PREVIEW-Episode 61: Nietzsche on Truth and Skepticism

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some folks who at one point said on doing philosophy, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 61 is what is truth? And we read on truth and lie in a non moral sense from Friedrich Nietzsche.

0:23 Jessica: And what is the year 1873.

0:26 Mark: My name is Mark Lintonmeier speaking to you from Madison, Wisconsin.

0:29 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:31 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:34 Dylan: Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:36 Jessica: And this is Jessica Berry in Atlanta, Georgia.

0:39 Mark: Welcome, Jessica.

0:40 Jessica: Thank you. It's great to talk to you all.

0:42 Seth: Yes, welcome.

0:43 Jessica: Thanks very much for having me on and congratulations on your success with this podcast. It looks like you guys have gotten quite a following.

0:49 Mark: Well, you said at least among your students at Georgia, several of them had heard of us.

0:53 Jessica: I have heard from at least one non philosopher who've identity that listens to Partially Examined Life. And a couple of students do so. Some of our MA students, some undergraduates.

1:02 Mark: Well, nice. So, yes, you're at Georgia State University, right. We had a guest.

1:06 Jessica: You had one of our graduate students on Getty Lustula.

1:09 Mark: Yes, on our Hume Smith episode, right?

1:12 Jessica: Yes. Yeah, it was a good episode. Getty just last week defended his master's thesis. He's a Master of Arts in philosophy now. And he's off to Boston University to take the next step in doing philosophy as a living.

1:23 Wes: Great.

1:24 Seth: Wow. Congratulations to Getty.

1:25 Jessica: He hasn't yet thought better of it.

1:29 Mark: He'll get there. We'll all get there in time.

1:32 Jessica: Well, some of us don't get that far. We get stuck.

1:34 Mark: Maybe you consider doing philosophy for a living. But then you grew old and at age 85, you will think better of it.

1:40 Jessica: That's entirely possible. Maybe even before then.

1:43 Mark: All the people that are dead, they have stopped doing philosophy. They're all quitters.

1:48 Dylan: So you say, Mark.

1:49 Jessica: That's a good point. That's a deep point.

1:53 Mark: Except that they're trapped. So Nietzsche, even though he's long dead, no longer doing philosophy, most of the occurrence of the earth, he's not been doing philosophy. And yet we pigeonhole him in that little narrow window where he was doing it.

2:04 Jessica: Yeah, so, I mean, Nietzsche had a career that was a scant 20 years or so that's frozen in time now like a bug in the amber. That's I guess, what we're looking at tonight.

2:13 Mark: And from doing philosophy he got syphilis, right?

2:16 Jessica: Yes. It's now been documented by lots and lots of forensic pathologists looking at his case.

2:22 Wes: So let's Say how we know Jessica.

2:24 Mark: She was one of her classmates. I had contacted her early on when I was trying to contact everybody that I could remember the name of to say, listen to our podcast or you should be on our podcast. And finally, I guess we're cool enough that you deign to just. Actually, we got your okay. Like last year, and it just took us this long to.

2:43 Jessica: I finally attained a status such that I got noticed by the partially examined life.

2:49 Seth: No, no, no.

2:49 Jessica: Okay. Too much. Sorry.

2:51 Seth: I'm sorry. Yeah, I think it was the other way around. It was simply a schedul. You're actually fully examined, Jessica.

3:00 Jessica: That sounds a little creepy, Seth.

3:02 Seth: Well, I didn't mean it to come off that way, but you didn't drop out. You actually.

3:06 Wes: Jessica finished the journey that we.

3:08 Seth: You finished the journey. And you're an actual, real academic working in the real world, real philosophy.

3:13 Jessica: Wow. I rarely hear myself described as working in the real world, as, you know, students love to say that academia is precisely the opposite of the real world, but I agree with you. Yeah, it's a job. It's got offices and fax machines and computers and tons of email. It's the real world. And I've been at Georgia State for about six years now.

3:30 Wes: Are you from Georgia originally?

3:31 Jessica: Oh, no.

3:32 Wes: You kind of have a little bit of a twang now. I'm from Georgia.

3:35 Jessica: No, I have a lot of family from the South. I grew up in the Southwest, but until I left Texas, that was the furthest east I'd ever lived. I've just been moving progressively more south. And in spite of my initial reservations, Atlanta has turned out to be a great place to be. It's a good town and a great department.

3:51 Wes: Great.

3:51 Jessica: So I've been very, very fortunate.

3:53 Mark: And what is the name of your big time Nietzsche book?

3:55 Jessica: Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition. Came out last year with oup.

4:00 Mark: Congratulations.

4:01 Jessica: Thank you. Thanks. It's been nice to have it out there.

4:03 Seth: I smell a thread hijack coming, I'm telling you.

4:06 Wes: What does that mean?

4:07 Jessica: Is that a technical term?

4:09 Seth: I think that as soon as you guys get a whiff of the skeptics and ancient philosophy, Wes and Dylan are going to jump on that.

4:16 Jessica: Well, that's great.

4:17 Seth: I try to go after it as much as possible.

4:19 Jessica: Terrific. No, I'm happy to do that, actually.

4:21 Seth: That would be just fine.

4:22 Jessica: I got started on this project for better or for worse, because there's kind of a dearth of work on Nietzsche and the Greeks. People who get interested in classics and start doing respectable ancient philosophy work. Tend not to be terribly attracted to Nietzsche. And people who've worked in Nietzsche for a long time, until recently, knew that Nietzsche was enamored of the Greeks, but didn't take a lot of time to learn the Greek and look at the texts and read the people Nietzsche read. Bring the two together.

4:48 Wes: Yes. And I did get a book from you, a copy of your book, which

4:51 Jessica: I. Oh, that's right. Good.

4:52 Wes: Will read at some point, which you've

4:54 Mark: read all of and will report on during this episode.

4:57 Speaker: Right.

4:57 Mark: I haven't seen it, so I'm skeptical. I don't believe that my conception of someone's book could correspond to reality, just in principle.

5:04 Jessica: Well, then you're not that sort of skeptic.

5:06 Wes: I feel a segue there. That was a very awkward, desperate attempt at a segue.

5:11 Seth: Mark.

5:13 Mark: Yes. Let's talk about why we're doing this particular essay. So this is an unpublished essay from early on in his career. He had done the Birth of Tragedy is kind of his famous aesthetics book, and then this. And he didn't publish it. Why did he not publish it? Was it not done, you said, Jessica.

5:28 Jessica: Well, I mean, it's anybody's guess why he didn't publish it. Throughout his career, Nietzsche always scribbled things down. He kept lots of notebooks, wrote down ideas, copied passages from works he was reading, took notes on other people, and he wrote sometimes slightly longer essays or drafts of things. And those things would occasionally find their way into published works later on and occasionally not. I think the best assumption is probably that he just didn't deem it fit for publication. It never articulated what it was he wanted it to do or he thought better of it.

6:00 Mark: But nonetheless, this has been picked up on, particularly by postmodernists, people that have a very complicated and perhaps nonsensical view. No, all right. I won't. I won't start being provocative right off the bat. View of truth itself as being a primary inspiration because he says very radical things, not just like the pragmatists, that truth can't be correspondence to the real world because we don't know anything about the real world. Truth has to be coherent or something like that. Those are contemporary theories that are lie, but this one is very radical sounding. Right. It's that there is no truth. It's all lies.

6:32 Wes: Truths are illusions.

6:34 Seth: I didn't get that sense.

6:35 Wes: Right.

6:36 Jessica: Yeah. It's actually very difficult to say what this essay is about. I mean, it's not a real essay. We have one section of an essay. Which essay was actually intended to be part of a much larger work. So there's another unpublished essay from around the same time, and that's Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. And these things were intended to be somehow stitched together in a much more ambitious project about the origins of philosophy and where the philosophical impulse in human beings comes from in the first place. It's kind of an inquiry into origins. It's not that far removed from the genealogical method that Nietzsche would later develop that he would become so well known for.

7:16 Wes: Right. It seems related to his question in Genealogy of Morals about where these sorts of ascetic values come from. Right. Because arguably this drive to truth, you know, he's asking a question about the origin of the drive for truth when our intellect is sort of designed to deceive us. So it seems counterintuitive that we would ever develop this drive in the same way that it seems counterintuitive that we would ever develop other sorts of ascetic values. It's reminiscent of the later question in the Genealogy of Morals. I guess it's the extra moral version of it.

7:48 Jessica: Right. Right.

7:48 Mark: Say what you mean by the extra

7:50 Jessica: moral there in this particular essay. Truth in the extra moral sense, originally, Nietzsche suggests, just starts. When human beings collect themselves together into societies, recognize that there are things they want and they got to get stuff done. And it's easier to do that with other people than alone. And out of this primordial almost situation, language somehow emerges as a tool for just getting stuff done. And this is just a page or two into the essay. What he calls the first laws of truth are just kind of conventions. They're agreements between people. We're going to use this sound or this phoneme to designate that kind of thing, and it just facilitates our practical advantages. We develop signals one another, things like, you know, poison, predator, and those things turn out to be really handy. And when people misuse these fixed conventions, it just disrupts the system that causes us inconvenience, and we come to dislike the misuse of these fixed conventions. But there's a sense in which people are speaking truly or correctly, designating things rightly, and a sense in which they're not. But that's an entirely pre moral sense of truth and lying. So I think that's the extra moral sense here.

9:04 Dylan: He says man, out of need and boredom wants to exist socially. Herd fashion requires a peace pact, and he endeavors to banish at least the very crudest war of all against all from his world. And this peace pact brings with it something that looks like the first step toward the attainment of this enigmatic urge for truth. We want to get along together, right? So we're going to have this notion of truth by which we line up what other people say with what we say to each other and making that kind of lining up, and also with our own experience and judgment of the world through our own perceptions, which would be seem to me like two kinds of correspondence. And it seems to be emphasized here that that correspondence is primarily one that's solely rooted in language. And I'm just wondering if I'm misinterpreting it or why that's the case.

9:47 Wes: It begins with the avoidance of harm and pain, right? Because untruth through, let's say, fraud or something like that can lead to harm. And that's essentially what we're initially trying to avoid. Truth comes on the scene in this extra moral sense, right?

10:01 Jessica: So there's sort of a utilitarian beginning. The translation I'm looking at is Brazeal's translation. What he says in the beginning is it's sort of a Hobbesian moment. There's a kind of contract. There's a peace treaty, he says, that brings in its wake something that. It appears to be a first step toward explaining this puzzling truth drive. And that's Nietzsche's puzzle through this entire essay and I would argue, through his entire career. One thing that Nietzsche cannot let go of is the question why on earth we have placed the such an inestimably high value on truth when it's clear that it's not always good for us, yet we say it's what we always want. So here, if we just look back at the text, this legislation of language, he says, establishes the first laws of truth. Then we have people who make mistakes, they misuse the conventions. Maybe somebody cottons onto the idea of intentionally misusing those fixed conventions. Maybe somebody decides to say something like, I am rich, and the proper designation for his condition would be poor. He misuses fixed conventions by means of arbitrary substitutions or even reversals of names. And if he does this in a selfish and harmful manner, society ceases to trust him and will exclude him. So when we look back at that, that's going to look to us like punishment. But we're looking at it very much through the lenses of our own highly moralized view of truth being valuable and lying being morally wrong. What Nietzsche wants to suggest is there's a time at which people doing this. It's inconvenient and can be positively harmful, right? Messing up a designation like Poisonous or predator can be difficult. But what he says is even at this stage, what we hate is basically not deception itself. We don't have a moral conception of it yet, but rather the unpleasant, hated consequences of certain sorts of deception. And then it's two pages later or so, maybe three or four, where Nietzsche finally gets around to coming back to that question. Wait, we still don't know where the drive for truth comes from. So we have that kind of origin story about how it gets off the ground, but that doesn't shed any light on the mystery of how human beings came to value something that is not obviously good for them, namely truth.

12:11 Wes: And then as far as the question of language, because, Dylan, I think you were asking about language, I think, in that early account, because here he is giving that. That's his early sketch of the answer to why we have a truth drive. He's talking about social mores being designed to facilitate peace and prevent conflict, let's say. Right. So language turns out to look like a subset of these customs, and language looks like here to be something that's customary. When he gives this early sketch of the solution to why we have the truth drive, he's also giving us another reason for why it is that the intellect ends up being inherently deceptive. Right. Because that's one of the things he does early on in the essay. He gives a litany of reasons as to why we would be confused about the truth drive. The intellect can't transcend specifically human interests. There's a pride in possession of the intellect that is like a blinding fog over the eyes of men. And then this function of self preservation, which is at the same time an explanation of the truth drive, or at least an initial sketch of an explanation, but also leads us into dissimulation, flattering, lying and so on, and all those sorts of things which really play an important role in social life.

13:21 Jessica: Right, right.

13:21 Mark: And he puts this right off as a means by which weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves, since they've been denied the chance to wage the battle for existence with horns or with sharp teeth of great beasts of prey. So, for instance, setting up a class structure itself, obviously there is a linguistic component, but there's more to it than linguistics. If you can puff yourself up and present an image of yourself in relation to your fellows as being of a superior class, say, than them, then that is a weapon right there that is enshrined in convention that's not entirely captured just by knowing their language. Say it's a custom.

13:56 Wes: Yeah, yeah. So this initial truth Drive actually leads to the simulation because it leads to people's manipulation of it.

14:04 Dylan: So what are we driving towards when we have a truth drive? That seems to be different than talking about what we mean by truth. So in this case, the drive for truth means what is truth? In this particular case, what is it that we're driving towards? Because it sounds like, again, this notion of truth is radically social, so it becomes a convention which would make it distinct from something like being correct. Right?

14:30 Jessica: Well, at least we think it does. I think when Nietzsche talks about the truth drive here and later in his published works, the Will to Truth, what he's talking about is the simple fact that philosophers and scientists, as two chief representatives of this view, take themselves to be pursuing truth. It's the goal of all their activity. It's what their life work is oriented towards and something they place value on. So it's actually a moral position. Right. So there's the truth drive. We think we want truth, some sort of accurate picture, an accurate representation of reality, ideally an objective one. And then there's our actual situation, which doesn't seem to be conducive to getting that, and which in fact seems to be facilitated by a lot of deception and illusion.

15:15 Dylan: Let me try to phrase my question a different way. You could say I really aspire towards the beautiful. And you could talk about the question and the problem of why do I have this aspiration toward the beautiful? And you would also have the, seems to me separate question of what do you mean by the beautiful in that you aspire towards it? Those are two different things. And I'm asking us to sort out a little bit is when Nietzsche is talking about the drive to truth, what is entailed in that term, truth for him, this case? What is he saddling the philosophers and the scientists with doing? Because it seems to me that amongst them they might have different criteria for what it means to have truth, to identify it as true. Even if they all have a drive to truth, they might have that all in common, but what they identify truth as might be very, very different.

16:08 Mark: Okay, I guess I just don't see him doing an operational deconstruction of the term truth in terms of the methods of the various sciences to get at the truth, that he thinks that he's starting this with a fundamental thing, that we think that we know what we're talking about, we think is basic. And one of the ways of approaching that is to say, yeah, well, you think you all have the urge for truth. But look, scientists and painters, you all have different methods of breaking this down. That would be one way to approach it. And he does end up eventually talking about the difference between, say, scientists and artists. But from the start, it seems like he's sort of talking about this as if this was something that we take right now to be a fundamental drive of man. You know, there's probably authors in particular that he's reacting to that were saying, we all want to know, and that's where all religion comes from and all this stuff. And he's trying to turn that around and give it a more, I would say, Freudian twist. Of course, Freud was taking from Nietzsche, not the other way around. But to say, no, there's gotta be some other. Assuming that we are animals and we are the way we are because of evolution, why would we have this seemingly counterproductive drive? Because really, illusion, according to his analysis, is beneficial to us socially. And it's one of the key strategies that we have developed to not only. Only get ourselves to survive as individuals, but then to consequently structure the whole society. It holds society together, these shared fictions. So he's asking why do these philosophers think that the drive to truth is a fundamental human drive, when pretty obviously that shouldn't be the case? So he's trying to puzzle out the motivations.

17:37 Wes: Yeah, I think he accepts that the drive is fundamental. I don't think he's trying to say that philosophers claim it's fundamental. And then he's challenging that. Right. He's accepting that there's a drive to truth, and then he's trying to figure out why, when it's the case that the intellect is prone to deception, Then he gives this long account of concept formation. Right. And a kind of obviously Kantian account of knowledge which says that the way knowledge works, we're bound to have access only to illusions and not truth with a capital T. Or we don't have access to things in themselves. So I think part of the answer to Dylan's question is what is he assuming to be entailed in the scientific or philosophical drive to truth? He seems to think that what's entailed is a belief that we can have access to things in themselves.

18:22 Dylan: That makes a big difference, it seems to me, when you want to call truth an illusion, right. What you mean by truth there makes all the difference in the world. How you understand, if it corresponds, what you see, your perceptions give you direct access or not, and what kind of qualifications you would make to that and what you mean by concept. It may be that talking about the drive to truth it utterly doesn't matter what you mean by truth.

18:46 Jessica: Maybe there are two different questions here. So, Dylan, you asked your question a minute ago, and then when Mark was talking about truth a minute ago, it struck me that I think you might be talking about a couple of different things. So let me go back to Mark, and then I'll get back to Dylan. So, Mark, when you said that, you don't really see Nietzsche deconstructing the concept or giving us a real analysis of

19:06 Mark: the concept of truth in operational terms. He's giving an analysis of the concept of truth, but he's not saying what you thought was a unified thing of seeking truth is actually going to be very different according to what job you have or something.

19:18 Jessica: Well, I mean, I don't think he has any analysis of the concept of truth here at all. At least none that's original to him. One of the irritating things about the reception history of this essay has been that everybody thinks that Nietzsche's got a theory of truth and knowledge and that he thinks truth is impossible and knowledge is unattainable for human beings, and that this essay shores up those views. And one of the reasons for thinking that that's not the case is that there is no definition of truth here. But there are a lot of provocative statements about truth. And one of them is that philosophers and scientists, Nietzsche suggests, take themselves to be pursuing truth, but he's skeptical about the value that they place on it. This essay actually is about the value of truth and knowledge, not about truth and knowledge. So then, Dylan, it seems like what you were asking was. Well, look, when he tells us that, you know, say, scientists or philosophers have a conception of themselves as pursuing truth, we've got to be able to cash out what he thinks they take themselves to be pursuing. What is the philosophical notion of truth that Nietzsche is so suspicious? The value of here? Right. Yeah. So, personally, I think it's this. And it starts out from the point about language, but it doesn't rest there. Human beings have a mode of representation. The way we represent the world to ourselves is linguistically. That's how we construct our representations and convey them to other people. And he thinks it ought to be clear from the way language most probably originated that language is not an impersonal, disinterested phenomenon in human history. It arises as a tool. It's a convenience for us. We need to get certain things done. So the designations we assign to things reflect our interests and our needs and our preferences. Yet somehow, peculiarly, we've become attached to the idea that the most valuable thing we could possibly have is a representation of real reality, mind, independent reality. Right. A representation that basically bears no traces of the people for whom it is a representation. Right. A disinterested representation of reality. And that, if we have to put it in language, is just an incoherent notion. So I think the idea of truth that he is suggesting philosophers and scientists go after, and that is a contradictory impossibility for us, is objective truth or the kind of truth that we often associate with objectivity or disinterestedness. That would be the long, short answer to your question. It's objectivity.

21:40 Wes: The section on language is kind of brief in comparison to the amount of time he spends on concept formation.

21:47 Jessica: It's very brief, but it's interesting. The most famous and most quoted part of this essay.

21:51 Mark: Let's read the quote.

21:52 Jessica: All right. Well, we're either talking about something I have on page 84, that truths or illusions which we have forgotten are illusions. Right. The passage from which that comes, I think, is probably the most famous. What then is truth? Nietzsche says, a movable host of metaphors, metonymies and anthropomorphisms, in short, sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical and binding truths or illusions, which we've forgotten are illusions. They're metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force. Coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.

22:32 Wes: And at that point he's already into his talk about concepts. And when he uses the word metaphor, I don't think he's simply using it linguistically because he talks about the idea of, let's say, an image or a sound being a metaphor for a nerve stimulus. Right.

22:47 Jessica: But etymologically, a metaphor is a transference.

22:50 Wes: So metaphor sort of has two uses in this. One is in our typical linguistic sense. And then the other, he's using it in a kind of metaphorical sense when he talks about concepts.

23:00 Seth: So we're talking a lot about truth. I don't want to forget what Jessica mentioned early on, that he starts off the essay talking about knowledge. And there's a strong connection between the concept of knowledge and the concept of truth as far as nature is concerned. And really, knowledge is what gives human beings a sense of self importance. It's sort of the vehicle of egotism or of our sense of our place in the natural world. If you Will. And it's that maybe haughtiness that deceives us about what the value of actual living is. So, Mark, when you mentioned the comment about we don't have horns and fangs, so we can't actually do things. He's trying to make a point about how what we do do is we use our intellect to dissimulate. And that essentially the activity of rationality is in itself a substitute. It's intended to take the place of actually doing and being in the world in kind of an active, willful way. And so I feel like this discussion about truth and the idea of building up concepts is all built on that edifice of him trying to show that the way in which human beings use their rationality and use their intellect to create a representation of the world is really a substitute for something that I imagine he would think would be more important, more primary, something like that. And that somehow undergirds this whole discussion.

24:28 Mark: So exertion of power is the thing that it's. I mean, that's the way he put it. We don't have claws, so we have to use this.

24:34 Seth: Well, at the end of the essay, he contrasts the life of the intellect versus an aesthetic life. And I felt like it was fairly clear in the early part of the essay that we substitute this idea of truth with a capital T as some sort of privileged access to things in themselves or to the real world, when in reality what it is is kind of a social convention that's about trust. Truth is really about a social convention that allows you to say that somebody can be trusted or not trusted. And at least in that sense, already we've deceived ourselves about what the point of truth is in the beginning because we believe we're accessing some sort of truth with a capital T or real things, real states, real objects, real entities. But also, it's the fact that it has this moral overtone that Jessica mentioned.

25:23 Jessica: That way of reading it, though, commits Nietzsche to an awful lot of statements about what truth is. It really just is a social convention, or it really just is this or that. And he doesn't have any such notions. It's not his task here to give us a metaphysical or semantic analysis of truth or the truth concept.

25:41 Dylan: Well, he's not analyzing, but he certainly has something he's carrying around with it. Right.

25:45 Jessica: I think what he's doing is he's putting his thumb on what we take truth to be and the value we put on it. And he's criticizing that he has no positive view to advance here, really

25:59 Seth: so

25:59 Dylan: you're saying he's wound up in a bunch because everybody else.

26:04 Jessica: He's clearly wound up in a bunch. Yes, Nietzsche was clearly, if anybody was wound up in a bunch.

26:09 Dylan: But everybody else thinks that truth is getting at the thing that is in itself and that everybody else is just too blind to see that that's not what truth is. And furthermore, that's not what I think it is either. I'm not going to tell you what it is because I don't think it has anything to do with the thing in itself. He's not wringing his own hands, he's just wagging his finger.

26:29 Jessica: I think he is wagging his finger, and I think he's wagging his finger only at a certain kind of pretension that he discovers in human beings. His job is to expose that. But I don't think that he's not that sort of the Socrates that some of our students get the impression of. You know, the guy who's got all the answers. But he's playing his cards close to his chest just because he's a jerk. He really has a view. He knows what piety is, but he's not going to tell anybody just because he's stingy or mean. I don't think Nietzsche's got that view.

27:02 Mark: A contentious version of Socrates.

27:04 Jessica: Yeah, exactly. But it's one that many undergraduate students, the first time you throw the euthyphro at them and they see Socrates and his style in the marketplace, they kind of think he's a jerk because it seems like he knows something but isn't being forthcoming. And that would be annoying. But I don't think that Nietzsche has that he's not being forthcoming about it. What Nietzsche's after is exposing just the tremendous conceit, the sheer vanity of the human animal and how incredibly self impressed we are. We have this tremendous pride in our own intellectual faculties. And Nietzsche thinks a lot of this is really silly. And one of his philosophical tasks here and throughout his corpus is to remind us that we're animals. Kind of vain little animals, but we're animals.

27:50 Wes: But if there's anything positive here, I think there's again, in this long account of the way concepts falsify the world, right. There seems to be some sort of positive account of the kind of knowledge that we're capable of having.

28:04 Jessica: Right.

28:04 Wes: He begins by talking about this primitive world of metaphor and the quote unquote, immediately perceived world. And then we get concepts that essentially falsify this world. And there's a number of different ways in which they do that. But one of them is, for instance, by making unequal things equal. So, for instance, there are no forms, there are no concepts, there are no species as metaphysical entities. And when we subsume individuals under them, we to some extent falsify by ignoring their differences. And beyond that, concepts are simply constructed. He uses this word construction at some point.

28:41 Jessica: Exactly. And that's why it's a falsification.

28:43 Wes: Yeah.

28:44 Jessica: We falsify because we're constructing these cognitions. And we're doing that in cases where we take ourselves not to be constructing anything at all, where we take ourselves to be just discovering. We think that our representations of reality are capable of sort of carving the world at its joints, that we're capable of getting an unmediate representation of reality, real reality. And Nietzsche knows enough, and he knows enough about science and the science of vision and perception in the 19th century to know that even perception, to say nothing of cognition, is an incredibly active process. We contribute a lot to that, but we take ourselves not to. And we have a moral stake in claiming that we don't contribute anything. We're capable of getting the pure, unvarnished truth. And that's what we're all after. And this is a really weird situation,

29:31 Seth: if I'm hearing what you're saying, is that he's pointing out that what we think we have access to, we don't have access to. But in bringing up the social characteristics of truth as trust, he's merely pointing out that that happens to be the way things are conventionally and not advancing that as a theory of truth.

29:51 Wes: It's not just convention, it's the way human cognition is structured. Right.

29:55 Mark: If you want to read Schopenhauer's and Kant's entire epistemology into him. Yes, but the way he talks, he

30:01 Wes: talks of this X, which is an explicit reference to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, this unknown X. I don't think it's reading into him. I think it's incredibly explicit.

30:10 Mark: Read a quote.

30:11 Jessica: Right. No, it's not reading into him.

30:12 Mark: It's a short essay. We should reread lots of quotes.

30:15 Seth: Yeah, okay. Only through forgetfulness can man ever achieve the illusion of possessing a truth in quotes in the sense just designated. If he does not wish to be satisfied with truth in the form of a tautology, that is with empty shells, then he will forever buy illusions for truths. And that's where he launches into the whole nerve stimulus that gives us the concept. Discussion.

30:37 Mark: What is in the sense just designated? What is the sentence before that?

30:41 Seth: That's the piece right before he makes

30:43 Wes: this kind of joke. You could see this as directed at Schopenhauer or Kant, but someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as well. He's making a joke about this concept of objectivity where basically the concepts according to which we make judgments about things are the same concepts that we actually construct these things with. So when we make a judgment, objectivity involves coming back to the object we've constructed with the same concepts we've constructed them with and finding them there. Essentially. It's sort of a weak conception of objectivity. Kant was perfectly satisfied with that. Right. Kant wasn't lamenting in the way that Nietzsche seems to be doing here, although you can argue about that. But Nietzsche seems to be lamenting or at least accusing others of assuming that what's valuable is access to things in themselves. Where under the theory of knowledge we're dealing with, we don't get access to things themselves. We get access to appearances that we've essentially constructed.

31:38 Seth: Wes I think it's even more fundamental than that. So you have this phoneme, if that's the right word, tree, and that we use this word, we call it a word, but it was really a sound before it became a written thing, or maybe not. And it's just arbitrary. It's arbitrary that we call trees trees and color, you know, snow, snow and so on and so forth. And it's the arbitrariness of our designations for things that is like hiding something behind a bush and going to find it.

32:07 Wes: I don't see that much follows from that arbitrariness of naming.

32:10 Dylan: That kind of arbitrariness doesn't matter at all. What's going to matter is whether or not those words correspond in a way that you can translate from one thing to another. It's going to matter that there's a one to one relation. But the fact that you have any sort of arbitrary sign that doesn't matter at all. I mean, that's a really weak objection. If that's really the content of the objection that we call it a tree or blue or red is arbitrary, that's really weak. I doubt that he means it that way.

32:38 Mark: And he's not. He's not giving the more subtle, potentially Saussurean point that it's not just that we've chose tree or arbol, it's the fact that, that we could call this thing a tree, where that's the object. Or we could call a clump of trees make that the basic object tree, or we could call the tree plus the surrounding grounds, like do you consider the roots part of the tree? That kind of arbitrariness in the way we carve up in the world in the first place. He doesn't even seem to be making that point that I saw.

33:03 Jessica: That is his point.

33:04 Wes: Yeah, the carving up.

33:06 Jessica: Yeah. We've somehow forgotten, you know, as we were designating things that words reflected, they're not completely arbitrary. Maybe it's a poor translation, maybe contingent would be better. What we forget is that when we make these designations, they reflect our interests. Right, and our needs. They're not totally random, they're calculated. But they're calculated to reflect our interests. And so, as Mark was just saying, if our interests happen to be in the part of the object that's above and below the ground, we're going to mean the tree and its roots. Or if our interests happen to be broader, we'll take in the whole forest. Or we designate things according to our interest and then somewhere along the line forget that these designations reflected our interests and begin to think what is suggested sometimes in Plato, that our categories carve the world at its joints, so to speak, such that our language reflects reality. And that's a pretense. That's the pretense that Nietzsche thinks we've forgotten is a pretense and that he wants to expose. It's a pretense and it's pretentious. It's got a kind of dual sense.

34:09 Mark: Let me get a quote out there so we can get his words and see if everybody likes your interpretation. There. What is a word? It is the copy and sound of a nerve stimulus. But the further inference from the nerve stimulus to a cause outside of us is already the result of a false and unjustifiable application of the principle of sufficient reason. I'll Schopenhauer so far. If truth alone had been the deciding factor in the genesis of language, and if the standpoint of certainty had been decisive for designations, then how could we still dare to say the stone is hard? As if hard were something otherwise familiar to us and not merely a totally subjective stimulation. We separate things according to gender, designating the trees masculine. The plant is feminine. Well, not in this language. But what arbitrary assignments. How far this oversteps the canons of certainty. We speak of a snake. This designation touches only upon its ability to twist itself and could also therefore fit a worm. More and more imperfections in the translation here. What arbitrary differentiations, what one sided preferences? First for this, then for that property of a thing. The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression, otherwise there would not be so many languages. It seems like there's a few different points sort of being shoved together in that passage.

35:19 Jessica: There are a ton. Can I jump in and name a couple?

35:22 Wes: Not all of them work.

35:22 Jessica: Yeah, well, I don't know. There are things I like about this little essay.

35:26 Wes: Well, the multiplicity of languages.

35:28 Jessica: Yeah, well, that's at the end of my list. So the first thing, the mention of Schopenhauer, the fourfold root, that's obviously in the background, as is Kant. Right. As Wes suggested before. But not just Kant, also a whole tradition. Kant really set the agenda not just for philosophy in the beginning of the 19th century, but also for science. You had just a legion of scientists out there either trying to vindicate or refine or overturn by empirical evidence Kant's description of our mental faculties, our cognitive architecture. And Nietzsche was tremendously fascinated by all of those people. So all the talk about things like nerve stimuli and the sound paintings and so on are the result of Nietzsche just kind of lifting, in a fairly cavalier way from people like Ernst von Bayer and Herman von Helmholtz and all these scientists that we never hear about in the 19th century who were doing things like measuring the nerve stimuli, the rapid heartbeats of certain animals, and trying to tie those physiological peculiarities about different animals to the way they perceive and the way they must cognize and represent the world. And Nietzsche got to be really fascinated with this and the conclusion of a lot of that neo Kantian scientific research, some of it friendly to Kant, some of it unfriendly to Kant, but all of it neo Kantian in the sense that it started from Kant. All of that stuff is informing Nietzsche's view here about the activity that goes on in cognition and how much we contribute, how. No perception. By the very nature of perception, there's so much stuff that's going on, we're not going to have any ability to calibrate our perceptions and adjudicate which one is more veridical than which. So Schopenhauer, Kant and a bunch of neo Kantians are in the background. And then when he gets to this bit about the arbitrary assignments and the gender distinctions in language, one of the things that attracted me to this essay in the first place is that this argument also appears prominently in a skeptical ancient Greek philosopher with whom Nietzsche was familiar, Sextus Empiricus, and in a work against the grammarians which is the first of a long series of skeptical treatises against the learned dogmatists who propound theories. Sextus goes after linguists for thinking that if we analyze language, it'll tell us something about the structure of reality, because language has somehow captured the structure of reality and carves the worlds at its joints. And Sextus just says, essentially, ah, this is absurd. If we read off the structure of reality directly from it and represented it in an unmediated way cognitively and turn that into language, there wouldn't be a bunch of different languages. But there are. We wouldn't assign one gender to one thing in one language and another gender to that same thing in another language. This wouldn't happen. All those arguments are just straight from Sextus empiricists. They're skeptical arguments against the Platonic intuition that we can intuit reality directly and carve the world at its joints, that we have a direct line to reality. So it was a long tirade, but very helpful.

38:29 Mark: So if you become a professional philosopher, then you are much cooler than the rest of us because you can bring Sextus in at the drop of a hat.

38:37 Jessica: Sextus is awesome. He's fantastic, actually. I would highly recommend read book one of Outlines of Pyrrhonism, see what you think of the arguments. It's just amazing.

38:45 Wes: Yeah, we should do that.

38:46 Jessica: And if some parallels don't jump out at you, I would be shocked if anybody could read Sextus and Nietzsche back to back and not be struck by the parallels. I'd be sure.

38:54 Mark: All right, now. But did you actually have to read those obscure neo Kantian German scientists, or is that just a bit of lore from Nietzsche secondary literature?

39:03 Jessica: No, I've been mired in that stuff. I've come to the decision that that is much more the job of somebody who's an intellectual historian and more of a history detective than I am. But I've spent a while mired in that stuff. Nietzsche read a lot of science. There's a lot of work yet to be done on what he made of all of that stuff. I think I've spent some time recently working on that. But it's a deep rabbit hole when you start reading some of these neo Kantian scientists. It's fascinating stuff. And if you're interested in things like color theory and the debates about whether Newton was or wasn't right, that's kind of interesting because it's a debate. Nietzsche ended up entirely on the wrong side of supporting Schopenhauer, who supported Goethe against Newton in thinking that all colors could somehow be derived from white light. So on. It's kind of a mess. But one thing that comes out of this tremendous volume of work is basically that there is so much influencing what we have always taken to be raw perceptions that we can't really take anything for granted. All the scientific work for a period of time in the 19th century supports a very skeptical conclusion that there are excellent arguments on both sides of just about any question you'd want to raise in respect of Kant's assessment of the faculties, the categories, and the rest of the cognitive architecture that he develops in the first Critique. It's entirely indeterminate, and the best science that we can muster can't answer these questions. And Nietzsche was just kind of fascinated by all that literature. This is where the borrowings in this essay, when he's talking about things like nerve stimuli and the sound paintings, he's reading a lot of science that we don't read and that we don't know. So there's even more in the background here than we're aware of, typically.

40:46 Dylan: I have to confess that I feel a little bit disappointed to hear this.

40:50 Jessica: I'm sorry. I seem to have that effect on people when I start talking about Nietzsche. I'm not sure why. So what's disappointing?

40:59 Dylan: There's so much going on in the 19th century in physics and biology that on the one hand is about perception, but there's also all this stuff that's going on about looking at the world and seeing the effects of things, but trying to see and understand what's underlying it. This is true in electromagnetic theory. This is true even before there was electromagnet theory and it was electricity and magnetism or the generation of the atom and atomic theory. All this chemistry and physics is going on in a way that every physicist knows that you don't have access to it. You're not perceiving it. You're not seeing the wall, you're not seeing the electromagnetic waves.

41:41 Jessica: Right, but that's sort of new to the 19th century.

41:44 Dylan: Faraday's 1830. I understand that it's new, but that's why I'm saying I'm kind of disappointed that maybe he just didn't talk to or wasn't clued in to this part of what was raging through science at the time.

41:56 Wes: Are you saying that scientists didn't have the pretense of getting at the nature of reality, let's say, or at things in themselves? They simply didn't have that pretense?

42:05 Dylan: I'm saying they didn't have that pretense in the sense of what they see right before their eyes, is the nature of reality.

42:13 Wes: I'm not sure that that's the claim, though.

42:14 Dylan: The principle of least action, the notion of energy, it's looking, trying to understand what the world is and there being a correspondence of your experiments that you will be seeing the way the world is. Yes, but that's not the same thing as your perceptions giving direct access to it in exactly the same way, right?

42:31 Jessica: No, no, Dylan, he's absolutely right. I mean, the naivety of that view of perception had long worn off early on in the 19th century. But keep in mind that Nietzsche, he's born in 1844, right? He's a schoolboy, 1840s and 1850s. And it was only in the 1860s, not that long before he began writing what we're reading now, that he discovered two things that he described as absolutely turning points in his intellectual life and the remained turning points. One is Schopenhauer, but the other one is Friedrich Lange, who is a philosopher of science, really, who wrote the massive tome, the History of Materialism. It discussed democritus and a lot of the atomistic philosophers that Nietzsche was already interested in at the time. But that was Nietzsche's first exposure to some of these ideas. So Dylan's right. I mean, it seems a little disappointing because Nietzsche's kind of late to the party.

43:25 Dylan: That's exactly why it's disappointing to me.

43:27 Jessica: Yeah, well, Nietzsche's a guy. I mean, he was just an academic, you know, he had the resources. He had.

43:32 Wes: Dylan, you're pointing out the difference between direct perception of things and then scientific models. So if we develop a scientific model of the atom, obviously we don't think we have any direct perceptual access to the atom. But I don't think that's the point here. I think the idea is that our model of the atom says something about reality. And actually, at the end of section one, I think he's kind of responding to just this sort of disappointment. So he talks about the idealist view and the fact that it seems to be belied by the coherence of our experience and the success of our scientific pursuits, because none of this resembles the chaotic projects of the imagination, the kind of stuff that we see in dreams. If all of this were a matter of concepts that we applied, it's a matter of our imagination doing the work, why isn't it more chaotic? Where does the coherence of our experiences it come from? What is it anchored in? If not something mind independent, then he goes on to say that actually, this coherence, we impress ourselves in this way. And he talks of us spinning out these things with the necessity of a spider spinning a web. That regularity comes from us on this view. So I think when he says there's a pretense to knowledge of things in themselves, I don't think that requires doing away with a distinction between perception and, say, scientific models. The scientific model is supposed to give us some sort of access to things in themselves. If this account is right, even if it's indirect. Am I wrong about that in Nietzsche's

44:55 Dylan: account or in what some.

44:57 Wes: Yeah, on Nietzsche's account, I think the distinction between model and perceptual data is pretty well established, and I'd be surprised if Nietzsche were ignorant of that.

45:07 Jessica: Well, you were taking us to the end of section one, where he's been discussing for some time, or appealing for some time to these notions about nerve stimuli and the way in which we perceive and the incompatibility of that picture, the scientific picture of perception, with our notion that we can somehow get direct access to reality or have it disinterestedly contemplate the world or attain pure knowledge. So he's been juxtaposing those for a while and appealing to the sciences to do it. But then, in the last sort of lengthy paragraph or so of Section one, essentially what he does is put on the brakes and say, look, lest we swing too far in the other direction, he says every person who's familiar with such considerations, namely the scientific considerations, according to which our perception and cognition is very active and structures a lot of what we do, all these people have no doubt felt a deep mistrust of all idealism of this sort. Just as often as he has quite clearly convinced himself of the eternal consistency, omnipresence and infallibility of the laws of nature, he's concluded that. That so far as we can penetrate here, from the telescopic heights to the microscopic depths, everything is secure and complete and infinite and regular and without any gaps, science will be able to dig successfully in this shaft forever, and all the things that are discovered will harmonize with and not contradict each other. So he's been appealing to science, but as I said before, we swing too far in the other direction and think that Nietzsche is just going whole hog and saying, look, science will answer all our questions. We should just look to that. Nietzsche has a warning here against the rash scientists. They're just as rash as the philosophers when they think that their methods and activity will discover all the Law like regularities with which the world operates. And instead of destabilizing our picture of reality, they'll make it stable again by bringing back all of the laws and vindicating all of our expectations and giving us certainties about the world. And Nietzsche won't even let us have that. Don't go too far in that direction. Against this, he says, against this perspective on the world, the following must be said. If each of us had a different kind of sense perception, we could perceive things now as a bird, now as a worm, now as a plant. There were people who thought things about plant perception, by the way, in the 19th century. It was kind of strange if we could perceive the world from all these different perspectives, or if one of us saw a stimulus as red, another as blue, while a third even heard the same stimulus as a sound, no one would speak of such a regularity of nature. Rather, nature would be grasped only as a creation which is subjective in the highest degree. That, by the way, is another one of the stock modes of skepticism, something on which Nietzsche had just finished writing kind of doctoral work before he attained his position at Basel. So again, there's a skeptical argument, like before, we just say, ah, it's to the sciences to tell us what the true story is about perception and how much of reality we can get. He says, look, if we go too far in that direction, the scientists get just as rash as the philosophers and think they can deliver the unvarnished truth, truths that will never change law like regularities. And so we have to say to both that if we had these different modes of perception, then we'd have to just suspend judgment on what the real reality is and get okay with the idea that we're just going to have what we have as human beings.

48:29 Wes: Yeah, and then he goes on in this paragraph to say this regularity of nature is in fact the regularity of our own concept formation. So time and space and causality, these are forms and concepts that we provide.

48:43 Jessica: There's a distinct echo of this, by the way, in beyond good and Evil 22, where he says, look, the physicists have this bad mode of interpretation. They think that nature just has this law like regularity. Well, supposing somebody came along and said, ah, it's all just will to power all the way down. What then? And then he just ends with that question. And the idea is like, well, there'd be no response to that, what then? Because there's no meta level position from which we could adjudicate whether they're right or the will to power hypothesis is right?

49:09 Dylan: Well, it's just a crappy question, right? From a scientist's point of view, someone comes up and says, oh, is it just all the will to power then from a scientist perspective, they just say, what do you want me to measure? Right. You gonna have me measure will to power? He might just laugh at you and say, well, of course I don't want you to do that. And you're just revealing yourself to not understand what I'm talking about. And the scientist is sitting there saying, well, but you clearly don't understand what science is about. If you think you're being provocative by saying the world is will to power all the way down, how are you going to show that?

49:39 Wes: Well, I think this question of whether Nietzsche is right in his characterization of scientists, I mean, that's kind of a historical question that's beyond our scope here. But, Dylan, you seem to be making scientists out to be early pragmatists in their approach to the truth.

49:52 Dylan: Well, I think this is an interesting question about scientists. If and when they moved to being more pragmatic or if they were always very pragmatic, and how much of that was in experiment versus in something like theory? I mean, it's hard to see that there isn't fundamentally a very, very pragmatic bend to it when you have scientists willing to revise what they think is true, or at the very least learn something and say, well, that's not true, and go on to revise it again. And so you have the simultaneous expectation that there is access to the world in some way that will be revealed in repeated experiments and so forth, but that you can change your conception of it. So both those things are going on at the same time.

50:39 Wes: I don't think the fact that scientists are defeasiblists would be enough. Right. The idea is that we're getting closer to a truth with a capital T. We're making progress towards it, at least. At least for contemporary science. My impression from reading, say, a Steven Weinberg and the New York Review of Books or other contemporary scientists who are also writers, often they seem to adhere to a much more naive, realist position when it comes to science and science's access to reality. They don't seem to be sophisticated pragmatists about it.

51:08 Mark: Right. You, as a particle physicist, Dylan, are not going to be typical of all the different levels of scientific description.

51:15 Wes: Right.

51:16 Mark: Anybody who has to deal with uncertainty is gonna. Yes, it's gonna have a little more

51:21 Dylan: philosophic sophistication, but I also suspect there's actually a pretty wide scope of disposition in this respect, even within the sciences and probably differences among broadly speaking, big disciplines in science, you know, between physics and biology and even different branches of each of those. How pragmatic they consider themselves. And not someone like Hawking will just call himself a Platonist. I don't even know if he's right about his own interpretation of himself in that respect. And there is a big difference between the very, very mathematical theorists and experimentalists. That's getting a little bit off topic. I just was.

51:57 Mark: Tie it back. Tie it back or drop it.

52:01 Speaker: Go.

52:02 Wes: I think we might be ready for section two.

52:04 Dylan: Well, there was one part about what Jessica just read that he's talking about relations and he seems to be making the point that one thing that's happening in language and in science and in our truth seeking in general is that we're always building on relations, that they're always tied to one another and they maybe are having this kind of game amongst themselves, but are never really getting at the essence of things and the things in themselves. And that they in fact can't because they're not in the end tied to or related to the thing in itself or things in themselves. The world as it really is a reality, but are all just sort of tied together in either consistency or human based rationality. And that there's something else out there. And that I think is an interesting idea I've been trying to figure out. What would you mean about the world that you could have access to that was not amenable to the principle of non contradiction? I'm not saying that it doesn't exist, but I'm just wondering, is it even articulable in such a way that I can say that it's there, there? This is what it would mean if it's based on language and based on relation. Somewhere along the line it's going to come down to the principle of non contradiction. Yeah, this is not like that in the same way, in the same mode, so forth and so on.

53:23 Jessica: Right. I like to think that Nietzsche is on board with Aristotle. This is something some of you will remember. Jim Hankinson, Texas, who I believe called Aristotle's argument for the principle of non contradiction the only successful transcendental argument in the history of philosophy. It just said that you can't express opposition to it coherently. People who dispute it are little better than vegetables. You can't get anywhere talking to them. So I think that's right. I think Nietzsche takes it for granted. You can't get Anything off the ground without it. And Nietzsche doesn't dispute it. He has no reason to.

53:54 Wes: He doesn't dispute it, but he questions the values of those sorts of truths. Right. He talks, I think, of empty husks here and tautologies.

54:02 Jessica: Well, he's talking about other people, Right. Those who won't be happy with empty husks. He thinks that logical truths are truths, but he also thinks people who take themselves to be truth seekers aren't going to be happy with just those they want, in addition a bunch of truths about real reality.

54:18 Wes: Unless we think Nietzsche is a relativist or sort of subject to self contradiction. We have to say that there's some sort of basic theory of truth right there. Right. Which rejects.

54:27 Jessica: He doesn't have to have a theory

54:28 Wes: of truth, not a developed theory of truth, but there's some implicit conception of truth which doesn't commit him to self contradiction.

54:35 Jessica: Right, absolutely.

54:36 Wes: But it doesn't have to be a full blown metaphysical and it explicitly isn't. So he's arguing against this deeper metaphysical realism, which is not to say he's a relativist.

54:47 Jessica: Right. I mean all he wants to say. Let's make it back to Dylan's point. All he wants to say is that we have these conceptions of reality, we have these perceptions and they're ours. And insofar as they're our perceptions and our representations, they're interested because we're creatures with interests. But nevertheless what we seem to want is a disinterested representation of reality. And that is just batshit crazy.

55:09 Dylan: Right.

55:10 Jessica: And that's the fundamental insight Nietzsche thinks diagnoses a real sickness in human beings.

55:16 Dylan: So that's the urge to truth.

55:18 Jessica: We want what we cannot have. Yeah.

55:20 Dylan: We want not only what we don't have, but what we can't have.

55:24 Jessica: Well, we want something that doesn't make any sense given the facts on the ground. Yeah, exactly.

55:29 Wes: Well, it's a kind of transcendent urge. Right. It's related to this and that's why it's ascetic urge Nietzsche talks about elsewhere, to sort of transcend the conditions of life, to exactly go under the root of things because there's a power to that.

55:41 Jessica: Yeah.

55:42 Mark: If this is an examination, as you were saying earlier, Jessica, not of truth as it is as a philosophical concept. Here's my theory of truth. But truth as we use the term, I think he sees it as a pretentious term. It's the semantic fact, reflective of course of this deep individual and group psychology of us wanting this consistency, this objectivity but then it's interesting on top of that that he leads off the entire essay by telling this description of how small we are.

56:10 Jessica: So happy you went back to that.

56:11 Mark: Yes, in the scheme of things, once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into number of twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing that was most arrogant and mendacious minute of world history. But nevertheless, it was only a minute after nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed and the clever beast had to die.

56:34 Wes: That sounds like the beginning of a Douglas Adams novel.

56:36 Jessica: Actually, I'm most indebted not just to this essay, but to this translation, Riziel's translation, because it's the thing that allowed me to open my own book on Nietzsche with the phrase once upon a time, which I was just sort of happy about.

56:51 Wes: Fantastic.

56:52 Jessica: But yes, it's incredibly deflationary.

56:54 Mark: I see. Leading off with that though, as well, presenting our smallness, he's presenting it dogmatically as we are animals. This is a fact about the thing in itself. I don't know whatever. But he's saying, right, well, it depends

57:05 Jessica: on what we mean by dogmatically.

57:07 Mark: There is a right in my own purposes in writing this. I'm Nietzsche speaking, I have as one of these. I don't know, he's not setting it up, as this is my interest to describe us as small or something, but that he's victim of the very thing that he's criticizing, of this push for objectivity, because that's exactly what belittling the subject and pointing out the fact that our whole race is only existent for a blip in the eternal. That's exactly what that's pointing out.

57:33 Jessica: And not only that, I mean, one might invent a fable like the one you just read, Nietzsche continues, and yet he would still not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. The situation is really bad. The deflationary attitude here, I think, is the topic of the essay. I'm tempted to just go back to Sextus here, because that's what I do. Pyrrhonian skeptics, Greek antiquity, described their project as the. To expose and to cure, where possible, the conceit and rashness of the dogmatists. And dogmatists had a very technical meaning. And that was why I was interested, Mark, in your use of dogmatism just now. This seems like a dogmatic picture. He said that Nietzsche's presenting It seems to me precisely anti dogmatic. And here's why. A dogmatist in the etymological sense is just someone who has beliefs, somebody who's got an overarching theory of reality, of what's true, a theory that's going to make it all make sense, a synoptic view of the way things are. And Nietzsche sees an incredible amount of pretense in that. The idea that these little human animals could take themselves to have a vision of the universe and all that it encompasses that is lasting and unchangeable, he thinks, is kind of ridiculous. And as he says on the next page, I think west must start out with this. The pride connected with knowing and sensing lies like a blinding fog of the eyes and senses of men. We exhibit nothing but a continuous fluttering, he says, around the solitary flame of vanity. That's the rule among human beings. And even a few pages later he says that the genesis of language, right, he's been talking about that. And this is on my page 83. The genesis of language doesn't proceed logically, right? We don't derive words for things from reality itself and all the material within and with which the man of truth, the scientist and the philosopher later work and build, if not derived from Never Never Land is at least not derived from the essence of things. And the translator points out that the literal word that's translated here as Never Never Land would be cloud cuckoo land, which is a device from an Aristophanes play where Aristophanes is making fun of philosophers, famously Socrates, for their pretentiousness. And I think the whole upshot of this entire essay is it's a deflationary critique of the pretense of the value that we place on the human intellect within nature.

1:00:05 Mark: I don't doubt that, but I still think that that first paragraph is an entire bit of intentional irony. But you're just saying that he's arguing against people that have this. This whole picture of the universe. And he does that by setting out a whole picture of the universe in which we are very small.

1:00:21 Jessica: Exactly, in order to oppose that pretense and to deflate it and to undermine it.

1:00:27 Wes: But beyond that, this sort of deflationary view can't go so far that it deflates itself. I took that to be part of what you were saying, Mark. Right. It can't simply lead to self contradiction. It's one thing to say that truths are illusions, and we have to parse that in a way that's going to make sense without leading to the claim that anytime Someone makes an assertion on a page that's false and therefore what I'm writing makes no sense.

1:00:49 Jessica: Right, right. That's a good point.

1:00:51 Wes: So we need a kind of moderate deflationary view, or otherwise it simply ceases to make sense.

1:00:57 Mark: I think somewhere in here we have to make a transition and at least play with the idea that the Derrida interpretation, the postmodernist interpretation of this essay has some appeal or makes some sense.

1:01:10 Jessica: No, we don't.

1:01:11 Mark: Right here I see a point where. So, okay, just as a background for the listeners, all of us to some degree looked at this secondary source, Maud Marie Clark's Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy from 1990. And she goes through the various interpretations, the postmodernist ones, and what Wes just said was pretty much a quote out of there as far as that goes. She even just. Just discounts the pragmatic account of truth as pretty obviously self contradictory, kind of silly. So what's a sensible way to get at this?

1:01:42 Wes: No, I don't think so.

1:01:43 Speaker: Well, let's.

1:01:43 Mark: Let's read some kind of Kantianism, Schopenhauer, you know. So folks, we went way into depth on the Kantian epistemology indie Schopenhauer episode that we did about a year and a half ago. So if some of this seems like a little. You're not getting clear in the details, go to that, because that really gets at in detail what exactly is given? How do we conceptualize it? How does the subject add all this kind of stuff? Stuff I want to at least play with a hypothesis in this that Nietzsche doesn't have just a straight Kantian correspondence view of truth, where truth is that your sentence will reflect the way things are. But yet the way things are for skeptical reasons is nothing that we can really know anything that much about. And there's the whole story. It's just a skeptical treatise. It's just pretentious. I tend to think that his skepticism is at least trying to go farther than that and even to sort of dissolve itself, that if he is really saying something about all of language, then he's saying even this thing that I'm saying right now, if you properly understand it, it will eat itself. I think that he has that pretension. It might be just goofy and you should just dismiss it. And he grew out of that as he got to more sophisticated works. But through things like that irony in the first section there, where it looks like he's giving this dogmatic picture while saying that it's against dogmatism, you might say, in wittgenstein terminology. He's pointing to something that cannot be said due to limits of language.

1:03:05 Wes: Just to clarify, she's arguing that Nietzsche is a neo Kantian.

1:03:09 Jessica: By her you mean not me, but Maude Clark, Right?

1:03:12 Wes: Marie Clarke is arguing that Nietzsche is a neo Kantian, which is to say a neopragmatist. She doesn't reject pragmatism outright. She just thinks he has a more sophisticated pragmatist view than the idea that truth is only a facilitation of life. Let's say you have to get much more sophisticated before you can make sense of the neo Kantian, neo pragmatist picture. But as far as this essay is concerned, she sees this as an early Kantian position and that it doesn't seem to reject the coherence of the thing in itself. It uses the idea that we don't have access to things in themselves as a reason to say that our truths are illusions. She'll argue that later on Nietzsche will actually reject the coherence of the idea of the thing in itself and so take on a more neo Kanti, neo pragmatist view. So that leads us back to this, let's say, post structuralist or postmodern interpretations that she rejects. Which is to say there's nothing outside of language or nothing outside of the text. That's the radical position which, Mark, you're saying that may be actually what's going on here.

1:04:11 Jessica: Is that what you're saying, Mark?

1:04:13 Mark: I'm at least trying to see if we can get a sympathetic account of that view somewhere in this conversation.

1:04:19 Jessica: Not for me.

1:04:21 Mark: I'm not sure that I'm up to actually giving it.

1:04:24 Jessica: If we were going to defend that view, the view that what Nietzsche is getting at here is somehow entirely self consuming. I think what we would have to believe and find textual support for is the idea that Nietzsche has abandoned the idea that truth is possible and that it's valuable. I don't actually think that he has abandoned the idea that in some sense truth is a valuable goal. He doesn't think it is the penultimate goal. And making everything else subordinate to it is a little bit sick. That's what tends toward asceticism. But Nietzsche describes himself throughout his philosophical works as a seeker of knowledge and of truth. He never gives that up. Moreover, keep in mind that this is being written by a philologist. This is a guy who first of all is a scientist, because philology is a proper wissenschaft in the 19th century, and it's a Wissenschaft with a rigorous Method, the whole point of which is to sort out good from bad interpretations. So the idea that somebody could take this text written by the philologist Nietzsche is, and argue on its basis that Nietzsche thinks every interpretation is as good as any other, which is sort of a Derridian view, is ridiculous. I mean, it just completely loses sight of who Nietzsche actually was as a person and what he was doing in his historical period. Which is a little bit ironic because I understand that postmodernism is a view that takes historical situatedness to be kind of central to understanding anything, but it totally abandons it with respect to Nietzsche in this essay. But also, you know, Mark, earlier, you quoted a bit from, like, the second page of the essay that I think is one quote among many that leads us to believe that Nietzsche does not, in fact, ever abandon the idea that truth is valuable. It's just not the only value. So on my page 80, you mentioned this quote about how, as a means for preserving the individual, the intellect unfolds its principal powers into simulation, which is the means by which weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves. Now, that doesn't suggest to me that human beings versus tigers, you know, they have claws and fangs and we have lies. That's not an even match at all, let's face it. But among human individuals, the weaker, less robust ones end up embracing dissimulation as a tool. And that's kind of consistent with the story he begins telling in the genealogy. There are some very clever people who finally seize upon the idea that, well, if we just tell a new story about what values are, can get the upper hand on these people who've been oppressing us. Right. So that's the kind of thing he has in mind that affects the slave morality triumph.

1:07:12 Wes: Yeah, and we get some hints of that, right, in sections 176 to 187, where. And I guess these are mainly notes that he's jotted down. Right. But.

1:07:20 Jessica: Right, these notes at the end, Right.

1:07:22 Wes: So he speaks both of the truth being destructive and hostile to the world, but also he talks about its Eudaimonic function.

1:07:29 Jessica: Yeah, I have a lot of trouble making sense of these Nietzsche associates, even here, early on in this quote I just read on page 80, lying with weakness, dishonesty with weakness. He also, throughout his career, associates Christianity as a tissue of lies. Christians are dishonest. It's a complaint he voices over and over. What kind of impact would that have if he didn't think there was any value at all to truth?

1:07:55 Wes: Right.

1:07:56 Jessica: None, Absolutely none. We would have no reason to Take anything he writes, even as a critique of anything at all. It's just so. The kind of completely self consuming character of this essay that Mark was worried about, I think cannot be there. It is not completely self consuming in that way.

1:08:13 Mark: Well, there's one sense of extra moral that we didn't talk about that I had gotten from the Clark book was that it's unintentional. We already talked about the dissimulation of calling yourself rich when you're in fact poor, of contravening the convention for your own benefit, that is the moral sense of lying. But he seems to think that these illusions, that really all conceptualization, he said, is illusion because it falsifies the raw sense data. Or, you know, maybe he's not even committed to saying that we have experience of this raw sense data. But in any case, since we construct this shared reality, it is all illusory in maybe the way the matrix is in the, the way that we, we have objectivity that we need from science. But that doesn't get at the thing in itself.

1:08:55 Jessica: We don't really know what that is.

1:08:57 Mark: So all of experience, all of knowledge in that sense, because it's not getting at the thing in itself is falsification. It's the extra moral kind of lying. Lying of this extra moral kind. Well, it's good for us in that it is a survival mechanism and it is a way in which we socially cohere to keep things going. It's a way that we even just make sense of the world at all. Just to not be a vegetable. Right, to make sense, to think at all, is to falsify. So I think he sees language itself and our conception of truth itself as pretentious. This is right from Kant, right. Kant thought that reason always reaches out beyond the possible objects of experience. And so that's why Bin Chopadhauer's fourfold root to the principle of sufficient reason. He wants to distinguish these legitimate uses of reason from the non legitimate. That's the same thing that Kant is doing, etc. There's something in language itself that is deceptive.

1:09:52 Jessica: It's not that it's deceptive, it's just that it's interesting.

1:09:55 Mark: It doesn't get at what you could take this as Wittgensteinian. Wittgenstein says that our individual concepts, really, they're all just based on a particular, very narrow set of things. But we think that to understand what a word means is to sort of be able to extend it way beyond its bounds. So if we come into this Concept of. Again, just to refer to some stuff from the Wittgenstein episode. We might think we understand this notion of my internal soul or something, but really that it's just a word that we've made up to attach and capture, like lightning in a bottle, some particular experiences. But then we reify it and call it an object. And there's something screwed up about that. I think Nietzsche thinks we do that with everything, that all words do that.

1:10:33 Wes: But it's deceptive only if we think that we have access to things in themselves. Only if we have that pretense. Right, Right.

1:10:41 Mark: I'm just not even sure I see that. Like the example that he gives, that when you come up with a concept of a leaf, you're falsify, by grouping all these things together, you're ignoring the differences between them. So right there there's a falsification, but

1:10:52 Wes: the illusion there is in attributing those properties, let's say, to things in themselves. Once you give up the idea that you have access to things in themselves, and that when you're, say, describing something as hard, you're actually attributing it to a thing in itself, then one could argue that there's no longer an illusion. Yes, you're still stuck with, let's say, appearances that aren't realities, but ultimately the doors open, open to saying the idea of a thing in itself doesn't make sense anyway. So there's a more ordinary kind of objectivity that we can have in relation to appearances.

1:11:23 Mark: Sure. I mean, but that doesn't still address that specific point I was making about conceptualization. We're not referring to a thing in itself. I'm just referring to these sensible things, these different leaves. And by grouping them together in leaf and then making scientific claims, say, about leaves in general, I've reified this concept that is in fact abstraction in the bad sense from these individuals. When really this kind of knowledge, like if we can have direct knowledge at all, putting aside the relation of the individual thing we experience to the thing itself, it would just be of individuals. But the fact is, all of our knowledge, especially then, like, so he talks about honesty. So when we get to these more abstract things, they become even more falsified. The very process of conceptualization, of shoving these things that really are unlike each other together into the units of thought. There's something screwed up about this is

1:12:13 Wes: what he ultimately ends up calling, right, an aesthetic relationship to nature. The fact that we are artistic creators in relation to nature. I'm not sure that you can say there's anything wrong with that until you again make this sort of pretension to the thing in itself. And that's just what Reify means there. There's nothing inherently wrong with being constructive. Let's say you're just constructing. So what if you're creating these concepts and so on and so forth. There's no falsification. Unless I think that the concept corresponds to something in reality, metaphysical reality.

1:12:43 Mark: If our inherent notions of knowledge and truth always are pretentious and we can't stop them from being pretentious in this way, and we can learn Kantian philosophy and say that I'm just using this to describe just the appearances and not the things that we're still. Well, we can't think like that. We're not able to do that. So we are always going to be speaking lies in some way.

1:13:03 Dylan: If he's going to call them lies, doesn't he have to mean that we know that they're not true?

1:13:08 Wes: No, because he uses the word unconscious. They're unconscious lies.

1:13:12 Dylan: Well, how could it be?

1:13:14 Wes: Yeah, that's a common critique of this, that there's no coherent sense of.

1:13:17 Dylan: What the hell does that mean, an unconscious lie?

1:13:20 Wes: It's a conspiracy, in other words, he calls it this. Lying is unconscious. It's quote unquote unconscious for forgetfulness. I think it means it's something related to repression.

1:13:30 Jessica: I feel like we're reading a lot into this essay. We're importing quite a lot. Rather than reading closely and extracting, we're shoehorning in. I wish he were clearer.

1:13:39 Wes: Well, the sense of unconscious is directly from the text. Right.

1:13:43 Jessica: Where are you exactly?

1:13:44 Wes: So let's look at paragraph 82 or 83 in the translation that we're sharing. Sorry, I'm looking for the word unconscious here.

1:13:51 Jessica: It's where he goes on about the leaf. It starts out in particular, let us further consider the formation of concepts.

1:13:58 Seth: No leaf ever wholly equals another, and the concept leaf is formed through an arbitrary abstraction from these individual differences, through forgetting the distinctions. And now it gives rise to the idea that in nature there might be something besides the leaves, which would be leaf, some kind of original form, after which all leaves have been woven, marked, copied, colored, curled and painted, but by unskilled hands, so that no copy turned out to be a correct, reliable and faithful image of the original form.

1:14:31 Wes: Where's the unconscious here?

1:14:33 Jessica: That's what we were asking you, Wes.

1:14:36 Wes: Okay, it's in the next paragraph.

1:14:38 Jessica: Okay.

1:14:38 Wes: Near the middle. Truths are illusions, which we have forgotten are illusions, which is this idea of forgetting is very important to turning mere falsehood into lying. And then the next paragraph, precisely by means of this unconsciousness and forgetfulness, he arrives at his sense of truth. This drive to truth is predicated on a kind of forgetting which I interpreted as repression. Yes, that's a reading into the text, but we can just call it forgetting or unconsciousness.

1:15:05 Jessica: Well, since repression is the Freudian notion, which of course you can get from Nietzsche, but not in this essay.

1:15:11 Wes: Right. So, yeah, I think that's where we get this notion of this lie from. He lies in the manner indicated, unconsciously, in accordance with habits which are centuries old.

1:15:20 Jessica: Right. He's pretty clearly being provocative, isn't he? Thus, you know, to express it morally, he's just given us this little sort of just so story about the origins of language and how we all needed it to get along and how inconvenient it is when people misuse conventions. We don't like that. But that ultimately becomes, at a later time, moralized. Here we are in the passage you just read from, and I think he's being a little bit intentionally provocative to express it in moral terms. Right. To be truthful is the duty to lie according to a fixed convention. And that's going to be the line that's the shocker. That's supposed to pack the rhetorical punch of this essay. So what do you mean by being truthful? Oh, to lie according to fixed conventions, but to unpack that notion of lie. What we need is all this sort of scientific theory about perception and the activity of cognition and. And how much we contribute to it, and all that stuff that we've been talking about so far.

1:16:13 Wes: In order to develop this pretension of truth, we have to forget about the origins of these sorts of things. We have to forget that they're merely conventional.

1:16:19 Jessica: Well, that they're interested.

1:16:21 Wes: Right.

1:16:21 Jessica: That our representations are always our representations, and yet what we always want is disinterested representations, which just doesn't make any sense. It is, as Nietzsche says, a contradictory impossibility.

1:16:33 Mark: So I'm still trying to get at whether he thinks the will to truth is a good or a bad thing. And you had started by saying, of course, if you look at his work as a whole, he considers himself a seeker after truth. Of course he considers it a good thing, he wouldn't be doing it. But because he has this model of knowledge where he doesn't seem to think we can get that, and we fool ourselves, and thereby we arrive at our sense of truth. So it's as if this will which is sort of fundamentally maybe a good thing. Inevitably, if we think it is fulfilled. Well, it's a bad thing if what we're really trying to do is get a truth because we're settling on illusion.

1:17:06 Jessica: Right. So there's truth and there's the will to truth. Nietzsche always describes himself as an inquirer, a knower, or a seeker of knowledge throughout the corpus. And inquiry is by definition a goal directed enterprise. It aims at something and what it aims at is truth. And I don't think Nietzsche would dispute that. He aims at that too. But what he is suspicious of is moralizing, promoting truth to a position in one's moral hierarchy such that absolutely everything else, if it falls short of truth, is degenerate and devalued. If something is an illusion, it's automatically bad. All deceptions are unconditionally, morally bad. That's the move that makes the difference between truth and truth moralized. And so the will to truth is characteristic of a creature who is driven only to pursue that thing at the expense of absolutely everything else. And that's what most philosophers are doing. That's what Nietzsche kind of associates Kant with doing. And that he thinks is a peculiar kind of sickness.

1:18:17 Wes: Yeah. Including the exception of the more artistic propensities. Right. That he gets into in section two.

1:18:22 Jessica: Yeah. And section two is really interesting. It's short and it's hard to make sense of.

1:18:26 Mark: So, well, maybe trying to divide the will to truth from the sense of truth that you arrive at that. Whereas the naive philosopher thinks that this will to truth is coming from a pure place and therefore coming to the conclusion that your sense of truth is always going to be based on this forgetfulness, that there's something wrong with that. That really what you need to do is just recognize that that's how human knowledge works. You don't get rid of the will to truth then, but you understand what it's doing, that the will to truth is some kind of. Of pragmatic thing. It's not going to get at an unmediated truth. It's going to get at. We won't debase it and say something useful always, but it's going to get at some insight that is relevant to human interests.

1:19:06 Wes: Right.

1:19:07 Jessica: You finally appreciate what it is to have truth as an actual human being. We're embodied creatures. Plato wanted a kind of truth that he thought you had to essentially die to get. When the soul is free of the horrible fetters of body and disgusting worldly trappings, then we have truth. And it is something pure and that already is to attribute a moral significance to truth. That makes it the hallmark of ascetic values. It puts it right up there with humility and chastity. And then to accept it as ultimately valuable, we have to devalue the ways in which we perceive that they're necessarily embodied, that we always see things only from a perspective. We just have to hate that. If we accept Plato's vision of truth or the German idealist's vision of human rationality, it's a fundamentally self loathing conception of the human intellect.

1:20:03 Dylan: So that would be equating truth with the good. That's the avenue by which we're moralizing the truth, Right?

1:20:09 Jessica: Exactly. It's unconditionally good. And deception is always bad. Illusion's never good. Nietzsche says, well, you know, it seems to work for us a lot of the time. Many people would succumb to suicidal nihilism if they learned the truth.

1:20:22 Wes: Yeah, we get at the very beginning of section 2, this image of the scientist taking shelter under an edifice of concepts in an effort to achieve safety from quote, unquote, different kinds of truths, which, again, there's another place where we see scare quotes and implicit commitment to at least some kind of truth. Yeah, and these different kinds of truths, of course, will have something to do with what he calls the fundamental human drive, this drive to metaphor, which continues, you know, it's the sort of thing which, in this previous section on concept formation, it looked like the concepts have sort of won the war. Right. We had built up an edifice of concepts and escaped from the mass of images that Nietzsche talks about. But actually this metaphorical drive will continue and it'll have an interesting sort of interplay with the drive to truth.

1:21:10 Jessica: Mm. The passage Wes was just looking at about the man of science, the one who builds his hut right next to the tower of science so that he'll be able to work on it and find shelter for himself beneath those bulwarks which presently exist. And he requires shelter, for there are frightful powers which continuously break in upon him. This pathos, this sentiment, the feeling that he's attributing to the man of science here becomes in Nietzsche's later published works, what he often calls the metaphysical need. And I think it's basically, it's just a need for certainty. The human drive for knowledge is, though we don't like to think of it this way, a drive for mastery. We want to make the unfamiliar familiar so we have something to cling to. People don't like uncertainty. It's very uncomfortable for us. And what we really want is a coherent story, one that's going to be really stable. It's going to make sense of everything for us. We require shelter in that sense. And Nietzsche thinks that that's a sign of weakness.

1:22:13 Wes: Yeah, it's really driven by survival and pain avoidance. Right. As opposed to artistic propensities which are more on the positive side. Right. Which will end up allowing us to have things like joy and so on

1:22:27 Jessica: and so forth, and which actually may convey to us a world picture, a representation of reality that is perfectly good, but that we dismiss. Because in the 19th century there's this kind of emergent war between art and science, subjective and objective representations of reality. And, you know, we started out talking about the publication of Nietzsche and his unpublished works and where they fit in. Nietzsche did, like many of his notebooks, kind of plunder this essay that we've been reading. Ideas from it appear in his published works. The ones that didn't appear in his published works we should be suspicious of. Right. He had 15 years to mull over this essay, and what he didn't save from it, we should think he probably just thought better of. But one thing he seems to save is at the end of section two, he compares what he calls the rational man and the intuitive man, sort of philosopher as we know him, through Kant and, say, the artist. That distinction comes out in Nietzsche's untimely meditation that he calls on the use and abuse of history for life. I had a hard time of making sense of section 2. It's very short and it doesn't seem to have any obvious connection to Section 1. Has no clear point.

1:23:38 Dylan: Well, it seems especially the end of. It seems to be pointing to why you would care about the problem of pretension. Why would you want to avoid the problem of the rational man? And it reminds me a little bit of birth, of tragedy and sort of the goal of the Dionysian. He says, right in the middle. The man who's guided by concepts and abstractions only succeeds by such means in warding off misfortune without ever gaining any happiness for himself from these abstractions. And while he aims for the greatest possible freedom from pain, the intuitive man, standing in the midst of a culture, already reaps from his intuition a harvest of continually inflowing illumination, cheer and redemption. In addition to obtaining a defense against misfortune, to be sure he suffers more intensely when he suffers. He even suffers more frequently, since he does not understand how to learn from experience and keeps falling over and over again into the same ditch he is then just as irrational in sorrow as he is in happiness. He cries aloud and will not be consoled. How differently the Stoical man who learns from experience and governs himself by concepts is affected by the same misfortunes.

1:24:47 Wes: This is what I was calling the difference between pain avoidance and survival. So the avoidance of misfortune as opposed to doing something more positive. And I think here he's also referencing. In ancient Greece, I thought of Aristotle's idea of the formation of the state. When you get to the point where you go from concern with mere survival and more primitive social associations to the good life and something that goes beyond survival. So it seems the relationship to section one is that despite the ascendance of the truth drive in science, let's say this drive to metaphor formation, what he calls the fundamental human drive, persists, and it's important to human flourishing. When he talks about ancient Greece, he talks about them existing side by side. Or actually in ancient Greece, he said the artistic strand sort of got the upper hand. And the evidence for that was, and this is a quote that I like. Neither the hose, nor the gate, nor the clothes, nor the clay jugs give evidence of having been invented because of a pressing need. So there's that element of a society that's important to flourishing which has to do with this metaphorical drive which goes beyond the truth drive.

1:25:57 Mark: So maybe you could say that part of this initial Hobbesian bargain, the initial urge, is to come up with a set of concepts that will nail everything down. And so you'd have a completely static society. Everybody's roles would be determined, the sort of truths and explanations for things to be determined. We're not going to delve deep into science. We're just going to say that God made that lightning. And it's only when you get to a point where you're not beset by fear, when you've really risen above the caveman status until you've achieved some sort of ability to have peace and leisure, that then you can reflect a little more closely on, well, how did this drive to truth that took us just so far to make these initial concepts and solidify everything, to really realize how the epistemological machinery works is to then understand the sort of fluidity and metaphor and all the stuff involved, and to start to think creatively. So this not only lets you imagine different scientific possibilities and different ways of investigating things and all this stuff, but also just to come up with completely imaginative artistic views of things in front of you that have no Obvious utility, because their utility is to delight and to enrich us intellectually.

1:27:10 Dylan: Well, it doesn't have to do with particularity. Isn't the avenue of the life negating aspects of abstraction and conceptualization is the force it has in glossing over and smoothing out individuality and particularity, individual perceptions. And so it becomes life negating in that way. And that this impetus towards truth and the pretension involved is a problem because it maybe, in the end, prevents us from flourishing the way we can as human beings. Because we've smoothed over our possibility by clinging to these concepts and abstractions.

1:27:48 Wes: Yeah. And also it leads to a preoccupation. Right. With the dangerous elements of life. One of the benefits here is that we actually get to indulge deception without injury. That's what the outlets of myth and art allow. The other difference is that unlike the dissimulation we saw in section one, which was unconscious, here it's actually conscious. It's done consciously and deliberately. And it arises not as a way of avoiding the dangerous elements of life, but as a way of celebrating life as something good.

1:28:17 Jessica: Right. This is why Nietzsche describes the Greeks as having a good will to deception or superficiality. They can indulge in that and sort of harness its potential without having moralized it so that they have to feel bad about it. That is available to them in a way it's not available to us. That's interesting. I hadn't thought about that before, actually.

1:28:36 Dylan: This is, incidentally, is the avenue, I think, in which postmodernists want to grab a hold of it. Right. The way in which myth and art actually get more towards the truth of things than concepts, both in the act of living, but in that activity gets more towards the way things actually are.

1:28:57 Mark: I don't like the way of putting

1:28:58 Jessica: that, but I don't know. I mean, I think there. There are Frankfurt School philosophers, I think, who say, look, we've got to get back to this sort of sense of mythology that we've lost. And that would be worthwhile recovering. But my understanding, the postmodern reading of Nietzsche, and of this essay in particular, was that it hinges on attributing to Nietzsche the claim that there is no truth and knowledge is impossible. And those two propositions cannot responsibly be ascribed to him on the basis of this text.

1:29:26 Wes: Well, he does talk about art getting at a higher truth, and it's between sections 183 and 187. Artistic pleasure is the greatest kind of pleasure because it speaks the truth quite generally in the form of lies. So there he seems to be getting at some sort of satisfaction of both drives, both what he calls eudynamic drives, one towards truth and one towards deception. There's a kind of fusion or synthesis there. And satisfaction from truth and satisfaction from deception, as we see in section two as well. There's an interesting interplay between art and science or art and concepts, because that scaffolding of concepts, or what he calls that immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself, is nothing but a scaffolding and Toyota for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. So the liberated intellect being this metaphorical drive or this artistic activity. So art works off of and has a kind of symbiotic relationship, I think, with abstraction. And then he goes on to talk about smashing the framework or putting it back together in an ironic fashion. It begins to sound like art is enriched by this relationship to the more aesthetic drive.

1:30:37 Mark: Right. If you're totally devoted to your art at the cost of everything else, that's a form of asceticism, but it's the kind that. That he seemed to be more in favor of than traditional whipping yourself asceticism

1:30:48 Wes: as an artist, you're not simply finger painting, right? There's no going back to the primitive state. There's no going back to the coagulated mass of images in pre conceptual life. But what you do as an artist, the way those more primitive drives find an outlet is through some sort of interaction with abstraction. And it can be destructive. It can be smashing the framework to pieces and then constructive rebuilding in an ironic fashion. But it's not simply that by engaging in artistic activity, we've simply escaped abstraction. We're still in some sort of relation to that. I don't think there's any return to this golden age of pre conceptual existence.

1:31:25 Jessica: Right?

1:31:26 Mark: I mean, when we say artist is making us see things in a different way, I mean, you could try to interpret that according to the Saussurean concept formation account. So that when I'm shown a face painted in this funky cubist way or something, I'm not doing the regular synthesis that I normally do that normally, even when we see a photograph, then we project upon it the different sides and things. But if we're then shown all the different sides, like in a cubist painting, then that's twisting. It's like it's visually filling in the gaps that we're supposed to be filling in our imagination. So therefore it's more than just reflecting. It's not just a conceptual. We're reflecting on the perceptive process or something. But it twists things around in a way that somehow is making us build concepts in a different way.

1:32:08 Dylan: So he contrasts the Intuitive man and the Rational man, or I wrote the Art man and the Concept man. Seems like the difference would be just that Rational man fetishizes concepts in a way that Intuitive man doesn't. And that's this sort of pretension, this drive towards truth with a capital T. That is the problem of Rational Man.

1:32:30 Jessica: I think that's basically right. If I were going to add to that, it would be just to say that Intuitive man is a figure who's reconciled to. Sounds a little bit like resignation, who embraces the fact that his thumbprint is always on his representations of reality. He's an artist in that sense. And he doesn't see that as a problem to be overcome or a moral

1:32:55 Dylan: flaw or something owned. Is that the same thing? I mean, one of the pretensions of Rational man would be that in finding truth with a capital T, he can lay claim to it and own it and manipulate it.

1:33:08 Jessica: Well, if he ever finds it, yeah.

1:33:11 Wes: And that.

1:33:12 Jessica: But that he wants to. That's the will to truth that Nietzsche's talking about. That he's driven by, you know, kind of consumed by. Yeah. I think Nietzsche's model for the Rational man, I think often is, is either Plato or Kant. I think his model for the intuitive man is pretty clearly Goethe, who also managed to get interested in things like science and scientific theory, but without succumbing to this crazy notion that the best representation is one that bears no trace of you as a representer. That's a kind of insanity that Nietzsche thinks Kant and Plato succumb to, but that others, more artistic souls don't. And they know things in a way that is healthier and certainly happier and more conducive to well being.

1:33:52 Mark: I couldn't help wondering, given Nietzsche's take on this, what he would think of the Clark book, which is very like, what could he mean by this sentence? Here are four meanings he could have to this sentence and really goes through and analyzes it and it's analytic philosophy is all it is. Would he think, no, that's actually very astute and be all in favor of that, or would he say that is fetishizing concepts and that is a good question doing damage to the artistry of this work. If it has these bits of irony and internal spirals and things, then those are perhaps not best Understood by the analytic approach that is given to him by Clara.

1:34:32 Wes: Right.

1:34:33 Jessica: It's really hard for me not to break in at this point and say that in my view the analytic continental distinction is a wholly political and philosophically insignificant distinction. It's philosophically meaningless. It does no work at all. It's a petty academic dispute and it's hindered more meaningful work than it's ever promoted. So I don't even know what it means. We would need to explain what are the criteria exactly according which somebody is a continental as opposed to an analytic philosopher.

1:35:00 Mark: I'm not referring to that. My only distinction here is the analytic method. And you could say continental philosophers have the analytic method in the same way.

1:35:08 Jessica: But I don't know what that means. That's precisely what I'm saying. Had no content.

1:35:12 Mark: If you see the kind of carefree way that this is seemingly written.

1:35:16 Jessica: Well, seemingly it was incredibly worked over

1:35:18 Mark: even though it making a lot of subtle points and contrast that with Clark's going step by step. That is the distinction one would want

1:35:25 Wes: to make between there's an artistry to this and Clark's book is simply utilitarian. Right.

1:35:30 Jessica: Well, maybe Clark is a more careful

1:35:32 Wes: ends justify the means and the means are not about producing the same sorts of of flourishes that you see in Nietzsche's writing.

1:35:39 Jessica: Clark pays attention to things Nietzsche actually says in ways that other readers do not, notably postmodern readers. They adduce their interpretations without the burden of textual support or the obligation to it. And as a philologist certainly Nietzsche would have to appreciate that a little bit. Nietzsche really does have a tendency to poke fun of what he calls scholarly oxen. I wonder not just with Clark, but all of us. What would he make of this entire cottage industry of interpretive works of his? I mean he kind of hoped there would be that amount of attention and there wasn't during his lifetime, but I think he would be sort of pleased by that. But also a lot of it is quite close reading. It's picky in a way that I don't know how comfortable he would be with. But insofar as he never abandons the idea that there are better and worse interpretations and that there is truth and that inquiry aims at it. I would have to say that a work like Clark's is, even if she's not entirely right, that is, if Nietzsche wouldn't back it, it deserves its place as the kind of watershed work that it is in demonstrating that you can talk about Nietzsche sensibly without resorting to self undermining. Claims like, well, there is no truth. If that's the case, then what reason do we have to take your interpretation or anything Nietzsche says seriously? Those are sort of non starters. Clark is really taking Nietzsche seriously in a way that no postmodern reader ever did. And I find that very admirable in her work, in spite of all the interpretive disputes that she and I have.

1:37:13 Mark: Yeah, I can't recommend that book enough. I mean, I didn't Read more than 2 and a half chapters of it, but still.

1:37:18 Jessica: Well, she's actually changed her position quite a bit.

1:37:21 Mark: You know, you can get. What's Heidegger's view of Nietzsche? What's the postmodernist view of Nietzsche? What's Danto's view of Nietzsche? I didn't know that he was such a major Nietzsche scholar.

1:37:29 Jessica: Danto and Kaufman really kind of dominated Nietzsche's scholarship for a long time.

1:37:33 Mark: Yeah, it really makes Nietzsche talk to contemporary pragmatists, for instance, and talks about the different. So Wes revealed that he had looked at this book before our long ago episodes on William James.

1:37:45 Wes: Yeah, I've been recommending this book to you guys since we started this podcast

1:37:49 Mark: so that I finally understood some of what you were talking about in terms of the different problems with the coherence theory of truth and things like that. And we'll have to. To get back back to that when we actually do Rorty and Putnam and

1:37:58 Jessica: all that, but good luck.

1:37:59 Mark: You could really line this up. We were saying maybe that there's no theory of truth in here at all. It really.

1:38:04 Wes: Clark admits that there's no explicit theory of truth in Nietzsche. And what she's doing is she's reconstructing something consistent with Nietzsche, let's say.

1:38:13 Mark: Yeah, the account in there and really the fact that a lot of the sophistication came from the consideration of, you know, what's Putnam's view of truth versus Rorty's view of truth and things like that that really made. Not to disparage, obviously Nietzsche's place in the canon is very secure, but at least this particular essay as being the work of a young man who has had maybe a little more flourish at this point than he did subtlety and original ideas. As you're saying, he's taking a lot of the epistemological points sort of straight from Schopenhauer and Kant and presenting them in a more flowery, artistic way. And some of the other points that look original are his recycling of the science of his time. It's an interesting glimpse of Him. And it's certainly a fun and provocative piece, but this should not be the Rosetta Stone for anybody, this particular essay.

1:39:01 Jessica: No, exactly. And it has been weirdly for a lot of people.

1:39:06 Mark: Can you briefly characterize, I think we've already said quite a lot about which parts of this persisted toward the end of Nietzsche's career. And specifically, I know the point that our listeners might be familiar with if you listen to our Genealogy of Morals episode. In the latter part of that he talks about the ascetic ideal. So that seems to be the main surviving element from this essay in his really later thought, which is that a certain Socratic kind of philosopher has this ascetic ideal of self denying in a way that is anti life, et cetera. Do you want to say anything else about sort of the career spanning evolution of these ideas on truth?

1:39:44 Jessica: Yeah, I mean, there are a couple of ideas that survived from this essay directly. The one that we've said about designations being arbitrary and for instance, assigning a gender to this or that object in our language being kind of contingent. If you look at Daybreak passage three, Nietzsche says, well, when man gave all things a sex and language, he thought not that he was playing, but that he'd gained a profound insight. It was only very late that he confessed to himself what an enormous error this was. And perhaps now he has not confessed it completely. So some things survive in almost direct quote in the next decade of works. This distinction between the rational man and intuitive man survives very directly. Human beings are animals fundamentally, and that we're not special magical rational animals, or that rationality is not a magical metaphysical property. That is the pervasive theme of human all too human. And Nietzsche reminds us of it again and again. The story that he tells about truth, starting out as our conception of truth, arose from people who used language properly versus those who didn't. Later there must have been some turn where that got moralized. And now we have this conception of there being a real reality versus the appearance and truth has the designation of being. What gets at real reality. That must mirror the kind of structure that Nietzsche develops in the Genealogy of Morals when he's analyzing the concepts of good and bad. There's an originally extra moral sense of those terms too. And then they become moralized. So I think there are rudiments of the genealogical method here and this pride that philosophers and scientists and seekers of knowledge have in just the value of the human intellect. Nietzsche comes to make a career out of questioning the value of our valuing truth. That just becomes a guiding question of his entire philosophy. So I think there are a lot of rudiments of it here, but there are also a lot of provocative particular phrases that have been picked out of this essay and quoted, often out of context, that don't survive, at least not verbatim. And we should ask ourselves, why not? And probably abandon this essay and just read the published stuff, because the good ideas are the ones that survived, the ones that didn't we shouldn't be paying attention to.

1:41:56 Mark: This was fun. It's wonderful language. And listeners have no excuse not to actually read this essay. It is so short. Just do it.

1:42:04 Jessica: It's hardly enough.

1:42:05 Mark: Stop right now and just freaking do it. It's online. Other people have other things they want to close out. Big themes that we did not hit here that you want to sum up. The voice of Seth, perhaps.

1:42:16 Wes: Voice of Seth is a lot like the thing in itself. I'm not sure.

1:42:20 Jessica: The mysterious X. The voice of Seth.

1:42:24 Seth: Not tonight.

1:42:24 Wes: The mysterious X.

1:42:25 Jessica: The mysterious X. That's just gonna be his Twitter handle from now on. Just be the mysterious X.

1:42:31 Mark: See, I was going to assure Seth. I always edit out myself baiting him and himself saying, no, I have no comment if he has no comment. But yet. Now, if you're gonna say something funny, Wes, in response to it, then we have to leave it in so everyone will know of the shame of Seth that we tormenting him at the end for not talking.

1:42:49 Wes: Sounds biblical.

1:42:50 Jessica: Seth, you always have such good comments on these. I'm always very impressed at the comments that come sort of quietly, just every so often that bring the conversation back to some point that it needs to come back to, both by Dylan and by Seth.

1:43:03 Seth: Yeah, normally that's my role, but the wave was just too strong. Tonight.

1:43:09 Wes: It says Buddhism.

1:43:10 Jessica: I don't know how to take that.

1:43:12 Wes: Is that what's going on? You've become a pacifist.

1:43:16 Mark: Stoicism.

1:43:17 Seth: I found myself having the experience during the course of this conversation of feeling like I had read almost the same thing that you guys had, but not quite. And I'm not quite sure why that was. But what I got out of the essay was very sum it up. Sum it up well. I mean, I didn't see the same discontinuity that Jessica mentioned between parts one and part two. That the essay opens with him talking about knowledge as a conceit and ending with quasi veneration of the intuitive person. And that there was this way in which the artist or the artistically creative person is somehow engaged with the world in a way that is more direct than the rational person. To me, the essay had quite a bit of structure to it around that theme.

1:44:06 Jessica: Right? No, actually I agree with all of that, except for saying that two is brief and it's harder to make sense of.

1:44:12 Seth: For me, this seemed like a very tightly constructed essay to me, that all the parts seemed to fit in together with the whole. And I felt like there was a very consistent theme, even though there was a lot of richness to the language and places where he was making big statements with fewer words than were probably necessary. So tonight was not a night for me to get into the flow of the conversation around the things that you guys were talking about. That's all right. It happens.

1:44:39 Mark: So the Nietzsche was cool, was impressive. The Clark was cool, was very right on point and very impressive. But yet both of those were blown away by our awesome guest.

1:44:51 Jessica: Your yappy guest.

1:44:54 Seth: We don't invite people on to keep their mouth shut.

1:44:56 Wes: It was very articulate, informative, yapping.

1:45:03 Mark: Thank you so much.

1:45:03 Jessica: Well, thanks for having me on. I mean, I really had a good time.

1:45:06 Wes: Yeah, thank you.

1:45:07 Jessica: I appreciate it and I love what you guys are doing, so kudos.

1:45:12 Mark: Next time is going to be a historic event because all four of us regulars are going to be in the same room talking about Candide by Voltaire.

1:45:23 Seth: And why is that historic, Mark?

1:45:25 Mark: Because Seth has never even met Dylan and I have not seen Seth since we were in grad school together.

1:45:31 Dylan: I've never met Wes or Seth in person.

1:45:34 Wes: Yeah.

1:45:34 Seth: Yes. We've been doing this for more than three years and we have not seen each other in person.

1:45:40 Wes: Well, I saw Mark a few years ago, but Seth, I haven't seen you since. Yeah, Clinton years.

1:45:45 Mark: We're now legally bound together as a corporate entity despite never having actually. Seth could really have a horrible odor problem. We don't know.

1:45:54 Wes: It's an online bromance. Corporatized. Yeah.

1:46:03 Seth: This will be the make or break episode.

1:46:06 Mark: Well, it's funny being Candide, which I remember being a wonderful, fun book, But I'm halfway through it and like the amount of actual philosophy in it, I could write on a note card. So I kind of knew that already. But it'll be fine.

1:46:20 Wes: Yeah, it'll be weird to actually be looking at people while I'm talking. It'll change the dynamic of the conversation.

1:46:27 Mark: You won't just get to close your eyes the whole time, put your head down on the.

1:46:31 Wes: Bang my head against the wall.

1:46:34 Seth: Perhaps that will be one of those more free flowing, topical as opposed to textual based conversations that the listeners have been asking for.

1:46:42 Mark: Get ready with your points to make

1:46:44 Seth: about Star wars

1:46:49 Mark: and Good night, everybody.

1:46:50 Jessica: Good night, everyone.

1:46:51 Wes: Good night.

1:46:52 Mark: Good night.

1:46:52 Seth: Good night.

1:46:54 Speaker: You may be beautiful but I'm not in the interesting. Cause I've got a female baby and she's got a cleaning blade. And I'd regret it if I lost my head for you. I wouldn't smile at me if I were wise. Because I'm not the best model that has yet to be. I'm just leaking like a jerk. Well, I'm down. I'm living out of work as well at home just being stupidly normal. Hope I leave you all alone. You may be beautiful but I won't tell you. Cause I'm not the kind of guy only would do more the wrong way. Did you know that I recovered far enough to take the strong way. I'm just leaking like a jerk with a tongue. I'm just living other work as well as the phone. Just being stupidly normal. But leave you well alone. You may be beautiful. I'm just leaking like a jerk. Will I take no. I'm just living out of work as well as home. I'm just leaking admiration. I appreciate your act. I'm just seeking admiration by distortion of the fact that I'm so happy with my beam and baby blue. And I'd regret it if I screwed her up for you. You may be beautiful but I would warn you I wouldn't notice me at.