"Will to Power," because all of a sudden, after my conversations on these boards, I understand much better the author's impetus. The first time I picked this book up, decades ago, I didn't see the point so I set it down unfinished. "Objective value is impossible," I would have said, "so live by subjective value. Live aesthetically." (Except it's only now, after recent conversations, that I realize I meant, "Live aesthetically."
Oddly enough, aesthetics is a branch of philosophy, one of the goals of which is to articulate objective aesthetic values. There's that word again. "Objective." I can't escape it.
People want values they can hold in consensus. This is, for example, the very essence of Kohlberg's Level 5 morality. And for all practical human purposes, consensus reality and objective reality are the same thing. They're two sets that intersect. Objective reality contains the known and theoretically the unknown. Unknown objective reality is, by definition, useless to talk about. Known objective reality is exactly congruent with consensus reality.
Objective values are the greater set of which objective moral values are a subset. I'm embarrassed to admit that I didn't widen my view to take in the greater set. I kept talking about moral values as if they were the only values. Obviously they're not. An ugly picture isn't immoral. Beauty isn't a moral value. But it is a value. An objective one? To what extent?
Nietzsche was grappling with all of this in the notebooks that became, "Will to Power."
I get it now. And I want to read it. As I will, so shall it be. Kindle is a great tool, by the way. Books appear on my phone instantaneously. Now that's power!
