Nietzsche: On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense

[HBOMB]

this statement from him struck me:

For they must all bear within themselves the laws of number, and it is precisely number which is most astonishing in things. All that conformity to law, which impresses us so much in the movement of the stars and in chemical processes, coincides at bottom with those properties which we bring to things. Thus it is we who impress ourselves in this way. In conjunction with this, it of course follows that the artistic process of metaphor formation with which every sensation begins in us already presupposes these forms and thus occurs within them.

all this is completely and solely contained within the mathematical strictness and inviolability of our representations of time and space. But we produce these representations in and from ourselves with the same necessity with which the spider spins.

Is he saying we can't escape the numbers?  That by our own creation in numbering and the systems and laws they are relayed within we have bound ourselves?  Also that the metaphoric creation is possibly bound in this manner or that metaphoric formation is our way of escaping the numbers...or is it both?

Editted for the Ahhhh

It continually manifests an ardent desire to refashion the world which presents itself to waking man, so that it will be as colorful, irregular, lacking in results and coherence, charming, and eternally new as the world of dreams. Indeed, it is only by means of the rigid and regular web of concepts that the waking man clearly sees that he is awake; and it is precisely because of this that he sometimes thinks that he must be dreaming when this web of concepts is torn by art.

This rings particularly true to me.

Oooh and I like that part that he quoted from Pascal about the workman who dreamed 12 hours a day he was king, and the Greeks beliefs in their mythological dieties...it would seem they brought their ethereal dream world to life, not that the dream can't be true. 

[LMNO]

If I get free, I'll answer this.

[HBOMB]

I really really love this bit:

Thereby men do not flee from being deceived as much as from being damaged by deception: what they hate at this stage is basically not the deception but the bad, hostile, consequences of certain kinds of deceptions.  In a similarly limited way man wants the truth: he desires the agreeable life-preserving consequences of truth, but he is indifferent to pure knowledge, which has no consequences; he is even hostile to the possibly damaging and destructive truths.   And, moreover, what about these conventions of language?  Are they really the products of knowledge, of the sense of truth?  Do the designations and the things coincide?  Is language the adequate expression of all realities?

I find the quote above quite huggable.

On a personal note:
Nietzsche can be at both times serious and quite comedic with his little satyrical twists thrown in at the ends of very profound points.  I've read some of his writings before in college, but that was years ago and it wasn't resonating with me then.  Now some years later he makes a hell of a lot more sense. 

[Your Audience]

. . . metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.

That's the point at which somebody should have hit him with a barstool.

Speaking of metaphors that don't correspond to entities...

Come, come now LMNO. I don't want to be your barstool.

[Your Audience]

this statement from him struck me:

For they must all bear within themselves the laws of number, and it is precisely number which is most astonishing in things. All that conformity to law, which impresses us so much in the movement of the stars and in chemical processes, coincides at bottom with those properties which we bring to things. Thus it is we who impress ourselves in this way. In conjunction with this, it of course follows that the artistic process of metaphor formation with which every sensation begins in us already presupposes these forms and thus occurs within them.

all this is completely and solely contained within the mathematical strictness and inviolability of our representations of time and space. But we produce these representations in and from ourselves with the same necessity with which the spider spins.

Is he saying we can't escape the numbers?  That by our own creation in numbering and the systems and laws they are relayed within we have bound ourselves?  Also that the metaphoric creation is possibly bound in this manner or that metaphoric formation is our way of escaping the numbers...or is it both?

Gettin hung up on numbers is as much a metaphoric creation as anything else. Then again, once you've identified the Law of 5s it's easier not be ensnared by it. But we shouldn't be complacent.

[Your Audience]

Nietzsche is thrilling and liberating to read, no doubt. I admire him for going to town on deconstructing the arogance of the enlightenment. But I'm always reduced to feel that he's simply replaced one arogance with another. Objective intellect is a falicy (excuse my bad english spelling by the way), but I instinctively feel that 'will to power' is as much an arogance. It was right of him to point out that the contemporary concepts of truth he battled with were validated simply by vertue of the 'truth holders' status and skill in  using the accepted linguistic metaphors, but instead of progressing to a more Taoist perspective of staying low and humble, like water, and not engaging with power mongers on their own level, he enflamed his own arguments and gave birth to that very aristocratic ideal of the Ubermensch. It is liberating to feel power, but if it is rooted in nothing but a 'subjective' self, then, as another great poet put it, 'the centre cannot hold'. You have the potential to end up with a crazy Hitler.
I think this is why some poeple call Nietzche 'conceptually permissive'. It's easy to get your rocks off on him but be warry what you spawn.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Nietzsche spawns everything from serial killers to Marylin Manson and Hitler

It aint hard to see why

There are better and less moaning faced philosophers out there (I always saw Nietzsche as a whiny bitch with some good one-liners)

If you need to kill someone, for whatever reason, reading some Nietzsche will help you get over most of the icky moral shit. Other than that fuck him.

Cybin,

Little or no respect for greatness

[Cain]

Hang on a moment: only an idiot could take any of Netzsche's writings and end up with Nazism, or indeed any sort of position on murder.  Nietzsche hated Germany, and anti-Semites in particular, he mocked Romantic nationalism and also despised the English (who Hitler held in high accord).  He called the state "the coldest of all beasts" and thought the worst of them to be the second Reich.

If anything, Nietzsche can be blamed for the ills of early psychiatry, as he was a direct influence on Freud and the like.  However, his contribution to the understanding of Nihilism, his worryingly global skepticism, his understanding of the development of morals as a political tool and his criticisms of Christianity, while sometimes somewhat unorganized or hard to follow, are pretty much unmatched even now.  His "Superman" was never a biological creation, it was a spiritual one, as anyone who read Thus Spake Zarathustra knows, and despite how much Rosenburg wanted it to be otherwise.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Okay I owe clarification. I never meant to say that the man himself was guilty of any of this, it just seems his writings are highly subject to the interpretations of madmen. More so than a great deal of other stuff. With people this smart you really need to be this smart yourself to understand what he's saying in context. What I do understand is how a lot of his stuff can be very easily misconstrued.

Netzsche is a kinda like a modern version of the bible or the kerrang in this sense. The 'moaning faced' thing I stand by tho. Any time I've read any of his work it's struck me as decidedly glum, even though similar revelations have been presented me by others in a more upbeat light.

[Cain]

Yeah, I thought thats what you may have meant.  Sorry, late night + dealing with idiots does not make me a nice person until 3pm.  He has a very mystical tone to his writing, which is quite unusual with Germans.  I think thats part of the problem, because he can express the idea with usual German clarity, but it seems to take on a larger meaning and significance.  The only other Germans who wrote like that were von Goethe and Carl Schmitt, the latter of which was also not a Nazi, but his work was taken on by them (and he had sympathies in that direction, too).

[LMNO]

this statement from him struck me:

For they must all bear within themselves the laws of number, and it is precisely number which is most astonishing in things. All that conformity to law, which impresses us so much in the movement of the stars and in chemical processes, coincides at bottom with those properties which we bring to things. Thus it is we who impress ourselves in this way. In conjunction with this, it of course follows that the artistic process of metaphor formation with which every sensation begins in us already presupposes these forms and thus occurs within them.

all this is completely and solely contained within the mathematical strictness and inviolability of our representations of time and space. But we produce these representations in and from ourselves with the same necessity with which the spider spins.

Is he saying we can't escape the numbers?  That by our own creation in numbering and the systems and laws they are relayed within we have bound ourselves?  Also that the metaphoric creation is possibly bound in this manner or that metaphoric formation is our way of escaping the numbers...or is it both? 

Pretty much the first three, yeah.  If we are the pattern makers, one of the fundamental patterns we use are the numbers.  But numbers themselves are abstractions of metaphors (if each lemon is slightly different from the others, then the word "lemon" is a metaphor.  To say that we have 5 lemons, you are stacking the metaphors together, making patterns of patterns).  We tend to think in the foundational systems we have made, so our thinking is contained within the numbers; that is, the numbers we use influence and shape our pattern making.

I like where he went with this, in that patterns are dissolved in dreaming, as well as in some art, so that experiencing art is akin to dreaming.

At least, I think that's what he said.






Also, YA: Shut up.

[Your Audience]

His "Superman" was never a biological creation, it was a spiritual one, as anyone who read Thus Spake Zarathustra knows, and despite how much Rosenburg wanted it to be otherwise.

I don't distrust his intentions. He does imply a difference between enlightened faith or the more mysterious 'knowing' and the constraints of the patterend ego:

. . . only in the <i>invincible faith</i> that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself, in short, only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency. If but for an instant he could escape from the prison walls of this <i>faith</i>, his "self consciousness" would be immediately destroyed.

And yes he does state that the subject has to 'forget' his one-way metaphorical relationship to experience, and therefore exercise personal power from an enlightened state, but the idea of the 'superman' in a spiritual sense, is volatile and prone to missinterpretation. This is in part probably down to his writing style, but I also feel the whole concept betrays a certain arogance in Nietzche. Whichever way you look at it, the 'superman' or 'overman' is considered a superior being, better  than human. Yes, any real connection between Nietzche and Nazism is a mistake, as is any attempt to deny that he was anti-authoritarian and believed ultimately in self-law (Of the Superman). But he still projected a perfectionist ideal onto the future and created a saviour figure (personified or not), and in that is as guilty of nihlism as Christianity.

His writting and ideas are amazing, and I would tell anybody to read them. There is a lot that is good in Nietzche. But his Ubermensch still implies that we are not good enough, which in turn implies a slight superiority and arogance. I believe that should be noted.

[LMNO]

It only implies arrogance if he claimed he was the ubermensch, himself.  As far as I know, he didn't. 

It seems to me that the height of arrogance is to say that humankind is already at it's highest peak, and that there's no way we can be better.




In the same way, saying, "you're in a black iron prison, and I'm not!" is much different than saying "we're all in a black iron prison, I'm just showing you the bars."

[Cain]

His "Superman" was never a biological creation, it was a spiritual one, as anyone who read Thus Spake Zarathustra knows, and despite how much Rosenburg wanted it to be otherwise.

I don't distrust his intentions. He does imply a difference between enlightened faith or the more mysterious 'knowing' and the constraints of the patterend ego:

. . . only in the <i>invincible faith</i> that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself, in short, only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency. If but for an instant he could escape from the prison walls of this <i>faith</i>, his "self consciousness" would be immediately destroyed.

And yes he does state that the subject has to 'forget' his one-way metaphorical relationship to experience, and therefore exercise personal power from an enlightened state, but the idea of the 'superman' in a spiritual sense, is volatile and prone to missinterpretation. This is in part probably down to his writing style, but I also feel the whole concept betrays a certain arogance in Nietzche. Whichever way you look at it, the 'superman' or 'overman' is considered a superior being, better  than human. Yes, any real connection between Nietzche and Nazism is a mistake, as is any attempt to deny that he was anti-authoritarian and believed ultimately in self-law (Of the Superman). But he still projected a perfectionist ideal onto the future and created a saviour figure (personified or not), and in that is as guilty of nihlism as Christianity.

His writting and ideas are amazing, and I would tell anybody to read them. There is a lot that is good in Nietzche. But his Ubermensch still implies that we are not good enough, which in turn implies a slight superiority and arogance. I believe that should be noted.

I have no major disagreements with that.

[Your Audience]

It only implies arrogance if he claimed he was the ubermensch, himself.  As far as I know, he didn't. 

You're right in saying it's not overt. It is only my own feelings for Nietzche's approach.

Although, it is still unproven, as far as I know, that his methodoligy works. His procedure for preparing for the arrival of the superman state (of being) is still incomplete. That's not to say that it couldn't work, just that we don't know, whereas Vipassana and Za Zen have proven results.