8 ms·

Nietzsche on Truth and Lie (1991)

chordalkeyboard 6y ago
> In fact I think that it’s perfectly consistent to believe a wide number of things with a great deal of passion, and then believe about those beliefs that you could be wrong. I hope that’s not a further paradox, I do not think that it is. It seems to me to be perfectly consistent to believe something passionately, to believe it in a very deep way and have a belief about that belief that “Well, you know. I could be wrong.” This is one of the lectures where Roderick discusses fallibilism which he characterizes as "strong beliefs, weakly held."
- SubGenius 6y ago
  I watched all videos a while back. Really liked them. The 'Self Under Siege' series was my faovorite. The talks on Nietzsche were great too.
- Thorentis 6y ago
  Knowing that you could be wrong, is very different to thinking it is impossible to know what is right. The latter in my opinion is the great poison of modern philosophy. It seems to be that it is often used as a way to excuse lazy reasoning and irrational behaviour. Better to pretend that truth can't be known, than earnestly seek it out, etc. The irony of course, is that people who don't think truth can be known, often act with a great deal of certainty about things they believe to be right.
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    > The latter in my opinion is the great poison of modern philosophy. Gettier problems are an example of the difficulties in knowing conclusively that you are right. More generally, humans are prone to cognitive error. I'm not sure its possible to have 100% justified certainty about many real world issues. This goes back to Descartes (perhaps further, my education is incomplete). > It seems to be that it is often used as a way to excuse lazy reasoning and irrational behaviour. I can agree with that! > The irony of course, is that people who don't think truth can be known, often act with a great deal of certainty about things they believe to be right. That is a tragic level of hypocrisy.
    - Thorentis 6y ago
      Yeah, I'm not arguing that it is easy to know the truth, but the issue I take with many modern philosophies is that they argue it is impossible to know the truth. Which to me is a self-defeating argument. I have had plenty of interesting discussions with people at dinner-parties/gatherings that start out on the surface as being a disagreement over morality or a different political leaning, but then once you get right down to first principles they admit that actually they think it's impossible to know the truth, so what does it matter anyway? This is always so frustrating, but it's important to get to this point so that you can debate the real issue, rather than going back and forth on the surface level issues that ultimately don't address the underlying disagreement.
      - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
        > then once you get right down to first principles they admit that actually they think it's impossible to know the truth I've heard somewhere that one can bootstrap from this point by making contingent statements since logical consequence is something that can be known with reasonable certainty. I freely admit that I'm getting out of my depth here. I just mean that if you can find a point of agreement with your interlocutor you may be able to build from there by referring to that with your next statement and so on. Its also the case that science has done a great job of finding a way (Popperian falsifiability) to get asymptotically close to truth in my opinion.
      - throwaway98797 6y ago
        Is there a difference between 1. Knowing that truth exists but we won’t ever know we found it or be 100% sure that we did 2. Knowing that there is no truth In both cases we are stuck not knowing what we know. Furthermore, #2 may only apply to only subsets of truths. Ie., this book is real. This iPhone is “true”. Yet not knowing what’s outside of the universe or knowing it can’t be known does not seem to influence the day to day. My perspective, is truth as a goal in itself is not useful. An interesting way to talk to people is see the consequences of their beliefs on them, not on the theoretically world where everyone does or doesn’t believe as they believe. I’ve met too many good Christians who acted poorly. I’ve met many asshole non-believers. In the end their faith or lack their of doesn’t appear correlated with how they treat their mother, their father, or others. In the short time we have on this planet I emphasize how I’m actually being treated.
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    this is ironic because that's a very stereotypical and lazy take on modern philosophy straight out of a Jordan Peterson book. If we came closer to the truth every time someone on the internet mirepresents modern or postmodern philosophy as "we can't know anything bro" we'd have ascended to some higher plane of existence by now.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - Thorentis 6y ago
      I didn't mean to generalise all modern philosophy, but I think it's fair to say that unlike philosophy in the past (e.g. The philosophy of antiquity) I think it's fair to say that this is one of the defining characteristics of modern philosophy.
  - feralimal 6y ago
    "people who don't think truth can be known, often act with a great deal of certainty about things they believe to be right." Great comment. It is very rare, in my opinion to find anyone who isn't acting on beliefs as if they were knowledge. 99.999% of people are unable to understand that what they think is 'knowledge' is actually a set of unverified assumptions. These assumptions are presented as true at school, in work, on TV, etc and they see that everyone else treats these assumptions as true, so... well they are true, right? People cannot accept holding something as a hypothesis. They may even say they do this, but they do not change their hypotheses when they get new information. If pushed, they may state something to be a 'hypothesis' and that they use the word 'know' as a shortcut to that - all fine - but then if they are presented with additional information they cannot take it on and will reject it. Cognitive dissonance has no place in their minds - it is a tension that is unacceptable. Apparently most of us seek certainty and prefer a certain story to just resting with the evidence. The idea of 'believing we know' permeates our lives, and is why I argue that science is religion. And beliefs held as true operate on fundamental levels, despite a lack of verified evidence. TLDR, people prefer stories to truth.
    - throwaway98797 6y ago
      When you act you collapse the space to one truth. Ie even if you probabilistic view on a stock. You ultimately comment by buying and collapsing the probability into a single truth. I think most, no, all people act with certainty when they act.
- SirArtVandelay 6y ago
  "Of Course... But Maybe.": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfGjORXSARI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfGjORXSARI
AmericanChopper 6y ago
I certainly read Nietzsche differently to this author (and probably Kierkegaard too by the sound of it). I think a point both of them made was that truth can only exist within the context of an agreed upon set of axioms. If you accept that you can’t prove your axioms, then your not accepting that all beliefs about truth are equally valid, you’re only accepting that all beliefs about truth are equally capable of being proven (as in, equally not capable at all). From that perspective it’s easy to see why you might reject dogmatism.
- jmkr 6y ago
  I've also read Nietzsche different from this post, and my professor taught it different. Things like talking about power in the article seem more related to people that came after Nietzsche. Something more like Foucault. I also don't think he's really concerned with mathematical versions of truth. I think there's probably a good way to interpolate between Nietzsche and the programming world. In the sense of believing in things because the community does. That's probably another discussion. Philosophize with a Hammer!
- aries1980 6y ago
  > If you accept that you can’t prove your axioms, then your not accepting that all beliefs about truth are equally valid, you’re only accepting that all beliefs about truth are equally capable of being proven (as in, equally not capable at all). Afaik this is related to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, so all you can say that within the axiom set you can't prove that there is no contradiction. (Note that this doesn't mean there is a contradiction, but you can't prove there is or there isn't any.)
dotsam 6y ago
This was interesting and the site looks like a great resource. I am particularly glad there are transcripts with the videos. The concern for truth and power (metaphysics as imperialism; theories setting the context of what counts as fact; the illusion of democracy) is certainly food for thought.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  I'm glad you like it, I've found these lectures to be helpful. Some of my favorites are linked below: [0] http://rickroderick.org/304-marcuse-and-one-dimensional-man-1993/ http://rickroderick.org/304-marcuse-and-one-dimensional-man-... [1] http://rickroderick.org/301-paul-ricoeur-the-masters-of-suspicion-1993/ http://rickroderick.org/301-paul-ricoeur-the-masters-of-susp... [2] http://rickroderick.org/306-foucault-and-the-disappearance-of-the-human-1993/ http://rickroderick.org/306-foucault-and-the-disappearance-o... [3] http://rickroderick.org/206-nietzsche-the-will-to-power-1991/ http://rickroderick.org/206-nietzsche-the-will-to-power-1991...
_lazlo 6y ago
Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an over-going and a down-going. ... I love him who is ashamed when the dice fall in his favour, and who then asketh: “Am I a dishonest player?”—for he is willing to succumb.
kayodelycaon 6y ago
I wish I had read this before my philosophy course assigned reading Nietzche. It’s completely changed how I view the works I’ve read by him. They make sense to me now. Taken out of context, he seemed a bit crazy. My Christian upbringing told me people like Nietzsche didn’t believe anything could be known, which is demonstrably false. Things can be “known” but it’s context dependent.
- claudeganon 6y ago
  Nietzche wasn’t crazy, but his whole philosophy is an appeal to irrationalism and obscuring the truth revealed by Christianity: social orders built on sacrifice of an “other” are little more than a collective crime we engage in to tell lies about ourselves, society, and defuse collective tensions. His intent was to build a philosophy that would reconstruct the veil of archaic orders that obscured these truths, justifying a return to a sacrificial systems within the context of modernity. This is evident before his death, where he was obsessed with the problem of Dionysus versus the example of Christ, ultimately recognizing that they were the same figure, but conjugated toward a lie (creation of a false divine through ritual violence) or the truth (a victim of collective irrationality, for which it is our duty to transcend): https://www.jstor.org/stable/2905504?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2905504?seq=1
alexpetralia 6y ago
This is an incredibly gripping read. Thank you!
leipert 6y ago
I don’t know if someone appreciates these anecdotes, I went to the same school [0] as Nietzsche. In the school records there are two stories of him receiving punishment. The first is pretty relatable for an adolescent in Germany, he was found drunk in a ditch after having a few beer. The second: He ate a sausage behind a pillar in the cloister. (At the time you were just allowed to eat in the dining hall during the appropriate times.) So every time someone uses Nietzsche in an argument, I imagine a pubescent guy saying the thing while mumbling a sausage behind a pillar. Of course in my imagination he has the Nietzsche beard as well. On a more earnest note, Nietzsche clearly was a great mind. Which was later eaten away by neurosyphilis. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pforta https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pforta
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  "in my imagination he has the Nietzsche beard as well." The Nietzsche beard? I don't know what image of Nietzsche you have, but he's well known for having a certain style of mustache, not a beard. "Nietzsche clearly was a great mind. Which was later eaten away by neurosyphilis" It's not clear that he had syphilis, and there are some arguments that he did not, like these: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/3313279/Madness-of-Nietzsche-was-cancer-not-syphilis.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/3313279/Madness-of-Nie... http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/jns/reviews/richard-schain.-the-legend-of-nietzsches-syphilis http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/jns/reviews/richard-schain.-the-l...
  - leipert 6y ago
    Isn’t a Mustache a type of beard? Maybe that is different in English, but in German a mustache is also called "above lip beard" (Oberlippenbart) Thanks for the sources on the Syphilis, I like this Part from the second article: > The important question for Nietzsche scholars is whether this diagnostic controversy has any interpretative bearing. We know, for example, that Nietzsche suffered from insomnia but it's not clear how that information impacts how one interprets Nietzsche. Of course dementia of any kind is a far more serious condition and seems to bring with it textual implications. But what exactly are those implications? This is kind of similar to the discussion whether Art and Artist are connected or not.
pmoriarty 6y ago
Nietzsche is one of the most widely misinterpreted philosophers. Whenever someone opines on what Nietzsche "really meant", it's good to take that with a grain of salt, and read what Nietzsche actually wrote for yourself. In this case, see Nietzsche's essay "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense" https://www.kth.se/social/files/5804ca7ff276547f5c83a592/On%20truth%20and%20lie%20in%20an%20extra-moral%20sense.pdf https://www.kth.se/social/files/5804ca7ff276547f5c83a592/On%...
jess000000 6y ago
Can't stop wondering what Jordan Peterson would think
bobthechef 6y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJSw5LJaR2A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJSw5LJaR2A

> In fact I think that it’s perfectly consistent to believe a wide number of things with a great deal of passion, and then believe about those beliefs that you could be wrong. I hope that’s not a further paradox, I do not think that it is. It seems to me to be perfectly consistent to believe something passionately, to believe it in a very deep way and have a belief about that belief that “Well, you know. I could be wrong.” This is one of the lectures where Roderick discusses fallibilism which he characterizes as "strong beliefs, weakly held."

SubGenius 6y ago
I watched all videos a while back. Really liked them. The 'Self Under Siege' series was my faovorite. The talks on Nietzsche were great too.
Thorentis 6y ago
Knowing that you could be wrong, is very different to thinking it is impossible to know what is right. The latter in my opinion is the great poison of modern philosophy. It seems to be that it is often used as a way to excuse lazy reasoning and irrational behaviour. Better to pretend that truth can't be known, than earnestly seek it out, etc. The irony of course, is that people who don't think truth can be known, often act with a great deal of certainty about things they believe to be right.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  > The latter in my opinion is the great poison of modern philosophy. Gettier problems are an example of the difficulties in knowing conclusively that you are right. More generally, humans are prone to cognitive error. I'm not sure its possible to have 100% justified certainty about many real world issues. This goes back to Descartes (perhaps further, my education is incomplete). > It seems to be that it is often used as a way to excuse lazy reasoning and irrational behaviour. I can agree with that! > The irony of course, is that people who don't think truth can be known, often act with a great deal of certainty about things they believe to be right. That is a tragic level of hypocrisy.
  - Thorentis 6y ago
    Yeah, I'm not arguing that it is easy to know the truth, but the issue I take with many modern philosophies is that they argue it is impossible to know the truth. Which to me is a self-defeating argument. I have had plenty of interesting discussions with people at dinner-parties/gatherings that start out on the surface as being a disagreement over morality or a different political leaning, but then once you get right down to first principles they admit that actually they think it's impossible to know the truth, so what does it matter anyway? This is always so frustrating, but it's important to get to this point so that you can debate the real issue, rather than going back and forth on the surface level issues that ultimately don't address the underlying disagreement.
    - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
      > then once you get right down to first principles they admit that actually they think it's impossible to know the truth I've heard somewhere that one can bootstrap from this point by making contingent statements since logical consequence is something that can be known with reasonable certainty. I freely admit that I'm getting out of my depth here. I just mean that if you can find a point of agreement with your interlocutor you may be able to build from there by referring to that with your next statement and so on. Its also the case that science has done a great job of finding a way (Popperian falsifiability) to get asymptotically close to truth in my opinion.
    - throwaway98797 6y ago
      Is there a difference between 1. Knowing that truth exists but we won’t ever know we found it or be 100% sure that we did 2. Knowing that there is no truth In both cases we are stuck not knowing what we know. Furthermore, #2 may only apply to only subsets of truths. Ie., this book is real. This iPhone is “true”. Yet not knowing what’s outside of the universe or knowing it can’t be known does not seem to influence the day to day. My perspective, is truth as a goal in itself is not useful. An interesting way to talk to people is see the consequences of their beliefs on them, not on the theoretically world where everyone does or doesn’t believe as they believe. I’ve met too many good Christians who acted poorly. I’ve met many asshole non-believers. In the end their faith or lack their of doesn’t appear correlated with how they treat their mother, their father, or others. In the short time we have on this planet I emphasize how I’m actually being treated.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  this is ironic because that's a very stereotypical and lazy take on modern philosophy straight out of a Jordan Peterson book. If we came closer to the truth every time someone on the internet mirepresents modern or postmodern philosophy as "we can't know anything bro" we'd have ascended to some higher plane of existence by now.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Thorentis 6y ago
    I didn't mean to generalise all modern philosophy, but I think it's fair to say that unlike philosophy in the past (e.g. The philosophy of antiquity) I think it's fair to say that this is one of the defining characteristics of modern philosophy.
- feralimal 6y ago
  "people who don't think truth can be known, often act with a great deal of certainty about things they believe to be right." Great comment. It is very rare, in my opinion to find anyone who isn't acting on beliefs as if they were knowledge. 99.999% of people are unable to understand that what they think is 'knowledge' is actually a set of unverified assumptions. These assumptions are presented as true at school, in work, on TV, etc and they see that everyone else treats these assumptions as true, so... well they are true, right? People cannot accept holding something as a hypothesis. They may even say they do this, but they do not change their hypotheses when they get new information. If pushed, they may state something to be a 'hypothesis' and that they use the word 'know' as a shortcut to that - all fine - but then if they are presented with additional information they cannot take it on and will reject it. Cognitive dissonance has no place in their minds - it is a tension that is unacceptable. Apparently most of us seek certainty and prefer a certain story to just resting with the evidence. The idea of 'believing we know' permeates our lives, and is why I argue that science is religion. And beliefs held as true operate on fundamental levels, despite a lack of verified evidence. TLDR, people prefer stories to truth.
  - throwaway98797 6y ago
    When you act you collapse the space to one truth. Ie even if you probabilistic view on a stock. You ultimately comment by buying and collapsing the probability into a single truth. I think most, no, all people act with certainty when they act.
SirArtVandelay 6y ago
"Of Course... But Maybe.": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfGjORXSARI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfGjORXSARI

AmericanChopper 6y ago

I certainly read Nietzsche differently to this author (and probably Kierkegaard too by the sound of it). I think a point both of them made was that truth can only exist within the context of an agreed upon set of axioms. If you accept that you can’t prove your axioms, then your not accepting that all beliefs about truth are equally valid, you’re only accepting that all beliefs about truth are equally capable of being proven (as in, equally not capable at all). From that perspective it’s easy to see why you might reject dogmatism.

jmkr 6y ago
I've also read Nietzsche different from this post, and my professor taught it different. Things like talking about power in the article seem more related to people that came after Nietzsche. Something more like Foucault. I also don't think he's really concerned with mathematical versions of truth. I think there's probably a good way to interpolate between Nietzsche and the programming world. In the sense of believing in things because the community does. That's probably another discussion. Philosophize with a Hammer!
aries1980 6y ago
> If you accept that you can’t prove your axioms, then your not accepting that all beliefs about truth are equally valid, you’re only accepting that all beliefs about truth are equally capable of being proven (as in, equally not capable at all). Afaik this is related to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, so all you can say that within the axiom set you can't prove that there is no contradiction. (Note that this doesn't mean there is a contradiction, but you can't prove there is or there isn't any.)

dotsam 6y ago

This was interesting and the site looks like a great resource. I am particularly glad there are transcripts with the videos. The concern for truth and power (metaphysics as imperialism; theories setting the context of what counts as fact; the illusion of democracy) is certainly food for thought.

chordalkeyboard 6y ago
I'm glad you like it, I've found these lectures to be helpful. Some of my favorites are linked below: [0] http://rickroderick.org/304-marcuse-and-one-dimensional-man-1993/ http://rickroderick.org/304-marcuse-and-one-dimensional-man-... [1] http://rickroderick.org/301-paul-ricoeur-the-masters-of-suspicion-1993/ http://rickroderick.org/301-paul-ricoeur-the-masters-of-susp... [2] http://rickroderick.org/306-foucault-and-the-disappearance-of-the-human-1993/ http://rickroderick.org/306-foucault-and-the-disappearance-o... [3] http://rickroderick.org/206-nietzsche-the-will-to-power-1991/ http://rickroderick.org/206-nietzsche-the-will-to-power-1991...

_lazlo 6y ago

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an over-going and a down-going. ... I love him who is ashamed when the dice fall in his favour, and who then asketh: “Am I a dishonest player?”—for he is willing to succumb.

kayodelycaon 6y ago

I wish I had read this before my philosophy course assigned reading Nietzche. It’s completely changed how I view the works I’ve read by him. They make sense to me now. Taken out of context, he seemed a bit crazy. My Christian upbringing told me people like Nietzsche didn’t believe anything could be known, which is demonstrably false. Things can be “known” but it’s context dependent.

claudeganon 6y ago
Nietzche wasn’t crazy, but his whole philosophy is an appeal to irrationalism and obscuring the truth revealed by Christianity: social orders built on sacrifice of an “other” are little more than a collective crime we engage in to tell lies about ourselves, society, and defuse collective tensions. His intent was to build a philosophy that would reconstruct the veil of archaic orders that obscured these truths, justifying a return to a sacrificial systems within the context of modernity. This is evident before his death, where he was obsessed with the problem of Dionysus versus the example of Christ, ultimately recognizing that they were the same figure, but conjugated toward a lie (creation of a false divine through ritual violence) or the truth (a victim of collective irrationality, for which it is our duty to transcend): https://www.jstor.org/stable/2905504?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2905504?seq=1

alexpetralia 6y ago

This is an incredibly gripping read. Thank you!

leipert 6y ago

I don’t know if someone appreciates these anecdotes, I went to the same school [0] as Nietzsche. In the school records there are two stories of him receiving punishment. The first is pretty relatable for an adolescent in Germany, he was found drunk in a ditch after having a few beer. The second: He ate a sausage behind a pillar in the cloister. (At the time you were just allowed to eat in the dining hall during the appropriate times.) So every time someone uses Nietzsche in an argument, I imagine a pubescent guy saying the thing while mumbling a sausage behind a pillar. Of course in my imagination he has the Nietzsche beard as well. On a more earnest note, Nietzsche clearly was a great mind. Which was later eaten away by neurosyphilis. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pforta https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pforta

pmoriarty 6y ago
"in my imagination he has the Nietzsche beard as well." The Nietzsche beard? I don't know what image of Nietzsche you have, but he's well known for having a certain style of mustache, not a beard. "Nietzsche clearly was a great mind. Which was later eaten away by neurosyphilis" It's not clear that he had syphilis, and there are some arguments that he did not, like these: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/3313279/Madness-of-Nietzsche-was-cancer-not-syphilis.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/3313279/Madness-of-Nie... http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/jns/reviews/richard-schain.-the-legend-of-nietzsches-syphilis http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/jns/reviews/richard-schain.-the-l...
- leipert 6y ago
  Isn’t a Mustache a type of beard? Maybe that is different in English, but in German a mustache is also called "above lip beard" (Oberlippenbart) Thanks for the sources on the Syphilis, I like this Part from the second article: > The important question for Nietzsche scholars is whether this diagnostic controversy has any interpretative bearing. We know, for example, that Nietzsche suffered from insomnia but it's not clear how that information impacts how one interprets Nietzsche. Of course dementia of any kind is a far more serious condition and seems to bring with it textual implications. But what exactly are those implications? This is kind of similar to the discussion whether Art and Artist are connected or not.

pmoriarty 6y ago

Nietzsche is one of the most widely misinterpreted philosophers. Whenever someone opines on what Nietzsche "really meant", it's good to take that with a grain of salt, and read what Nietzsche actually wrote for yourself. In this case, see Nietzsche's essay "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense" https://www.kth.se/social/files/5804ca7ff276547f5c83a592/On%20truth%20and%20lie%20in%20an%20extra-moral%20sense.pdf https://www.kth.se/social/files/5804ca7ff276547f5c83a592/On%...

jess000000 6y ago

Can't stop wondering what Jordan Peterson would think

bobthechef 6y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJSw5LJaR2A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJSw5LJaR2A