what ‘it’ is, but a relation that produces it uniquely , and only in that moment, and only from ‘its’ perspective in that moment. A world creates and recreates itself , but in a way that is not accessible to a neutral
overview, because the nature of its fecundity is inherently perspectival. This is why matter is already value-laden

Young children experience emotions, but they have to learn what they are, what they mean, what they are called. — T Clark

I don’t think they have to learn what they mean in a fundamental sense. What they mean is inherent in their very expression as emotions. An emotion is a kind of appraisal of one’s situation, a way of interpreting its significance, whether one has a word label for the emotion or not.

Recently watched an exchange between Jonathan Haidt, Steven Pinker and Jordan Peterson, titled Enlightenment and the righteous mind. I think it relates to some of the issues raised in the OP. — universeness

It certainly does. Unfortunately I strongly disagree with the positions of all three of those thinkers. None of them have a grasp of what I consider to be the most important ideas in 20th and 21st century philosophy.

Right but what is a view without sentience? Besides using Wittgenstein to just say, "This is nonsense!" is there any other good responses here? — schopenhauer1

I think sentience as it is conventionally understood is a confused notion, as if to be sentient is to be possessed of some special substance or ineffable property in addition to how we understand physical stuff to interact. The problem is the way we wall off what we think of as the subject from the object. On one side is value, feeling and will, and on the other is dead content. No wonder we have a ‘hard problem’ and mystery of the gap between the in-itself and the for-itself. We created it with this artificial separation. Going the panpsychism route just reifies the split, and turning everything into information still assumes some sort of totalizing metaphysics. I like Nietzsche’s approach.

“Assuming that our world of desires and passions is the only thing “given” as real, that we cannot get down or up to any “reality” except the reality of our drives (since thinking is only a relation between these drives) – aren't we allowed to make the attempt and pose the question as to whether something like this “given” isn't enough to render the so-called mechanistic (and thus material) world comprehensible as well? I do not mean comprehensible as a deception, a “mere appearance,” a “representation” (in the sense of Berkeley and Schopenhauer); I mean it might allow us to understand the mechanistic world as belonging to the same plane of reality as our affects themselves –, as a primitive form of the world of affect, where everything is contained in a powerful unity before branching off and organizing itself in the organic process (and, of course, being softened and weakened –).

We would be able to understand the mechanistic world as a kind of life of the drives, where all the organic functions (self-regulation, assimilation, nutrition, excretion, and metabolism) are still synthetically bound together – as a pre-form of life? – In the end, we are not only allowed to make such an attempt: the conscience of method demands it. Multiple varieties of causation should not be postulated until the attempt to make do with a single one has been taken as far as it will go (– ad absurdum, if you will). This is a moral of method that cannot be escaped these days; – it follows “from the definition,” as a mathematician would say. The question is ultimately whether we recognize the will as, in effect, efficacious, whether we believe in the causality of the will. If we do (and this belief is really just our belief in causality itself –), then we must make the attempt to hypothetically posit the causality of the will as the only type of causality there is.

“Will” can naturally have effects only on “will” – and not on “matter” (not on “nerves” for instance –). Enough: we must venture the hypothesis that everywhere “effects” are recognized, will is effecting will – and that every mechanistic event in which a force is active is really a force and effect of the will. – Assuming, finally, that we succeeded in explaining our entire life of drives as the organization and outgrowth of one basic form of will (namely, of the will to power, which is my claim); assuming we could trace all organic functions back to this will to power and find that it even solved the problem of procreation and nutrition (which is a single problem); then we will have earned the right to clearly designate all efficacious force as: will to power. The world seen from inside, the world determined and described with respect to its “intelligible character” – would be just this “will to power” and nothing else. –“