RE: Are you the monster you want to be?
December 20, 2018 at 3:47 pm
(This post was last modified: December 21, 2018 at 1:07 am by vulcanlogician.)
(December 19, 2018 at 5:15 pm)Gae Bolga Wrote: I wonder how nietzsche would have viewed the relationship between his heavily traditional truth emphasis and his polarizing notion of a will to power. This was already a bit murky in his own time, but with the rise of our modern day alternative facts and their clear ability to seize the power that forms the basis of his valuations.........well...
Could it be that he might no longer see honesty as a virtue, or, failing that, realize that something is deeply amiss in the confluence between those two currents in his thoughts?
I agree with what you're saying. Given that Nietzsche rails so hard against the religious for their dishonesty, something certainly does seem amiss when he seemingly refers to truth as something so subjective. But I think his position is defensible. Let me give it a try:
The greater truth to Nietzsche is the truth which affirms life. Nietzsche's truth esteems life and the world, despite how fucked up the world is. Any truth which fails to affirm life is false right out of the gate. This doesn't mean that things are only true or false subjectively. This merely means that, to Nietzsche, for a truth to be true, it must affirm life first, then it is given consideration for truth or falsity.
All of this is best understood in its proper context. Much of his thinking is a reaction against Plato, Christianity, and Schopenhauer or --more generally-- all modern philosophy. He was a critic and a gadfly. He questioned our most fundamental assumptions. That's what makes him such a great philosopher.
Imagine Platonic Truth (life denying) and Nietzschean truth (life affirming) as sort of a yin and yang which (when observed together) form a more whole and complete ideal. Nietzsche wants to be a yin to philosophy's yang. And (in this capacity) I think he does a great job.
I err on the side of Plato in my views of what truth is, but Nietzsche does have a point. Much of philosophy really is life denying.
When we aren't philosophizing, much of our life is falsehood built upon falsehood, with a little bit of truth built on top of that. That's life. But philosophy can't handle that. Philosophy only wants to deal with truth. Philosophy wants to analyze the human condition but it ALSO wants to dispense with all falsehoods. To Nietzsche, you can't do both at the same time. This is why he thinks Plato fails so hard. Plato urges the philosopher to detach himself from his instincts and inclinations, then go about discerning the truth. Nietzsche sees Plato and philosophy as some kind of alien force... opposed to life... a spectral presence trying to inflict its inward inclination toward "truth" upon life and upon the world.
Christianity carries this to a worse extreme. The Christians see the world as some horrible, unjust state of affairs that needs to end as soon as possible. Life is a burden. Instead of enjoying the world and drinking from the fountain of life, the Christians say the world (and life) is some contemptible thing. They prefer their imaginary "kingdom of heaven" to the the real and actual world. In other words, they prefer death... they are deniers of life. And as such, they make life out to be some bleak and depressing thing that needs to be apologized for instead of enjoyed.
