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Single Idea 7186

[filed under theme 10. Modality / A. Necessity / 11. Denial of Necessity ]

Full Idea

What's necessary is that something must be held to be true; not that something is true.

Gist of Idea

There are no necessary truths, but something must be held to be true

Source

Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 09[38])

Book Ref

Nietzsche,Friedrich: 'Writings from the Late Notebooks', ed/tr. Bittner,Rüdiger [CUP 2003], p.148

A Reaction

This may be right, but it doesn't follow that the truths we label as 'necessary' are the ones that we have to believe, or even that we have to believe that our chosen beliefs are necessary rather than contingent. Why did we pick those beliefs?

The 78 ideas from 'Writings from Late Notebooks'

7149 Comprehending everything is impossible, because it abolishes perspectives [Nietzsche]
7147 Values are innate and inherited [Nietzsche]
7148 The 'I' is a conceptual synthesis, not the governor of our being [Nietzsche]
7157 We think each thought causes the next, unaware of the hidden struggle beneath [Nietzsche]
7158 Morality kills religion, because a Christian-moral God is unbelievable [Nietzsche]
7159 The only happiness is happiness with illusion [Nietzsche]
7151 Courage, compassion, insight, solitude are the virtues, with courtesy a necessary vice [Nietzsche]
7150 By developing herd virtues man fixes what has up to now been the 'unfixed animal' [Nietzsche]
7160 Christian belief is kept alive because it is soothing - the proof based on pleasure [Nietzsche]
7161 The essence of a thing is only an opinion about the 'thing' [Nietzsche]
7162 Morality can only be upheld by belief in God and a 'hereafter' [Nietzsche]
7163 Morality is merely interpretations, which are extra-moral in origin [Nietzsche]
7164 Not feeling harnessed to a system of 'ends' is a wonderful feeling of freedom [Nietzsche]
7152 With protoplasm ½+½=2, so the soul is not an indivisible monad [Nietzsche]
7154 We can't use our own self to criticise our own capacity for knowledge! [Nietzsche]
7153 We can't be realists, because we don't know what being is [Nietzsche]
7155 Consciousness exists to the extent that consciousness is useful [Nietzsche]
7156 Sense perceptions contain values (useful, so pleasant) [Nietzsche]
7165 Virtue is wasteful, as it reduces us all to being one another's nurse [Nietzsche]
7166 Man is above all a judging animal [Nietzsche]
7169 Is the perspectival part of the essence, or just a relation between beings? [Nietzsche]
7170 'Wisdom' attempts to get beyond perspectives, making it hostile to life [Nietzsche]
7171 Rationality is a scheme we cannot cast away [Nietzsche]
7167 Words such as 'I' and 'do' and 'done to' are placed at the point where our ignorance begins [Nietzsche]
7168 Modest people express happiness as 'Not bad' [Nietzsche]
7172 Existence without meaning or goal or end, eternally recurring, is a terrible thought [Nietzsche]
7173 Rights arise out of contracts, which need a balance of power [Nietzsche]
7174 Categories are not metaphysical truths, but inventions in the service of needs [Nietzsche]
7175 Philosophers find it particularly hard to shake off belief in necessary categories [Nietzsche]
7176 'Purpose' is like the sun, where most heat is wasted, and a tiny part has 'purpose' [Nietzsche]
7178 The utility of an organ does not explain its origin, on the contrary! [Nietzsche]
7179 Survival might undermine an individual's value, or prevent its evolution [Nietzsche]
7180 Darwin overestimates the influence of 'external circumstances' [Nietzsche]
7181 Pain shows the value of the damage, not what has been damaged [Nietzsche]
7177 Virtues from outside are dangerous, and they should come from within [Nietzsche]
7182 'Perspectivism': the world has no meaning, but various interpretations give it countless meanings [Nietzsche]
7183 'Subjectivity' is an interpretation, since subjects (and interpreters) are fictions [Nietzsche]
7189 Maybe there are only subjects, and 'objects' result from relations between subjects [Nietzsche]
7185 Replace the categorical imperative by the natural imperative [Nietzsche]
7186 There are no necessary truths, but something must be held to be true [Nietzsche]
7188 Logic tries to understand the world according to a man-made scheme [Nietzsche]
7193 Virtue for everyone removes its charm of being exceptional and aristocratic [Nietzsche]
7194 Experiencing a thing as beautiful is to experience it wrongly [Nietzsche]
7190 Our values express an earlier era's conditions for survival and growth [Nietzsche]
7191 What does not kill us makes us stronger [Nietzsche]
7192 Remove goodness and wisdom from our concept of God. Being the highest power is enough! [Nietzsche]
7199 It is dishonest to invent a being containing our greatest values, thus ignoring why they exist and are valuable [Nietzsche]
7201 Knowledge, wisdom and goodness only have value relative to a goal [Nietzsche]
7200 A combination of great power and goodness would mean the disastrous abolition of evil [Nietzsche]
7203 In heaven all the interesting men are missing [Nietzsche]
7204 The upholding of the military state is needed to maintain the strong human type [Nietzsche]
7195 If the world aimed at an end, it would have reached it by now [Nietzsche]
7196 Pessimism is laughable, because the world cannot be evaluated [Nietzsche]
7197 Pleasure needs dissatisfaction, boundaries and resistances [Nietzsche]
7198 Nihilism results from measuring the world by our categories which are purely invented [Nietzsche]
7209 There is no will; weakness of will is splitting of impulses, strong will is coordination under one impulse [Nietzsche]
7205 Altruism is praised by the egoism of the weak, who want everyone to be looked after [Nietzsche]
7206 Things are strong or weak, and do not behave regularly or according to rules or compulsions [Nietzsche]
7207 Counting needs unities, but that doesn't mean they exist; we borrowed it from the concept of 'I' [Nietzsche]
7208 Paganism is a form of thanking and affirming life? [Nietzsche]
7132 Philosophers should create and fight for their concepts, not just clean and clarify them [Nietzsche]
7133 There are different eyes, so different 'truths', so there is no truth [Nietzsche]
7134 Something can be irrefutable; that doesn't make it true [Nietzsche]
7135 'Freedom of will' is the feeling of having a dominating force [Nietzsche]
7129 Perception is unconscious, and we are only conscious of processed perceptions [Nietzsche]
7131 The intellect and senses are a simplifying apparatus [Nietzsche]
7130 Unity is not in the conscious 'I', but in the organism, which uses the self as a tool [Nietzsche]
7137 Is a 'philosopher' now impossible, because knowledge is too vast for an overview? [Nietzsche]
7138 The 'I' is a fiction used to make the world of becoming 'knowable' [Nietzsche]
7139 Explanation is just showing the succession of things ever more clearly [Nietzsche]
7140 Chemical 'laws' are merely the establishment of power relations between weaker and stronger [Nietzsche]
7141 A living being is totally 'egoistic' [Nietzsche]
7136 Morality is a system of values which accompanies a being's life [Nietzsche]
7142 All motions and 'laws' are symptoms of inner events, traceable to the will to power [Nietzsche]
7143 Consciousness is a 'tool' - just as the stomach is a tool [Nietzsche]
7145 Logic is not driven by truth, but desire for a simple single viewpoint [Nietzsche]
7144 Logic must falsely assume that identical cases exist [Nietzsche]
7146 Belief in the body is better established than belief in the mind [Nietzsche]