Paragraph by paragraph in Nietzsche
Knowledge is invented, paragraph 1
Nietzsche, vitalist: refers to life.
Knowledge can help human beings to continue to exist. Paragraph 2
”the pride connected with knowing an sensing…”
knowledge is connected to deception, and keeping them alive.
For Nietzsche there is a criterion by which to distinguish what is good and bad, and it is about what enhances life. To distinguish what is worthwhile and what is not.
Knowledge is for the sake of life, not for itself.
All there is is deception, bad or good.
Paragraph 3.
Plato and idealists seem to lack a drive for truth.
Paragraph 4
Truth is a fiction which derives out a convention that we use in order to come around and understand each other. They eliminate the war of all against all through the invention of this.
(This text of Nietzsche is a kind of hermeneutical key to the rest of his works, and so is kind of the most important)
[The death of God is the death of truth claims, at least to an extent].
[Society is a kind ossification of metaphors, whilst the individual is the one who can deossify those metaphors].
”The establishment of language is the first loss of truth”.
The distinction between the lier and the truthspeaker is that when the lier uses value designations to use something that isn’t real to appear to be real, then the lier is shown to be a wrong-doer, in that they injure society.
When talking about lies, he is talking about fiction.
”We are all liers to the extent that we think”.
We desire the life-preserving consequences of truth, like not killing each other.
”Forgetfullness is important for the constitution of truth generally”
Paragraph 5
All things are anthropologic, insofar as they are all an account of all things. In a way, Nietzsche is endorsing a position similar to Protagoras.
There is no literal manner in which we can refer to things. We can only refer to things metaphorically, and so the word metaphor itself is not really meaningful concept.
Truth can have two opposites, the lie and the falsehood. One thing is to be truthful, and a different thing is to be factual.
[Someone influenced by Nietzsche is Bourdieu in talking about fictions; had lectures at the college de France, called On the State, where he theorises that power is a fiction, similar to Nietzsche’s use of the word.]
How can we know that Nietzsche is consistent in saying that words have no relation to the real things? [Anticipating De Saussure ? Rorty and Heidegger speak against truth without holding themselves to be truthful; how to abandon truth]
Paragraph 6
”Every concept arrises from the equation of unequal things”
”By forgetting the distinguishing aspect of it”
We’re all human beings, and we’re not the same, so we discard physical traits and personality traits and so on, and then we get the general concept of the human being that we all should fit into. So we have to discard a lot from the thing that it originally was to have something that we can call of that thing.
Recommendation! Jorge Luis Borges Funes, the Memorias about a person who can remember every single detail. He is a fictional character who couldn’t forget. He is incapable of forgetting, he remembers exactly everything. Thinking about his previous day, would take the same amount of time that a day took. He was incapable thereby of conceptualising. So forgetfullness, or alienation, plays an important part in the creation of concepts.
This discarding is entirely arbitrary, there is nothing guiding us about how to do it; there is nothing in nature that guides us about how to discard in how we conceptualise; pure arbitrariness.
This is nominalism, which is as old as philosophy; only particular objects exist, and any general concept has no reality outside the mind. What is actually out there, has no relation to what we think.
Paragraph 1 page 84 [7], Nietzsche’s definition of truth.
Paragraph 8
”When we define things in a human world, we beg the question of the kind of things we can also find in that human world”
The invention then, allows to control, to anticipate and calculate. Truth then, or ficiton rather, serves life.
[In frankfurt school, rationality is nothing but instrumental rationality]
The arbitrary constructions then allows us to subordinate one thing to another. Similar to Foucault.
In The Order of Things, Foucault more or less does the same thing as Nietzsche in this text, focusing on Biology, linguistics and economy.
Nietzsche has a story going here: first we are impressed by things, the x. Then from those we construct perceptions, and then from these perceptions we abstract further, into conceptions, which are more or less what metaphors are.
The conceptualised frameworks we have hang on running water, they relinquish reality.
[Mathematics and logic, are done despite what is the case; Nietzsche is used to criticise the contemporary use of concepts as problematic in science]
”The metamorphosis of world into man”.
[Heideggers criticism of science: the object of science is not the thing, noumena].
Paragraph 9
The artist is the conscious creator. All human beings should be creators, the artist is that person who is consciously creating non-realities and fictions.
[Hillary Putnam: the eye of God, that perspective that would be able to see everything for what it is, without embodying a specific perspective, but that is not a position we can reach. We are confined in our specific perspective.] Which Nietzsche agrees with. There is no such position which one can actually attain.
Saussure concludes the exact same thing as Nietzsche in regards to language here.
”An eternal dream would certainly be felt to be reality”
Tradition is not an excuse for validating a truth claim.
Nietzsche is saying something similar to Gadamer here. We can only judge according to what is compatible to the tradition handed down to us. But the actual content of that tradition matters not at all, except in the hermenutical use of it.
[The early Nietzsche on action, or performativity, but lacking a substance. There is no idenity, but there is identification]
Section 2
Paragraph 2
You can reimagine the stream of Heraclitus as art, and dissimulation. It is sincere in what it is doing. No art claims to represent reality truthfully, but with goals which are wholly not lied about. Whereas a scientist would be offering what appears as something non-invented and found.
Paragraph 3
The rational man is afraid of gut feeling, and the intuitive man is afraid of conceptualisation.
Intuition can be philosophical, at which point it refers to perceptions, but then there’s the sense in the arts of following your intuitions, they’re not following an impression but rather something internal, their heart. As though the inutitive man is closer to sensibility.
We are back to vitalism here in the last paragraph. Everything is about the coming-to life.
Recommendation! Julio Cortazar Cronopios and Famas.
Smaller book (light novel eheh) These short stories are about two different types of creatures, named in the title. The Cronopias are the intuitive, and the famas are the rational.
The intuitive man is in more in tune with the passing (chronos), and cares not for the stability.