The fourth in a sporadic series.  Previously one, two and three.

The following are quotes from Human, All too Human.  Given that I want to tie some elements together, I’ll make some comments after each, and then proceed to synthesis/conclusion at the end.  Apologies for the length, even trimming the quotes (via …) this is still a lot of meat to chew on.

The Traditional Error of Philosophers.—All philosophers make the common mistake of taking contemporary man as their starting point and of trying, through an analysis of him, to reach a conclusion. “Man” involuntarily presents himself to them as an aeterna veritas as a passive element in every hurly-burly, as a fixed standard of things… They will not learn that man has evolved, that the intellectual faculty itself is an evolution, whereas some philosophers make the whole cosmos out of this intellectual faculty. But everything essential in human evolution took place aeons ago, long before the four thousand years or so of which we know anything: during these man may not have changed very much. However, the philosopher ascribes “instinct” to contemporary man and assumes that this is one of the unalterable facts regarding man himself, and hence affords a clue to the understanding of the universe in general. The whole teleology is so planned that man during the last four thousand years shall be spoken of as a being existing from all eternity, and with reference to whom everything in the cosmos from its very inception is naturally ordered. Yet everything evolved: there are no eternal facts as there are no absolute truths. Accordingly, historical philosophising is henceforth indispensable, and with it honesty of judgment.

Here Nietzsche introduces a deeply historical perspective[1] to the philosophy of man, which is all the more remarkable when you consider the time he was writing.  Although he notes thousands of years, he is still only talking historical mankind, yet alludes to the pre-historic development of mankind.  We now know we have thousands of generations of what is modern man, and that is only the tail end of our evolution as a species.  The knowledge of that (including interbreeding of Homo Sapiens with Neanderthal and Denisovian) is new even to us.  This is one of the places where Nietzsche has brilliantly anticipated, even when he wasn’t able to follow the thought to the degree that we can.  A very important aspect of understanding man and human behavior in historical perspective is, we do indeed change over time, but not always in the direction of progress.  It is equally the case that we can revert to older forms given that we have them buried in our heritage.

The bit “some philosophers make the whole cosmos out of this intellectual faculty” is really a shot at the Platonic/Aristotelian dominance of Western thought, which culminates in the Enlightenment.  Warby (whom I have linked to repeatedly) is writing about Post Enlightenment Progressivism (or as  old internet wag Billy Beck put it, the Endarkenment).  One of his major points is the historical pattern of human behavior, and Nietzsche himself touches on the notion of eternal recurrence (vice the above aeterna veritas).  What is important in really accepting history as a perspective is it is anti-theoretical, history exists as contingency, there is nothing inevitable about it nor does it move into the future in some predictable fashion.  This is destruction of the Hegelian endeavor (and in other sections not quoted Nietzsche propounds on that point), and do we ever need that now.  It is the Hegelian dialectic that rules much of our modern mentality (and not merely in the Marxian diversion).

The Scientific Spirit Prevails only Partially, not Wholly.—The specialized, minutest departments of science are dealt with purely objectively. But the general universal sciences, considered as a great, basic unity, posit the question—truly a very living question—: to what purpose? what is the use? Because of this reference to utility they are, as a whole, less impersonal than when looked at in their specialized aspects. Now in the case of philosophy, as forming the apex of the scientific pyramid, this question of the utility of knowledge is necessarily brought very conspicuously forward, so that every philosophy has, unconsciously, the air of ascribing the highest utility to itself. It is for this reason that all philosophies contain such a great amount of high flying metaphysic, and such a shrinking from the seeming insignificance of the deliverances of physical science: for the significance of knowledge in relation to life must be made to appear as great as possible. This constitutes the antagonism between the specialties of science and philosophy. The latter aims, as art aims, at imparting to life and conduct the utmost depth and significance: in the former mere knowledge is sought and nothing else—whatever else be incidentally obtained. Heretofore there has never been a philosophical system in which philosophy itself was not made the apologist of knowledge [in the abstract]. On this point, at least, each is optimistic and insists that to knowledge the highest utility must be ascribed. They are all under the tyranny of logic, which is, from its very nature, optimism.

I suppose I could write an entire article on just this quote.  Nietzsche is pretty much the last philosopher to legitimately hold philosophy over science, and he is proven wrong, in the pragmatic view, and right, in the loss of meaning we have experienced since he wrote.  We now hold scientists in higher regard than we do philosophers; and are we not impoverished, at least for meaning in life, by doing so?  This is a case where looking to Nietzsche is a matter of righting what he was wrong about by resurrecting values over knowledge, and specifically his notion of revaluation of the values.  In later writing he would address this and call what we are becoming The Last Man with great disparagement.  In contrast, Marx saw the ascendance of scientific knowledge as superior, and thus unjustly and inappropriately labeled his maundering philosophizing ‘scientific socialism’.

Neil Postman’s book Technopoly is much more understandable in this light (whereas I read that before, which made it an even more difficult read).  Every technological advance we make always involves a trade-off and very rarely do we recognize this.  In this case, we have strongly biased the advance of knowledge at the sacrifice of meaning.  It is similar to Schumpeter’s observation on capitalism – it is creative destruction; which is chaos, not orderly or theoretical and not in keeping with any teleological belief (the bugbear of Marxism).

Phenomenon and Thing-in-Itself.—The philosophers are in the habit of placing themselves in front of life and experience—that which they call the world of phenomena—as if they were standing before a picture that is unrolled before them in its final completeness. This panorama, they think, must be studied in every detail in order to reach some conclusion regarding the object represented by the picture. From effect, accordingly is deduced cause and from cause is deduced the unconditioned. This process is generally looked upon as affording the all sufficient explanation of the world of phenomena. On the other hand one must, (while putting the conception of the metaphysical distinctly forward as that of the unconditioned, and consequently of the unconditioning) absolutely deny any connection between the unconditioned (of the metaphysical world) and the world known to us: so that throughout phenomena there is no manifestation of the thing-in-itself, and getting from one to the other is out of the question. Thus is left quite ignored the circumstance that the picture—that which we now call life and experience—is a gradual evolution, is, indeed, still in process of evolution and for that reason should not be regarded as an enduring whole from which any conclusion as to its author (the all-sufficient reason) could be arrived at, or even pronounced out of the question. It is because we have for thousands of years looked into the world with moral, aesthetic, religious predispositions, with blind prejudice, passion or fear, and surfeited ourselves with indulgence in the follies of illogical thought, that the world has gradually become so wondrously motley, frightful, significant, soulful: it has taken on tints, but we have been the colorists: the human intellect, upon the foundation of human needs, of human passions, has reared all these “phenomena” and injected its own erroneous fundamental conceptions into things. Late, very late, the human intellect checks itself: … That which we now call the world is the result of a crowd of errors and fancies which gradually developed in the general evolution of organic nature, have grown together and been transmitted to us as the accumulated treasure of all the past—as the treasure, for whatever is worth anything in our humanity rests upon it. From this world of conception it is in the power of science to release us only to a slight extent—and this is all that could be wished—inasmuch as it cannot eradicate the influence of hereditary habits of feeling, but it can light up by degrees the stages of the development of that world of conception, and lift us, at least for a time, above the whole spectacle. Perhaps we may then perceive that the thing-in-itself is a meet subject for Homeric laughter: that it seemed so much, everything, indeed, and is really a void—void, that is to say, of meaning.

Now remember that all of this was written in late 19th century, when our conception of evolution was brand spanking new and the entire field of anthropology was yet to be deeply developed (and long, long before the intellectual rot in that field set in).  Here is where it all comes together – the chaos and the emergence from that chaos of something not of the chaos itself.  This is not the Hegelian dialectic, which is a more mechanical contrivance; this is more like biology and ecology – niche evolution and species exploitation of such.  There isn’t much predictable about that and certainly no future that can be predicted based on observation and theorization.  Evolution proceeds by accident, not plan.  That is anathema to our modern [read Enlightenment] scientific sensibilities, and to our deeper (and very non-rational) need for order over chaos.  Warby has written on the emergence of the social from the biological, so too did Jane Jacobs in looking at economics and proto-urban theory.  So order does arise, mostly because we humans want orderly lives amidst the underlying chaos.  Where we tend to delude ourselves is where we project, in the here and now outward where we have no information that tempers our judgement.  That can be our tendency to universalize our own prejudices/perspectives, or to expect the future to unfold according to some theory.

Reason (the backbone of the Enlightenment) is a late-comer to the human party.  Which isn’t to say it is unwelcome, but it is fair to say, it isn’t the whole story despite the pretensions of the zealots of reason (half-blinded as are all zealots).  The error, and it seems a common one, is to read that last sentence as nihilistic, as though that is the final say on the subject.  Instead, it should be read as here is a limit, and for what is beyond that limit we must look to other means to discover, and some of those means are what reason precludes.  Nietzsche is much lighter than presumed and is offering up a challenge, not despair.  There are several times he writes, particularly in the prefaces to his works, that he isn’t speaking to the people of his time, but to those of us yet to come.  And for us, we aren’t given the answers (as we almost always prefer), but the questions that are essential for us to tackle if we aren’t merely to be cogs in a dysfunctioning machine.

[1] I want to contrast this perspective to those of say Hobbes and Rousseau who both used imaginative and reductive views of earlier man and his natural state to buttress the conclusions they would draw.  This is an avenue of inquiry that Nietzsche didn’t explore in depth, but points to and is so much more relevant for us today than when he wrote.