Nietzsche, from Human All Too Human:

“Future of science. — To the man who works and searches in it, science gives much pleasure; to the man who learns its results, very little. But since all important scientific truths must eventually become everyday and commonplace, even this small amount of pleasure ceases; just as we have long ago ceased to enjoy learning the admirable multiplication tables. Now, if science produces ever less joy in itself and takes ever greater joy in casting suspicion on the comforts of metaphysics, religion, and art, then the greatest source of pleasure, to which mankind owes almost its whole humanity, is impoverished. Therefore a higher culture must give man a double brain, two brain chambers, as it were, one to experience science, and one to experience nonscience. Lying next to one another, without confusion, separable, self-contained: our health demands this. In the one domain lies the source of strength, in the other the regulator. Illusions, biases, passions must give heat; with the help of scientific knowledge, the pernicious and dangerous consequences of overheating must be prevented. — If this demand made by higher culture is not satisfied, we can almost certainly predict the further course of human development: interest in truth will cease, the less it gives pleasure; illusion, error, and fantasies, because they are linked with pleasure, will reconquer their former territory step by step; the ruin of the sciences and relapse into barbarism follow next. Mankind will have to begin to weave its cloth from the beginning again, after having, like Penelope, destroyed it in the night. But who will guarantee that we will keep finding the strength to do so?”

To us, things are such that they suggest they are more than they are to us. This suggested “more” is the subject of metaphysics.

We cannot believe a chair is essentially the phenomena by which we know it, yet we know the chair by way of its phenomena.

We cannot take a memory as something in the present. It exists in a moment in the past.

And nobody loves a person as given by experience, we love the person beyond the experience.

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We are constantly thinking in metaphysical terms, but we cannot believe metaphysics can be this simple, so we invent ghosts.

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Much of skepticism is just the selective severing of phenomena from metaphysical being.

A short tantrum inspired by Deb Owen’s blog article “are we waiting for an ‘education crisis’?”:

Training is a matter of preparing a student for specific kinds of situations by equipping them with necessary facts, theories and skills. Training is instrumental and it begins with a need, expressed as a role — a profession — and works backwards to the student.

Education works from the other direction. It begins with the particular student and that student’s virtues, and develops the student as an individual and citizen toward self-fulfillment through service to the community.

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The question of Why is not addressed in training. Training is focuses on What and How.

In education Why is foundational. Knowing how to ask Why — for oneself and with others — is the root from which What and How grow and give Why visible, concrete form. They substantiate and sustain it. But in education What and How are not permitted to crank away without the guidance of Why, as they are in training.

Education is both moral and practical. Training is only practical.

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Training and education are not exclusive categories. There is a degree of training in education and a degree of education in training, especially in a republic like ours. There’s not a bad or good. Neither can be dispensed with. The workforce undeniably needs efficient, effective workers who know how to perform specific kinds of useful tasks. However, it is just as true, but harder to see, that our culture also needs souls who have been cultivated to think beyond means, and to weigh and deliberate  and synthesize and communicate the relative value of various ends to various perspectives.

This is the kind of person who ought to be educators.

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My concern is that the education most of our educators have received is training in pedagogical technique and classroom management. Their entire outlook on education is limited to the domain of techne: skills and knowledge. The teacher has the skills and the knowledge to impart skills and knowledge, and to them, that is education. It is not enough for an educator to love teaching. An educator must also love education.

Nietzsche, again: “My eyes, however strong or weak they may be, can see only a certain distance, and it is within the space encompassed by this distance that I live and move, the line of this horizon constitutes my immediate fate, in great things and small, from which I cannot escape. Around every being there is described a similar concentric circle, which has a mid-point and is peculiar to him. Our ears enclose us within a comparable circle, and so does our sense of touch. Now, it is by these horizons, within which each of us encloses his senses as if behind prison walls, that we measure the world, we say that this is near and that far, this is big and that small, this is hard and that soft: this measuring we call sensation — and it is all of it an error!”

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People who think subjectivity is inside their heads and the objective world is that which encloses it have it all turned inside-out.

We just like to think of the world and ourselves objectively because objects — that which we grasp with the pudgy little fingers of our comprehension — are easier to think about. Much harder to think is truth which somehow includes, involves and exceeds us.

We reduce being to what is comprehensible and feel that we have mastered life.

An email I sent to a philosophy professor I know:

I’ve been thinking about your picture of Nietzsche as skeptic.

I suspect we disagree on some points, but I am not sure about that. I’d like to get some clarification and also to offer you another picture of Nietzschean skepticism to react to.

Obviously, Nietzsche did advocate a consoling, soothing form rigorous skepticism. I understand Nietzsche’s Epicurus as his exemplar of this kind of skepticism: “Epicurus, the soul-soother of later antiquity, had that wonderful insight, which is still today so rarely to be discovered, that to quieten the heart it is absolutely not necessary to have solved the ultimate and outermost theoretical questions. …he who wishes to offer consolation — to the unfortunate, ill-doers, hypochondriacs, the dying — should call to mind the two pacifying formulae of Epicurus, which are capable of being applied to very many questions. Reduced to their simplest form they would perhaps become: firstly, if that is how things are they do not concern us; secondly, things may be thus but they may also be otherwise.” (The Wanderer and His Shadow 7).

I find no evidence that Nietzsche disapproved of this kind of skepticism, and in fact, I believe he saw it as the most honorable alternative to Romanticism, which of course he detested and never tired of attacking in all its myriad forms. I think Epicurus may be the only person besides Goethe that Nietzsche never attacked.

From what I remember of our chats from several years ago, my guess is that we agree this far. The rest I am much less sure about.

Notice in the passage above (WS 7) how conditional his advocacy was. It is presented as a philosophy for “the unfortunate, ill-doers, hypochondriacs, the dying ” — again, for precisely the people vulnerable to Romanticism. There is reason to believe that Epicurean skepticism is only a means to a less gentle, more aggressive “Fredrickian” form of skepticism. Nietzsche describes Fredrickian skepticism in Beyond Good and Evil 209:

“Men were lacking; and [Fredrick’s father] suspected, with the bitterest vexation, that his own son was not enough of a man. In that he was deceived: but who would not have been deceived in his place? He saw his son lapse into the atheism, the esprit, the pleasure-seeking frivolity of ingenious Frenchmen — he saw in the background the great blood-sucker, the spider skepticism, he suspected the incurable wretchedness of a heart which is no longer hard enough for evil or for good, of a broken will which no longer commands, can no longer command. But in the meantime there grew up in his son that more dangerous and harder new species of skepticism — who knows to what extent favored by precisely the father’s hatred and the icy melancholy of a will sent into solitude? — the skepticism of audacious manliness, which is related most closely to genius for war and conquest and which first entered Germany in the person of the great Frederick.

“This skepticism despises and yet grasps to itself; it undermines and takes into possession; it does not believe but retains itself; it gives perilous liberty to the spirit but it keeps firm hold on the heart; it is the German form of skepticism which, as a continuation of Frederickianism intensified into the most spiritual domain, for a long time brought Europe under the dominion of the German spirit and its critical and historical mistrust.”

This recalls the Dionysian/Romantic distinction Nietzsche described most explicitly in Gay Science 370: “Every art, every philosophy may be viewed as a remedy and an aid in the service of growing and struggling life; they always presuppose suffering and sufferers. But there are two kinds of sufferers: first, those who suffer from the over-fulness of life — they want a Dionysian art and likewise a tragic view of life, a tragic insight — and then those who suffer from the impoverishment of life and who seek rest, stillness, calm seas, redemption from themselves through art and knowledge, or intoxication, convulsions, anesthesia, and madness. All romanticism in art and insight corresponds to the dual needs of the latter type…” From there he goes on to discuss two forms of pessimism.

So the Dionysian/Romantic distinction can be applied to skepticism, with skepticism regarded as a variety of pessimism toward knowledge. The soothing effect of skepticism is the “peace as a means to new wars”, mentioned in Thus Spoke Zarathustra — a peace Nietzsche preferred to be as brief as possible.

There is a fair amount of support for this view of the two skepticisms and their sequence and relative value:

“Redeemed from scepticism. — A: Others emerge out of a general moral scepticism ill-humoured and feeble, gnawed-at and worm-eaten, indeed half-consumed — but I do so braver and healthier than ever, again in possession of my instincts. Where a sharp wind blows, the sea rises high and there is no little danger to be faced, that is where I feel best. I have not become a worm, even though I have often had to work and tunnel like a worm. — B: You have just ceased to be a sceptic! For you deny! — A: And in doing so I have again learned to affirm.” (Daybreak 477)

“One should not be deceived: great spirits are skeptics. Zarathustra is a skeptic. Strength, freedom which is born of the strength and overstrength of the spirit, proves itself by skepticism. Men of conviction are not worthy of the least consideration in fundamental questions of value and disvalue. Convictions are prisons. Such men do not look far enough, they do not look beneath themselves: but to be permitted to join in the discussion of value and disvalue, one must see five hundred convictions beneath oneself — behind oneself … ” (Antichrist 54)

Based on these and other passages I can supply if you want to see them, I think that Nietzsche understood Epicurean skepticism to be the foundation for a Frederickian skepticism, neither of which are to be considered the purpose of his philosophy, but only a means to something higher.

So I’m not claiming that Nietzsche was against rigorous, soothing forms of skepticism. I am claiming that he did not view it as any more than a temporary means to something higher. My position is that Nietzsche considered both forms of skepticism to be stages in a process of gradual liberation from positive metaphysics, all for the sake of a post-theological melioristic form of morality. This latter point is a much more complicated conversation. For now I’d like to see how far you agree with me on the Epicurean vs Fredrickian skepticism question.

I had to draw myself an ibis.

I like the fact that it looks like a hybrid of snake (the most down-to-earth animal) and bird (the sky-highest animal).

I also admire how it can sit on the surface of the water and stab fish who swim near the surface with its quill-sharp beak.

The ibis is a million times cooler than a liger.

My big accomplishment last weekend was designing this logo for a friend of mine.

“With every type of wound and loss, the lower, cruder soul is better off than the nobler soul. The dangers for the nobler soul must be greater; the likelihood that it will get into an accident and be destroyed is truly enormous, given the diversity of its conditions of life. – When a lizard loses a finger, it grows back: not so with people. –-“

Phalanx vs barbarians, phalanx wins. Champion team vs All Stars, champion team wins. Teams are greater than the sum of individual talents.

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What makes chemistry fascinating is that the quality of the whole changes as elements combine. You can’t account for this by counting atoms.

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Building a team can be viewed as filling holes with roles, or it can be seen as the highest form of alchemy.

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Desperation genericizes: everything is crushed into the mold of the need. The desperate are repellent: they just want to fill a hole.

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UX is the art of helping organizations see people as people, not as hallucinations of the organization’s needs and wishes.

A corollary to: “Ask me no questions, and I’ll tell you no lies.”

Don’t ask me to justify myself, and I won’t ask you to understand.

Soil, water, air and light, under the direction of the seed, organize themselves into life.

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“Now we are all flowers.” That’s what leaves say just before they crinkle brown and blow to the ground.

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I watched the orange sun stretch across the highway to the massed trees, whose leaves stood on end, ecstatic at the touch of light.

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We set goals and as we meet them, to our surprise we sail past and surpass them. We see that they were there to propel us further. Life works on a need-to-know basis.

“Nature likes to hide itself” – Heraclitus.

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For humans, artificiality comes naturally, and naturalness is artifice.

People become addicted to the determinacy of mathematical knowledge and empirical knowledge.

Mathematical reasoning converges to one solely possible conclusion. After reasoning arrives at its answer, all other answers can be eliminated by virtue of their nonconformity to the already-known correct answer. Deliberation on mathematical matters is unnecessary.

The empirical also converges to one possibility — one exclusive state of affairs. A well-constructed statement of empirical fact is either true or it is not true. If a statement of fact is ambiguous, it is inadequately formulated.

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If knowledge were solely mathematical and empirical, there would be no room for disagreement.

However, some knowledge is practical. Nobody will disagree that there are multiple ways to solve a math problem, and multiple approaches to investigate and determine the fact of a matter. Likewise, in all but the most artificial situations there are multiple means to reach the same end.

So, the practical, whether in the mode of taking action or of pursuing understanding, is multiple — even when applied to a single determinate end. To argue that a means to some end is not effective simply because another means is demonstrates a lack of practical experience.

Practical experience points to the fact of practical multiplicity.

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Beyond the empirical, the mathematical, and the practical (either in action or in pursuit of understanding), the world is also full of meanings, conspicuously or even overwhelming due to their strongly positive or negative valuations, and some so close to neutral they barely register as relevant at all.

And when we become empirically observant or rational or when we take practical action or seek understanding, it is all motivated by meaning. Something strikes us as meaningful and selectively emphasizes particular aspects of reality, without abandoning reality. Meaning drives what is seen as relevant, it directs the inquiry, it sets the objective of reasoning, it suggests methods to be employed, and it reveals where our knowledge seems insufficient.

These meanings are sometimes fleeting, but sometimes they persist for a time. And some of these meanings are purely personal and impossible to speak of, but some are felt to be universal, and are equipped with the means of expression and the expectation of being recognized. Some meanings are so persistent that we are born into them and maybe never even realize they are there, unless they falter or vanish. A person born into world of 24-hour daylight might never even have a word for “day”, because he has never experienced night.

The meanings that we share with others tend tend to endure longer than those we experience alone. The meanings we experience to be out in the concrete world, and reliably associated with particular things, almost as if the meanings were a property of these things, also tend to have more stability than those meanings that lack any particular concrete thing to attach to (or to condense upon), and which perhaps color the entire world at once as a mood.

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Meaning in search of outwardness, concreteness and persistence — and maybe social recognition, acknowledgment, agreement or sharing — is art.

Also, things that have outlived their meanings — but which out of habit are taken for meaningful, and perhaps no longer even expect to be experienced as meaningful — often displace art, and are of interest to art.

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It is a prejudice of our time that the best foundation for agreement is the determinate. But is it possible that the determinate is overvalued? Is it possible that it is valued out of habit (inertia of practice) or from a taste that values coercion over dialogue and deliberation? With determinate knowledge, one person can compel another with arguments. With indeterminate knowledge, both parties must come to a common understanding and then to an agreement, all within the limits of reason.