As many times as I have heard the question "What is truth?" I have never heard this outrageous of an argument against the very existence of truth. I was watching all of the way through this reading for that very question, but alas it was nowhere to be found. Nietzsche began with a grandiose fairy tale of how knowing was first created in a galaxy far, far away and although he proceeds to build an extravagant case against the very existence of truth. In the construction of his argument he explains that words are not able to be true. Each word can only completely describe one item, any other item would have to be exactly the same in order to have the same word assigned to it and practically without exception everything has some variation.
If word themselves cannot express truth then every point which Nietzsche endeavors to make is made void by the very argument which he is trying to make. Right from the very first paragraph, in an effort to accuse all of humankind and to scoff at one of the characteristics which humans have which generally elevates us to a higher level than the rest of creation; Nietzsche has the audacity to describe human intellect as proud and deceived.
It would appear to me that it would be difficult to surpass the arrogance and dishonest pretense of one who would propose an argument which disallows all opposition by asserting that any words which might be proposed would by their nature be untrue. It would appear that the fairytale which is most obvious in this reading is the world in which Nietzsche has endeavored to ponder.
2 comments:
Yes, his argument is NOT scientific and is a bit of a truism as it cannot be experimentally disproven. Freud is not taken seriously today for that very same reason.
from a bio of Karl Popper...
Popper coined the term critical rationalism to describe his philosophy. This designation is significant, and indicates his rejection of classical empiricism, and of the observationalist-inductivist account of science that had grown out of it. Popper argued strongly against the latter, holding that scientific theories are universal in nature, and can be tested only indirectly, by references to their implications. He also held that scientific theory, and human knowledge generally, is irreducibly conjectural or hypothetical, and is generated by the creative imagination in order to solve problems that have arisen in specific historico-cultural settings. Logically, no number of positive outcomes at the level of experimental testing can confirm a scientific theory, but a single genuine counter-instance is logically decisive: it shows the theory, from which the implication is derived, to be false. Popper's account of the logical asymmetry between verification and falsification lies at the heart of his philosophy of science. It also inspired him to take falsifiability as his criterion of demarcation between what is and is not genuinely scientific: a theory should be accounted scientific if and only if it is falsifiable. This led him to attack the claims of both psychoanalysis and contemporary Marxism to scientific status, on the basis that the theories enshrined by them are not falsifiable. His scientific work was influenced by his study of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.
...but regardless, I believe that every word that Nietzsche speaks (and Freud, for that matter) is "true."
Nietzsche, WtP
493 (1885) - Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live. The value for life is ultimately decisive.
534 (1887-1888) - The criterion of truth resides in the enhancement of the feeling of power.
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