I also think it is natural, once someone starts thinking for themselves, to require evidence for beliefs. — Janus

I generally agree, but not for moral beliefs because those are not or at least not easily verifiable with evidence. How many people do actually change their minds about those when confronted with evidence or rational argument? Not that many I'd say, even on this forum, and if they change their minds it's often because of some life-changing experience they had, not because they examined their beliefs rationally.

Forget the moral or ethical challenges―given all the physical challenges humanity faces, do you believe human life will look anything like it does today in a couple of centuries? I mean do you believe there will still be a huge population, technological societies, preservation of historical culture, religion? — Janus

No, I think a lot will change given the physical challenges, how that exactly will look like I wouldn't know... But I do think these changes will inevitablely also included societal organisational and ideological changes. That is what I see myself doing, looking at a different ideas and how they might fit with a changing world.

The problem is that religion asks people to believe things for which there is no evidence. That works as long as people give lip service because they are cowed by fear of punishment, as was the case in the Middle Ages, or as long as they are illiterate and impressionable, which was also the case for most of human history, or as long as they are not capable of critical thought.

So what do you propose? A return to imposed beliefs, theocracy?

I really don't have a concrete proposal in mind, I'm mostly exploring the possibilities... But since religion (and not necessarily organised religion like we have had it) has been an important part of most of human history except maybe for this small slice of Western history we happen to be living through, it seems like something worth thinking about.

I think the picture you paint of religion there is a bit one-side, evaluated from a perspective of the Western tradition that elevates reason or critical thought itself as the summum bonum. It's also merely a belief that it is good that everybody be taught critical thinking skills in order to make up their own minds... as we estabilished earlier, not everyone can or is even interested in doing that.

We "impose" beliefs on people anyway, no matter what societal and religious organisation, just by virtue of the fact that humans don't suddenly pop into existence as blank slate adults.... there's allways a set of beliefs and underlying assumptions people are enculturated in. And if secular states teach people they should look for evidence and examine their beliefs critically and rationally, then yes that would make any mythopoetical belief problematic.

None of this is to say we should do away with critical thinking, if such a thing were even possible, just that perhaps we have overvalued it.

Is that what you'd like to see? — Janus

No ideally not, but I'm just not convinced that the current way of doing things will work out in the long run, if you project that forward say a couple of centuries. What I don't want to see is things devolving again like they did in the 20th century.

I disagree with you that the state is "value neutral"―the laws of the state reflect the most significant moral injunctions. So, what is missing according to you? Are you advocating something like the "noble lie" when it comes to instilling religious belief in children?

I don't see why we would need a transcendent authority (God) as lawgiver, when we already have the state as lawgiver, and I think it is arguable that most people do not think murder, rape, theft, corruption, exploitation and so on, are acceptable. So just what is it that you think is missing? — Janus

The noble lie maybe doesn't work anymore, after the 'dead of God'. But the need religion fulfilled before the dead of God presumably hasn't gone away. What is missing in secular states is a sense of the mythopoetical, the Dionysian or however you want to call it... something that moves or inspires people to des-individuate into or unite with the group. There is still some kind of tribal desire if you will to be more than atomised individual subjects of a rational state.

And what we precisely don't want it seems to me, is the state taking up that role, because that is to road to nationalism or worse... fascism. If you don't have some other force like religion, you always risk some great leader type stepping up and using these unfulfilled desires for his ends.

Not according to this site:

Europeans who consider themselves atheists are a small minority, except in France and in Sweden, where about 20 per cent say that they are atheists; a vast majority of all Europeans nominate themselves as religious persons. — Janus

These numbers maybe are a bit surprising, not for south and east-central Europe, but certainly for North and Western Europe where I'm from. Very rarely is religion something that is discussed or practiced in public, not with people I meet, but also not more generally in various public media. So in so far they are religious it certainly seems something more private and individual.

Further down the site it says the following:

With the word of the sociologist Grace Davie, it’s a kind of ‘believing without belonging’. People pick and choose religious beliefs, doctrines, and practices and they are mixing and matching them, as they would select food in a cafeteria, so we can talk of ‘cafeteria religion’, or as ‘church-free spirituality’. Europeans remain religious, their approach is eclectic, and they borrow ideas from several traditions. Meanwhile, many institutionalized churches are running empty, especially in the West.

I'd say maybe they are 'spiritual' rather than religious. It seems to me religion implies something more public with practices and institutions that curate a certain tradition. It's Protestantism, the lack of central organisation, but then without the Book or local church even.

Maybe one could just say that is fine, people can make up their own minds. But as I alluded to earlier I doubt that is true, maybe for the philosophical types it is, but not for most.

I think a lot of people learn by mimicking and copying others (children certainly do), hence the success of all these influencer types today. And so if you don't have organised religion anymore and the state is supposed to be secular and value-neutral... the only ones left with enough resources can almost only be commercial actors, who end up molding the minds of people, for their interests.

My child likes to play a game where she points her finger at me, almost touching my face, but stops just an inch away, saying, “I’m not touching you, I’m not touching you.” This is trolling. By contrast, when she sits in the back seat arguing with her brother, and I tell them to stop, she might protest, “I’m not touching him.” That is bullshit. The latter feigns innocence for the sake of impression management. The former goes beyond this and delights in provoking a reaction. — Colo Millz

This was very funny, especially the dry serious way you conveyed it.

I would say if it weren't for Plato rethorics would be considered the 'natural' way of using speech. And Protagoras would consider appeal to truth just another form of sophistry.

Bullshitting then is perhaps a more honest self-conscious way of using speech in that it recognizes and plays with the inherent rethorical nature of speech. And trolling would be a way to actively undermine the force of the rethorical game the sophists that appeal to truth play.

If rethorics was the name of the game in pre-socratic Greece, than there is nothing essentially nihilistic about it.

Right, but it is not as though religion, as opposed to theocracy, has been "done away with" (in the West). — Janus

Well in Europe that's probably more the case than in the US. Most non-muslim Europeans are secular nowadays. There have been concerted efforts to do away with it, from different groups over the past few centuries (bourgeois liberals, socialists, academia, hippies etc etc). And that's not to say they might not have had good reason to do so, but there hasn't really come anything in its place.

I think that what the OP complains about...the disenchantment of Nature due to a supposed decline of reverence for nature is a furphy, a strawman.

There is a tendency in all transcendence-based eschatalogically motivated religions to disvalue this world as the source of suffering, the veil of illusion or the vale of tears in favour of an imagined perfect realm.

So it is not really a case of the disenchantment of Nature, but of the disenchantment of the transcendent accompanying a return to nature. This begins with Aristotle...think of Rafael's painting 'The School of Athens'...Plato points to the heavens and Aristotle points to the ground — Janus

Yes I agree with that I think. A lot of these analysis of the crisis of meaning gloss over the fact that Christianity might itself already have been a part of the problem. They kindof loosely equate Christianity with any religion, whereas it was already a very peculiar kind of departure from the mythological polytheistic religions that came before. Those did enchant the natural world by embellishing it, not by transcending it.

But the societies we are a part of aren't recognized as being an end in themselves, they are just there to fulfil the desires of it's members.
— ChatteringMonkey

If the desires are conditioned into the people rather than being critically realized by them, then of course that's a problem. We come to be blind followers instead of critically active members in our communities.

Today we might say we are brainwashed by culture in the form of advertising and popular media, whereas in the past, in theocratic and aristocratic societies, and today in autocratic societies, critical thinking is not only implicitly discouraged, but explicitly banned under penalty of punishment. — Janus

Yes I agree, that's why I've always thought this whole free speech debate we had recently was a bit of a red herring.

The idea that we are these autonomous free agents self-determining what we will be and want to do based on this market of free ideas seems fundamentally misguided. By the time we are mature enough to really begin to discern we have already been enculturated in some or other mores and have inherited certain hierarchies of values we use to discern... doing away with religion only creates a void for advertisers to jump in. Edward Bernays certainly figured that one out.

Science remains indispensable, but it cannot by itself tell us what anything means. One can retain plenty of respect for science while recognising that fact, which is built into the very foundations of the method. — Wayfarer

Maybe you can't. Religion and myth is build on a certain non-literal and wholistic understanding of the world, where the values and meaning naturally flows from.

Literal use of language to describe the world and to accumulate knowledge eventually ends up dissolving that mythical super structure.

Okay, that's an assertion―can you provide an argument for it? I mean, we all, as members of a society, and to one degree of consciousness or another, play a part in a larger whole―we have no choice but to do that. — Janus

But the societies we are a part of aren't recognized as being an end in themselves, they are just there to fulfil the desires of it's members. And maybe that works to some extend for those that have their desires met for the most part, probably not so much for those that are less fortunate.

What counts as evidence? In the 20th century you had a couple of big ideologies fighting it out and trying to fill the void left by religion. People do seem to crave being a part of a larger story, if it isn't religion, than maybe nationalism, or maybe just supporting a sports club or saving the world from climate disaster etc etc...

I'm not the most religious person, but even I do also intuitively feel like just fulfilling my individual desires doesn't quite do it.

Maybe because meaningful is only really meaningful if it transcends mere individual preferences, because it plays a part in a larger whole... that would be the reason for it.

Yes ok you were making another point indeed, namely that improving welfare would be hindered by not also making the mitigation efforts.

My point was that the goal of improving welfare is itself something that goes against the goal of mitigation, because in practice you end up using more fossil fuels, illustrated by the graph @frank posted.

If Asia-Pacific coal consumption is surging because of poverty alleviation and industrial development, then mitigation isn’t optional. It’s the condition for those gains to be sustainable. With no mitigation, alleviation efforts become attempts to refill increasingly rapidly leaking buckets. — Pierre-Normand

I can see how one gets to this conclusion, the reasoning makes some sense. It does assume however that we can increase welfare and reduce the use of fossil fuels at the same time, which seems like a big leap considering that the whole system we build after the industrial revolution is build on the energy from fossil fuels.

Isn't the more straightforward conclusion that increasing welfare for 8 billion people isn't possible without destroying the earths biosphere (which would eventually also destroy our welfare)?

Accepting that conclusion is a big ask however, because it is essentially incompatible with progressivism.

In other words, the very process of filling other buckets (economic growth, poverty reduction) is widening the hole (climate destabilization). This makes Hayhoe’s metaphor vivid, not refuted. — Pierre-Normand

Aren't you essentially making the same point here, that resolving our problems (growth and poverty reduction etc) makes the problem worse (cause more warming because of CO2)?

"People often think of climate change as a separate bucket at the end of a long row of other buckets of problems we're trying to fix that are wrong in the world," Hayhoe told Axios.

"This includes poverty, disease and access to clean water."

"Climate change is not a separate bucket," Hayhoe said. "The reason we care about climate change is that it's the hole in every bucket." — Pierre-Normand

And the reason we can't get off of fossil fuels, is because without them we wouldn't even have buckets.

I don't know how you're seeing divine knowledge as a component of dualism. How does that work? — frank

I don't see it necessarily as an aspect of dualism, that was the point I was trying to make. Pre-socrates I think it was mostly a matter of a wider or better perspective on the same world. The Gods had a birds-eye perspective and humans merely a frogs-perspective or some such, less complete and more flawed. The difference is merely one of scale on the same continuum, not a real dualism which assumes another transcendental world (a real difference in kind).

I think the dualism came from Plato and Socrates (who probably had their inspirations too no doubt), where an emphasis is put on reason, that is consciously thinking things through logically in non-metaphorical literal concepts, in universals (i.e. dialectics). To me that seems to be the way you get to the idea of an immaterial, eternal and transcendental realm, because universals are a-temporal and immaterial.

Yes globalisation and offshoring would suggest one has to look at things at a global level, and not at the level of national economies. A lot of the most pressing ecological problems and key resource reserves are also to be looked at globally.

Maybe so, they certainly had a concept of the divine in general, and 'divine knowledge' for instance. But the Gods generally don't seem to have come from another realm, but were part of and interacting with this world... they lived on mount Olympus.

What I envision as 'divine' and 'divine knowledge' for the pre-socratic Greeks, is not necessarily something coming from another transcendental realm, but just something more perfect and complete because they had a better point of view from on high. Like you have a better and more complete view of the earth from orbit then from the surface.

There is the underworld where souls go after dead yes, but that doesn't seem to be the kind of place where one would go looking for divine knowledge exactly.

No doubt you had all kinds of dualisms before, but the christian spirit-body dualism, and the emphasis on the word of God (religion of the book) seems like a new thing coming out of a culture that put a lot of stock in reason. Philosophy was an invention of the Greeks.

My perhaps ideosyncratic take is that a misunderstanding, or deformation, of the 'logos' by Plato, later taken over by Christianity, is the origin of this dualism.

Consider that in Heraclitus metaphysics of becoming, "logos" is the regularities or patterns in the world that can be apprehended by us because we evolved from this world. We can to some extend intuït them, or understand them because we have an innate abilty to recognize patterns.

Note that 'reason' doesn't necessarily come into play here, we do not need to consciously think through formal arguments to be able to derive patterns from our experiences.

Heraclitus was no dialectician!

In Plato (and Socrates) dialectics became the dominant form of arriving at truth, that is via conscious logical arguments. Concepts and language are the building blocks of these arguments. And a feature of language is that in abstracting concepts from the world, from particulars to universals, it pulls them out of their spacio-temporal context.... concepts are immaterial and eternal. That is the spirit.

Plato takes these unchanging forms as primary or real... eternal being instead of constant becoming. An understanding of the structure of the world, i.e. Logos, then is arrived at via conscious reasoning in terms of a-temporal concepts.

From the patterns of a temporal world of becoming we are a part of, Logos morphs into a transcendental realm of reason, and later into 'the word' of God... and so you get a spirit split from the body.

The Chinese knew not to make the same mistake as the dao that can be named is not the eternal Dao.

The resulting debate, therefore, concerns the epistemology of moral improvement: whether justice is better secured by refining the wisdom of the past, or by subjecting that past to rational critique guided by universal moral principles. — Colo Millz

I would submit that neither works at this point.

Reason was never all that great at the task at hand.

And refining wisdom of the past doesn't work anymore because the world has changed a lot since the scientific and industrial revolution and is changing at an ever increasing pace, so that refining the tradition incrementally can't really keep up with that pace.

IMHO the most important parameter is “carrying capacity”. This is the number of living organisms (crops, fish, trees, people) which a region can support without environmental degradation. This concept explicitly recognises that there are physical limits to growth. However, you rarely hear economists talk about this. — Peter Gray

Ooh you hear them talking about it, but almost exclusively in disparaging terms. Limits to growth is not to be taken seriously and actively fought against because it's an ideology set on destroying our civilization.

And to be fair, it would probably destroy civilization as we know it, if we were to actually try to take these limits into account, because growth is assumed and necessary to keep the system going. But then again, if we go ahead and reach the limits it's only a matter of time before civilisation collapses anyway because of ecological degradation and resource depletion... so it's not much of an argument.

Carrying capacity, and bio-physical limits are also not entirely fixed, in that one can increase the capacity and stretch limits with technology... but that also is only delaying the inevitable it seems to me. Still that is I guess the main argument against limits to growth, technology will solve the issues as we encounter them. It has in the past, for instance the green revolution or fracking (peak oil), and so it will do so again in the future. Again, a tentative argument at best if one thinks things through for a couple of seconds, but people will believe what they want to believe I guess.

Cyrus the great seems to have been the first in recorded history, maybe/probably it goes back further, as an answer to religious conflict as empires formed and tried to incorporate diverse religious traditions in one political entity. It's an empire 'meta'-valuesystem it seems to me.

Yes I think I can agree with that. I have come to see it also less in binary terms.

I left something out of my last post. I said that we are born with certain things. That’s true, but we also learn things from what we observe and experience. Those are not necessarily traditional or conventional, or even social. — T Clark

And yes we are part of the world, which puts some structural demands on us.

We have a nature, the world is a certain (changing) way... within those bounderary you can have diverging traditions, but not with infinite variation.

It was reading some scholarly article this afternoon about Nietzsche and his views on the laws of Manu, and on laws in general, which one could see as a kind of tradition, or a convention if you will.

He seems to think that these things do not form arbitrary exactly, but also not as a result of reason strictly speaking, but rather as the result of an artistic vision with a certain kind of society in mind.

This then gets codified and passed over the generations as the Truth, the law, the word of God etc... a holy lie.

Tradition then precedes people... it educates and forms them into what they are. So insofar as the OP is asking for a justification for tradition, he's got it exactly backwards if we follow this line of reasoning. Tradition, convention is typically what can be used as a justification.

One could say we have moved past that, and rely on reason now for justification, but reason will, as you say, necessarily have to go back to some kind of value because it doesn't say anything on its own.

I would say the assumptions, what values are deemed more important, are ultimately a matter of convention... of tradition. To say otherwise one would have to assume some objectivity to values, and that is a whole other can of worms.

Aah ok, but then I would just say this isn't about logic. That is, when people say they follow a tradition because that's what they did in the past they aren't making a logical argument, nor should they I think. Do you think people should be able to make a logical argument for everything they do, that seems off to me.

A logical argument perserves truth from the premisses to the conclusion... but the conclusion is only true if the premisses were true to begin with.

Anyway this is beside the point of the OP probably, I also don't quite got what you were getting at.

About conservation of truth.

Ok that's a more nuanced position already.

Let me present you two other possible problems with reason alone re-evaluating traditions.

One, people are to some extend creatures of habit, and at least in part formed by the traditions they are inculcated in... and will have trouble changing. Constant and rapid cycling through traditions might be bad for that reason alone, it risks creating anomie.

Two, I doubt a lot of people are really able to think through all first, second and third order effects of a certain tradition by reason alone. Often the effects of a tradition play out over multiple generations, and it's actually really hard to accurately and completely assess them without the benefit of experience over longer periods of time.

Alright, go for it!

Can you make the case that an appeal to reason yields better results than an appeal to tradition, not only on an individual level, but also on a societal level?

I don't think there's much to say about it, other than stating the obvious that perpetual growth is indeed not possible.

The only question then is when will growth stop? And that is largely a question of our ability to keep increasing available energy. Rome had donkeys and slaves... we have fossil fuels but those - being non-renewable in the short term - will run out eventually.

Maybe we will be able to transition to other forms of energy like nuclear or 'renewables' and increase available energy even more, or maybe not... in any case, at some point we would eventually hit some hard physical limits.

Ok start here.

Does illegitimacy even have meaning absent any legal order? Isn't legitimacy only a thing if there is already an established (legal) order? Or what do you take the word to mean?

And if it indeed doesn't have meaning in that case, then the whole question of what is a legitimate author of a constitution is in fact a meaningless question, and consequently the whole argumentation following that has no real basis.

Not theocracy, the Chinese are secular-ish... It's just the idea that those in power can rule, until they have shown to be unworthy of ruling.

I'm probably in favour of a kind of minimal state, though I think our societies have become so complex and highly technological that a lot would probably have to be included in that minimum. To give an example, you probably need some kind of environmental regulation now that we have the capacity to pollute as much as we do. That used to be less of an issue.

The mandate of heaven.

There's always going to be people and groups vying for power in some way or another.

People in power will determine what the constitution looks like, by and large.

But if they diverge from what people want so bad they risk revolt and losing the mandate of heaven.... and then you get another group with the power to change what's in the constitution, probably more in line with what people want.

So yes, there is no legitimate author, but you will have an author.

In a way Hobbes was closest to mark. The last thing one wants is a constant war of everybody against everybody as that is worse for everybody in the long run, so it makes sense to trade some freedoms for peace.

The difference now is that it will be happening on a global scale and in the centre of the 'empire' that conceived of and constituted the global order.

Also the Japanese are probably a little less prone to revolting than the western world.

There are these moments in history where a large enough group are fed up the current order and everything gets thrown in the balance, and you basically get a different system before and after.

Bookburnings and iconoclasm are not just some temporary outbursts of collective insanity, but a conscious effort to wipe away existing traditions. I think we might be due... but I hope you're right.

The real question which seldom seems to be answered is how our economic system that is fundamentally based on growth can handle the decrease of global population. Our financial system simply needs growth, just like the pension system. When the whole system is based on debt, you need that perpetual growth. If Japan (or now South Korea) shows us what will happen, the future seems to be of anemic growth. — ssu

Yet this won't be a dramatic event, but a thing that basically countries will cope, somehow, but it will have huge effects. Yet just like climate change, the real political outcomes will be disguised as crisis that cannot be directly linked to such subtle change as this one. — ssu

But you do see it now that the system will have to change... the stars are aligned (population decline, climate change, geopolitical shifts etc). Political crisis and conflict are typically the way these changes get implemented, in leaps and bounds, Trump is just the start of it.

It's the fertility rates that are dropping, all over the world and consistently over a long period now. Population will still increase for a while, because of increased life expectancy, but probably will start dropping rather sharply somewhere in the latter half of the century.

The long and short of it, is that it's good for the biosphere and bad for human societies.

Ecologically a lot of the issues are downstream of the sharp increase in population after the industrial revolution because we have taken in a lot of space and our production and consumption has become a strain on the natural world. From that perspective it is good that human population doesn't seem to be increasing indefinitely.

Economically and socially however, a society, or maybe rather our kind of modern societies, will have trouble keeping afloat. Economic growth is assumed and necessary because we rely on it to pay off our debts. For an economy to grow you typically need a constant influx of people of working age. Innovation, another necessity for economic growth, will presumably also decrease as the demographic ages because that generally comes from younger people.

Politically, parties and people tend to view it exclusively from one or the other perspective, even though both are true. It's easier to deny one or the other perspective, because the idea that both are true is rather unsatisfactory as the problem seems hard to solve then... either you get economic and social issues because of decline in population and a skewed demographic pyramid, or you get worse ecological problems because of ever growing economies which will eventually also cause social and economic issues.

I don't think the politics of it matter all that much either way, because policy efforts to increase fertility rates have hitherto been mostly unsuccessful.

For Landa, the case shows how society views insanity and uncontrollable passion (including intellectual passion) as less dangerous to social order than sane, utilitarian crime—since a rational criminal exposes the arbitrariness of property and social safeguards.

I don't think Landa has this quite right. He highlights an interesting case. However, I am not sure if this doesn't say more about more general aesthetic and moral attitudes. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree with your conclusion. Landa's interpretation, not only of Nietzsche, but also of its cultural reception and effects, seems forced. If anything one would expect it to shift opinions away from bourgeois ideology, because it's an ideology based precisely on utility.

Nietzsche devaluates utility and that somehow gets co-opted to strengthen an ideology based on utility?

Do you believe in a kind of perennialism, the idea that a lot of these religions or wisdom traditions point to a similar thing, but just use different conceptions for it? Or do you think they really are fundamentally different in some important ways.

I was struck by the similarities for instance between Heraclitus notion of the wisdom and the Doaist. This notion of the one/doa/logos that is beyond conception, desire being the thing that leads us away from the one etc etc... Both are situated arround the same time, 500 BC. It is possible that they influenced eachother, or rather had older sources in common, but more likely is probably that they independantly came to similar conclusions because of the way things are.

A certain guy with a moustache would say the Western tradition, Christianity is still a young tradition, and that this ascetic path eventually leads to a kind of Buddhism where the will get negated (for instance Schopenhauer). Maybe that's overly reductive and determinist, I don't know. But it does seem to me like a 'logical' path a tradition would follow give the nature of world (changing, impermanent) and the nature of the human mind (fixating, grasping for permanence).

How does one reconcile with the ever changing impermanent without negating the will altogether? Some of your quotes seem to point to moderation, some of them to a more total renunciation of worldly desires, some seem to point to a kind of Amor Dei and some of them seem more like the Epicurian notion that abstinence ultimately intensifies pleasures.

So yes, maybe there are different ways to deal with the question.

I was wondering if anyone would bring some wisdom skepticism to the table. Is wisdom merely difficult to define, or does it, perhaps, not exist? — Tom Storm

I can bring some wisdom skepticism to the table, not necessarily about its existence, but about its value.

In wisdom traditions wisdom usually involves letting go of desire.

The basic intuition they generally start from is that world is a continuous changing and interconnected whole... the one.

Conceptualisation, dividing the one into parts with the mind, is thus not merely a neutral, but an active process, implying some force or desiring involved in the dividing.

But since the world is an interconnected whole, the conceptualisation is also an imposition and thus falsification of the one.

To be better attuned with the whole, one needs to let go of these conceptualisation that lead him astray, ... and letting go of these conceptualisation means letting go of desire.

And so you get the ascetic ideal, and taken to its ultimate conclusion, the will to nothing... nihilism.

But then the question becomes, as living beings, have we not thrown out the baby with the bathwater?

I can give you some of Nietzsches thoughts on it, he doesn't think there is simple or direct causal link from one conscious thought to another, but that they seem to cause eachother because they come from a similar unconscious wellspring so to speak.

Josh quoted the following passage from his notebooks in another thread:

“Everything which enters consciousness is the last link in a chain, a closure. It is just an illusion that one thought is the immediate cause of another thought. The events which are actually connected are played out below our consciousness: the series and sequences of feelings, thoughts, etc., that appear are symptoms of what actually happens! - Below every thought lies an affect. Every thought, every feeling, every will is not born of one particular drive but is a total state, a whole surface of the whole consciousness, and results from how the power of all the drives that constitute us is fixed at that moment - thus, the power of the drive that dominates just now as well as of the drives obeying or resisting it. The next thought is a sign of how the total power situation has now shifted again.” “Supposing the world had at its disposal a single quantum of force, then it seems obvious that every shift in power at any point would affect the whole system - thus, alongside causality, one after the other, there would be dependency, one alongside and with the other.” — Nietzsche