Worlding and the re-valuation of all values — Anything can be a value.

Recently, I read a great run down on Nietzsche and the philology of his time informing his entire schtick. It came out on thw 19th September 2024.

Alexander Prescott-Couch. “Nietzsche’s Ideas about Morality Were Shaped by Philology.” Aeon.co 19 September 2024. https://aeon.co/essays/nietzsches-ideas-about-morality-were-shaped-by-philology

Yes go away and read that, and then come back here. It's so great, it's okay to forget to come back here…

Philology is like a truck chassis to Nietzsche's emotional engine. A type of structuralism. An Ur-structuralism, as are philology's allies the grammar/glamour/magick-spell blur.

In which Apollo and Dionysus provide both fuel and a heat differential, so Nietzsche's engine increases entropy while generating complexity, which provides the energy to re-value all-values. [After Carnot]. And misses the main game IMHO.

I think taphonomy [ eg. see Divining the…—gap  and it's footnote] is better than genealogy per se as a model for this (I do family history a bit), as it is in touch with the ground beneath our feet, not just the air our heads mouth begat. I think taphonomy can be used to get past the genetic fallacy critiques (even when accurate), and also accusations of historicism (however 'valid').

I must have been primed to read this essay because I’ve been writing about revaluing revaluations of value (see links here on labour and here on romancing the value) recently, and on the 17th September 2024 I wrote in my notebook, after my birthday dinner out with the fam (thinking vaguely about Nietzsche’s re-valuation of all values with my usual clouded WTF handwaving through the week):

Anything can be a value.

With the follow up:

Finding purpose, oneself, meaning, can often just be bad meditation.

Values exists at the nexus between reality we have no say in (and depend on) and the bits we would like to have a say in, and so can have a say in, when to we talk to others about all this handwacing we do.

This is the urge to should, which is most easily recognised when we use it in a imperative form.

You should do better than that.

But this is only the most noticeable way we do it, or at least the first place I noticed it. But informs all of our selfing, regardless of our egos, expectations or entitlements as monarchs or slaves. Like really Nietzsche? WTF!

If anything can be a value then there is no point looking for their orgin. Enough said, but this is why genetic fallacies can be good criticisms at times, thought of course, these criticisms can in turn become values, if anything can be a value, and things get metaphysically complicated, even deconstruction cannot save us from the increase in entropy, or meaninglessness.)

There is no point looking for their origin in order to explain them, or ourselves. Even as we feel the urge to should the world into existence (with the now handy and already-made values of priority and primal origins).

This is particularly bad meditation when we go off to find ourselves. (There we are now) We are already here, in the nearby now, making meaning, value, purpose. It’s bad meditation because such self-talk excludes the world even as it worlds, FFS, and so leads, often, to a doubling-down emotionally, and so heads  into doctrinal dogmaland. This is bad selfing (often we do not do this alone) and thus leads to bad worlding.

[had a side thought here writing this about how Entropy can only increase because potential complexity lets it roam about those greater/increasing possible vector spaces made as we count out to infinite infinites rammifying us out into legends in our own lunchtimes]

Now because values shift through time and across geographies, their fixations flutter as we mind ourselves and others in the world, (as Nietzsche learned in his philological ways in that ye-olde zeitgeist) and especially because the urge to value is less noticeable (in many cultures) than the details or expressions of the values in their material and performative gestures, and disputations [culture wars]. So we get bamboozled by the history of a practice or culture as a rich and ancient ensemble of practices and material outcomes (artifacts) when we should be looking at the urge that generates all that wondrous shit, in order to explain anything, if not everything, such as the world.

A re-valuation of all values is all very well, but if we don’t look at the urge that worlds those values, revalued in light of their shifty unbuddha natures, or not, we will not get anywhere.

Anything can be a value.

Some values are more common because of convergence in our urged lifeways that others. Focussing on the common values will not save us either, nor will any focus on  deontological commitments in worlding.

This is why unity does not unify.