THE WORLD AS WILL TO POWER & REPRESENTATION

Lecture by Prof Nihilus (James T Stillwell III). ( I-Theist on youtube)

see also the video version of this lecture http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Yga807Y6Yg

INTRODUCTION.
In this video/lecture I will be expounding and articulating the central tenet of Fredrich Nietzsche's philosophy he entitled "wille Zur macht" or in english "will to power". To accomplish this task I will be quoting generously from The published works of Fredrich Nietzsche as well as from his book "Der Wille Zur macht" which was a collection of his unpublished notations which were published by his sister Elizabeth after his death.
I will also be quoting from the published works of Benjamin DeCasseres who was a brilliant essayist, Nietzschean idealist, individualist anarchist, and some what of a mystical poet who lived from 1873 to 1945. It is interesting to note that he was also a distant relative of Spinoza.
I will also be quoting from western style philosophers such as Peter Hughes, Arthur Schopenhauer, and eastern style philosophers such as Alan Watts, Eckhart Tolle as well as psychologist Carl Jung.
I have broken the following lecture into 3 sections
SECTION 1: THE ONTOLOGY OF THE WILL
SECTION 2: THE WILL TO POWER AS SYMBIOSIS & SOCIOLOGY
SECTION 3: THE WILL AND IT'S SCALPEL
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SECTION 1: THE ONTOLOGY OF THE WILL
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Fredrich Netzsche rejected materialist mechanism in favor of his own flavor of an Atheistic form of idealism. Or in his own words...
"Science" as a prejudice – ... A "scientific" interpretation of the world, as you understand it, might still be one of the most stupid of all possible interpretations of the world ... This thought is intended for the ears and consciences of our mechanists who nowadays like to pass as philosophers and insist that mechanics is the doctrine of the first and last laws on which all existence must be based...'
– Nietzsche
(GS§373)
Nietzsche drew quite heavily from Schopenhauer's theory of the will and advanced his own.
For Schopenhauer and Nietzsche "Matter" is a representation of will, a wills representation of other wills and itself. Or as De Casseres put it " Power is another name for Will."

Matter is what DeCasseres called "an eidolon of the will, the symbol of an Image".
By representing other wills as objects it turns them into something to have, possess, control or a means to an end to gratify itself. Objective Knowledge/representation is the wills way of dominating and thus "to have" or "own".
"Life is a lewd game of tag played by I Want and Catch Me" -Benjamin DeCasseres.
For Nietzsche and Schopenhauer Willing is the inner aspect of power/energy attempting to assimilate other wills to its telos.
"The victorious concept force still needs to be completed: an inner will must be ascribed to it, which I designate 'will to power'"
and in Beyond Good and Evil, s.36, Walter Kaufmann transl. He said:
"Suppose, finally, we succeeded in explaining our entire instinctive life as the development and ramification of one basic form of the will--namely, of the will to power, as my proposition has it... then one would have gained the right to determine all efficient force univocally as--will to power. The world viewed from inside... it would be "will to power" and nothing else!"
The will does this through representing externality as objective/quantitative, thus creating subject object dichotomies, qualitative vs quantitative. It should be noted here that this is not an ontological dualism but merely an epistemic one.
"All ostensible mind can be attributed to matter, but all matter can likewise be attributed to mind" -Schopenhauer
Or Benjamin DeCasseres put it this way "The Will is not just only the inventor of the Universe but it is the Universe."
And the notable psychologist Carl Jung, who is known for his ideas concerning the collective unconscious, wrote that "psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another", and that it was likely that "psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing".
Or in the thought provoking words of my fellow philosopher Peter Hughes...
"A common oversight: though mind may be unexplainable by matter, mind may still be conditioned with matter. One must distinguish the epistemological from the ontological issue."
Thus the (epistemological) Hard Problem of Consciousness does NOT necessarily imply (ontological) Substance Dualism (soul)."
This double aspect view of Schopenhauer and-Neitzsche is an atheistic form of Ontological monism and is not some form of vitalism or "ghost in the machine".
In contrast however, the so called "ontological monist" position known as materialism (which is a single aspect view) actually leads to ontological dualism since it cannot account for or explicate how qualitative knowledge or an internal "what it's like" first person knowledge can emerge from material, biological mechanism. This is a clear indication that consciousness or qualitative states, and matter which is 3rd person quantitative knowledge must be separate.
This epistemic gap causes some materialists and scientism culties to either deny the existence of The Mind Body problem or resort to "promissory note materialism" or even "eliminative materialism".
Materialism/physicalism and dualism both confuse a representation of the world for the world "in it self" or the actual. When one comprehends however, that the world as we perceive it is merely a representation of primal will or consciousness, one can begin to understand that the representer (That is mind, will, or consciousness) cannot itself be a representation. Humans represent their environment as space, time, mater, causality, and other primal wills or consciousnesses represent their environment in very different ways.
The representations becomes more simplistic the further one travels down the scale of organic complexity until one reaches matter which represents it's will as gravity. Force is not caused by unconscious material substance but is rather a representation of force, that is "will" or desire.
On this matter Nietzsche was quite clear -quote:
"The mechanistic world is imagined only as sight and touch imagine a world (as "moved") --so as to be calculable-- thus causal unities are invented, "things" (atoms) whose effect remains constant (--transference of the false concept of subject to the concept of the atom)...
If we eliminate these additions, no things remain but only dynamic quanta, in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta: their essence lies in their relation to all other quanta, in their "effect" upon the same. The will to power is not a being, not a becoming, but a pathos --the most elemental fact from which a becoming and effecting first emerge--
The Will to Power, s.635, Walter Kaufmann transl.
In this way idealism dissolves "The hard problem of consciousness" which materialism and dualism either ignore or utterly fail to address.
I would like to note here that neither Nietzsche or Schopenhauer put forth a theory of "free will". As Nietzsche referred to "free will" as that "hundred-times-refuted theory". The will is not free. Or in the words of Schopenhaur...
"The ability to deliberate ... yields in reality nothing but the very frequently distressing conflict of motives ... This conflict makes the motives try out repeatedly, against one another, their effectiveness on the will [desire]. This puts the will in the same situation as the body on which different forces act in opposite directions, until finally the decidedly strongest motive drives the others from the field and determines the will. This outcome is called resolve, and it takes place with complete necessity as the result of the struggle ... through that which we do we only find out what we are.' (Essay on the Freedom of the Will)
For Nietzsche Consciousness doesn't cause actions but is merely accompanied by them. Concerning the causality of the will Nietzsche wrote:
"There is absolutely no other kind of causality than that of will upon will." The Will To Power - 658 (1885)
Again, Consciousness does not cause actions but is accompanied by them as to provide a series of possible actions and their consequences, thus revealing which course of action will provide one with more power and which will leave one in a state of weakness.
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SECTION 2: THE WILL TO POWER AS SYMBIOSIS & SOCIOLOGY
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It should be noted that not all wills to power exist in a state of oppisition to one another but rather exist in symbiotic relationships.
For example, the bacteria which live in a stomach and aid in the digestion of nutrients, the mutually beneficial relationship between dogs and humans which has existed for thousands of years.
Familiar and romantic relationships are of course another example. For further examples we can look to religious groups and political parties which are all groups of individuals who share similar if not identical ideologies oughts and ideals and thus gain power by being a part of a gang. Concerning symbiosis and wills to power Nietzsche said:
"My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (--its will to power:) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on--"
The Will to Power, s.636, Walter Kaufmann transl.
However, Nietzsche realized that for the most part existence is force against force, will against will.
Or in the words of DeCasseres
"In organized society we pillage under prescribed conditions, plunder within limits; what we call social justice is merely the machinery by which we regulate theft.....Who will probe the subtleties of theft in organized society? Who dare trace his smallest possession to its beginnings? All the things we own are smeared with blood and tears, and our triumphal marches are over the skeletons of the lost."
It should be noted as well, that for Nietzsche each organism was a multiplicity of wills to power while for Schopenhauer each organism was a singular will.
For Schopenhauer the "Will" was the will to survive but for Nietzsche it was wille Zur macht" (will to power), that is an insatiable drive to manifest power, control, or dominion. Or again in the words of De Casseres... "Whatever exists wills dominion over something else."
For Nietzsche the will to survive was merely the lowest level of the will to power. That is a weakened will which has fallen prey to a stronger will. If an organism is not threatened it will seek to grow and to extend its force, it's dominion.
Quote:" [Anything which] is a living and not a dying body... will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant - not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power... 'Exploitation'... belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will to life."
from Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, s.259, Walter Kaufmann transl.
Quote:“A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength — life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results” (Nietzsche 1966, §13).
The will to justice and equality is also a weakened form of the of the will to power.
'One desires freedom so long as one does not possess power. Once one does possess it, one desires to overpower; if one cannot do that (if one is still too weak to do so), one desires "justice," i.e. equal power.'
– Nietzsche
(WP§784)
Or DeCasseres articulated it this way:
"All popular uprisings are attempts to impose upon the strong the very yoke which the weak are trying to cast off--the yoke of slavery."
Even knowledge, in cases where it does not grant one power is subsumed under the will to power when a falsity will serve ones power interest best.
Much of what most people believe is false and is based upon sub-conscious will to power considerations.
All belief systems that is religions, cults, and political parties are power structures and "in groups" which grant power to those who are therein united.
All moral dogmas are false in the sense that none of them are absolute nor objective but are mere baseless opinions and declarations of inner subjective likes and dislikes.
For example one who is disadvantaged in some way will often believe in equality and egalitarianism and attempt enforce their beliefs and or "is to be's" on others through legislation so as to gain power through the violence of the State.
Whenever one says "there ought to be a law against this or that" they are actually saying "if one does x, one ought to be seized by the violent force of the state".
This is true of everything from speeding, to taxation, to murder.
If legislation is not backed by the threat of violence and ultimately lethal deadly force it is merely a suggestion.
For Nietzsche Christianity is a "slave religion" slave morality with power stifling virtues that benefit the weak, such as meekness, equal rights, pity, humility etc. Or as philosopher Peter Hughes put it in his book Neo-Nihilism: the philosophy of power.
'Nietzsche contends that the objective morality that most western subjects put faith in today germinated two millennia ago with the advent of Christianity. When the Jews became subject to Roman rule, their means of overcoming that curtailment of power was the revaluation of Roman values, a revaluation that became the dominant religion of the world. Roman values were an example of what Nietzsche named ‘master morality’: a system that held characteristics such as strength, honour, pride, courage, fortitude, etc., as the highest of values. A cult emerged which completely inversed master morality. It was a cult which preached weakness, humility, compassion, faith, hope and charity to be the highest virtues. Such characteristics of course empowered the weak – those who needed charity, hope, equality, compassion given to them, a God who blessed them as being weak. A weakling who has nothing to be proud of will gain power by proliferating the view that humility is a virtue, pride a vice. ‘Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth’ Jesus said, Matthew reported. This kind of ideology that empowers and ennobles the weak for being weak Nietzsche calls ‘slave morality’. It is weakness and mediocrity dressed as virtue. This inverted ideology quickly spread, despite the Roman criminalisation of it. Almost three centuries after Jesus’ alleged resurrection, Constantine legalised and converted to Christianity. Soon thereafter the Roman Empire fell. This slave morality has now spread to two billion adherents after two millennia.'
Nietzsche Defines The master or authority figure as "a creator of values" where as the slave moralist has his values as a response to noble morality. That is it is reactionary.
The history of morals is then that of conflicting wills (the strong and the weak) of these two types of moralities . The higher or noble type creates his own values out of an abundance of power while the powerless or disadvantaged respond out of resentment. The Coexistence of these two types of moralities is impossible as the weak and or disadvantaged, the mediocre herd seeks to enforce it's values on everyone.
For Nietzsche every higher civilization came about via barbarian conquerors who with their will to power preyed upon the weaker, moral and peaceful societies. Or in his own words, quote:
'At the base of all these noble races one cannot fail to recognize the beast of prey ... Roman, Arab, Germanic, Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, Scandinavian vikings – in this need they are all alike. It is the noble races who have left the concept "barbarian" in all their tracks wherever they have gone.'
– Nietzsche
(GM, T1, §11)
Nietzsche defines a healthy society as not existing for its own sake, but for the sake of a higher type , that is the value creators.
The state is itself a consequence of the will to power, that is a power structure, gang, or "ingroup" of individuals with a monopoly on violence within a given geographical region which grants special immunities and privileges to those within. Statism is yet another belief system, consisting of baseless religious dogmas.
Each religionists creates a God concept in the shape and character of their own ego and power interests and each unwitting voter votes for the master they think will grant them power over their neighbor, or who will steal their neighbors money via taxation and put it where they wish it to go.
A country or state is really just a prison. A system of control.
Sure, a citizen has a much bigger cell and more privileges (or so called "rights") but a citizen is still in confinement to some extent. A a society, a country has it's prison guards (police) with their special immunities. That is a protected power class or Aristocracy with its special "rights".
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SECTION 3: THE WILL AND IT'S SCALPEL.
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For Fredrich Nietzsche ,the will was the fundamental driving force behind the organic and inorganic. Or as Benjamin DeCasseres a Nietzschean poet and essayist later put it...
" I conceive the Will-to-Power to be fundamental and irreducible. In this matter I am an absolute Nietzschean. Power is another name for Will. Both are mystical, metaphysical, a priori. Whatever exists wills dominion over something else. No mental or physical movement is conceivable without the idea of conquest. The word self-conquest means will-to-power. Buddha’s extinction in Nirvana is will-to­-power. It is a positive that admits of no negative. All ethical and religious systems are will-to-power."
Schopenhauer noted concerning the wills primacy and control over memory quote....
"In just the same way, memory is enhanced by pressure of the will. Even when otherwise weak, it preserves completely what is of value to the ruling passion. The lover forgets no opportunity favourable to him, the man of ambition no circumstance that suits his plans, the miser never forgets the loss he has suffered, the proud man never forgets an injury to his honour, the vain person remembers every word of praise and even the smallest distinction that falls to his lot..."
For Nietzsche and Schopenhauer both, recollection, thoughts, conceptualizations and even awareness are subsumed under the will. Thoughts and concepts are useful fictions which carve up the the world into "man" and "nature" "mine" and "yours", into "subject" and "object." Into "in group" and "out group" into "country" and "enemy" "East" and "West". These are of course useful practical mind made distinctions but ultimately nothing more.
Or as in the immortal words of Schopenhauer.
'Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.'
The quote I just read is merely one example of how the will uses concepts (in this case a country or State) to carve out it's "mine", "us" or "them". By defining others (that is them) we define ourselves. What would "The believer" be without "the unbelieving"?.
The apparent Universe is a singular interconnect whole.
Or in the Poetic words of DeCasseres
"Star-shine and eye-glance and water-gleam are the same. The star sees itself through the medium of the human eye, and the moon shines on itself."
Through the intellect the will carves up the universe which is one seamless process into parts--hence the wills way of attempting to gratifying itself "to have", to dominate, to overpower. Hence the concept of "property". The apparent world is a pizza, conceptualization is a scalpel and each will is attempting to cut its slice of "mine". A "thing" is merely a "think".
In his book Stillness Speaks Eckhart Tolle put it this way:
"Reality is one unified whole, in which all things are interwoven, where nothing exists in and by itself.
Thinking fragments reality--cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces."
The Buddha recognized this same profound truth 2,500 yrs ago:
“In the sky there is no distinction of east and west; people create the distinctions out of their own minds and then believe them to be true.”
Or as in the eloquent words of Alan Watts.
'[An] organism, including its behaviour, is a process which is to be understood only in relation to the larger and longer process of its environment. For what we mean by "understanding" or "comprehension" is seeing how parts fit into a whole, and then realizing that they don't compose the whole, as one assembles a jigsaw puzzle, but that the whole is a pattern, a complex wiggliness, which has no separate parts. Parts are fictions of language, of the calculus of looking at the world through a net which seems to chop it up into bits. Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember"
It is the built into the very nature of The will to power to oppose, resist and exclude to maintain a sense of separatation, to appropriate, to exploit, to objectify and utililize all to its telos. So there is "I" against the "other," "us" against "them".
Or as De Cassres put it in his magizine pamphlet "This I is aggressive. If it isn’t, it will be murdered by another I."
Or as he wrote in his book Chameleon: Being a book of my selves.
"This element of warfare is so deeply rooted in the nature of things--it is so absolutely a necessity if the universe is to continue to exist--that Nature in order to perpetuate herself everlastingly invents opposites to attain her ends."
Or as Nietzsche put it in BG&E sec 259
"life itself means appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation" BG&E sec 259
The ego "the story we tell our selves about ourselves", the "my story" (the poor needy little me) which are thought patterns, are another way of the will gratifying itself which is "to have," "to possess."
The ego is a way for the will to objectify itself through the intellect to have identity in a conceptual sense. The ego says "I accomplished this or that, notice me! "I am important!, I have this or that". "I am a victim! " Or even "I am worthless". But I think DeCasseres put it best when he said:
"To prey-to prey-that is our essence. If we cannot be powerful and happy and prey on others we invent conscience and prey on ourselves." And "To trace the evolution of-conscience that pathologic still, small voice which man-kind declares tells it when it is doing wrong-would be to write the history of mankind's defeated dreams....
The criminal-so called preys upon Society in the name of instinct; (The will to power). Society preys upon the criminal-so called-in the name of an abstraction."
I believe what DeCasseres is stating here is synonymous with what Nietzsche called "bad conscience":
"I look on bad conscience as a serious illness to which man was forced to succumb by the pressure of the most fundamental of all changes which he experienced, – that change whereby he finally found himself imprisoned within the confines of society and peace...... All instincts which are not discharged outwardly turn inwards" -Fredrich Nietzsche -On The Geanology of Morals
The essence of will is to prey, to assimilate other wills to it's telos which is it's power.
However, when it's power is thwarted in the name of an abstraction-Society (The State) or suppressed through religious beliefs (like that of a instinct suppressing system of belief like Christianity for example) the will turns inward and feast on itself like a cancer. While "bad conscience" gives the will it's "thing" it's to-have, it is what DeCasseres calls "the soul preying on itself".
It also finds identity through mental positions and propositions, beliefs, and religious dogmas. When these are challenged by other wills the will feels threatened because it's mind made identity it's "to have" is threatened.
As one of the consequences of these conceptual dichotomies and mental compartments we view our environment and often one another as a series of objects to be assimilated into our telos instead of the process which is the Universe and fail to see that we are our environment and thus in the long run are self destructing. If you see a tree as a concept, a thing which is discrete and separate from the whole process of life then to you it is nothing more than a means to an end--instead of an integral part of the very atmosphere which we breathe. Or as DeCasseres stated
"Nature has in the intellect of man, bred her foe. She has in her blind willing willed Her doom."
Through conceptualization we "thingify" and platonically see reality as objects moving through space and time. But "reality" is not made of "things". If you could speed up time, you would see solidity turn to liquidity. You could watch solid steel disolve before your eyes. Existence is movement.
"Quote: "This world is the will to power — and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power — and nothing besides!" (Nietzsche 1968, §1067)
The will is a "thirst" and thus never sated for long. Or in the words of DeCasseres "Universal Unhappiness is caused by the inability of an infinite appetite to subsist on a finite amount of crumbs." -
. Or as Schopenhauer noted:
“The basis of all willing … is need, lack and hence pain … If, on the other hand, it lacks objects of willing, because it is at once deprived of them again by too easy a satisfaction, a fearful emptiness and boredom come … life swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom” – WWR v.i, §57
The Will is immutable and admits of no negation. Even the most ascetic endeavors of renunciations and self disciplines are merely "willing not to will". You cannot defeat the will by willing nor desire by desiring. Or as De Casseres articulated...
All great negations are at last splenid affirmations. We renounce by desiring not to have, and to say, "I refrain" is really to say, "I will not to will." Absolute renunciations cannot be conceived. We are the gibes of an eternal Will. Turn wheresoever we may we cannot escape it."
External contrary wills/power/energy are obstacles which cause pain which causes complexity and adaptations which allow a will to over-come a given obstacle. Hence "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" -Fredrich Nietzsche.
Pleasure is experienced through the overpowering of an obstacle which is another will. Or as Benjamin DeCasseres expressed it:
"It is the war of wills that breeds limitation, and so long as there is limitation there is pain, and pain-the severance of dream from deed....
The obstacle that stands in the path of my inexorable attractions must die-or else slay me. It is merely a question of which is the stronger, (or fit) not whose is the trespass." Or in another place he said "Every increment of power is an increment of life."
Or Fredrich Nietzsche spoke well when he said in his book The AntiChrist. Quote: "What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? All that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome."
Life is merely a unique case of wille Zur macht (will to power).
For Nietzsche most of the Universe consisted of blind sub-conscious willing. All is force against force, will against will, conflicting desire against desire. Force against force.
Existence is a battle field of competing wills-to-power! You are born into this war and you may not opt out.
"the ego and its needs are the nearest approach to a fundamental Reality that we know. No one can ever step outside of his I. This I is aggressive. If it isn’t, it will be murdered by another I." -Benjamin DeCasseres
'All is force, all is energy, all is will to power. You are will to power. You are born into a world of competing powers, they compete for your adherence as neighbouring planets compete for equidistant meteorites. If you have not the inherent will to fight the powers, you will join them thereby augmenting their power. But if you stand apart, deflecting external imperatives, refusing submission to any god, creed, state, law or ideology, never surrendering your will to the will of others – if such a stance you take, apotheosis to a heavenly body will you manifest: Yes, as Nietzsche decreed, ‘The free man is a warrior.’ -Neo-Nihilism The Philosophy of Power
In conclusion, for Nietzsche the cosmos of which we are apart is nothing but will to power and its effigies, a continuous cosmic collision of competing forces. Our ultimate telos then is power not to kiss the ass of the devil or to eternally grovel at the feet of a Devine father figure.
Nor be over come by a pathologic still small voice and beg like babbling lunatics before an emasculated savior.
But to be our own god's, that is be value creators, to be beyond good & evil, to be what De Casseres called "un allied minds" or what I call an I-Theist. Nietzsche did not write to everyone but to the exceptionals. His philosophy is not for the faint of heart nor those in need of a crutch.
I will now bring this lecture to a close with one final quote from Benjamin De Casseres.
"Few there are who dare walk the shifting surfaces of the Milky Way; few are born to voyage against the North Star.
Wreak your soul on life. Use your powers. Never question whether they are moral. Once you put the question you are already weak."

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Purposeless --Alan Watts

..."You pick up a pebble on the beach – look at it – beautiful. Don't try and get a sermon out of it – sermons and stones and god and everything be down – just enjoy it, don't feel that you got to salve
your conscience by saying that this is for the advancement of your aesthetic understanding. Enjoy the pebble. If you do that you become healthy, you become able to be a loving, helpful human being. But if you can't do that, if you can only do things because they are somehow, you are going to get something out of it, you are a vulture.

So, we have to learn – we don't have to, you don't have to do anything, you don't have to go on living –but it's a great idea, it's a great thing if you can learn what the Chinese call 'purposelessness'. They think nature is purposeless. When we say something is purposeless, that's put down, there's no future in it, it's a washout. But when they hear the word purposeless, they think that's just great. It's like the waves washing against the shore, going on and on and on forever, with no meaning.The great Zen master said, as his death poem, just before he died: 'from the bathtub to the bathtub I have uttered stuff with nonsense'. The bathtub in which the baby is washed at birth, the bathtub in which the corpse is washed before burial, all this time I have said many nonsenses.

Like the birds in the trees go 'tweet, tweet, tweet!' what's it all about? Everybody tries to say 'ah it's the mating call, that's the purpose, trying to get their mate, you know, attract him with a song. That's why they have colors, butterflies have eyes on them, self protection' the engineering view of the universe! Why do that? They say 'well it's because they need to survive'. Well, why survive, what's that for? 'Well to survive'.

See, human beings really are a lot of tubes. And all living creatures is just tubes. And a tube has to put things in one end and let it out at the other. Then they get clever about it and they develop nerve ganglia on one end of the tube, the eating end called the head. And that's in it's got eyes, and it's got ears, and it's got little organs and tenons, things like these, and it helps to find things to put in one end so that you can let them out at the other. Well, while you're doing this you see the stuff going through, where's the tube out? And so that the show can go on, and the tubes have complicated ways of making other tubes, who go on doing the same thing, and at one end or at the other. And they say well, that's terribly serious, that's awfully important, we've got keep on doing this (ah ah ah). Now when Chinese say 'nature is purposeless' - this is a compliment. It's like the idea of the Japanese have a word 'Yugen', and they describe Yugen as: 'watching wild geese fly and be hidden in the clouds, as watching a ship vanish behind the distant island, as wondering on and on in a great forest with no thought of return'. Haven't you done this, haven't you gone on a walk with no particular purpose in mind? Carry a stick with you and you occasionally hit a doodle and wander along and sometimes twirl your thumbs. It's at that moment that you are a perfectly rational human being, you learn purposelessness. All music is purposeless. Is music getting somewhere? If it were, I mean if the aim of music, of a symphony were to get to the final bar, the best conductor would be the one who got there fastest! See, dancing, when you dance, do you aim to arrive at a particular place on the floor? Is that the idea of dancing? The aim of dancing is to dance! Is the presence. Well it's exactly the same with our life! We think life has a purpose. No.

Here is the choice: are you going to trust it or not? If you do trust it, you may get let down. And this it is yourself, your own nature and all nature around you. There are going to be mistakes. But if you don't trust it at all you are going to strangle yourself. You are going to fence yourself round with rules and regulations and laws and prescriptions and policemen and guards. And who's going to guard the guards? And who's going to look after big brother to be sure that he doesn't do something stupid? No go. To live I must have faith. I must trust myself to the totally unknown. I must trust myself to a nature which doesn't have a boss, because a boss is a system of mistrust. That is why Lao Tzu's Tao 'Loves and nourishes all things but does not lord it over them'." ~Alan Watts, Who Guards The Guards?...

Neo-Nihilism: Atheist Meta Ethics by Peter Sjöstedt Hughes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmGL8NQ519Q

Following the death of faith in God non believers have become confused over the issue of ethics and morality. I shall seek to end their confusing thereby offering the honest answer to view on ethics to which a liberated atheist thinker would arrive. It is not humanism, but a qualified form of nihilism. 

I shall look at confused responses that is: evolutionary psychology, humanism, utilitarianism, contractarianism and cultural relativism and find them lacking. To begin with it is essential to understand the difference between descriptive and prescriptive ethics. A dichotomy conflation of which has been the cause of most of the confusion regarding ethics. Descriptive ethics then, describes the behaviour of humans and other species amongst themselves. We can say describe the compassion and altruism amongst mankind. But describing behaviour does not logically entail that one prescribes or advocates that behaviour. Prescriptive ethics prescribes values that others "ought" to have, it prescribes behaviour one "ought" not to do this or that. For religions prescriptions are given by God. David Hume made clear it is logically impossible to derive prescriptive ethics from descriptive ethics. It is logically impossible to derive an "ought" prescription from an "is" description or a value from a fact. For example it may be a fact that we have evolved compassion to aid our survival. But from this fact it is impossible to derive the value that one "ought" to be compassionate. Such a transgression of logic is as invalid as deriving the value that one "ought" to be aggressive from the fact that we have evolved aggression. Morality then is not based on reason but on sentiment which is both biologically and culturally conditioned. As Hume stated : "It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger." (Its not contrary to reason, its just highly unusual) 

Following this understanding to those who claim that we have a moral sense within us from what is good and what is evil I will reply with the following. It may be a fact that we have the characteristics of compassion, empathy, altruism etc But these are universal characteristics NOT universal values. They are facts not values. Different cultures value different characteristics for example the characteristic of "pride" was the highest value for Aristotle in Greece 2500 years ago. But was one of the lowest vices for medieval christianity being one of the seven deadly sins. So the characteristic of "pride" is a fact but it is merely culture not logic which decides whether it is a value. Like wise, Plato considered compassion to be a womenly vice. The Spartans considered aggression to be a virtue. The Vikings considered death in battle to be the only way of entering their heaven valhalla. Again characteristics, facts and values must be separated. With this understanding here are some responses to the question of our values. Evolutionary psychology, we can explain characteristics through evoltion. But we cannot explain which characteristics we "ought" to value from evolution. Evolution describes the facts, but it cannot prescribe values or bridge the "is", "ought" gap. We have evolved both aggression and compassion, evolution cannot tell us which we should value the more. Likewise humanism claims there are certain human characteristics that aid our survival and thus are universal values (human rights) However this again derives values from facts. Moreover other facts such as anger, aggression and manipulation have also aided and still aid our survivial. There is no way of proving them to be true and rights can only exist within a legal frame work. Outside of countries such notions are absurd. 

Utilitarianism also suffers from logical inconsistency, it derives the value of the utility principle (increase everyones pleasure and decrease the pain) from the fact that we seek pleasure and avoid pain. Even if this were a fact it does not entail how we "ought" follow it. On may seek pain and avoid pleasure without contradiction. Facts do not lead to values. Contractarianism states that values are derived from certain characteristics such as altruism as they help society acheive peace and stability. However this assumes what it seeks to prove it begs the question, as it values peace and stability as a condition from which values are derived. Many cultures have valued war and battle, both cultural evaluations are subjective not objective. What has been said in no way leads to cultural relativism , they state that one "ought" not to criticise other cultures. This itself is a value and prescription (and "ought") that itself is relative to their culture and thus not an objective moral imperative either. Rather if we want to be rational we must criticise other cultures based on our subjective preferences and be conscious of the fact. This does not lead to classical nihilism as we understand that it is a fact that we value things whatever they maybe. Even perception itself is an evaluation. We perceive what is a value to us. Nihilism per say is impossible due to human nature. But different things are valuable to different people and different creatures. Therefore this account is known as neo nihilism. Objective morality is an illusion and like religion is a means to control others.