Date: Sun, 7 May 1995 09:53:34 -0700 (PDT)
From: "Wayne A. King" <kingwa-AT-crl.com>
Subject: No facts?


>On Sat, 6 May 1995 Marc Demarest <demarest-AT-hevanet.com> wrote:

 <somewhat chomped>

Thanks sincerely for your views.  Your observations, at least
as I understand them, seem to be very much in accord with my own
regarding Nietzsche. He is contradictory, but never in a sloppy
way, always in a way that challenges the reader to solve the
puzzle.  This may be a fundamental reason why I find every time I
read him, I find something new, while at the same time I am never
sure if my latest interpretation is any closer to N than were my
earlier ones. Whatever N's actual views about his own writings
were, they remain mostly hidden from us, and despite his frequent
writings about his own writings.

>I think we'd do well to remember that N adopted stances that
 seem, in retrospect (and from a cultural position where we accept
 all sorts of things that our forbears 100 year ago would have
 found untenable) to be extreme with a specific pedagogical
 purpose in mind -- to create dissonance between what he took to
 be the norms of his readership and the point he was trying to
 make ...

I think this an excellent point.  N "adopted" stances. I am never
completely certain which stances are "his" vs. his adopted ones,
never certain when he is not wearing one of his many masks.  While
all thinker's ideas are adopted to some extent, I believe N's
adaptations are far more apt to produce misunderstanding than
most. The strangest thing is that he not only seemed perfectly
aware of this, but may have done it intentionally, what Nehamas
calls "undermining himself."

>Personally, I don't understand what "perspectivism" is -- unless
 by that you mean his interesting in the knowing-subject, in what
 we are taught to call phenomenology. N was a historian, a
 contextualist -- someone who believed in the idea that "facts"
 were embedded in webs of historical context outside of which said
 "fact" meant nothing, or less or different or something else.
 Vide *Twilight of the Idols*, "'Reason' in Philosophy":

Here is a brief passage showing what Alexander Nehamas said about
N's perspectivism in the introduction to his Nietzsche, Life as
Literature:
   "... the distinction between what his (i.e., N.) writing
   contains and what it produces can be at best provisional.
   This view is perspectivism, Nietzsche's famous insistence that
   every view is only one among many possible interpretations,
   his own views, particularly this very one, included.  But if
   the view that there are only interpretations is itself only an
   interpretation, and therefore possibly wrong, it may seem to
   follow that not every view is after all an interpretation and
   that Nietzsche's position undermines itself. "


>N would have found I think the statements suggested above to qualify as
"facts" and would have followed on by saying 'but so what? What do these
tell us about how we might live better'... When we start to ask that question,
we no longer have recourse to the naively empirical.

As indicated, it just seems to me he was either intentionally
undermining himself in phrasing it like he did.  I wonder if
anybody proficient in German could tell us if there's the
possibility of something being lost or distorted in the
translation from the German into the English, "There are no facts,
only interpretations"?

>As for the idea that somehow N was Derrida, and believed that
language prevents us from having recourse to plain facts, and
condemns us to a world in which "N had no twin brother" cannot be
verified, see Book 3 of *The Gay Science*, #244:
>"Thoughts and words -- even one's thoughts one cannot reproduce entirely in
  words."
>That's the classic pre-deconstructive precedence fallacy if I
ever saw it.

Please explain what you mean by the "classic pre-deconstructive
precedence fallacy" (and how it relates to the quote.)  I don't
know what fallacy that is.

>Someone suggested that N meant "moral facts" when he said "facts" and I
think that's a reasonable place to start to understand what N meant.

That was one of my first responses too.

>But we can't lose sight of N's rhetoric (strong, poetic,
metaphoric, aphoristic... and therefore empirically loose), and we
have to remember his definition:
  "He is a thinker; that means, he knows how to make things simpler than they
   are." (GS, Book 3, #189)

An interesting way to look at it.

>We also have to beware of Foucault's author-function and getting caught in
trying to reconstruct a man's "mind" from a pile of words...

But isn't that more or less what most Nietzsche interpreters are
trying to do when they assure us what (they think) Nietzsche
meant?

Regards,
Wayne
Lilburn, Georgia


	--- from list nietzsche-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu ---

     ------------------