Extract from Beyond Good and Evil (para. 5)
5. That which causes philosophers to be regarded half- distrustfully and half-mockingly, is not the oft-repeated discovery how innocent they are—how often and easily they make mistakes and lose their way, in short, how childish and childlike they are,—but that there is not enough honest dealing with them, whereas they all raise a loud and virtuous outcry when the problem of truthfulness is even hinted at in the remotest manner. They all pose as though their real opinions had been discovered and attained through the self-evolving of a cold, pure, divinely indifferent dialectic (in contrast to all sorts of mystics, who, fairer and foolisher, talk of ‘inspiration’), whereas, in fact, a prejudiced proposition, idea, or ‘suggestion,’ which is generally their heart’s desire abstracted and refined, is defended by them with arguments sought out after the event. They are all advocates who do not wish to be regarded as such, generally astute defenders, also, of their prejudices, which they dub ‘truths,’— and VERY far from having the conscience which bravely admits this to itself, very far from having the good taste of the courage which goes so far as to let this be understood, perhaps to warn friend or foe, or in cheerful confidence and self-ridicule. The spectacle of the Tartuffery of old Kant, equally stiff and decent, with which he entices us into the dialectic by-ways that lead (more correctly mislead) to his ‘categorical imperative’— makes us fastidious ones smile, we who find no small amusement in spying out the subtle tricks of old moralists and ethical preachers. Or, still more so, the hocus-pocus in mathematical form, by means of which Spinoza has, as it were, clad his philosophy in mail and mask—in fact, the ‘love of HIS wisdom,’ to translate the term fairly and squarely—in order thereby to strike terror at once into the heart of the assailant who should dare to cast a glance on that invincible maiden, that Pallas Athene:—how much of personal timidity and vulnerability does this masquerade of a sickly recluse betray!
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Just interested in a general discussion about this passage. It always brings a smile to my face :)
Comments (38)
This 'prejudiced proposition' is what Thomas Kuhn refererred to as a paradigm in the context of scientific inquiry.
I was really stirred by that passage when I first read it, and I still think it's valuable. This is the part that seems most important to me at the moment:
This idea has appeared in other philosophers, has it not? We don't start from nowhere. We start in the middle of things, already biased and invested. We rationalize. Thinking is wishful.
I think being highlighted here is the mistake of philosophers who can't separate fact from interpretation. Interpretations stack up on top of each other and build something complex and thoughtful but each building block is personal truth and betrays the intention of a universal claim. I may be wrong and I haven't read the book and so I probably shouldn't be commenting at all but that was what I thought of while reading the passage.
No, Nietzsche is arguing that all fact IS interpretation. Truth is perspectival in nature, and all perspectives are value systems.
I suppose that is technically true when we look at what the word fact means but only because interpretation is required to utilise arguments of causation. Do you think though he is perhaps underestimating the role of the unconscious mind in interpretation? To ascribe values to an automated process seems inappropriate right?
Later on in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche says:
"Now it is beginning to dawn on maybe five or six brains that physics
too is only an interpretation and arrangement of the world (according to
ourselves! if I may say so) and not an explanation of the world."
"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?"
It’s been a while since I’ve read it and I’m rereading now. I don’t think he mentions “fact” does he? I took what you mentioned to be a reference back to the “theoretical men” first touched on in “The Birth of Tragedy”. I could obviously be wrong I’m no professional scholar and I’m not inclined to read what other philosophers say about any work until I’ve drawn my own roughshod conclusions.
Also, will be posting some other parts in different threads. If nothing else he’s a very rich source and this is historically apparent if you can see how many people he’s influenced and still influences.
As he well knows but does not so easily let on, thus it was for his kindred spirit, Plato. When he says:
this should be understood as one skeptic addressing another, one poet to another. One who would be commander and legislator to another who was and still is.
THE REAL PHILOSOPHERS, HOWEVER, ARE COMMANDERS AND LAW-GIVERS; they say: "Thus SHALL it be!" They determine first the Whither and the Why of mankind, and thereby set aside the previous labour of all philosophical workers, and all subjugators of the past--they grasp at the future with a creative hand, and whatever is and was, becomes for them thereby a means, an instrument, and a hammer. Their "knowing" is CREATING, their creating is a law-giving, their will to truth is--WILL TO POWER. --Are there at present such philosophers? Have there ever been such philosophers? MUST there not be such philosophers some day? . . . (BGE, 211)
I have long thought that Nietzsche made too much of the mathematical format of Spinoza's Ethics. The observation overlooks a humility that is thorough going throughout the work. Consider his notion that speaking of God having "free" will is the projection of the human need to work toward ends.
Also, Spinoza's idea of Substance is a direct challenge to the duality of Descartes. The guy did a lot of what Nietzsche wanted to do.
I won't get into the rhetoric of his pronouncements on Spinoza, but a postcard to Overbeck shows Nietzsche's admiration of Spinoza:
I did not know of this.
Thank you.
I agree that he says that, but it seems to be that this has to be taken as an exaggeration or a wicked joke. While writing the line in a particular mood, I suspect that Nietzsche that he was sharing a fact and not just an interpretation. I understand the charm of 'no facts, only interpretations,' but I doubt that we can live or speak without absurdity without such a central distinction.
As I read Nietzsche, he's an intellectually stimulating mess. His work for me is the portrait of a powerful mind at work. It doesn't stick together, though of course it's not unrelated fragments either. Sometimes he's a prophet, sometimes a skeptic, etc.
Fascinating post. That's a good example of the one of the sides of Nietzsche. Is this side really different from the founder of a religion?
[quote=Nietzsche]Their "knowing" is CREATING, their creating is a law-giving, their will to truth is--WILL TO POWER. --Are there at present such philosophers? Have there ever been such philosophers? MUST there not be such philosophers some day?[/quote]
I recall a line when he described conquerors as artists, imposing a form on the conquered. I found it to be an illuminating metaphor. Accusations of irrationalism seem fair here, though presumably Nietzsche in such a mode would dismiss rationality as some kind of superstition of the weak. Nevertheless, worldly power seems to require technology and the efficient coordination of human effort. In short, I don't see an escape from unromantic forms of rationality for anyone who isn't satisfied with an otherwise impotent self-love. At his strangest, Nietzsche was an autoerotic fireworks display.
They are fair, but not accurate. Nietzsche leads the casual reader to such conclusions, but dig down and Nietzsche is rational but, in his own words, not irrationally rational.
Good point. FWIW, I've read lots of Nietzsche. He was my favorite for many years. Personally I could never find just one Nietzsche. For me he offered a portrait of a personality in all of its complexity.
I like the phrase 'irrationally rational.' I think there's wisdom in that. I like Nietzsche when he's not so manic that he's no longer funny. I suppose he's also funny when he's manic, but it becomes unclear whether he's still in control. Ecce Homo is quite a ride.
Nietzsche isn't the only philosopher to put the fact-value distinction into question. Quine, Donald Davidson, Hillary Putnam, Thomas Kuhn and Nelson Goodman are among many who have reached similar conclusions..
"To be objective, one would have to have some set of mind-independent objects to be
designated by language or known by science. But can we find any such objects? Let us look at an extended example from the philosopher Nelson Goodman.
A point in space seems to be perfectly objective. But how are we to define the points of our everyday world? Points can be taken either as primitive elements, as intersecting lines, as certain triples of intersecting planes, or as certain classes of nesting volumes. These definitions are equally adequate, and yet they are incompatible: what a point is will vary with each form of description. For example, only in the first "version," to use Goodman's term, will a point be a primitive element. The objectivist, however, demands, "What are points really?" Goodman's response to this demand is worth quoting at length: If the composition of points out of lines or of lines out of points is conventional rather than factual, points and lines themselves are no less so. ... If we say that our sample space is a combination of points, or of lines, or of regions, or a combination of combinations of points, or lines, or regions, or
a combination of all these together, or is a single lump, then since none is identical with any of the rest, we are giving one among countless alternative conflicting descriptions of what the space is.
And so we may regard the disagreements as not about the facts but as due to differences in the conventions-adopted in organizing or describing the space. What, then, is the neutral fact or thing described in these different terms? Neither the space (a) as an undivided whole nor (b) as a combination of everything involved in the several accounts; for (a) and (b) are but two among the various ways of organizing it. But what is it that is so organized? When we strip off as layers of convention all differences among ways of describing it, what is left? The onion is peeled down to its empty core."
Did Nietzsche just call Spinoza a sickly recluse??
I define "power" as basically influence over another's decisions--and it's a matter of degree with each person. I don't think a great deal of rationality is necessary. It doesn't take a lot to have a high degree of worldly influence and independence: ask a gang leader.
I see your point, and I agree that a person doesn't have to know physics or philosophy, for instance, to rise in the world. I would't limit rationality to things like physics or philosophy though. Perhaps the dominant form of rationality is know-how. To become a gang leader requires interpersonal know-how. For me the 'rational' way to figure out how to get such a position is to observe and question those who already have that position. It seems possible that their account of their success would be less useful than observing them closely. Sometimes we know how without knowing exactly how we know how.
Indeed. I'm familiar with some of those above and with others who also question the distinction. I also understand that defending the distinction is likely to come off square or unexposed.
Quoting Joshs
I'm a little iffy about the first sentence, but I'll respond to this as well as I can. Is the Lincoln Memorial a mind-independent object? How about the moon? What about what you or I ate for breakfast?
Surely we can look at the world from different perspectives, but that 'perspective' metaphor already implies that it's one and the same thing that's being looked at. The notion of interpretation also includes something like fact that is being interpreted. Saying there are no facts but only interpretations is like saying there are no sons/daughters but only fathers.
Quoting Joshs
For my money, a mathematical example is less than ideal here. If math has an objectivity, I think it's a result of the discourse being normal. I do understand the value in showing the limits or breaking points of various important concepts, but perhaps there's a tendency to dwell on these atypical breaking points and ignore the typical success of the concepts. When you or I watch the news, for instance, do we not almost automatically sort the facts from the spin? And maybe the pizza delivery guy 'made bank' last night. I'd be tempted to ask him how much he made, rounded to the nearest dollar.
It also implies an ordering principle whereby the different views are related to each other. Various and sometimes contradictory elements are presented to bring attention to this order. I cannot recall reading anything that suggested it was a structure that could be changed.
The desire for different outcomes will start with accepting that.
I believe many secretly guard the inner premise of some kind of ‘transcendent being’ in which one moves ‘above and beyond’ confused/imprecise human distinctions; or even beyond ‘distinction’ itself! I think we’re much lesser than this and we’ve actually stepped past what is ‘real’ by framing items as ‘unreal’. By this I mean that it is not a case of seeking to ‘transcend’ to some ‘higher state’, but rather to sink lower to what we’ve moved beyond in our cognitive and social evolution, in our relationships brought into being through the intricacies of language (written/spoken; as this is an example of!) whilst being acutely aware of our inablilty to distribute to others our inner-language - in the broader category of linguistics not merely as ‘worded thoughts’ (although in my experience some suffer to grasp this idea of ‘thinking’ in a wordless state; if your one of those I apologise for this and guess it’s better for you to dismiss this as utter drivel than dispute it). For you that cannot think in anything other than words I can still offer up the ‘landscape’ of words, language itself hidden from itself, as a worthy foe to battle with and wrestle some vague notion of meaning from as it twists and turns, shifting shape form and pattern, leaving the narrative of being a living, breathing chaos, the falsely dichotic, dynamic, ever-writhing Dionysus, that is - for want of a better term - the human ‘spirit’.
The whole business of reducing Nietzsche to some dichotic game of ‘objectivity’ versus ‘subjectviity’ or the weighing of this or that ‘interpretation’ as ‘true’ versus ‘false’, is to me at least, beside the point - which is a point, not a stretched out ‘thought’ bent and warped to fit our sense of selfhood and sense of ‘humanity’.
Without a doubt under the the most analytic mind, under the cold logic of investigation taken on as a means to set aside ‘emotion’ the drive is nevertheless an emotional drive not some sequence of events cut into neat tidy parcels.
Anyway, that is why I posted.
I can narrow that selected line down a little further for myself to this:
It sticks out for me because of my own little “divinely indifferent dialectic” I guess! Or rather my own plague of thoughts ;)
I didn't understand all of your post, but I can relate to this. Nietzsche is a fascinating personality to hang out with. He contains multitudes. If I pick on him for this or that, I'm razzing an old friend for laying it on a little thick. A lonely wolf in his own time, he's almost common sense now. This morning's Don Draper thinks he's the first person to [s] fall in love with his secretary[/s] gaze into the abyss. Because it can be an intensely negative and debilitating experience, the new arrival is sure that others can't really be gazing into the void ---for how could they be functioning as if nothing happened? or as if Nothing didn't happen...
Quoting I like sushi
FWIW, I think it's clear that concept alone is far from being all that matters. Reality is not just words, and performing effectively in it is not just a matter of concepts. Know-how is only partially verbal. Nietzsche and quite a few other philosophers use rhetorical strategies that have a cumulative, emotional effect. The strong philosophers tend to drop killer metaphors, with no exact meaning but plenty of suggestive power. Nietzsche is strong black coffee--disturbing, inspiring, with an effect that is not just propositional.
This is something that’s always fascinated me. It is like assuming we’ve always had the ability to read a book. It is reasonable enough to say we’ve always been able to “read” (the environment) but not to say we’ve always been able to read written words. The same disparity with language and thoughts really bothers some so much they blankly refuse to say “thought” is possible without words.
Haven’t you met folks like that? I was shocked to find how common they are - although they’re not by any means in the majority from my experience.
I have myself sometimes thought or argued that there was no thinking without words, but I had a particular understanding of thought in mind. If (and it's context dependent) we include knowhow within thought, then suddenly most of our thinking is arguably happening without words.
The question is what it means to say that something is mind-independent. Or more generally, what an object is. The idea of object is an invention with a long pedigree in Western history. We can thank Aristotle, Galileo, and Descartes among others for our carving up experience into the abstractions we call objects. Granting that we invented this construct, we are still apt to defend it on the basis of its usefulness for us.The fiction of the object would seem to enable us to create many valuable technologies. But just because we have found the mind-independent object to be a useful construct for a long time doesn't mean that we cant replace it with an even more powerful construct, one that would seem to sacrifice precision and predictability at one level but in fact may provide an overall more useful explanatory framework over all. We've had to make such a choice many time before in the history of science. Pre-Darwinian biology made use of an elegant explanatory order for the origin of species. The Darwinian evolutionary paradigm sacrificed this elegance in favor of a relativism at the lower bound but a more effective paradigm at a meta level.
The issue of something like the Lincoln Memorial existing independent of us is what exactly can we point to in unison as what we are seeing in common. SOMETHING is there to contribute to our interpretations of it, but what that substrate is cannot be teased out from what we construe of it.
Mark C. Taylor(2001) characterizes this 'enactivist' ethos thusly; “Contrary to popular opinion and many philosophical epistemologies, knowledge does not involve the union or synthesis of an already existing subject and an independent object” Subjectivity and objectivity emerge through an ongoing adaptive process.
The Memorial is an item of language which has to be read off. What something is is a function of what we need it for, what we do with it, how we interact with it. And that changes not only from person to person but from instance to instance when we look at something, If we place a man from 30,000 years ago in front of a bus, how will that person's eyes track the vehicle? It depends on many things. Will they see it as a single thing or a collection of parts? And what is the significance of these parts for them?
Are they seeing the same bus as we are? What about it is the same? We could say their ability to avoid bumping into it maybe, but that will depend on their assessment of what it is made of and whether it is a mirage. Is a series of lines and curves scrawled in the sand a group of letters that form words or is it random patterns? It depends on many things, including what languages we are familiar with and our vocabulary. What is the 'object' or 'same object' that we all can agree on here? And what would it even mean to ask such a question apart from the intentions , background knowledge an context of each person encountering such a situation?
So yes, every meaning is interpretation all the way down, but a better word than interpretation is interactive transformation . An object is the result of a particular active engagement between person and world based on a interrelational framework of intentional directionality, personal history and knowledge, context, culture, for the sake of ongoing purposes. Object means nothing outside of how it relates to our goals.
" When you or I watch the news, for instance, do we not almost automatically sort the facts from the spin? "
This a good example of the disadvantages of thinking of facts as mind-independent. If you believe that, you will be forced, as many are today, to disparage and attack those who are , in a thoroughgoing way, interpreting those supposed facts in profoundly contradictory ways relative to your understanding. Thus the endless accusations of fake news, brainwashed or lying, ethically compromised politicians and duped citizens.
An understanding of facts that sees them as interpretive from top to bottom will , instead of questioning the integrity of others, seek to unfold their interpretive framework from their perspective.
IF we want to just keep doing science in the same way we have been, we can retain the old thinking about the mind-indepdendence of reality. But in order to build psychological theories and machines that think more like we do, and can do more complex cognitive and perceptual tasks, it will be necessary to think beyond mind-independence. Newell and Simon's neural network model of 60 years ago modeled itself on mind-independent objects, but it was profoundly limited in what it could do.
Interpretation all the way down doesn't destroy the notion of objectivity, it simply exposes it as an abstraction masking within itself more interesting possibilities. In a way,enactivist thinking leaves the old thinking intact, but works within it to make explicit its hidden context-dependency.
Quoting Joshs
As an abbreviation for my feeling about that rabbit role (and not as an authority), I mention the later Wittgenstein. I can't 'prove' the futility of that rabbit hole in the language of that rabbit hole in the same way that I can't prove the God doesn't exist. I can suggest that the what-X-means game seems to have a built-in futility the further away it is from practice. Roughly, I suggest that ordinary language use is something like the base of the pyramid. We understand one another quite well without knowing exactly how we manage it. After-the-fact philosophical analyses strike me as tending to be artificial. What Joe means by 'object' when he uses it successfully may have little to do with Kant or Heidegger.
Quoting Joshs
The concept of the object within philosophy no doubt has its history, but surely humans have been experiencing and talking about objects since long before the philosophers made things complicated without many of them doing much to actually help in managing those objects. I may sound a little bit anti-philosophy here, but I learned my suspicions of philosophy from philosophy in the first place, so I do value the genre.
Quoting Joshs
These are good points. I see no easy answer for that last question, especially given your first sentence. What something is is a function of what we need it for, what we do with it, how we interact with it. I'm not saying I accept that sentence as a fact, but I agree with its emphasis on context and purpose. I'll also grant that many useful distinctions can still break down or have fuzzy boundaries. A tool doesn't have to always work to be worth passing on as a way we do things around here.
Quoting Joshs
I understand the kind of rigid-mindedness you are cautioning against. I can relate to that. But note that the denial of fact altogether dissolves the boundary between news and fake news. There is only news that I don't like and new that I do without fact, as far as I can tell. And the word 'news' loses its force altogether.
Do you have any comment on whether it is a fact that 'there are no facts'? For context, I've defended ideas like that before. Philosophy can embrace itself as a paradoxical sophistry that is nevertheless good. I like the Tristan Tzara and other dada theorists.
The issue is largely a matter of taste. Hyper-clever philosophy, as it wanders away from application, sometimes strikes me as a kind of critical mysticism. Something 'profound' is achieved, but it still often enough just looks like words that make a small group feel good about itself, a romantic'reaction to philosophy losing prestige to science and technology for instance.
I like to think that I've read enough of these writers to criticize 'my' group from the inside. On the other hand, the whole thing is so disconnected from practice and being tested that there's no clear way to establish who really understands Heidegger (for instance) profoundly enough to be worthy of criticizing him. To me this further supports the 'not even wrong' judgment or attitude. If there are no facts, but only interpretations, then I seem to only risk a 'boo' or a 'you're don't get it, dude' in reply to these concerns. I say that I mostly do get it but that it's nice to be able to turn it off and speak with the vulgar when appropriate.
The thing about objective realism is that when it is applied to the understanding of individual cognition , affectivity and motivation it reifies psychological phenomena into arbitrariness. There are exciting writers working in philosophy of mind and cognitive science today, such as Shaun Gallagher, Evan Thompson and Alva Noe. these are scientists who also happen to endorse relativist, interpretive enactivism as a way of understanding human empathy, schizophrenia, autism, perception affect, etc.
If youre tired of the lazy sycophantic regurgitations of Heidegger and Derrida in much of today's continentel writings you should give these writers a try. They are well-versed in Husserlian and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, as well as Heidegger, Gadamer and many other continentals.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I still think you might be projecting some theory of 'mind-independence' on me, but it's a small issue. Nevertheless, I'd just emphasize that a counter theory that accepts the divorce of 'mind,' 'fact', 'object', ... from their typical use misses the point. I guess I'm doing something like defending (the good part of) common sense against the excesses of intellectual hipsters, for my own hipster reasons. I'm endlessly looking for the perfect intellectual selfie. The lighting is never quite right.
Thanks for the suggestions. At the moment I'm mostly focused on learning technical skills. After spending years in the rabbit hole, the experience has been as important as any book. It enriches the books that preceded it and helps me test them. Philosophy is great and necessary as a zoomed-out view of our situation, but I'd say that it just can't substitute for a struggle with the details. Some know-how is learned in the trenches and can't be squeezed into concepts. Call it vanity, but I want to do a non-academic philosophy here, synthesizing 'official' philosophy with other valuable influences.
Merged from previous thread.
Note: I am planning to post other extracts in separates threads, but I’ll make sure to select then carefully regarding the content and pose a subject of discussion more explicitly, okay? If not then I’ll not post any more extracts from this work.
This observation regarding "many souls" that make up an individual is something that stands in stark contrast with Nietzsche's use of egoistical expressions that would make him a self proclaimed prophet.
It is odd how one fills in the gap changes with what is understood to what is being claimed.