Nietzsche Flashcards
(9 cards)
How does Nietzsche critique anthropocentrism and intellectualism in philosophy?
Nietzsche criticizes the tendency of Western philosophy to
- place humans at the center of existence (anthropocentrism) (against Hegel and Marx)
- prioritize intellect as the supreme faculty (intellectualism).
He argues that humans are just one part of the universe and that reason is not the highest form of engagement with the world. Instead, Nietzsche emphasizes that our main skill is deception to survive..
What does Nietzsche say about the “drive to truth”?
If humans are so deceiving, how comes we are so concerned with the truth? Where did the drive for truth come from?
Nietzsche suggest drive for truth emerged over time as a distorted version of the human drive to form metaphors.
Nietzsche first paints a Hobbesian chaotic state of nature
From this he thinks that through boredom and necessity the urge to live social arises. And like Hobbes he says a kind of social contract arises.
And to make this al happen we need language, and accordingly we need a shared truth.
How does Nietzsche view language?
Language is a system of agreed-upon signs, rooted in metaphor, that enables communication and survival.
Words are
- copies of nerve stimuli
- we use them to be social
> They are metaphorical, they say more about us and our relationships. They are practical tools.
Liars, by breaking these conventions, harmfully disrupt communal order and reveal language’s dependence on shared trust.
What does Nietzsche mean by the “forgetfulness of the origins of language”?
Over time, humans forget that language and concepts are creations of their own design.
Originally vivid metaphors, words harden into fixed systems of meaning, leading people to treat them as natural, objective truths rather than practical and contingent tools.
How do words and concepts “equalize the unequal,” and why is this problematic?
Words simplify reality by reducing unique phenomena into general categories (e.g., “leaf” erases the individuality of each leaf).
While practical, humans subject themselves to these concepts as if they weren’t a project of their own making.
What is Nietzsche’s view of rationality in science and ethics?
We order concepts (into web of concepts) to get a grasp of things and of ourselves, it allows us to work together.
Nietzsche compares this to a columbarium of dead metaphors: a framework that obscures their metaphorical origins.
It says more about us than any reality outside of us. And so, science and ethics is just about finding things that we have put there in the first place (but we forgot). Think of the law of gravity, it just links to a web of other concepts. we know the effects of gravity, not the law of gravity itself.
What contrasts rationality according to Nietzsche?
Between subject and object there is no relationship of causality, no relationship of correctness, the only thing there is, is aesthetic.
All art and myth want to do is appearances. This is closer to human nature. Unlike rigid rationality, art transcends conceptual categories, creating new perspectives.
The artist is a lier too, but doesn’t do harm because it doesn’t pretend to be otherwise. It’s about intuitively getting caught up in your own metaphors.
So what ends up being ‘the truth’ according to Nietzsche?:
Nietzsche does not believe in an absolute truth (or at least at humans getting at it)
What is truth: A movable host (Army) of metaphors, metonymies and anthropomorphisms. (we used this army to fight the world outside of us)
How does Nietzsche’s philosophical development build on and diverge from Kant and Hegel?
Nietzsche agrees with Kant that time and space are constructs of the imagination but rejects their necessity.
He follows Hegel in historicizing constructs but pushes further, emphasizing their creative origins.
For Nietzsche, constructs like time, space, and concepts are metaphors created by us, not universal or historical necessities.
