At 3:15 PM -0800 2/6/00, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
>At 9:48 AM -0800 on 2/6/00, Matilda Waltzed:
>
>
>> how right he is to 'poo poo' the works of such non-entities as s�ren
>>kierkegaard,
>> friedrich nietzsche, jean paul sartre, martin heidegger, blaise pascal,
>> fyodor dostoyevsky and karl jaspers. what charlatans are they.
>
>LOL!
>
>
>Well, I *might* claim Nietzche was a philosopher... Naaaw, probably not...
>
>So, yeah, you're right, Matilda. Charlatans, all. :-).
>
>I'll take Descartes, though, if you don't mind, just for old time's sake,
>being the inventor of analytic geometry must count for *something*. Okay,
>okay, even Pascal, just for fun... :-).
>
>Here's a hint, for those of you in Rio Linda: If it *ain't* logical, it
>*ain't* philosophy. For lack of a better term, it's *literature*.
I may have missed some of the messages in this thread, especially the ones
about "existentialism." From some of the messages I quickly scanned and
then deleted, I gather that someone in a new article used the expression
"of existential proportions" (or somesuch), someone else then said "What
the fuck?" to the use of "existential" as a modifier, and then the thread
got into existentialism as a philosophy, and leading thinkers often called
existential philosophers.
(BTW, "existential" is a perfectly good word. I took the original author's
use of "existential importance" or "existential proportions" to mean that
the existence of something is at stake. Likewise, the "existential
quantifier" in logic is perfectly well-defined. It has nothing to do with
Camus and Sartre and beatniks reading poetry in City Lights Books.)
Bob has taken strong exception to folks like Nietzsche, Heidegger, etc.
being called philosophers.
This is a particular interest of mine, so I'll make some comments. Skip
this if philosophy is of no interest to you.
There are two basic kinds of philosophy (ignoring the usual breakdown into
ontology, metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics): philosophy
about the the nature of the world and philosophy about how humans fit into
the universe. This second aspect may provide insights into how one might
live one's life, how one might deal with the inevitability of death, and
how one might find "meaning" in a universe which, according to science,
almost certainly has no real meaning in the classical sense (of meaning
being handed down by God to Moses, of meaning being given to Mohammed by
Gabriel, etc.).
The first kind is really "natural philosophy." Science, by its modern name.
Darwin, Newton, Einstein, etc. And Descartes for his work on analytic
geometry. But to call Descartes a "real" philosopher because of his work on
geometry and to say that Nietzsche is _not_ a real philosopher because he
didn't work in science is mostly pointless.
The world views given us by Darwin, Newton, Planck, and others are
certainly much more important than the world views given us by any
non-scientist philosophers I can think of. Hard to say Kant's theories are
comparable to evolution, a theory which informs nearly every aspect of our
lives today.
Which is not to say that the insights of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are
unimportant. Far from it. Nor is it very useful to dismiss their bodies of
work as "literature."
Nietzsche, in particular, was essentially the first _modern_ philosopher.
To those who don't know what he wrote about, I regret that I can't justify
spending an hour or two recapping his views, his aphorism, his changing
outlook. Read some of his stuff. Doesn't matter where one begins. (I'd
advise one of the main collections, e.g., "Portable Nietzsche," the Walter
Kauffmann translations.)
Nietzsche was not writing about the laws of mathematics, or physics, or
chemistry. He was asking what it means to be human in the modern world.
What it means to know we will die, that we are part animal but part more
than animal, that we can think about our place in the universe, and that we
are dealing with the reality that science has essentially shown us that the
concept of a God or set of gods is _no longer needed_ to explain the world.
(This is the infamous "God is dead" point. Nietzsche was fond of stating
things boldly, even provactively. A real shit disturber. And a brilliant,
clear writer. I admire him greatly.)
He correctly saw, in the 1870s, that the scientific discoveries of the 18th
and 19th centuries had forever changed our outlook on man vs. nature, man
vs. God, man vs. fate.
There are some folks of a technical bent--perhaps Bob Hettinga is one of
them--who consider this all twaddle. _Of course_ there is no God, _of
course_ man is a variety of animal, _of course_, _of course_, _of course_.
However, if the considerations of the "modernists" like Kierkegaard,
Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Heidegger are simple restatements of the
obvious, then what is left of philosophy?
Pierce? Wittgenstein? Other analytic and language philosophers?
This is certainly the trend in modern philosophy departments. In the usual
attempt to "scientify" their field, to make all theories testable and
refutable, the "language philosophers" are just about all that is left.
(Ironically, the modern language philosophers are even _more_ "just
literature" than are those philosophers Bob Hettinga has dismissed as mere
scribblers.)
I read philosophy for the joy of learning new insights. Nietzsche provides
them in spades. His is not a _systematic_ philosophy, but a _way_ of
thinking. And there are probably very good reasons to believe there _can_
be no "systematic philosophy" that is also true; being that there is no
Prime Mover, no Higher Power, no Underlying Purpose, only the emergent
behavior and "logical depth" (cf. Charles Bennett and others in recent
books on entropy and physics) of Reality, any attempt at a Grand Unified
Philosophy is pointless.
(Which is not to say that nothing is real, nothing is true, nothing is
important. Far from it. Just that the Nietzschean insights are probably
more useful than a "systematizers" grand theory of how all of reality
works.)
Many who followed Nietzsche lacked his brilliant ability to communicate
with wit and humor. Heidegger, for example, writes in a dense style which
takes much study. ("Dasein recapitulates its throwness." Which makes sense
once one understands what "dasein" stands for and what "throwness" means in
Heidegger's system.) Habermas is, for me, just as dense.
In summary, Nietzsche was the first major philosopher to address the deep
questions about what humans really are. Not as biological beings, not as
cultural beings, but as thinking beings in a world where there is no
fundamental purpose to the universe.
(This is where the high school level of these viewpoints usually comes in:
"Existentialism is about the meaningless of life." Feh.)
Nietzsche was the G�del of philosophy.
--Tim May
print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
"Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.
