"To my mind, science has nothing to say on the existence of God." They may not talk about God, but science has plenty to say about metaphysics, in the sense that every era of science implies its own understanding of method that changes over time with shifts in philosophy(Bacon, Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend), which is rooted in underlying metaphysical assumptions that are generally hidden from them.

"To my mind, science has nothing to say on the existence of God."

They may not talk about God, but science has plenty to say about metaphysics, in the sense that every era of science implies its own understanding of method that changes over time with shifts in philosophy(Bacon, Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend), which is rooted in underlying metaphysical assumptions that are generally hidden from them. — Joshs

Metaphysics is tosh.

Your thinking is rooted in a particular metaphysics (worldview, paradigm, personal construct system) just as is everyone else's. That worldview evolves over time, but very slowly

Your thinking is rooted in a particular metaphysics (worldview, paradigm, personal construct system) just as is everyone else's. That worldview evolves over time, but very slowly — Joshs

If philosophy doesn't begin with epistemology, then it's basically intellectual masturbation. Take Heidegger and his obsession with being, from which people such as he are able to construe endless - perhaps socially useful, but more often socially destructive implications.

Why is being fundamental - and by what rules does he proceed? Truth is not his guide, facts are either adduced or cast aside to suit his argument. Maybe there's some loose logic, or process of reason to string things together - but based on some insubstantial concept that more likely arises from language than reality. It's tosh, designed to paper over the mistake of suppressing science as truth for 400 years.

Heidegger wasn't the only one who raised the issue of the entanglement of truth and value, language and reality, epistemology and empiricism. Some of the most interesting developments in analytic philosophy(Quine, Davidson, Sellars, Rorty, Putnam, Goodman) concern this topic.

For instance, this from Putnam:

"Many thinkers have argued that the traditional dichotomy between
the world "in itself" and the concepts we use to think and talk about
it must be given up. To mention only the most recent examples,
Davidson has argued that the distinction between "scheme" and
"content" cannot be drawn, Goodman has argued that the distinction
between "world" and "versions" is untenable, and Quine has
defended "ontological relativity." Like the great pragmatists, these
thinkers have urged us to reject the spectator point of view in metaphysics
and epistemology. Quine has urged us to accept the existence
of abstract entities on the ground that these are indispensable in
mathematics, and of microparticles and spacetime points on the
ground that these are indispensable in physics; and what better justification
is there for accepting an ontology than its indispensability
in our scientific practice? he asks. Goodman has urged us to take
seriously the metaphors that artists use to restructure our worlds,
on the ground that these are an indispensable way of understanding
our experience. Davidson has rejected the idea that talk of propositional
attitudes is "second class," on similar grounds. These thinkers
have been somewhat hesitant to forthrightly extend the same
approach to our moral images of ourselves and the world. Yet what
can giving up the spectator view in philosophy mean if we don't
extend the pragmatic approach to the most indispensable "versions"
of ourselves and our world that we possess? Like William James
(and like my teacher Morton White) I propose to do exactly that.'

I'm tired and I'm going to bed. I got about three lines in when the irresistible droop of dog-tiredness hit me. Maybe it's a consequence of you throwing any old shite at me - to suggest I'm wrong. That could get very tiring, very quickly. If you're as energetic as you seem, might I suggest having a proper go at understanding what I'm actually saying, before insisting I'm wrong. Organisms effect the environment! No shit! What's your real problem?

Nietzsche is referring to a metaphysical God. “God is dead” doesn’t refers to the existence or even just to the death of a religious tradition in society. He is making a specific metaphysical point about our world and our place within it.

“God” refers to the metaphysical idea of our existence being constituted in something outside our world, in some transcendent force which defines who we are, gives us our meaning, from outside our own meaningless existence. When Nietzsche says ”God is dead.” he is referring to the realisation this transcendent account is impossible. He's not equating religion with God. He's pointing out a feature of many religious beliefs and making a metaphysical point about the realisation it's impossible.

Since we are of the world, there is no way something beyond it can define our existence or are meaning. God is dead because we realise the transcendent cannot be us or how we come to exist. The transcendent power of God cannot be how we exist, mean, live, etc., any claim suppose we are constituted or made by such a transcendence is shown to be necessarily false. We know that God cannot be a formal reason we exist or have meaning as existing beings.

What does this mean for the theistic God? Nothing in terms of whether a theistic being might exist or not. To say there cannot be a transcendent God doesn’t preclude any sort of casual entity in the world. One might, for example, have some sort of being who caused a universe to exist. Or a powerful dictatorial judge and jailer, who sends people to a land of plenty to a fiery jail. Since those are claims about what exists in the world, they have to be judged on the relevant claims and evidence.

But Nietzsche’s point does something even more powerful to the theistic God than denying its existence: it turns God into a mortal. Like any human, God becomes just another state of existence, a mere being of a large amount of power, who is subject to the possibility of death (all it would take is a state of existence in which God ceased) and is subject to rule of both logic and values. God ceases to be the special kind of being of infinite existence and infallible judgement. A command of God, for example, has no inherent superiority over a command of a human. A human may know or argue just as well as God. (Really, God is just one of many humans, one of the many rational denizens of the world).

..we need to accept a scientific understanding of reality — karl stone

This would seem difficult to do when one insists on ignoring readily available evidence from the real world.

"To say there cannot be a transcendent God doesn’t preclude any sort of casual unity in the world. One might, for example, have some sort of being who caused a universe to exist."

Nietzsche slayed a lot of Gods, not just the God of Augustine or even Descarte's pineal-gland mediated transcendency. He demolished a whole platoon of atheistic Gods. He also slayed Sartre's atheistic Cartesian consciousness, and the metaphysical logic of cause-effect that the natural sciences depend on. He slayed the teleological undepinnings of Marxist atheistic dialectical materialism, and the bliss of nothingness in zen mindfullness . He dismantled the scientistic worship of scientific method among prominent media atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Dan Dennett.

I don't know. Nietzsche was pretty clear about what he opposed that happened in his time and before him. We can discuss his actual words toward that end. Many argue that it didn't hold together as a system. He was pretty darn persistent, nonetheless.

But forgive me if I don't place what he might have objected to in his future in the same category.

Let's start with the matter of whether the slaying of gods included "precluding any sort of causal unity in the world" as brought forward by TheWillowOfDarkness. Are you arguing that observation is incorrect?

..we need to accept a scientific understanding of reality
— karl stone

This would seem difficult to do when one insists on ignoring readily available evidence from the real world. — Jake

What evidence, and who is ignoring it? I set out ideas I spent a lot of time and effort on - and this is my thanks, is it? Let me make myself quite clear. If you can't tell truth from a hole in the ground, then your entire silly species will end up in the hole. If you don't like that, think on how much future generations are going to despise you. Think on what they will suffer. It's all me, me, me with you people. Get a grip.

Nietzsche is referring to a metaphysical God. “God is dead” doesn’t refers to the existence or even just to the death of a religious tradition in society. He is making a specific metaphysical point about our world and our place within it. — TheWillowOfDarkness

And I'm making a point about the role God served in civilization - as objective authority for moral law, not saying anything about whether God exists or not. I've stated plainly that I don't know, and no-one else knows either. Do you? Hold the front page of Time Magazine. Do you?

Obviously, a Darwinian explanation of the origins of man undermines religious conceptions of reality, but that is explained. The Church made a mistake when they imprisoned and tried Galileo for heresy. They should have embraced Galileo as discovering the means to decode the word of God as made manifest in Creation. If there's a Creator God, (as I suggest was first hit upon by some pre-historic homo sapien, fashioning a stone hand axe - when it occurred to him to ask, "if I made this, who made me, and who made the world?") and if, science is true, then science is the word of God.

Primitive homo sapiens went on to employ God as objective authority for moral law, to enable hunter gatherer tribes to join together, as the basis of society and civilization. This eventually led to Judeo Christian religious ideation, and Darwin, and Nietzsche's effect on society. But that's not what should have happened. The effect of imprisoning Galileo was immense - and still resounds unto this day. The Church effectively divorced science as an understanding of reality, from science as a cornucopia of endless bounty - upturned by industry in pursuit of profit from the 1700's.

Religious, political and economic ideological bases of civilization were protected, at the cost of using science as a tool, but ignoring science as a rule for the conduct of human affairs. We lent the power of science and technology to primitive ideologies, and the consequences persist. You may have noted, we have all the knowledge and technology we need to address climate change, deforestation, over-fishing, pollution and so on, but don't. Why? Because we apply technology as ideology dictates, not as scientific truth dictates. We have ignored 'the word of God' - as revealed by science!

Not sure what TheWillowOfDarkness meant by "causal unity in the world"
What I meant was that Nietzsche attacked the presuppositions behind objective causal logic underpinning the natural sciences.

"Forgive me if I don't place what he might have objected to in his future in the same category."

I accept your reluctance. But I should just note that my claims concerning the deficiencies in the thinking of philosophers who came after Nietzsche with respect to his ideas are echoed and supported by writers such as Deleuze, Heidegger, Derrida and Rorty, If there is a causal unity in the world for Nietzsche it is that of Will to Power, which posits a radical perspectivalism and rejects any notion of science as progress toward truth or truth as correspondence with reality.

" It is no more than a moral prejudice that
the truth is worth more than appearance; in fact, it is the world’s most
poorly proven assumption. Let us admit this much: that life could not exist
except on the basis of perspectival valuations and appearances; and if,
with the virtuous enthusiasm and inanity of many philosophers, someone
wanted to completely abolish the “world of appearances,” – well, assuming
you could do that, – at least there would not be any of your “truth”
left either! Actually, why do we even assume that “true” and “false” are
intrinsically opposed? Isn’t it enough to assume that there are levels of
appearance and, as it were, lighter and darker shades and tones of appearance
– different valeurs, to use the language of painters? Why shouldn’t
the world that is relevant to us – be a fiction? And if someone asks: “But
doesn’t fiction belong with an author?” – couldn’t we shoot back: “Why?
Doesn’t this ‘belonging’ belong, perhaps, to fiction as well? Aren’t we
allowed to be a bit ironic with the subject, as we are with the predicate
and object? Shouldn’t philosophers rise above the belief in grammar?
With all due respect to governesses, isn’t it about time philosophy renounced
governess-beliefs?” –
The world with which we are concerned is false, i.e., is not fact but fable and approximation on
the basis of a meager sum of observations; it is "in flux," as something in a state of becoming, as
a falsehood always changing but never getting near the truth: for--there is no "truth" (1901/1967).
Will to Power."

"We should not erroneously objectify
“cause” and “effect” like the natural scientists do (and whoever else thinks
naturalistically these days –) in accordance with the dominant mechanistic
stupidity which would have the cause push and shove until it “effects”
something; we should use “cause” and “effect” only as pure concepts,
which is to say as conventional fictions for the purpose of description and
communication, not explanation. In the “in-itself ” there is nothing like
“causal association,” “necessity,” or “psychological un-freedom.” There,
the “effect” does not follow “from the cause,” there is no rule of “law.”
We are the ones who invented causation, succession, for-each-other, relativity,
compulsion, numbers, law, freedom, grounds, purpose; and if we
project and inscribe this symbol world onto things as an “in-itself,” then
this is the way we have always done things, namely mythologically."

That should have been "causal entity". (which I have now corrected).

What I meant is Nietzsche's argument about the death of God doesn't preclude the existence of a god as an existing being.

For example, we cannot preclude the existence of a being who does the actions of a Christian God on the grounds transcendence is impossible. If we want to say there isn't such a being, we need an empirical account which falsifies such a being.

Nietzsche wouldn't say transcendence is impossible, he'd say it's an incoherent notion. People assert transcendental bases all the time, but what they doing is merely asserting an arbitrary valuation that has no more grounding than any other valuation system. Submitting a transcendental claim to empirical test would not be useful, especially since, as Nietzsche argued, the idea of empirical falsificationism is grounded in the metaphysical notion of truth as correspondence.

I once organized a debate with fifteen kids with 10-11 years, about the existence of God; I myself did not take part. They reached to this conclusion: God existed in the past, when the Bible happened; but not anymore.

My excuses for the hiatus, I've been awfully busy the last couple of days...

If hunter gatherers had not discovered God, and appointed him as an objective authority for social morality - such that, tribes could overcome their natural tribal hierarchies without slaughtering eachother, the civilization that gave rise to the Nazis could not have occurred, and we'd still be running around in the forest with sharp sticks — karl stone

My point was that Nietzsche wasn't talking about God or religion in general, but about Christianity and the Christian God. So even if it were true that hunter gatherers united because of their discovery of God, which I doubt ( I think technology, agriculture was the primary cause and religion followed to 'keep' these new societies together), even then this isn't a counter argument to Nietzsches point. As I said, he was making a point about a specific occurrence in history, the reversal of values by Judaism and the consequent rise of Christianity over the values of ancient Greece and Rome.

Religion in general is not necessarily a reversal of values, but an extension and veneration of those values. Greek and Roman religion for instance had a whole pantheon of Gods with all kinds of values embodied in the different Gods. The relative novelty of Judeo-Christian religions was their monotheism (Zoroastrism went there before) and their ascetic denial of all that is human except for the moral good. Sure we have a sense of morality ingrained, but that is not all we are... Nietzsche view was that focusing only on this aspect of humanity, as Christian culture did, leads to an impoverished cultivation of the human being.

As for Nazism, it has little to do with Nietzsche's philosophy because he had nothing to say about politics. His philosophy was a kind of virtue ethics, aimed at the individual, he wasn't advocating any kind of socio-political organization. And Hitler was merely a politician, who used bits of random philosophy to make his political ideas appealing to the masses, as politicians do. I don't think it's even feasible to use the same argument to refute both Nietzsche's philosophy and Nazism.

For sure, but my point was claims about what God does/if God exists are empirical cliams. If someone stands up and says: "This being of God exists and cause this." it is not a transcendent claim at all. They might try to say its transcendent to escape empirical scrutiny, but that doesn't make it true.

I used "impossible" for this reason. The existence of a transcendent being is an oxymoron. The catergory of things being claimed, existent transcendent beings, is incoherent and so they are impossible.

My point about the empirical is that this point doesn't give us reason to reject the empirical claims made about God. If someone says: "God was here yesterday. They spoke to me." or "God existed than and was a being who caused a flood.", we are actually dealing an empirical claim which isn't touched by Nietzsche's argument about transcendence.

The incoherence of transcendent doesn't mean there cannot be, for example, a being who takes an action to cause a planet or lifeform to exist. "God is dead" is not to say that a powerful being does not exist. It's just says they cannot be transcendent.

Then what is God supposed to mean in this instance? Just a colorful expression for an existing being with impressive abilities? Any abilities or attributes of a being that were open to empirical scrutiny would be non-transcendent, so as far the the empiricist was concerned naming this being God would be no more helpful or meaningful than naming it Frank. Can beings with great skills exist for Nietzsche? Yep. Would he call them Gods? Only as a figure of speech. Some would say that science has nothing to say one way or the other about transcendent notions like a self-causing cause. Others, like Dan Dennett, argue that it is within the purview of empiricism to verify or falsify such notions.

If hunter gatherers had not discovered God, and appointed him as an objective authority for social morality - such that, tribes could overcome their natural tribal hierarchies without slaughtering eachother, the civilization that gave rise to the Nazis could not have occurred, and we'd still be running around in the forest with sharp sticks
— karl stone

My point was that Nietzsche wasn't talking about God or religion in general, but about Christianity and the Christian God. So even if it were true that hunter gatherers united because of their discovery of God, which I doubt ( I think technology, agriculture was the primary cause and religion followed to 'keep' these new societies together), even then this isn't a counter argument to Nietzsches point. — ChatteringMonkey

My argument is not that hunter gatherer tribes untied "because" of their discovery of God - they united because of the practical benefits you allude to. God is not the why, but the how. Specifically, how they overcame the 'alpha male' problem. They adopted a common understanding of reality, in which God served as objective authority for laws that applied equally to everyone. This created a template for how society was possible - and that template was reworked endlessly before we get to Judeo Christian morality.

Then there's a misunderstanding in Nietzsche - following from Darwin's survival of the fittest, actually not Darwin - but Darwin's bulldog, name of Huxely, I think - that natural morality was merely selfish and violent. I don't believe that's so - in part because of the fact they stuck together and raised children.

All that said, the "transvaluation of values" is a real phenomenon. It's the difference between tribal and multi-tribal morality, wherein the former, is the rule of the alpha male, and the latter, an explicit moral code justified with reference to the authority of God, applying equally to both tribes within the fledgling society. Nietzsche's misunderstanding of this phenomenon led him to God is dead, nihilism and the unermennsch. But he's wrong. Even the alpha male within the hunter gatherer tribe was not selfish, immoral and brutal. When that happens in chimpanzee society - the beta males join forces and drive him out or kill him.

This leads, oddly to Hobbe's Leviathan - and his observation that the King cannot simply behave tyrannically, because the cost is ultimately too great. These are natural laws mirrored in political philosophy. So please, feel free to disagree - but if you think my argument is that it was "because" of God - hunter gatherers joined together, and that's not just a careless form of words, I can only repeat what I've already said. Of course there were practical benefits of cooperation, but a cooperative multi-tribal society was difficult to maintain without an objective authority i.e. God.

Then, in regard to Nietzsche - you have another misunderstanding to contend with that revolves around Galileo's imprisonment and trial for heresy by the Church, for formulating scientific method in the first place, rather than recognizing that scientific truth is valid knowledge of Creation - and thus, effectively the word of God. So really, the Church set religion and science a collision course. Nietzsche plucked at these threads, but failed to understand, and drew all the wrong conclusions.

I don't know much about Nazis - as I said at the beginning. I have only the most cursory understanding of how Nietzsche plays into Nazism, and have shied away from comment on that matter. I'm more familiar with the idea of the ubermensch as it plays out in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. A great book, well worth reading - for it indicates, something else I believe follows from the evolutionary reality, and goes undiscovered and misunderstood by Nietzsche.

In my view, human beings are moral creatures. Chimpanzees are moral creatures in a primitive tribalistic sense. Raskalinkov kills two women because he thinks himself above herd morality - but that's not the seat of morality. It's in us, ingrained by evolution in a tribal context.

It only becomes explicit - where hunter gatherer tribes need to join together, and that's religion. Nietzsche didn't understand this, but Dostoevsky did, because Raskalinkov breaks down under the weight of his guilty conscience. He can't even spend the proceeds of the crime while he's starving. So, there is no ubermensch because human beings are possessed of an innate moral sensibility. Nietzsche is quite simply factually incorrect.

My argument is not that hunter gatherer tribes untied "because" of their discovery of God - they united because of the practical benefits you allude to. God is not the why, but the how. Specifically, how they overcame the 'alpha male' problem. They adopted a common understanding of reality, in which God served as objective authority for laws that applied equally to everyone. This created a template for how society was possible - and that template was reworked endlessly before we get to Judeo Christian morality. — karl stone

Ok, I agree with this. God as a way of giving morality it's authority...

Then there's a misunderstanding in Nietzsche - following from Darwin's survival of the fittest, actually not Darwin - but Darwin's bulldog, name of Huxely, I think - that natural morality was merely selfish and violent. I don't believe that's so - in part because of the fact they stuck together and raised children. — karl stone

Well I think for Nietzsche there wasn't a single 'natural' morality. Both were natural. He believed in types, with different moralities suitable for them. The problem he thought was the one came to dominate the other historically by the reversal of values, so that higher types also came to believe they had to adopt that morality. Even with a morality based on the idea of God, you still need someone to rule and make the laws, because 'the idea' of God doesn't create morals by itself...

All that said, the "transvaluation of values" is a real phenomenon. It's the difference between tribal and multi-tribal morality, wherein the former, is the rule of the alpha male, and the latter, an explicit moral code justified with reference to the authority of God, applying equally to both tribes within the fledgling society. Nietzsche's misunderstanding of this phenomenon led him to God is dead, nihilism and the unermennsch. But he's wrong. Even the alpha male within the hunter gatherer tribe was not selfish, immoral and brutal. When that happens in chimpanzee society - the beta males join forces and drive him out or kill him. — karle stone

As I allude to before, I think 'God is dead' and 'nihilism' were mere descriptions of what he saw happening allready (Believing God is dead leads to nihilism because people don't really believe in the values anymore). The 'ubermensch' was his attempt at revaluation of values.... after nihilism was a fact of current Christian culture.

It's also important to note I think that he didn't think that altruism and selfishness were opposites, the one flows from the other. Altruïsm he saw as an overflowing of strenght... The higher morality as Nietsche saw it also wasn't merely selfish, immoral and brutal, but more in line with traditional noble valuations, or a-moral classical Virtù as Machiavelli saw it.

I don't know much about Nazis - as I said at the beginning. I have only the most cursory understanding of how Nietzsche plays into Nazism, and have shied away from comment on that matter. I'm more familiar with the idea of the ubermensch as it plays out in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. A great book, well worth reading - for it indicates, something else I believe follows from the evolutionary reality, and goes undiscovered and misunderstood by Nietzsche.

In my view, human beings are moral creatures. Chimpanzees are moral creatures in a primitive tribalistic sense. Raskalinkov kills two women because he thinks himself above herd morality - but that's not the seat of morality. It's in us, ingrained by evolution in a tribal context. — karl stone

I've read Crime and punishment... and Nietzsche also read at least some of Dostoevsky's books, as he compliments him on his great psychological,insights, and i agree with that. But I just don't think they were adressing entirely the same problem, or at least their solution was of a different type as Dostoevsky was thinking about how a society at large could function, and there religion plays a vital role. Nietzsche was only thinking about a way forward for a certain type of people, he was a virtu ethicist... a book for none and all.

It only becomes explicit - where hunter gatherer tribes need to join together, and that's religion. Nietzsche didn't understand this, but Dostoevsky did, because Raskalinkov breaks down under the weight of his guilty conscience. He can't even spend the proceeds of the crime while he's starving. So, there is no ubermensch because human beings are possessed of an innate moral sensibility. Nietzsche is quite simply factually incorrect. — karl stone

The jury's still out I'd say... we have an innate moral sensibility, in the sense that we have an aptitute to devellop morals, but what kind of morals isn't set in stone, I don't think.

All we have, according to Nietzsche , is an aptitude to develop a perspective and to exhaust ourselves, our will, in and through this perspective, Will to Power overcomes itself in the act of fulfiling itself, thus to be is to constantly self-overcome, to no end other than difference itself. This is joyous-suffering life. There is no moral aim here in the sense of the advocacy of a specifc normative perspective. It is precisely the shattering of normativity. What kind of 'virtue' ethics is this? One in which the cardinal virtue is the character of self-overcoming(this does not mean development in any sense).

I think I agree with that, 'a-moral virtu', that is beyond 'good and evil' but not beyond 'good and bad'.

Karl stone, to illustrate my point further, what about for instance Hindoeism and its caste system? That civilization, and the religion it is build on, goes back even further than the Judeo-Christian traditions. Nietzsche at least thought that particular system was older and more sophisticated than Christianity. How would we know that one is more 'natural' than the other?

I think it is a mistake to take Nietzsche's objections to certain metaphysical ideas to be an abandonment of objective description or that nothing can be learned about the causes of events.

The premise of a book such as the On the Genealogy of Morality not only points to a shared experience but argues that the conditions are even narrower than one might realize if one takes the present evaluations as given. Nietzsche objected to the "English psychologists" because they assumed what was present to them in real time must be "natural." The need for a method of history is introduced:

Now as for that other element in punishment—that which is fluid, its “meaning”—in a very late state of culture (for example in present-day Europe), the concept “punishment” in fact no longer represents a single meaning at all but rather an entire synthesis of “meanings”: the previous history of punishment in general, the history of its exploitation for the most diverse purposes, finally crystallizes into a kind of unity that is difficult to dissolve, difficult to analyze and—one must emphasize—is completely and utterly undefinable. (Today it is impossible to say for sure why we actually punish: all concepts in which an entire process is semiotically summarized elude definition; only that which has no history is definable.)
GM 2, 13 Translated by Maudemarie Clark and Alan J Swensen

Another thing to consider when reading Nietzsche is that the topic of health and sickness is never treated as something outside of shared experience. As a provocateur, he was constantly crashing the party with questions about how healthy other people were. He also observed that we each have our own systems and that what is good for one may kill another. He never said that there was a point where the greater problem of sickness can be isolated from the one an individual confronts.

It would help if i understood what you have in mind when you refer to objective experience. Do you mean an empiricism that can ground itself in a view from nowhere? Where scientific truth is possible as an assymptotic development through validation and falsification?
I'd say Nietzsche rejects that model of objectivity as correspondence between human representations and an external world. The kind of objectivity he upholds is a local one of perspectival descriptions that hold contingently within particular communities.

"It is no more than a moral prejudice that
the truth is worth more than appearance; in fact, it is the world’s most
poorly proven assumption. Let us admit this much: that life could not exist
except on the basis of perspectival valuations and appearances; and if,
with the virtuous enthusiasm and inanity of many philosophers, someone
wanted to completely abolish the “world of appearances,” – well, assuming
you could do that, – at least there would not be any of your “truth”
left either! Actually, why do we even assume that “true” and “false” are
intrinsically opposed? Isn’t it enough to assume that there are levels of
appearance and, as it were, lighter and darker shades and tones of appearance
– different valeurs, to use the language of painters? Why shouldn’t
the world that is relevant to us – be a fiction? And if someone asks: “But
doesn’t fiction belong with an author?” – couldn’t we shoot back: “Why?
Doesn’t this ‘belonging’ belong, perhaps, to fiction as well? Aren’t we
allowed to be a bit ironic with the subject, as we are with the predicate
and object? Shouldn’t philosophers rise above the belief in grammar?
With all due respect to governesses, isn’t it about time philosophy renounced
governess-beliefs?” –
The world with which we are concerned is false, i.e., is not fact but fable and approximation on
the basis of a meager sum of observations; it is "in flux," as something in a state of becoming, as
a falsehood always changing but never getting near the truth: for--there is no "truth" (1901/1967)."

It would help if i understood what you have in mind when you refer to objective experience. — Joshs

My comment asked how you understand this quote from Nietzsche's notebook when placed side by side with the historical method developed in his published work. The purpose of the On the Genealogy of Morality is objective analysis. Are you suggesting he was just kidding when he purported to explain the origins of guilt,"bad conscience", and the ascetic ideal?

By the way, what edition of The Will to Power are you quoting from? My Kaufmann and Holingdale edition does not have your citation numbers.

"Are you suggesting he was just kidding"?
He wasn't kidding . He was offering a 'useful fiction', His view of science is akin to(although more radical than) that of American pragmatists like Dewey and James, and the neo-pragmatist Rorty. 'Fiction' in this sense isnt a falsehood, it is an account that clarifies the world in relation to our drives. Of course, these 'post-truth' authors fill up 1000's of pages elaborating the details of their radically relativistic doctrines, Are they kidding? No, the way in which they think about the world has built into it
this implied contingency, it is self-reflexively contingent .

As for the citation from Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche's genealogical method of historical analysis , which was taken up by Heidegger and Foucault, is not a causal explanation of history.

"Genealogy is a historical perspective and investigative method, which offers an
intrinsic critique of the present. It provides people with the critical skills for analysing
and uncovering the relationship between knowledge, power and the human subject in
modern society and the conceptual tools to understand how their being has been shaped by historical forces. Genealogy as method derives from German philosophy, particularly the works of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), but is most closely associated with French academic Michel Foucault (1926-24).
Michel Foucault’s genealogical analyses challenge traditional practices of history,
philosophical assumptions and established conceptions of knowledge, truth and
power. Genealogy displaces the primacy of the subject found in conventional history
and targets discourse, reason, rationality and certainty. Foucault’s analyses are against
the idea of universal necessities, the search for underlying laws and universal
explanatory systems, the inevitability of lines of development in human progress and the logic that we learn more about things and become better at dealing with them as time goes on. Instead, genealogy seeks to illuminate the contingency of what we take for granted, to denaturalise what seems immutable, to destabilise seemingly natural categories as constructs and confines articulated by words and discourse and to open up new possibilities for the future."
Úna Crowley

Nietzsche's pragmatism on display:
"We do not consider the falsity of a judgment as itself an objection to a judgment;
this is perhaps where our new language will sound most foreign.The
question is how far the judgment promotes and preserves life, how well it
preserves, and perhaps even cultivates, the type. And we are fundamentally
inclined to claim that the falsest judgments (which include synthetic
judgments a priori) are the most indispensable to us, and that without accepting
the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the wholly
invented world of the unconditioned and self-identical, without a constant
falsification of the world through numbers, people could not live – that a
renunciation of false judgments would be a renunciation of life, a negation
of life. To acknowledge untruth as a condition of life: this clearly means
resisting the usual value feelings in a dangerous manner; and a philosophy
that risks such a thing would by that gesture alone place itself beyond
good and evil."


BTW, the quote you were asking about was from Beyond Good and Evil.

Which was my point. Nietzsche identifies any proposed God is just another mortal. "God is dead" doesn't refer to whether a being named "God"exists or not, but to a metaphysical point that dispenses with any being beyond the world or the finite. Even a God, if they existed as claimed, would not be God.

Alrighty then.