The importance of living in the 'here and now' is one emphasised by many authors. One author, Ken Keyes, in, 'Handbook of Higher Consciousness: The Science of Happiness', states,
'If you are not enjoying every here and now moment in life, it is because your addictions (otherwise known as desires, attachments, demands, expectations, emotional programming, models of how life should treat you) are making you dwell in the dead past or the imagined future. They are keeping you from being here and now. All there is in life is the eternal now moment- and the experience of the moment is created by the programming in your head'. — Jack Cummins

Being trapped within the ‘dead’ past and imagined future are of a piece with being stuck within the punctual ‘now’. The problems you list don’t come from privileging the past or future over the immediate present, but from splitting these three dimensions of time off from each other. We can never experience a pure in-itself present. That would make all experience vanish. Imagine trying to enjoy a piece of music without thr ability to retain the prior note in mind while listening to the presently appearing note. The meaning of the music as music would disappear. Imagine reading these sentences without anticipating into the next letter and word. What we call the ‘now’ gets its sense and meaning by retaining the just past and anticipating into the future. These three dimensions all belong to the same ‘now’. It is when we treat our past, future or present in a refied and isolating way rather than as belonging to a continuous creative flow that we run the risk of reducing our experience to meaninglessness.

↪DifferentiatingEgg

Nietzsche was a literary artist whose personal interactions were no more remarkable than other literary artists of his day. His special value lay in his ability to create. He was only an immoralist in terms of a kind of fantastical advocacy he left almost entirely on the page. — Baden

Does ‘literary artist’ mean he was not also a philosopher? I don’t know about you, but when I develop a philosophical insight and validate it to my satisfaction, it becomes a guide for my interactions with others. I can’t go back to seeing the world the way I did before the insight. Do you think that after producing his evolutionary account of the origin of species, Darwin persisted in perceiving animals in his daily surroundings as having arose out of independently founded lineages?

You argue that modern liberalism, in the guises of personal
improvement, self-help and wellness programs, gives preference to the desires of the individual over the community, but you don’t question the split between personal and collective desire this presupposes. You also don’t mention that an ethic of the collective good and an ethic of self-actualization have in common the grounding of will in a metaphysical subject. The reason that advocates of. personal improvement beleive that bettering the self by attending to one’s needs and wants ( Maslow, Rogers) is the route to bettering society is that they put their faith in a natural or innate disposition toward the good, a biological or spiritual compass that guides development in a way that melds the ethical and the personally desired. More enactively inclined approaches reject the idea of an innate ethical disposition in favor of a notion of phronesis, an ethical wisdom or attunement that centers on the attainment of compassion. This compassion, in turn, arises out of the realization of no-self, the awareness that the grasping ego is a mirage we cling to. Shaun Gallagher explains how Francisco Varela derives this notion from a melding of enactivism and Buddhism:

For Mencius , the Good is tied up with natural
kinds of innate dispositions plus the cultivation of those dispositions. This notion of a natural disposition may not satisfy everyone as a concept of the good and indeed it doesn’t satisfy Varela, even if he retains it as a kind of implied starting point. Likewise, natural disposition
should not satisfy enactivists, since nothing in enactive principles pre-ordain natural disposition as in any way intrinsically good. It’s in his third lecture that he takes the analysis I think one step, or we might even say, he has a quantum Leap involved here. One step further, providing a great amount of neuroscientific detail about distributed neural networks to explain the idea of a selfless
virtual self , an agent that emerges from a pattern or aggregate of personal processes and he then links this conception up with Buddhist practice. and I think this leads us to Varela’s core thesis , where he says ethical know-how is the progressive firsthand acquaintance with the virtuality of self. the emphasis in his analysis is going to fall on cultivation.

Putting the self in question is a kind of deconstructive phase of Buddhist mindfulness practice, out of which comes something more positive, and here he quotes a Buddhist scholar who says when the reasoning mind no longer clings and grasps one awakens into the wisdom with which one was born and compassionate arises without pretense. So it’s funny because Mencius’s kind of natural disposition is implied here but what is added to this idea is the notion of compassion. so if we ask where precisely is the notion of the good in Varela’s work, the answer is the Buddhist conception of compassion. The good is what compassion means, the good is to eliminate suffering. So for Varela and for Buddhist theories this is closely tied to the conception of or the elimination of the self as a source of suffering.

Yes. But you seem to me to be laying down an essence of "same" and using that as a rule which outlaws the ways in which we actually use "general" and "generality". — Ludwig V

Do you mean that I am using “same” as a rule which outlaws beforehand certain ways among others that we may use general and generality, or that general and generality are exclusively associated with specific ways of use (“the” ways we actually use them, versus a potential infinity of possible uses)?

What I was trying to do was not outlaw any particular use of “same” , but to point to a use of same which relies on the consultation of a picture. If we say that two photos of an object depict the same object, or we stare repeatedly at an object and report that our perception continues to be of the same object, should we say that the sense of ‘object’ here is unique to the specific context and instant of use, or that what we mean by object here is something (i.e. general category) whose sense transcends the instant and context of its use? If the latter, then it would seem to tie ‘same’ to the consultation of a categorical picture.

Yes, but each time we invoke the same generality we mean a particular sense that wasn’t already present in the generality. So it’s never the ‘same’ generality being used each time.
— Joshs
Yes, you get that result if you think of same in the light of the logical axiom that A=A is the paradigm of sameness. Actually, for me, it is the limiting case of sameness and is the point at which it is deprived of all real meaniing. Obviously, any generalization must be applicable to a range of particular cases, which may will likely not be identical in all respects, as required by our paradigm. But the concept of a paradigm allows for differences. In short, your argument suggests that generality is, strictly speaking, impossible. That may not be a reductio ad absurdum but it is certainly a reduction to pointlessness — Ludwig V

Generality is possible whenever we use that word. But what is the difference in what we are doing when we think the endless possibilities of grammatical use of a word like paradigm, general or game, and the uses of a word like particular? Is Wittgenstein invoking a theory of generality (“the concept of a paradigm allows for differences”), or would he eschew the search for the essence of generality and instead look at the various ways we use words like “same,” “general,” and “particular”? Would you agree that if there is no essence of meaning of any word , then there is no essence of meaning of ‘particular’, and likewise no essence of meaning of ‘general’, paradigm, game, category, etc?

The particular givenness doesn’t imply the more general concept. On the contrary, the general meaning is secondary to and derivative of the particular sense.
— Joshs
I'm a bit puzzled about what "swallowed up" means here. We only ever encounter particular houses and particular people. Even though they are particular, they can be described in terms of generalities — Ludwig V

Yes, but each time we invoke the same generality we mean a particular sense that wasn’t already present in the generality. So it’s never the ‘same’ generality being used each time.

Illiberal leaders in previously liberal countries do not justify their authoritarianism or interventions in opposition to liberalism. In general, they position themselves as saviors of liberalism

Likewise, dictators across the world still feel the need to have rump legislatures, to hold votes on reforms, etc. They still feel the need to hold sham elections. Even Assad did this during the civil war. They still go by "president" or "prime minister" instead of "king," "emperor," "emyr" or "shah." When they attack the West, they normally do so while tacitly accepting the values of liberalism. They deride the West as not being truly democratic, as having become an oligarchy, or just as often, as having fallen into a sort of technocratic socialism. Such criticisms accept liberal values however. When they attack "Western values" such a LGBT issues, they do so using the same language used by conservative liberals within the West, speaking to "freedom to differ" and "freedom of religion" or "freedom for traditions."

Yet they decidedly do not recommend some sort of alternative ideology the way the Soviet Union did. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I prefer ‘philosophical perspective’ to ‘ideology’. Ideologies lend themselves to empty slogans abstracted away from how people actually understand themselves in their pragmatic relations with others politically, economically and ethically. Positioning oneself as a ‘savior of liberalism’ or calling one’s party ‘National Socialism’ are examples of marketing slogans that mask the profound philosophical differences that separate, say, adherents of MAGA from social liberals. What’s important is not whether two competing groups use the same language, but how far apart the meaning those concepts is in their actual use by those groups.

The failure to articulate and hold the liberal center allows for growing encroachment on the political center by far right wing thinking and 'left of liberal' thinking on the left side. MAGA and some of the so-called Democratic Socialists both pose problems for central liberalism, whether rounding up 10 million illegal immigrants or abolishing the police — BC

I agree with your overall analysis. I would say that in order for liberals to gain the ascendancy again in the U.S., what is needed isnt so much an articulation and holding of a liberal center but its creation. That is, a movement needs a critical mass in order to deserve the label of ‘center’. There simply isn’t a large enough percentage of the country identifying with liberal values right now to produce such a critical mass. Achieving this will rely less on the strategies of political leaders than on the slow process of social evolution.

I believe there has been a significant overestimation of the percentage of the population in the U.S. and Europe who ever supported liberal democracy for philosophical rather than just reasons of economic self-interest, because the ranks of liberal political parties were for a long time inflated with voters who were in fact philosophically anti-liberal, and who have now organized right-wing populist parties like MAGA that more purely reflect their anti-liberalism. Rural people in countries around the world have followed a pattern similar to MAGA , reorganizing their political parties in a rightward direction politically to reflect the traditionalism and conservatism they have always believed in.
— Joshs

If I understand correctly, you think we have misinterpreted the fact that liberalism won (which is what Fokuyama's main idea was built on)? Well, your arguments cannot be argued with, in this regard his ideas seem idealistic. — Astorre

My point is:
1) Many, including Fukuyama, explain the recent rise of rightwing populism and authoritarianism as a form of ‘backsliding’ away from the ideal of liberalism.
2) My claim is this should not be interpreted as backsliding but rather as an overestimation of the percentage of the world population who embraced liberalism to begin with.
3)This does not mean liberalism ‘lost’. I agree with Fukuyama that the world has been and will continue to be to move in the direction of liberalism, but I find his ethical reasons to be less relevant than his pragmatic reasons (people will eventually find that liberalism works better for them). But this does not mean there cannot and will not at some point in the future be a ‘post-liberalism’ that subsumes and exceeds the best of liberalism.

In that case, do you agree with these ideas:

In the Marxist perspective, society is divided into a base (production relations, means of production) and a superstructure (ideology, politics, culture). The base is primary: changes in the economy (for example, the transition from feudalism to capitalism) give rise to new ideologies that justify or disguise these relations.

It follows from this that it is impossible to "invent" an ideology and impose it as the "pinnacle of evolution" - it will collide with the reality of the base. — Astorre

I would move away from Marx’s narrow definition of the base in terms of economic and class structures, in favor of epistemic and values-based norm-producing social structures which include but arent simply determined by the economic aspects of society. Rather than producing ideologies which justify or disguise the base social normative structures, these structures themselves instantiate and imply a certain constellation of philosophical-metaphysical stances. Every individual participating within a social structure contributes to the invention of these partially shared philosophical
worldviews, which include within themselves attitudes toward political and economic theory. Individuals neither simply march in lockstep with the social norms nor deviate wildly from them, since they are partially shared. A person who offers a new philosophical-economic-political perspective that they believe represents a ‘pinnacle of evolution’ can influence others but not simply ‘impose’ their vantage on the community unless that community is already receptive to such a perspective. There is a philosophical-economic-political evolution but the ground of its becoming is collective rather than strictly individual.

. I think that W is right to point to the importance of explanations after the event. But it seems odd to say that understanding is not "present" during communication. Surely understanding is expressed in communication and in even in non-communicative action. In any normal action, there is a huge amount of complexity and we may be unable to resolve various ambiguities simply of the basis of a single action. Then we need to clarify after the event. But a great deal of that complexity can be expressed in the processes of planning and preparation, before the action. — Ludwig V

I read W as making a distinction between what phenomenologists call the mode of givenness of an object and the object taken in a theoretical sense. It’s not that a mode of givenness doesn’t give us to understand a thing, but that what we are given to understand is a contextual sense of an object that cannot be swallowed up within a more general categorical definition on it. The particular givenness doesn’t imply the more general concept. On the contrary, the general meaning is secondary to and derivative of the particular sense.

↪Joshs Your solution here would appear to avoid infinite regress. As a general rule do you find infinite regress problematic? — Tom Storm

Not so much problematic as illusory. When we stand between two mirrors facing each other, this seems a good exemplar of pure self-repetition. But we tend to miss the way that repetition sneaks in alteration, if not in the objects then in how they strike us. We think what we want from science is pure repeatability as the same, but what we really are looking for is relevance.

I discern two main theses in the OP. First, there is an anti-Fukuyama argument. He famously claimed that with rise of liberal democracy around the world, we had reached the end of history, a Hegelian-like pinnacle of political and philosophical organization. But the recent global trends away from liberalism and toward various forms of autocracy and totalitarianism would seem to argue against the idea that history has been moving in the one direction Fukuyama described. The second argument seems to be a relativistic one. Not only are an increasing number of countries rejecting liberal democracy, but we have no ethical grounds for judging such choices to be incorrect, and to proclaim liberal democracy to be divinely sanctioned. There is no such thing as being on the ‘wrong side of history’, because the unique histories of different cultures around the world produce a diversity of political systems tailored to the particular values and needs of those communities.

As to the first argument, my response to the claim that there has been a massive worldwide flight from liberal democracy is that we must be careful to separate political trends from changes in philosophy. Let me use the rise of MAGA in the U.S. as an example. What do we make of the supporters of Trump who applaud his authoritarian tendencies, many of whom once were loyal members of the Democratic party with its liberal agenda? Have they changed philosophies? Did they used to be liberal concerning issues like climate, covid science, gender, authoritarianism, multiculturalism and immigration and suddenly decided to change their minds and “reject” their former liberal views?

I suggest they always held traditionalistic, conservative beliefs about these issues, but maintained their allegiance to liberal parties only as long as those parties benefited them economically. I believe there has been a significant overestimation of the percentage of the population in the U.S. and Europe who ever supported liberal democracy for philosophical rather than just reasons of economic self-interest, because the ranks of liberal political parties were for a long time inflated with voters who were in fact philosophically anti-liberal, and who have now organized right-wing populist parties like MAGA that more purely reflect their anti-liberalism. Rural people in countries around the world have followed a pattern similar to MAGA , reorganizing their political parties in a rightward direction politically to reflect the traditionalism and conservatism they have always believed in.

If anything, I would argue that the actual parentage of the worldwide population that supports liberal democratic philosophies has grown steadily over the past 100 years. But this fact is being obscured by the reshuffling of the political parties.

As to the second argument of the OP, should we maintain a relativistic stance toward the type of social and political
organization a culture adopts? To a certain extent, yes. I think in many places it is both true that authoritarian regimes maintain a ruthless hold over their populations, and that those populations historically gravitate toward strong leadership. For instance, El Salvadorian dictator Bukele is one of the most popular leaders in Latin America.

But I do think that liberal democracy has advantages over more authoritarian political systems that can be described in pragmatic rather than in abstract ethical terms. If one thinks of political organization as a complex dynamical system, we may say that such systems tend toward their own evolution. As they become more complex they become more stable. The enlightened self-interest of individuals will steer them towards modes of social
organization which foster communication, commerce and creativity rather than stifle it. This parallels and expresses a philosophical evolution which increasingly favors experimentation, innovation and symbiosis over static stability. So while I think we can find many who now still prefer some degree of authoritarianism over liberalism, the longer term trends favor the evolution of more complex forms of social organization, which may even at some point shift from liberal democracy to some kind of loosely organized anarchy. With its economic liberalization into a Capitalist-technocracy, China is likely halfway to a more full-fledged political liberalization that may take another 50 years or more.

science is not about absolutes; it is about contingencies. The scientific method is a future looking construction of the conditionally structured sentence, "If...then...", that is, repeatable results are always grounded in finitude, and there is nothing in reason's logic to apodictically guarantee things will continue in this way (Sartre's notion of radical contingency is about just this: the world's behavior is not logically constrained). But ethics has a completely different ground: Good and Evil, without argument, the strangest thing in all of existence, though this is hard to acknowledge. Take two states of affairs, one ethical/aesthetic (Wittgenstein conflates the two), the other factual only, like the sun rising in the east or facts about the order of numbers; just a plain fact. what is the difference? What makes an ethical state of affairs ethical? Good and Evil, and here, unlike in science, the extralinguistic reference is itself (is such a thing even possible?) qualitatively makes the difference, evidenced by pain and pleasure. — Constance

So all empirical facts are subjective and relative. One could say with Michel Henry that they are the product of ecstasis, the securing of experience by relation to other experience. Does one need then to ground experience in some ethical substance absolutely immanent to itself to put a stop to this apparent infinite regress? That would be the case if one considered the only choice to be a binary opposing pure self-affecting immanence and alienating , mediating reflection. But there is another option: an ecstasis whose repeating act of self-difference is always original , fecund and productive rather than derivative and secondary to an immanent self-affecting ground.. This ecstasis is already a language prior to the emergence of verbal speech, the social within nature , inseparably nature/culture. Pain, angst, desire, attunement, feeling are the very core of ecstasis as self-displacement and self-transcendence.

↪Joshs While "grammar is a product of the mind", it is also embedded in the world. Rather than being forced to choose between realism and idealism, we might reject the framework that juxtaposes the two. The world is our successful interpretation and communication within our forms of life. — Banno

You’re sounding like a phenomenologist. All you need to do is drop the ‘successful’. After all, is t that just one more piece of grammar?

But it would be a mistake to think that therefore the rock could not fall unless there is a mind present - that the rock's fall is inherently a mental phenomena. — Banno

Would you say that grammar in Wittgenstein’s sense is the product of a mental phenomenon? If a word like truth only gets its sense from how it is used grammatically in public discourse, do we then say that such discourse is grounded in the interaction among minds? But then what do we do about the grammatical possibilities of ‘mind’?

According to quantum mechanics, everything exists in a superposition until it is observed. 
Superposition means that different physical quantities (such as waves, forces, or electrical signals) can exist simultaneously and influence each other without losing their individual properties.
So, in my view, this means that what I do not see or am not aware of exists in a superposition—a vast range of possibilities. It only truly exists the moment I see it and become aware of it.
It seems, then, that before something is observed, everything exists—but only as possibility (superposition). 
We live in a vast field of potential outcomes that only become definite once we observe them.

And this puzzles me.... — Jan

Physicist and philosopher Karen Barad favors Niels Bohr’s explanation of the double slit experiment over Einstein or Heisenberg. Bohr does not see scientific knowledge as describing pre-existing objects with independent properties. Instead, the outcome of the double-slit experiment shows that what is observed depends on the experimental arrangement. The electron (or photon) does not have an inherent “wave” or “particle” nature independent of how we measure it. Whether we see an interference pattern (wave-like) or two distinct bands (particle-like) is a function of the measurement setup, not a revelation of some hidden essence of the electron.

Barad takes Bohr’s explanation further, claiming that reality is not made of independent objects with inherent attributes.Instead, reality consists of phenomena produced through intra-actions.The double-slit experiment demonstrates this. There is no independent electron “with” a wave-or-particle nature, only the phenomenon of electron plus apparatus. For Barad, the very concepts of “wave” and “particle” are not properties of nature-in-itself, but arise only within specific experimental arrangements. The experiment demonstrates the inseparability of observer, apparatus, and observed.

The business about seeing redness when one presses one’s own eyeball didn’t impress me. The need to learn from others what redness is makes this possibility dubiously relevant – unless everyone has the same experience, which is, I suppose, possible.
But the idea that one could somehow abolish redness, I think, is based on a misunderstanding of how colour works. Colour words are a system; they segment the colour spectrum, so abolishing redness sounds as if it would leave a gap in the spectrum, which is hard to understand, or just restrict the spectrum. That is possible. Dogs, for example, can’t see red. As I understand it, they see red objects as black, so the abolition is a substitution. But the ability to see red is, for us, a physiological capacity – are we to imagine some feat of genetic engineering?
I think you may be right in comparing colour with pain – in the sense that W is thinking of redness as (grammatically) like pain. Perhaps this is possible if one doesn’t understand the colour spectrum, but we do. That makes a huge difference, because if there is a spectrum of pain, it is a spectrum of intensity, not of quality. We do have qualities of pain – stabbing, aching, throbbing etc. – but they are not on a spectrum. — Ludwig V

You suggest Wittgenstein’s “pressing the eyeball” example is irrelevant because color concepts are socially learned.
Then you shift the discussion toward physiology (dogs can’t see red; genetic engineering). Wittgenstein would say this is sliding back into an explanatory, scientific register (physiology, genetics), which is not the issue. He isn’t denying the biological basis of vision; he’s showing that philosophy generates pseudo-problems by treating “redness” as if it were an inner object. The “pressing the eyeball” example is a reminder that even when we report “seeing red,” the grammar of “red” is not that of an inner sensation, but part of a learned practice. Dismissing the example as irrelevant misses Wittgenstein’s therapeutic poin. He’s not offering data but undermining a picture, the picture of color as an inner object. You also treat “abolishing redness” as a problem of spectrum physics, but Wittgenstein might say “abolishing redness” looks nonsensical not because of biology but because of how the grammar of color words works in our language.


On comparing color with pain, you say that pain has a spectrum of intensity, while color has a spectrum of quality. I think Wittgenstein’s point isn’t that colors and pains are the same kind of phenomenon but that the grammar of the words is comparable. With both, the temptation is to treat them as inner objects we directly access. But Wittgenstein shows that meaning is in the use. “I have a toothache” works like “This is red” not by pointing to a private inner object but by participating in a practice with public criteria. You speak as if “the color system” guarantees a metaphysical space for redness, as though the system enforces an ontological necessity. But the necessity is grammatical, not metaphysical. It comes from how we use color words, not from a hidden structure of reality.

The mysterious concept of ‘temperament’ arises out of creating artificially separated categories out of learning , cognition and affectivity.
— Joshs

Cool. So can we think of temperament as habitual patterns of sense making? I’m assuming you include in temperament people’s preferences for order, simplicity, chaos, or whatever… — Tom Storm

We could say they are habits, but not blind or arbitrary habits. They are shaped by the needs of optimal anticipation of events, so to the extent that a particular pattern of interpreting events reproduces itself stably over time, it does this not because of some inertia, but to the extent that it is effective. Emotion crises arise as indications that the patterns we relied on are brining to fail us, and we either have to construct our world to a small and smaller circle of what we can cope with, or begin the process of re-organizing our system of constructs.

We don’t need Nietzsche and Heidegger in order to do philosophy, since we are already formulating, testing and revising our own philosophical systems all the time.
— Joshs

Of course, but in most cases it often seems to take the contributions of others to promote a significant shift in our thinking. Although I’m sure break through moments can also happen from life events. But what does it mean to read Wittgenstein or Heidegger and see the world radically anew? From what you say above, is it correct to think you might define philosophy as an act of sense making? — Tom Storm

All of our behaviors are acts of sense-making, questions we pose to the world that it may either confirm or invalidate. It is certainly true that other people provide rich resources that we can take average of in opening up promising new avenues of thought. But more important than the contributions of others is the audacity, persistence and ingenuity with which we tinker with our ideas. Nietzsche and Heidegger will do nothing for us if we are not prepared to rethink them in our own terms, relative to our own concerns and history. Because we must already be prepared to absorb the ideas than any great philosophy has to offer, 90% of the work has already been done before we are ever exposed to the likes of Nietzsche and Heidegger. Whenever someone claims that so and so’s thinking had a life-changing effect on them, I suspect that scratching beneath the surface will reveal such a readiness to be transformed.

I keep wondering if there are transformational understandings about time and self and being and truth and reality that would open up and utterly change one. Surely that's the promise of thinkers like Nietzsche and Heidegger. — Tom Storm

That’s also the promise of psychologist George Kelly, the one who said that each of us walks around every moment of very day with our own personal construct system. You can think of it as a dynamical, constantly self-updating personal philosophy which doesn’t need to be articulated verbally to oneself or others in order to guide every aspect of our lives and determines our success at coping with emotional, intellectual and ethical challenges.We don’t need Nietzsche and Heidegger in order to do philosophy , since we are already formulating, testing and revising our own philosophical systems all the time. By the way, Kelly collapses these categories together. He gets rid of the separation between will, affect and cognition.

I think life difficulties are much more defined or informed by one's temperament more than what some intelligent person said back in the day.
— Manuel

Well said. A perspective people tend not to consider as they seem to attribute everything to learning and discernment. — Tom Storm

The mysterious concept of ‘temperament’ arises out of creating artificially separated categories out of learning , cognition and affectivity. This prompts us to dismiss a child’s temper tantrum as the product of temperament rather than as their flailing attempts at making sense of social events that impact them.

Will to power may be a metaphysical claim about the structure of existence, but for me it only carries weight if it is also experientially meaningful—can be embodied as a lifestyle. — praxis

My point wasn’t that it is MERELY an ontological
principle as opposed to being experientially meaningful. It is both at once. Like Heidegger’s Being, Kant’s Transcendental Subject, Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, or Husserl’s Transcendental Subjectivity, Nietzsche’s Will to Power is not simply an abstract metaphysical thesis but a grounding condition for the possibility of meaningful existence itself. To say “it only carries weight if it can be embodied” is almost redundant: its function as a metaphysical a priori is precisely to determine what embodiment, practice, or lifestyle can mean at all.

Will to Power functions as a perspectival lens: an interpretive key to life understood as force, struggle, creation, and transformation. Its significance does not depend on being translated into “lifestyle” after the fact; it is already lived through the embodied dynamics of drives, values, and self-overcoming. In this way, Will to Power differs from other major philosophical principles: it is not a condition standing behind existence, but an interpretive enactment within existence itself.

Does anyone feel better about the Nietzschean notion of power—embodying it as a lifestyle? — praxis

Yes, I do. Why do you not? Respond specially to the distinction I made between conventional definitions of power and the alternative I laid out. Btw, it’s not a lifestyle , any more than the structure of temporality is a lifestyle. It’s an ontological ground.

Now even if we take a large city, we would have similar differences between the rich and poor places. — ssu

This isnt about the rich vs the poor. Someone can be poor but socially progressive , or rich and socially conservative. Traditional (far right) social values are not correlated directly with level of wealth. They are more closely related to level of education.But even here, we need to focus on a particular kind of education After all, some of the highest ranking leaders within the MAGA movement are ivy league-educated. The sort of education. or intellectual
understanding I have in mind relates to what I call ‘social i.q.’, a set of insights into the way that individuals reciprocally shape each other’s values and knowledge within discursive communities. Social
traditionalists embrace an older set of notions that conceive of personhood in terms of isolated, autonomous subjectivity (like Ayn Rand’s Objectivism). Being a billionaire doesn’t prevent one from having a traditionalist worldview like Trump. I have a number of wealthy friends who are MAGA supporters.

And do notice that especially in Europe in many countries the conservatives haven't gone with the populism similar to Trump. — ssu

Axios doesn’t seem to have noticed what you are noticing. They report:

The populist wave that formed in the wake of the 2015 migrant crisis has not crested. It's surging — and spreading — across Europe, cheered on by a U.S. government eager to see MAGA go global. For the first time in modern history, far-right parties are leading opinion polls in Europe's four largest economies ( The U.K, Germany, France and Italy)

In addition, in Austria in the 2024 legislative elections, the Freedom Party achieved its best-ever result, 28.8%, and is leading coalition talks. In Portugal, Chega became the main opposition party after winning 60 of 230 seats in May 2025, marking a major shift. Other countries with far-right parties in government, either leading or part of coalition, include Croatia, Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, the Netherlands, Slovakia and Sweden, where far-right Sweden Democrats prop up the minority government.

There are many parallels between MAGA and Europe’s far-right movements, even if they’re not identical in style or political system.

Some of of the strongest similarities include
populist nationalism. MAGA’s “America First” is paralleled by Europe’s “France for the French” (Le Pen), “Germany for the Germans” (AfD), and “Italy for the Italians” (Meloni’s party roots) . Both MAGA and the European far -right frame politics as protecting the “real people” against outsiders (immigrants, Brussels/EU, elites).

They also share an anti-Immigration focus. The framing of immigration as a civilizational threat is almost identical.
Both groups attack elites and institutions. MAGA attacks the “Deep State,” and the media as “enemies of the people.” while in Europe, AfD rails against “mainstream media” and the Berlin political class, while Orban in Hungary portrays Brussels and liberal elites as oppressors of the nation, and Le Pen denounces the French establishment and globalists.
Both embrace cultural conservatism. MAGA is anti-“woke,” and attacks gender and LGBTQ rights in favor of strong Christian identity politics In Europe, Poland’s PiS government pushed anti-LGBTQ laws, Hungary banned LGBTQ education content, and many far-right parties link national identity with traditional Christianity. Both frame culture wars as existential fights.

Both embrace an authoritarian style and election doubts. Trump allies and MAGA figures have actively supported European far-right leaders (e.g., Steve Bannon worked with Le Pen, Salvini, Orbán). Shared rhetoric often bounces across the Atlantic (immigration “invasions,” “globalist elites,” “law and order”).

Do notice that this has been an universal transition that has happened in all Western (and other) countries. Yet not all countries have suffered similar polarization. — ssu

I have claimed that there is a direct correlation between population density and political orientation in the current era. But by population density , I don’t simply mean how many people live in a country relative to its size. After all, a huge percentage of Australia is uninhabited. What I’m looking at is the density experienced by the average inhabitant of a country or region. One can calculate this by median pwd (population-weighted density). Doing so, one sees that the average person in countries like the Netherlands, France, Sweden, Belgium and Germany lives in a much denser environment than in many U.S. states (like Wyoming, Idaho, Arkansas, Oklahoma, etc) . So to be fair in our comparisons, we shouldn’t compare the level of political polarization in Belgium or the Netherlands to the U.S. as a whole, we should compare them to states in the U.S. with comparable average lived density, like Massachusetts, Illinois or California. What we find by doing so is that such highly dense U.S. states are no more polarized than their European counterparts, because like those counterparts, a large percentage of their populations are relatively urban and therefore reject strong social conservativism.

It seems that Nietzschean values place power (self-overcoming) on a pedestal, perhaps slavishly — praxis

Would you feel better about the Nietzschean notion of power if you saw it as radically distinct from its conventional definitions? For instance, if we filter his concept of power through interpreters like Joseph Rouse, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, we get something like the following:

Rouse, channeling Foucualt, argues that connventional understandings of power usually come in two main strands. First there is power as possession or capacity: someone or some institution has power because they have resources, authority, or force at their disposal. This is the classical liberal or realist view: power is something one can hold, wield, or lose. The. there is power as domination. Especially in critical or sociological theories, power is often understood in terms of control, coercion, or subordination (e.g., Max Weber’s definition of power as the ability to impose one’s will despite resistance).

Rouse’s account of power, drawing heavily on Foucault, shifts away from both of these “substance-like” views. For Rouse, power is not a thing or resource one possesses. It’s not an object or capacity that sits in someone’s hands waiting to be used. Power is relational and productive. It emerges through practices, discourses, and networks of interaction. Power doesn’t just repress or constrain, it also constitutes possibilities for action, knowledge, and subjectivity. Power is inseparable from meaning and normativity. It is bound up with how practices make certain things intelligible or significant. It is “mid-stream,” always embedded in ongoing activities, rather than a force applied from outside.

Rouse rejects the idea that power is something imposed in a top-down, centralized, hierarchical fashion (“the state” or “the sovereign” commanding from above). Instead, he emphasizes that power circulates and operates from below. It is embedded in local practices, everyday interactions, institutional routines, and forms of knowledge. It is capillary, spreading through networks rather than radiating from a single source. It works through norms, practices, and discourses that people themselves enact and reproduce, not simply by external command. Hierarchies are effects, not origins, of power. Institutions like governments, professions, or sciences don’t so much “possess” power and trickle it down; rather, they are stabilized patterns of already circulating power relations.

Nietzsche attempts to ground this circulating, capillary relational nature of constitutive power in a principle
of differentiation. As Deleuze explains,

The relation of force to force is called "will:' That is why we must avoid at aIl costs the misinterpretations of the Nietzschean principle of the will to power. This principle doesn't mean (or at least doesn't primarily mean) that the will wants power or wishes to dominate. As long as the will to power is interpreted in terms of a "desire to dominate," we inevitably make it depend on established values, the only ones able to determine, in any given case or conflict, who must be "recognized" as the rnost powerful. We then cannot recognize the nature of the will to power as an elastic principle of aIl of our evaluations, as a hidden principle for the creation of new values not yet recognized. The will to power, says Nietzsche, consists not in coveting or even in taking but in creating and giving. Power, as a will to power, is not that which the will wants, but that which wants in the will (Dionysus himself). The will to power is the differential element from which derive the forces at work, as weIl as their respective quality in a complex whole.

If philosophy’s puzzles “spring” from this desire for exactness, that makes its own expectation the creator of the issues it thinks it sees in the world and wants to solve. I don’t think we yet have a good sense of why it has this desire, but perhaps it helps to listen when he says “We are unable to circumscribe… concepts….” (p. 25), as if we wanted to, but cannot, draw a limit around them that is complete enough, covering or predicting all possible outcomes (and here “concept” is a practice, like identifying or following a rule — Antony Nickles

If we ask Wittgenstein where linguistic meaning comes from, he directs us to a focus on WHAT we do with it in the context of ongoing social practices. We must immerse ourselves in actual historical processes to gain clarity and avoid confusion concerning the use of language. But if we ask him where desire for exactness, certainty, generality, consistency and completeness come from, he seems to depart from his emphasis on historical embeddedness , and instead attributes this desire to some trans-historical ‘instinct’. Why the difference in description of the use of words vs the desire to use them in certain ways? This just speculation only part, but I’m inclined to link his departure from history with regard to desire to his own craving for ethical transcendence.

In the Investigations, “forms of life” are the background practices that make language intelligible. Witt insists they are not grounded in theory, but in “what we do.”
At first glance this sounds close to historicism or relativism (since forms of life can differ). But Wittgenstein doesn’t historicize them in Nietzsche’s or Foucault’s sense (as contingent, power-saturated events in a genealogy).
He doesn’t valorize becoming.

In ethics, this restraint coexists with a longing for the absolute. From the Tractatus through the 1929 Lecture on Ethics, Wittgenstein consistently implies that ethical seriousness involves a transcendent demand, even if it cannot be stated in propositions. There remains a hope that what ethics gestures toward is not merely contingent, but somehow absolute and non-relative, even though it can never be said in language. Wittgenstein refuses to explain the ground of ethics or truth in terms of history, power, or metaphysics. Unlike the post-Nietzscheans, he seems haunted by transcendence. Ethics, for him, is not just a historical formation but a necessity of the human spirit.
Where Nietzsche embraces difference as the essence of truth, Wittgenstein says: ethics is what lies beyond the limits of language, a demand we cannot shake.This is why some readers (e.g. Cavell, Diamond) see Wittgenstein as still religious, in contrast to the radical immanence of Nietzsche or Deleuze.

Wittgenstein’s admiration for Kierkegaard testifies to this religious longing. Wittgenstein’s biographer Ray Monk said this about him:
“Wittgenstein did not wish to see God or to find reasons for His existence. He thought that if he could overcome himself - if a day came when his whole nature 'bowed down in humble resignation in the dust' - then God would, as it were, come to him; he would then be saved.”

It is clear from remarks he wrote elsewhere, that he thought that if he could come to believe in God and the Resurrection - if he could even come to attach some meaning to the expression of those beliefs - then it would not be because he had found any evidence, but rather because he had been redeemed.”

If ethical desire can transcend historical contingency, then perhaps this is why for Witt other kinds of desires as well (desire for certainty, generality, completeness) are not simply ‘what we do’ in the historical sense of
contingent discursive practices, but confused expressions of a transcendent feeling.

But for the existentialists it doesn't imply this. They don't ignore the sorts of passages you quoted, but build on this idea of the self in flux to construct a particular sort of framework for "self-mastery" to live up to Nietzsche's admonition to: "Become who you are. Do what only you can do. Be the master and the sculptor of yourself — Count Timothy von Icarus

The existentialists (Sartre, Kierkegaard) don’t build on Nietzsche’s radical idea of the self in flux, they miss the point of it by retaining certain traditional metaphysical presuppositions about subjectivity. While existentialists look like they take Nietzsche’s idea of selfhood-in-flux seriously, they actually smuggle in older metaphysical assumptions about the subject that Nietzsche was working to dismantle. For Nietzsche, there is no stable, enduring self beneath the flux of drives, affects, and perspectives. The “self” is really a multiplicity of competing forces (wills to power) that sometimes achieve a temporary organization. To “become who you are” is not to find or realize some essential self, but to actively shape and reconfigure these forces, sculpting from chaos. There is no deep subject that “has” experiences; instead, the “I” is a grammatical fiction that masks the play of forces.

Although Sartre denies a pre-given essence, he still posits a transcendental subjectivity, consciousness as “nothingness” that transcends facticity and projects meaning. The self is not fixed, but there is still an agent-subject doing the projecting. For Kierkegaard, the self is a relation that relates itself to itself, grounded in relation to God. There is still a metaphysical anchor, a responsible, singular subject that must confront despair, faith, and authenticity. In both cases, even though the self is described as evolving or free, there’s an underlying metaphysical subjectivity, a core “I” or relational structure that guarantees its unity.

Some of these things we pit against each other in fact belong together, and complement each other. But our leaders can’t and don’t want to show that — Fire Ologist

Our leaders? You’re telling me the fights over values and ways of life tearing families and neighbors apart is caused by ‘leaders’? The leaders are late to the party. These things start at the grass roots, not from on high. I recently discovered my childhood next door neighbor lives in a different universe from me, even though we were best friends as kids. He wasn't transformed by some leader, he always had those views, but it didn’t emerge until he began to notice how far his thinking was from many of the people around him, including me.

You can’t wish away real, entrenched differences in outlook and ways of life separating one community from another by blaming them on the nefarious influence of some powerful individual. That’s insulting to persons and communities who rely on forging their own value system as a compass for guiding their life and making sense of their world.

One may then ask, where did the polarization come from? I think one reason is that people are simply dissatisfied about the political establishment and thus many have eagerly taken on populism. And my argument is that the two political parties aren't doing anything to limit the polarization. On the contrary. — ssu

You’ve got it backwards. The polarization wasn't the result of the make-up of the political parties. It was due to the fact that one part of the country, the cities, moved more rapidly into a post ‘60’s economic, social and intellectual way of life than the slower changing rural areas. As a result, people needed to change what the political parties stood for in order to reflect the growing cultural divide. They have now done that. 60 years ago the republican party was socially moderate , fiscally conservative , supportive of the U.S. as the world’s policeman, and over-represented by wealthy, educated voters. It is now the populist party, is dominated by the poor, lesser educated and working class, is isolationist and socially conservative.

Not all is political, I agree. Universally there is this divide between the urban and the rural, but in the US it's especially nasty. The hostility especially against the poor is very telling, as if it's OK and not bigoted for white people to talk in a derogatory manner especially about poor whites. How hillbillies, crackers or white trash are talked about even publicly is quite astonishing. — ssu

The political divide is not a reflection of hostility against the poor. It’s a reflection of the hostility against traditional ways of thinking on the part of the educated urban elite. This urban elite supports progressive liberal economic policies to help the poor , including a higher minimum wage, government subsidized health care ( Obamacare, Medicare, Medicaid), support for education. But rural poor whites overwhelmingly reject progressive economics in favor of small government , socially conservative populism. Many wealthy whites also support this right wing populism, because they share with the rural poor a traditionalist worldview. The best indicator of where one stands on the political divide is not wealth, it is population density. The more sparsely populated the region one lives in, the more likely one will be to support traditional political , religious and economic values, and the more likely one will be to vote for the Republican party.

And the last issue is American political discourse itself, which promotes and encourages toxicity and lashing out. The two-party system creates an environment where there is no reason to be diplomatic or try to reach out to the other side. In fact, it usually seems that the main argument that both sides give for voting for them is that the other side is so dangerous and will destroy everything good in the Republic. If politicians had to form coalition governments, the discourse wouldn't be so hostile. — ssu

It’s not the two-party system that promotes toxicity and lashing out, it’s the polarized cultural environment pitting urban against rural. For decades the two parties were quite cordial toward one another and there was much across-the-aisle compromise and consensus. Israel is just as polarized politically as the U.S. and it’s a multiple-party parliamentary system.

This is a particularly illuminating and helpful perspective. — Tom Storm

Some interpreters treat Nietzsche as an existentialist. You’ve probably read some of their work. They talk about him like he’s a self-help guru trying to get us in touch with ourselves so that we can actualize our highest potentials. Notice that this way of talking assumes there’s a subject sitting inside a body, and this subject continues to be itself as it decides what it wants and needs to fulfill its desires. Now compare this to the language Nietzsche uses in the following quotes, where he says there is no ‘egoism’ and no ‘individual’.

“The 'I' (which is not the same thing as the unitary government of our being!) is, after all, only a conceptual synthesis - thus there is no acting from 'egoism'”.

“That man is a multiplicity of forces which stand in an order of rank, so that there are those which command, but what commands, too, must provide for those which obey everything they need to preserve themselves, and is thus itself conditioned by their existence. All these living beings must be related in kind, otherwise they could not serve and obey one another like this: what serves must, in some sense, also be an obeyer, and in more delicate cases the roles must temporarily switch so that what otherwise commands must, this once, obey. The concept of the 'individual' is false. In isolation, these beings do not exist: the centre of gravity is something changeable; the continual generation of cells, etc., produces a continual change in the number of these beings. And mere addition is no use at all. Our arithmetic is too crude for these relations, and is only an arithmetic of single elements.”

“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.”

Anyhow, I think this is a point of significant tension for Nietzschean fiction and specifically for Nietzschean heroes. The triumph of the strong over the weak ("the weak should fear the strong") is, for many audiences at least, not appealing. Yet fiction generally can't attain to the same level of distance, abstraction, and ambiguity as Nietzsche's aphoristic and bombastic style. Any victory of the strong over the herd will necessarily be more concrete and visceral. Hence, there is a crossroads for authors where either the Nietzschean hero will fail to be truly Nietzschean or else risks becoming repugnant. — Count Timothy von Icarus

If what you’re really interested in focusing on in this OP is a psycho-sociopolitical analysis of the reception of Nietzsche’s work among specific demographic strata of contemporary culture, that’s fine, but Im not particularly interested in another discussion of fascism among the unwashed and their superficial readings of great philosophers. if you’re seriously interested in understanding the work in itself, let me know because then we can discuss what Nietzsche means by such concepts as egoism , individuality, power, the weak and the strong, and the Overman. My aim is not to secure the ‘right’ Nietzsche in order to rescue him from terrible misreadings. It is to avoid repeating the usual cliches about Nietzschean power, strength and egoism recycled from Marxist and Christian thought, so that another Nietzsche can be made to appear. This would not simply be a ‘kinder, gentler’ Nietzsche, as though we could use the same cliches and position him on the ‘right’ side of them. I dont know ether he is kind and gentle. Whether he is or not, I want to show to what extent this other Nietzsche has been obscured by the preconceptions imported from traditional philosophical thinking about the self, the community, power and ethics.

↪Joshs You remind me of the history forum where everyone thinks the object is to prove the OP and following statements wrong. That could often be a very unpleasant experience that could never become an interesting discussion. I think the quality of the people in a forum makes a big difference. — Athena

Find me any extended discussion on this forum without a point of view being argued , discussed and disagreed with. I dont think you’ll find one. Disagreement and questioning of a philosophical point of view does not in itself mean that proof of correctness is the goal. There are many other criteria on the basis of which to question a set of ideas, such as internal coherence, clarity, aesthetic quality, ethical value, pragmatic usefulness, etc.

I think starting a thread with an interesting AI and asking people to say what they think of what AI said, could be a lot of fun. I can not imagine what the problem would be. I just do not have the experience to know what can go wrong. — Athena

Let’s say I start a thread with a quote from Plato. My readers will take the quote itself as some inert substance waiting to be molded into the OP’s point of view. They will want see that the OP understands the quote, but more importantly they will want to see HOW the OP understands it, what they want to do with it, and how they will deal with reader critiques and disagreements. It is conceivable that the OP could instruct an A.I. to do all these things without the group knowing it. It is even conceivable that readers will learn from the ensuing discussion and may even find it as interesting as dealing with a real person. But most likely, if the creator of the OP is not tightly guiding the A.I. on the basis of a well thought-out direction of argument. , the result will appear superficial and not adequately responsive to participants’ concerns in the discussion.

I have argued for a fundamental parallel between Wittgenstein's hinges and Gödel's incompleteness results: both demonstrate that systematic thought requires ungrounded foundations. By examining how epistemic and mathematical systems share this structural feature, we gain insight into the nature of foundational certainties across domains of human understanding — Sam26

I have argued that this parallel is more metaphorical than substantive, because the two concepts operate in fundamentally different domains and address different kinds of problems. To claim a direct parallel between the mechanics of hinges and incompleteness is to make a category error. There is only a broad formal similarity between the two. Gödel saw his results not as a reason to abandon formalism but as a guide to discovering new, intuitive axioms from set theory that could extend our mathematical knowledge. He was a mathematical Platonist who believed we had access to mathematical truth beyond formal systems. For Wittgenstein, the problem of skepticism is dissolved, not solved. The response is to stop looking for a philosophical foundation and recognize the foundation in our ordinary practices.

I wanted to do a reading group on Ishay Landa's The Joy of the Knife: The Nietzschean Glorification of Crime. It is a chapter from his The Overman in The Marketplace: Nietzschean Heroism in Popular Culture. It covers a topic I have been mulling over for a while and it is also very accessible and deals with popular culture icons I think most will know (e.g., Hannibal Lector, everyone's favorite cannibal :grin: ). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Wonderful. Another Critical Marxist misreading Nietzsche. If you’re going to stand a chance of doing justice to Nietzsche’s prose, it’s a good idea to get some fundamentals right. Landa tries to situate Nietzsche within a Marxist framework as an ideological apologist for a specific, "Dionysian" form of bourgeois crime. This is a reductive and moralizing interpretation which misses the point.

“The Joy of the Knife" claims that Nietzsche performs an ideological sleight of hand by glorifying a specific, immaterial, "spiritual" form of crime (the "joy of the knife") to metaphorically justify the real, material violence of capitalist competition and class hierarchy. The criminal becomes a symbol of rebellious individuality, but only to ultimately serve as a "guardian angel of private property" by directing rebellion away from material critique and towards a metaphysical struggle against "mass society."

This is a fundamental misreading. Nietzsche is the philosopher of **immanence**, not transcendence. The will to power is not a metaphysical entity "inside" us (a ghost in a machine); it is the genetic and differential principle of forces in the world itself. The body is not a vessel for a spirit; it is a complex, dynamic arrangement of forces.

The Nietzschean body is a "play of forces”. The "joy of the knife" is not an abstract idea but a capacity for affecting and being affected. It is the feeling of a force expanding and overcoming resistance. To interpret this as "idealism" is to completely miss Nietzsche's radical materialism of forces. Landa’s claim that Nietzsche ignores "material motivation" fails because it operates with a crude, economic notion of the "material." For Nietzsche, the drive and feeling of power is the primary material reality. Landa claims that Nietzsche's philosophy is a "recuperation for bourgeois purposes" and that his criminal ultimately justifies the existing social order by rebelling against "mass society" rather than property relations. He is a "guardian angel of private property."

But Nietzsche is not a conservative or an apologist; he is a radical genealogist. His project is not to justify any existing order but to show how all orders (including bourgeois morality and law) are founded on contingent, violent, and often ignoble beginnings. Genealogy is not about finding the origin but about tracing the descent and emergence of concepts. It is a history of the present designed to show that what we accept as true and necessary (our morals, our laws, our sense of justice) is historically constructed and shot through with power relations. Nietzsche doesn't defend bourgeois property; he asks “What violent history, what forgotten suffering, what will to power instituted this concept of "property" and made it seem sacred?
The goal is to denaturalize and destabilize the present order, not to affirm it. Nietzsche's "yes" is not a yes to
what is but a yes to what becomes, to what differs. The "individualism" Nietzsche champions is not the bourgeois individual (a product of the market and state power, but the "Overman" , an overcoming of the human, all-too-human type produced by modern society.

Landa links Nietzsche to Sade, arguing that his philosophy is essentially sadistic, advocating the infliction of pain for the pleasure of mastery. It uses the figure of Hannibal Lecter as an exemplar of this Nietzschean sadism. This is a moralistic and psychological reduction. Nietzsche's interest in hardness, suffering, and cruelty is ethical, not psychological. It is about the conditions for artistic and spiritual creation. The "cruelty" Nietzsche speaks of is first and foremost directed at oneself: it is the cruelty of the sculptor who breaks the stone to create the statue. It is the active, affirmative force that destroys the reactive within us (the "herd" mentality, the internalized "slave morality").
The "Joy of the Knife" is not the joy of hurting others but the aesthetic joy of a force achieving its maximum expression. It is the feeling of a force being equal to its concept. It is the feeling of the artist wielding the chisel, the philosopher wielding the concept, the warrior wielding the sword perfectly. To reduce this to a psycho-pathology of "bloodlust" is to completely miss its aesthetic and ontological dimension.

Landa also says Nietzsche’s individualism is merely a means to a collectivist, hierarchical end, thus betraying its supposedly liberatory potential. But Nietzsche's "individual" is not the liberal subject. It is a transindividual site of forces. The "Will to Power" is not what an individual *has*; the individual is what the will to power becomes in a specific configuration. The Overman is not a super-powered individual. The Overman names a process, a going-across, a transformation of the human into something else. It is about the creation of new possibilities, new ways of being, new values. It is not about the triumph of one individual over others but about the emergence of a new form of life that transcends the current human economy of ressentiment and bad conscience. His purpose is not to glorify any specific crime or social order but to provide the tools for a ruthless critique of all values, especially the moral ones we hold most dear. He doesn't offer a new system to believe in but a method for questioning,

Landa’s major error is to read Nietzsche as prescribing a content ("be a criminal who loves the knife"). Nietzsche’s rebellion is not against "mass society" on behalf of a bourgeois elite, but against the "herd instinct" within all of us, the instinct that prefers comfortable lies to dangerous truths, that prefers slave morality to the difficult task of creating new values. His war is not between social classes but between different types of forces, active and reactive, that cut across every individual and every social formation.

I don't use GPS while driving or LLMs for my TPF postings either. Call me a luddite ... I'm secure in my own cognitive abilities. — 180 Proof

Would you say that those cognitive abilities have benefited from exposure to the intellectual stimulation and challenge provided by the ideas others offer on forums like this one?
I dont know that I can so easily distinguish the benefits of conversation with participants here and the conversations I have with an A.I. which I then incorporate into my contributions on this site. The concepts it exposes me to are not invented by a machine. The machine culls and parses knowledge and opinion produced by an enormous community of actual human beings. Of course, my conversation with such a community has its limitations. The machine can lie and hallucinate in its parsings, so I need to know to request sources and quotes I can verify.

And since the machine doesn’t create its own point of view , I have to direct the conversation at every step, which keeps the challenge to my thinking at a more superficial level than is the case with a direct interchange with people. Still, I find the access it gives me to preliminary background information indispensable to the process of organizing my arguments, just as submitting a draft for peer review does. It doesnt make me lazy, or cause me to doubt my own cognitive abilities, any more than refreshing one’s acquaintance with a topic through background reading or conversation does. It sharpens those skills. Which is why I sympathize with on this issue. Most contributors to this site will use A.I. in spite of the rule, since it’s easy to cover one’s tracks. The rule is useful for reminding everyone that A.I. does lie, and more importantly, is not a substitute for presenting and arguing one’s own thesis.

But when he says our judgments (“A has a toothache”) have “always coincided” with our criteria for them (the “red patch”) it seems to open a can of (skeptical) worms, i.e., like it is a coincidence (that could disconnect at any moment). But I take it to be the sense of “coincide” that they “correspond in nature”; or, “are in accord” (Merriam-Webster) — Antony Nickles

But the specter of skepticism remains, because a referential relation is implied between judgement and criteria. And this implication is deliberate on Wittgenstein’s part. As he elaborates later, what grounds the meaning of a phrase, its use, is not determined by a comparison between judgment and criteria.

This is how I would put it. In the late 19th century Nietzsche came along and from a critique of such predecessors as Hegel and Schopenhauer produced a radical new vision for philosophy . 20 years later Husserl did something comparable, and Heidegger and Derrida pushed this thinking even further. Sartre read Husserl, Heidegger and Nietzsche but missed the point of their work. Instead, his existentialism remained confined to the period prior to Nietzsche , the Hegelian milieu of such figures as Kierkegaard and James. So yes, his writing offers its own unique vantage, but it’s a vantage which belongs to a metaphysical framework and era that Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger strove to overcome.

I'm not sure Sartre is a lightweight compared to Husserl, at least (and thereby Heidegger, whom I respect less).

Concerned differently? Mistaken about what his priors were saying? Sure.

Lightweight? Naw. — Moliere

It took me years to understand Husserl. His writing is extraordinarily dense with ideas. When I pick up Sartre’s Being and Nothingness after reading Husserl (or Heidegger’s Being and Time), it’s like going from Mozart to Salieri.

Who do you find more convincing, particularly in relation to solipsism, and why do you think Husserl went off his original track the way he did? — Baden

Some believe he ‘went off track’, and that’s usually because they prefer a realist notion of essences, and a world-directed empiricism. One of my favorite interpreters of Husserl is Derrida, and in his major works on Husserl he always emphasizes the profound continuity over the course of Husserl’s career. It seems when people make the claim you’re making they usually have in mind his turn toward transcendental subjectivity, as though that werent already hinted at in his earlier writings, and as if it represented a retreat from an original world-centered empiricism into a solipsistic Cartesianism via Kantian Idealism. Misreadings of Husserl along these lines abound, and Sartre is one of the most egregious examples of it, according to Derrida:

It is true that in my work Sartre was very important, in the beginning. When I was a student, he was already there, and it's by reading Sartre that, in a certain way, I began to get into the field of philosophy and literature. For this reason, it would be absurd for me to try to absolutely distance myself from Sartre. That being said, quite quickly I thought it clear that Sartre was a representative of a philosophy like Husserlian phenomenology, adapted to France, a philosophy that was already beginning to make some noise but that at the same time, and even with respect to what he was introducing or translating from phenomenology, from Heidegger even, that there were some enlargements, distortions, simplifications, which from that point of view seemed to me to amortize what was essentially interesting about the work of Husserl and Heidegger. And so since then I have never ceased, in a certain way, to see better into all of that. [Lights up a cigar.]

FT: But do you mean that from the point of view of the legitimacy of Husserl's and Heidegger's thought, for instance, or of a critique of the reading offered by Sartre of Husserl or Heidegger?

JD: Yes, I mean that both in what he was keeping and in what he was critiquing, in my opinion, he was not a rigorous enough reader. And from that point of view, it turns out that the work done by him in France was very ambiguous. I am not saying that it was simply negative, but he and others with him kept from us for a long time the real importance and the sharpness of Husserl's and Heidegger's work while importing them and pretending to critique them, as both translator, if you like, of Husserl and Heidegger and critic of Husserl and Heidegger. This is not to say that it was simply a question of finding our way back into Husserlian and Heideggerian orthodoxy against Sartre. Not at all. But I think that even in order to understand, to critique Husserl and Heidegger, it was necessary to understand them better than Sartre did in those days. The point is not here to issue some condemnation; since that's how it happened, it couldn't have happened otherwise, in those conditions and in a certain number of historical conditions.

But it is a fact that Sartre's thought obscured in quite a powerful way what was happening elsewhere in German philosophy, even in the philosophy that he himself pretended to be introducing in France. To say nothing of Marx and to say nothing of Freud and to say nothing of Nietzsche, whom he, in a way, never really read. I mean that he misunderstood Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche (to put them together as is usually done) even more than he misunderstood Husserl and Heidegger, whom he nevertheless quoted. And so, from that point of view, we have to deal with a huge sedimentation of thought, a huge philosophical sediment that covered the French scene for quite a few years after the war and that, I think, has marked everyone from that generation. I would say that there was a lot of dissimulation, and subsequently it has been necessary to undo this sedimentation in order to find again what was dissimulated by it, in a way.

Sartre no doubt, well, guided me, as he did so many others at the time. Reading him, I discovered Blanchot, Bataille, Ponge-whom I now think one could have read otherwise. But finally, Same was himself the "unsurpassable horizon". Things changed when, thanks to him but especially against him, I read Husserl, , Heidegger, Blanchot, and others. One would have to devote several dozen books to this question: What must a society such as ours be if a man, who, in his own way, rejected or misunderstood so many theoretical and literary events of his timelet's say, to go quickly, psychoanalysis, Marxism, structuralism, Joyce, Artaud, Bataille, Blanchot-who accumulated and disseminated incredible misreadings of Heidegger, sometimes of Husserl, could come to dominate the cultural scene to the point of becoming a great popular figure?

Sartre was a philosophical lightweight compared to Husserl, which is why Heidegger called his work ‘dreck’ ,and why Merleau-Ponty considered his work a continuation of Husserl’s project and distanced himself from Sartre’s thinking. Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception is explicitly a development of Husserl’s later work, emphasizing embodiment, perception, and the lifeworld.

Regarding your question about solipsism, I thinks Sartre’s notion of subjective freedom is more solipsistic and voluntaritistic than Husserl’s. What is needed is an account of subject-world interaction which doesn’t oppose subjective will to external circumstances and then proceed to privilege one side of the binary over the other. There is neither outside nor inside prior to interaction. We always understand ourselves though participation in normative discursive communities, but these are partially shared circumstances, subtended by perspectival positionings do not allow for their being swallowed up and dissolved into a flat social totality. We mirror ourselves in others as reciprocal interaffecting, but it is an interaffecting that doesn’t remove the utter particularity of individual vantage.