That may be, but did you show in any of those discussions that you understand the difference? If so, can you reproduce that part here?
I, too, doubt it, actually. But doubt is not an argument.
Nietzsche writes:
“On the origin of logic. The fundamental inclination to posit as equal, to see things as equal, is modified, held in check, by consideration of usefulness and harmfulness, by considerations of success: it adapts itself to a milder degree in which it can be satisfied without at the same time denying and endangering life. This whole process corresponds exactly to that external, mechanical process (which is its symbol) by which protoplasm makes what it appropriates equal to itself and fits it into its own forms and files.” (Will to Power 510 whole, Kaufmann trans.)
By “need not” I meant that there is no proof that bacteria behave according to logic. Asking me to prove that statement is therefore asking me to prove a negative.
No, this is nonsense. Logic is itself a form of ethics or morality. Consider Nietzsche’s early essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (1873):
“Insofar as the individual wants to maintain himself against other individuals, he will under natural circumstances employ the intellect mainly for dissimulation. But at the same time, from boredom and necessity, man wishes to exist socially and with the herd; therefore, he needs to make peace and strives accordingly to banish from his world at least the most flagrant bellum omnium contra omnes [“war of all against all”]. This peace treaty brings in its wake something which appears to be the first step toward acquiring that puzzling truth drive: to wit, that which shall count as ‘truth’ from now on is established. That is to say, a uniformly valid and binding designation is invented for things, and this legislation of language likewise establishes the first laws of truth. [… T]o be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors. Thus, to express it morally, this is the duty to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie with the herd and in a manner binding upon everyone. Now man of course forgets that this is the way things stand for him. Thus he lies in the manner indicated, unconsciously and in accordance with habits which are centuries old; and precisely by means of this unconsciousness and forgetfulness he arrives at his sense of truth. From the sense that one is obliged to designate one thing as ‘red’, another as ‘cold’, and a third as ‘mute’, there arises a moral impulse in regard to truth. The venerability, reliability, and utility of truth is something which a person demonstrates for himself from the contrast with the liar, whom no one trusts and everyone excludes. As a ‘rational’ being, he now places his behavior under the control of abstractions. He will no longer tolerate being carried away by sudden impressions, by intuitions. First he universalizes all these impressions into less colorful, cooler concepts, so that he can entrust the guidance of his life and conduct to them. Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept. For something is possible in the realm of these schemata which could never be achieved with the vivid first impressions: the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, and clearly marked boundaries–a new world, one which now confronts that other vivid world of first impressions as more solid, more universal, better known, and more human than the immediately perceived world, and thus as the regulative and imperative world. Whereas each perceptual metaphor is individual and without equals and is therefore able to elude all classification, the great edifice of concepts displays the rigid regularity of a Roman columbarium and exhales in logic that strength and coolness which is characteristic of mathematics. Anyone who has felt this cool breath [of logic] will hardly believe that even the concept–which is as bony, foursquare, and transposable as a die–is nevertheless merely the residue of a metaphor, and that the illusion which is involved in the artistic transference of a nerve stimulus into images is, if not the mother, then the grandmother of every single concept. But in this conceptual crap game ‘truth’ means using every die in the designated manner, counting its spots accurately, fashioning the right categories, and never violating the order of caste and class rank. Just as the Romans and Etruscans cut up the heavens with rigid mathematical lines and confined a god within each of the spaces thereby delimited, as within a templum, so every people has a similarly mathematically divided conceptual heaven above themselves and henceforth thinks that truth demands that each conceptual god be sought only within his own sphere. Here one may certainly admire man as a mighty genius of construction, who succeeds in piling an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water. Of course, in order to be supported by such a foundation, his construction must be like one constructed of spiders’ webs: delicate enough to be carried along by the waves, strong enough not to be blown apart by every wind. As a genius of construction man raises himself far above the bee in the following way: whereas the bee builds with wax that he gathers from nature, man builds with the far more delicate conceptual material which he first has to manufacture from himself. In this he is greatly to be admired, but not on account of his drive for truth or for pure knowledge of things. When someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding. Yet this is how matters stand regarding seeking and finding ‘truth’ within the realm of reason. If I make up the definition of a mammal, and then, after inspecting a camel, declare ‘look, a mammal’ I have indeed brought a truth to light in this way, but it is a truth of limited value. That is to say, it is a thoroughly anthropomorphic truth which contains not a single point which would be ‘true in itself’ or really and universally valid apart from man. At bottom, what the investigator of such truths is seeking is only the metamorphosis of the world into man. He strives to understand the world as something analogous to man, and at best he achieves by his struggles the feeling of assimilation. Similar to the way in which astrologers considered the stars to be in man’s service and connected with his happiness and sorrow, such an investigator considers the entire universe in connection with man: the entire universe as the infinitely fractured echo of one original sound–man–; the entire universe as the infinitely multiplied copy of one original picture–man. His method is to treat man as the measure of all things, but in doing so he again proceeds from the error of believing that he has these things [which he intends to measure] immediately before him as mere objects. He forgets that the original perceptual metaphors are metaphors and takes them to be the things themselves.” (http://nietzsche.holtof.com/Nietzsche_various/on_truth_and_lies.htm)
This distinction of yours between herds and “human small groups” assumes that herds cannot be small. “Small” is a relative term.
Sure there are. Nietzsche coined the term “herd morality” in the late 1800s to refer to something that already existed in prehistory.
The concept “herd morality” is not the same as that which that term refers to…
At most, language is coeval with herd morality. Language won’t emerge if there is no herd or group, no others for the individual to communicate with. The development of the rules of language, however, is of a kind with the development of the morality of custom. For the latter especially see Nietzsche’s Dawn.
That’s not what I’m suggesting. What I’m suggesting is that herd morality–not the logical concept “herd morality”–preceded human language (though not language in general, as bees also have language).
Wrong. You can teach a child to think logically by teaching it that it’s bad, not allowed, punishable to contradict oneself, for example. Indeed, this is how the development of logical thinking always works. At the very least one is punished with not being understood, being considered thick, mad, etc.
Here’s something for you to ponder. Was there a prehistory before the concept was “invented logically by using language logically”? The concept “prehistory” was invented in history; the term obviously defines it in relation to history. But “prehistory” refers to the period before history…
