Market Excesses

For Nietzsche the basic factum to which we come as human beings is will to power. Each and everyone of us has his own will to power and evaluates the world in terms of this will to power. For example, as a thinker, I evaluate the world in terms of great thoughts which, unascertained at the time of conception, come to predominate a century or two later whereas the business man will evaluate the world in terms of what sells. Heidegger's work in the main ascertains great thoughts in their inception, growth and decline. He placed extra weight on individual thinkers who lived historically because he himself was an individual thinker who lived historically. Another example of this mode of evaluation is Nietzsche; for him "the greatest events—they are not our noisiest but our stillest hours." On The Stillest Hour he noted that "it is the stillest words which bring the storm. Thoughts that come on doves' feet guide the world." What a far cry from evaluations derived from the market place which ascertain greatness in terms of profit, popularity and business! The power politics of today which are fuelled by market considerations measure the greatness of a country in terms of its economic growth, i.e. yearly rate of production or, more accurately, destruction. Similarly, knowledge no longer stands as knowledge but as something translateable into a degree or qualification which has currency in the market place, including which institution you attented and the final score achieved. Work has also become the ultimate component of a "good" life following the diktat of the market place. Evaluations derived from the market place also decide what books are published, films produced and art works shown. As the sole concern of the market place is to make money it is entirely just to say as I did in Truthfulness and Money that money in the most truthful of truth-values and has taken the place of the Christian God as the source of all possible meaning. Money has become truth as defined by me, i.e. That which makes meaning possible and is suggested by the possible meaning of a word. On the question of truth, Heidegger decided that which definition of truth came to prevail at a particular time gave the historical shape of that age—for a long time truth was understood as "correctness of representation" but this definition changed to that of today, i.e. "That which makes meaning possible and is suggested by the possible meaning of a word" because truth is historical, i.e. subject to time and becoming, meaning that for Heidegger and myself there are no "eternal truths" as we might find in Plato and Christian theology. The danger of course is that evaluations stemming from the market place become all embrasive and prevent other modes of evaluation from ripening (man, the evaluator—Nietzsche)—other values will be deemed invalid. Yet evaluations as they derive from the market place and as they derive from thinkers are in many ways opposed (as I discovered in the various jobs I have held). To sum up: man evaluates. Today this evaluation is fashioned throughout by the market. Yet there are other modes of evaluating as we find in Nietzsche and Heidegger. "The world revolves not around the inventors of new noises but around the inventors of new values; it revolves inaudibly." In parentheses in Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 261, "it is the intrinsic right of masters to create new values." In Of Redemption Zarathustra says "the will is a creator. All 'it was' is a fragment, a riddle, a dreadful chance—until the creative will says to it 'But I willed it thus!''' Perhaps Enowning will no longer seem so strange an enterprise on reading these crucially important aphorisms.

Addendum—As I noted in a French piece Société de contrôle et anarchie selling one's self through for example one's CV no longer has a pejorative or degrading connotation showing the victory of the market even in terms of the identity of the individual.