Nietzsche and Rorty against metaphysics
Diego Martínez Zarazúa
In this paper I will attempt to present the contextualist critique of metaphysics carried out by Friedrich Nietzsche, later on reinterpreted by Richard Rorty in contemporary philosophic debates. Aiming to this purpose, first I will proceed to explain said critique (mainly founded upon the analysis of the genesis and use of language); and then I will appraise this nietzschean attack on metaphysics from the holist standpoint advocated by Rorty. In a youth text, both short and interesting, Nietzsche wrote:
Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beast had to die. 1
Knowledge, as Nietzsche understands it, does not exhibit what things really are, but it shows them tainted (Michel Foucault even says that between knowledge and 2
things there can only be a violent relation ). And so, Nietzsche thinks that we live our lives through illusions: classifications, labels, concepts, and thus the truths, are all fictitious. But whence does this scandalous statement come? Nietzsche argues that words and concepts (taken in this paper as equivalents) are generated whenever we even uneven experiences.
Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept “leaf” is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects. This awakens the idea that, in addition to the leaves, there exists in nature the “leaf”: the original model. 3
Therefore, words pass over what is singular. However, nature only holds pure individuality; and as a consequence, concepts (that are constructions of the finite spirit) are nothing but anthropomorphisms. Concepts are human projections, and are not
1
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Sobre verdad y mentira en sentido extramoral , España: Tecnos, 2012, p. 21. Foucault, Michel. La Michel. La verdad y las formas ju rídicas, rídicas , México: Gedisa, 1984, p. 9. 3 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Sobre verdad y mentira, mentira, op. cit., p. cit., p. 27. 2
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backed up by nature (since the latter lacks of categories and labels)… The world does not speak. Only we do 4, says Rorty. A renewal of nominalism is set here. We emit statements from abstract concepts –and thus general–, though what there really exists is a vast conglomerate of individuals; of which we privilege some attributes and omit some others. However, if nature itself does not underwrite any forms, concepts or genders, then we are unable to find in it any guidance towards finding a “rule of omission” –namely a guideline that points out what to brush off–: nature does not aid us on choosing the best concept for an object, nor can we appeal to it in order to justify any classification table. Nevertheless, we arbitrarily objectify subjective categories, and so we feel certain that the world is as we think it is. This is why, not without irony, Nietzsche asserts that man has no natural propensity towards truth; if anything, he would have it towards deceit (because he craves to hold as true what himself has created). In order to gain some clarity on this matter is useful to draw upon Funes the Memorious, a character created by Jorge Luis Borges, which is –in some ways– opposed to the man described by Nietzsche. Funes’ oddity is that “what he once meditated would not be erased” 5. Funes not only he remembered every leaf on every tree on every wood, but even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it 6.
He was, let us not forget, almost incapable of general, platonic ideas. It was not only difficult for him to understand that the generic term dog embraced so many unlike specimens of differing sizes and different forms; he was disturbed by the fact that a dog at three-fourteen (seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog at three-fifteen (seen form the front). His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him on every occasion. […] I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details. 7
Funes the Memorious is the ridiculous excess of what man is not capable. We take shelter from the countless individualities we perceive by deleting their identity, particularity, and unique appearance. Words are the attempt of stopping the perpetual river, at no time identical to itself, which is the experience. Hence there is no way we can anchor – truthfully – any classification to reality (a reality that is, to both Nietzsche
4
Rorty, Richard. Contingencia, ironía y solidaridad , Barcelona: Paidós, 1991, p. 26 Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones, Colombia: Debolsillo, 2011, p. 132. 6 Ibid ., p. 133. 7 Ibid ., pp. 133-134. 5
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and Borges, a flux that slides off our clumsy hands). This thought reflects another much older. In the Theaetetus, a Plato’s dialogue, is said that the followers of Heraclitus speak like maniacs, because one cannot talk with them on any subject:
For, in accordance with their text-books, they are always in motion. […] If you ask any of them a question, he will produce, as from a quiver, sayings brief and dark, and shoot them at you; and if you inquire the reason of what he has said, you will be hit by some other new-fangled word, and will make no way with any of them, nor they with one another; their great care is, not to allow of any settled principle either in their arguments or in their minds, conceiving, as I imagine, that any such principle would be stationary; for they are at war with the stationary, and do what they can to drive it out everywhere. 8
These ancient people seem to echo in Borges’ Funes. Both heracliteans and Funes the Memorious distrust the regularity: the formers because of an exacerbated adherence to their doctrine, and the latter due to a disability for forgetfulness and abstraction. That is why Nietzsche, whom in this text seems to be a native of Ephesus rather than Röcken, claims that hierarchies, concepts, and the overall structure that the mind imprints –but ascribes– to the world, “if not derived from never-never land, is a least not derived from the essence of things”9. This has corrosive consequences on truth, because if we suppose that the truth of a statement depends on whether or not it represents adequately the order of the universe, nonetheless the latter turns out to be nothing but a human projection, then truth seems to be a pitiful swagger:
When someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding. Yet this is how matters stand regarding seeking and finding "truth" within the realm of reason. 10
Michel Foucault, a relevant hermenut of this Nietzsche’s text, concludes that knowledge lacks of nature, essence, and universal conditions, for he shares the nietzschean definition of truth: “a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding” 11. In other words, veracity is
8
Platón. Teeteto, 179e-180a, Diálogos V , Madrid: Gredos, 1988, pp. 251-252. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Sobre verdad y mentira, op. cit., p. 27. 10 Ibid., p. 30. 11 Ibid., p. 28. 9
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nothing else but custom, and that is why Foucault points out that “truth itself has a history”12. The point for Nietzsche –and thus for Foucault as well– is that we think through language and that words are conditioning us. The point is that we would not claim that a black dog resembles more to a brown dog than to a white cat if we were not already convinced about a classification that sets them that way. The point is that we are trapped into perspectives, prejudices or convictions; and it is only on the basis of this historical a priori that “ideas could appear, sciences be established, experience be reflected in philosophies, rationalities be formed, only, perhaps, to dissolve and vanish soon afterwards”13. José Ortega y Gasset, Spanish philosopher and studious of Nietzsche, claims the same in the following extract:
Every wilful and explicit philosophy moves through the scope of a pre-philosophy or belief, that is for the individual the reality itself, and thus remains silenced. Is only after we elucidate said pre-philosophy (radical and unreasoned), that the limitations of the explicit philosophies come to light. 14
But then, he points out acutely, knowledge is, beforehand, the most determinate opinion about things 15. And what to do with all of these thoughts? American philosopher Richard Rorty puts them in very simple terms. He has given up on the idea that we have a direct access to truth because, as Nietzsche, he also paid attention to language. Rorty is part of the th
“linguistic turn” that the 20 century philosophy undertook, in which the language came to claim the throne once occupied by the consciousness (for about two centuries until then). This means that from now on language is to be considered the philosophical theme par excellence, and thus every opinion shall be referred to this linguistic standpoint. Being so, knowledge will also be language, or at least will somehow have to deal with it. Perhaps with this on mind Rorty says, “Of a thing, it can only known what is stated in the propositions that describe it”16. And then he continues:
12
Foucault, Michel. La verdad y las formas jurídicas, op. cit ., p. 3. Foucault, Michel. Las palabras y las cosas, México: Siglo XXI, 2010 , p. 15. 14 Ortega y Gasset. José, Apuntes sobre el pensamiento, Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1966, p. 29. 15 Ibid., p. 26. 16 Rorty, Richard. El pragmatismo, una versión, España: Ariel, 2000, pp. 145-146. 13
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If there is not a direct access to things, if there is no knowledge that has any other form than a phrasing attitude, then all that can be known about things are the relations that they hold with each other. 17
Therefore, knowledge depends on relations that surpass it, namely the context in which its statements make sense. This does not result in the suppression of things beyond human linguistic experience; in fact, that issue is irrelevant. We should not care for it, and is inessential to the current argument. In this regard Rorty says:
The anti-essentialist [that is: contextualist] does not question that trees and stars existed long before there were statements about trees and stars […]. But the fact that things preexist their statements does not help us to make sense of the question “What are the trees and stars besides the relations they have with other things, besides the statements that we utter of them?” 18
If things exist by themselves, well, good for them, but that is not what our problem is about. On the contrary, our problem lays on what those things are. And “what they are”, for a philosophy that has carried out the linguistic turn, is a question that can only be answered with language. We have seen with Nietzsche the origin of words: they are not build upon the structure of reality; human words do not mirror the word of God, etched in the heart of things from the creation until the end of times. Quite on the contrary, man created words in his image and likeness. Although the word, being as it is, namely a conventional practice, cannot be changed by human will. Words do not belong to any man in particular. We learn to speak an alienated language. Hence is far more accurate to say that man belongs to language, and not the other way around. Words are not expressions of man; it is him who is expressed through words. This is one way of paraphrasing what Ortega y Gasset once said: we have ideas, but beliefs have us. One cannot conquer its own perspective, but is the latter that rule upon us discretely and to the full extent. In consequence science and philosophy are, as any other kind of conversation, contextual, partial, related to our beliefs, in which we are, although not very consciously. Rorty sums up these ideas in his conception of a contextualist process of validation, which he calls holism. According to this, belief is justified when it is in
17
Ibid ., p. 146. Ibid ., p. 152.
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harmony with what a group of people already deems worthy and relevant. This does not mean that any belief can be true, but only the ones that adjust to the standards of their day. And actually not only truths, but also the philosophical problems, academic topics, subjects of study, moral values, ethical dilemmas… in summary, every one of the human conversations are attached to a particular zeitgeist that embraces them. Each form of validity falls into a paradigm. In broad terms this has been the general way in which contextualist thinkers have criticized metaphysical thought. In this paper we have been against the idea of a truth that is exempt of an argumentative process, for it is, allegedly, self-evident; against the understanding of a history that narrates the uninterrupted development of humanity towards a more perfect civil state; against the notion of a science which depletes the possibilities of interpreting the world; against the conception of the human rights that grounds them upon essential human structures. All of these ideas take shelter under a metaphysical standpoint, and thus we rather turn our backs on them. Inasmuch as claiming loyalty to one’s beliefs -says Rorty- does not turn them on anything better than the hope and dreams of a particular human group. These metaphysical opinions have concurred in erecting enormous conceptual buildings upon foundations which contextual nature has been ignored. In the same respect, Nietzsche wrote that “truths are illusions which we have forgotten that are illusions”19; or that man is worthy of his admiration, for he “succeeds in piling an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water” 20. To sum up, metaphysical thought forgets its own condition of being a thought. And thus we would do better appraising the contextual contingency of validity above its necessity and universality.
19
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Sobre verdad y mentira, op. cit., p. 28. Ibid ., p. 30.
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Bibliography.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones, Colombia: Debolsillo, 2011. Foucault, Michel. La verdad y las formas jurídicas, México: Gedisa, 1984. ______________ Las palabras y las cosas, México: Siglo XXI, 2010. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Sobre verdad y mentira en sentido extramoral , España: Tecnos, 2012. Ortega y Gasset. José, Apuntes sobre el pensamiento, Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1966. Platón. Teeteto, 179e-180a, Diálogos V , Madrid: Gredos, 1988. Rorty, Richard. Contingencia, ironía y solidaridad , Barcelona: Paidós, 1991. ____________ El pragmatismo, una versión, España: Ariel, 2000.
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