In The Genealogy of Morals, one set of conditions binds the alternatives to it. Changes happen but they are also new expressions of what happened before. Finding this ground is not like consulting a map before taking a trip. — Valentinus
I think the historicist or determinist charge is probably fair, but is he not more that this too? — Tom Storm
I'll look for an accessible article on Nietzsche's epistemology. Everyone seems to describe him as a perspectivist. — Tom Storm
"Who is that person behind the curtain?" - Dorothy — Valentinus
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/52319/52319-h/52319-h.htmI know all this perhaps too much from experience at close quarters—that dignified philosophic abstinence to which[Pg 196] a belief like that binds its adherents, that stoicism of the intellect, which eventually vetoes negation as rigidly as it does affirmation, that wish for standing still in front of the actual, the factum brutum, that fatalism in "petits faits" (ce petit faitalism, as I call it), in which French Science now attempts a kind of moral superiority over German, this renunciation of interpretation generally (that is, of forcing, doctoring, abridging, omitting, suppressing, inventing, falsifying, and all the other essential attributes of interpretation)—all this, considered broadly, expresses the asceticism of virtue, quite as efficiently as does any repudiation of the senses (it is at bottom only a modus of that repudiation.) But what forces it into that unqualified will for truth is the faith in the ascetic ideal itself, even though it take the form of its unconscious imperatives,—make no mistake about it, it is the faith, I repeat, in a metaphysical value, an intrinsic value of truth, of a character which is only warranted and guaranteed in this ideal (it stands and falls with that ideal). Judged strictly, there does not exist a science without its "hypotheses," the thought of such a science is inconceivable, illogical: a philosophy, a faith, must always exist first to enable science to gain thereby a direction, a meaning, a limit and method, a right to existence. (He who holds a contrary opinion on the subject—he, for example, who takes it upon himself to establish philosophy "upon a strictly scientific basis"—has first got to "turn up-side-down" not only philosophy but also truth itself—the gravest insult which could possibly be offered to two such respectable[Pg 197] females!) Yes, there is no doubt about it—and here I quote my Joyful Wisdom, cp. Book V. Aph. 344: "The man who is truthful in that daring and extreme fashion, which is the presupposition of the faith in science, asserts thereby a different world from that of life, nature, and history; and in so far as he asserts the existence of that different world, come, must he not similarly repudiate its counterpart, this world, our world? The belief on which our faith in science is based has remained to this day a metaphysical belief—even we knowers of to-day, we godless foes of metaphysics, we too take our fire from that conflagration which was kindled by a thousand-year-old faith, from that Christian belief, which was also Plato's belief, the belief that God is truth, that truth is divine
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[A]rt, I repeat, in which lying is sanctified and the will for deception has good conscience on its side, is much more fundamentally opposed to the ascetic ideal than is science: Plato's instinct felt this––Plato, the greatest enemy of art which Europe has produced up to the present. Plato versus Homer, that is the complete, the true antagonism––on the one side, the whole–hearted "transcendental," the great defamer of life; on the other, its involuntary panegyrist, the golden nature. An artistic subservience to the service of the ascetic ideal is consequently the most absolute artistic corruption that there can be, though unfortunately it is one of the most frequent phases, for nothing is more corruptible than an artist.) Considered physiologically, moreover, science rests on the same, basis as does the ascetic ideal: a certain impoverishment of life is the presupposition of the latter as of the former––add, frigidity of the emotions, slackening of the tempo, the substitution of dialectic for[Pg 200] instinct, seriousness impressed on mien and gesture (seriousness, that most unmistakable sign of strenuous metabolism, of struggling, toiling life).
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Has, perchance, man grown less in need of a transcendental solution of his riddle of existence, because since that time this existence has become more random, casual, and superfluous in the visible order of the universe? Has there not been since the time of Copernicus an unbroken progress in the self-belittling of man and his will for belittling himself? Alas, his belief in his dignity, his... irreplaceableness in the scheme of existence, is gone—he has become animal, literal, unqualified, and unmitigated animal, he who in his earlier belief was almost God ("child of God," "demi-God"). Since Copernicus man seems to have fallen on to a steep plane—he rolls faster and faster away from the centre—whither? into nothingness? into the "thrilling sensation of his own nothingness"—Well! this would be the straight way—to the old ideal?—All science (and by no means only astronomy, with regard to the humiliating and deteriorating effect of which Kant has made a remarkable confession, "it annihilates my own importance"), all science, natural as much as unnatural—by unnatural I mean the self-critique of reason—nowadays sets out to talk man out of his present opinion of himself, as though that opinion had been nothing but a bizarre piece of conceit; you might go so far as to say that science finds its peculiar pride, its peculiar bitter form of stoical ataraxia, in preserving man's contempt of himself, that state which it took so much trouble to bring about, as man's final and most serious claim to self-appreciation (rightly so, in point of fact, for he who despises is always "one who has not forgotten how to appreciate"). But does all this involve any real effort to counteract the ascetic ideal? Is it really seriously suggested that Kant's victory over the theological dogmatism about "God," "Soul," "Freedom," "Immortality," has damaged that ideal in any way (as the theologians have imagined to be the case for a long time past)?–– And in this connection it does not concern us for a single minute, if Kant himself intended any such consummation. It is certain that from the time of Kant every type of transcendentalist is playing a winning game––they are emancipated from the theologians; what luck!––he has revealed to them that secret art, by which they can now pursue their "heart's desire" on their own responsibility, and with all the respectability of science. Similarly, who can grumble at the agnostics, reverers, as they are, of the unknown and the absolute mystery, if they now worship their very query as God? — Nietzsche
Plato, the greatest enemy of art which Europe has produced up to the present. Plato versus Homer, that is the complete, the true antagonism––on the one side, the whole–hearted "transcendental," the great defamer of life; on the other, its involuntary panegyrist, the golden nature. — Nietzsche
...thinkers like Leo Strauss who charge Nietzsche with being an "historicist" rather than someone who recognizes the "discovery of nature." — Valentinus
The dialectic opposing this approach is voiced by thinkers like Leo Strauss who charge Nietzsche with being an "historicist" rather than someone who recognizes the "discovery of nature." — Valentinus
Nice and thanks. I just can't read an entire book in this tone. The observations are rich but for me the prose is so swollen, passive aggressive and rhetorically portentous, I just can't do it. — Tom Storm
Endless possibilities here. "Plato a douchebag, Homer a genius: discuss". I get the feeling that the people who like FN already agree with him. — Tom Storm
Is Strauss championing empiricism ( the discovery of nature) to what he is reading as a subjectivism in Nietzsche?I — Joshs
I get the feeling that the people who like FN already agree with him. — Tom Storm
But he is the one who said that bothering to oppose a point of view is a recognition of it. — Valentinus
I should make clear that I don't agree with him. But he is the one who said that bothering to oppose a point of view is a recognition of it. Maybe even an argument for it. It comes with the territory. — Valentinus
I'm disappointed to learn that Nietzsche is a metaphysician after all. — Tom Storm
https://monoskop.org/images/8/8e/Derrida_Jacques_Of_Grammatology_1998.pdfAs early as 1873, Nietzsche described metaphor as the originary process of what the intellect presents as "truth." "The intellect, as a means for the preservation of the individual, develops its chief power in dissimulation." "A nerve-stimulus, first transcribed [iibertragen] into an image [Bild] ! First metaphor! The image again copied into a sound! Second metaphor! And each time he (the creator of language] leaps completely out of one sphere right into the midst of an entirely different one." In its simplest outline, Nietzsche's definition of metaphor seems to be the establishing of an identity between dissimilar things. Nietzsche's phrase is "Gleich machen" ( make equal ), calling to mind the German word "Gleichnis"-image, simile, similitude, comparison, allegory, parable-an unmistakable pointer to figurative practice in general. "Every idea originates through equating the unequal." "What, therefore, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms; ... truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions, ... coins which have their obverse effaced and now are no longer of account as coins but merely as metal." I hold on here to the notions of a process of figuration and a process of forgetfulness. In this early text, Nietzsche describes the figurative drive as "that impulse towards the formation of metaphors, that fundamental impulse of man, which we cannot reason away for one moment-for thereby we should reason away man himself . . ..Later he will give this drive the name "will to power." Our so-called will to truth is a will to power because "the so-called drive for knowledge can be traced back to a drive to appropriate and conquer." Nietzsche's sense of the inevitable forcing of the issue, of exercising power, comes through in his italics: " 'Thinking' in primitive conditions (preorganic) is the crystallization of forms . . .. In our thought, the essential feature is fitting new material into old schemas, ... making equal what is new." The human being has nothing more to go on than a collection of nerve stimuli. And, because he or she must be secure in the knowledge of, and therefore power over, the "world" (inside or outside), the nerve stimuli are explained and described through the categories of figuration that masquerade as the categories of "truth." These explanations and descriptions are "interpretations" and reflect a human inability to tolerate undescribed chaos-"that the collective character [Gesamtcharakter] of the world ... 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 [human weaknesses-Menschlichkeiten] ."As Nietzsche suggests, this need for power through anthropomorphic defining compels humanity to create an unending proliferation of interpretations whose only "origin," that shudder in the nerve strings, being a direct sign of nothing, leads to no primary signified. As Derrida writes, Nietzsche provides an "entire thematics of active interpretations, which substitutes an incessant deciphering for the disclosure of truth as a presentation of the thing itself." — link
Now if the "subject" is thus put in question, it is clear that the philosopher creating his system must distrust himself as none other. And indeed Nietzsche articulates this problem often. He couches his boldest insights in the form of questions that we cannot dismiss as a rhetorical ploy. Writing on "The Uses and Abuses of History" as early as 1874, he warns us: "And this present treatise, as I will not attempt to deny, shows the modern note of a weak personality in the intemperateness of its criticism, the unripeness of its humanity, in the too frequent transitions from irony to cynicism, from arrogance to scepticism." The spirit of self-diagnosis is strong in every Nietzschean text. "Every society has the tendency to reduce its opponents to caricatures-at least in imagination ... Among immoralists it is the moralist: Plato, for example, becomes a caricature in my hands." Quite in passing, he places a warning frame around all his philosophizing: "One seeks a picture of the world in that philosophy in which we feel freest; i.e., in which our most powerful drive feels free to function. This will also be the case with me!" In a passage in The Gay Science, he spells out his version of the particular problem that leads Heidegger and Derrida to writing under erasure : How far the perspective character of existence extends or indeed whether existence has any other character than this; whether existence without interpretation, without "sense, " does not become "nonsense"; whether, on the otherhand, all existence is not essentially an interpreting existence [ein auslegendes Dasein]-that cannot be decided even by the most industrious and most scrupulously conscientious analysis and self-examination of the intellect; for in the course of this analysis the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself in its own perspective forms [perspektivische Form]" and only in these. We cannot look around our own corner.
— link
What differentiates naturalism is its presupposition that the person holding a meaning can define it as ‘information’, which presumes that the person holding it “ does. to have much impact on it “. — Joshs
As far as ‘ anchor of fit to world, surprisingly , a reciprocal anchor of fit extending from subject tot world and world to subject can actually be a more pragmatically useful sort of anchor of fit than the representational realist version. — Joshs
If I send you a box of Oreos, will you read Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception? If after reading it you still feel the same about phenomenology at least you’ll have a better sense of what’s being compared here — Joshs
"Physical" power as distinguished from the purposes for which it is used is morally neutral and therefore more amenable to mathematical strictures than is its use: power can be measured. This explains why Nietzsche, who went much beyond Hobbes and declared the will to power in terms of "quanta of power." From the point of view of legal exactness, the study of the ends is replaced by the study of potestas. The rights of the sovereign, as distinguished from the exercise of these rights, permit of an exact definition any regard to any unforeseeable circumstances, and this kind of exactness is again inseparable from moral neutrality: right declares what is permitted as distinguished from what is honorable. — Leo Strauss, chapter 5
Insofar as someone is just repeating the claims of experts from a particular field, and is straightforward about doing so, it's not clear what the problem is. Other than perhaps that they're trying to gain some benefit for themselves, by association. I guess that's a philosophical-ish equivalent of name-dropping at a party.I think that's true to an extent. My comments here were aimed at non-scientists (in the main), so the critique would still apply. If one needs to be embedded in Buddhist practice to be able to judge what it can and cannot discover, then we should expect to hear about the limits of neuroscience only from actual neuroscientists. Alternatively, if layman can say what neuroscience can't account for it seems one-sided to say the least to claim that I'd have to practice religion to be able to comment on what it can't account for. — Isaac
Re: underline part: Sure, and this is trivially true. Science does not account for, say, the meaning of life the way religion does, nor the way economics or art theory do. One needn't be an expert in either field in order to notice this.As such, the claim here, oft repeated, that science does not account for X in the way that religion/phenomenology/woo does, can only come from a Buddhist neuroscientist!
Plato set the bar for knowledge very high. — Wayfarer
I don't think Strauss was suggesting an equivalence. — Fooloso4
this is trivially true. Science does not account for, say, the meaning of life the way religion does, nor the way economics or art theory do. — baker
Science, religion, economics, art theory, etc. -- they (can) all claim to account for the meaning of life, and not merely address it, indeed.Are you sure you're not confusing 'addressing' with 'accounting for'? — Isaac
(Leaving aside that threats of eternal damnation, or simply being burnt alive upside down in a public square have considerable persuasion power --)That religion claims to account for the meaning of life is not an indication that it actually does account for the meaning of life. It tells us the subject matter of it's investigation, not the success of the outcome.
Agreed.That science does not account for the meaning of life has no bearing whatsoever on whether non-scientific endeavours do account for the meaning of life. It tells us only what science doesn't do. It remains possible that all other endeavours don't do it either.
Yes, but the relations between those claimants are likely going to be rather tense.If non-scientists can claim that science does not account for the meaning of life from outside of its practices, then the non-religious can claim that religion does not account for the meaning of life from outside of its practices.
It's not just the old science vs. woo, mind you. In many fields of human interest, but which are of vital importance to many people, science is quite useless or inapplicable. Issues like "How to choose a worthwhile career?", "How to be happy in life?", "How to get along with others without being a doormat, but also not so aggressive as to alienate them?" are of vital importance to people, but even though these questions are studied scientifically, there isn't much use for those studies (too small a return for considerable investment). So people resort to other or additional ways of obtaining useful information on such issues. Advice of elders, traditions, self-help, ... — baker
Vonnegut says you don't know what a good painting is till you've seen a million paintings. — j0e
Issues like "How to choose a worthwhile career?", "How to be happy in life?", "How to get along with others without being a doormat, but also not so aggressive as to alienate them?" are of vital importance to people, but even though these questions are studied scientifically, there isn't much use for those studies (too small a return for considerable investment). So people resort to other or additional ways of obtaining useful information on such issues. Advice of elders, traditions, self-help, ... — baker
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