Maybe it’s time to abandon epistemology and follow Rorty. Could be the confusion originates in the metaphysics grounding epistemology.

lets take a break from Nietzsche for a moment. Could you tell me if you are familiar with Karl Popper and the difference between his approach to scientific truth and that of Thomas Kuhn? Or at least, can you tell me what you know of the changes in the way the notion of scientific method has been understood over the past 300 years(deduction, falsificationism, paradigm change, etc)? Do you think there has been no significant change since Newton in how science understands its method? This will help me a lot here.

"You seem more interested in the critique than the results of his investigation."
Im interested in the method of his investigation, because the results are pre-figured in the method in the sense of how we are supposed to understand the groundedness of those results..
Could you tell me if you are familiar with Karl Popper and the difference between his approach to scientific truth and that of Thomas Kuhn?

Alrighty then.

." Who or what is the agent
of repetition of a thought in consciousness? Am I the agent, the operator of this repetition? How is this repetition related to time? Is there any difference between the two repeated thoughts? Am I aware of these differences?"

Let me construct a model of consciousness based on the work of Merleau-Ponty and contributors to 4ea approaches(embodied, embedded, enactive, affective ) to cognition.
The mind functions as an inseparable interaction with environment and body. It is nothing but this interaction. There is no self-identical self in this model. Self is a bi-product of the constant constructive interactive activity of the organism-envirnmental interaction. Consciousness is not self-conscious in the sense of being able to turn back on itself and grasp itself identically. To reflect back on the self is to alter what one turns back to. The impression we get of consciousness as the commander of decision, as unfolding meaning as a linear causal sequence of nows (one damn thing after another), is the result of the way linguistic grammar is constructed , But rather than a single linear causal intentional vector, consciousness can more accurately de described as a site of competing streams of fragmented perceptions and conceptualizations jostling for attention. Consciousness, far from being the self-knowing commander, is besieged from unconscious processes and bodily affects that interact with and shape consciousness outside of its awareness. So the notion of agent is a bit of an illusion, there is no ghost in the machine, it is more of a community.of interaffecting agents. Consciousness performs a momentary synthetic function, making it appear that this community is a single 'I' . But the unfolding of time for this constructed 'I' is always a bit disjointed, a past that is always reconstructed by the present that it is supposed to frame, and a futuring that pulls the present into an anticipative orientation ahead of itself. There is no room for the transcendental in this model.

Gendlin's solution was "The past is not past because an observer determines that it happened at an earlier position on Newton's absolute time line. The past is the living process's own past, made past by its new present. Or, we can say the past makes itself past by functioning to shape a new present. If one living process is both (and I agree it is), we have to say that it is a constantly self-reshaping process."
This is consistent with Heidegger's argument that past is "what has been as what is
still present and still determining the present and the future—this is
not a mere retaining." The past as having been, present and future are simultaneous and equiprimordial.One never occurs without the other. What is present constantly 'is' as having been.
But does this mean the past dominates the present? Not for Heidegger. The past is always a new past, a past prefigured by the present and the future. "Primordial and authentic temporality temporalizes
itself out of the authentic future, and indeed in such a way that, futurally having-been, it first arouses the present. The primary phenomenon of primordial and authentic temporality is the future.

There are two parts to your comment . The second part, concerning policy toward those openly contemplating suicide on this site, may be open to debate, but I don't see it as an unreasonable approach given what I've said above.
So let's leave simmerdown out of the discussion now and just talk you and me about the first part of your comment, "Depression is an irrational state of mind" (If you're more comfortable, we could move this discussion elsewhere). There is absolutely no consensus on this issue within the psychological , psychiatric or philosophical communities. So you shouldn't take it as an empirical 'fact' but as a contested hypothesis. There was a time when cognitive therapy articulated reasoning within an rational-irrational binary, but they have mostly discarded this position in favor of seeing behavior as adaptive or unadaptive relative to one's own aims. In other words, depression not as false or irrational representations of an independently existing objective world, but depression as a failure to adaptively cope within one's own subjective world of aims and goals. Mindfulness approaches , which have gained in popularity recently, also take this non rationalistic view of depression.

Oh fer Chrissakes. You don't think the op, as articulate and thoughtful as they sound, hasnt thought about the pros and cons of suicide? Their comment, in fact, specifically discusses the pros and cons. Your own contribution, labeling its very consideration as 'irrational', was intended as helpful but could be interpreted as alienating and thus have the opposite of its intended effect. You might respond that that validates your point about the need to shut off discussion. I don't think most psychiatric professionals would steer troubled clients away from online depression support groups, which are , of course, populated by amateurs. There is psychological therapy and then there is philosophical therapy. There are many here for whom these discussions serve as philosophical therapy. As I said , I'm not advocating un-moderated discussion.
If the moderators on this site are not able to closely follow threads, then maybe it would be easier to simply declare certain topics off-limits(I imagine there may be legal issues for whoever runs this group to consider). Otherwise, there would need to be some agreement on what would constitute triggering or trolling.

I agree with Leo. Honor the choice that simmerdown made to open their views up to discussion here.If it appears that contributions by others to the discussion become obviously harmful, then a moderator could make a decision at that point. What I've read so far it seems to me has been thoughtful and supportive, and a counter to the isolation that tends to accompany profound sadness. it also wouldnt hurt to explore ways of thinking about sadness challenging its knee-jerk medicalization.

You should mention (oops, you did)how many of those descriptions have had to be crossed off over the years the more we understand about the abilities of other animals. Tool users? Social communicators? Creators of cultures which are handed down? Conscious? Self-Conscious? Capable of mourning, empathy, moral thought, reason and calculation? All these traits were at one time thought to be uniquely human, but are now recognized as shared by our fellow creatures.
It may be best to abandon the attempt to distinguish humanity from other animals as a difference in kind, a qualitative 'nature'. It is coming to seem that where humanity departs from animality is more a difference of degree than kind.

"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.

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)."

I'll let Heideggerian scholar Eugene Gendlin answer this:
"The past reshapes itself in the course of the body's(and mind's) present performance. Of course the past exists and functions in and as our new present. But the present must be capable of something new, otherwise past experience could not have happened either. The past might have been based on a previous past, but at some point it had to be new. And not only at an earlier point. Present experiencing
is always capable of something new that reshapes the past.
The present living process reshapes its past by reshaping itself, reshaping what it
was. In every living process each next bit reshapes the previous. We could say that the past
reshapes itself as present living. Or, we could say that present living generates a “past” by
reshaping itself.
The past is not past because an observer determines that it happened at an earlier
position on Newton's absolute time line. The past is the living process's own past, made past by
its new present. Or, we can say the past makes itself past by functioning to shape a new
present. If one living process is both (and I agree it is), we have to say that it is a constantly
self-reshaping process."

Yes, but is this knowledge of a 'you' a knowledge of something that resists its own moment-to-moment transformation? Descartes needed to postulate a notion of consciousness partially independent from the world of contingent change in order to nail down the objectivity of science in certain knowledge.
But if the 'you' of self-consciousness is of something always other than itself, then Descarte's certainly turns into contingency, and knowledge is no longer knowing THAT you exist but the knowing of particular WAYS that you exist.

There are ideal instance all the time. But in order for an ideality to continue to exist as itself it has to repeat itself. What happens when you try to repeat a thought in consciousness? The very sense of its subtly changes, because time means exposure to context, and context is always changing context. This is the fundamental underpinning of time.
As soon as a concept is animated with the intention to say something, it exposes itself to context.

I'm using transcendental as metaphysical a-priori (not derived from experience). "The Transcendental Deduction is Kant’s attempt to demonstrate against empiricist psychological theory that certain a priori concepts correctly apply to objects featured in our experience. For Kant a concept is a priori just in case its source is the understanding of the subject and not sensory experience. The specific a priori concepts whose applicability to objects of experience Kant aims to vindicate in the Transcendental Deduction are Unity, Plurality, and Totality (the Categories of Quantity); Reality, Negation, and Limitation (the Categories of Quality); Inherence and Subsistence, Causality and Dependence, and Community (the Categories of Relation), and Possibility-Impossibility, Existence-Nonexistence, Necessity-Contingency (the Categories of Modality)."

Heidegger:"Kant was the first to articulate explicitly the characteristics of nature as represented in the natural sciences. He was therefore also the first to state what a law means in the natural sciences
Nature is understood as the law-governed changes in location within a homogeneous
space and within the sequence of a homogeneous time. This is natural
science's supposition. In this supposition, that is, in this assumption of "nature" determined
accordingly, there lies simultaneously an acceptio. In such a supposition,
the existence of space, motion, causality, and time is always already accepted as an unquestionable fact. Here accepting and taking mean immediate receiving-perceiving. What is accepted in natural science's supposition is a homogeneous space."
The objectivity of objects is the function of a synthetic construction on the part of the subject. The objectivity of nature is determined in reference to the kind of knowledge the knowing subject possesses regarding himself. Objectivity is a determination on the part of the subject. Kant formulates
this situation in the proposition he called the supreme principle of all synthetic judgment, which reads: "The conditions of the possibility of experience in general are likewise conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience and that for this reason they have objective validity in a synthetic a priori judgment."
Notice that Kant is not not claiming that the content of objects is a -priori, rather the conditions of possiblity of causal determination are a=priori. The idea that beneath the veil of the appearance of things lies underlying unities that science can grasp through successive approximations(constructions) toward an assypmtotic horizon of empirical truth is founded on a priori suppositions. Karl Popper's notion of falsifiability rests on Kantian presuppositions concerning the conditions of possibility of causal objectivity.

Heidegger questioned the justification of Kant's transcendental categories, saying that they were not a-priori but rather invented . He also questioned Husserl's(and Sartre's and Marx's and Hegel's) notions of consciousness as self- consciousness, the idea that there is such a thing as immediate pre-reflective self-awareness.

I think we could devote our entire lives to trying to keep our position as rigidly fixed as possible, and in spite of our best efforts, we would find that we had changed our perspective continually over the course of our life. Of course, we would probably argue that our current view had been our position all along and we merely fine-tuned it.
By the same token, one could dedicate their being to never settling for any particular position, even refusing tattoos on the belief that they symbolize a permanence of view. And yet, one would find over the course of their life that that changes in their worldview amounted to variations of an unfolding theme. Neither the self-same nor revolutionary overcoming rules experiencing; rather a being-the-same differently.

Testicles produce testosterone. Testosterone vs estrogen equates to manliness vs femininity. Castrati, with their higher voices, are seen as feminized. Is all humor derived from damage to testicles a sign of hostility or oppression? Perhaps only to the humorless. But I gotta hand it to you, it took balls to write that.

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 believe that Husserl referred to this synthetic activity of mind with regard to concepts an 'idea in the Kantian sense', a meaning that can be repeated indefintely as self-identical. For Kant the objectivity of science is secured transcendentally via the categories which make infinitization and ideality possible. Husserl modifies Kant by dropping the trasncendental categories of perception and instead locating the basis of ideality in the interative self presencing within the tripartite structure of time consciousness.
Question: do we really want to hold with either Kant or Husserl concerning a trancendental justification of ideality? IS there something in the self that comes back to itself identically moment to moment as it interacts with a world? If not, then pure ideality never is able to constitute itself in consciousness.
Outside of number itself as empty self -identical counting, is there anything in the mind's abstractions that meaningfully returns to itself identically? This was Derida's argument , as well as Merleau-Ponty's. The idea in the Kantian sense is a solpsism, ignoring the embodied basis of thought.

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.

I never met anybody who did not have a fixed position. Let me explain that. By fixed position I don't mean a script they can rattle off. I dont even necessarily mean a position they are even conscious of. By fixed position I mean that, at the highest level of abstraction, we all carry with us and make sense of our world in all its aspects by interpreting it though a worldview that includes and integrates within itself political, aesthetic, philosophical, spirirtual and psychological elements. THis wworldives is not static but evolves slowly. So it is not fixed within itself by fixed(stable) in a relative sense in relation to the worldviews of others.
Whether we know it or not, we all belong within a family of philosophical positions/eras.

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.

"One must determine something which remains unchanged for a period of time, and this is continuity". What you are describing is a mathematical abstraction. It is a device that we invented as a tool in our attempts to make sense of the world. But other than pure mathematical objects, there is no such thing as pure continuity in the world of meaningful experience.

As far as continuing to be the same differently, if you repeat a word to yourself over and over(or glance at it on a page), the sense of the word will change. This effect applies to any meaning we attempt to repeat. If you want to preserve 'same' to mean pure mathematical identity, then, what we intend to mean when we repeat a meaning continues to be similar to itself by at the same time differing from itself. This is non-logical continuity, the way our unfolding experiences belong to patterns and themes while always transforming in subtle ways the very meaning of those patterns and themes.

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."

I think James is understanding continuity in a different way than you are. If we look at the contents of consciousness, whether past actions and habits , present or anticipative experieincing, as conceptual objects, then continuity has to be understood in terms of a logic of objective causation and its determinations.
There is a very different way to understand continuity that does not operate under the terms of the causality of conceptual logic.

The key quote from James is :"What we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder
pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it. Our feeling of the same
objective thunder, coming in this way, is quite different from what it would be were the thunder
a continuation of previous thunder."

The thunder in this example is not a concept that is either true or false in its meaning, but a way of being thunder whose sense in consciousness changes in continuous fashion over time.
A way or sense of being something understood this way is not definable by predicative properties or attributes of a concept. It must be understood instead as akin to a fabric changing its textural shape as a whole, in a breeze .It is not a matter of reductively determining each state of the fabric by reference to a previous state, because the attempt to do so further transforms the sense of that past. There is a way of continuing to be the same differently that eludes the reifications of conceptual logic, a kind of referential but not deterministic consistency, that accrods better with actual phenomological experience of the 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.

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.'

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

Past may be determined and fixed, but it must also enter into the very horizon that we experience as the 'present'. Otherwise there would be no sense of the continuity of meaning and purpose from moment to moment. The present arises out of a background context that it is at the same time continuous with and differs from.

William James put it thusly:

"Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. But now there appears, even
within the limits of the same self, and between thoughts all of which alike have this same sense of
belonging together, a kind of jointing and separateness among the parts, of which this
statement seems to take no account. I refer to the breaks that are produced by sudden contrasts in the
chain, making often explosive appearances and rending each other in twain. But their comings and
goings and contrasts no more break the flow of the thought that thinks them than they break the time
and the space in which they lie. A silence may be broken by a thunder-clap, and we may be so
stunned and confused for a moment by the shock as to give no instant account to ourselves of what has happened. But that very confusion is a mental state, and a state that passes us straight over from the silence to the sound. The transition between the thought of one object and the thought of another is no more a break in the thought than a joint in a bamboo is a break in the wood. It is a part of the
consciousness as much as the joint is a part of the bamboo.

The superficial introspective view is the overlooking, even when the things are contrasted
with each other most violently, of the large amount of affinity that may still remain between the
thoughts by whose means they are cognized. Into the awareness of the thunder itself the awareness of
the previous silence creeps and continues; for what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder
pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it.[12] Our feeling of the same
objective thunder, coming in this way, is quite different from what it would be were the thunder
a continuation of previous thunder. The thunder itself we believe to abolish and exclude the silence;
but the feeling of the thunder is also a feeling of the silence as just gone; and it would be difficult to find
in the actual concrete consciousness of man a feeling so limited to the present as not to have an
inkling of anything that went before. Here, again, language works against our perception of the truth.
We name our thoughts simply, each after its thing, as if each knew its own thing and nothing else."

The only 'knowledge' that can't be manipulated is knowledge that is utterly ignorant of the contingent conditions of its production, and so blind to its inpermanence.

"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.

Pragmatic necessity, in the sense it is used by American pragmatist philosophers like Dewey and James, is a contingent necessity rather than a metaphysical necessity grounded in the notion of truth that you understand, based on my reading of your previous posts. You seem to embrace a correspondence theory of truth, depicting a subject constructing conceptual representations from perceptual contact with an independently existing world(Truth as Mirror of Nature). Thus, you see dna as fitting its environment. What you miss is the recent turn in evolutionary biology toward an enactive, self-organizing model of the relationship between organism and environment, in which adaptations of organism to world modify that world, and thus there is a circle of mutual transformation between organism and world such that it becomes incoherent to talk about a one-way corresponding between subject and 'what is out there'.
Nietzsche, like Dewy and James see aims and goals as relative to contingent worlds that we bring into being and which change via our interactions with it. Altruistic agents act altruisticlly becasue that altruism is motivated by a selfish need that simultaneously benefits the self and the other, but in different ways. This is also the basis of cooperation.

" But the God that Nietzsche declared dead was his society´s traditional God; when people become atheist, they are atheist of the god of their parents, and assume that all of the other gods are false or are different images of the god of their parents."

Nietzsche slayed a lot of Gods, not just the God of Augustine or even Descarte's pineal-gland mediated trancdendendency. He demolished a whole platoon of atheistic Gods. He also slayed Sartre's atheitistic Cartesian consciousness, and the metaphysical logic of cause-effect that the natural sciences depend on. He slayed the teleological undeprinings 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.

Why do we identify with and care for children if there is not evolutionariliy adapted brain module or predisposition for it? Nietzsche calls into question the "opposition" between egoism and altruism, the view that a selfish agent cannot act altruistically.
For isntance, caring for something smaller and weaker doesn't threaten us, thereby allowing us to validate our own competence an worth. Isnt this what the unconditional and utterly dependent love of a child for the parent accomplish? The fufllment of selfish needs presupposes and requires social life, not just in terms of pragmatic survival, but for emotional fulfillment. Doubtless, ther are parents with no particular love for their children, in which case those children are either dicarded or kept as financial investments until they are old enough to help maintain a farm or other family business. Larger families were crucial to economic survival in previous eras.

I would love to hear your position in particular. How important is Lacan, as you understand him, to you? Do you find Deleuze's appraoch to be more rigorous or satisfying?
Every philosopher has numerous communities of interpreters who clash among themselves. For instance, there are thos who read Derrida as a Kierkegaardian-Levinasian-Hegelian theological figure(John Caputo). Others assimilate him to a neo-pragmatism in the mold of Wittgenstein and Dewey(Rorty).
I situate Derrida 'after' post-Neitzschean writers like Lyotard, Foucault, Deleuze , William Conolly and Jean-Luc Nancy. That is to say , Derrida understands and moves with them, but his step is a more radical one than theirs, and they havent grasped this.
"Derridas own deconstructionism puts forth that there should be no privileged positions. Privileged readings."

"For of course there is a "right track" [une 'bonne voie "] ,
a better way, and let it be said in passing how surprised I have often been, how
amused or discouraged, depending on my humor, by the use or abuse of the
following argument: Since the deconstructionist (which is to say, isn't it, the skeptic-
relativist-nihilist!) is supposed not to believe in truth, stability, or the unity of
meaning, in intention or "meaning-to-say, " how can he demand of us that we
read him with pertinence, precision, rigor? How can he demand that his own text
be interpreted correctly? How can he accuse anyone else of having misunderstood,
simplified, deformed it, etc.? In other words, how can he discuss, and
discuss the reading of what he writes? The answer is simple enough: this definition
of the deconstructionist is false (that's right: false, not true) and feeble; it
supposes a bad (that's right: bad, not good) and feeble reading of numerous
texts, first of all mine, which therefore must finally be read or reread. Then perhaps
it will be understood that the value of truth (and all those values associated
with it) is never contested or destroyed in my writings, but only reinscribed in
more powerful, larger, more stratified contexts. And that within interpretive contexts
(that is, within relations of force that are always differential-for example,
socio-political-institutional-but even beyond these determinations) that are relatively
stable, sometimes apparently almost unshakeable, it should be possible to
invoke rules of competence, criteria of discussion and of consensus, good faith,
lucidity, rigor, criticism, and pedagogy." Derrida, Limited, Inc.

"Derrida points to the Real but is stuck in the realm of concepts."
This is a common misreading of Derrida. Just as "nothing outside the text" is commonly interpreted as meaning nothing outside of linguistic signifiers. To which critics respond, what about the body, affect, per-linguistic perception? But Derrida isnt talking about formal language or concepts at all. Rather an economy not only prior to the distinction between language and expression, between concept and intuition, but also prior to the distinction between the 'Real' and the 'imaginary', There are numerous metaphysical presuppostions embedded within Lacn's discourse.

You miss the essence of Nietzsche, which was his discovery that truth, rather than being sovereign, is handmaiden of the will , and will is non-self aware, a product of perspective, which itself is arbitrary. Social life co-operation, caring for the young are possible for Nietzsche, not because of either an inherited gene for altruism or a divine inspiration, but out of pragmatic necessity. He was the first radical relativist. He understood Darwinism better than Darwin did.

Doesn't time apply differently to us, too, in different periods of our lives? How long did a year seem to you when you were a child? How many times did you ask your parents(or do your kids ask you) "are we were there yet?" when you took a road trip with them? When you return home after an hour of errands , doesn't your dog act as if you were gone for days? So if a child, or pet, seems to have a very different conception of the passage of time than an adult, I can just imagine how different an insect's notion of time must be. It would seem from the above examples that the more capable one is of anticipating into the future the more predictable the world seems and the faster time seems to flow. There many events in a dog's life where it has no way of estimating duration ( although this isnt always the case. A dog may wait at the front door at the same time every day for a child to return home from school).

I don't see a whole lot of Derrida in your description, certainly not concerning cleaving off from the Real. i dont think we ever get to the Real with Derrida, any more than we do with Heidegger.