20 ideas
24084 | Seeing with other eyes is more egoism, but exploring other perspectives leads to objectivity [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: Wanting to know things as they are - that alone is the good inclination: not seeing ..with other eyes; that would be merely a change of place of egoistic seeing. …Practise at seeing with other eyes, and without human relationships, hence objectively! | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1881-82 [1882], 11[013]) | |
A reaction: That Nietzsche thinks we should try to see things objectively will come as a bit of a shock to those who have him catalogued among the relativists. It's clear from other writings that he thinks (rightly) that perfect objectivity is unattainable. |
24092 | I tell the truth, even if it is repulsive [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: As a man I tell the truth, even the repulsive ones. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1881-82 [1882], 12[86]) | |
A reaction: I wonder if even Nietzsche had his limits. He is quite coy about sexual matters, for example, before Freud and various sexual revolutions. To ruthlessly tell difficult truths strikes me as a scientific approach to the world. |
17884 | Mathematical set theory has many plausible stopping points, such as finitism, and predicativism [Koellner] |
Full Idea: There are many coherent stopping points in the hierarchy of increasingly strong mathematical systems, starting with strict finitism, and moving up through predicativism to the higher reaches of set theory. | |
From: Peter Koellner (On the Question of Absolute Undecidability [2006], Intro) |
17893 | 'Reflection principles' say the whole truth about sets can't be captured [Koellner] |
Full Idea: Roughly speaking, 'reflection principles' assert that anything true in V [the set hierarchy] falls short of characterising V in that it is true within some earlier level. | |
From: Peter Koellner (On the Question of Absolute Undecidability [2006], 2.1) |
17894 | We have no argument to show a statement is absolutely undecidable [Koellner] |
Full Idea: There is at present no solid argument to the effect that a given statement is absolutely undecidable. | |
From: Peter Koellner (On the Question of Absolute Undecidability [2006], 5.3) |
17890 | There are at least eleven types of large cardinal, of increasing logical strength [Koellner] |
Full Idea: Some of the standard large cardinals (in order of increasing (logical) strength) are: inaccessible, Mahlo, weakly compact, indescribable, Erdös, measurable, strong, Wodin, supercompact, huge etc. (...and ineffable). | |
From: Peter Koellner (On the Question of Absolute Undecidability [2006], 1.4) | |
A reaction: [I don't understand how cardinals can have 'logical strength', but I pass it on anyway] |
17887 | PA is consistent as far as we can accept, and we expand axioms to overcome limitations [Koellner] |
Full Idea: To the extent that we are justified in accepting Peano Arithmetic we are justified in accepting its consistency, and so we know how to expand the axiom system so as to overcome the limitation [of Gödel's Second Theorem]. | |
From: Peter Koellner (On the Question of Absolute Undecidability [2006], 1.1) | |
A reaction: Each expansion brings a limitation, but then you can expand again. |
17891 | Arithmetical undecidability is always settled at the next stage up [Koellner] |
Full Idea: The arithmetical instances of undecidability that arise at one stage of the hierarchy are settled at the next. | |
From: Peter Koellner (On the Question of Absolute Undecidability [2006], 1.4) |
24089 | Essences are fictions needed for beings who represent things [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: The true essence of things is a fiction of representing being, without which being is unable to represent. 11[330] Thinking must assert substance and identity because a knowing of complete flux is impossible. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1881-82 [1882], 11[329]) | |
A reaction: I have defended (in my PhD) the thesis that the concept of essence is required for explanation. Do animals need the concept of essence in order to represent? I think people and animals ascribe essential natures to most things. |
24090 | Our inclinations would not conflict if we were a unity; we imagine unity for our multiplicity [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: How is it that we satisfy our stronger inclinations at the expense of our weaker inclinations? - In itself, if we were a unity, this split could not exist. In fact we are a multiplicity that has imagined a unity for itself. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1881-82 [1882], 12[35]) | |
A reaction: Plato had the same thought, but stopped at three parts, rather than a multiplicity. What Nietzsche fails to say, I think, is that this 'imagined' unity of the mind is not optional, and obviously has a real link to the one body and the one life. |
24087 | People who miss beauty seek the sublime, where even the ugly shows its 'beauty' [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: Whoever does not achieve the beautiful seeks the wildly sublime, because there even the ugly can show its 'beauty'. Likewise we seek the wildly sublime morality. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1881-82 [1882], 11[049]) | |
A reaction: Is the 'we' here Nietzsche, or the herd? The former, I guess, since some the values he likes seem rather ugly to me. He is a fan of war, for example. I'm guessing that massive destruction is sublime but ugly. |
24091 | The sublimity of nature which dwarfs us was a human creation [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: This beauty and sublimity of nature, before which every human being seems small, was first imposed on nature by us. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1881-82 [1882], 12[38]) | |
A reaction: I was struck when I was 10 with how indifferent to a landscape I was, when my mother told me it was 'beautiful'. Five years later I saw it differently. I assume nature is not intrinsically sublime. Dwarfed by our own concept is a bit odd. |
24093 | We can aspire to greatness by creating new functions for ourselves [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: To see the new greatness not above oneself, not outside oneself, but to make a new function from it. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1881-82 [1882], 13[19]) | |
A reaction: Thus we might combine the Aristotelian and the existentialist views! Do we discover our function or invent it? Anyone who acquires an expertise is creating a new function for themselves, presumably with a high value. |
24085 | For absolute morality a goal for mankind is needed [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: I deny absolute morality because I do not know an absolute goal of mankind. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1881-82 [1882], 11[037]) | |
A reaction: Christianity dreams of union of souls with God (clustering around God like goldfish to food, according to Dante). That is an absolute goal, justifying an absolute morality. If Aristotelians could identify human nature, its flourishing might be absolute. |
24094 | Humans are vividly aware of short-term effects, and almost ignorant of the long-term ones [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: How weakly human beings feel responsible for their indirect and distant effects! And how cruelly and exaggeratedly the closest effect that we exert pounces on us - the effect we see, for which our myopic vision is still just sharp enough! | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1881-82 [1882], 15[11]) | |
A reaction: This strikes me as both accurate and important, because consequentialist ethics is largely committed to judging by a very distorted image of their own objective. |
24086 | The goal is to settle human beings, like other animals, but humans are still changeable [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: Obviously the goal is to make human beings as steady and firm as most animal species; they have adapted to the conditions of the earth etc. and do not change essentially. The human being is still changeable - is still becoming. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1881-82 [1882], 11[044]) | |
A reaction: I favour an Aristotelian view, based on the flourishing of human nature, but this thought obviously challenges such a view. Great changes to a culture can make some difference to the apparent nature of people. |
24088 | See our present lives as eternal! Religions see it as fleeting, and aim at some different life [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: Let us press the image of eternity on our life! This thought contains more than all religions that despise this life as fleeting and taught us to look toward an unspecified different life. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1881-82 [1882], 11[159]) | |
A reaction: This is the best statement of the idea of eternal recurrence I have so far found. His ideal is to design a life for ourselves which we would be happy to see endlessly repeated. A lot of thought would have to go into that! |
21094 | There are two kinds of right - to power, and to property [Hume] |
Full Idea: Right is of two kinds: right to power and right to property. | |
From: David Hume (Of the First Principles of Government [1750], p.25) | |
A reaction: These seem to be positive rights. No mention of the right not be to unjustly abused. It is hard to find any sort of radical political thinking in Hume. His empirical scepticism extends to his politics. He approves of modern consitutional monarchy. |
21095 | It is an exaggeration to say that property is the foundation of all government [Hume] |
Full Idea: A noted author has made property the foundation of all government; and most of our political writers seem inclined to follow him in that particular. This is carrying the matter too far. | |
From: David Hume (Of the First Principles of Government [1750], p.25) | |
A reaction: This obviously refers to John Locke. Locke's idea strikes me as hideous. It says the foundation of government is the right of property owners to protect what they have against non-owners. It implies social exclusion in the constitution. |
24095 | Our growth is too subtle to perceive, and long events are too slow for us to grasp [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: The slowness of the events in the history of human beings is not suited to the human sense of time - and the subtlety and smallness of all growth defies human vision. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1881-82 [1882], 15[41]) | |
A reaction: The only way we can study history is by 'periods'. It is as if English history has its slate wiped clean in 1066, 1485, 1603 and 1689. All historians know that the reality of it all is totally beyond our grasp. |