Nietzsche 2
MARK:
however i think nietzsche's (not-entirely formulated) answer is that you can distinguish between "stuff that formally gets acknowledged as being of the Type of Truth; and stuff that's, y'know, TRUE"
so what's at issue is less his criterion of truth (which he apparently thinks will take care of itself), more - to borrow from steve colbert - his criterion of truthiness
Well, this is what I would want Nietzsche to believe, that truth takes care of itself, people come up with the criteria they need as they go along (which is to say that philosophy has nothing interesting to say about truth), but I'm not sure it is what he believes.
The subtitle of Beyond Good And Evil is Prelude To A Philosophy Of The Future, and he's addressing people who he believes don't exist yet, or maybe exist as a handful of actual living people or soon to be living people whom he doesn't know and has no inkling of but whom he's counting on to eventually run across his books and be inspired to invent for themselves a new type of thinking and being - and who in doing so can invent a new epoch for Europe. But for his story to make sense - a Hero Story, but one that hasn't happened yet - the forces arrayed against these new men must be powerful and omnipresent. So what you're calling "Type Of Truth" or "Truthiness" must be more than just a habit and mistake of philosophers, who don't realize that small t truth takes care of itself. Rather big T Type of Truth must be a force in the world, not something that men simply believe in the moments when they're doing philosophy but something they live with and live by. But he never says what this is, this Truth, and of course he believes that philosophers over time have come up with new truths while believing that their new truths were universal, each new one the right one. But I think he thinks there's an omnipresent Platonism-Christianity-Democracy-Positivism (e.g., there are elements common to all of those, no matter how much they imagine they oppose each other), but he never sits down and states what those common elements are. And what I want him to say is that among the common elements are the beliefs that reality is limited to what's already there and that truth is a correct understanding or description of it - but that this "already there" is something other than man and the life he lives in his body and man and his creations (and that women never really faint and villains always blink their eyes, and children are the only ones who blush, and life is just to die). Except again what I've done to make sense of Nietzsche is to project Dewey onto him.
In any event (and this will be post number three, later tonight), Nietzsche has what I think is a split in him, and the split is this: On the one hand, he thinks the tradition that he comes out of puts matching before making, and something in him wants to buy into that dichotomy and simply reverse it, make it "making comes before matching" (that's a phrase I picked up from Gombrich's Art And Illusion), and he wants to turn philosophy around and put it on the side of making, with philosophers being creators and commanders. But on the other hand he doesn't buy the dichotomy (as well he shouldn't), doesn't think that making and matching are necessarily at odds with one another. But if he doesn't buy the dichotomy, that making and matching are opposites, how can he ever say it was really in force, that a new man is necessary either to reverse it or to overthrow it?
however i think nietzsche's (not-entirely formulated) answer is that you can distinguish between "stuff that formally gets acknowledged as being of the Type of Truth; and stuff that's, y'know, TRUE"
so what's at issue is less his criterion of truth (which he apparently thinks will take care of itself), more - to borrow from steve colbert - his criterion of truthiness
Well, this is what I would want Nietzsche to believe, that truth takes care of itself, people come up with the criteria they need as they go along (which is to say that philosophy has nothing interesting to say about truth), but I'm not sure it is what he believes.
The subtitle of Beyond Good And Evil is Prelude To A Philosophy Of The Future, and he's addressing people who he believes don't exist yet, or maybe exist as a handful of actual living people or soon to be living people whom he doesn't know and has no inkling of but whom he's counting on to eventually run across his books and be inspired to invent for themselves a new type of thinking and being - and who in doing so can invent a new epoch for Europe. But for his story to make sense - a Hero Story, but one that hasn't happened yet - the forces arrayed against these new men must be powerful and omnipresent. So what you're calling "Type Of Truth" or "Truthiness" must be more than just a habit and mistake of philosophers, who don't realize that small t truth takes care of itself. Rather big T Type of Truth must be a force in the world, not something that men simply believe in the moments when they're doing philosophy but something they live with and live by. But he never says what this is, this Truth, and of course he believes that philosophers over time have come up with new truths while believing that their new truths were universal, each new one the right one. But I think he thinks there's an omnipresent Platonism-Christianity-Democracy-Positivism (e.g., there are elements common to all of those, no matter how much they imagine they oppose each other), but he never sits down and states what those common elements are. And what I want him to say is that among the common elements are the beliefs that reality is limited to what's already there and that truth is a correct understanding or description of it - but that this "already there" is something other than man and the life he lives in his body and man and his creations (and that women never really faint and villains always blink their eyes, and children are the only ones who blush, and life is just to die). Except again what I've done to make sense of Nietzsche is to project Dewey onto him.
In any event (and this will be post number three, later tonight), Nietzsche has what I think is a split in him, and the split is this: On the one hand, he thinks the tradition that he comes out of puts matching before making, and something in him wants to buy into that dichotomy and simply reverse it, make it "making comes before matching" (that's a phrase I picked up from Gombrich's Art And Illusion), and he wants to turn philosophy around and put it on the side of making, with philosophers being creators and commanders. But on the other hand he doesn't buy the dichotomy (as well he shouldn't), doesn't think that making and matching are necessarily at odds with one another. But if he doesn't buy the dichotomy, that making and matching are opposites, how can he ever say it was really in force, that a new man is necessary either to reverse it or to overthrow it?