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30 jun 06 "explain nietzsche's anti-realism" now i have to read this. barf. i skimmed it. i skimmed the first two paragraphs of one section about 2/3 of the way down. sue me. the site is a good resource, though (stanford encyclopedia of philosophy). try looking up some other stuff in it, and while doing so try and put it out of your mind that it's a lot more fun to go downstairs and make a sandwich. short answer: nietzsche's anti-realism is the position that there is no universal standard for morality (which acts are "right", and which are "wrong"). "Verily, men gave themselves all their good and evil" -- 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' "...good and evil that are not transitory do not exist" -- also from 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' i will try to present a "nietzsche's anti-realism primer" -- i don't know about you, but i get tired of the cryptic language used in philosophy texts. i suspect that it's made this way because the concepts are actually elementary, and they're trying to cover this up to support the $1.6 billion a year philosophy industry. i'm going to clarify what i mean by "object", because i use that term a lot here. an object is anything, any one thing distinct from another thing, that is imagined or perceived. a dog is an object (the concept of "dog", as opposed to a particular dog). a particular dog ("spot") is an object. "morality" is an object. etc. an object is any discreet thought-structure -- a concept, a category which can encompasses any "thing". plato posited the existence of an objective reality, and anti-realism is the denial of the existence of such a reality -- anti-platonism, if you will. an objective reality is derived not from objects, or discreet though-structures, as i mentioned above, but from a single, universal "supreme object" (thus the term "objetive reality"), within some sort of supreme consciousness or other "place" that doesn't exist as a classical thought-structure (an object, as i described it above), but is rather "somewhere else." plato isn't all that clear on where this might be, but at least he has a name for it: "the realm of ideas". we'll talk more about objects. take our creation of the object "dog" based on our perceptions (there's a particular reflection of electrons in front of us that we're going to name "dog"). we're able to do this naming because we have, in our mind, already made the object "dog", which amounts to a template against which perception can be compared. when we make objects out of specific perceptions, we compare to this "dog" object, and, depending on how close the match is, assign that perception the name "dog". an objective reality would be one in which these objects are "real", a de facto standard, and not just conceptual templates created by one individual. the restriction of objectivism to one person is called phenomenology; the individual shapes categories out of events, or phenomena, such as the aforementioned bunch of electrons manifesting as an object, such as a "dog". phenomenology could, for all intents and purposes, be considered a synonym for anti-realism. consider each of our minds. we each have our own perceptions, and our ways of thinking about things. an event comes along -- say, a dog runs out of a house. bob sees the dog, and his reality is "a viscious dog is running out to attack me." joe sees the dog, and his reality is "a friendly dog is running out to greet me." biff, who is a severely dellusional paranoid schizophrenic, sees a haggard shoe-shine boy flying out of a cave on gorgon-wings of steel, who plans to implant microchips in his (biff's) teeth constructed to receive orders broadcast from the pentagon. all of these are realities, but no one is more "valid" or "real" than another. for each of the players, their reality is real. for there to be an objective realiy, there would have to be one single "template" of an object, extant for everyone, against which all other objects can be judged, compared, and named. plato was into this -- for him, there was an ultimate "dog", a god of a dog (so to speak), the "perfect" dog, that existed not in individual minds (this would be phenomenological subjectivity), but in something he called the "realm of ideas". according to this dog-standard, you can look at objects around the world and say "this is a dog", "this is not a dog", or even "this dog is more dog-like than other dogs". nietzsche's anti-realism ("there is not an objective reality") is principally applied to his moral philosophy; he wasn't a big metaphysician (metaphysicist?), largely because metaphysics serves no purpose; nietzsche restricted his philosophy to explaining and proposing solutions to the socio-cultural problems he observed around him. nietzsche's objection with morality was that there isn't such a thing as "good" and "bad", such that it can be universally applied to every culture, and every-one; there's no "realm of ideas" universal template for "right and wrong". imagine some pre-literate tribe somewhere that kills off their elderly when they become unproductive. according to our standard of morality, our standard of good and bad, this is murder, and is wrong. but according to tribe x, this is resource-conservation, and is good. what is it, exactly, that makes killing someone else "bad" or "wrong"? we all agree not to do it, and there are consequences to doing it, but there are also consequences to not doing it. phenomena that generate cause-and-effect can't be judged, but only observed. when you really think about it, you find yourself not trying to explain "there is no such thing as good/bad", but rather "what the heck are 'good' and 'bad', anyway?". everyone has his or her own morality (what he or she does and does not, will and will not, do) -- even the sociopath has it ("do only what benefits me"), whether or not they act on it. an enforced cultural moraltiy is the same thing as the law. take it or leave it, nietzsche's anti-realism constitutes the denial that there is an objective morality -- that there is no universal "good" and "evil" (one of his books is called 'beyond good and evil'). morality doesn't exist in the realm of ideas, which itself doesn't exist in the first place. i believe nietzsche thought that there might be an objective reality for some objects (maybe dogs?), but certainly not morality. that was his big thing. f. nietzsche pooped on objective reality, pooped on morality, and especially pooped on their intersection. hey, that was more fun than i thought it would be. anyway, i hope that was understandable and/or somewhat cohesive. i'm go downstairs and make the aforementioned sandwich. i'm into liverwurst these days. the "liverwurst-object". |
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