Nietzsche 1

[koganbot]

Am 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.

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

another thing he is probably saying here: that the ever-more elaborate structures of generalisation needed for knowledge to get anywhere (to "refine itself") are not just necessary simplifications, but deliberate acts of dishonesty; of refusal to incorporate the (know) facts that would dissolve the generalisation in question

i think some* of his unclarity comes from two -- somewhat conflicting -- facts: one is that his thinking was in motion over the relatively short span of his non-lunatic writing life (not much more than 13 years), so that, while some of his ideas changed a lot, other changed very little (but it's not always easy to decide which!); the other is that no two of his books attack the problems he's worrying at in the same way -- so in a sense one way to clarify what he's getting at is to to see how he comes at it in one of the other books (where other things may be murkier, but this aspect may be less so)

adorno and benjamin -- both vivid disciples -- attempted to use this same style, deliberately breaking off one version of the argument, and returning, or seeming to, from a very different angle: they referred to this dispersed structure of approach as "constellated thinking" (i assume on the analogy with constellations -- stars as sets of points that we project pictures or symbols or markers from mythologies onto);

*and some of it comes from the "lonely man" syndrome: sometimes he's trolling the sheeple for their stupidity not seeing how clever and different and important and special he is; sometimes he's desperate for intellectual companionship; he was of course a manic depressive, so his glee at being misunderstood could be and was supplanted by despair at same, and back round again

[koganbot]

Well, one of my hypotheses about Nietzsche is that he was trapped in philosophy as it was given to him more than he realized*, but another is that he tends to realize more than you think he does on first reading.

*and even within what was given him he didn't seem to have realized that philosophy provided him more alternatives to Plato-Descartes-Kant-Schopenhauer than he realized. The one sentence I know from Bacon, for instance - "knowledge is power" - implies that philosophical alternatives to "truth is a description of what is already there" had existed for almost four hundreds years before Nietzsche came along. But then, see second hypothesis above as to what Nietzsche did or did not realize.

Question: Is there any other major cultural figure ever who has had five or more consecutive consonants in his name?

[koganbot]

had existed for almost four hundred years

Er, three hundred. Still is a long time.

[koganbot]

another thing he is probably saying here: that the ever-more elaborate structures of generalisation needed for knowledge to get anywhere (to "refine itself") are not just necessary simplifications, but deliberate acts of dishonesty; of refusal to incorporate the (known) facts that would dissolve the generalisation in question

But what's to choose between the two (necessary simplifications and deliberate acts of dishonesty), and why can't someone say "Yes, I know that there are known facts that contradict this but I think with more knowledge the contradiction will go away"? If you're going to call that "dishonesty," then what is your criterion for honesty, and for truth, and where did that criterion come from? (A preview of my next post.)(But speaking of "post," I'll be gone for a bit because I have to go to the post office.)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

pre-emptive answer to this diagonally below!

however i think nietzsche's (not-entirely formulated) answer is that you can distinguish between "stuff that formally gets acknowledged as being of the Type of Truth; and stuff that's, y'know, TRUE"

so what's at issue isn less his criterion of truth (which he apparently thinks will take care of itself), more -- to borrow from steve colbert -- his criterion of truthiness

(that said, this is notoriously an area where he appears rather trivially to be contradicting himself the whole time)