Nietzsche 1
Dec. 8th, 2008 10:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbotAm studying Nietzsche's Beyond Good And Evil in preparation for an exam tomorrow. The book is far harder to understand than I was expecting. A major problem is that Nietzsche usually speaks in pronouncements rather than giving examples or making arguments, and he's spare on analogies as well. And he'll use hotly contested terms - "Platonism," "Christianity," "democracy" - as if what they represent goes without saying (so he doesn't say it) or, when he does say it, as if what they represent is a monolith.
Sometimes his pronouncements are grossly simplistic; other times they're wildly ambivalent and correspondingly subtle. And sometimes they're ineradicably cryptic: "And only on this now solid, granite foundation of ignorance could knowledge rise so far - the will to knowledge on the foundation of a far more powerful will: the will to ignorance, to the uncertain, to the untrue! Not as its opposite, but - as its refinement!" Possibly this is his paradoxical way of saying that it's more important for your ideas to accomplish something - create new worlds, new conversations, new forms of life - than for them to be "right," and if you wait on "rightness" and "truth" then you'll never reach the heartiness and gaiety of life and creativity that you want. And I think that he's implying that when people declare their truths, this is fundamentally what they're doing. (But then how is "truth" a fetter that needs to be overcome?) Yet there are other passages where he's talking about the vast amount of knowledge that he thinks good philosophers of the future ought to accumulate.
But essentially I've had to project Wittgenstein and Kuhn and Dewey back onto Nietzsche to make the sense I did of his passage, and I'm not sure I was correct to do so. I was writing what I want Nietzsche to mean but I'm not sure if it is what Nietzsche means. And contra this passage, I think I'm right to try to get Nietzsche right, if he's got something different to say from what I now think, since I already know how to put Wittgenstein and Kuhn and Dewey to use, whereas if Nietzsche has something to say that's new to me, and I've projected W, K, and D onto him rather than making my way to the (differently) Nietzschean, then I won't have something new to put to use, just my same old pragmatist same old.
I would want Nietzsche to say that putting your ideas to use is how you test their truth, but I don't think Nietzsche had gotten there. So I think he confuses matters by using the word "ignorance," and this confusion will be the subject of my next post. I think some of the confusion is his, not mine.
You could say that Nietzsche's style necessarily makes reading him into a creative act, and probably Nietzsche would be delighted with that, though my guess is that he's also, basically, a lonely man in a room and doesn't realize the extent to which we can't see his thoughts. I don't think it's a given that if he were clearer our response would be less creative. I think it can go either way: the effort we put into understanding his vague utterances may make both our understanding and our originality stronger, but the vagueness can also allow us to evade what would have most challenged and stimulated us if the vagueness hadn't allowed us to overlook it. And the vagueness can allow Nietzsche himself not to notice when his own ideas are conventional or half-baked.
Sometimes his pronouncements are grossly simplistic; other times they're wildly ambivalent and correspondingly subtle. And sometimes they're ineradicably cryptic: "And only on this now solid, granite foundation of ignorance could knowledge rise so far - the will to knowledge on the foundation of a far more powerful will: the will to ignorance, to the uncertain, to the untrue! Not as its opposite, but - as its refinement!" Possibly this is his paradoxical way of saying that it's more important for your ideas to accomplish something - create new worlds, new conversations, new forms of life - than for them to be "right," and if you wait on "rightness" and "truth" then you'll never reach the heartiness and gaiety of life and creativity that you want. And I think that he's implying that when people declare their truths, this is fundamentally what they're doing. (But then how is "truth" a fetter that needs to be overcome?) Yet there are other passages where he's talking about the vast amount of knowledge that he thinks good philosophers of the future ought to accumulate.
But essentially I've had to project Wittgenstein and Kuhn and Dewey back onto Nietzsche to make the sense I did of his passage, and I'm not sure I was correct to do so. I was writing what I want Nietzsche to mean but I'm not sure if it is what Nietzsche means. And contra this passage, I think I'm right to try to get Nietzsche right, if he's got something different to say from what I now think, since I already know how to put Wittgenstein and Kuhn and Dewey to use, whereas if Nietzsche has something to say that's new to me, and I've projected W, K, and D onto him rather than making my way to the (differently) Nietzschean, then I won't have something new to put to use, just my same old pragmatist same old.
I would want Nietzsche to say that putting your ideas to use is how you test their truth, but I don't think Nietzsche had gotten there. So I think he confuses matters by using the word "ignorance," and this confusion will be the subject of my next post. I think some of the confusion is his, not mine.
You could say that Nietzsche's style necessarily makes reading him into a creative act, and probably Nietzsche would be delighted with that, though my guess is that he's also, basically, a lonely man in a room and doesn't realize the extent to which we can't see his thoughts. I don't think it's a given that if he were clearer our response would be less creative. I think it can go either way: the effort we put into understanding his vague utterances may make both our understanding and our originality stronger, but the vagueness can also allow us to evade what would have most challenged and stimulated us if the vagueness hadn't allowed us to overlook it. And the vagueness can allow Nietzsche himself not to notice when his own ideas are conventional or half-baked.
