Nietzsche a realist? What are you smoking?

Rob Schaap rws at comserver.canberra.edu.au
Sat Aug 7 00:25:29 PDT 1999


G'day Miles'n'Ken,


>The more I read Fred, the more I question the
>originality of most of the recent pomo literature (e.g.,
>Zizek, Butler).

Yeah, save your money and be smugly up to date: buy a dog-eared *Genealogy of Morals* and repeat the words you find there-in after the prefix "As (place any well-known French philosopher since Althusser here) has argued ... ". Nietzsche didn't have a useful answer to the representation problem, and neither do the pomos. Well, mebbe Rorty, in his more pragmatist moments, comes close. His continuation of the idea that valid truth claims are the ones that currently seem to work ain't a million miles from Chomsky's idea of competence (as I think I understand it) and Habermas's idea of intersubjectivity - as Hilary Putnam has it "what is true depends on what our terms refer to, and - on any picture - determining the reference of terms demands sensitivity to the referential intentions of actual speakers and an ability to make nuanced decisions as to the best reconstruction of those intentions."

I reckon that's what we do when we argue on LBO (rather than imagine each others' faces and stuff) - and why Ken, whose arguments seem recreationally directionless at times (and why not?), always gets us asking him what he's getting at.

That probably didn't help anybody - just felt like a swift kick at a passing idealism-unto-nihilism, really.

Cheers, Rob.



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