Nietzsche 3

OK, now to the "will to ignorance" thing. Right in the preface Nietzsche says that philosophical dogmatizing is a "noble childishness," and he means "dogmatizing" as an insult but "noble" as a compliment. This is a tension in Nietzsche. On the one hand he wants us to grow up and recognize ourselves as the creators of our truths, and so take responsibility for our truths rather than believe that truth emanates from some nonhuman deity or "reality." And so Nietzsche wants us not to value truths for their own sake but for what we can accomplish with them, and perhaps to prefer uncertainty and error if those accomplish more. But on the other hand he takes history as a series of different people creatively erecting different "eternal" truths in succession, often, Nietzsche says, on the flimsiest of bases.

( So if I were talking to Nietzsche... )

Nietzsche 4

According to Nietzsche, if I'm reading him right, Plato stood truth on its head by denying perspective. But I think it's a mistake for Nietzsche to use the word "perspective," it's a residual from Kantianism. I can believe that the earth rotates around the sun and I also can believe that the sun rises in the east and in certain circumstances that the sun rises on the left, and that's all a matter of perspective but so what? The trouble with "perspective" is that it implies an independent thing that we're all looking at, and so someone can get from the word that, yes, bias is inevitable. But that's not what Nietzsche is aiming for at all. When Copernicus decided the planets were material objects like earth that didn't cause a change in perspective but more like a wholesale change in an activity, like going from watercolors to ice hockey. You could say that what Nietzsche really means by "perspective" is "serves some human interest," and maybe that's what he should have said, but that's Dewey not Nietzsche.

( degrees and subtleties of gradation )