Postmodernism, cont. - Philosophical Root

                                                                            Kant

To me, Thomas Jefferson is a perfect example of the Enlightenment. He famously wrote: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Now “men” either means human beings (Menschen) or the thought is stupid. This idea is a refutation of the medieval teachings of the Church, taken from St. Thomas. On the one hand, Aquinas's philosophy is grounded in the concept of natural law, which posits that certain rights and moral principles are inherent in human nature and can be discovered through reason. According to natural law, all humans possess inherent dignity and worth because they are made in the image of God. On the other hand, St. Thomas Aquinas articulated a view of social and gender relations that embodies a duality of equal dignity and different social valuations. He upheld the inherent dignity of all human beings, recognizing their equal worth as rational beings created in the image of God. However, he also maintained that natural law prescribed distinct roles for each sex and for different social classes. Men were naturally suited for leadership and public authority due to their perceived greater rationality, while women were inclined toward domestic responsibilities and nurturing roles. Similarly, Aquinas believed that society required a hierarchical structure in which some individuals, naturally endowed with leadership qualities, would guide and govern, while others, suited for various types of labor, would follow and support. This hierarchical complementarity, encompassing both gender and social roles, was seen as reflecting a divinely ordained order that contributed to the common good. While men and leaders were regarded as heads of households and society, women and workers were viewed as essential partners and supporters, their roles justified by theological interpretations of scripture and practical necessities. In this official philosophy of the Declaration, Jefferson stressed human moral and political equality; in his private life, he practiced hierarchy – he was a slave owner.

    The basis for political equality was reason – a minimal competence that we all share. We can know enough about ourselves and reality to understand our own interests and the common good to govern ourselves. The previous class society was premised on a denial of competence: women, children, the laboring classes, and of course Jefferson’s slaves were thought to lack full rationality, full competence. They needed patriarchal guidance. They were incapable of self-government. People – like the sovereign monarch – did not have to know everything to be able to govern themselves. But they had to be able to make competent judgments based on evidence and reasoning. The government is to the sovereign people was the cabinet was to the sovereign monarch: presenting to the sovereign arguments and evidence as to the requirements of justice and reality. The denial of competence was thus also a denial of a capacity of judging what reality and justice requires. Both arguments appealed to human nature.

   Thomas Aquinas’ teachings on nature and natural hierarchy lent themselves to an ideological justification of the power of an elite over the great majority of working people and women. Enlightenment thinkers got around nature by reducing it to what can be quantified and described without respect to meaning and value. The universe for the 18^th Enlightenment was a closed system operating by mechanical laws indifferent to human aspirations. With this ontological shift came a simplifying of reason, reducing it from a richer Aristotelian understanding to a much more restrictive empiricist-rationalist conception in philosophy and of course to the scientific methods – which did wonders for natural science to be sure. (More specially, it cut out Aristotle’s concern with essence and teleology, which understood in a certain way brings a hermeneutic aspect to reason and a meaning-aspect to reality.) A collection of raw materials without intrinsic value. Nature so understood didn’t justify any hierarchy. On this reduction, the justification of unequal classes and restriction of women’s political involvement was taken away – it was emancipatory.

   But it came at a heavy price. Adopting the Galilean picture of the world cut off our inner lives – the realm of meaning; the realm of art, religion, morality, political action, and philosophy; the realm of freedom, reason, spontaneity, and love – from reality; imprisoned us in our subjectivity. If nature (reality) is a closed system, then everything in it is predetermined. If everything is predetermined, then our experience of (limited) freedom and meaning is an illusion. The belief in emancipation, an illusion.

   [I believe the way to go would have been to keep the classical understanding of a meaningful nature but criticize and purge the ideological interpretations of it.]

  Kant attempted to reconcile our freedom (and thus meaning) with determinism by making the physical, sensual world a kind of Matrix – designed by whatever programmer designed our brains. Our brains construct reality; our minds to not conform to it. The physical world is a closed system because our minds (subconsciously) generate it as such. Reason is thus powerless to know anything about reality as such, about goodness, about beauty. Our knowledge is the knowledge of our own construction, like mapping our minds instead of the world. The world we know is our own representation of reality, and we cannot get out of our minds/brains and compare our representations with reality itself. Our deterministic science accurately describes the representation – the algorithms of the Matrix. But even though we cannot know anything about reality, we are free to imagine or to have faith that our subjective lives correspond to something real, even if not the phenomenal world. Science can’t prove that wrong, since it is limited to appearances, to the world as a human representation.

   The roots of Postmodernism today – the extreme forms of it in art and philosophy – are to be found here.

  For Kant, we are imprisoned in a subjective Matrix, the creation of our own conscious experience. But within that subjectivity, we experience the world at the level of sense perception universally the same. It is like we are in windowless spaceships orbiting a planet but at least have all the same instruments. Thus the sky appears blue to all of us. We all see the white coffee cup on my desk. The data of science are the same for all of us. And science works. Like being inside a computer-programmed virtual world that has been programmed with the laws of physics, which we can amazingly discover from our location inside the program.

    But even on Kant’s terms, what gives anyone the warrant to assume that his instrument panel is the same as others. Perhaps the sky is blue for me but green for you as it was for the painter Eduard Munch, who asserted that what his critics can't understand was that for him the sky was green. Perhaps for you it is green, too, but the abstract sign ‘blue’ refers to that color and it refers to the color blue for me. Since I can’t get inside your spaceship mind and experience the world as you do, and vice-versa, we can never know.

   From there it is a short step to the idea that different kinds of people do have different instrument panels based on different natural or political histories. Whorf-Sapir believed different cultures had different instrument panels. Marx believed that the exploited working class had a different instrument panel from their capitalist exploiters. Nietzsche thought that the resentment weak had a different mode of experience from the value-creating noble – that the drive for power or the maximal possible elevation of the ego determines how we experience the world. And from there it is a short step to Foucault, who believes that this power drive permeates all of experience and expresses itself at the very core of our language – in discourses – that make, for example, the subjectivity of marginalized groups very different from those who are not marginalized (I guess the billionaires).

   All of this begins with the idea of Kant: reality, the reality that we perceive even, is a human construction all the way down. Few share Kant’s belief that the construction is universal – as science is universal. Many postmodern folk also see science as one power discourse among others. But the assumption that we live in a Matrix of our own making is dogma.

 Postmodernism, cont. [hurriedly written]

Much postmodern culture focuses on sex and gender, categories that I usually prefer to forget about. And one of the most confusing trends for me is the attempt to dissolve the ‘binary’ of man / woman, boy / girl into a spectrum of possible gender ‘identities.’ Here is a sample of possible identities, going in alphabetical order:

Agender: A person who does not identify themselves with or experience any gender. Agender people are also called null-gender, genderless, gendervoid, or neutral gender.

Abimegender: Associated with being profound, deep, and infinite. The term abimegender may be used alone or in combination with other genders.

Adamas gender: A gender that is indefinable or indomitable. People identifying with this gender refuse to be categorized in any particular gender identity.

Aerogender: Also called evaisgender, this gender identity changes according to one’s surroundings.

Aesthetigender: Also called aesthetgender, it is a type of gender identity derived from aesthetics.

Affectugender: This is based on the person’s mood swings or fluctuations.

Agenderflux: A person with this gender identity is mostly agender with brief shifts of belonging to other gender types.

Alexigender: The person has a fluid gender identity between more than one type of gender although they cannot name the genders they feel fluid in.

Aliusgender: This gender identity stands apart from existing social gender constructs. It means having a strong specific gender identity that is neither male nor female.

Amaregender: Having a gender identity that changes depending on the person one is emotionally attached to.

Ambigender: Having two specific gender identities simultaneously without any fluidity or fluctuations.

Ambonec: The person identifies themselves as both man and woman and yet does not belong to either.

Amicagender: A gender-fluid identity where a person changes their gender depending on the friends they have.

Androgyne: A person feels a combination of feminine and masculine genders.

Anesigender: The person feels close to a specific type of gender despite being more comfortable in closely identifying themselves with another gender.

Angenital: The person desires to be without any primary sexual characteristics although they do not identify themselves as genderless.

Anogender: The gender identity fades in and out in intensity but always comes back to the same gendered feeling.

Anongender: The person has a gender identity but does not label it or would prefer to not have a label.

Antegender: A protean gender that can be anything but is formless and motionless.

Anxiegender: This gender identity has anxiety as its prominent characteristic.

Apagender: The person has apathy or a lack of feelings toward one's gender identity.

Apconsugender: It means knowing what are not the characteristics of gender but not knowing what are its characteristics. Thus, a person hides its primary characteristics from the individual.

Astergender: The person has a bright and celestial gender identity.

Astral gender: Having a gender identity that feels to be related to space.

Autigender: Having a gender identity that feels to be closely related to being autistic.

Autogender: Having a gender experience that is deeply connected and personal to oneself.

Axigender: A gender identity that is between the two extremes of agender and any other type of gender. Both the genders are experienced one at a time without any overlapping. The two genders are described as on the opposite ends of an axis.

Bigender: Having two gender identities at the same or different times.

Biogender: Having a gender that is closely related to nature.

Blurgender: Also called gender fuss, blurgender means having more than one gender identities that blur into each other so that no particular type of gender identity is clear.

Boyflux: The person identifies themselves as male, but they experience varying degrees of male identity. This may range from feeling agender to completely male.

 

 

 

 There seems to be a lot of overlap, with the common theme being: ‘I am not a man or a woman, strictly speaking.’ The underlying assumption seems to be: sex (arguably) and gender (certainly) are “social constructs,” not natural phenomena. Nature is not normative here. Reality doesn’t tell us how to think or act here. Rather, how we think, feel, and act has been determined by social power: the power of men over women, of heterosexual people over homosexual people, etc. Rejecting the traditional ascriptions of sex/gender gets associated with an act of liberation from these repressive social structures that are perpetuated ‘on automatic’ so to speak by language and its ‘binary oppositions’ and ‘hierarchies’ among such concepts.   

 

   What sense can I make of this? Growing up, I never questioned the idea that nature divided humanity into two sexes, male and female. The connection to reproducing the species seemed obvious at some point: my father didn’t give birth to me or nurse me; my mother did. That seemed a rather fundamental difference. As did the fact that I could not give birth and that I could get a woman pregnant. Indeed, getting women pregnant and becoming a father have been the most impactful events in my life. Reflecting more generally, the central role of sex and birth in human life (along with death), it certainly makes sense to me. It is a bridge between all human cultures: we are born of woman, we are born into a world that was there before us and will be there after us, and we are mortal.

  Are the ‘binary’ sexes, male and female, natural? Depends on what you mean by natural. What is the difference between a human mother who loves and cares for her children and a mother cat or bear? If we think of ‘natural’ as what is exemplified by the mother cat or bear, then the human mother transcends ‘nature.’ The cat and bear abandon and apparently forget their offspring after they can fend for themselves. They only “love” their offspring in a radically attenuated sense. They don’t tell stories about mothers' love – or violations of that love; about the meaning of motherhood. We can’t imagine the mother cat suffering remorse if something happens to a kitten while she is distracted by other things. Their souls can’t be wounded by evil done to a child or the grief of losing a child. We mark the difference between human meanings and animal instincts in all kinds of ways. Humans imbue the nature we share with cats and bears with meanings, within a world (Welt, not just Um-Welt). But inhabiting a realm of meaning is natural for us; it is how we are. Natural is relative to the being in question: what is natural for us is not necessarily natural for a cat, though many overlaps obviously exist. For a cat, human motherhood can only be super-natural. But our meanings are not radically cut off from nature as expressed in the lives of cats; they emerge from that matrix to become something that transcends it.

     The dominant experience between the ‘binary’ of man and woman is related to sexual reproduction and the meanings it has within our different worlds. We can imagine a world – an ‘unnatural’ world- in which sexual reproduction and its associated human meanings did not have this importance. For instance, in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, motherhood and reproduction are fundamentally restructured to align with the World State’s highly controlled society. Natural reproduction is entirely eliminated; instead, human embryos are artificially created through the Bokanovsky Process, which produces large numbers of identical individuals from a single egg. These embryos are then conditioned and socialized to fit into their designated roles within the societal hierarchy. Traditional family structures, including motherhood, are abolished, with the concept of family being deemed outdated and unnecessary. Citizens are conditioned from birth to accept and value their roles in society, with emotional detachment from natural processes and familial bonds being promoted. Hatcheries and Conditioning Centers play crucial roles in producing and preparing citizens, ensuring uniformity and control. This system erodes personal connections and individual identity, focusing instead on maintaining a stable, compliant population through technological means rather than human relationships. That world is more imaginable today than it was at the time Huxley wrote the novel.

    In George Orwell’s 1984, attempts were made to radically reengineer the natural-worldly meanings of sex and sexual relations. The Party exerts extensive control over sexual identities and behavior as part of its broader strategy to dominate every aspect of life. The Party suppresses sexual desire and personal pleasure by promoting policies that view sex merely as a means of procreation for producing loyal Party members, rather than as a source of personal fulfillment. Techniques such as promoting chastity through organizations like the Junior Anti-Sex League, and viewing any deviation from Party-approved sexual behavior as "thoughtcrime," are employed to eliminate personal pleasure and emotional bonds. The Party’s pervasive surveillance extends to private activities, including sexual behavior, to prevent dissent and maintain control. By destroying intimate relationships and emotional connections, the Party aims to ensure that all loyalty and emotional energy are directed solely toward Big Brother and the state. Through propaganda and indoctrination, the Party enforces its ideological control, eradicating personal and romantic fulfillment to prevent any challenges to its authority.

     In the human world, which is natural for us, the forces of nature at work in the mother cat are weaker; they don’t force a particular set of meanings on a given form of life. At the level of gender, depending on the form of life, there are many ways to be (not just perform!) a girl or a woman, a boy or a man. I have raised a daughter. I tried to make her aware of how capitalism reduces the being of women – through entertainment, advertising, and fashion industries – attempts to construct a female type such that the human worth of a woman is a function of her sexiness. I always admired athletic women – “Tomboys” – who dared to buck the system in that respect. But although I understood that there were different ways to be a woman – some better than others – I never questioned the fact that there were women and men. The same applies to being a man. I never thought that to be a “real man” you had to be like John Wayne.

    I think how we think, act, and feel as men and women depends on what makes sense in a form of life, or as a rejection of a particular form of life. My critique of both masculinity and femininity in capitalism was based on my belief that capitalism alienated men and women from one another, constructing in ways that violated our reality in order to perpetuate itself as the dominant economic form. Again, I never questioned the reality of masculinity and femininity themselves.

The radical break with human nature as I have been trying to understand it – becoming conscious of yourself within a realm of meanings and interpretations emerging from the natural forces at work in cats and bears and being interwoven within a form of life interacting with other forms of life – occurs with ‘Modernity,’ of the regime of Science-Technology-Capitalism. Galileo’s crime was not providing definitive evidence and knock-down arguments for a more scientifically accurate model of the solar system; it was reducing all of physical reality – nature – to fit his mechanical physics, alienating not only human meanings from the universe but the attenuated love of the mother cat as well. This paralleled an analogous movement in capitalism, which reduced all of nature (including human nature) to raw materials to be exploited for profit. We always demean and devalue that which we intend to violate and exploit.  The product of this was the transformation of the natural rhythms of birth and death for a society in which technology has become our ‘nature’ and a society that has made traditional male-female roles – and the gender conceptions associated with them – increasingly irrelevant. We are somewhere between traditional economies that had to live within the natural limits of their places and Huxley’s Brave New World. Confusion is the result.

    My great-grandparents are the best example of a marriage I have known. They both farmed a piece of land they loved and cared for. It was – together with raising their children – a common project, a common love. They divided the labor. It made more sense for my great-grandfather to plow the fields with the horses and my great-grandmother to tend the garden and the chickens, for example. Both that was not alienation. All jobs that were necessary to the life of the farm were valuable and valued. My great-grandmother was not demeaned by tending the garden rather than plowing the fields, strong woman though she was. She gave birth to their three children at home and nursed them. Neighbors helped pick up the slack, for the farm was embedded in a farming community in which self-help networks were essential. Both loved their children, but as a mother who carried each of the children in her body, gave birth to each in pain, and nursed each her relationship to the children was naturally different. Now in that farming community, having 72 genders or doing away with men and women in favor of a spectrum of identities would have made no sense at all.

   But it is not nonsensical in the urban metropolises generated by Science-Technology-Capitalism (now global). What roles there are have become largely interchangeable. I am a teacher. My masculinity is not essential for my teaching. I live together with my sons: I cook and do all the tasks my grandmother did. There are no fields for me to plow. Not even a garden to tend to. Men and women have been disconnected from the kinds of social and economic functions that made sense in pre-industrial economies. Carrying over the norms and concepts that made perfect sense to metropolitan Berlin in 2024 makes no sense. Neither do the virtues that both great-grandparents had to have to a high degree to be a competent member of their agricultural community. Success in capitalist Berlin demands a whole different set of qualities – not virtues but the ability to present yourself in a certain way, to manipulate others into believing what you need them to believe, etc.

   What I am suggesting is that postmodernism does belong to a certain form of life – contemporary global, urban capitalism, with its social atoms and masses. And I am also suggesting that this form of life – if you want to call it a form at all – is the setting for the 72 genders and the dissolution of the natural (in a human way natural) categories of man and woman. For Science-Technology-Capitalism is premised on the denial of nature – or replacing our human ideas of nature with the reductive form embraced by Galileo, Descartes, Newton as well as Rockefeller and Bill Gates.

     In place of trying to live by conforming our minds with nature (in the broad sense), we have taken over the lore of ‘autonomy’ – which also fits perfected into urban capitalist cities populated by isolated individuals and their acquaintances. I don’t see any difference between Modern and Postmodern in this respect: both posit the self as the source of meaning and value. Nature is cookie dough to be cut up by the autonomous self. Or the identity-group. Or the powers-that-be. The idea of nurturing mothers and fathers as a response to the human reality of birth and child-rearing gets thrown out with the rest.  I am not saying that every woman has a vocation of being a mother or every man the vocation of being a father. Some clearly do not and that is fine. I am saying that a form of life that cannot honor being a nurturing mother or father – a form of life cut off from human nature – is destructive.

    The metaphysical system of Nominalism that underpins Science-Technology-Capitalism also only makes sense within that regime (or in the minds of people who affirm that regime). Reality transcends our conceptualizations and classifications of it. To take the well-know example: we have one word to refer to ‘snow’; the Inuit have a more complex vocabulary:

• kanevvluk: 'fine snow'
• qanikcaq: 'snow on ground'
• muruaneq: 'soft deep snow'
• nutaryuk: 'fresh snow'

 

The net of their language is more compact, captures more of reality than ours because their form of life required that at some point in their history. Meaning in both cases does have a referent, a referent that transcends language and can be classified and conceptualized in different ways – even as a poem can be translated in different ways. All the possible ways of classifying and conceptualizing ‘snow’ would be its reality even as all the possible plausible translations and readings of a poem might be thought to constitute its meaning, its reality. But making sense depends on who we are, where we are, and when we are. We are finite. Motherhood has been important in different ways because it has been important to us, necessary to us. In my world, it had been embedded in a language of love. That limits what can make sense.

    Nominalism abstracts from this. Anthropomorphic readings are subjective, prejudiced, ideological (as they indeed often are), socially constructed. But even a shadow is a shadow of something real. Even a distortion distorts some reality that could be seen more clearly. Nominalism denies nature. It posits that reality is cookie dough, and the mind can carve it up in any way it likes – ways that imply power over others or liberation from that power. From that fact that no one system of meaning (classification, conceptualization) can be THE TRUTH, it concludes that all possible systems of meaning are arbitrary. And that matches the experience of the alienated city-dweller caught in the web of capitalist life very well. It becomes logically a matter of taste whether I am a man, woman, or one of the other identities. And if there is no reality to violate, if I or my group can cut it up any way we like, then someone who wants to undermine my meanings and values and force his on me is just a naked attempt to dominate me. Nominalism makes sense in the context of Science-Technology-Capitalism.

    And if, as I believe on the basis of the reasoning provided by Christopher Lasch and others as well as my own experience of life, this regime generates various form of narcissistic personality types (disorders) as it main character, then ‘autonomy’ and ‘Nominalism’ become even more commonsensical. For the narcissist desires above all to remove all limits to its needs and desires, and reality is by definition a limit. If doing x violates the being of an animal or a person, then the animal or person limits my will. Nature is a limit. Love – from the outside of love – is a limit. The self or the identity as a source of meaning and value is the denial of nature or reality as a source of meaning and value. And this is the necessary prerequisite for Science-Technology-Capitalism: if I need to deforest the upper peninsula of Michigan for profit, then I must treat it as raw material. If I want to technologically intervene in my body to change it, I must view it as raw material, as property. If I want to extract stem cells from the aborted fetus, I must view it as raw material. I must demean and devalue everything, which means I must exclude it from the language of love, indeed from the realm of meaning. This is not true philosophy; this is the anthropology of a particular regime: Science-Technology-Capitalism.

   Aspects of so-called postmodernism push against this. I am sympathetic to them. Other aspects attempt to embody its logic more perfectly. I am opposed to them.

   I believe we have a nature – not the same kind as the cat; not one that forces one interpretation on us. Nature is like a poem. There are many possible readings of the poem; there are fewer possible profound readings. We are limited by our finite perspective. We are fallible: especially to the extent we remained locked into narcissism. But the poem – nature – talks back to us and we need to listen. Science-Technology-Capitalism is deaf, blind, and mute.

 Postmodernism, cont.

                                                          Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)

One of the strangest features of popular postmodernism is the emphasis on ‘binary opposites’ and the alleged implications undermining people’s ability to represent reality using language.

   The basic idea is not complicated. My 9-year-old son expressed it not too long ago”: “You know, without evil, there would be no good. The good would just be common.” He is thinking Derrida’s thoughts after him. I have tried to write about how the meaning of one concept depends not only on an opposite (sometimes) but a whole web of other, related concepts.

    Now if we don’t get carried away, that can be a helpful insight. I immediately think of what a revelation it was to Malcolm X and Mohammad Ali how black and white, darkness and light, are connotated in our language; how categorizing people as black and white imported all those connotations into our experience of race; how their natural response was to reverse the hierarchy, seeing white a of the devil and black as of God. I can understand how the use of ‘men’ or ‘Man’ for human beings normalized a view of men as somehow paradigmatic human beings and women as only human by analogy. What this means for me is that we must subject the use of such language to critical, moral thinking. I have no problem with that. Let’s root out all demeaning, dehumanizing uses of language, both conscious and unconscious uses. Concepts are not fixed. Philosophy is the making sense of and the deepening of concepts. This deepening can go on without end.

   It is when the idea becomes metaphysical, absolute that the problems begins. An argument like this:

The meaning of one concept is intelligible only with reference to another opposite concept. If meaning is thus constructed, it is a function of the differences between concepts and not how they represent reality. Thus attempts to represent reality with language are futile. Thus there is no truth, no understanding, etc.

It is true we would not clearly – clear and muddled, another binary opposite (I unashamedly think clarity a virtue and muddle a vice – another binary) – recognize the evilness of Auschwitz without the concepts of good and evil. We would not recognize the evilness of the evil of Auschwitz without at the same time being able to recognize the goodness of a Primo Levi, who wrote so truthfully about the experience of being alive in Auschwitz. The meaning is not conveyed by one concept alone but both. More, the ‘binary’ belongs to a larger conceptual web of concepts. It is a complicated phenomenon. We apply the concept ‘evil’ to Auschwitz but Auschwitz expands the meaning of the concept ‘evil’ as well. When applied to Auschwitz, evil means something different than it does when applied to, say, Donald Trump. Every application of the concept changes both the concept and the object it is applied to and the person applying it. Every application involves perspective and interpretation. In no case do we have a god-like, absolute understanding of things. We are always in danger of applying it in inauthentic ways, in ways that cover up as opposed to revealing reality. Any use can involve us in difficult thought. But the goal is to conform our language and our thinking to the experience of evil – in this case, the evil of Auschwitz. And our experience of evil is an experience of something that confronts us, shocks us even. Reality is thus the measure of thinking. It is like that perfect circle that judges all the empirical circles we draw with pencil and paper.

    The point of the pop-Derrideans is that trying to conform your mind to reality is pointless because the structure of language constructs reality all the way down. (I am not sure this is Derrida’s point. I don’t pretend deeply to understand him though I have spent some time and effort reading a selection of his ‘texts’). That would make sense only if I accept a binary – Absolute knowledge or complete skepticism – that makes no sense to me. It is important to understand how ignorant we are. We understand this better the more we understand. But it trivializes experience to imagine that evil is just a word (nominalism!) and thus doesn’t disclose anything about Auschwitz.

 Postmodernism, cont.

                                                          Christopher Lasch (1932-1994)

At the extreme fringe of philosophy, you get an epistemic relativism that goes all the way down. Precisely this variant is most popular in the culture at large. It is easier for one thing: ‘x is true or good because I desire or need it to be true or good’ (or ‘my identity-group so desires or needs it to be true or good’). This is nonsense but powerful nonsense (cf. witch-burning in the past). I think its power is connected with the dominant personality type produced by consumer capitalism.

   I will make my background assumptions explicit.

·        We need to live in a certain kind of community to develop our nature – our highest most defining capacities. Part of this is contingent: whether a person becomes a craftsman, actor, teacher, physicist, or farmer is contingent; learning to be good at something and to be able to live in fellowship with others dedicated to that goal is essential.

·        We are less than fully human if we do not make virtues part of our being. You only become honest, just, courageous, discerning, etc. by doing honest, just, courageous, or discerning things. Without living in fellowship with others in a community – including friendship, a great gift – which values such virtues you cannot make them a part of yourself. You will be left with your desires just as they are, focused on you, unrefined by the higher needs of living in fellowship with others. (Cicero defines the tyrant as the person who is incapable of living in community with others.)

·        We need roots: ties to a family, a place in the world we care deeply about. We need a home in other words.

·        You can take this or leave it but I think we need hope, faith, and love as metaphysical or theological virtues – that is, as spiritual demeanors. I don’t see how a person can affirm life or find themselves loveable without them. I think this has roots in our mortality and our being subject to great misfortune.

·        We share a common humanity with others, and that has deep moral implications. I love the particular; I love diversity if for no other reason than places on earth are diverse. But without an underlying solidarity with all of humanity, we cannot explain good or evil and thus are incomplete. This absence of this sense of common humanity leads to othering, reducing people to categories. That is a major root of evil.

  

That is an important part of my (and not only my) picture of human nature.

Capitalism (globalization) as a totalizing economy destroys community and the dignity of work, alienates people from their roots (from a sense of belonging: no wonder ‘identity’ politics are so prevalent), encourages vice (greed, sloth, covetousness, violence, etc.), and reduces people and the earth to commodities. The factory worker to the craftsman can serve as an analogy for capitalist vs. human work. The sprawling urban center where people are mostly strangers to one another pursuing their own private interests vis-a-vis the southern Indiana farming community that my great grandparents were part of is an analogy for the loss of roots, our accursed social mobility (or perhaps the airport – masses of strangers from everywhere and nowhere with no interest in each other going on their separate journeys). I could go on. All of this is supported by an ideology of individualism and “success” defined as wealth and status – or today, by finding an identity to latch on to: leaving home and making it big. Or today by self-definition, appearing before others as the self-defined self, usually with the aid of purchased products. I have no time to do a thorough analysis here. I will just quote Christopher Lasch:

 

“Every society reproduces its culture, its norms, its underlying assumptions, its modes of organizing experience— in the individual, in the form of personality.”

 

“Our growing dependence on technologies no one seems to understand or control has given rise to feelings of powerlessness and victimization. We find it more and more difficult to achieve a sense of continuity, permanence, or connection with the world around us. Relationships with others are notably fragile; goods are made to be used up and discarded; reality is experienced as an unstable environment of flickering images. Everything conspires to encourage escapist solutions to the psychological problems of dependence, separation, and individuation, and to discourage the moral realism that makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom.”

 

“Notwithstanding his occasional illusions of omnipotence, the narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience. His apparent freedom from family ties and institutional constraints does not free him to stand alone or to glory in his individuality. On the contrary, it contributes to his insecurity, which he can overcome only by seeing his “grandiose self” reflected in the attentions of others, or by attaching himself to those who radiate celebrity, power, and charisma. For the narcissist, the world is a mirror, whereas the rugged individualist saw it as an empty wilderness to be shaped to his own design.”

 

“In a society that dreads old age and death, aging holds a special terror for those who fear dependence and whose' self-esteem requires the admiration usually reserved for youth, beauty, celebrity, or charm. The usual defenses against the ravages of age—identification with ethical or artistic values beyond one's immediate interests, intellectual curiosity, the consoling emotional warmth derived from happy relationships in the past—can do nothing for the narcissist. Unable to derive whatever comfort comes from identification with historical continuity, he finds it impossible, on the contrary, "to accept the fact that a younger generation now possesses many of the previously cherished gratifications of beauty, wealth, power and, particularly, creativity. To be able to enjoy life in a process involving a growing identification with other people's happiness and achievements is tragically beyond the capacity of narcissistic personalities.”

To the performing self, the only reality is the identity he can construct out of materials furnished by advertising and mass culture, themes of popular film and fiction, and fragments torn from a vast range of cultural traditions, all of them equally contemporaneous to the contemporary mind.* In order to polish and perfect the part he has devised for himself, the new Narcissus gazes at his own reflection, not so much in admiration as in unremitting search of flaws, signs of fatigue, decay. Life becomes a work of art, while "the first art work in an artist," in Norman Mailer's pronouncement, "is the shaping of his own personality.”

 

I see the prevalence of the narcissistic personality type as a sociological phenomenon more than a moral critique. It is usually a “defense mechanism,” a way of protecting the self against an absence of love and all the spiritual needs that capitalist society cannot meet. We are all affected by the structures that give rise to it: weak nuclear families (if that); social mobility and atomization; loss of roots; cut off from history; consumerism and advertising, which encourages consumption as lifestyle; commodification of practices that could promote true character, like sports; the worship of idols, who we call stars; dependence on media (especially social media) rather than interpersonal communication and reading for a sense of reality; work that cannot be imagined as a vocation. Everything conspires to force us back in on ourselves and to prevent the transformation of self-centered desires into virtuous characters.

   What I can add to Lasch is that the perfect epistemology for narcissism is epistemic relativism or subjectivism. And the perfect narcissistic ontology sees reality as something analogous to cookie dough which the self can cut up in any way it pleases. Existentialism – or nihilism – is the best way to look at ethics for the narcissist. And deconstruction is the best narcissistic approach to art. What all of these have in common is this: they remove limits to self-wishes, desires, and perceived needs. Reality limits the self. Truth limits the self. Beauty limits the self. Goodness in things limits the self. The self is constantly seeking to overcome limits to its will. The way the damaged narcissistic self can try to find itself loveable – which is narcissistic precisely because it does not have the resources to find itself truly loveable – is to follow Nietzsche’s advice: having killed “God” (the source of reality, beauty, and goodness outside you that can find you loveable), the (pitiful) self secretly tries to become a God substitute itself. Hopeless and absurd. The more entrenched in narcissism you become, the less objectively loveable you become, except as an object of pity. And outside of being loved and being part of a community that demands virtues, narcissism is all that there is. Except failed narcissism, which results in depression and other kinds of mental illness. Whenever the nature of any being is damaged, illness is the result. And capitalism in its present form damages human nature at its core.

   So narcissism unhinges us from reality. Capitalism manufactures narcissism (and mental illness) by depriving us of the sunlight, water, and soil, so to speak, we need to flourish (in exchange for a bunch of consumer goods and a few genuine benefits like modern dentistry). MAGA and the politically correct left are different expressions of the same thing with the same roots. Both are “postmodern” in a negative sense. I would say they represent extreme cultural distortions of postmodernism that are largely explainable sociologically.

 POSTMODERNISM: Some Reflections

                                                        Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1948)

 

Like many people, I dislike this term and the cliches associated with it. I some senses I am also ‘post’ modern: that is, I am a critic of certain aspects of modernity, which in a still more radical form are the aspects of the postmodern I am critical of. I will skip the labels and focus of some of the ideas I find problematic. These will be loose reflections only.

 

There are aspects of classical liberalism (in the tradition of Locke, Hume, and Mill) that I find indispensable; others I criticize. I resist the idea that liberal democracy as arose during the Enlightenment is nothing but an illicit universalizing of a European/American, middle-class, white, male perspective – of no value beyond that category; a form of oppression of marginalized groups. It is not wrong to say it was the ideology of the middle class in the early stages of capitalism and the industrial revolution. It is not wrong to say European (mostly British) men formulated it. I agree that outside of that socio-economic context it may make no sense: I suppose it made little sense to Tecumseh, for example; it would probably have made no sense to Japanese Samurai of the 17^th century. The idea that an individual has natural rights and in that respect are all equal disclosed something about our humanity – perhaps in distorted, culturally thick form – that most pre-modern regimes repressed. Yes, natural rights were a gift of culture, of a particular culture in a specific historical constellation. But I for one do not want to undo that aspect of the Enlightenment. I don’t want to return to a society in which torture is fine or in which witches and heretics were burned at the stake. The idea that an idea is tainted by its origin – that it originated largely in the minds of white middle-class men in this case – is a fallacy. I wouldn’t give a damn if it arose in a Japanese fishing village, a medieval nunnery,  or in the halls of Montezuma. I am grateful for anything good from my past irrespective of its contingent origin.

 

. . .

 

In a graduate philosophy course called “Conservative Thought,” I read Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (I was also introduced to Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Foucault in this course.).  We discussed the by now well-known themes: the incredulity toward “meta-narratives” – the grand, all-explaining “narratives” like Marxism, Naziism, Thomist Christianity, Enlightenment progress, etc. as ultimate justifiers of knowledge (beliefs) and action; the rise of the computer society and the commodification of knowledge at the expense of truth and wisdom; skepticism concerning the representations of reality we make through language and art; the loss of legitimacy of institutional repositories of expert knowledge. All of these categories are so vague. I wish some meta-narratives had lost their potency. Then one economic blueprint destroys whole rural farming communities and working-class communities, when it thus causes the loss of local knowledge of the land and people, then, yes, I say fuck that economic meta-narrative. (I still recall a speech by Angela Merkel in which she cited a statistic about the decline of farmers from 30% in the GDR to 4% with the matter-of-fact assurance that this was a necessary adjustment to the modern economic philosophy – without a thought for the destruction of the village culture and the loss of knowledge and skills that had been accumulated over generations. The same kind of thing happened in Stalinism.) Yes, I judge a meta-narrative by its fruits. The fruits are always local and personal. But we can’t live without metaphysics, whether in the form of religion or not. (Nihilism is also a metaphysics; so is pragmaticism.) That would be like trying to communicate with language without grammar or logic.

 

. . .

 

Epistemic pluralism is another theme of ‘postmodern’ thought that I am sympathetic to. No epistemic relativism – sometimes the one is confused with the other. Enlightenment thought often assumes that one model of rationality is valid universally. Thus the scientific method is often considered to be rationality as such and applied in all areas of life – you can study ‘literature science’ in Germany. This is because reality (ontology) is interpreted as being just what a perfect science (defined by the methods scientists actually use) would tell us it is – and nothing more. This wished-for ontology defines the parameters of much Enlightenment-liberal belief in its ‘realism.’ As a philosopher I admire, Hilary Putnam, put it: “What I used to find seductive about metaphysical realism is the idea that the way to solve philosophical problems is to construct a better scientific picture of the world (Representation and Reality, p. 107).” Or, it is the same in modern philosophy: the entire philosophy of the past was discredited because it was naïve: it did not make the ‘critical turn’ that Descartes initiated with his methodical skepticism.  Take a form of rationality that works for some particular purpose and make it the imperial ruler over all other forms of rationality in every context, and you have the Enlightenment and modernity. In this, I side with the so-called postmodernism. No doubt science in its social meaning – for better or worse – functions as discourse in Foucault’s sense and ideology in Marx’s sense.

     Where I draw the line is here: the practice of science is not discourse; it represents reality (nature) if only from a very narrow point of view. It is a form of reason tailored to knowing certain things about the way the universe works. In science, 'data' refers to empirical evidence collected through observation, measurement, and experimentation, serving as the foundation for testing hypotheses and developing scientific theories. An observation can only count as a datum if interpretation is bracketed out: everyone regardless of background or worldview must agree that, for example, the atmospheric temperature is at a certain place and time is a certain value. The recorded average global surface temperature for a specific year consists of many discrete measurements (the data) taken from various locations around the world. These individual temperature readings, collected from weather stations, satellites, and ocean buoys, are the 'data'. Each measurement represents a data point that contributes to the overall dataset. When aggregated and analyzed, these discrete measurements allow scientists to calculate the average global surface temperature and identify trends, test hypotheses, and refine scientific theories about climate change. The point is that the data are intersubjectively verifiable and reliable in the sense that all scientists offer compatible descriptions. There is no room for subjectivity or interpretation here.

   Continuing, a hypothesis is a testable statement or prediction about natural phenomena; for example, "Increased atmospheric CO2 levels contribute to global temperature rise." To test this, scientists gather data on CO2 levels and global temperatures over time through methods like ice core samples, satellite observations, and weather station records. They analyze this data for correlations and causal relationships using statistical methods and climate models. If the data supports the hypothesis, it gains credibility; if not, it may be revised or rejected. A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation based on a body of evidence and multiple tested hypotheses, integrating and explaining a wide range of phenomena. In climate science, validated hypotheses about factors influencing climate change are integrated into the theory of anthropogenic climate change. Continuous data collection refines and validates theories, with the theory of climate change predicting future patterns based on current trends, guiding policymakers and scientists. In the context of climate change, data on CO2 levels and temperatures help test hypotheses about its causes and effects, contributing to the comprehensive theory of anthropogenic climate change, which is supported by diverse lines of evidence and has significant predictive power for future climate conditions.

    Fossil fuel burning is either causing the climate to warm or not. Science is the rational way to approach this question, it doesn’t matter whether you are Muslim or Jew, Christian or Buddhist, atheist or pagan.  There is no Jewish or pagan science. Science can indeed represent reality but from a limited point of view. Science cannot tell me what is real, good, beautiful, true, rational per se, or wise. Science is not a religion or a metaphysics. When it aspires to this, it can become used as discourse or ideology. Carl Sagen and Richard Dawkins are examples of scientists taking on another role as discourse propagators. People confuse these two faces of science and thus believe silly things like vaccines cause autism or a witch doctor is just as scientific as a practicing scientist; or that any belief that is not justified by science (e.g. I love my children. The birch trees are beautiful.) are ultimately unreal.

   When postmodernism becomes metaphysical – claiming that everything is text or discourse – then I part ways with it.

I will go on with this later.   

 

 

 Nietzsche on Truth, Again: on "Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense"

I wrote this about 15 years ago, in another life, as part of a rare philosophical discussion with an intelligent, philosophically engaged student (Stefan G.), who as a musician was really into Nietzsche.

 

        Now I can't write a book about Nietzsche's many views of truth, but overall I sense one basic fault line that runs through his writings: as a philosopher the striving to go beyond surfaces, to question public opinion and traditional convictions, and in the end gain a deeper (or higher) perspective on life.  In this mode, truth is connected to depth and authenticity; the opposite to it is laziness, conformism, false comfort, cowardice, superficiality.  The tension arises when in his desire for depth (or heights) Nietzsche also strives to satisfy the whole of his being, “to affirm life.”  The idea is that an unsentimental, pure striving for truth does reach its object – life, the world, as they really are.  And the problem for Nietzsche is his conclusion that they are utterly horrible. At the bottom of his thinking I always sense the “wisdom of Silineus,” quoted in his early work The Birth of Tragedy: the best for man he cannot have, for it is never to have been born.  Given this “truth,” all means are allowed to escape it; nothing else matters but to overcome it.

      The Greeks in Nietzsche's view lived life to its fullest, empowered by a largely amoral make-believe world and the good sense not to question to deeply into the nature of things “as they are in themselves.” Thus we can't have both: truth/depth and life at its fullest.  Throughout his productive life, Nietzsche attacks the value of truthfulness for the sake of “affirming life” at the only level he believes it can be affirmed – an amoral “aesthetic phenomenon.”  And yet, at other times, qua skeptical philosopher, he belies this willingness to be satisfied with illusions, constantly telling his readers what he believes the deepest truths are and trying to give us the courage to face them as they are.  One of my theses: Nietzsche has set up a false dichotomy. And he is inconsistent, at times praising the courageous who can face truth, and times claiming truth is less important than “life.”

Nietzsche's many passages on truth consider not a univocal concept, but different aspects of the word.  Often he uses truth and means scientific truth.  His attitude towards science is complex and contradictory; yet his adherence to a scientific worldview as the true one, regardless of those passages in which he considers science one perspective among others, drives his thinking in “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense.”   It is also significant that he thinks truth, morality, and aesthetics to be logically separate categories, just like scientific attitudes today; he divides what Socrates/Plato thought of as belonging together: truthfulness and  goodness (and in the Symposium, beauty).  Of course, Nietzsche agrees with Socrates that scientific views are fundamentally indifferent to man's life; one can have all the truth one wants by counting and measuring things, but whatever utility such truths may have for us, they don't touch fundamental questions of meaning.  And, of course, the scientific perspective is indifferent to questions of meaning; a logical difference becomes a metaphysical gap when the indifferent reality revealed by science is taken to be metaphysical reality as such. 

 Sometimes he is obviously not attacking the kind of truth-seeking he believes himself to be doing, but a conventional, shallow “truth” which does not go much beyond wishful thinking.  Philistinism.  Those who pretend to love the truth but use philosophy as a stage to display their ego.  Or the pedant who does not realize that truth pursuing at the deepest levels is not the pedantic enterprise of normal science or conventional wisdom, but dynamite. 

Another of my theses: Nietzsche's view of truth is informed by science; it is reductive; it is wrongly cut off from moral and aesthetic reality (from goodness and beauty); and thus Socrates/Plato was right and Nietzsche wrong.  A well-known question from Jenseits von Gut und Böse could serve as a further preface for Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne and for my response to it:

 

“Granted, we want truth; why not rather Falsity? And Ignorance?  – The problem of the value of truth confronts us here, a – or were we the one who is confronting that problem”

 

[„Gesetzt, wir wollen Wahrheit: warum nicht lieber Unwahrheit? Und Unwissenheit?  –  Das Problem vom Wert der Wahrheit trat vor uns hin, –  oder waren wir's, die vor das Problem hin traten?“ ]

 

From what context, from what application does this question draw its force, for it does have some signifying power; it is not a meaningless question.  My answer: of course, in superficial sense of “truth” (in quotation marks), it does have force.  In fact, in this sense, it is not truthfulness, but a form of self-deception. In this sense, to question to value of “truth” is to question the value of self-deception, philistinism, pedantry.  Ironically, much of Nietzsche's attack on truth is a veiled attack on a superficial attitude towards truth, an attack on self-deception.  It also draws force when applied to certain practices of science and scientifically-minded philosophers: one can certainly question the value of devoting one's life to counting and measuring and calculating things which don't touch the surface of authentic life – as Socrates brought philosophy from the study of the heavens to man.  And one can question the value of a naive optimism that the truth will always be pleasant and comforting, and all other such conventional certitudes. For such contexts, Nietzsche's question is “dynamite.”  It helps clean the air in one's thinking about truth, and attack ad hominem against certain lazy and fallacious forms of thinking. At this level, we are not yet doing genuine philosophy, but defining the space in which serious thinking should take place by getting rid of the corrupt forms.

What the question cannot mean without both absurdity and mendacity is to call the genuine forms truthfulness into question.  Here, the tension between depth and being able to be glad one was born comes into play to make things difficult for Nietzsche and confusing for his readers.  In the end, there are no arguments to be made, for we have to do with things which are absolute, sui generis. To choose to live a lie, to deceive oneself, to remain ignorant about matters essential to life, to deceive others, to prefer myths to truths because they make life seem more pleasant or less horrible – this can't be what Nietzsche is about. If it is, in fact, what he is about, I cannot come up with an argument to show he is wrong; but I would only pity him. I certainly couldn't take his writings seriously; I couldn't respect him as a philosopher, whose vocation is precisely to seek truth, wherever it will lead.  He would receive a failing grade in my writing class for all his rhetorical brilliance.  We would simply have to part ways.

 

And now to "Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense"

 

I.  Nietzsche opens the piece, frames it so to speak, by one of his standard appeals – again, rhetorically brilliant – to the meaningless, indifferent universe, and the insignificance of man and his reason within it.  But this colorful opening does critical philosophical work for Nietzsche, and shouldn't be quickly passed over without at least briefly analyzing what work it does. It signifies, of course, to his readers because none of us can escape the power of this picture of the world, which draws its force not only from the success of particular scientific theories of nature (Darwinian evolution, relativity Theory, thermodynamics, etc.), but from the scientific “value-free” way of thinking, and the demythologizing (Weber's Entzauberung der Welt; disenchantment of the world) tendencies introduced into the culture through science.  It forms the horizon – the unquestioned assumption – of Nietzsche's project; the force of so much of what Nietzsche has to say depends on this horizon. 

I suppose he thinks it true; I suppose he believes what he writes, that nature is utterly indifferent to human longings.  If he believed, as he sometimes does write, that it is only one human perspective among others, then one could without loss of depth find another perspective which would make other life possibilities possible.

His horror at existence unredeemed by the aesthetic is closely dependent on the meaningless universe + Darwinian nature (with all minor differences Nietzsche has with Darwin, he is fundamentally in agreement with his reductive naturalism), and the demythologizing of nature as a source of meaning. It is the truths of science which – for Nietzsche – leave no conceptual space for God, and thus are responsible for “the death of God."

Nietzsche's article draws it force for us due to the power of the scientific worldview.  In a universe where only atoms, molecules, waves, forces, etc. obeying causal laws (or acting at random in the quantum dimension), the spirit has no conceptual space to exist. To call this worldview „scientific“ is a misnomer, however: true science does not make metaphysical statements about Being such as statements affirming or denying the reality of our inner life, or whether Reality is nothing but what is revealed by scientific practice (of which science is, of course, a part).  This metaphysical move is what is behind the so-called scientific worldview, which most of us accept as a matter or faith, and which make reductions of the inner life to causes which in principle can be investigated by science (and thus “real” according to this metaphysic) seem so plausible, despite being so improbable that to believe them would almost imply that our inner lives have no more reality than those depicted in the popular movie as existing in the Matrix.  Nietzsche sometimes speaks of scientific truth as a perspective; sometimes he assumes it as unquestioningly true.

Next Nietzsche performs a reduction of truth – truth in the service of the instincts. Though in Nietzsche (at least in later works), life is not so much oriented to survival as a “will-to-power” (and this has been understood in many different ways), the framework is basically reductive: it seems to us that a person may love truth, that philosophers may pursue truth, that honesty is a virtue, etc. In fact, although we are not conscious of it, what “true” really is amounts to a mean to an end programmed into our organisms by “animal physiology.” 

Nietzsche reduces the value to truth as a spiritual category to fundamentally different biological/psychological categories.  This amounts to the claim that our experience of truth as a virtue, etc., is an illusion masking instincts, non-rational, non-individual processes that determine our being without our being able or willing to acknowledge them.  In a similar way, Freud reduced much of conscious life to a mask of the ID, which was his interpretation of what Nietzsche was trying to get at with his „will-to-power.“ 

Have I understood Nietzsche correctly?  Partly.  He goes back and forth from this reductive concept to criticizing shallow view of honesty and truthfulness. But to criticize certain attitudes as embodying shallowness with respect to truth and honesty, is at the same time to presuppose there are deeper attitudes – his own, for example; and these deeper attitudes cannot be accounted for reductively, as really only serving instincts or social conventions.

Aside from reducing truth to a function of the instincts, Nietzsche offers a sort of anthropological picture of society, in which in order to co-exist (and with his picture of the instincts it can be no more than coexistence), some minimal consensus of the meaning of words and conventional behavior is needed by Nietzsche's (to me, as much as I share Nietzsche's dislike of conformism, rather revolting) picture of people as herd-people.  Truth is never valued for its own sake, but as a means to the end of protection of the weak.  As long as people are not physically harmed, no one has anything against deception, which is more or less the natural thing for us to do. 

The point to emphasize here is that people have a tactical relation to truth – not truth, but those things their instincts program them to desire drive behavior; truth is good or bad only to the extent it allows them to achieve these pre-given desires.  Truth is “good” only when deception prevents them from getting what their instincts program them to want.  Thus pure truth, if it existed, is irrelevant, “not worth striving for,” as Nietzsche puts it.

This sociological picture (fantasy?) of truth is also reductive.  We think honesty is a virtue, but what is really always is amounts to little more than a social convention which can be more or less effectively manipulated to achieve those ends to which our instincts program us to strive for. That many people treat it as though it were this can be interpreted reductively; but in light of Nietzsche's own truthfulness and his implicit criticism of this philistinism, it can also be interpreted as merely a shallow attitude towards truthfulness.  Again, Nietzsche moves back and forth between his reductive hypothetical constructions and his belief in a higher and lower form of truthfulness.

I can't go too far into the meaningless universe hypothesis.  But it is not obviously true; I'm not even sure I – we – know exactly what it means. It is certainly not  a scientific fact, theory, or hypothesis, though the reason people believe in it is not unconnected with the cultural-epistemological power of science. But there is no experiment one could conduct to prove whether nature is meaningless; no amount of data could verify or falsify the hypothesis; the question is no part of the disciplines of physics, chemistry, geology, etc.   Perhaps it is just another way of proclaiming one's atheism, or one's nihilism?  But neither atheism nor nihilism are scientific or mathematical matters. My thesis: the meaningless universe hypothesis is an expression of ... meaning, not science. And as such, should be no more assumed as obviously true than the (distorted) religious attitudes Nietzsche criticizes.

With respect to the reduction-to-instincts interpretation, one has to distinguish between evolutionary changes over time and the mechanisms behind these changes – unquestionably matters of science – and the reduction of our inner life to biological processes (the mind-body problem) which is philosophical, not scientific. The relationship between physiology and the inner life remains highly contentious within philosophy. Suffice it to say Nietzsche does not seem to be aware of the issues involves; he gives no arguments supporting his reductive thesis; in other words, he begs the major questions involved, because it seems he confuses the scientific aspects of the Darwinian framework with the philosophical aspects.  A course in the philosophy of science would have helped him sort these kinds of issues out.

The final part of Nietzsche's article claims that language by its very nature is not an adequate means to expressing truth. Although this raises issues I can't deal with here involving the philosophy of language, I will at least indicate my position at the end of these comments.

Reading Nietzsche, though almost always a pleasure, is philosophically frustrating. This is because he blinds us with his powerful rhetoric from his typically dubious philosophical moves and assumptions. In this article, he moves back and forth between his reductive assumptions (never argued) to his polemic against philistinism and conformism (responsible for much of the force of his writings) to his attack on moralities based on notions of common humanity, equal worth, or human dignity.  One can deal with the reductive assumptions with philosophical argument; against the moralistic polemic against philistinism and conformism I have nothing to object to, only when put in the context of his rejection of the moral worth of each individual human life – his “extra-moral sense” – he draws conclusions diametrically opposed to those I would draw.

 

II.

What underlying conception of truth lies behind the “extra-moral” framework assumed by Nietzsche?  For here, at least, is something he considers true.

Interesting is the conceptual dependence of substantive matters of meaning and his conception of truth – in particular, the relation of truth to meaning, emotional response, our deepest longings.  Thinking about what Nietzsche believes to be true and the interpretation of the concept “truth” that these beliefs he regards as true presuppose shows that the concept of “truth” cannot be conceived logically independently from substantive beliefs about meaning of self, others, world.  Independently of any substantive moral beliefs, in the inclusive sense that Nietzsche's rejection of morality is a moral belief (i.e. a belief involving the meaning of our dealings with self, others, world), one cannot say what truth or reason is. Thus no independent, morally neutral rationality can then adjudicate between conflicting claims. 

Nietzsche's unquestioned belief in an indifferent universe, in man's utter insignificance, and in a reductionist pseudo-Darwinian interpretation of the human soul co-determine a conception of “truth” as value-free, scientific, “objective” in the sense that who one is is irrelevant to the truth. The question is: is this conception the only one, or even the better one, in the context of philosophy?

In general, the concept truth is applied when our judgments of the way things are accurately reflect the way things really are – which in itself doesn't say very much, applying to everything from counting chairs to complex questions of the sciences  or the humanities or politics, or the deeper questions of meaning we must face in our lives.  It always implies the possibility of error as well as the possibility that the truth may not turn out to be what we wish it to be.  But depending on context in which the concept is applied and the kinds of questions asked, truth has different grammars.  Consider the following examples:

 

Example One

     It is an (admittedly vastly complex) scientific question whether the human-caused increase of green-house gases into the atmosphere is causing significant climate changes.  Groups and individuals have strongly conflicting political, economic, and personal interests in the outcome of this scientific question.  Of course, to the extent that a scientist investigating the question is led to not see the relationship the way it is through such external, emotional commitments – say he hates capitalism and believes for moral and political reasons in a radical political and economic change – to that extent his attitude and emotional responses blind him to the truth of the matter, which is quite independent of, and indifferent to, his hopes.  The personal attitudes and emotional responses are logically external to the reality of climate change.  And this reality can in principle be investigated whatever one's fundamental beliefs, which should ideally be “bracketed out” during the investigation.  Truth for scientific questions is not logically tied to emotional response; even if one's political passion aided rather than hindered the search for truth, the relationship is purely contingent.

A real scientist, upon looking at the data of his politically passionate colleague, could meaningfully say: “I don't care about his politics; the question is whether his data holds up.” Further assume the data are skewed to support the politically passionate scientist's political agenda.  Then his emotional response could rightly be cited as a cause which hindered his pursuit of truth, or blinded him to reality.  In this the passion would be similar to tiredness or drunkenness – an external cause for not getting things right, for distorting thought. Such a conception of truth – entirely proper within many practices – gives rise to an idealized picture of objectivity and the perfectly rational thinker, which assumed in Nietzsche's time a cultural power transcending the practices (science and engineering) where it was at home. It behind a model for truth and rationality itself, characterized famously by Thomas Nagel as “the view from nowhere” by an intelligence which occupies the Archimedean point.  Who sees things as God would see them.

When made absolute, such a conception of truth does become “extra-moral.”  The this particular grammar is abstracted from the social practices in which it is at home,  everything (including all meaning and value) becomes just as external to reality as the scientists political passion to the facts of global warming.

Through the optic of this conception of truth, being and meaning are radically divorced; meaning is banished into subjectivity, which itself has no footing in being and thus is subject to reduction. Thus the meaningless and indifferent universe as well as Darwinian psychology is the pre-determined outcome of applying the scientific conception of truth to metaphysics. (Clearly – the indifferent universe and pseudo-Darwinian nature of Nietzsche are metaphysical speculations.) 

 

Example Two

      Now consider a case where emotional response functions differently as a critical concept. Image a happily married man who falls in love with another woman.  He is accused of being shallow and romantically sentimental in both his loves and what they mean. (I am actually thinking of a character in Iris Murdoch's The Sacred and Profane Love Machine.)  Being a psychiatrist, he justifies his adultery by citing certain empirical claims from psychology.  He might say, for example, that evolution has genetically pre-formed the male of the species such that he seeks to pass his genes along at every opportunity; therefore, not monogamy but polygamy is natural and thus his adultery is justifiable.  But he may not make any such claims. He might simply give romantic-sentimental accounts of being-in-love with two women, lovers being tragically fated for one another, being in the grip of irresistible emotions, wanting to finally live authentically, feeling alive, etc. 

Suppose someone does want to say, and truly: “You, sir, are shallow and sentimental.”  Could someone who is unsure, or the lover himself, say, as did the fellow scientist above: “I don't care whether he is shallow and sentimental.  I just want to know whether his beliefs are true?”

Although this makes perfect sense in scientific example above, and might also make sense if the question were the truth of his psychological (scientific) claims, the response seems absurd as a reaction to the judgment of shallowness and sentimentality. Here the shallowness and sentimentality – unlike the political passion of the scientist above – is not a contingent cause of faulty thinking, but the very form of the error itself.  The shallowness and sentimentality are the bad thinking (and feeling), not the external cause of it.  In this example, the emotional response functions as a critical concept; to judge someone's relationships as  shallow and sentimental is to criticize them; these concepts indicate a way such relationships can be false, unauthentic, counterfeit, or corrupt – not the cause of such failures.

In the second example, where feeling and thought cannot be logically separated, truth involves one of Nietzsche's uses: to distinguish between the authentic and the unauthentic; in the first example, where feeling may only be logically related to truth as an external cause contingently aiding or hindering thinking, the logical distinction is between the correct and the incorrect. 

The confusion occurs when Nietzsche treats matter belonging to first context in terms of the second:  the problem of the naturalistic reduction of meaning “explaining away” the reality of the inner life in terms of a scientistic, quasi mechanical theory – consciousness gives us the illusion of truthfulness, but really we are driven by unconscious selfish instincts obeying their own programs and social conventions serving such instincts in the weaker specimens.

Thus within the scientistic (actually metaphysical) reduction, the relevant contrast for truth is no longer authentic verses unauthentic expressions of the inner life (truthfulness, honesty) – and the exposure of the inauthentic is what gives Nietzsche's writings force – but correct verses incorrect, with consciousness and the inner life being proclaimed inherently illusionary and mendacious in light of Nietzsche's metaphysical biology.  [I think these two examples also partly clarify the logical differences between the natural sciences and the humanities.]

 

III.

To want to look at cases like example two above – thinking about the inner life where concepts like shallow or sentimental function logically as critical concepts, forms of error or untruth, rather than contingent causes of error like in example one – means to want to see moral problems (or hermeneutic problems in general) as scientific problems as in example one: to want to separate truth from value.  Seeing the lie in terms of one conception of truth or the other – example one or two – cannot be conceptually independent from the objects under consideration: lying and truth. Both examples only make sense on the basis of prior assumptions about the reality involved, which itself cannot be determined by an independently intelligible theory of truth; the reality involved rather makes the theory of truth intelligible. 

The problem of finding out the shortest way to Golm from Bornim is the same for the sinner and the saint, the profound and the superficial; the problem of knowing whether someone's “being in love” is an authentic response to another person or an infantile fantasy is tied to values and persons in a way the road to Golm is not.  Both are questions of truth in the sense that judgments can be made about the way things are, etc.

Nietzsche's extra-moral truth applied to the inner life makes sense only against the background assumption of the indifferent universe and the pseudo-Darwinian [Darwin was not interested in the mind-body problem, to my knowledge, but only the mechanisms of evolutionary change] reduction of the inner life to effects of instinct.  Under this reduction, problems like wanting to know whether being-in-love is a deep emotional response to the wonder of another person or an infantile fantasy simply dissolve – all states we term “being-in-love” are effects (masks) of a primary reality – instinct. 

I suppose Nietzsche would say the illusions are necessary for conscious creatures who would otherwise see how horrible life in the meaningless universe really is and stop reproducing, or stop trying to fulfill its program – the will-to-power, whatever it is that this program orders us to do.  [What or who would recognize this?  How does this recognition fit into the biological program?]   But the reduction is intelligible only by a prior decision to see the reality of the inner life in terms of a conception of truth (example one) which corresponds to objects of scientific investigation or the shortest way to Golm – which at one stroke denies the reality of the inner life and explains away any conception of truth not reducible to “animal physiology.”  A circular argument, since the issue is precisely whether the conception of truth in example one is appropriate for thinking about the inner life.

Meaning for Nietzsche – problems of example two are problems of meaning – is an “aesthetic phenomenon,” an effect of the instincts, an “interpretation” which creates a non-existing wall consisting of fantasies about self, others, and world separating that which uses the personal pronoun “I” from the relentless reality of the blind will-to-power.  Such a view of things is certainly not scientific, not independently verifiable or falsifiable by sinners or saints, profound or superficial people.  We can't set up the Nietzschean picture alongside the Socratic one, for example, and appeal to an independent conception of truth to help us decide which is true. The Good and the True cannot be conceptually disentangled.  Judgments of value (or lack of value) co-determine whether one thinks about a matter in terms of example one or two.  In Nietzsche's case, his denial of the value of truth for life (as he conceives it) influences his decision to see it in an “extra-moral sense.” Notice how the force of Nietzsche’s writings largely depends on his effective polemic against philistinism and unauthentic conventions.  Here he is operating with a conception of truth outlined in example two: distinguishing genuine from counterfeit spiritual states. But then he moves quickly to the reduction involved in seeing the inner life in terms of the conception of truth in example one. 

This going back and forth between debunking the inauthentic and reducing all of the inner life is confusing; the force of his rhetoric is in no small way indebted to this confusion. It is as if the dubious scientistic reduction of the inner life lives parasitically off of the effective debunking of counterfeit forms of the inner life.

 

IV.

The full reality of the inner life cannot be captured in an extra-moral conception of truth. The deceptions, lies, flattery, shallowness, and so on, are critical concepts indicated forms of real spiritual harm.  Plato has his Socrates say that it is better to suffer evil than to do it.  Wittgenstein thinks genuine morality is absolute, sui generis.  Lies almost always harm the liar and the one lied to (perhaps, as Kant thought, they always harm them) because we are not just spin-offs of a master program, but beyond all the fantasies of our fat relentless egos we are real, and radically singular, even if not transparent (which would be boring). I don't need to prove that lying always harms the soul to refute Nietzsche; just one case is needed to refute his reductionism. And I don't have to go to extremes like the “Holocaust lie” – a simple example from academic life will suffice.

Consider the example of two college instructors, evaluating the written work of their classes. 

 

Professor Nitske

       Image a Nietzschean instructor who sees before him every Tuesday morning a group of herd animals hiding behind masks of “the flabby concept of humanity.” But among the class is a very promising specimen with a strong will and intelligent, showing the potential to become a freier Geist or perhaps even an Übermensch. 

Glancing through the work of the class, he finds what he expected to find – flawed, weak arguments, written in flat, democratic prose. Rather than waste his time giving them instruction on how to improve their arguments, their thinking, their prose, he gives them all much better marks than they deserve to flatter them, which not only satisfies his love of irony but insures his popularity which is a condition for his freedom. But he spends much time on the work of the budding Übermensch.

Afterwards, during the semester pause, he begins to feel something like remorse.  Hasn't he betrayed those students in his class?  Hasn't he betrayed his vocation?  Fortunately, he recalls the hard truths he has learned from Nietzsche: remorse is caused by the power of the resentment of the herd gaining power over his will through the illusions of morality, a “moral interpretation” of essentially amoral phenomena. As the remorse is thus the product of illusions, revealing nothing about the reality of the matter, he is safe to laugh about it, affirming life as it really is on his way home from work.  He knows this is the way life really is, because this is a question of extra-moral truth, which leaves no conceptual space for any reality remorse may possibly reveal.

Professor Nitske is (I hope!?) a caricature, but not because I am being unfair to the extra-moral Nietzsche.  Part of my argument against Nietzsche is that we cannot really imagine an extra-moral Nietzschean; of course, we can imagine someone devoted to truthfulness, who hates all the lying hypocrisy one encounters in the world, very frequently among moralists and religious people (but not only); we can be amused at how blind some of the most brilliant thinkers have been to the psychological and cultural background of their thinking; we can be nauseated at the all-too-human resentment which fuels the conscious life of many people. And so on. This is the Nietzsche that still speaks to us with force. 

But the reductive Nietzsche – the Nietzsche of the “extra-moral sense” – creates a picture of the inner life which can only be a parody, cannot really be taken seriously.  [Some might say that the Nazi doctors with their medical experiments might be an accurate picture of a desire for truth without a moral sense?]  At best belongs in those courses of metaphysics which deal with questions of the reality of the external world or the self. But at soon as such speculations, however fascinating, descend from the ivory tower of metaphysical speculation into the world of real people, ... well, I think Wittgenstein gave the definitive refutation of that...

If, however, we pretend that Professor Nitske is not a caricature and take the example seriously, ... well, I want to try to imagine how Socrates would respond.  I think Socrates would say that this instructor was ensnared in a labyrinth of evil, blinded to his own evil by the shadows of his true reality pictured on the wall of the very dark part of the cave he is in – pictures made by the rhetoric of sophists like ... Nietzsche.

According to the “sophist” Nietzsche's extra-moral sense, the instructor would be acting consistently with the view that morality – which is based on the illusion that the class were not creatures with a kind of individuality and inner life we associate with ourselves and conditions our sense that each of us is due justice, respect – is in fact an “effect” of a herd instinct, and that this “effect” has corrupted the practice of teaching over the centuries, causing teachers to waste time treating every member of their classes irrespective of ability as owed their best instruction, and courageously resisting the seductions of this kind of lying morality.  But such a view is corrupt.

In the extra-moral view, seeing Professor Nitske as corrupt would be due to the conventions of the herd-men trying to protect themselves from the strong; seeing his mask hiding his corruption would not be due to an inner sense of shame at his corruption but an ironic sense of superiority; seeing his flattering of those students he sees as herd-people would not be a form of harming them, since such are not capable of being harmed by falsity as such. 

Can philosophical arguments – rather than the ad hominem we seemed to be left with – be made against such an extra-moral view?  Which view of the instructor is true?  How would one go about investigating this question?  There is no neutral ground, no Archimedean point, no extra-moral perspective on which to stand.  However, to see the class as part of a herd and thus remove oneself from the claims they make on the instructor qua students and human beings (justice, respect), does not involve us in a question that can be answered scientifically in terms of example one (climate change).  No data or experiment could prove that their inner life was so attenuated as not to be worthy of serious obligations. To see them in reductive terms already presupposes that one has refused to recognize the possibility of such an inner life.  At most the Nietzschean could claim:

 

“If the totality of reality is such that what is real by definition can only correspond to what can be investigated by science or subject to the conception of truth illustrated by my example one, then the question may be treated as a scientific one, in the extra-moral sense.”

 

But that is a very large metaphysical if. Being in its totality is not a possible object of knowledge or Vorstellung. Our notions of truth are limited by our possible experience, but need not, I think, be considered illusions for that reason, as I will try to show with the next example.  And it would produce the absurdity of not knowing what to do with the investigator. Presumably, his truth and his inner life would be just as unreal, and therefore his results unreal.

 

Professor Lurie [based on Coetzee's character in Disgrace]

      This instructor, in a spiritual state bordering on despair, pursues a student (an immature one, uncertain of herself, and not a particularly good student) sexually, and under odd circumstances (see Disgrace) gets her in bed.  She then seeks to trade on the sexual relationship for favors in the course she has with Professor Lurie.  Lurie's teaching has to a large extent lost his meaning for him under the circumstances of university reform which has been phasing out the humanities because they can't be proven to contribute to the gross national product.  He has a certain contempt for the young people in his courses, who seem only interested in jobs, consumption, prestige, sex, music.  Reluctant at first, he lets things take their course – the student-lover misses an exam; he tries to get her to make it up, but she is not very willing, doesn't see it as important.  [Now I will modify Coetzee's story.]   Assume the student writes a term paper which even under the most generous interpretation should not pass.  Yet he passes her, because he doesn't want to risk losing her as a lover. 

Now imagine this instructor suffers remorse – the pained recognition of guilt. He feels he has betrayed his vocation; he feels he has betrayed his student.  She deserved his best instruction; she deserved the justice of being evaluated fairly; she deserved to be treated seriously as a person – all this, although she was not fully aware (but at some level felt it notwithstanding) of these things herself. 

But her inability to love Lurie was partly conditioned by the fact that he saw her as a person/student not deserving to be treated seriously; nor could she really respect him, as shown by the cynical remarks she made after love-making about his teaching attitude.  One could paint this picture in greater detail.  In any case, Lurie confesses all, asks the student and his colleagues for forgiveness, and resigns his teaching post.

In the view I am attributing (rightly or wrongly) to Socrates, the pain of remorse is the form of the recognition of reality (per example two).  Naturally remorse may be more or less lucid or pure.  It may itself be corrupt. It is thinkable that Lurie was just bowing to morality because he was, in the end, a conformist; or perhaps his remorse was just a show to put his declining ego on stage again – a deceit, a pose, a mask, perhaps even to himself.  Socratically, it should be of the utmost importance to determine whether the remorse was genuine or counterfeit (truth per example two). 

But when Nietzsche writes there are no moral phenomena, only moral interpretations of phenomena [true, he didn't write his in the article I am considering; but it is compatible with the thought in this article], he seems to be denying that in this case the remorse could possibly be a form the  recognition of reality takes; he seems to be denying to framework of authentic/corrupt remorse altogether with his reductions, on the view that remorse as expressing a moral phenomenon in this case is the illusion produced by a physiological program in which the herd (following its instincts) protects itself from the stronger specimens; a program in which the war of all against all is reduced in scale. 

To believe – Socratically – that remorse may reveal something real about the people and deeds involved in the example would be like believing in God or a fairy tale.  Why? I know of no possible answer other than one I have already mentioned:  the metaphysical assumption that moral phenomena have no place in a “scientific” universe.  Remorse for Nietzsche – operating exclusively with truth per example one – can only be an external cause which in this case prevents Lurie from seeing clearly the (amoral) nature of things.

Again, who are we to believe?  How are we to go about finding out who is right?  No objective solution seems possible. No answer in the sense of the shortest way to Golm.  One cannot say Nietzsche or my Socrates are mistaken, though I suppose both would think the other confused and influenced by irrational motives under the surface of the thought. 

However, an irreducible personal element does seem to exist, which seems to support the Socratic picture. Since the object does not lend itself to scientific investigation, choosing to see it “scientifically” as Nietzsche does cannot be based on logic but on “interpretation.” But when seeing things “scientifically” in an “extra-moral sense” does not correspond to the nature of the object being investigated, and then it must have its source elsewhere – in the mind of the investigator.

While neither the Socratic nor the Nietzschean views are reducible to personal categories, neither is it possible to think these categories away. Nietzsche reveals partly who he is by his extra-moral sense, by seeing most people as herd-people, by seeing truth as a tactic in a survival-social game scenario in which the instincts play themselves out.  While Lurie's remorse may be corrupt, there is no a priori reason grounded in the nature of things that it has to be (the concept “corrupt” would not even be applicable in such a case – in fact, the whole of our evaluative concepts would be rendered meaningless on Nietzsche's reductive thesis, which is one of the reasons a Nietzschean is not imaginable except as a caricature or an embodiment of evil); and whether or not it is corrupt, it reveals something about Lurie that he, in the end, is not able to deal with students as not deserving justice from him as an instructor.

Thus there is an irreducible element of ad hominem in these diverging perspectives which no amount of reasoning can do away with.  What confuses the matter, however,  is the seductiveness of the pseudo-scientific view that there are no moral phenomena, only moral interpretations of phenomena – that real truth is always “extra-moral.”  And thus that truthfulness requires us to recognize that morality – and thus, absurdly, truthfulness – is an illusion.

One can only expose such logical-metaphysical confusions. But even when they have been put away, there is no logical ground which compels Nietzsche on pain of irrationality (like denying that x is the shortest way to Golm would be demonstrably irrational, or getting a sum wrong) to recognize that remorse may be authentic, that there are moral phenomena.  And at this level, logically, only ad hominem and circular type arguments are possible.  Thus one can only partially “refute” Nietzsche.

 

 

 

V.

Evil is sui generis. To ask for reasons why lying, flattering, deceiving are wrong shows that one has not understood the concepts – is ignorant in the Socratic sense.

Nietzsche writes:

“The liar uses the valid designations, the words, to make the unreal appear as real; he says, for example, 'I am rich,' when the word 'poor' would be the correct designation of his situation. He abuses the fixed connotations by arbitrary changes or even by reversal of the senses.”

 

Here, as throughout, the force of the passage draws on its seemingly moral passion, exposing how mendacious we often are prone to be. He sounds a bit like Socrates, though without Socrates' warm, deeply humane irony.  He seems to concede the distinction between lie and truth is real, though only within the context of socio-linguistic conventions to which we by nature can only have a strategic and tactical (i.e. superficial) relationship.  But the “liar” seems hardly a neutral word – to call someone a liar is to judge him negatively, one would think.  But not for Nietzsche in his “extra-moral sense.”  In this sense, the lie is not seen as good or bad, but in terms of something like the rules of a game, much as anthropologist describe the behavior of alien, primitive cultures.  The point of all society is to end the open war of all against all; deception is kept within the limits of what is tolerable to society; truth and lie come into being with socio-linguistic conventions. 

But by nature creatures of instinct prone to deception, our relationship to truth is external; we condemn it only when in the interests of our “will-to-power” to do so. This is our nature and the nature of society for Nietzsche, not a criticism. He is doing something like anthropology here, though I doubt such a thesis would be publishable today. (Perhaps it wouldn't even make for a passing grade in an undergraduate anthropology course, but this is beside the point.)

 

A tension results as we are not clear whether Nietzsche is attacking inauthenticity or doing metaphysical anthropology. 

 

In any case, the attitude towards deception and truth Nietzsche attributes to “man-in-society” is utterly superficial; truth is pragmatically related to instincts, including self-preservation, and the fictions which promote these.  Man-in-society is superficial for Nietzsche. He lacks depth, individuality – all the qualities we associate with true humanity.  Truth and deception alike are portrayed – reductively – as necessarily a means to certain ends which can be characterized independently.  Both have only instrumental value. 

Interesting that this superficial relation to truthfulness seems to be shared by Nietzsche's herd-people as well as his “higher types.”  [See Jenseits von Gut und Böse, erstes Hauptstück, 4.]  Whatever it is that separates Nietzsche's Übermensch from the herd-people, it is not love of truth. People – I suppose most all of us at one time or another – develop a shallow relationship to truth. The issue is not whether we are by nature lovers of truth, but whether, however difficult an achievement, we are all condemned by our nature, by the slavery of consciousness to our instincts (whether these be strong or weak is unimportant in this respect), to a superficial relationship to truthfulness; or whether a deeper relationship to truthfulness is not a fiction but a human potentiality, and one worth striving for. 

To examine this question, one could again look at teaching as a vocation, and consider the case of an instructor who flatters his students.  Suppose a student writes a paper on King Lear.  Imagine that the instructor was due to be considered for tenure, and that student evaluations weighed heavily among the responsible committee.  The instructor, however, resists any temptation as unworthy to flatter the student, and evaluates the work fairly – with a poor grade.  He justifies his criticisms, however, with much care and insight, and the students profits from this.  The student acknowledges the justice of the criticisms – although they have not exactly promoted his career hopes.  He does become a better writer and does understand Lear better due to the experience.

 

I think Nietzsche would admire this instructor.

 

I do not think he could say why within the terms of his article.

 

There is something beautiful in being treated justly, in being treated with a view towards one's real good – which in this case was not the externalities of careers, but good writing and better understanding.  But apart from the pragmatic advantages that resulted from the instructor's truthfulness, advantages that could be explained in terms of Nietzsche's “man-in-society,” but simply being treated as someone worthy of justice and the best instruction cannot be bracketed out. 

To be treated such is also good, sui generis, apart from the positive consequences which are of course a part of the picture.  Many of us have experienced such instruction, and though we may always be mistaken and revise our thinking about certain instructors based on further reflection, there is nothing that prevents such authoritative experiences of truthfulness from being genuine. An anthropology which does not leave conceptual space for such authoritative experience creates a caricature of human relations.  To those of us who have been the beneficiaries of such truthfulness, the strategic attitude towards truth both of Nietzsche's fictive herd-people and equally fictive Übermensch must seem vulgar.

Such instructors' truthfulness is not only a form of respect for students as persons and learners, and not only a form of respect for (love of) their vocation and the subject, but is also conditioned by a sense that to flatter students is a form of harm beyond any practical consequences it may have.  Perhaps flattery would have the consequence of preventing students from attaining excellence in the areas of writing or literature; perhaps they would never come to a deeper understanding and appreciation of Lear, which would be a shame.  But to be flattered or deceived about one's true stand in the practice is to be dealt with as though one were the kind of person – a herd-man – not deserving truth and justice.

For Socrates such harm was qualitatively greater than any worldly consequences.  And the flatterer harms himself most of all.  He betrays his students and his vocation, betrays a deep trust.   His relationship to his subject, his vocation, and his students would be exposed as hopelessly superficial; he would be exposed as nothing but a prisoner of his instincts, which is not an extra-moral anthropological judgment, but a moral corruption.

Such questions as  “is it really bad to flatter” etc. make no sense, are in fact unintelligible outside the area of abstract metaphysical speculations which call the reality of the world and the inner life as such into question. In such circumstances, for an instructor to understand the fact in an “extra-moral sense” that his actions had revealed him to be a shallow flatterer and deceiver would sound like a cheap rationalization.  “I know I'm a shallow flatterer and a deceiver, but so what?  We're all that way by nature!” Nonsense.  Such a move would only reinforce his superficiality.

Notice only as a shallow flatterer would he be wearing a mask in his role as teacher, posing to be what he was not.  Nietzsche seems to be denying with his metaphysical anthropology to possibility of transcending this miserable condition.  With his rejection of equal worth, he seems to deny flattery and deceit are forms of harm for most, if not all, of humanity. 

 

VI.

One can, in the end, only give an alternative to Nietzsche's account of truth.  Each person must then explore the matter in terms of his or her own experience, though if they do this is the sense of truthfulness, they will already have, in a sense, decided the issue.  Why can't I see my students as herd-people, why are their abilities irrelevant to his seeing?  Of course, it is thinkable that my inability means that I am caught in some Hobbesian-Nietzschean slave morality. Perhaps I am too cowardly to face cruel reality.  Perhaps I am in need of false consolation. Etc. ad nauseum.

Part of the vast experiential ground why I find it impossible to see others as herd-people is the birth of my daughter. The wonder of it.  The awesome sense of wonder and responsibility and love involved. Of course, this is personal testimony, and I can only give my word for its authenticity. Those who know me may be better able to judge this. Logically, I might be putting on a show; maybe I just need an example to express my will-to-power in overcoming Nietzsche.   Of course, I should be aware of the possibility of posing or masking underlying motives in using this example. That is one reason why I never use personal examples in my public writing – it already creates a suspicion of wanting to instrumentalize them, indicating after all a shallow relationship to them.

All this aside – many people, I suppose, feel similar things at the birth of their children. This feeling has nothing to do with the prospective abilities of their children. There is not the slightest evidence that my daughter is on her way to being an Übermensch. I suppose Nietzsche would see her – as he sees women generally – as part of the herd, eaten up with resentment at not being a Nietzschean man (one reason for me not to like Nietzsche – in fact, I don't like him for this, but I find it difficult to judge him too harshly for my own reasons).  But such wonder conditions the way I see other people's children.  The experience of grief at the loss of loved ones – again, people who for Nietzsche I suppose would be herd-people.  In grief, the uniqueness, the irreplaceableness of people becomes manifest through the pain of loss in ways no words or philosophy could express. This also conditions the sense that people are radically singular. Also remorse. Etc.

Notice with respect to truth, that there is no independent way to this reality.  Only by experiencing wonder, love, remorse, grief, and so on – by allowing these heavily emotional responses to make a genuine claim on us – is the reality they point to revealed. Exactly this is what informs example two. Exactly this is what Nietzsche distances himself from. It's as if he is saying that to only road to truth is to treat such emotional responses as causes of error per example one; that when we no longer allow them to make their claims on us, we will see reality in its true, amoral form; we will see these responses not as forms revealing reality, but as effects of an underlying biological program. 

And, as I have argued, there is no independent way of knowing which view is right. All philosophy can do is crudely draw the boundary where science ends and philosophy begins, and thus expose the attempt to justify the Nietzschean view as the objective one. The whole objective=true and subjective=illusion view belongs to the conception of truth per example one; precisely the blurring of the boundaries is characteristic of example two.

That I, like most of us, respond to these defining human events as genuine and revealing does not mean that I or we are saints; that are fat relentless egos are not constantly at work hiding this reality from us, constructing images, idols, fantasies of others and the world which console us or make us feel better about ourselves or make us feel superior to others or extra-special is ways for which there is little evidence. But it is precisely because of this that truthfulness is so important.  Precisely for this reason are practices such a writing, chess, foreign languages, philosophy, science, good farming, gardening, etc. important – in such practices, we learn that reality cannot be reduced to what we want it to be or imagine it to be (Murdoch).   Such practices are excellent preparation for the moral life, which is partly defined by the constant effort to penetrate through the fantasies of the fat relentless ego and see others . . . as other. 

Obligations within practices to treat others with justice and respect are deeply moral, and train one to see others as others and not as part of a herd. Only by seeing and treating others as deserving of justice, by preserving the truth of defining experiences – a the wonder of birth, the pain of grief or remorse, love, being treated and treating others justly, fulfilling one's obligations as teacher. . . .  This might not be radical enough for youth!  As Wittgenstein said of his philosophy: it leaves things as they are.

 

VIII.

Nietzsche's thoughts on truth and language. Nietzsche doesn't think words can designate the way things are.  He doesn't think concepts express reality. What can this not mean?  It cannot mean that I cannot give you directions to Bornim and my words will not suffice to get you here.  It cannot mean under pain of absurdity that Nietzsche thinks his words bear no relationship to the way things are.  It cannot mean that our ordinary notions of truth are suddenly invalid.

What can he mean?  Actually Nietzsche makes it clear he is not talking about our ordinary notions of truth, which he takes – wrongly – to be necessarily superficial.  Quite unexpectedly, he dives into Kantian things-in-themselves and Platonic forms, claiming that if there were pure truth, this is what it would be. But since such notions are incoherent or unreachable (which?), and not worth striving for, pure truth is incoherent or unreachable. 

 

Well, I don't know. Perhaps I am missing something, because I know Nietzsche was a great thinker. 

 

It is not perfectly clear to me whether he believes that such truth is contingently unreachable for man, and is chastising those weak mind – as the fashionable post-modernism of the 90's did – who don't recognize this; or whether he believes such a notion of truth is incoherent (as I do, in spite of the interesting roles such concepts play within the thought of Kant and Plato).  In neither case do I see such metaphysical conceptions and their incoherence as providing a ground to debunk our ordinary notions of truth and the importance of truthfulness, which, as I tried to show by the example of teaching, are not always trivial.  These ordinary conceptions (example one and two above) in no way assume things-in-themselves or Platonic forms, and remain unaffected by a metaphysical critique of these. 

The purity of truth or truthfulness does not depend on reaching an unintelligible Archimedean point, a “view from nowhere” in the absence of which “everything goes.”  The purity of truth and truthfulness is revealed by one's inner attitude to it – as revealed by my humble example of the instructor who treated his students justly.  Of course, there are much greater examples of purity – for me, the writings of Primo Levi would be one example. Wittgenstein would be another. In short, I think Nietzsche's linguistic argument simply misses the point.  Non sequitur.

 

p.s. I do not read Nietzsche as a total skeptic, but a philosopher in pursuit of “higher truths,” even if he was only able to understand truth in the sense of my example one. 344 of the Fröhliche Wissenschaft is a key passage for me in this reading.

At deepest level, Nietzsche’s philosophy trying to do what he believes Greek tragedy achieved; looking at the horrible reality, but, without lying about it in art, without giving, for example, false metaphysical consolation, transforming it into something we can live with through his writings, through art.  Actually, true art vs. false art.