Frank Kogan

At this point we were xposting like crazy, but also I think there is a basic way that we were talking past each other.

--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.