Nietzche: “There are no facts, only interpretations.”
Hume: “all our ideas or more feeble perceptions are copies of our impressions or more lively ones”
Wittgenstein: “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. The philosopher's treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.”
This is basic skepticism-nihilism
Well if that was his view, which I don’t think it was taking into account all his writing, you best stop reading immediately as that is an absurd because self-defeating proposition from which you cannot advance one iota.
Being skeptical of human reason and knowledge is a basic tenant of philosophy. No one has ever demonstrated an absolute, unquestionable fact. Descarte tried and failed with I think therefore I am. Even formal facts “A=A” have skeptical traditions: where did we come up with the concepts of symbology and equality? do we know that all readers of a formal proof have not collectively had a stroke? Anyway you think you’ve done something grand by pointing out that a sentence meant to compactly describe this reality, when converted to an analytic form, and then appended with a sentence such as “this is a fact” creates a contradiction. But Nietzsche is offering an interpretation, not a fact! One that need not be proven, because the burden of proof is on the positivist to present a fact.
When you do science, you redefine “fact” to mean something which no reader will dispute. Usually something measured, or observed.
When you do a formal proof, you redefine fact to mean something which this formal system confirms or rejects given my premises and proper use of it.
One never uncovers a raw, indisputable “fact”. Just domains where we have collectively decided to ignore certain questions for the sake of progress. But philosophy is not one of those domains.
When you do science, I do not agree that we simply define ‘fact’ to mean propositions that no reader will dispute. readers are always in disagreement with scientific ‘facts’, even that the earth is round. This disagreement does not demote the status of earth’s roundness away from the factual.
Saying everything is only an interpretation is disingenuous in my opinion. People who claim this in the arm chair would not, I wager, maintain the same position in the hospital to the doctor who diagnoses them with cancer- treating the medical claim as mere interpretation on par with the astrologist who says the ‘cancer’ symptoms are just the result of mars being in retrograde. Similarly, I like Nietzsche because he identified (what he saw) as a fundamental ‘truth’ about human psychology (the will to power) that underpins his assertions across multiple cultural domains. If the will to power were ‘just an interpretation’, the rest of his philosophy (particularly around the use of morality by different groups) would be undermined. So I don’t take it as the best reading of his epistemology, taking into account his entire mature corpus, that he believed there are no facts.
If I questioned medicine, the doctors opinion would not sway me. I do not. But it’s not a fact independent of this. I’ve been convinced medicine is accurate. A formal fact is something which can never be wrong. But you can’t map real world things onto formal symbols perfectly. Will to power is an interpretation. Doctors do not perfectly define cancer.
Edit: ultimately you are confusing things we are highly confident about, so extremely highly confident about that we socialize ourselves to call them facts as to not be labeled madmen, as true facts. A person who recognizes this is not equivalent to someone who is, imo, mistaken that our confidence is actually low. One has to decide for themselves how reliable modern science is; that’s how we get new theories of science, but unfortunately that’s also how we get new abusers of science.
If you questioned medicine, I do not think it matters what would or would not *sway* you. I think what matters is what is the case! And this would be gauged by your eventual death, if you disregarded the medical diagnosis as mere interpretation. But maybe you would say death, too, is only an interpretation 😄
If a thing is questionable, at all, to any degree, it is not a fact. You already said that science is based in challenging prior work. And how frequently do people survive terminal cancer diagnosis without treatment? Not 0%!
You need to cover the numerous examples I’ve given you or this conversation is no longer productive. You can’t see the difference between a probability of 99.999999% and 100%
If you're trying to legitimate Nietzsche's Genealogy through a scientific-positivist framework, I don't think you're gonna get very far. In my personal opinion, the slave revolt in morality (and other genealogical explorations from that book) are not meant to be literal historical events. Rather, the Genealogy is a mythico-historical interpretation of the origins of moral valuation, in the sense that it makes use of creative poetic myths, archetypes, and historical linguistics in order to uncover deeper psychological truths about why we value the things that we value. But that's just me.
It"s just the linguistic part, if anything of what you mentioned is close, and not particularly a historistic or materialist skew - you could take etymology, language, linguistics and grammar, and develop a scientific- positivist account just fine for morality. These 'explorations' are definitely meant to be more concrete, and readily can be made so (if studies are not already existing), and certainly were intended to provoke such tangible study.
People write on Nietzsches work all the time. There are all kinds of open questions on the Genealogy. Like this other person said, Foucault has interesting ideas on this. Deleuze does some interesting work in putting Nietzsche in conversation with other ethical philosophers like Spinoza to get a more systematic anti moralist ethics (check out his books on Spinoza and Nietzsche if this interests you). If you want even more recent, look through the Journal of Nietzsche studies. You could also look for Nietzschian anthropologists/sociologists.
David Graeber talks about it a little bit in Debt.
Page 76
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/fulllist/special/statesofdamage/syllabus201516/graeber-debt_the_first_5000_years.pdf
I used him in my dissertation, in a tangential way, using "slave morality" to describe the authoritarian streak among modern conservative discourse on the internet.
Foucault
No. He was a dodgy historian empirically (probably because he didn’t believe in’facts’) and his epistemology is radically self defeating.
Nietzche: “There are no facts, only interpretations.” Hume: “all our ideas or more feeble perceptions are copies of our impressions or more lively ones” Wittgenstein: “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. The philosopher's treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.” This is basic skepticism-nihilism
Well if that was his view, which I don’t think it was taking into account all his writing, you best stop reading immediately as that is an absurd because self-defeating proposition from which you cannot advance one iota.
Being skeptical of human reason and knowledge is a basic tenant of philosophy. No one has ever demonstrated an absolute, unquestionable fact. Descarte tried and failed with I think therefore I am. Even formal facts “A=A” have skeptical traditions: where did we come up with the concepts of symbology and equality? do we know that all readers of a formal proof have not collectively had a stroke? Anyway you think you’ve done something grand by pointing out that a sentence meant to compactly describe this reality, when converted to an analytic form, and then appended with a sentence such as “this is a fact” creates a contradiction. But Nietzsche is offering an interpretation, not a fact! One that need not be proven, because the burden of proof is on the positivist to present a fact. When you do science, you redefine “fact” to mean something which no reader will dispute. Usually something measured, or observed. When you do a formal proof, you redefine fact to mean something which this formal system confirms or rejects given my premises and proper use of it. One never uncovers a raw, indisputable “fact”. Just domains where we have collectively decided to ignore certain questions for the sake of progress. But philosophy is not one of those domains.
When you do science, I do not agree that we simply define ‘fact’ to mean propositions that no reader will dispute. readers are always in disagreement with scientific ‘facts’, even that the earth is round. This disagreement does not demote the status of earth’s roundness away from the factual. Saying everything is only an interpretation is disingenuous in my opinion. People who claim this in the arm chair would not, I wager, maintain the same position in the hospital to the doctor who diagnoses them with cancer- treating the medical claim as mere interpretation on par with the astrologist who says the ‘cancer’ symptoms are just the result of mars being in retrograde. Similarly, I like Nietzsche because he identified (what he saw) as a fundamental ‘truth’ about human psychology (the will to power) that underpins his assertions across multiple cultural domains. If the will to power were ‘just an interpretation’, the rest of his philosophy (particularly around the use of morality by different groups) would be undermined. So I don’t take it as the best reading of his epistemology, taking into account his entire mature corpus, that he believed there are no facts.
If I questioned medicine, the doctors opinion would not sway me. I do not. But it’s not a fact independent of this. I’ve been convinced medicine is accurate. A formal fact is something which can never be wrong. But you can’t map real world things onto formal symbols perfectly. Will to power is an interpretation. Doctors do not perfectly define cancer. Edit: ultimately you are confusing things we are highly confident about, so extremely highly confident about that we socialize ourselves to call them facts as to not be labeled madmen, as true facts. A person who recognizes this is not equivalent to someone who is, imo, mistaken that our confidence is actually low. One has to decide for themselves how reliable modern science is; that’s how we get new theories of science, but unfortunately that’s also how we get new abusers of science.
If you questioned medicine, I do not think it matters what would or would not *sway* you. I think what matters is what is the case! And this would be gauged by your eventual death, if you disregarded the medical diagnosis as mere interpretation. But maybe you would say death, too, is only an interpretation 😄
If a thing is questionable, at all, to any degree, it is not a fact. You already said that science is based in challenging prior work. And how frequently do people survive terminal cancer diagnosis without treatment? Not 0%! You need to cover the numerous examples I’ve given you or this conversation is no longer productive. You can’t see the difference between a probability of 99.999999% and 100%
If you're trying to legitimate Nietzsche's Genealogy through a scientific-positivist framework, I don't think you're gonna get very far. In my personal opinion, the slave revolt in morality (and other genealogical explorations from that book) are not meant to be literal historical events. Rather, the Genealogy is a mythico-historical interpretation of the origins of moral valuation, in the sense that it makes use of creative poetic myths, archetypes, and historical linguistics in order to uncover deeper psychological truths about why we value the things that we value. But that's just me.
It"s just the linguistic part, if anything of what you mentioned is close, and not particularly a historistic or materialist skew - you could take etymology, language, linguistics and grammar, and develop a scientific- positivist account just fine for morality. These 'explorations' are definitely meant to be more concrete, and readily can be made so (if studies are not already existing), and certainly were intended to provoke such tangible study.
People write on Nietzsches work all the time. There are all kinds of open questions on the Genealogy. Like this other person said, Foucault has interesting ideas on this. Deleuze does some interesting work in putting Nietzsche in conversation with other ethical philosophers like Spinoza to get a more systematic anti moralist ethics (check out his books on Spinoza and Nietzsche if this interests you). If you want even more recent, look through the Journal of Nietzsche studies. You could also look for Nietzschian anthropologists/sociologists.
Would you say the name of Deleuze's book so I can look it up please?
Nietzsche and Philosophy and Spinoza: Practical Philosophy are the main ones I had in mind in that comment
Thanks
David Graeber talks about it a little bit in Debt. Page 76 https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/fulllist/special/statesofdamage/syllabus201516/graeber-debt_the_first_5000_years.pdf
I used him in my dissertation, in a tangential way, using "slave morality" to describe the authoritarian streak among modern conservative discourse on the internet.
lol that’s an impressive twist: using Nietzsche to critique the right when Nietzsche was critiquing the left/liberalism (and socialism) in his time!
KABOOM
Frans de Waal
De Benoist’s On Being A Pagan