Thanks! Helpful quotation you provided, and very relevant to the thread. Although, I would be interested in your take on what he meant by 'our new language', I haven't got any idea what he's talking about there.

Just another way of saying 'our new way of talking about things', I suppose.

Thanks! Interesting. I had the feeling there was something important behind it.

AH! I get it. 'Science'.

I know of outlooks that equate the Good with the Beautiful. The True as well?

I mean that when N. refers to 'our new language', he means modern scientific method - Science.

I don't think so. His metaphysics is closer to Schopenhauer's. Did he equate life-giving with true? Of course not. That doesn't even make any sense. He had a mundane usage...basically what Wosret described and a transcendent truth that we reach for. As we lift off trying to grasp that greater truth we look down and see our selves in a vaster context. As we go to describe what we see we spout myths.

Along those lines...

Ugh, come on dude, do better than this shit.

I asked for suggestions as to what is meant by 'our new language', I got from SLX 'Just another way of saying 'our new way of talking about things', I suppose'.

When I ventured: perhaps he meant 'science', then SLX swears at me.

I guess I am just not up to speed on what StreetlightX understands by 'philosophy'. It's probably because I'm old. But it also might be because he just doesn't like me.

I swore at you because you're literally making shit up.

I was asking for suggestions. I thought, maybe, when he's talking about 'our new language', what he means is, the 'new' way of talking about things that belongs to the modern age, as distinct from the 'traditional' way of talking about things, that belongs to the past - Plato, and all the other fossilised nonsense that he thinks is crap. So, I hazarded a guess - science. I am quite willing to admit that I'm incorrect, but I do try and remain polite.

No, it wasn't intended as sarcastic in the least. When he says:

'We do not object to a judgment just because it is false; this is probably what is strangest about our new language', I thought he might have been referring to the fact-value dichotomy and 'our new language' being a reference to the way science talks about things (as being, for example, devoid of value, unlike, for instance, Platonism,) OK, it doesn't mean that - so the question remains, what is 'our new language'? Maybe, it's 'philosophy as defined by Nietszche' i.e. a way of thinking about philosophy that he has invented. I don't know - I'm asking the question.

I mean that when N. refers to 'our new language', he means modern scientific method - Science. — Wayfarer

Doesn't sound like a question to me, back-peddler. Sounds like you vomiting words out of a keyboard based on zero textual evidence whatsoever, unmotivated by any of the quotes so far cited in this thread.

You're such a nice person, SLX. I wonder how I ever got along previously. Anyway, courtesy Dr Google, I have found the words the Nietszche vomited up about this, it has to do with 'species preservation' being more important than Kant and Plato's nonsense about 'a priori truths'. You know, solid, life-affirming stuff about the Ubermensch and the Will to Power, and all that other neat fascist stuff that replaces stuffy old Christianity. Glad we got to the bottom of that.

Yeah, glad that your scholarship is so deep that 'oh I Googled some random quotes' is your pathetic excuse for literally making shit up as you go along.

'Something solid, something grounded, something more reliable than reason elevated to divine status', is what sticks with me.

Yeah, alot will stick to an intellectually dishonest hack.

Feeling annoyed with myself for being flippant earlier in the thread, I have actually spent the morning reading Nietzsche. I think we should beware of the argument you quote about neo-Darwinism.

Physiologists should think twice before deciding that an organic being's primary instinct (Trieb) is the instinct for self-preservation. A living being wants above all else to release its strength; life itself is the will to power, and self-preservation is only one of its indirect and most frequent consequences. Here, as everywhere, we must beware of superfluous teleological principles! And this is what the instinct for self-preservation is. — Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil 13

I see what you mean. The need to be good blinds people. I think N's philosophy is multi-dimensional.

Apparently Bannon stated that darkness is good. He mentioned Darth Vader and Satan as examples. He's talking about power... but oddly he didn't mention Adolph. I think N would say Bannon is almost there.

I guess that Nietzsche's understanding of Platonism is a standard one in which the realm of Ideas is to be pursued because it is not corrupt like the phenomenal world. It is the true realm where "things" are the way really are and this alone makes it good. — Πετροκότσυφας

...of all errors thus far, the most grievous, protracted and dangerous has been a dogmatist's error: Plato's invention of pure spirit and of transcendental goodness....Of course, in order to speak as he did about the spirit and the good, Plato had to set truth on its head and even deny perspectivity, that fundamental condition of all life... — Nietzsche: Preface to Beyond Good and Evil

Later in s34 he goes on:

It is nothing but a moral prejudice to consider truth more valuable than appearance; it is in fact the most poorly proven assumption in the world. We should admit at least this much: there would be no life at all if not on the basis of perspectivist assessments and apparentnesses... — Nietzsche

Yep. Nietzsche always maintained a healthy scepticism towards what he understood as the science of his day, and only total and utter ignorance could make one think that the 'new language' he refers to is the language of science. You'd have to be talking out of your ass, in other words.

the only way that one would interpret Nietzsche as defending the "modern scientific method" or referring to it by saying "our new language" would be bad interpretation based on one's sensibilities. — "Πετροκότσυφας

I really do understand that my stab at that was completely mistaken and that the passage I pasted in was nearer the mark.

You know, he also said this:

Buddhism does not promise, it delivers, while Christianity promises everything and delivers nothing.” —F. Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

I should stick to my self-imposed rule of never discussing Nietzsche.

He wasn't a bad guy you know.

I can't see how it's possible to admire both Nietszche and Plato, and I admire Plato.

So did he. Criticizing people doesn't mean that you don't admire them.

Re Nietzsche's attitude to science and truth, consider this (from Gay Science):

"To make it possible for this discipline to begin, must there not be some prior conviction – even one that is so commanding and unconditional that it sacrifices all other convictions to itself? We see that science also rests on a faith. There simply is no science "without presuppositions". The question whether truth is needed must not only have been affirmed in advance, but affirmed to such a degree that the principle, the faith, the conviction finds expression: “Nothing is needed more than truth and in relation to it everything else has only second-rate value.”
...
Thus the question “Why science” leads back to the moral problem: Why have morality at all when life, nature, and history are “not moral”? Those who are truthful in the ultimate sense that is presupposed by the faith in science thus affirm another world than the world of life, nature, and history; and insofar as they affirm this “other world” – must they not by that same token negate this world, our world?..

It is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests – even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire from the flame that was lit by a faith thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine. – But what if this should become more and more incredible, if nothing should prove to be divine anymore unless it were error, blindness, the lie – if God himself were to prove to be our most enduring lie?"

So Nietzsche may be interpreted as rejecting the belief that science reveals to us any transcendentally objective truth or order, just as he is rejecting with his "God is dead" any crude, objectivistic idea that the popular Judaeo-Christian religion of the "sky-father" reveals any transcendentally 'objective' truth or order.

He is therefore, on this reading, not ruling out creative spiritual ideas of subjective transcendental truth or order, which may contribute to the flourishing of human life.

Thus he is very much in line with the Kantian notion that we are warranted to believe some things for which there can be no empirical evidence for practical reasons, even if his notion of what constitutes practicality would not accord with Kant's. and thus even if Nietzsche himself would probably not, on the basis of his rejection of the categorical imperative, agree that his philosophy accords with Kant's.

just as he is rejecting with his "God is dead" any crude, objectivistic idea that the popular Judaeo-Christian religion of the "sky-father" reveals any transcendentally 'objective' truth or order. — John

I thought "God is dead" was supposed to be about an historical event.

He is therefore, on this reading, not ruling out creative spiritual ideas of subjective transcendental truth or order, which may contribute to the flourishing of human life.

You're reading things into Nietsche which aren't there.

'Why did Nietzsche, in his zeal to deny God, end up rejecting science as well? Because his denial of God is dependent on the denial of any order whatsoever in the universe. Because he knew that science took its origin, and is still based on, a world in which order prevails. If the world is chaos, there can be no order, and hence no laws either of nature or of science. (In our day, however, even the word "chaos" is being redefined, as mathematicians and scientists discern hidden order in chaos.) For the existence of any kind of laws presupposes a Lawgiver, and indeed the originators of modern science—Newton, Descartes, Leibniz, etc.—quite openly expressed their faith in a Divine Lawmaker. In order to deny the latter, Hume, Nietzsche, and those who follow their path must deny the existence of any kind of order at all.'

Henry Bayman

'The total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos—in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms... Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses. Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident; for it is only beside a world of purposes that the word "accident" has any meaning.'

The Gay Science

"God is dead" was supposed to be about an historical event. — Mongrel

Nietzsche understood how immense the consequences of the rise of Christianity had been, and how immense the consequences of its decline would be as well, and had the intelligence to know he could not fall back on polite moral certitudes to which he no longer had any right. Just as the Christian revolution created a new sensibility by inverting many of the highest values of the pagan past, so the decline of Christianity, Nietzsche knew, portends another, perhaps equally catastrophic shift in moral and cultural consciousness. His famous fable in The Gay Science of the madman who announces God’s death is anything but a hymn of atheist triumphalism. In fact, the madman despairs of the mere atheists—those who merely do not believe—to whom he addresses his terrible proclamation. In their moral contentment, their ease of conscience, he sees an essential oafishness; they do not dread the death of God because they do not grasp that humanity’s heroic and insane act of repudiation has sponged away the horizon, torn down the heavens, left us with only the uncertain resources of our will with which to combat the infinity of meaninglessness that the universe now threatens to become. — David Bentley Hart