Nietzsche 3
Dec. 9th, 2008 08:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbotOK, 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 I'd ask him what's to choose between the two, between thinking that you're uncovering an eternal truth or thinking that you're creating a contingent truth? Or to ask this another way, who's more likely to create a new truth, someone who thinks he's doing the former or someone who thinks he's doing the latter? I don't have an answer to this second question, but when it comes to creative paradigm shifts, I don't think you can beat Copernicus and Kepler, who were neo-Platonists who thought that the "harmony" and "symmetry" of their new system proved its correctness (for Kepler the word "harmony" was quite literal; he worked out correspondences between musical harmonies and the rotations of the six planets, those correspondences themselves being a reason to think not just that he was right but that all the harmonies and symmetries he was uncovering were a cause of the rotations and the solar system (if I'm understanding Platonic "causation" correctly)).
Using terms such as "perspective" and "contingent" and "necessary fiction" and the like may be useful for getting yourself to understand rather than dismiss other cultures and previous ways of doing things (and remember, fiction is more a compliment than an insult), but do they make any difference one way or another in helping people to "legislate and command" i.e. create (what Nietzsche wants new philosophers to do)? Why would he expect philosophers, of all people, to be the ones to revalue previous values and create new ones? Isn't that what talented people do already, with or without philosophy? I would ask (without necessarily knowing the answer, but leaning towards believing this is right), isn't Nietzsche at the most trying to give philosophers the permission to rejoin the general ongoing dance, rather than restrict themselves to trivial pursuits such as epistemology?
Two points about the last few paragraphs. First, I feel at least some of those questions bubbling up within the text, not just within me. But I also feel that Nietzsche sidesteps a basic question: he assumes the ongoing importance of philosophy rather than asking himself how important it actually is. He thinks civilizations can live within Platonism and Augustinean theology and Utilitarianism and Positivism and the like. So I get the sense that he thinks that culture imposes "matching comes before making" on us and therefore that only philosophy can kick us free from this. Yet at the same time he believes that matching is a form of making, so once again I wonder what there is to kick free from.
"Those philosophical laborers after the noble model of Kant and Hegel have to determine and press into formulas, whether in the realm of logical or political (moral) thought or art, some great data of valuations - that is, former positings of values, creations of value which have become dominant and are for a time called 'truths.' It is for these investigators to make everything that has happened and been esteemed so far easy to look over, easy to think over, intelligible and manageable, to abbreviate everything long, even 'time,' and to overcome the entire past." In this passage Nietzsche seems deluded in two ways, first in overlooking the creativity of Kant and Hegel, but second in assuming that such philosophers' work can be taken as a summary of "everything that has happened and been esteemed" rather than as just one of the many disparate activities that cultures put forth.
Second, I worry that once again I am projecting Dewey, Rorty, Kuhn, Wittgenstein et al. back onto Nietzsche in the way I'm framing these questions and using, e.g., the term "a contingent truth." What's a truth contingent upon? I'd say the paradigm/language game/social practice - those three terms pretty much amounting to the same thing. But those terms aren't Nietzsche's; what those terms are (fortunately) missing is any relation to Cartesian-Lockean-Kantian psychology, a mind looking outward. I wouldn't say that Nietzsche adopts that psychological model - where Descartes et al. give you "the mind" Nietzsche puts drives, creativity, will to dominate, will to power, with the will to knowledge being a mere subset of the will to power. And he turns Kant on his head by calling the drives "the given," rather than thinking of the given as that which the things out there present to our mind. I didn't take this to be Nietzsche actually believing in a "given" but rather his asserting that what is paramount is the urge to shape the world. But still, he's working out the relation between two things - creating and describing, let's say - and this seems like a bit of a hangover from Kant's way of dividing up form(ing) (via the concepts) and content (which is the given, that which is being formed). Nietzsche seems to have no sense - at least when he's discussing "truth" - of the world being made up of diverse social activities in which people participate. So while I'd like the import of Nietzsche to be that the creators reshape the social activities in which they participate, create new language games out of the old, I don't know if Nietzsche would endorse that. His creators command, they don't negotiate.
So if I were talking to Nietzsche I'd ask him what's to choose between the two, between thinking that you're uncovering an eternal truth or thinking that you're creating a contingent truth? Or to ask this another way, who's more likely to create a new truth, someone who thinks he's doing the former or someone who thinks he's doing the latter? I don't have an answer to this second question, but when it comes to creative paradigm shifts, I don't think you can beat Copernicus and Kepler, who were neo-Platonists who thought that the "harmony" and "symmetry" of their new system proved its correctness (for Kepler the word "harmony" was quite literal; he worked out correspondences between musical harmonies and the rotations of the six planets, those correspondences themselves being a reason to think not just that he was right but that all the harmonies and symmetries he was uncovering were a cause of the rotations and the solar system (if I'm understanding Platonic "causation" correctly)).
Using terms such as "perspective" and "contingent" and "necessary fiction" and the like may be useful for getting yourself to understand rather than dismiss other cultures and previous ways of doing things (and remember, fiction is more a compliment than an insult), but do they make any difference one way or another in helping people to "legislate and command" i.e. create (what Nietzsche wants new philosophers to do)? Why would he expect philosophers, of all people, to be the ones to revalue previous values and create new ones? Isn't that what talented people do already, with or without philosophy? I would ask (without necessarily knowing the answer, but leaning towards believing this is right), isn't Nietzsche at the most trying to give philosophers the permission to rejoin the general ongoing dance, rather than restrict themselves to trivial pursuits such as epistemology?
Two points about the last few paragraphs. First, I feel at least some of those questions bubbling up within the text, not just within me. But I also feel that Nietzsche sidesteps a basic question: he assumes the ongoing importance of philosophy rather than asking himself how important it actually is. He thinks civilizations can live within Platonism and Augustinean theology and Utilitarianism and Positivism and the like. So I get the sense that he thinks that culture imposes "matching comes before making" on us and therefore that only philosophy can kick us free from this. Yet at the same time he believes that matching is a form of making, so once again I wonder what there is to kick free from.
"Those philosophical laborers after the noble model of Kant and Hegel have to determine and press into formulas, whether in the realm of logical or political (moral) thought or art, some great data of valuations - that is, former positings of values, creations of value which have become dominant and are for a time called 'truths.' It is for these investigators to make everything that has happened and been esteemed so far easy to look over, easy to think over, intelligible and manageable, to abbreviate everything long, even 'time,' and to overcome the entire past." In this passage Nietzsche seems deluded in two ways, first in overlooking the creativity of Kant and Hegel, but second in assuming that such philosophers' work can be taken as a summary of "everything that has happened and been esteemed" rather than as just one of the many disparate activities that cultures put forth.
Second, I worry that once again I am projecting Dewey, Rorty, Kuhn, Wittgenstein et al. back onto Nietzsche in the way I'm framing these questions and using, e.g., the term "a contingent truth." What's a truth contingent upon? I'd say the paradigm/language game/social practice - those three terms pretty much amounting to the same thing. But those terms aren't Nietzsche's; what those terms are (fortunately) missing is any relation to Cartesian-Lockean-Kantian psychology, a mind looking outward. I wouldn't say that Nietzsche adopts that psychological model - where Descartes et al. give you "the mind" Nietzsche puts drives, creativity, will to dominate, will to power, with the will to knowledge being a mere subset of the will to power. And he turns Kant on his head by calling the drives "the given," rather than thinking of the given as that which the things out there present to our mind. I didn't take this to be Nietzsche actually believing in a "given" but rather his asserting that what is paramount is the urge to shape the world. But still, he's working out the relation between two things - creating and describing, let's say - and this seems like a bit of a hangover from Kant's way of dividing up form(ing) (via the concepts) and content (which is the given, that which is being formed). Nietzsche seems to have no sense - at least when he's discussing "truth" - of the world being made up of diverse social activities in which people participate. So while I'd like the import of Nietzsche to be that the creators reshape the social activities in which they participate, create new language games out of the old, I don't know if Nietzsche would endorse that. His creators command, they don't negotiate.
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posting without reading! (sorry my unbusy moment just vanished)
Date: 2008-12-09 04:00 pm (UTC)FIRST:
Any given one of us is [a] unable to gather all the data there is; [b] unable to process usefully even all the data we COULD gather; [c] operating from within a solitary biological unit placed somewhere in place and time that is (by definition) far from most of the other places and times
So what we any one of us know is inescapably delimited. What FN argues is that we select from the data practically available to us, in a hierarchy of priorities -- sometimes simply pre-selected, sometimes evolving* -- and similarly select the strategies we adopt for adjusting this availability.
So are different perspectives commensurable? Well, possibly they are if they are more or less distorted reflections of an underlying reality, reachable or othwerwise. But FN has no faith in any such idea; not least because he is -- and this I suspect is a new idea with him? -- deeply unsure whether commensuration is a good thing, whether or not it's achievable. "Just because my perspectgive-truth is useful to me in this circumstance, it DOESN'T follow it would be useful to YOU in this same circumstance."
OK, we should also quickly break down what he means be "useful" (which is a pragmatist's word, not a nietzschean word).
1: he means "is this perspective necessary for your survival"?
1a: which is sometimes glossed as "is this perspective necessary for the survival of the species"?
2: he means "does this perspective help enrich life and experience?"
2a: which is sometimes glossed as "does this perspective help enrich your very particular life and experience?"
He does NOT believe these four related "usefulnesses" amount to the same thing; anything but -- they may well pull in entirely different directions.
However re, 2a I think be believes this aspect -- taken in number (ie arguing that there are and should be multiple individual perspectives, not necessarily commensurable -- is important to 1a (" something like: biologically speaking, the presence of multiple warring perspectives leafing to richness is necessary for the survival of the species")
Somewhere out of all this, we get to refine his idea of "will to error" as a value. Our perspective, as a selectivity, is necessarily error-bound -- we have chosen to prioritise some data over others, based on all kinds of caprice and shortcuts. Even if our simplifications and generalisations and data-triage are the best we feel we can do, we KNOW we have taken these shortcuts (whether for enrichmnent or survival). At the point they become dogmatised, as they do in certain social systems of data-selection and simplification and prioritisation (christianity/platonism, acc.FN) -- which is to say, if they declare themselves the ONLY system that can lead to truth ( notwithstanding individuals aligned with said systems opting for their own perspectival error), then they are doing so KNOWING that they are falsifying the situation. The data is not yet in; and never will be. (FN was quite pessimistic about ratio of potential data to data the species will ever gather...)
HOWEVER: FN's attitude to such systems -- especially the less dogmatic ones -- is ambiguous. He recognises that simplification and clarity bring joy -- they are a good thing in the sense that they make us feel good. And also a good thing insofar as they allow us to survive. (Note subtle difference between these two types of good thing...)
part II
Date: 2008-12-09 04:01 pm (UTC)What I called "truthiness" in an earlier post is any social attempt at combination of perspectives ("ideology" being one one loaded shorthand for such a project...)
What is the context of the combination of the incommensurable perspectives? FN is NOT expansive on this -- I would suggest for two reasons. One is that he assumes it will reintorduce dogmatism, albeit at a metalevel (for example: insistence on civil rules of engagement and debate and conflict secretly being a fatwa on entire regions of potential perspective); the second is a degree of political naivety, not really recognising the degree to which his own trauma of isolation, sour grapesing about community and greghariousness and "herd values", renders him blind to levels of social organisation that aren't the vasty herd-mass of the Dogmatic Systems and the Solitary Warrior Boldness of the Untimely Individual. (worth remembering: he had a pretty bad experience as part of the Wagner Gang, where he was beloved heir until he started jibing against uncritical Wagner-worship, at which point he was banished and pretty nastily vilified... He was strong enough to "grow" from this, it didn't silence him, but fair to assume it DID scar him towards group projects).
Nietzsche's question is: can we really assume that the Will to Truth is as Good Thing? "Is the will to truth by definition good for us" or ( to be rigorously perspectival about it) -- is the fact that a truth is Good for Me in this instance a demonstration that it's good for you? His -- very unsettling -- answer is: No. I have an anecdote about catastrophes on Everest which may helps open up how one person's perspectival truth is another person's anti-survival perspectival catastrophe -- which possibly illuminates this unsettling answer -- but posting this now as I just got a bunch of real actual urgent work put on my desk.(Apologies this is not a direct answer...)
*But "change in perspective" -- or perhaps better "change in perspectivity" -- is NOT easily won; FN believes we don't really significantly alter our potential for perspective without significantly altering the way we live our lives).
Re: posting without reading! (sorry my unbusy moment just vanished)
Date: 2008-12-19 06:30 am (UTC)--I am saying that for what Nietzsche himself wants to accomplish (not to mention for what I want to accomplish), "perspective" is a TERRIBLE word. I'll add that being unable to gather all the data there are/being unable to process usefully even all the data we COULD gather is also very much the wrong issue. It's technical and from what I can see irrelevant. What if both Plato and I could gather all the data there are (whatever that means). How would that resolve the differences between us? He thinks that reality/the forms/the ideas are eternal and unchanging. I think that things that change are real, that a jacket gets its identity as a jacket from the fact that we use it as a jacket, not that it partakes of some eternal idea of "jacketness," and that if we put two jackets several feet apart and call them "goal posts" then they are goal posts, and they get this from their being used in the game, not from their participating in an eternal goalpostness. I can't imagine what data I would show Plato that could convince him he's wrong, that the real can change, given that he's defined the real as unchanging, so if something has changed then that thing is not the real, and to the extent it is real this is only owing to its partaking in something that does not change. It isn't that he and I have different perspectives on some third thing - reality - it's that we use the word "real" differently; it extols different characteristics and leads a different life, engages in different activities. I wrote in Nietzsche 4 "The trouble with 'perspective' is that it implies an independent thing that we're all looking at." Nietzsche didn't have the concepts "paradigms" or "language games" to work with, but they'd serve his purposes much better, I'd think, since they don't imply an independent thing that we're all looking at, nor do they imply looking at all, for that matter.
Re: posting without reading! (sorry my unbusy moment just vanished)
Date: 2008-12-19 07:35 am (UTC)1a: which is sometimes glossed as "is this perspective necessary for the survival of the species"?
2: he means "does this perspective help enrich life and experience?"
2a: which is sometimes glossed as "does this perspective help enrich your very particular life and experience?"
Putting aside the word "perspective" ("set of ideas" would be more to the point; "way of doing things" too), "survival of the person or the species" is never at issue in Beyond Good And Evil. "Will to power" is the core motive, not "will to survive," the latter being Schopenhauer's formula, not Nietzsche's. "Power" here is creativity and shaping as much as it is domination, but I think Nietzsche thinks of domination and of shaping as being the same basic impulse: you dominate by giving things shape (but he also can see drives vying for power within a particular person; so "will to power" isn't necessarily tied to an individual; can be both within an individual and can be an attribute of certain collectives).
And as far as I can tell he's perfectly ambivalent about what we would call "multiculturalism" (which, again, I insist is not multiple "perspectives"). The noble urge to simplify and select is not due to the inability to gather or organize data but rather to the impulse to develop one's own culture and art to its fullest - undiluted by race mixing or by a knowledge of different ways of doing things in the past and different ways of doing things in the present, which make us "a kind of chaos." But on the other hand he seems to revel in that chaos as well, if I'm reading him right. The book is back at the library, but I copied this down: "Measure is alien to us, let us own it; our thrill is the thrill of the infinite, the unmeasured. Like a rider on a steed that flies forward, we drop the reins before the infinite, we modern men, like semi-barbarians - and reach our bliss only when we are most - in danger." (Generally he's used "modern man" as a sarcastic, derogatory term, but here he's fully identifying himself with it.) But still, this isn't about helping the species as a whole to survive, it's about the enjoyment of risk. This was from Section 224. Tellingly, back in Section 212 he's saying "'modern ideas'... would banish everybody into a corner, a specialty," so the philosopher "would be compelled to find the greatness of man, the concept of 'greatness,' precisely in his range and multiplicity." But this isn't an eternal value; Nietzsche is saying that the philosopher supports this to counteract the shortcomings of his age. Back in Socrates' day the Athenian notables "let themselves go - 'toward happiness.'" So to counter that what was needed were "Socratic sarcastic assurances of the old physician and plebeian who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh, as he did into the flesh and heart of the 'noble,' with a look that said clearly enough: 'Don't dissemble in front of me! Here - we are equal.'" [So Nietzsche's positing the Socrates - hardly a democrat - as nonetheless a Leveller!] I'd say the principle here, if there is any, is "What - given the current circumstances - can we do best to produce greatness?"
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Date: 2008-12-09 07:23 pm (UTC)as i started speculating in Nietzsche 4, i think FN pretty clearly believes the world is made up by diverse "types" -- at the very least aristocrats versus the herd, but he doesn't think of the latter as uniform and all of a kind (he'd sharply distinguish between "northern herd" and mediterranean herd"; or '"jewish herd" and "buddhist herd")
partly these "types" are variegated biological-temperamental (the biology the given); and i think within the arts he is moving towards a "world... made up of diverse [artistic] activities"; ie that poet-think and dancetune-think do not overlap especially
but no, he doesn't seem to distinguish the types by working backwards from the material result of their practice, i don't think -- where what you do comes first and the shape of your belief-system follows (so it's not actually backwards, it just seems it compared to the way others think)
(i associate this way of thinking with marx and materialism, actually; but my version of marx is a pragmatist's version i suspect!)
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Date: 2008-12-13 08:46 am (UTC)-j
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Date: 2008-12-13 10:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-13 01:56 pm (UTC)(By the way, I've still not had time to think about or comment on your and his recent posts. Country Music Critics Poll is due in 38 hours and I'm busy cramming. But I'll try to take a mental health break from that at some point today and do some of this.)