Thread started: Mar 1 2007, 6:06 PM EST
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Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense", and one of the things that struck me is that he is very passionately arguing that Truth cannot be "man's" ultimate goal as we delight and are so good at Lying.
(P 80: "Deception, flattering, lying, deluding...is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them.")
But, as I think I heard in lecture on Wednesday, Nietzsche seems to believe in understanding concepts through opposition (like what we saw in Benveniste with knowing "I" only through "you").
So, isn't this fascination that we have for a lie, "So long as it is able to deceive without injuring" (P90) merely another expression of our desire to know Truth?
Another question I was thinking of raising was in relation to
"Thus it is we who impress ourselves in this way. In conjunction with this it of course follows that the artistic process of metaphor formation with which every sensation begins in us already presupposes these forms and thus occurs within them." He is alluding to the fact that we impress ourselves by creating something (intellectually) and then 'discovering' it sometime later. On P85 he uses the example of a camel and our definition of a mammal. Aren't these definitions that we give to things (especially things in science, for example: things that we do not control as humans, but that we can observe) based purely on observation rather than on us creating something (like religion, for example) and then looking for proofs. Or in other words, aren't some of these observations on pre-existing phenomenon, instead of intellect created notions, and if so, how can we create a metaphor of something that was pre-existing? Would these observations not be legitimate and not "a truth of limited value"?
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