Nietzsche notes I
All passages from The Will to Power.
"A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist. According to this view, our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning; the pathos of "in vain" is the nihilists' pathos...." (585 A)
Interpreting "does not exist" as "can not be," then by logical implication (?--not checking) if there is to be an absence of nihilism then the world that ought to be needs to be achievable.
Professor Reginster made the distinction between necessarily and contingently non-existing worlds; he claimed that an unachievable ought-to-be world of Nietzsche's description must be necessarily non-existent (as opposed to just happening to not be the case.)
Does this crumble in the face of a sort of weak skepticism, or fallibilism? If, despite everything we might believe, we believe that the opposite is possibly the case, can there be any necessarily impossible worlds, really? Is Nietzsche's whole system irrelevant, then?
Or should we smash the binary distinction between contingent and necessary--turn it into a continuum of likelihood. There is redemption for Nietzsche here, then--it turns into the observation that as one's moral goals become more difficult, one is more likely to declare them to be impossible, to be frustrated and fall into despair. I.e., chances and intensity of the nihilistic element of life increase.
"This perspective world...is very false.... But its intelligibility, comprehensibility, practicability, and beauty begin to cease if we refine our senses... the more superficially and coarsely it is conceived, the more valuable, definite, beautiful, and more significant the world appears. The deeper one looks, the more our valuations disappear--meaninglessness approaches. We have created the world that possesses values!" (602)
Am I misreading this when I think this amounts to an endorsement of parsimony in truth? He goes on to make grandiose claims about everything being false and permitted, blah blah blah, but it looks at least initially to me as if he (in my terms...) is just trying to halt the reductionist treadmill on the grounds that detail increases complexity. Yes? No! That's part of this--the mention of the intelligible, comprehensible world being simplified (perhaps at the expense of accuracy and strength). But also he objects to the trimming out of value--maybe of moral objects, that have no place in a parsimonious description of experience. I think, ultimately, that he's confused himself here, as he has confused me.
"To impose upon the becoming the character of being--that is the supreme will to power.
...
That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of becoming to a world of being:--high point of the meditation."(617)
Ah! Why do I see lambdas everywhere!
When I took the Wittgenstein course last fall, it was after a summer of research on PLT Scheme, a functional programming language, which had followed a year of indoctrination into computer science.
The relevant bit: Scheme is built around the lambda calculus developed by Alonzo Church, which essentially reduces all computational problems to the level of a single primitive, the lambda, which represents an abstracted function or procedure. Everything in the language (well, not really, but mostly) is theoretically reducible to these atoms of process.
There is a lot of snobbery among functional language people against object oriented programmers because functional programming has oodles of natural beauty. Really.
So when I hit the Tractatus and was confronted with logical atomism, I recoiled in disgust. How clumsy to claim the smallest units of existence were objects! Absurd--the smallest unit is the lambda. Functional atomism. Ha!
This is magical thinking--a superficial similarity, a reading-onto of a text, not a reading-from. But let me indulge myself for a minute and lie to myself about Nietzsche's implicit vision of a functional world, with functional atoms--a combination of a near idealistic recognition that information is the currency of mentality and that our experience must be built from our mental building blocks with preference for becoming over being--the existence of information is not enough--there must be an endless overturning and processing, with the only permanence being the result of recursion. A metaphysics in which everything truly is the accumulation of millions of vibrations, each quivering blip of experience resonating and shuffling all others in a nondeterministic infinitely processing universe....
Ah... ridiculous. Who do I think I am, Stephen Wolfram? And yet, and yet...I must occasionally free myself from my endless left-brain review.
"But I can see how it is; my mind takes pleasure in wandering, and is not yet willing to be restrained within the bounds of truth. So be it, then; just this once I will ride her on a loose rein...."
- Descartes. [Who remains, in my opinion, a total douche. But he did furnish this nice quote.]
I should be more careful to avoid such methodological slippage.