With all due respect to Hume, Kant, and Kierkegaard, I’ve found Nietzsche to be one of the more fascinating philosophers we’ve studied in this course so far, at least as far as Beyond Good and Evil is incredibly (often bordering on aggravatingly) thought-provoking. I can see where the notion of “will to power” has been and still is often misunderstood, since in its impure form (the kind the Nazis unfortunately latched on to) it does involve a fight against the weak. A genuine will to power, in its natural state free of social constraints will enable the individual to turn the will into him or herself and make themselves a better, stronger, more genuine person, able to rise above the dominant herd mentality which has turned the natural into the evil and the unnatural into the good. (We talked in class about how in many ways Nietzsche’s thought parallels many of the teaches of Buddhism, but in his emphasis on questioning social constructs which go against what is “natural” to a person, his thought also reminds me very much of Taoism.)
The similarities between Nietzsche and Kierkegaard are many; both speak of individuals transcending society/the universal and becoming an individual. For Kierkegaard this entails a leap to faith (to become a "knight of faith"); for Nietzsche it is more of a leap to independent thought (to become a "philosopher of the future"). Both men recognize the inherent difficulty of the tasks they write about. As my sociology professor would say, we are puppets on strings, and the strings are held by the society we live in; we cannot choose whether or not we wish to cut the strings until we recognize that the strings are even there. One of the problems is that many social constructs assert that there is only one truth (both in terms of what does or does not exist and what is or is not ethical), and that this truth is fixed and unchanging. Ethics in particular, as I’ve stated before, are definitely not universal, or at least I cannot think of a single universal question that can be asked of every single situation that has ever occurred or will ever occur to determine the rightness or wrongness of a particular action. What was right for the Maori pre-European contact worked for them at that time, but if we attempted to universalize the truths of the Maori to every single living culture, things might get ugly – not unlike the current state of affairs where globalization is in many cases eradicating cultural diversity. Biodiversity is crucial to the survival of the planet; I would argue – and I think Nietzsche would agree -- that cultural and philosophical diversity is likewise crucial to the survival of mankind.
Once again, we find a philosopher challenging the church of his time. While the Church wishes to keep its congregants as members of the “herd” -- or the “flock,” since the Judeo-Christian norm is to think of God as a shepherd -- this goes against the will to power by subjecting a myriad of wills to one dominant authority. Nietzsche also poses a problem for the world of science. Science purports to be objective; in reality, I do not believe that a human being is capable of complete objectivity. (I am tempted to say that no sentient being is capable of complete objectivity, but just because I have no knowledge of something does not necessarily leave out the possibility for its existence.) As previously stated, we are part of the very world we perceive; to attempt another (probably inadequate) analogy, if there is a mosaic made up of sentient, thinking tiles, one tile cannot rise above the mosaic and see what the mosaic looks like in its entirety. And yet many scientists, social and natural, past and present, have been arrogant enough to believe that they are completely objective. A biologist sees the world differently than a physicist does. An anthropologist will have a different take on things than would an economist. (Indeed, two economists will have a different perspective if they were trained in neo-Keynesian, neo-classical, or Marxist economics). But this is precisely why we have so many ways of looking at the world; no one method is able to “see” the whole picture, and the various perspectives are necessary in order to come as close as we can to doing so.
As far as perspectivalism, the analogy discussed in class of snapping photos hit home. If I am taking a walk in the woods and bring my camera (as I often do), and snap a photo of a red-tailed hawk, for me to call the resulting photo a snapshot of “truth” is only correct insofar as I acknowledge that it is the truth of one very specific angle and one very specific moment in time of a very specific place in the world, and by the way, there are probably a myriad of things going on that the camera wasn’t able to capture. If I took ten friends to the woods and we all snap a picture of a particular tree at the exact same time, even if we all used the exact same type of camera, same exposure, et cetera, none of our pictures would look the same -- and the moment after we take our pictures, the “truth” beyond our cameras will have changed. A squirrel in the tree might have moved. The wind might blow and move some leaves on the ground. Minute details we may not even see will have been altered. But even going back to the pictures we would have taken in this instance, we are not, in fact, using all the same “cameras.” The camera analogy leaves out the critical psychological aspect of perspectivalism.
Every observation a person makes about the world is filtered through their being an x-year old man/woman with a certain socioeconomic, cultural, and educational background, with certain experiences and a certain attitude they take to these experiences, with certain biological and physical attributes, who were brought up by parents with certain experiences and values (who in turn were brought up by parents with certain experiences and values, et cetera, et cetera), and who very likely have certain interests, skills, preferences, and values of their own. To further complicate matters, a person constantly experiences new things, and their values, interests, skills, and attitudes may change over time. All of this -- and no doubt many other variables I haven’t thought of -- will affect not only how a person perceives the world, but also how they subsequently interpret the world, and indeed what fragments of “reality” they choose to incorporate into their interpretation. Even Nietzsche in all his brilliance cannot escape this (as his unfortunate sexism and anti-Semitism show), but part of his brilliance is that he recognizes this, and even stresses that what he writes is his own opinions, not to be universalized, or worse, systemized.
One of the many things I’ve thought about in the course of reading Nietzsche is whether or not there is a “transcendent” reality, a truly objective “truth” that exists independent of our subjective truths, by which I mean the subjective truths of each and every individual being capable of any semblance of observation. To bring back Kant for a moment, he had talked about the noumena versus the phenomena; the actual “thing” itself versus what we perceive of the “thing.” My perception of the world will always be incomplete, in part because I can only perceive one small part at any given time, in part because I cannot even perceive all of that one small part (e.g., my hearing is poor so many things escape my auditory grasp), and also in part because there exist things completely outside of my sphere of awareness. It is to be hoped that one’s sphere of awareness increases over time, but no matter how hard any of us may try, we cannot know everything because there is more to know than can ever be known by one individual. Even humanity collectively cannot know everything, simply because we all human beings, and as such, have inherent human limitations. There are probably countless phenomena which escape our awareness; yet they exist, objectively, as the noumena, whether or not we know about them. They don’t simply pop into existence at the moment they enter our awareness, although we can say that something did not exist to us until we know about it. Even when we talk about that which one is aware, it is also a question of what we are able to perceive about the objects of our awareness. How we perceive the world is different from how a honeybee or a redwood or a paramecium perceives the world; if rocks in their own way are able to perceive the world, they too do so much differently than a human does. If there is an objective reality, it is Kant’s noumena, that which we cannot get at; thus we have to make do with interpreting the elements of the world that we can perceive.
Assuming that there is that elusive objective truth, it raises another question: does it make everything else un-truth? I would say not necessarily. In Cormac McCarthy’s play The Sunset Limited, the two characters, unnamed but referred to as “White” and “Black” in the program and the script, engage in a verbal chess game discussing the morality of suicide, the existence (or nonexistence) of God, the meaning of suffering, and the general state of the world. Both come from profoundly different backgrounds, and on most counts have completely opposite viewpoints. Yet even as both make statements about the world which are seemingly at odds with what the other is saying, they are both speaking truths about the world around them (although their respective thoughts on God might be an exception to that; it's not likely that God can objectively exist while simultaneously objectively not exist). The problem comes when we attempt to universalize our personal truth -- or for that matter, the truth purported by one society. If we embrace a number of different truths, and acknowledge that the transcendent “truth” is found somewhere in each and every individual truth, as well as acknowledging that truth is anything but stagnant, we will have come closer to a better understanding of the world around us.
