That’s a confusion of two completely different meanings of the word “metaphysics”.
I don’t want to claim i have any special insight into Nietzsche’s soul, but if you read enough of him and begin getting into the way he thinks, the thoughtexperiment makes perfect sense. He doesn’t really care whether or not the world would recur on any cosmological scale. It’s all about the lifevalues… he’s a philosopher, not a scientist.
But lifevalues impinge on the relationship of life on values as is values on life. Another oroborous.
If so, it’s possible that a similar relationship ccurs with a recurrance being l ooked at as a thought experiment, or as an ontologycal inquiery. The fact of there is an intent to overcome the dualities of good and bad, may imply an overcoming of a speculative or ontological distinction. My guess would be that re- occurance being more like a reintegration of both views. Just a hunch, though.
And that’s another reason it is said he gave up on putting ER forth as a cosmological or metaphysical theory, and instead opted to make it a means by which to test one’s attitude toward life.
What standard is there for judging Nietzsche interpretations? What are we doing by looking at his aphorisms if not trying to get at what he intended to convey with them? Is coherency then the standard? If one’s interpretation of Nietzsche is coherent, in that a narrative ties in many of the works in a consistent way, that’s a good interpretation? What’s there to say coherence is the criterion?
ER is not a metaphysical view. It’s a view about the physical universe, and therefore it’s just a a cosmological one.
I can accept wtp as a view about this world, but ER is clearly a theory about the whole of all that is, it’s unfolding through time, and time itself within the whole. In the notes he puts forth what looks like deductive arguments which attempt to show that given certain things like finite things and an infinite amount of time, ER necessarily follows.
There’s also this:
“What was the cause of the downfall of the Alexandrian culture? With all its useful discoveries and its desire to investigate the nature of this world, it did not know how to lend this life its ultimate importance, the thought of a Beyond was more important to it! To teach anew in this regard is still the important thing of all:–perhaps if metaphysics are applied to this life in the most emphatic way,–as in the case of my doctrine!”
He refers to it as a metaphysics applied to this life, which stands opposite to a metaphysics of a beyond. That sounds kind of like cosmology as physical scientists think of it, but he doesn’t call it that. He had the vocab but didn’t use it. Instead, he’s saying he wants a view of this world from which one can borrow “its ultimate importance.” On the one hand he wants becoming innocent, unsaturated with moral value, and on the other he wants a metaphysics of this world which lends it importance, value. ER is not a metaphysics of a beyond, but on the other hand it’s worth taking into account this from Schopenhauer as Educator:
“[Schopenhauer’s] greatness lies in having set up before him a picture of life as a whole, in order to interpret it as a whole; while even the most astute heads cannot be dissuaded from the error that one can achieve a more perfect interpretation if one minutely investigates the paint with which this picture is produced and the material upon which it is painted […] Nowadays, however, the whole guild of the sciences is occupied in understanding the canvas and the paint but not the picture; one can say, indeed, that only he who has a clear view of the picture of life and existence as a whole can employ the individual sciences without harm to himself, for without such a regulatory total picture they are threads that nowhere come to an end and only render our life more confused and labyrinthe.”
This is of course early Nietzsche, but the thought seems relevant, and it’s fair to say ER is not strictly speaking a scientific cosmology.
Why do I keep saying that the literature says so?
Metaphysics says so. Cosmology is an ambiguous term because it’s a branch of metaphysics and a branch of natural sciences. Nietzsche wasn’t doing science, and he wasn’t doing metaphysics; it was something in between, which he nontheless called a kind of metaphysics. ER is about physics, but it is not physics. See quote above from SE.
I’ve lost track of our conversation with this quote. Why is it important to say Nietzsche is a pragmatist? Let’s say I cede this point, what then?
Religions offer comfort in the face of finality, aside from other things, in that they say there isn’t any. If ER is a mere thought experiment, then the life it portrays in the thought experiment is not the life one actually lives, or believes one will live and die. You think you’ll die, but you love life, and hate death. ER is a comforting thought for people like that, but in affirming it, they’re not affirming their own life; their affirming this imaginary life that eternally recurs.
Yea, the sentiment is revenge, aversion of transience, a need to redeem the past, frustration at being incapable of extending one’s will over the past.
Exactly. For people who love life, the thought of death is a bummer. They’d want it to not end once and for all, and ER says that it won’t really end. There’ll be more of it. It’ll be the same, true, but if you’re faced with total annihilation or still existing, albeit a life you enjoyed living over once, then you can easily see which one’s the more harrowing.
What are they?
Nobody can prove or falsify cosmological theses----which are not the same as metaphysical theses. But you can render them more or less plausible, and get at what their underlying assumptions are. And that’s what Nietzsche did, pretty well.
Coherence and consistency across the text.
Yes, exactly. But specifically you want coherence/consistency within the text. And that doesn’t mean you can’t chart changes in position from Nietzsche across time, or across different texts.
You have a case to make for prefering incoherence?
Yup, and that doesn’t make it ‘metaphysics’ in the sense I’m using the term. (The same sense Nietzsche and the ancients do). ER is a thesis about the physical universe. Just the physical universe. And therefore it is not meta-physical. It’s on a par with any other scientific theory, empirically verifiable in principle. That’s cosmology, not metaphysics.
Ok, we’re agreed.
You can call it “picking flowers”, or anything you want, so long as you ignore the classical usage of the term and redefine somehow. Nietzsche wasn’t doing science, but he was making a hypothesis which is in principle empirically verifiable by the scientific method. Just as scientists can wander into philosophy, philosophers can start hypothesizing about science. Happens often.
Nietzsche has a pragmatic theory of truth. The ‘truth’ just is what works. Like any claim about Nietzsche, it’ll be controversial, but that’s my view of his theory of truth. In that sense, does Nietzsche think that ER is true? Well, if it makes your life better, and it enhances your will to power, then perhaps he thinks it is…
Side point: Thinking of Nietzsche as a pragmatist about truth, makes all of Nietzsche’s claims to truth cohere with his perspectivism----whereas if you thought he had a correspondence theory, they would not.
I used prove in a colloquial way. If you show inconsistency with the theory itself and are committed to consistency as a criterion for truth, then you can falsify it. On the other hand, you can “prove” one in the way we say Einstein’s cosmological views are proved. And Nietzsche didn’t do it well. He didn’t do it at all. He merely characterizes ER; he doesn’t use it to predict phenomenon which can then be verified. He makes no effort to render it plausible as scientific cosmological views are made to be plausible.
He says he doesn’t care about contradiction, and that there are contradictions in his texts, in his texts.
No, but I am aware that, as I mentioned above, Nietzsche doesn’t care about system building, or contradictions; moreover, he doesn’t consider falsehood an objection, and showing that an interpretation is inconsistent is a way of showing it can’t possibly be true. Philosophical charity is a great idea if you’re doing analytic philosophy, or trying to get at what’s true, but if you’re a scholar, you need to consider and leave room for the possibility that the author contradicts himself in his texts.
And it’s not a mere scientific cosmology either. Scientific cosmological theories don’t lend life ultimate importance, meaning, value, or anything of the sort. ER does. Nietzsche seemed to have been aware of this, which is why he calls it a kind of metaphysics.
…you saw how he characterized science when he was talking about Schopenhauer’s genius. He had a conception of what science is and what science does, and when he characterized ER he didn’t call it a cosmological theory; he also knew metaphysics and what metaphysics does, and he chose to call ER a kind of metaphysics, one which he qualifies by saying that it’s a metaphysics applied to this life. Even though ER may be in principle empirically verifiable by the scientific method, it is also more than that, and this more is why he says it is a metaphysics of this life. This more should not be categorized as a scientific theory, one because Nietzsche doesn’t call it that, and two because it’s not in principle empirically verifiable.
When he speaks about what he thinks about truth, he talks about “perspectivism.” Is there something the term “pragmatism” brings to the picture which the term he himself uses doesn’t?
Truth as something said to honor your most cherished beliefs; as a roundabout way of saying they’re valuable. Truth as a value…which one is aware that it is a value, perspectival.
They don’t have a right to it, because what is “true” is determined by the particular order of rank and particular harmony within the social structure of the drives and impulses of the new philosopher. If Nietzsche saw himself as one such new philosopher, and ER as his own hard earned truth, then to have a right to it, to see its “truth,” to recognize it as true, does not mean following his reasons. It means having had similar experiences to him, or being similar to him in some other kind of way. This is far from a cosmological view.
[tab]This gives a pretty good idea, I think, of what Nietzsche had in mind when he put forth WTP and ER. He tried to place himself among these sages.
“The sparse and un-ordered observations of an empirical nature which [Thales] made regarding the occurrence and the transformations of water (more specifically, of moisture) would have allowed, much less made advisable, no such gigantic generalization. What drove him to it was a metaphysical conviction which had its origin in a mystic intuition. We meet it in every philosophy, together with the ever-renewed attempts at a more suitable expression, this proposition that “all things are one.”
It is strange how high-handedly such a faith deals with all empiricism. In connection with Thales, particularly we can learn what philosophy has always down when it would reach its magnetically attractive goal past all the hedges of experience. Philosophy leaps ahead on tiny toe-holds; hope and intuition lend wings to its feet. Calculating reason lumbers heavily behind, looking for better footholds, for reason too wants to reach that alluring goal which its divine comrade has long since reach.”[/tab]
I thought perspectivism was a theory of truth.
As I said, “metaphysical” in the one sense means “pertaining to what’s beyond the physical”, whereas in the other sense it means “pertaining to the whole of the natural”.
Granted and I agree, if the second sense of a metaphysical theory means it pertains to the whole of the natural, and with which one can, as he says, “lend this life its ultimate importance.”
Here’s what I don’t understand: You keep saying that there is some inconsistency in the notion of ER. You’ve mentioned two different ways of thinking about ER. And you can draw from both the published and unpublished writings. But I have no idea what you think the inconsistency is. ER is not a metaphysic in any traditional sense—so if that is one half of an inconsistency, we can ignore that alleged inconsistency. But frankly, I’m lost about what you keep referring to.
And a side point: consistency is not usually thought of as a criterion of truth. You can be perfectly consistent, and still dead wrong. But as for textual scholarship, then yes, consistency is the goal.
He does a fair bit more than characterize ER in WP 1066. He makes a deductive argument, with all the premises and assumptions and physical requirements laid out. Does he gather evidence to support the physical claims he needs? No, of course not. He’s not a scientist—he just quotes them. Here’s the point: ER—the argument for ER—makes claims about the physical universe—that’s the sense in which it is a physical theory.
It doesn’t matter if Nietzsche cares about contradictions, for you who are interpreting his texts. If you have a contradiction, then one half of it cannot be true—and that’s why you should care about contradictions. If there are contradictions in a text, it does not mean maximum coherence is all of a sudden not important—it just means that there are contradictions in the text. But really, what’s your goal for this thread: Is it to talk about the actual idea of ER, or to talk about how to do secondary scholarship?
If someone contradicts themselves, then some of what they are saying is false. Typically, you want to interpret the text as if the writer is as little stupid as possible. Hence, you try to render what he says as consistent as possible. And frankly, I think Nietzsche is generally pretty consistent. He just looks like he’s not, because he equivocates sometimes, speaks in different contexts, etc. ANd as for the claim “falsehood is not an objection”----that’s a tangent, but he’s thinking of ‘falsehood’ in a particular sens…fuck it, i’m bored, nevermind.
No, it quite clearly doesn’t. ER says nothing about what the ultimate importance/meaning/purpose of life is. Part of it’s beauty is that it gives you a guide to how to live without taking a stand on ultimate purposes/values/meanings. And ER certainly doesn’t itself give life meaning/purpose/whatever.
I’m not sure what your point is. On the one hand you’re saying Nietzsche is calling ER metaphysics. On the other hand you’re saying it’s not metaphysics. But in all of this, I’m not sure what the point is. We’re pretty much agreed that ER is not metaphysics in any traditional sense. If you want to redefine metaphysics, and equivocate about it, then fine, I’ll be on board… I just don’t get what the point is.
Yea… the definition. A perspectival truth just is a pragmatic one.
I don’t know how you got it into your mind that someone thinks ER can only be seen as a cosmological view. All I’m saying is that it can be read as a cosmological view, and that it is not traditional metaphysics.
I didn’t say it was sufficient for truth. It’s necessary–an argument can’t be true if it isn’t at least consistent.
No, accuracy is the goal, and for that you have to look at their private letters, books they’ve read, people they’re influenced by, people they hate, terms they keep coming back to, etc.
What about the part where I argue that Nietzsche wants and intends it to be more than that? ER is about the physical world, but in such a way that it lends something to life. He criticizes scientists precisely for being incapable of coming up with a big picture that, again, “lends something to life.” That’s why in BGE he holds philosophy and the philosopher as sovereign over both religion and science.
And why should I care that one half cannot be true? It’s possible Nietzsche’s views are false. It’s possible there’s a contradiction there. If I spot it, then my job as a scholar is not to reinterpret it such that the contradiction goes away. It’s to present it as such.
It depends on what my task is. If I’m a scholar, then I report my findings with as little bias as possible. Sometimes that means reporting that my findings warrant the conclusion that Nietzsche contradicted himself somewhere. If I’m a Nietzschean apologetic, then my task would be to take his arguments and make them less inconsistent, to pick up where he left off and argue for his conclusions in a better way.
It seems you’re saying the job of the philosophical historian is to photoshop the wrinkles off past philosophers as best he can.
You can drop any part of the conversation you want, man. What I want is to understand what Nietzsche meant by ER. In order to do that I can’t just look at passages where he talks about ER. Other stuff may come up. If you feel obliged to respond to every one of my points, don’t.
Yea, and I’ve been talking about how scholars ought to resist the urge to smooth over the rough edges of the people they study. If your goal is truth, then you should be charitable and where an author can be interpreted in two ways, you should consider the stronger argument. However, if your goal is an accurate portrait of the history of philosophy, then where an author can be interpreted in two ways, then you should look at his other works, his private letters, his contemporaries, etc., in order to most accurately represent his views as he intended them.
Dude…he says it does, in no ambiguous terms. I quoted it. It’s on this page. Look at it.
Nietzsche’s wording is careful here. He doesn’t say ER’s conception of the world is saturated in moral value. ER doesn’t give one standard all encompassing value theory. It’s not moralistic, and in this sense it’s not metaphysical, keeping in mind that Nietzsche thinks traditional metaphysics are means by which to ground certain values. There’s a reason Nietzsche chose Zarathustra as his mouthpiece for ER, and that’s because he thinks the historical Zarathustra was the first moralist, whereas Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is the first immoralist.Becoming is innocent in the ER world-view, yet the picture of the world ER provides nonetheless lends this life it’s ultimate importance, and it is in this sense that it’s not cosmological. Standard scientific cosmological views, Nietzsche says and I quote above, don’t and can’t do this. Look at Nietzsche’s critique of science in BGE, We Scholars for example.
The value of life, or of anything else is not in the ER picture of the world; one doesn’t find answers about value in ER, yet one can create value within it. God is dead, and so is the world in which God served as the cornerstone, but Zarathustra (the beast-[philosopher]-god) created a new world and the ground of this world is fertile. In other words, in order to ascertain the ambition of Nietzsche’s ER mouthed by his Zarathustra, and consequently it’s meaning, one should look at what Nietzsche thought the historical Zarathustra was responsible for in world history. Lampert makes this point, and I’m sure Saw is aware, in the introduction of Nietzsche’s Teaching. The historical Zarathustra, he thought, created the world in which the western world lived in until Nietzsche wrote TSZ, introduced ER, and split history in two. ER, regardless of it’s actual truth or falsity, is supposed to be believed, just like the historical Zarathustra’s conception of the world and time was believed quite apart from it’s truth or falsity, consistency or inconsistency, and certainly not because of their truth or consistency.
[tab]I realize I’m rambling. Feel free to respond to any or none of what I’ve said.[/tab]
My point is ER is not a scientific cosmology as you were arguing earlier.
And I’m saying it’s neither a cosmological nor a metaphysical view, but a blend of both.
Well if we’re being testy about it, arguments are never true or false, premises are. Arguments can be valid or invalid. Conclusions sound or unsound.
“No”?? —Surely you judge accuracy by at least partly consistency. I mean, you said so in the previous sentence. As for textual scholarship, the text stands on its own. The only two foundations of a text are the front and back cover. You can always chart the history/biography of a person/idea… and that’s great, but it’s something mroe than text scholarship, since you’ve reached outside of it. You want to figure out what Nietzsche reeeaallly thought… wonderful.
You’ve never said what ER “lends” to life. It certainly doesn’t add anything to do with value, or meaning, or purpose. ER does not tell you what you should value. ER doesn’t tell you what is valuable. ER is just a guide to approaching what you already find valuable.
I thought ‘accuracy’ mattered to you…? Anyways, your job as a scholar is to make sure that you’ve actually found a contradiction, and not an equivocation or something else. Guess what that means? You’ve got to rub it around, see how it fits, see if you can make it fit—because you only know you have a contradiction if it really doesn’t fit.
No, that’s just what a philosopher would do----someone trying to get closer to good arguments, and further from bad ones. Doesn’t matter if it’s faithful to the text, for a philosopher. And for a scholar, it is still best to interpret as if the writer isn’t stupid. You don’t know if you have a real contradiction unless you’ve tried to make it consistent, and failed. That’s just basic scholarship.
I don’t think you understood what I said.
Great. So by a ‘cosmology’ I mean: A physical theory about the cosmos. ER is a physical theory about the cosmos. Therefore, ER is a cosmology. Not sure what else to say about it.
Oh my god man… here’s a tip about how to have a conversation… don’t say something like “No, it’s not that!”. “No, it’s not that either!” (While I go on about why you should agree). And then afterwards say something like “…It’s boooootttthhh”. It would have been a fucking ton easier just to say, “Yes, elements of cosmology, aaannnd”. Logically speaking, if you have a proposition like “X AND Y” …it’s just false to say “Not X”, “Not Y”. And that’s what you’ve been doing.
Yea, I have. A couple of times now. I’ve talked about the significance each and every action and experience ER gains once one experiences and acts with ER as a background. It doesn’t purport moral facts to inhere within the world, so in this sense becoming is innocent, yet if believed, life gains meaning. That’s the genius of ER. It’s not moralistic, and at the same time it’s not nihilistic.
I’m talking about scholarship. That’s not the only way, and failing to make it consistent does not mean you have a contradiction. It just means you were incapable. Luckily scholarship is not this simple. Being a scholar means immersing yourself in the life-world context in which the author you’re studying existed as a way of better understanding their train of thought. That way you delimit the ways of interpreting their works, the premises of their arguments, and the ways in which they can be fitted together. The text doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it exists in a historical context.
If you can interpret an argument as consistent if you interpret one of the premises a certain way, but the research into the life of the philosopher makes it unlikely that they held that view, then what do you suppose a good scholar should do?
My proposition is not X and Y. It’s elements of X, but not other elements of X, and elements of Y but not other elements of Y.
What significance does an action gain because of ER? It’s not in any of your posts. I’m asking because I’m curious. I’ve looked…
- You keep saying that ER lends something value/significance… you still have not said what exactly that is supposed to be. It’s not above, nor in the Schopenhauer as Educator quote.
- Like a good scholar, you haven’t sourced the above quote. It sounds like it comes from Birth of Tragedy----years before Nietzsche ever said anything about ER. Does it? Did you check to see if it was written long before ER? —That might matter, right?
- ER is not even mentioned in the quote. So, what makes you think he was talking about it, rather than other parts of “his doctrine”?
- Can you simply cite a passage from Nietzsche’s text where he talks about ER adding value/meaning/or whatever?
Depends what you are a scholar of. If you are doing philosophical scholarship, then you should re-interpret the argument to make it as strong as possible. If you are doing historical scholarship (or just history of philosophy), then give that stuff about the person’s biography…
The quote is from the notes on ER written in fall of 1881 after his ‘discovery’ of ER in mid August of the same year. I’ve only ever found these notes translated by good old Oscar Levy, in the 16th volume of the collective works.
The significance ER yields to actions and experiences is from the thought that they need to be good enough for one to want to do them all over again. If one thinks one will do it all over again for all eternity, one will attempt to live in such a way as to want to live over the same life again. It’s a this-worldly metaphysics. It is conceived by N. not because he believes it to be true and has resigned himself to believing only what is true regardless of whether the truth is beneficial, but because its a life affirming error. He’s a cultural physician who diagnosed his times with nihilism and prescribed ER as the antidote.
The book is in my office, but I can cite other portions of that section that talk about the meaning of ER tomorrow.
Seems rather farfetched to me, you would assume people who love life wouldn’t need comforting.
Maybe you could spin the idea to be a kind of revenge on religion… but the sentiment is for and foremost love for life i think.
Yeah but Nietzsche’s point was about what is most life-affirming, about loving this life… not necessarily about what is the most harrowing. If he wants to promote life-affirming values, the idea seems to work fine.
Does it bother you if someone is motivated or comforted by their imagination? If so, why and how are you bothered?