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Nietzsche 3
OK, 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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(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.)