Nietzsche a realist? What are you smoking?

Sam Pawlett rsp at uniserve.com
Sat Aug 7 00:01:04 PDT 1999


Michael Perelman wrote:
>
> I don't know much about Nietzsche, but did he write in The Will to Power.
> "there are no facts just interpretations"? If so, I would like an exact
> reference.
>

"Against positivism, which halts at phenomena--"There are only Facts"--I would say No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations. We cannot establish any fact "in itself": perhaps it is folly to want such a thing...

"In so far as the word "knowledge" has any meaning, the world is knowable, but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings--"Perspectivism."

"It is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their For and Against. Every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm"

F. Nietzsche The Will To Power 481,p 267

Also,

"There are no facts, everything is in flux, incomprehensible,elusive; what is relatively most enduring is --our opinions."

WP 604, p327

"The ascertaining of "truth" and "untruth", the ascertaining of facts in general, is fundamentally different from creative positing, from forming, shaping, overcoming, willing, such as is of the essence of philosophy..."

WP 605, p327

For balance:

"It is true that there might be a metaphysical world; the absolute possibility of it can hardly be disputed. We view all things through the human head and cannot cut this head off; though the question remains, what of the world would still be there if it had been cut off?"

Human All Too Human 9, p24

"All the presuppositions for a scholarly culture, all the scientific methods, were already there; the great incomparable art of reading well had been established --that presupposition for the tradition of culture, for the unity of science, natural science, allied with mathematics and mechanics was well along the best way--the *sense for facts*, the last and most valuable sense, had its schools and tradition for centuries."

Anti-Christ 59

I think what Nietzsche is saying in all this is a denial of "facts in themselves", a denial that there can be self-justifying facts unmediated by theory and culture. N is defending a weak realism while refuting a strong metaphysical or naive realism.

Sam Pawlett



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