Why I accept Nietzsche's advice to quit grumbling and accept my fate

I've made big changes in my philosophy through the years, not with 10,000 people watching, more like a few hundred people watching, and the changes looked like being inconsistent in principles, or at variance with stability. It seems better to people if you can remain the same all through your life or make changes right in line with your past work.

But I wasn't lucky enough to be raised with a philosophy I could maintain all my life. And maybe because of that I developed a distrust of intellectual authority, which had both good and bad consequences in my life. The good was the creative independence I had in developing my philosophy, the bad was burning all my bridges so others could not easily follow me, or me them.

I developed at least five new religious philosophies before I arrived at my present philosophy, which is lasting. I began with rejecting Christianity and developing several new versions of paganism. Then over time, influenced by both conservation and sociobiology, I developed Evolutionary Catholicism. And finally after much study and thinking I developed theological materialism and the projected Theoevolutionary Church.

Each time, with each change, I sent my work to people who couldn't follow my changes over the years or who still think I have the same past views---even my family, which bothers me. Those who follow me now are mostly new people.

But I know I wouldn't be who I am today and I wouldn't have developed my present philosophy if my life had gone any other way. So, as best I can I accept Nietzsche's advice, which he got from the Greeks, to quit grumbling (as I have just done) and accept my fate.

Corrupting and repairing Nietzsche

Almost every modern philosopher runs away from connecting Nietzsche's will-to-power to biology and I think that's a mistake. The other mistake is in tying to make the will-to-power only about self-mastery, which seems to be mainly a reaction to the Nazis and World War Two.

But thinking a little deeper, when the will-to-power is connected to biology it ultimately leads to altruism, being-for-others, which is the foundation of religious ethics. Group-selection was more successful than selfish individualism in survival and reproduction and so altruism was inherited in the human gene pool and remains with us today.

The will-to-power also needs to be connected to natural evolution. Evolution and natural selection are an outside force working to adapt individual wills to power to the environment that they are trying to survive in, so the will-to-power doesn't work or shape life unhindered.

But evolution and natural selection connected to the will-to-power don't lead to imperial dominance of one group over all the others because, as we saw with Hitler, the whole world gangs up on and destroys the imperial dominance of one group over all the others. When man was still a beast that sort of imperial dominance often applied but not since the world became crowded with different ethnic groups all seeking their own ethnostates.

I go even further and change the will-to-power to the will-to-Godhood, or Tirips, which is a material activation within material life with the definite direction of evolving toward Godhood, which is the always sought-after zenith of success in survival and reproduction, but never ending, since evolution always continues on, sometimes going sideways or backward yet always upward toward the object or objects of supermaterial Godhood.

Power and happiness and even survival and reproduction then become secondary goals or reactions to the deeper primal agency or activation of material life to evolve to supermaterial Godhood, and there is no honest need to reject that definition of Godhood and religion.

The outsider position affirming a direction in evolution

Those who believe in the complete randomness of evolution, the vast majority of scientists, often make dismissive comments regarding any kind of direction to evolution, usually in footnotes to show its unimportance to the text, but then the footnote’s are often emotional and long, protesting too much. I find the arguments that evolution is “non-purposive” and random as closed as the religious arguments denying evolution, information is lacking in both arguments.

A few men have had the courage to claim some sort of internal direction, or a development toward complexity in evolution, Ken Wilber and Francis Heylighen are two thinkers who do have courage in discussing a direction in evolution. Philosopher Wilber said, evolution is “the opposite of chance or randomness in the universe. It's evidence of a force that is pursuing against randomness in the universe... Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory holds that all of these transformations upward were just the result of chance and randomness. But there is no way in hell that the universe went from atoms to Shakespeare out of random stabs. This is an extraordinary driven process. The astrophysicist Erich Jantsch referred to evolution as “self-organizing through transcendence,” which is a good way to think about it...” (Conversation in Enlightenment, Issue 47, 2011 -p-48)

Scientist Francis Heylighen wrote, “ ...it is assumed that evolution is largely unpredictable and contingent on a host of uncontrollable factors, which may steer its course in any of an infinite number of directions. However, it is noted that directions in which complexity increases are generally preferred...Though fitness is relative to the environment, it has two components that can increase in an absolute sense, internal fitness (strength of linkages between components) and number of environmental perturbations that can be counteracted. Increases in these two components tend to be accompanied by respective increases in structural and functional complexity...Still, it can happen that systems evolve towards a simpler organization, although this seems rare. It is most likely to occur when the system enters a simpler environment, as when an organism becomes an internal parasite or moves back from the land to the water, but these are obviously unusual examples which go against the general trend of environments becoming more complex. The net effect will tend to be that the new ecosystem, formed by environment together with the newly added system (parasite, cave fish, aquatic mammal, etc.) will become more complex than it was before the appearance of the simplified system... ("The Growth of Structural and Functional Complexity during Evolution”)

I see evolution moving inevitably in a pattern, even though it has its random elements, and the pattern has a discernible direction, in spite of instances of stagnation and retreat, toward “higher and higher more effective living forms,”as Cattell put it. The goal of evolving to Godhood need not deprive us of either science or religion. Defining the Spirit-Will as internally activating life toward evolving toward higher and higher forms and eventually to Godhood, shaped by natural outside evolution, may be a bit further than these men want to go, but we go there. I think such a drive and direction will one day be acknowledged by science. and religion.