I am wondering if this paper is accessible? As in, can people still interested read the paper? I have an account on there, and it was free for me, but I had to actually use the academia portal rather than being able to find it through public search engines. — Moliere

I wrote a similar paper, available here in draft form:

https://www.academia.edu/38288335/Heidegger_Will_to_Power_and_Gestell

“If we examine Heidegger's treatment of Nietzsche's Will to Power in 'The Word of Nietzsche:" God Is Dead"' , (located in The Question Concerning Technology), it seems that Heidegger identified Nietzsche's thinking of self-transformation of values-structures as the last stand of metaphysics. Heidegger argues "The will to power is the ground of the necessity of value-positing and of the origin of the possibility of value judgment." "The principle of value-positing" comes out of the ground of Being as Will to Power. According to Heidegger's reading, particular value-structures become stabilized by the Will, and present themselves to the subject. This "constant reserve"(William Lovitt's translation, seemingly closely allied with 'standing reserve') belongs to the sphere from out of which the will to power wills itself.

Within this quote is all that I fear about idealism.

Note how every instantiation of idealism is also a tool of power. — Isaac

So we might have social constructions around pots, clay, even atoms, but the the distributions of those constructs will be bound by the parameters of the data from outside the Markov Blanket — Isaac

The split between internal representation and external reality that free energy models depend on amounts to a particular sort of idealism. It seems to fit Kant's own definition of empirical idealism:

“Idealism is the opinion that we immediately experience only our own existence, but can only infer that of outer things (which inference from effect to cause is in fact uncertain)” (Kant 2005: 294).

As Barrett writes “...concepts exist in your human mind that is conjured in your human brain, which is part of nature. The biological processes of categorization, which are rooted in physical reality ...are observable in the brain and body”.

“If you talk to a chemist, “real” is a molecule, an atom, a proton. To a physicist, “real” is a quark, a Higgs boson, or maybe a collection of little strings vibrating in eleven dimensions. They are supposed to exist in the natural world whether or not humans are present—that is, they are thought to be perceiver-independent categories. If all human life left this planet tomorrowsubatomic particles would still be here. But evolution has provided the human mind with the ability to create another kind of real, one that is completely dependent on human observers.”

“ Plants exist objectively in nature, but flowers and weeds require a perceiver in order to exist. Common sense leads us to believe that emotions are real in nature and exist independent of any observer, in the same manner as Higgs bosons and plants.”

Folk generally have little difficulty as to the distinction between clay, the stuff we make pots with, and "clay" the word we use to talk about clay. — Banno

I would hope not , because that distinction is presupposed by the way we use language in those situations.

↪Joshs Clay is dug out of the ground.

"Clay" is a socially constructed word; the stuff we dig up and make pots out of is called "clay".

This is a very important distinction. — Banno

Where and how do you draw the line here so as to be able to make the distinction you’re trying to make between what is constructed and what is prior to and independent of construction?

Sure, if you like. Communities construct cups out of clay. — Banno

And they construct ‘clay’ and ‘chemicals’ and ‘physical’.

Sure, numbers and so on have a reality that is not physical and yet not dependent on any individual mind. That's because they are constructed by communities of minds using language. — Banno

Is this also true of cups? Are they constructed by communities of minds using language? Is the word ‘physical’ then just one of these social
constructions?

The cup still has a handle, even when unobserved in the cupboard. — Banno

There are no teapots in Jovian orbit even though we have not made conclusive observations. There are aspects of reality that are the way they are regardless of their relation to mind.

Idealism is the converse of this view. Idealism holds that statements are true only in some relation to mind. It claims not just that we cannot know that the unobserved cup has a handle, but that there is no truth to the matter; not just that we cannot be certain that there are no teapots in Jovian orbit but that there the notion of truth cannot be applied to what is beyond consciousness. — Banno

Not necessarily. If we are expand the concept of idealism beyond Kant and neo-Kantianism ( and actually we wouldn’t need to do so in order to protect the form of realism that you embrace, since your realism is already a kind of idealism) we can incorporate forms of idealism that argue all of reality are ideas. But ideas dont require humans or mind or consciousness. Deleuze and Nietzsche argue this way. Idea is a creative differential
of forces imminent in all relations , whether animate or inanimate. This avoids the split between mind and matter.

When I think of the number 3, is there a pattern of synapses that fire in my brain that correlate to that thought? Is that pattern of firing synapses fairly consistent every time I think of 3? — Real Gone Cat

Why do you think of the number 3? What is the motivation, the context that frames the thought of 3? Isn’t it always slightly different? If I ask you to continue thinking the number 3, is that not the same as repeating a world over and over? Doesn’t the word begin to lose its initial sense? So my over overall
question is , is the sense of meaning of ‘3’ ever identically repeatable, and if not , would not the pattern of firing of neurons associated with the thinking of ‘3’ also change from in lstance to instance?

Personally, I see the issue as one of function over description. Both the mental event and the statement are functional, not descriptive. — Isaac

In the case of state vs function, description vs process, being vs doing , is it basically a matter of a temporally unfolding event ( or series of events ) rather than an instantaneous spatial pattern? And if so, can such a temporal sequence repeat itself more or less such as to be consistently identifiable as the same, and thus allow a something like a neural process to be correlated with a statement?

I don't think you understood Schopenhauer. Go back and get the vibe of it. Then come back and examine N. — Tate

Are you saying that Deleuze did not understand Schopenhauer?

Schopenhauer was a hard determinist, so there's no denying the Will in that sense. — Tate

What assumptions must be made about the nature of the will in order to argue that it must be denied in a Buddhist-like pose of nothingness? How can a hard determinism lead to that conclusion, and does hard determinism not presuppose metaphysical assumptions about the nature of the real?

↪Joshs He's talking about S's idea that the will is the thing in itself. S eventually decided against that.

N is here agreeing with Kant. — Tate

Deleuze argues that Schopenhauer’s pessimism is a result of thinking Will as representation and illusion.

For Schopenhauer, “ the essence of the will puts us into an unlivable, untenable and deceptive situation.
And this is easily explained: making the will a will to power in the sense of a "desire to dominate", philosophers see this desire as infmite; making power an object of representation they see the unreal character of a thing represented in this way; engaging the will to power in combat they see the contradiction in the will itself.

Schopenhauer does not inaugurate a new philosophy of the will in any of these respects. On the contrary, his genius consists in drawing out the extreme consequ-ences of the old philosophy, in pushing the old philosophy as far as it can go.

By making will the essence of the world Schopenhauer continues to understand the world as an illusion, an appearance, a representation (BGE ) Limiting the will is therefore not going to be enough for Schopenhauer. The will must be denied, it must deny itself.

According to Nietzsche the philosophy of the will must replace the old metaphysics: it destroys and supersedes it. Nietzsche thinks that he produced the first philosophy of the will, that all the others were the final avatars of metaphysics.“

Your mind is continually synthesising, combining and judging, and that activity is what constitutes your reality, or should we say, your being. The task of philosophy is understanding that, as Schopenhauer says in the opening paragraph of World as Will and Idea. — Wayfarer

Now all you have to do is dump Schopenhauer’s metaphysical conception of the Will in favor of Nietzsche’s:

“There are still harmless self-observers who believe in the existence of “immediate certainties,” such as “I think,” or the “I will” that was Schopenhauer's superstition: just as if knowledge had been given an object here to seize, stark naked, as a “thing-in-itself,” and no falsification took place from either the side of the subject or the side of the object.”(BGE)

This is why I believe that a thoroughly scientifically-aware form of idealism is the philosophy of the future. Materialism in its classical sense - the idea that the Universe consists of inanimate lumps of matter and undirected energy which somehow give rise to life - will be consigned to history. — Wayfarer

This account implies a relational basis for the basic organizing processes of life, but it doesn’t necessarily support a subject-based and consciousness-based relationality. One could just as easily argue that outside of consciousness and subjectivity are fundamental relational processes that transcend materialism at the same time that they transcend subjective consciousness.

↪Joshs Silly speculative question, perhaps, but what do you think Nietzsche would have made of postmodernism and Derrida's reading of him? — Tom Storm

I would like to think he would say ‘Finally someone understands me.’( maybe not so much with Derrida)

Plus he had a huge mustache. — Tate

At least he didn’t have mutton chops.

↪Joshs I checked in with some professors on reddit. In some ways the later N is opposed to Kant, but he never strayed from basic Kantian metaphysics, that is, we don't know the world as it is.

You're putting it a little too strongly, in other words. — Tate

There are many Nietzsches. That is , there are many interpretive camps when it comes to his work. There are right and left Nietzscheans, realist and postmodern Nietzscheans. The Nietzsche I understand and find still
radical and exciting is a postmodernist. The best interpreters of him I have found are Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida and Heidegger. Those who think he believes we ‘don’t know the world as it is’ are not postmodernists, they are neo-Kantians. They certainly have a right to their interpretation but I find it utterly conventional, missing everything that I find original in his work.

For the Nietzsche I understand , there is no way the world is in itself apart from our creative interaction with it. The world isn’t an external reality, it is a ceaseless becoming.


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

… we must make the attempt to hypothetically posit the causality of the will as the only type of causality there is. “Will” can naturally have effects only on “will” – and not on “matter” (not on “nerves” for instance –). Enough: we must venture the hypothesis that everywhere “effects” are recognized, will is effecting will – and that every mechanistic event in which a force is active is really a force and effect of the will.

– Assuming, finally, that we succeeded in explaining our entire life of drives as the organization and outgrowth of one basic form of will (namely, of the will to power, which is my claim); assuming we could trace all organic functions back to this will to power and find that it even solved the problem of procreation and nutrition (which is a single problem); then we will have earned the right to clearly designate all efficacious force as: will to power. The world seen from inside, the world determined and described with respect to its “intelligible character” – would be just this “will to power” and nothing else.”
( BGE)

But if you're arguing about whether sciences are more "objective" than human sciences, and that the person says that nothing can be objective anyway, it's still the same context, it's an epistemological context in both cases. — Skalidris

Immediate contexts can never be ‘epistemological’ because the latter refers to general categories of meaning, while the former involves the actual subjective and intersubjectively established sense of a generally defined meaning. In other words, the same epistemologically defined meaning can have a potentially unlimited number of senses, depending on the context of its use.

I missed that. Where does he shoot down Kant? — Tate

More on that here:

https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/nietzsches-engagements-with-kant-and-the-kantian-legacy-volume-i-nietzsche-kant-and-the-problem-of-metaphysics/introduction?from=search

“The later Nietzsche’s uncompromising criticism of Kant places him in clear opposition not only to Schopenhauer, but also to the early ‘back to Kant’ movement.”

Opposition to Schopenhauer's pessimism, yes. — Tate

Also opposition to his metaphysics, which Nietzsche thought was too close to Kantian idealism( his notion of will , for instance). Nietzsche considered himself to be making a radical break with metaphysics , and he thought Schopenhauer remained attached to it.

they were choosing to ignore the specific contextual sense of the phrase in favor of a generic meaning
— Joshs

Mmmm I don't know, it doesn't seem context related to me. I believe anyone (who likes questioning things) could say "you're selfish" and mean "you're more selfish than average" in any context. — Skalidris

That IS the context of the utterance. When one means ‘you’re more selfish than average’, they have a specific contextual reason for making that statement at that time to that person. There is some currently relevant issue that prompts the insult.

It occurs to me I've never considered N to be anything but a philosophical[ (though not scientific) naturalist,
— 180 Proof

If by that, you mean he didn't incorporate supernatural causes into his philosophy, yes.

For N, truth is always a metaphor, though, so he certainly wasn't a physicalist. His touchstone was Schopenhauer. — Tate

Yes, a touchstone, and also an adversary. Nietzsche’s starting point is in opposition to Schopenhauer.

Nietzsche’s naturalism is not Darwinian. It consists of the tension between affective drives rather than causal
relations among physical objects.

Context-insensitive expressions are governed by linguistic rules that determine their contents (semantic values), which remain invariant in all contexts of utterance.

Is that what you meant? — Skalidris

I didn’t mean they were following a rule, only that they were choosing to ignore the specific contextual sense of the phrase in favor of a generic meaning.

Or maybe there is name to describe people who refuse to see things as non binary? — Skalidris

Context insensitivity or context blindness? Or maybe literalism.

How does what they are causally dependant on, or what they reduce to have any bearing on how fundamental or important they are? My wife is made of nothing but molecules. That doesn't have any bearing on how important she is. — Isaac

Not just the magnitude of her importance to you, but the qualitative changes in her importance, how and whether she is relevant or irrelevant to you, is closely tied to the motivational model you understand her behavior through. You don’t just understand her at the reductive level of neural or molecular interaction in causal terms. You also understand her molar behavior in such terms(social and bodily influences). Objectively causal materialist models are rife in current social
psychologically we literature, such as ‘cognitive bias’ and Jonathan Haidt’s empirical analysis of moral thought.

There are of course alternatives to neo-Kantian approaches to motivation that don’t require a return to traditional metaphysics.

For instance , if your wife develops depression do you recommend a cognitive therapist who will help her to change her ‘unrealistic’ thinking, a classic Freudian who would examine her adjustment to the ‘real world’, or would you choose a client-centered therapist who would encourage her potential to create new realities?

The more one looks at the way the language is used, the more one sees that faith has to do with an ethical life, and the evidence that supports faith is the way one lives oneself, not the way the world works. — unenlightened

If we put this a bit differently and say that the evidence that supports faith is the way one lives oneself, not the way others live, we might then have to deal with what separates me from we , or binds us all together. This is of course a very sticky wicket. The old fashioned ethical approach begins with such concepts as free will and the autonomous individual, and the assumption that the me and the we are separated by a clear divide such that it is necessary to start from the way I live rather than the way we live. In its most extreme form, Objectivism , the ‘we’ can go to hell if it stands in the way of the me. Utilitarianism tries to strike a balance between me and we.

More recent approaches , like Wittgensteinianism, phenomenology and postmodernism, assert that the we is already built into the me. From this vantage, evidence concerning how I live my life cannot be separated from evidence concerning how we live our lives. Self-interest is already an investment in the interests of others. Put differently, without an intimate understanding of the way the world of other people works, I will fail to live an ethical life, since that ethics depends on my insightful relations with others rather than empty rules.

In cults people often radiate happiness as a consequence of 'knowing' that god's will is being fulfilled and that they are part of a system of transcendent meaning that will deliver a great destiny and reward. The world they know is exactly as it is meant to be, all has been provided for. I suppose my overarching point is that perhaps not all optimism is worth having. — Tom Storm

A central characteristic of the psychology of cults is an intense need for a sense of belonging. This need finds its satisfaction in a delicately constructed and very vulnerable faith, so the happiness radiated by cult members comes at a great cost. It requires enormous energy keeping at bay all forces that might risk bursting the bubble of faith so tenuously held together by lock-step thinking. This means making the outside world the enemy. I got to know the members of three cults, the Moonies , Yogananda , and Kerista, based in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, and saw first hand how this need manifested itself.

The bible is radical in that it preaches basically the opposite message of a lot of ancient literature and I just have no idea where these ideas came from. the bible humbles kings and boosts the oppressed. I don't know why anyone in antiquity would choose to boost the poor and diseased when it's more natural and widespread to think of them as low. the hebrew bible affirms the dignity of the disabled (exodus 4:10) in a way that virtually no one else does. — Moses

Have you read any of what Nietzsche proposes concerning this ‘slave’ morality?

That doesnt really make sense. Its like saying “the reason for me walking to the store is reason itself”.
You gave a non-answer to my question. — DingoJones

You asked what is the value of faith. I believe that faith and value are inextricable. Faith in its most fundamental form is an expectation, a hope, an anticipation, a question which assumes a certain kind of answer, a space of possibilities to be realized. Faith can be rewarded or disappointed. When we value, we are also asking a question that expects a certain kind of answer. A value can be violated or confirmed. So faith is intrinsic to valuation. What is the value of having a particular faith? What is the value of having a particular value? These seem to be the same questions to me.

f we can observe it and there are plenty of witnesses then we could still doubt, but we'd be into some kind of cartesian doubt where we doubt our senses or our own perceptions. faith plays a role in either. — Moses

Im not talking about rational doubt , which Cartesian doubt is referring to, but pragmatic faith and doubt , which is a very different thing. The perceptual world we experience changes every moment. We use a kind of pragmatic perceptual faith to create and then recognize a certain constancy and stability within what is actually a turbulent flux. This works more or less , but we are also using the same sort of pragmatic faith to assume that our social world, our friends and acquaintances, will behavior in ways that are recognizably predictable and intelligible to us. This is a shakier proposition, which is why on a day to day basis we experience stress , anxiety and disappointment as our faith in others is confounded. This pragmatic anticipatory faith is different from truth-falsity factuality that you’re taking about, The latter is a narrow and artificially worked up practice, whereas the former is how we live most of our lives.

I see faith as a necessary part of epistemology. lets say we're trying to determine if a historical event happened in antiquity so we have no personal witnesses but we have the bible and a few tablets from ancient rulers indicating a conflict. is that enough to believe? when you make that jump into belief that the event happened? — Moses

Let’s say there are plenty of personal witnesses and we’re talking about something all of us can observe at the same time. Is a kind of faith not also operative here ?

Maybe they are wrong though…what is the value of faith? — DingoJones

The value of faith is value itself. Logic, empiricism and reason depend on a foundation of values, which are the essence of faith.

I'm not explicitly talking about God. The new atheists may or may not be talking about God when they denigrate the role of faith. The topic of faith is a matter of epistemology; it doesn't necessarily relate to God. — Moses

There is such a thing as faith in epistemology, a faith that the new atheists don’t recognize in themselves.

Faith is a part of everyday life outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition. It's unavoidable. Faith is basically belief without "adequate" evidence or proof, and it's a necessary component of basic, everyday life. We simply don't have the time or energy to follow up on all the information that we take in over the course of a day or a week. — Moses

Yes, and I would go even further. Our lives are a mess. All of us. I dont mean this to sound as bad as it does. What I mean is that whatever we have accomplished in our past, we wake up in the morning and have to start from scratch. Logic and information are a delicate house of cards resting on the foundation of a human psyche that struggles day to day with continually shifting moods , now of confidence, now of trepidation and doubt, now of terror , now of anxiety, now of loss. No kind of
packaged logic, proof or information will enable us to avoid these vicissitudes of mood. Each moment we are alive we put forward a faith, an expectation of some kind that the next moment will either reward or destroy. I arrange all my food containers at a slight angle on my shelves? Why do I do this? For the same reason I consider certain number combinations ‘good’ and others ‘bad’. It is a kind of faith, even in the absence of religious belief or overt superstition.

don’t think “underlying basic assumptions”, being merely suppositions, count as metaphysics.

I’ll wait for something to actually qualify as an absolute pre-supposition, which a metaphysics of anything, would surely demand. — Mww

Husserl , Rorty and Heidegger wrote a fair bit on absolute presuppositions underlying the sciences prior to the 20th century, including res extensia as the notion of a self-identical object with intrinsic content ,
attributes and properties persisting in time. The natural is thus thought of as restricted to such objects and their measurable movements in a mathematizable space

↪Skalidris

How can we ever be sure that the decision we’re making isn’t biased? Biases are unconscious…
— Skalidris

Work to make the unconscious conscious. The few who attempt to do so find it is a long, painful process. — ArielAssante

And after all that work they eventually find that what they end up with is a conscious bias.

get to decide which one is right? Or is it that whichever one I choose is right (Relativism)? Or that it doesn't matter whch one I chose?

So you agree with me that philosophy is not of much help in deciding between the various systems of ethics, that all it can do is set out the relationships between them. but you add that I get to choose whichever I prefer?

What of my further point, that it's not down to me alone, but to us? — Banno

Whichever one you choose must earn and re-earn that privilege by validating its usefulness repeatedly in your relationships with others. Philosophy is vital to this endeavor , since a personal philosophy or worldview is what is being decided on. Worldview, personal philosophy, ethical system, these are all synonymous, so it makes no sense to say that a system of
ethics we prefer doesnt help decide between various systems of ethics.


Is that ‘relativism’ becuase its relative to your construal? I guess so, although you are arriving at the determination of its usefulness with the aid of results from many social interactions. Just because the way those interactions shape you is not identical to the way they shape others doesn’t mean this ‘relativism’ walls you off from others. It just means that agreed on ethics must be negotiated among individuals with somewhat differing vantages, while each ethical perspective must itself be open to constant test and adjustment as a result of social experience.

So its down to ‘us’, but an ‘us’ which must take into account the vantages of its participants rather than attempting to swallow them up in a group anonymity.

Which one is the ‘system of ethics’? — Banno

Whichever one makes the most sense to you. You already have a system of ethics you prefer, which I would guess matches up with something between between Kant and Marx.

How would that work? — Banno

Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Kant , Hegel, etc:

Each of these implies an original approach to ethics.

You must have noticed by now that philosophy is not of much help in deciding between the various systems of ethics. All it can do is set out the relationships between them. — Banno

I though a philosophy WAS a ‘system of ethics’.

It used to be thought of as matter, but then e=mc2 was discovered, along with electromagnetic fields (not to mention "the observer problem"). But that all happened after 1905 so it's out-of-bounds for this thread. — Wayfarer

Not necessarily.

“In Einstein's first 1905 paper on E = mc2, he treated m as what would now be called the rest mass,[5] and it has been noted that in his later years he did not like the idea of "relativistic mass".”(wiki )