[lit-ideas] Nietzsche & truth
- From: "Eric Dean" <ecdean99@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 00:00:31 +0000
I enjoy Nietzsche a lot. I think he has profound insight and immense
intellectual courage. I also think he can be a complete crackpot. In some
passages I find it hard to decide which I think is going on, great insight
or obsessive grinding, and of course the answer may be 'both'.
Sometimes I think Nietzsche commentators are so concerned to burnish the
image of their scholarly obsessions that they struggle to make him
constantly consistent with himself. I find myself doing that sometimes too.
For example, it's hard for me to reconcile all the things Nietzsche says
about truth. Sometimes he writes like Mike Chase quotes him, sweeping aside
the notion as just an illusion that helps sustain a form of life and nothing
else. Sometimes he says more nuanced things, like those Phil Enns has
quoted recently, in which he expresses what one might call a relativized or
perhaps even a pragmatic notion of truth.
In my inclination to make Nietzsche consistent with himself, I think perhaps
the way to understand these passages is to hear him using the word 'truth'
in two different senses. In one sense, perhaps we might dare to use Truth
with a capital 'T' for this sense, the word refers to the idea that there is
some one grand unified reality in which everything is consistently
disambiguated and all illusion dispelled. This is the sense I imagine he is
spurning in his more vehement diatribes against truth. The other sense is
the more pragmatic sense that truth is what characterizes understandings
that are at least temporarily productive.
But then there is the whole question of why Nietzsche would have bothered to
so forcefully say anything if in some sense he didn't think he was telling
truths which he imagined his readers, or even more so those who would never
read him, were deaf to.
I guess the simplest thing to say is that what Nietzsche leads me to is a
sense of humility about my own capacity to understand things. He's like
what Plato seems at times to imagine Socrates to have been, someone who can
undermine just about any preconception you might bring to a discussion of
what it's like to be human. I wonder if Nietzsche would have found that
comparison quite as appalling as some of his comments about Socrates might
lead one to believe. I get the sense that he hated the pious attitude he
perceived about the life of Socrates but maybe wouldn't have hated the
bear-baiter Socrates sometimes appears to have been.
Regards to one and all,
Eric Dean
Rockford IL
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