85 ideas
| 20262 | Don't use wisdom in order to become clever! [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: One ought not to use one's wisdom to become clever! | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 308) | |
| A reaction: And I would add 'don't think that being clever makes you wise'. Nietzsche, as always, is subtler than me (which is why I read him a lot). Presumably wisdom is broad, and cleverness is focused. Will becoming clever spoil someone's wisdom? |
| 20255 | Early 19th century German philosophers enjoyed concepts, rather than scientific explanations [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Early 19th century German philosophers retreated to the first and oldest level of speculation, for, like the thinkers of dreamy ages, they found satisfaction in concepts rather than in explanations - they resuscitated a prescientific type of philosophy. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 197) | |
| A reaction: I have a suspicion that this may still apply to 'continental philosophy'. Personally I love explanations, which lead to understanding. But not all explanations are scientific. |
| 20260 | Carlyle spent his life vainly trying to make reason appear romantic [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Thomas Carlyle spent a long life trying to make reason romantic to his fellow Englishmen: to no avail! | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 298) | |
| A reaction: An interesting gloss on the shift from the Enlightenment to the Romantic era. Presumably the idea of the 'genius' and the 'hero' are the means whereby Carlyle hoped to achive this. |
| 7973 | There is no longer anything on which there is nothing to say [Baudrillard] |
| Full Idea: There is no longer anything on which there is nothing to say. | |
| From: Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil [2004], p. 17) | |
| A reaction: Compare Ideas 2937 and 6870. I'm not sure whether Baudrillard is referring to the limits of philosophy, or merely to social taboos. I like Ansell Pearson's view: we should attempt to discuss what appears to be undiscussable. |
| 20256 | What we think is totally dictated by the language available to express it [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: We have at every moment only that very thought for which we have ready to hand the words that are roughly capable of expressing it. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 257) | |
| A reaction: This is a highly influential idea, even if this expression of it is little known. Everyone who places language at the centre of philosophy believes something like this. It is a very striking thought, and must certainly contain considerable truth. |
| 20265 | The desire for a complete system requires making the weak parts look equal to the rest [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: There is playacting going on among systematisers: inasmuch as they want to make the system whole and round off the horizon around it, they must attempt to have their weaker qualities appear in the same style as their strong ones. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 318) | |
| A reaction: Filed under 'rationalism', because they are the notorious system builders, but the same tendency and problem can be seen to some extent among empiricsts who seek completeness. David Lewis, perhaps. |
| 6267 | A culture needs to admit that knowledge is more extensive than just 'science' [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: The acknowledgement that the sphere of knowledge is wider than the sphere of 'science' seems to me to be a cultural necessity if we are to arrive at a sane and human view of ourselves or of science. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Intro) | |
| A reaction: A very nice remark, with which I intuitively agree, but then you are left with the problem of explaining how something can qualify as knowledge when it can't pass the stringent tests of science. How wide to we spread, and why? |
| 6272 | 'True' and 'refers' cannot be made scientically precise, but are fundamental to science [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Some non-scientific knowledge is presupposed by science; for example, I have been arguing that 'refers' and 'true' cannot be made scientifically precise; yet truth is a fundamental term in logic - a precise science. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Lec VI) | |
| A reaction: We might ask whether we 'know' what 'true' and 'refers' mean, as opposed to being able to use them. If their usage doesn't count as knowledge, then we could still end up with all actual knowledge being somehow 'scientific'. |
| 7975 | The task of philosophy is to unmask the illusion of objective reality [Baudrillard] |
| Full Idea: The task of philosophy is to unmask the illusion of objective reality - a trap that is, in a sense, laid for us by nature. | |
| From: Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil [2004], p. 40) | |
| A reaction: There is a vast gap between this and the Lockean view (Idea 7653) that philosophers are there to help reveal reality, probably via science. I retain the Enlightenment faith that there is a reality to be found. Baudrillard must be taken seriously, though. |
| 7986 | Drunken boat pilots are less likely to collide than clearly focused ones [Baudrillard] |
| Full Idea: Two boats on Lake Constance in dense fog are in less danger of colliding if their pilots are drunk than if they are attempting to master the situation. | |
| From: Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil [2004], p.196) | |
| A reaction: Charming, but I think empirical research would prove it false. At least rational pilots know to keep to the right (?) when a shape looms through the fog. I prefer rational pilots, but then I am one of those sad people who admires the Enlightenment. |
| 7982 | Instead of thesis and antithesis leading to synthesis, they now cancel out, and the conflict is levelled [Baudrillard] |
| Full Idea: Gone is the dialectic, the play of thesis and antithesis resolving itself in synthesis. The opposing terms now cancel each other out in a levelling of all conflict. | |
| From: Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil [2004], p.129) | |
| A reaction: This is from someone who approved of 9/11 (p.137 of this text), and seemed to welcome conflict. His idea, which has plausibility, is that the modern media have become a great warm bath that calmly absorbs every abrasive thrown into it. |
| 6276 | 'The rug is green' might be warrantedly assertible even though the rug is not green [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: 'The rug is green' might be warrantedly assertible even though the rug is not green. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Three) | |
| A reaction: The word 'warranted' seems to be ambiguous in modern philosophy. See Idea 6150. There seem to be internalist and externalist versions. It seems clear to say that a belief could be well-justified and yet false. |
| 20380 | Why should truth be omnipotent? It is enough that it is very powerful [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: I have no idea why the dictatorship and omnipotence of truth would be desirable; it's sufficient for me that it has great power. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], §507) | |
| A reaction: I once heard a philosopher (at Essex University) assert that truth is the only value, which was interesting. Nietzsche actually wants to endorse the value of lies and deceptions, like the 'noble lie' in Plato's Republic. |
| 20235 | Like animals, we seek truth because we want safety [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Even that nose for truth, which is, at bottom, the nose for safety, human beings have in common with animals. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 026) | |
| A reaction: After Darwin, Nietzsche immediately saw that we need an account of humanity which is continuous with animals. The first step to physical security is ascertaining the physical facts. This idea rings true. |
| 6266 | We need the correspondence theory of truth to understand language and science [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: A correspondence theory of truth is needed to understand how language works, and how science works. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Intro) | |
| A reaction: Putnam retreated from this position to a more pragmatic one later on, but all my sympathies are with the present view, despite being repeatedly told by modern philosophers that I am wrong. See McGinn (Idea 6085) and Searle (Idea 3508). |
| 6277 | Correspondence between concepts and unconceptualised reality is impossible [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: The great nineteenth century argument against the correspondence theory of truth was that one cannot think of truth as correspondence to facts (or 'reality') because one would need to compare concepts directly with unconceptualised reality. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Three) | |
| A reaction: Presumably the criticism was offered by idealists, who preferred a coherence theory. The defence is to say that there is a confusion here between a concept and the contents of a concept. The contents of a concept are designed to be facts. |
| 6264 | In Tarski's definition, you understand 'true' if you accept the notions of the object language [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Anyone who accepts the notions of whatever object language is in question - and this can be chosen arbitrarily - can also understand 'true' as defined by Tarski for that object language. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Intro) | |
| A reaction: Thus if we say "'snow is white' is true iff snow is white", then if you 'accept the notion' that snow is white in English, you understand what 'true' means. This seems to leave you with the meaning of 'snow is white' being its truth conditions. |
| 6265 | Tarski has given a correct account of the formal logic of 'true', but there is more to the concept [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: What Tarski has done is to give us a perfectly correct account of the formal logic of the concept 'true', but the formal logic of the concept is not all there is to the notion of truth. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Intro) | |
| A reaction: I find this refreshing. A lot of modern philosophers seem to think that truth is no longer an interesting philosophical topic, because deflationary accounts have sidelined it, but I take the concept to be at the heart of metaphysics. |
| 6269 | Only Tarski has found a way to define 'true' [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: There is only one way anyone knows how to define 'true' and that is Tarski's way. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Lec II.5) | |
| A reaction: However, Davidson wrote a paper called 'On the Folly of Trying to Define Truth', which seems to reject even Tarski. Also bear in mind Putnam's earlier remark (Idea 6265) that there is more to truth than Tarski's definition. Just take 'true' as primitive. |
| 6280 | Realism is a theory, which explains the convergence of science and the success of language [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Realism is an empirical theory; it explains the convergence of scientific theories, where earlier theories are often limiting cases of later theories (which is why theoretical terms preserve their reference); and it explains the success of language. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Four) | |
| A reaction: I agree. Personally, I think of Plato's Theory of Forms and all religions as empirical theories. The response from anti-realists is generally to undermine confidence in the evidence which these 'empirical theories' are said to explain. |
| 7974 | Without God we faced reality: what do we face without reality? [Baudrillard] |
| Full Idea: The eclipse of God left us up against reality. Where will the eclipse of reality leave us? | |
| From: Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil [2004]) | |
| A reaction: Baudrillard's distinctive view is that modern culture is thwarting all our attempts to grasp reality, which itself becomes a fiction. The answer is that you are left in the position of the ancient sceptics. Sextus Empiricus (see) is the saviour. |
| 7987 | Nothing is true, but everything is exact [Baudrillard] |
| Full Idea: Someone said: everything is true, nothing is exact. I would say the opposite: nothing is true, everything is exact. | |
| From: Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil [2004], p.210) | |
| A reaction: In analytical terminology, this appears to say that vagueness is ontological, not epistemological, agreeing with Williamson and others. To say that 'nothing is true', though, just strikes me as silly. What does Baudrillard mean by 'true'? |
| 20258 | Most people treat knowledge as a private possession [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Most people take a thing they know under their protection, as if knowing it turned it into their possession. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 285) | |
| A reaction: A typically wicked and subtle remark. This presumably makes knowledge part of the will to power, with which Francis Bacon would presumably agree. |
| 6284 | If a tautology is immune from revision, why would that make it true? [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: If we held, say, 'All unmarried men are unmarried' as absolutely immune from revision, why would this make it true? | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Four) | |
| A reaction: A very nice question. Like most American philosophers, Putnam accepts Quine's attack on the unrevisability of analytic truths. His point here is that defenders of analytic truths are probably desperate to preserve basic truths, but it won't work. |
| 20250 | We may be unable to remember, but we may never actually forget [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: It has yet to be proven that there is such a thing as forgetting; all we know is that the act of remembering is not within our power. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 126) | |
| A reaction: There is some evidence for this. We forget innumerable people, but then find that we recognise them if we meet them many years later. Anecdotes report very ancient memories suddenly surfacing. |
| 6273 | Knowledge depends on believing others, which must be innate, as inferences are not strong enough [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Our ability to picture how people are likely to respond may well be innate; indeed, our disposition to believe what other people tell us (which is fundamental to knowledge) could hardly be an inference, as that isn’t good enough for knowledge. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Lec VI) | |
| A reaction: An interesting claim. There could be an intermediate situation, which is a hard-wired non-conscious inference. When dismantled, the 'innate' brain circuits for assessing testimony could turn out to work on logic and evidence. |
| 6274 | Empathy may not give knowledge, but it can give plausibility or right opinion [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Empathy with others may give less than 'Knowledge', but it gives more than mere logical or physical possibility; it gives plausibility, or (to revive Platonic terminology) it provides 'right opinion'. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Lec VI) | |
| A reaction: See Ideas 174 and 2140 for Plato. Putnam is exploring areas of knowledge outside the limits of strict science. Behind this claim seems to lie the Principle of Charity (3971), but a gang of systematic liars (e.g. evil students) would be a problem case. |
| 20270 | There is no one scientific method; we must try many approaches, and many emotions [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: There is no one and only scientific method that leads to knowledge. We must proceed experimentally with things, be sometimes angry, sometimes affectionate towards them, and allow justice, passion, and coldness to follow one upon another. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 432) | |
| A reaction: Alexander Bird says the same thing in our time. I agree, but I think there is a core of controlled conditions and peer review. |
| 17084 | You can't decide which explanations are good if you don't attend to the interest-relative aspects [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Explanation is an interest-relative notion …explanation has to be partly a pragmatic concept. To regard the 'pragmatics' of explanation as no part of the concept is to abdicate the job of figuring out what makes an explanation good. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], p. 41-2), quoted by David-Hillel Ruben - Explaining Explanation Ch 1 | |
| A reaction: I suppose this is just obvious, depending on how far you want to take the 'interest-relative' bit. If a fool is fobbed off with a trivial explanation, there must be some non-relative criterion for assessing that. |
| 20131 | We can cultivate our drives, of anger, pity, curiosity, vanity, like a gardener, with good or bad taste [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: One can dispose of one's drives like a gardener and, though few know it, cultivate the shoots of anger, pity, curiosity, vanity as productively and profitably as a beautiful fruit tree on a trellis; one can do it with the good or bad taste of a gardener. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 560) | |
| A reaction: This sort of existentialism I find very appealing. You take what you are given, the cards you are dealt, and try to make something nice out of it. This is quite different from the crazy freedom of later existentialists. |
| 20242 | Things are the boundaries of humanity, so all things must be known, for self-knowledge [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Only when the human being has finally attained knowledge of all things will he have known himself. For things are merely the boundaries of the human being. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 048) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be a rather externalist view of the mind. If philosophy aims to disentangle mind from world then good knowledge of the world seems to be required. |
| 20249 | Our knowledge of the many drives that constitute us is hopelessly incomplete [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: No matter how hard a person struggles for self-knowledge, nothing can be more incomplete than the image of all the drives taken together than constitute his being. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 119) | |
| A reaction: This gives the concept of personal identity that arises from the (later) doctrine of the 'will to power'. It is a bundle view of the self, but a bundle of drives rather than of percepts and mental events. His view is close to Hume's. |
| 7978 | There is no need to involve the idea of free will to make choices about one's life [Baudrillard] |
| Full Idea: There is no need to involve the idea of free will to make choices about one's life. | |
| From: Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil [2004], p. 57) | |
| A reaction: Someone who believed that free will was metaphysically possible, but that they themselves lacked it, might feel paralysed, defeated or fatalistic about their decision-making. But that would be like falsely believing you were fatally ill. |
| 20231 | People used to think that outcomes were from God, rather than consequences of acts [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: People used to believe that the outcome of an action was not a consequence, but an independent, supplemental ingredient, namely God's. Is a greater confusion conceivable? | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 012) | |
| A reaction: Not sure how well documented or accurate this is, but Nietzsche was a great scholar, and it would explain the fatalism that runs through many older forms of society. |
| 6282 | Theory of meaning presupposes theory of understanding and reference [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Theory of meaning presupposes theory of understanding and reference. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Four) | |
| A reaction: How can you have a theory of understanding without a meaning that requires to be understood? Personally I think about the minds of small animals when pondering this, and that seems to put reference and truth at the front of the queue. |
| 6281 | Truth conditions can't explain understanding a sentence, because that in turn needs explanation [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: You can't treat understanding a sentence as knowing its truth conditions, because it then becomes unintelligible what that knowledge in turn consists in. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Four) | |
| A reaction: The implication, I take it, is circularity; how can you specify truth conditions if you don't understand sentences? Putnam here agrees with Dummett that verification must be involved. Something has to be taken as axiomatic in all this. |
| 6278 | We should reject the view that truth is prior to meaning [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: I am suggesting that we reject the view that truth (based on the semantic theory) is prior to meaning. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Three) | |
| A reaction: It is a nice question which of truth or meaning has logical priority. One might start by speculating about how and why animals think. A moth attracted to flame is probably working on truth without much that could be called 'meaning'. |
| 6271 | How reference is specified is not what reference is [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: A theory of how reference is specified isn't a theory of what reference is. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Lec V) | |
| A reaction: A simple and important point. We may achieve reference by naming, describing, grunting or pointing, but the question is, what have we achieved when we get there? |
| 6268 | The claim that scientific terms are incommensurable can be blocked if scientific terms are not descriptions [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: The line of reasoning of Kuhn and Feyerabend can be blocked by arguing (as I have in various places, and as Saul Kripke has) that scientific terms are not synonymous with descriptions. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Lec II.2) | |
| A reaction: A nice clear statement of the motivation for creating the causal theory of reference. See Idea 6162. We could still go back and ask whether we could block scientific relativism by rethinking how descriptions work, instead of abandoning them. |
| 20266 | It is essential that wise people learn to express their wisdom, possibly even as foolishness [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: It is not yet enough to prove a thing, one must seduce people to accept it or raise them up to it. That is why a knowledgeable person ought to learn to speak his wisdom: and often in such a way that it sounds like foolishness. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 330) | |
| A reaction: Kant comes to mind. He has needed endless exegesis by people who write better than him. Have there been even greater philosophers who couldn't express their wisdom at all? Cratylus, perhaps! |
| 6279 | A private language could work with reference and beliefs, and wouldn't need meaning [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: A language made up and used by a being who belonged to no community would have no need for such a concept as the 'meaning' of a term. To state the reference of each term and what the language speaker believes is to tell the whole story. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Three) | |
| A reaction: A subtle response to Wittgenstein's claim (e.g. Ideas 4152,4158), but I am not sure what Putnam means. I would have thought that beliefs had to be embodied in propositions. They may not need 'meaning' quite as urgently as sentences, but still… |
| 6270 | The correct translation is the one that explains the speaker's behaviour [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: What it is to be a correct translation is to be the translation that best explains the behaviour of the speaker. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Lec III) | |
| A reaction: This seems fairly close to Quine, but rather puzzlingly uses the word 'correct'. If our criteria of translation are purely behavioural, there is no way we can be correct after one word ('gavagai'), so at what point does it become 'correct'? |
| 6283 | Language maps the world in many ways (because it maps onto other languages in many ways) [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: We could say that the language has more than one correct way of being mapped onto the world (it must, since it has more than one way of being correctly mapped onto a language which is itself correctly mapped onto the world). | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Four) | |
| A reaction: This spells out nicely the significance of Quine's 'indeterminacy of translation'. Others have pointed out that the fact that language maps onto world in many ways need not be anti-realist; the world is endless, and language is limited. |
| 6275 | You can't say 'most speaker's beliefs are true'; in some areas this is not so, and you can't count beliefs [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: The maxim that 'most of a speaker's beliefs are true' as an a priori principle governing radical translation seems to me to go too far; first, I don't know how to count beliefs; second, most people's beliefs on some topics (philosophy) are probably false. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Three) | |
| A reaction: Putnam prefers a pragmatic view, where charity is applicable if behaviour is involved. Philosophy is too purely theoretical. The extent to which Charity should apply in philosophy seminars is a nice question, which all students should test in practice. |
| 20251 | Actions done for a purpose are least understood, because we complacently think it's obvious [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Of all actions, the ones least understood are those undertaken for a purpose, no doubt because they have always passed for the most intelligible and are to our way of thinking the most commonplace. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 127) | |
| A reaction: You feel that Nietzsche is right about our stupendous lack of of self-knowledge, but then a bit of a panic ensues, because it is not clear what you are supposed to do about anything, particularly if we don't know why anyone else does anything. |
| 20271 | Beauty in art is the imitation of happiness [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: By beauty in art one always understands imitation of happiness. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 433) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure how one goes about imitating happiness. One can replicate things that make us happy, like a nice landscape. But some beauty in art is also novel, and produces a new sort of happiness. Kandinsky. |
| 7980 | In modern times, being useless is the essential aesthetic ingredient for an object [Baudrillard] |
| Full Idea: Since the nineteenth century it has been art's claim that it is useless...so it is enough to elevate any object to uselessness to turn it into a work of art...and obsolete useless objects automatically acquire an aesthetic aura. | |
| From: Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil [2004], p.111) | |
| A reaction: Art is 'purposive without purpose' (Kant). An nice summary of the situation, and this seems to explain the role of Duchamp's famous urinal, up on the wall and rendered useless. The obvious rebellion, though, is Arts and Crafts. |
| 20230 | The very idea of a critique of morality is regarded as immoral! [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Even to think of criticising morality, to consider morality as a problem, as problematic: what? was that not - is that not - immoral? | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], Pref 3) | |
| A reaction: Offering critiques of the value of morality and of truth are perhaps Nietzsche's greatest achievements. |
| 20234 | Morality prevents us from developing better customs [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Morality acts to prevent the rise of new and better mores: it stupefies. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 019) | |
| A reaction: Note that he wants 'better' customs, and not just different ones. So the deep question concerns the criteria for why some customs are better. He seems to want us to fulfil our natures more completely. Arts, sciences, great deeds... |
| 20237 | Moral feelings are entirely different from the moral concepts used to judge actions [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: The history of moral feeling is completely different from the history of moral concepts. The former are powerful before, the latter especially after an action in view of the compulsion to pronounce upon it. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 034) | |
| A reaction: I think he places the feelings in our animal origins, and the concepts in rather unnatural cultures. |
| 20238 | Treating morality as feelings is just obeying your ancestors [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: To trust your feelings - that means obeying your grandfather and your grandmother and their grandparents more than the gods in us: our reason and our experience. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 035) | |
| A reaction: He says prior to this that feelings are just an inheritance, not our true natures. Stoics said 'live according to nature', by which they meant 'live by reason', because that is our true nature. |
| 20243 | Human beings are not majestic, either through divine origins, or through grand aims [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Formerly one tried to get a feel for the majesty of human beings by pointing backward toward their divine descent: this has now become a forbidden path. ...So now the path humanity pursues is proof of its majesty. Alas, this too leads nowhere! | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 049) | |
| A reaction: I love the breadth of Nietzsche's vision, both across history, and in the great scheme. He goes on to say that we are no more a 'higher order' than ants and earwigs. |
| 20268 | Most dying people have probably lost more important things than what they are about to lose [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: The act of dying is not as significant as the universal awe of it would have us believe, and the dying person has probably lost more important things in life than he is now about to lose. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 349) | |
| A reaction: He says this is a thought about death which we tend to repress. It would depend on the life, I should think, but it is probably right in very many cases. |
| 20252 | Marriage is too serious to be permitted for people in love! [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Lovers' vows ought to be publicly declared invalid and marriage denied the pair: and indeed precisely because one ought to take marriage unspeakably more seriously! | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 151) | |
| A reaction: Sounds like the traditional aristocratic attitude to marriage, so the idea suits Nietzsche. I think that nowadays it is much wiser to be base proposal of marriage on friendship than on love. You are choosing a life-long friend, not someone to adore. |
| 20236 | Marriage upholds the idea that love, though a passion, can endure [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: The institution of marriage stubbornly upholds the belief that love, though a passion, is, as such, capable of duration. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 027) | |
| A reaction: No wonder Nietzsche never married. Women must have been terrified of him, when he came out with this sort of remark. I doubt whether many couples who are celebrating their golden wedding would agree with him. [1/5/2017] |
| 20263 | Fear reveals the natures of other people much more clearly than love does [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Fear has furthered the universal knowledge of humanity more than love, for fear wants to discern who the other person is, what he can do and what he wants. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 309) | |
| A reaction: Nietzsche had it in for love at this stage in his career. This remark strikes me as brilliantly accurate. |
| 20233 | Punishment has distorted the pure innocence of the contingency of outcomes [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: With this infamous art of interpreting the concept of punishment, people have robbed of its innocence the whole, pure contingency of events. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 013) | |
| A reaction: What a wonderfully subtle observation about moral luck! That whole problem is driven by the issue of whether the agent should be punished. When a chain of errors leads to disaster, we may see many innocent people doing a collective evil. |
| 7983 | Good versus evil has been banefully reduced to happiness versus misfortune [Baudrillard] |
| Full Idea: The ideal opposition between good and evil has been reduced to the idealogical oppositions between happiness and misfortune. The reduction of good to happiness is as baneful as that of evil to misfortune. | |
| From: Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil [2004], p.139) | |
| A reaction: A nice example is the use in the media of the word 'tragic' for every misfortune. See the debate over the translation of the Greek 'eudaimonia'. 'Happiness' seems the wrong translation, if it leads to comments like Baudrillard's. |
| 20248 | People do nothing for their real ego, but only for a phantom ego created by other people [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Whatever they say about their 'egotism', people nevertheless do nothing their whole life long for their ego, but instead for the phantom ego that has formed in the heads around them and been communicated to them. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 105) | |
| A reaction: Nietzsche has a vision of true devotion to the ego as healthy, and so (I would say) does Aristotle, though the two might disagree about the details. I want to live among people who work on themselves, not those who always sacrifice themselves. |
| 20246 | If you feel to others as they feel to themselves, you must hate a self-hater [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Supposing we felt toward someone else as that person feels about himself, then we would have to hate him if he (like Pascal) found himself hateful. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 063) | |
| A reaction: And how does the Golden Rule work if the other people feel suicidal (as groups sometimes do)? |
| 20272 | Honesty is a new young virtue, and we can promote it, or not [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Among neither the Socratic nor the Christian virtues does honesty appear: it is one of the youngest virtues, still quite immature. ...We can advance it or retard it, as we see fit. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 456) | |
| A reaction: I associate the virtue of honesty with the cult of sincerity of feelings which arose in the romantic movement. |
| 20240 | The Jews treated great anger as holy, and were in awe of those who expressed it [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: The Jews felt differently about wrath than we do and decreed it holy; in return, they, as a people, viewed the foreboding majesty of the individual with whom wrath showed itself connected, at a height at which a European is incapable of imagining. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 038) | |
| A reaction: If you thought wrath was really wonderful then presumably you would aspire to partake of it, but I see no signs of the Jews having been an especially wrathful people. It sounds like the tantrums of Tudor monarchs, which was their royal privilege. |
| 20244 | Christianity replaces rational philosophical virtues with great passions focused on God [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Christianity disallows all moral value to the virtue of philosophers - the triumph of reason over affects - and demands that affects reveal themselves in splendour, as love of God, fear before God, fanatical faith in God, and blindest hope in God. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 058) | |
| A reaction: Faith, hope and charity are the three great Christian virtues that were added to the four cardinal virtues of the Greeks. |
| 20274 | The cardinal virtues want us to be honest, brave, magnanimous and polite [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Honest towards ourselves and whatever else is our friend; courageous toward the enemy; magnanimous toward the defeated; polite - always. This is how the four cardinal virtues want us to be. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 556) | |
| A reaction: I take this to be Nietzsche genuinely asserting his four cardinal virtues, rather than being ironic. He certainly asserts politeness as the fourth virtue earlier in the book. Cf a different list in Idea 20382 |
| 20257 | Cool courage and feverish bravery have one name, but are two very different virtues [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Courage as cold bravery and imperturbability, and courage as feverish, half-blind bravura - one calls both of these things by the same name! How different are the cold virtues from the warm ones! | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 277) | |
| A reaction: How few philosophers are capable of making a subtle but accurate observation like this! How many other virtues should be subdivided? |
| 20259 | Teach youth to respect people who differ with them, not people who agree with them [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: The surest way to ruin a youth is by teaching him to respect those who think like him more highly than those who think differently. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 297) | |
| A reaction: On the whole I prefer to read the philosophers who seem to be on my side, because I am trying to strengthen my explanation of the world, and opponents aren't much help. I do read opponents, if they explicitly challenge what I defend. |
| 20267 | Seeing duty as a burden makes it a bit cruel, and it can thus never become a habit [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: To require that duty always be somewhat burdensome - as Kant does - amounts to acquiring that it never become habit and custom: in this requirement there linger a tiny remnant of ascetic cruelty. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 339) | |
| A reaction: Habit, of course, is the ideal of Aristotelian virtue. |
| 20275 | Most people think they are already complete, but we can cultivate ourselves [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: We are free to handle and cultivate our drives like a gardener ...but how many people know we are free to do this? Don't most people believe in themselves as completed, full grown up facts? | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 560) | |
| A reaction: I see Nietzsche as an existentialist philosopher. He is much more than that, but this quotation endorses what I take to be the central idea of existentialism. |
| 7981 | Whole populations are terrorist threats to authorities, who unite against them [Baudrillard] |
| Full Idea: One way or another, populations themselves are a terrorist threat to the authorities...and by extension, we can hypothesize a coalition of all governments against all populations. | |
| From: Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil [2004], p.120) | |
| A reaction: This may count as left-wing paranoia, but it is a striking thought, which plants an uneasy notion in the mind whenever we see two world leaders disappear behind closed doors for a chat. |
| 20229 | No authority ever willingly accepts criticism [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: As long as the world has existed, no authority has ever willingly permitted itself to become the object of critique. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], Pref 3) | |
| A reaction: A political remark, but it leads into speaking of conventional morality as just such an authority. Nowadays teachers have feedback forms, and leaders have to endure party conferences. But on the whole it remains true. |
| 20254 | People govern for the pleasure of it, or just to avoid being governed [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Some govern out of pleasure in governing, others in order not to be governed - to the latter, governing is merely the lesser of two evils. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 181) | |
| A reaction: Our current society is full of self-employed people whose major motivation is to avoid being employees. |
| 20273 | The French Revolution gave trusting Europe the false delusion of instant recovery [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: The 'Great Revolution' [in France] was nothing more than a pathetic and bloody quackery, which understood how, through sudden crises, to supply a trusting Europe with the sudden hope of recovery. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 534) | |
| A reaction: Whenever a new leader comes into power there is the same honeymoon period, where dreams of salvation have a moment in the sun. |
| 7976 | People like democracy because it means they can avoid power [Baudrillard] |
| Full Idea: If the people puts itself into the hands of the political class, it does so more to be rid of power than out of any desire for representation. | |
| From: Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil [2004], p. 54) | |
| A reaction: Very nice. If we are all in the grips of some biological 'will to power', that needn't be power over huge numbers of other people, merely power over our immediate lives. It can be expressed by building a wall. |
| 7977 | Only in the last 200 years have people demanded the democratic privilege of being individuals [Baudrillard] |
| Full Idea: Individuality is a recent phenomenon. It is only over the last two centuries that the populations of the civilized countries have demanded the democratic privilege of being individuals. | |
| From: Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil [2004], p. 55) | |
| A reaction: I think Aristotle's ethics and politics imply individuality, given that the only purpose of civic society seems to be to enable individuals to flourish and lead virtuous lives. Society is justified, for example, because it makes friendship possible. |
| 20232 | Get rid of the idea of punishment! It is a noxious weed! [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: People of diligence and goodwill, lend a hand in the one work of eradicating from the face of the earth the concept of punishment, which has overrun the whole world! There is no more noxious weed! | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 013) | |
| A reaction: Nietzsche never tried his hand at school teaching or parenting or running a youth club. But I still love this idea. In really good families I suspect that punishment is almost unknown. |
| 20253 | Modern wars arise from the study of history [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: The great wars of our day are the effects of the study of history. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 180) | |
| A reaction: The Prussians reacted to Napoleon. The Nazis reacted to Versailles. But now the study of history reveals to us dreadful wars based on simplistic accounts of history. Be wise about history, not ignorant of it. |
| 20261 | History does not concern what really happened, but supposed events, which have all the influence [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: The writer of history deals not with what really happened but merely with supposed events, for only the latter have had an effect. ...All historians speak of things that have never existed except in imagination. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 307) | |
| A reaction: This seems blatantly true, and is most obvious in the case of forged documents which have been hugely influential. Erroneous conspiracy theories are another example. (Note: only scorn conspiracy theories if you think conspiracies never happen!). |
| 7979 | The arrival of the news media brought history to an end [Baudrillard] |
| Full Idea: The course of history came to an end with the entry on the scene of the news media. | |
| From: Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil [2004], p. 83) | |
| A reaction: The sort of remark for which Baudrillard became famous. It strikes me as nonsense. The view the British people got of the Battle of Trafalgar was even more distorted than their picture of the Battle of El Alamein. We know what he means, though. |
| 7984 | Suicide is ascribed to depression, with the originality of the act of will ignored [Baudrillard] |
| Full Idea: Suicide is always ascribed to depressive motivations with no account taken of an originality of, an original will to commit, the act itself. | |
| From: Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil [2004], p.153) | |
| A reaction: Apparently research suggests that most suicides are clinically depressed, but even within the depression there is a startling act of will that goes beyond merely feeling bad. |
| 20241 | Enquirers think finding our origin is salvation, but it turns out to be dull [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Investigators of knowledge ...have regularly presupposed that the salvation of humanity depended on insight into the origin of things. ...but with insight into origin comes the increasing insignificance of origin. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 044) | |
| A reaction: This sounds like the etymological fallacy, of thinking that the origin of a word gives you a true grasp of its meaning. |
| 7985 | Pascal says secular life is acceptable, but more fun with the hypothesis of God [Baudrillard] |
| Full Idea: What Pascal says, more or less, is that you can more or less content yourself with a secular existence and its advantages, but it's much more fun with the hypothesis of God. | |
| From: Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil [2004], p.155) | |
| A reaction: Pascal will be a bit startled when he reads this, but it is a lovely way to present his idea. It suddenly sounds much more attractive. Life would be much more fun if we lived according to all sorts of startling beliefs. Relating your life to God is one. |
| 20245 | Christianity hoped for a short cut to perfection, that skipped the hard labour of morality [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: You can say what you like: Christianity wanted to liberate humanity from the burden of the demands of morality by pointing out a shorter way to perfection, or so it believed. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 059) | |
| A reaction: This conjures up Graham Greene's Catholic heroes, who wallow in sin, but hope for salvation at the last moment. |
| 20247 | Christianity was successful because of its heathen rituals [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Not what is Christian in it, rather the universal heathenism of its rituals is the reason for the propagation of this world religion. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 070) | |
| A reaction: I'm afraid I think this is right. I grew up bewildered by the lack of content in the rituals of church services. Even austere protestants manage to sing and recite. Maybe philosophies should do this - wanted: new Cartesian and Kantian rituals! |
| 20269 | 'I believe because it is absurd' - but how about 'I believe because I am absurd' [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Many people have achieved the humility that says: 'I believe because it is absurd', and have sacrificed their reason for it. But no one, as far as I know, has achieved the humility, which is only one step further, of 'I believe because I am absurd'. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 417) | |
| A reaction: Nietzsche gives the Latin: 'credo quia absurdum est' (Tertullian), and 'credo quia absurdus sum'. It may look like an insulting remark from Nietzsche, but it is actually in tune with the spirit of the original. |
| 20264 | The easy and graceful aspects of a person are called 'soul', and inner awkwardness is called 'soulless' [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: The sum of inner movements that are easy for a person and that he consequently performs happily and with grace is called his 'soul'; - if inner movements obviously cause him difficulty and effort, he is considered soulless. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Dawn (Daybreak) [1881], 311) | |
| A reaction: 'Soulless' is usually applied to people deficient in some sort of empathic feeling, or with an inability to recognise grandeur. It seems to imply that people who experience inner torture are soulless, but romantics see them as very soulful. |