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Laughter

Laughter plays an important part in NLP.

The Olympian vice. – In spite of that philosopher who, being a true Englishman, tried to give laughter a bad reputation among all thoughtful people –, “laughter is a terrible infirmity of human nature, and one that every thinking mind will endeavor to overcome” (Hobbes) –, I would go so far as to allow myself a rank order of philosophers based on the rank of their laughter – right up to those who are capable of golden laughter. And given that even gods philosophize (a conclusion I have been drawn to many times –), I do not doubt that they know a new and super-human way of laughing – at the expense of everything serious! Gods like to make fun of things: it seems as if they cannot stop laughing, even during holy rites.

Beyond Good & Evil paragraph 294

 

Law

One of the reason people believe in cause and effect is that they believe in the existence of laws of nature. But this mistakes a mathematical description of an event for an explanation. It also explains how cause and effect is tied up with necessity.

The ‘regularity’ of a succession is only a figurative expression, as if here a rule were being obeyed: it is not a fact. Likewise ‘conformity with a law’. We find a formula to express a kind of sequence that occurs again and again: doing this doesn’t mean we have discovered a ‘law’, and even less a force which is the cause of the recurrence of sequences. That something always happens thus and thus is here interpreted as if a being’s always acting thus and thus resulted from obedience towards a law or a legislator, while without the ‘law’ it would be free to act otherwise. Yet precisely that thus-and-not-otherwise might originate in the being itself, which behaved thus and thus not on the prompting of some law but as constituted thus and thus. It only means: something cannot be something else as well; cannot do first this, then something different; is neither free nor unfree, but just thus and thus. The mistake lies in a subject being invented in.

Notebook 2, autumn 1885 – autumn 1886 paragraph 142

Linguistic

NLP stands for Neur-Linguistic Programming. For that reason language is very important in NLP. Everything that you have learned from experience is somehow coded in the brain. The complete set of this code in NLP is called the world model. Whatever you say is coming from this world model. For that reason a NLP practitioner is very good at listening for in the way you phrase stuff, you can hear where the world model of a person is rich, poor or too poor or too rich. The idea of NLP is enrich someone’s world model so that he gets more options in life and more freedom to chose between these options. If someone has a problem, this only means that his world model is not rich enough to find the solution. So NLP solves problems by enriching world models. For that reason if a NLP practitioner gets someone to speak differently about his problems a first step towards a solution has been made.

At long last, let us contrast the very different manner in which we conceive the problem of error and appearance. (I say “we” for politeness’ sake.) In the past, alteration, change, any becoming at all, were taken as proof of mere appearance, as an indication that there must be something which led us astray. Today, in contrast, precisely insofar as the prejudice of reason forces us to posit unity, identity, permanence, substance, cause, thinghood, being, we see ourselves somehow caught in error, compelled into error — so certain are we, on the basis of rigorous examination, that this is where the error lies. It is no different in this case than with the movement of the sun: there our eye is the constant advocate of error, here it is our language. In its origin language belongs to the age of the most rudimentary psychology. We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language — in plain talk, the presuppositions of reason. Everywhere reason sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things — only thereby does it first create the concept of “thing.” Everywhere “being” is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of being follows, and is a derivative of, the concept of ego. In the beginning there is that great calamity of an error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a capacity. Today we know that it is only a word. Very much later, in a world which was in a thousand ways more enlightened, philosophers, to their great surprise, became aware of the sureness, the subjective certainty, in our handling of the categories of reason: they concluded that these categories could not be derived from anything empirical — for everything empirical plainly contradicted them. Whence, then, were they derived? And in India, as in Greece, the same mistake was made: “We must once have been at home in a higher world (instead of a very much lower one, which would have been the truth); we must have been divine, because we have reason!” Indeed, nothing has yet possessed a more naive power of persuasion than the error concerning being, as it has been formulated by the Eleatics, for example. After all, every word and every sentence we say speak in its favor. Even the opponents of the Eleatics still succumbed to the seduction of their concept of being: Democritus, among others, when he invented his atom. “Reason” in language — oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.

Twilight of the Idols, ‘Reason’ In Philosophy, paragraph 5

Logic

Many NLP language patterns work because they break the laws of logic.

We do not succeed in both affirming and negating one and the same thing: that is a subjective empirical proposition which expresses not a ‘necessity’ but only ‘a non-ability’. If, according to Aristotle, the principle of non-contradiction is the most certain of all principles, if it is the final and most fundamental one upon which all proofs are based, if the principle of all other axioms lies within it: then one ought to examine all the more carefully what it actually presupposes in the way of theses. Either, as if it already knew the real from somewhere else, it asserts something with respect to the real, to what is: namely, that opposite predicates cannot be ascribed to the real. Or does the principle mean that opposite predicates shall not be ascribed to it? Then logic would be an imperative, not to know the true, but to posit and arrange a world that shall be called true by us. In short, the question remains open: are the axioms of logic adequate to the real, or are they measures and means to create for us the real, the concept ‘reality’? … But to be able to affirm the former one would, as I have said, already need to be acquainted with what is; and that’s simply not the case. The principle thus contains not a criterion of truth, but rather an imperative about what shall count as true. Supposing there were no A identical with itself, such as that presupposed by every logical (including mathematical) principle, supposing A were already an illusion, then logic would have as its presupposition a merely illusory world. And indeed we believe in that principle under the impression of endless experience which seems continually to confirm it. The ‘thing’ – that is the real substratum of A: our belief in things is the precondition for our belief in logic. The A of logic is, like the atom, a re-construction of the ‘thing’ … By not grasping that, and by making of logic a criterion of true being, we are well on the way to positing all those hypostases – substance, predicate, object, subject, action, etc. – as realities: i.e., to conceiving a metaphysical world, i.e., a ‘true world’ (- but this is the illusory world once again . ..). The most basic acts of thought – affirming and negating, holding-to-be-true and holding-to-be-not-true  are, inasmuch as they presuppose not only a habit but a right to hold-to-be-true or hold-to-be-not-true in general, themselves ruled by a belief that there is knowledge for us, that judging really can reach the truth. In short, logic does not doubt its ability to state something about the true-in-itself (namely, that this cannot have opposite predicates). Here the crude, sensualist prejudice reigns that sensations teach us truths about things – that I cannot say at the same time of one and the same thing that it is hard and it is soft (the instinctive proof’I cannot have two opposite sensations at the same time’ – quite crude and false). The conceptual ban on contradiction proceeds from the belief that we are able to form concepts, that a concept doesn’t merely name what is true in a thing but encompasses it … In fact logic (like geometry and arithmetic) only applies to fictitious truths that we have created. Logic is the attempt to understand the real world according to a scheme of being that we have posited, or, more correctly, the attempt to make it formulatable, calculable for us …

Notebook 9, autumn 1887 paragraph 97

Logic is tied to the condition: assuming that identical cases exist. Indeed, in order to think and conclude logically, the fulfillment of this condition must first be feigned. That is: the will to logical truth cannot realize itself until a fundamental falsification of all events has been undertaken. From which it follows that a drive rules here which is capable of both means, firstly of falsifying, then of implementing a single viewpoint: logic does not originate in the will to truth.

Notebook 40, August – September 1885 paragraph 13

Lost performative

All sentences that express a norm, rule, opinion or judgment without stating whose judgement, opinion, rule or norm it is, is a lost performative and is part of the metamodel. It is classified as a distortion of reality whereas one can, of course, also argue that it is a deletion. The word “lost” certainly suggests that.

Man as the measurer. – Perhaps all the morality of mankind has its origin in the tremendous inner excitement which seized on primeval men when they discovered measure and measuring, scales and weighing (the word ‘Mensch’, indeed, means the measurer, he desired to name himself after his greatest discovery!). With these conceptions they climbed into realms that are quite unmeasurable and unweighable but originally did not seem to be.

Human, All Too Human book 3, paragraph 21

Injustice necessary. – All judgments as to the value of life have evolved illogically and are therefore unjust. The falsity of human judgement derives firstly from the condition of the material to be judged, namely very incomplete, secondly from the way in which the sum is arrived at on the basis of this material, and thirdly from the fact that every individual piece of this material is in tum the outcome of false knowledge, and is so with absolute necessity. Our experience of another person, for example, no matter how close he stands to us, can never be complete, so that we would have a logical right to a total evaluation of him; all evaluations are premature and are bound to be. Finally, the standard by which we measure, our own being, is not an unalterable magnitude, we are subject to moods and fluctuations, and yet we would have to know ourselves as a fixed standard to be able justly to assess the relation between ourself and anything else whatever. Perhaps it would follow from all this that one ought not to judge at all; if only it were possible to live without evaluating, without having aversions and partialities! – for all aversion is dependent on an evaluation, likewise all partiality. A drive to something or away from something divorced from a feeling one is desiring the beneficial or avoiding the harmful, a drive without some kind of knowing evaluation of the worth of its objective, does not exist in man. We are from the very beginning illogical and thus unjust beings and can recognize this: this is one of the greatest and most irresolvable discords of existence.

Human, All Too Human Part 1, paragraph 32

Love

One of Richard Bandler’s favorite sayings is: “Freedom is everything and love is all the rest.” These are the two values of NLP: freedom and love.

Love. Is the most astonishing proof wanted of how far the transfigurative force of intoxication can go? ‘Love’ is that proof, what’s called love in all the languages and mutenesses of the world. Intoxication here gets the better of reality in such a way that, in the consciousness of the lover, the cause seems obliterated and something else located in its place – a quivering and a sudden gleam of all the magic mirrors of Circe. Here man or animal makes no difference; even less do spirit, goodness, probity … One is made a fine fool of if one is fine, a gross fool of if one is gross; but love, and even love of God, the saintly love of ‘saved souls’, at root remains one thing: a fever that has reasons to transfigure itself, an intoxication that does well to lie about itself. And anyway, when one loves one is a good liar, to oneself and about oneself: one strikes oneself as transfigured, stronger, richer, more perfect, one is more perfect … Here we find art as an organic function: we find it embedded in life’s most angelic instinct: we find it as life’s greatest stimulus – art, thus, sublimely expedient even in its lying … But it would be a mistake to stop at love’s power to lie: it does more than just imagine, and actually alters the ranking of values. And not only does it change the feeling of values … The lover is more valuable, is stronger. With the animals, this state produces new substances, pigments, colors and forms: especially new movements, new rhythms, new calls and seductions. With man it’s no different. The economy of a man is richer than ever, more powerful, more whole than the non-lover’s. The lover becomes a spendthrift: he’s rich enough for it. He now dares, becomes an adventurer, becomes a donkey of generosity and innocence; he believes in God again, he believes in virtue because he believes in love. On the other hand this idiot of happiness grows wings and new capacities, and even the doors of art open up to him. Discount from poetry in sounds and words the suggestion of that intestinal fever – and what remains of poetry and music? … L’art pour l’art, perhaps: the virtuoso croaking of abandoned frogs despairing in their swamp … All the rest was created by love …

Notebook 14, spring 1888 paragraph 120