[Editor's Note: Thanks to Randall Miron for this post. Randall's a long-time audio editor of ours and has been helping edit blog posts here recently as well.]
In his short book Nietzsche
Hayman decries the fact that few commentators (Derrida and Henry Staten being notable exceptions) have helped us come to terms with this fact. To address this lacuna is his goal. He wonders, along with Staten, whose book Nietzsche's Voice
Not having studied Nietzsche in much depth, I found Hayman’s book (and the podcast!) a short and sweet means of going a little deeper. It can be read in a few hours and even though I wouldn’t call the book an introduction in any ordinary sense, it gives us a general frame through which to evaluate facile characterizations of Nietzsche as an unequivocal enemy of truth. The will to truth is a worthy value; it’s just not the highest virtue. Its voice must be allowed to speak, but must never be allowed to drown out all the others.
-Randall Miron
Great post and seems like a great book. I haven’t read it, but the first thought of worry is that is could be used to supposed relativism (any view is equally as valid) and some post modernist thought which though similarities. It seems to me and I could be wrong that Nietzsche is pointing to something very different.
“it’s just not the highest virtue. Its voice must be allowed to speak, but must never be allowed to drown out all the others.”
It seems to me that Nietzsche is trying to drown out the dogmatists as is Heidegger in Letter on Humanism.
Nietzsche does very much in discounting “Truth” drown out some voices.
It seems to me that Nietzsche is trying to get back to his understanding of Heraclitus and the skeptics like Pyrro and Sextus Empiricus.
Who advocated and Buddhist like Middle Way which avoids “views”, “beliefs” “Truths” as opposed to later post-Socratric philosophers and the later development of Christian thinking of the Law of the Excluded Middle.
Everything exists or it doesn’t. We die or we don’t. God exists or life has no meaning. etc..
“The Tathāgata teaches the Dhamma by the middle without veering to either of these extremes – eternalism (dualism or there are two separate things) or annihilationism (nihilism or all is “One”)’ – having abandoned them without reservation. He teaches while being established in the middle way. What is that Dhamma? By the formula of dependent origination, the effect is shown to occur through the cause and to cease with the cessation of the cause, but no agent or experiencer […] is described.”
“Conditioned Arising is “[…] a ‘Middle Way’ which avoids the extremes of ‘eternalism’ (dualism or there are two separate things) and ‘annihilationism (nihilism or all is “one”)’: the survival of an eternal self, or the total annihilation of a person at death.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_way
In zen this is “Not One and Not Two” the One and the Many.
(Not the One or the Many)
“Sextus Empiricus raised concerns which applied to all types of knowledge. He doubted the validity of induction long before its best known critic David Hume, and raised the regress argument against all forms of reasoning:
“Those who claim for themselves to judge the truth are bound to possess a criterion of truth. This criterion, then, either is without a judge’s approval or has been approved. But if it is without approval, whence comes it that it is truthworthy? For no matter of dispute is to be trusted without judging. And, if it has been approved, that which approves it, in turn, either has been approved or has not been approved, and so on ad infinitum.”
“Sextus did not deny the possibility of knowledge. He criticizes the Academic skeptic’s claim that nothing is knowable as being an affirmative belief. Instead, Sextus advocates simply giving up belief: that is, suspending judgment about whether or not anything is knowable. Only by suspending judgment can we attain a state of ataraxia (roughly, ‘peace of mind’).”
“Michael Frede, however, defends a different interpretation, according to which Sextus does allow beliefs, so long as they are not derived by reason, philosophy or speculation; a skeptic may, for example, accept common opinions in the skeptic’s society. The important difference between the skeptic and the dogmatist is that the skeptic does not hold his beliefs as a result of rigorous philosophical investigation.”
“It must also be remembered that by “dogma” Sextus means “assent to something non-evident [ἄδηλος, adēlos]” (PH I, 16). And by “non-evident” he means things which lie beyond appearances (and thus beyond proof or disproof), such as the existence and/or nature of causality, time, motion, or even proof itself.”
copy and paste to save time
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sextus_Empiricus
“A great Zen master said, “Do not seek the truth; simply cease cherishing illusions.” If there is a primary practice or path to enlightenment, this is it—to cease cherishing illusions. ”
http://www.adyashanti.org/index.php?file=writings_inner&writingid=30
much respect
Randall:
When I first started trying to make sense of Nietzsche, I shared the same view as Hayman, thinking Nietzsche was a troubled genius who ended up crazy, maybe due to his philosophy. It is now clear to me that he was a genius (only crazy like a fox) as the founder of now post-Modern philosophy.
If you read Ecce Homo which he wrote toward the end of his life of suffering, you will see that in fact he had found peace with the complexity of life (in the Heraclitian sense as qapla notes above), and even with suffering itself. His later life mental deterioration was unrelated to his philosophy (either in content or in spirit), and could have been as easily explicable as Alzheimers or another form of dementia.
The philosopher Robert Solomon often said he wished Nietzsche had never written Zarathustra because it is so hard to understand and often turns new readers off, thinking that Nietzsche is nonsense.
You have given a nice spin to Hayman’s book: “it gives us a general frame through which to evaluate facile characterizations of Nietzsche as an unequivocal enemy of truth. The will to truth is a worthy value; it’s just not the highest virtue. Its voice must be allowed to speak, but must never be allowed to drown out all the others.”
The next level up from truth is value itself, which is the heart of Nietzsche, contained in his agonistic will to power which I would summarize as: True agency (strength) is against the other, with obstacles and resistances, not denying but affirming the Other –in the absence of certainty–in the presence of self-sufficiency and of rationality, and in the existential enactment of the will to power.
PS: A Robert Solomon anecdote regarding Nietzche and Frithjof Bergmann:
Solomon described in one lecture a very personal experience he had while a medical student at the University of Michigan. He recounted how he stumbled as if by chance into a crowded lecture hall. He was rather unhappy in his medical studies at the time, and was perhaps seeking something different that day. He got precisely that. The professor, Frithjof Bergmann, was lecturing that day on something that Solomon had not yet been acquainted with. The professor spoke of how Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return asks the fundamental question: “If given the opportunity to live your life over and over again ad infinitum, forced to go through all of the pain and the grief of existence, would you be overcome with despair? Or would you fall to your knees in gratitude?”
Solomon collapsed and died of pulmonary hypertension on January 2, 2007 while changing planes at Zurich airport.