Thursday, September 04, 2008

Nietzsche and doubt

Arnold posted a good reflective quote on Nietzsche not being consistent.
Nietzsche’s [claim] was that our desire for truth above utility is just one of the many symptoms of human weakness and lack of self-reliance: we are incapable of carrying the burden of our solitude and asserting our will as the ultimate ground of everything we believe; we cannot bear the realization that we are self-grounded, unprotected by any universal order of things.

But on this point, as in most other areas of philosophizing, he was not consistent: he glorified the spirit of doubt, but failed to see that if there is no such thing as truth, there cannot be doubt either. My act of doubting implies that I believe something to be true, but am unable to decide what that something is. If we get rid of truth, doubt becomes impossible.
- Leszek Kolakowski, Metaphysical Horror, p. 29

3 comments:

  1. Thanks. Perhaps someday I should actually try reading Nietzsche.

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