On 12/2/2018 4:58 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 30 Nov 2018, at 19:22, Brent Meeker <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 11/30/2018 1:15 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Perspectivism is a form of modalism.
Nietzsche is vindicated.
Interesting. If you elaborate, you might change my mind on Nietzche,
perhaps!
All what I say is very close the Neoplatonism and Negative Theology
(capable only of saying what God is not).
Bruno
From https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/
6.2 Perspectivism
Much of Nietzsche’s reaction to the theoretical philosophy of his
predecessors is mediated through his interest in the notion of
perspective. He thought that past philosophers had largely ignored
the influence of their own perspectives on their work, and had
therefore failed to control those perspectival effects (/BGE/6;
see/BGE/I more generally). Commentators have been both fascinated and
perplexed by what has come to be called Nietzsche’s “perspectivism”,
and it has been a major concern in a number of large-scale Nietzsche
commentaries (see, e.g., Danto 1965; Kaulbach 1980, 1990; Schacht
1983; Abel 1984; Nehamas 1985; Clark 1990; Poellner 1995; Richardson
1996; Benne 2005). There has been as much contestation over exactly
what doctrine or group of commitments belong under that heading as
about their philosophical merits, but a few points are relatively
uncontroversial and can provide a useful way into this strand of
Nietzsche’s thinking.
Nietzsche’s appeals to the notion of perspective (or, equivalently in
his usage, to an “optics” of knowledge) have a positive, as well as a
critical side. Nietzsche frequently criticizes “dogmatic”
philosophers for ignoring the perspectival limitations on their
theorizing, but as we saw, he simultaneously holds that the operation
of perspective makes a positive contribution to our cognitive
endeavors: speaking of (what he takes to be) the perversely
counterintuitive doctrines of some past philosophers, he writes,
Particularly as knowers, let us not be ungrateful toward such
resolute reversals of the familiar perspectives and valuations
with which the spirit has raged against itself all too long… : to
see differently in this way for once,/to want/to see differently,
is no small discipline and preparation of the intellect for its
future “objectivity”—the latter understood not as “disinterested
contemplation” (which is a non-concept and absurdity), but rather
as the capacity to have one’s Pro and Contra/in one’s power/, and
to shift them in and out, so that one knows how to make precisely
the/difference/in perspectives and affective interpretations
useful for knowledge. (/GM/III, 12)
This famous passage bluntly rejects the idea, dominant in philosophy
at least since Plato, that knowledge essentially involves a form of
objectivity that penetrates behind all subjective appearances to
reveal the way things really are, independently of any point of view
whatsoever. Instead, the proposal is to approach “objectivity” (in a
revised conception) asymptotically, by exploiting the difference
between one perspective and another, using each to overcome the
limitations of others, without assuming that anything like a “view
from nowhere” is so much as possible. There is of course an implicit
criticism of the traditional picture of a-perspectival objectivity
here, but there is equally a positive set of recommendations about
how to pursue knowledge as a finite, limited cognitive agent.
Thanks. But I do not oppose perspectivism with Plato, and certainly
not with neoplatonism, which explains everything from the many
perspective of the One, or at least can be interpreted that way.
Pure perspectivism is an extreme position which leads to pure
relativism, which does not make sense, as we can only doubt starting
from indubitable things (cf Descartes). But Nietzsche might have been
OK, as the text above suggested a “revised conception” of objective.
With mechanism, you have an ablate truth (the sigma_1 arithmetical
truth), and the rest is explained by the perspective enforced by
incompleteness.
My reading of Nietzsche is he thought that there are many different
perspectives and one can only approach the truth by looking from
different perspectives but never taking one of them as definitive. This
goes along with his denial and rejection of being a system builder. I
think he equated system builders with those who took their perspective
to be the only one.
Brent
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