Nietzsche 4

[koganbot]

According to Nietzsche, if I'm reading him right, Plato stood truth on its head by denying perspective. But I think it's a mistake for Nietzsche to use the word "perspective," it's a residual from Kantianism. I can believe that the earth rotates around the sun and I also can believe that the sun rises in the east and in certain circumstances that the sun rises on the left, and that's all a matter of perspective but so what? The trouble with "perspective" is that it implies an independent thing that we're all looking at, and so someone can get from the word that, yes, bias is inevitable. But that's not what Nietzsche is aiming for at all. When Copernicus decided the planets were material objects like earth that didn't cause a change in perspective but more like a wholesale change in an activity, like going from watercolors to ice hockey. You could say that what Nietzsche really means by "perspective" is "serves some human interest," and maybe that's what he should have said, but that's Dewey not Nietzsche.

I have a similar problem with the phrase "necessary fiction." Fiction compared to what? Well, compared to the absolute, the fixed, the eternal. But those constitute the very notion of truth that Nietzsche is trying to get away from. But to call a truth that may fall short of eternal "a fiction" is to set as your standard the notion of "truth" that you're trying to overthrow. Again, this isn't Nietzsche's intent, which is more along the lines of telling us that we sometimes have to choose what we believe, or at least take responsibility for our beliefs. (Which, by the way, is something I get from Plato, if not from "Platonism.") I can see how in Nietzsche's time using a term like "necessary fiction" was a way to jog the mind away from Kant's way of dividing the necessary and the contingent. Unfortunately such terms as "necessary fiction" outlived Nietzsche's context.

The most interesting thing in the book for me is where Nietzsche thinks that peculiarities of language have forced a belief in opposites on philosophers, that language "will continue to talk of opposites where there are only degrees and many subtleties of gradation." I think he's wrong here. Standard linguistic competence in the use of words like "soft" and "loud" and "hot" and "cold" and "independent" and "dependent" and "essential" and "accidental" etc. involves using them to express degrees and subtleties of gradation. That's how we can talk of cold stars at a couple thousand degrees above zero and high-temperature superconductors at a couple hundred degrees below zero, and the U.S. achieving its independence from Britain despite reminding intertwined commercially with Britain and France, etc. What happened in philosophy was that people like Plato found such degrees and subtleties, when it came to "dependent" and "independent," to be hugely problematic, in that he wanted causes to be absolutely 100 percent independent of effects, reality to be absolutely independent of appearance, etc., and some philosophers want grounds to be so independent of the thing being grounded that if the latter ceases to exist the former will remain unchanged. That people such as Aristotle and Aquinas were driven to deploy the term "unmoved mover" wasn't owing to language masking the degrees and subtleties of gradation but rather because those degrees and subtleties were so evident and inescapable that such philosophers resorted to extreme measures to try to do away with them. I think Nietzsche runs two complaints into one, disliking philosophy's attempts to get rid of the degrees and subtelties and disliking philosophy's creating opposites out of terms that never should have been opposed in the first place, such as "mind" and "body" and "consciousness" and "instinct." Those should be two separate complaints.

But this gives a clue to the intent of Nietzsche's wordplay, his calling ignorance a refinement of knowledge and his using phrases such as "necessary fiction." He's trying to jostle us into perceiving subtleties that philosophy bulls over.

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i thought your exam was today! (or is this it?)

[koganbot]

Yes. I didn't get a chance to read your responses to Nietzsche 3 and Nietzsche 4 until after the exam, but the earlier ones I did read were quite helpful. I'm still swamped in stuff (such as poptimists polls), but I'll try to reply to some of these at some point.