Nietzsche 2
Dec. 8th, 2008 06:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbotMARK:
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 is less his criterion of truth (which he apparently thinks will take care of itself), more - to borrow from steve colbert - his criterion of truthiness
Well, this is what I would want Nietzsche to believe, that truth takes care of itself, people come up with the criteria they need as they go along (which is to say that philosophy has nothing interesting to say about truth), but I'm not sure it is what he believes.
The subtitle of Beyond Good And Evil is Prelude To A Philosophy Of The Future, and he's addressing people who he believes don't exist yet, or maybe exist as a handful of actual living people or soon to be living people whom he doesn't know and has no inkling of but whom he's counting on to eventually run across his books and be inspired to invent for themselves a new type of thinking and being - and who in doing so can invent a new epoch for Europe. But for his story to make sense - a Hero Story, but one that hasn't happened yet - the forces arrayed against these new men must be powerful and omnipresent. So what you're calling "Type Of Truth" or "Truthiness" must be more than just a habit and mistake of philosophers, who don't realize that small t truth takes care of itself. Rather big T Type of Truth must be a force in the world, not something that men simply believe in the moments when they're doing philosophy but something they live with and live by. But he never says what this is, this Truth, and of course he believes that philosophers over time have come up with new truths while believing that their new truths were universal, each new one the right one. But I think he thinks there's an omnipresent Platonism-Christianity-Democracy-Positivism (e.g., there are elements common to all of those, no matter how much they imagine they oppose each other), but he never sits down and states what those common elements are. And what I want him to say is that among the common elements are the beliefs that reality is limited to what's already there and that truth is a correct understanding or description of it - but that this "already there" is something other than man and the life he lives in his body and man and his creations (and that women never really faint and villains always blink their eyes, and children are the only ones who blush, and life is just to die). Except again what I've done to make sense of Nietzsche is to project Dewey onto him.
In any event (and this will be post number three, later tonight), Nietzsche has what I think is a split in him, and the split is this: On the one hand, he thinks the tradition that he comes out of puts matching before making, and something in him wants to buy into that dichotomy and simply reverse it, make it "making comes before matching" (that's a phrase I picked up from Gombrich's Art And Illusion), and he wants to turn philosophy around and put it on the side of making, with philosophers being creators and commanders. But on the other hand he doesn't buy the dichotomy (as well he shouldn't), doesn't think that making and matching are necessarily at odds with one another. But if he doesn't buy the dichotomy, that making and matching are opposites, how can he ever say it was really in force, that a new man is necessary either to reverse it or to overthrow it?
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 is less his criterion of truth (which he apparently thinks will take care of itself), more - to borrow from steve colbert - his criterion of truthiness
Well, this is what I would want Nietzsche to believe, that truth takes care of itself, people come up with the criteria they need as they go along (which is to say that philosophy has nothing interesting to say about truth), but I'm not sure it is what he believes.
The subtitle of Beyond Good And Evil is Prelude To A Philosophy Of The Future, and he's addressing people who he believes don't exist yet, or maybe exist as a handful of actual living people or soon to be living people whom he doesn't know and has no inkling of but whom he's counting on to eventually run across his books and be inspired to invent for themselves a new type of thinking and being - and who in doing so can invent a new epoch for Europe. But for his story to make sense - a Hero Story, but one that hasn't happened yet - the forces arrayed against these new men must be powerful and omnipresent. So what you're calling "Type Of Truth" or "Truthiness" must be more than just a habit and mistake of philosophers, who don't realize that small t truth takes care of itself. Rather big T Type of Truth must be a force in the world, not something that men simply believe in the moments when they're doing philosophy but something they live with and live by. But he never says what this is, this Truth, and of course he believes that philosophers over time have come up with new truths while believing that their new truths were universal, each new one the right one. But I think he thinks there's an omnipresent Platonism-Christianity-Democracy-Positivism (e.g., there are elements common to all of those, no matter how much they imagine they oppose each other), but he never sits down and states what those common elements are. And what I want him to say is that among the common elements are the beliefs that reality is limited to what's already there and that truth is a correct understanding or description of it - but that this "already there" is something other than man and the life he lives in his body and man and his creations (and that women never really faint and villains always blink their eyes, and children are the only ones who blush, and life is just to die). Except again what I've done to make sense of Nietzsche is to project Dewey onto him.
In any event (and this will be post number three, later tonight), Nietzsche has what I think is a split in him, and the split is this: On the one hand, he thinks the tradition that he comes out of puts matching before making, and something in him wants to buy into that dichotomy and simply reverse it, make it "making comes before matching" (that's a phrase I picked up from Gombrich's Art And Illusion), and he wants to turn philosophy around and put it on the side of making, with philosophers being creators and commanders. But on the other hand he doesn't buy the dichotomy (as well he shouldn't), doesn't think that making and matching are necessarily at odds with one another. But if he doesn't buy the dichotomy, that making and matching are opposites, how can he ever say it was really in force, that a new man is necessary either to reverse it or to overthrow it?
no subject
Date: 2008-12-18 06:02 pm (UTC)view (or a view of his, at one time; or an experiment by him, at one time) of language as essentially an ossification of long-ago fixing of meanings (by falsifying the surplus of change we experience, substituting 'untrue' but usefully inaccurate limitations of our experiences for the more true but less useful alternatives)
The trouble I have with this is that (1) the claim that language fixes meanings really needs to be elaborated on, since it's not at all clear what "language" and "fix" and "meanings" mean in such a sentence, and also it doesn't seem true; e.g., the language of soccer doesn't prevent someone from inventing rugby, and the language of rugby doesn't prevent someone from inventing American football and Australian Rules football, and the words "planet" and "motion" were given new meanings over the course of the Copernican Revolution, so language seems plenty adaptable; and (2) the idea of "substituting 'untrue' but usefully inaccurate limitations of our experience for the more true but less useful alternatives" is something that begs for examples, and in Beyond Good And Evil it never gets them. What's a true but less useful alternative?
no subject
Date: 2008-12-24 10:14 pm (UTC)your worries in (1) don't seem apposite since the point of saying the meanings of words were arbitrarily fixed long ago wasn't to insist that they are now fixed i.e. unchanging. if they WERE fixed, then they were once not fixed (and we can ask what the reason or cause for their fixing was, and who fixed them, even if the answers turn out to be somehow deflationary); and they can be unfixed again. i don't think, on the basis of what you just said about language being adaptable, that you and nietzsche are in disagreement on this point.
in (2), i don't know what nietzsche's examples are but i think his preferred kind of example, meant to fill out the idea of something said being more or less true and more or less useful, involves there being a gradation to our sensory discrimination. what gets counted as / called a P is restricted by convention to certain of our experiences, even though discriminating more finely would be in some sense justified because some non-P experiences would still be appropriately similar, because making the finer discriminations would be too troublesome - making us too sensitive to variations which got in the way of our living in certain successful ways. what sets the level of discrimination we care about is in some way supposed to be connected to what we can get by with paying attention to / caring about. i would not be surprised if a story about pseudo-primitive people warning each other about dangerous events ('bear!!') were involved at some point.
no subject
Date: 2008-12-25 03:24 am (UTC)