Despite his principled resistance to the concept of martyrdom, the great German philosopher, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, clearly sacrificed himself for the truth. After resigning due to ill health from his position of professor of the University of Basel, he lived a spartan, hermetic lifestyle, wracked with an illness that is now thought to have been syphilis, as Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann describes:
He is shy, about five-foot-eight, but a little stooped, almost blind, reserved, unaffected, and especially polite; he lives in modest boarding houses in Sils Maria, Nizza, Mentone, Rome, Turin.
To the outside observer, he must have appeared a pitiful shadow of a man. But he burned with an unparalleled intensity in his inner world, producing dozens of lengthy philosophical volumes in just fifteen years. His four part masterpiece, Also Sprach Zarathustra, was written in under two years in a grand style reminiscent of the Old Testament.
Nietzsche called himself a friend of the truth, but he also realized that in order to become the man that Diogenes sought with a lamp in the broad daylight of ancient Athens, he had to attack that which he loved most of all:
A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions.
Polonius would be proud of this succinct crystallization of the scientific method. But those who seek wisdom must question even their quest for wisdom, and wisdom itself.
What is truth?
asked Pontus Pilate, words which Nietzsche believed to be the wisest spoken in the entire New Testament.
And so those who seek the truth arrive at a dangerous question mark: is nothing true? and if so, how do we, as empathic and social creatures, reconcile this with the violence of the natural world (ourselves included) and avoid the doctrine:
Nothing is true/Everything is permitted
Progressives strive to maintain a reality based community, and it is precisely because of this principled stance that we must have the courage to examine our progressive values and attempt to discern our justifications for possessing them, following again the scientific method...
In science, convictions have no rights of citizenship, as is said with good reason. Only when they decide to descend to the modesty of a hypothesis, of a provisional experimental point of view, of a regulative fiction, may they be granted admission and even a certain value within the realm of knowledge - though always with the restriction that they remain under police supervision, under the police of mistrust. But does this not mean, more precisely considered, that a conviction may obtain admission to science only when it ceases to be a conviction? Would not the discipline of the scientific spirit begin with this, no longer to permit oneself any convictions? Probably that is how it is. But one must still ask whether it is not the case that, in order that this discipline could begin, a conviction must have been there already, and even such a commanding and unconditional one that it sacrificed all other convictions for its own sake. It is clear that science too rests on a faith; there is no science "without presuppositions". The question whether truth is needed must not only have been affirmed in advance, but affirmed to the extent that the priniciple, the faith, the conviction is expressed, "nothing is needed more than truth, and in relation to it everything els has only second rate value."
The bolding of Nietzsche's statement is mine; the italics are Nietzsche's. The conviction that Nietzsche is talking about here is the conviction that the truth is divine. It is a full frontal assault on both the metaphysical and scientific concepts of "truth".
Nietzsche is by no means calling for an abolition of adherence to the principle of honesty - rather, he is its most ardent, if Quixotic crusader. What he is calling for is an examination of our very values. Our deepest convictions must be scrutinized. Truth is revealed to be another moral prejudice, and thus becomes questionable along with everything else.
This presents a sort of strange loop, or paradox, depending upon one's point of view: if we arrive at the conclusion, by employing the scientific method, that the notion that truth is divine and a causa prima is an a priori judgment - a conviction - and therefore suspect according to the very same scientific method, how can we possibly ever determine what values guide our existence as human beings?
Perhaps the answer lies in the viscera: when a normally functioning human being encounters a wrongness, they feel it in their guts, in their heart, perhaps even in their pineal gland?
When you are sick, as I am today, you feel it in every fiber of your being, you know something is wrong; you just need a doctor to find out the exact nature of the problem and to hopefully fix it. We know something is wrong with the world we are living in, we feel it in every fiber of our being - even those who misdiagnose the causes. This intuition, of course, rejects the scientific method. Yet another conviction? We return again to the problem...
As humans have progressed through different environments, their values have changed over time as they adapted to these new environments: the settlement, the city, the metropolis, the global community. Empathy grows out of necessity, from small kinship groups to the entire human family. In today's world, perhaps the necessity of continued survival in an increasingly complex and more interconnected environment dictates empathy and mutuality, for the only apparent alternative is mutually assured destruction. In previous times, people could afford the luxury of cruelty. But perhaps we are also suffering under the legacy of such libertinage?
Perhaps. It would do honor to the person who inspired this diary to end it with a question mark...
What are your perhapses?