First of all, I might be off the mark in "getting" what this passage really means. I'm a reasonably smart guy, but when I read this kind of stuff, I feel my IQ bumping against the ceiling. That being said:
Nietzsche is considering, if I can bring in a reference from law, "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" in very absolutist terms. If asked in court to take such an oath, most people do so without hesitation, ignoring the fact that they must necessarily break that oath due to incapacity and linguistic limitations. If asked to describe a criminal I clearly saw, for example, I would be forced to give a very course verbal description-- I could not explain, for example, the true chain of causality that led to a criminal behavior, even if I sincerely tried to.
But anyway let's look at the case of morality. It is not true, for example, that there is any objective morality-- that which we simply MUST not do because it is an evil no matter how you look at it. But do we raise our children to be moral, or to be amoral? I don't think any of us would teach our children that stealing can provide great benefits so long as we identify and execute on various techniques to avoid detection and capture. We are more likely to to say, "It's bad to steal, and people who steal often are not good. They are bad members of society." The objective truth of this is not known-- it may be, for example, that stealing overall represents a redistribution of wealth that increases the viability of a society and even the species. It is therefore impossible to speak on the issue of morality without at least RISKING self-deception or the deception of others.
So can the scientific conviction-- that all OTHER presuppositions except an absolute demand for objective truth by eliminated-- itself be made a hypothesis, and "brought into" the world of valid scientific ideas?
I don't think it matters, because this isn't actually how scientists, and the scientific community, work. Personal presuppositions and even deceptions are fully acceptable in science, given that we follow certain procedural points to keep them from arriving at untruthful results. In a sense, we've learned to dance with the devil of our various untruths and convictions, and still come up with something pure at the end.
Nietzsche is considering, if I can bring in a reference from law, "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" in very absolutist terms. If asked in court to take such an oath, most people do so without hesitation, ignoring the fact that they must necessarily break that oath due to incapacity and linguistic limitations. If asked to describe a criminal I clearly saw, for example, I would be forced to give a very course verbal description-- I could not explain, for example, the true chain of causality that led to a criminal behavior, even if I sincerely tried to.
But anyway let's look at the case of morality. It is not true, for example, that there is any objective morality-- that which we simply MUST not do because it is an evil no matter how you look at it. But do we raise our children to be moral, or to be amoral? I don't think any of us would teach our children that stealing can provide great benefits so long as we identify and execute on various techniques to avoid detection and capture. We are more likely to to say, "It's bad to steal, and people who steal often are not good. They are bad members of society." The objective truth of this is not known-- it may be, for example, that stealing overall represents a redistribution of wealth that increases the viability of a society and even the species. It is therefore impossible to speak on the issue of morality without at least RISKING self-deception or the deception of others.
So can the scientific conviction-- that all OTHER presuppositions except an absolute demand for objective truth by eliminated-- itself be made a hypothesis, and "brought into" the world of valid scientific ideas?
I don't think it matters, because this isn't actually how scientists, and the scientific community, work. Personal presuppositions and even deceptions are fully acceptable in science, given that we follow certain procedural points to keep them from arriving at untruthful results. In a sense, we've learned to dance with the devil of our various untruths and convictions, and still come up with something pure at the end.
