I came across a new blog today (well new to me) that had two great posts. The first was on Nietzsche as a scientific realist. Well more accurately on Brian Leiter's version of Nietzsche. I should say that I've seen Leiter's book on Nietzsche at the bookstore several times. I've just never quite been able to buy it for rather irrational reasons. His blog just turns me off. To me it is often an example of everything I dislike about blogs - especially political blogs. To be fair I can think of equally annoying blogs on the conservative side. It's funny because every now and then someone sends me a link to his blog that I truly enjoy. 9/10 it's a post on Nietzsche too. Further, now that I read the interesting discussion at Duck Rabbit, it sounds like Leiter's Nietzsche is far closer to my reading of Nietzsche than I would have expected. Well, Leiter still has the "anti-pomo" rant going on. But I tend to think most Analytic views of what Continental Thought is to be wildly wrong. Further I tend to read Derrida and Heidegger as realists too. So there you have that.
Don't get me wrong, I still think Nietzsche, Derrida and others problematize many aspects of philosophy typically taken for granted. But then if you read my discussion of Socrates from yesterday, you'll see that to me a real realism has to be problematizing. That is, I tend to find a simple correspondence theory as problematic. That's one reason why I find Gödel so interesting. He more or less went from something I see as very Socratic into an argument for scientific realism. The way I read Nietzsche and Derrida is actually very close to what I see Gödel doing with respect to Mathematics.
Of course I'll be honest and say that I suspect Leiter doesn't see Nietzsche in that way. (Obviously I don't know one way or the other)
The other post at Duck Rabbit was also somewhat relevant to my Socrates post. It was in response to Brian Weatherson's recent post on Wittgenstein and the role of philosophy. Both posts are excellent and worth reading and offer yet more reasons for me to go out and buy a bunch of Wittgenstein rather than the books I just did buy. However I try and keep my buying queue honest and put them as close to a first in first out decision as possible. (With exceptions - I didn't buy the book on Pythagoreanism nor Giordano Bruno that I had in my Amazon list - lack of funds)
Anyway, the part of "Duck's" post which was relevant to me was the following:
So when the philosopher says "[P]", this is to be taken as a reminder of something we already know, not a thesis to be proved in the face of ignorance or doubt. We already know it, so an argument for it would be out of place, as this would make it look like its truth, rather than its significance in the context, is what we are unclear on. We would say "Well, duh! But so what?", asking for a further, substantive claim instead of looking for the "hidden" aspect of [P] which was the real philosophical point. Compare §126, in which he says that "since everything lies open to view, there is nothing [for philosophy] to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us."
"Duck" says later that the purpose of the significance of these philosophical arguments is "to dispel philosophical illusion, of the sort that makes it seem as if a philosophical doctrine is required to unravel an apparent mystery." Peirce I think moves in this direction as well. We have brute facts that are constantly impacting us and dialogs allow us to include this into our thought. Put a different way, philosophy demonstrates the limits of philosophical thought so as to force us into encountering the real. (I don't know if "Duck" would agree with this) But of course any such encountering tends to engender philosophizing which we must use philosophy to dispel so as to encounter reality in the purity of its unfolding itself to us.
Of course I'm not sure how much this is true of Wittgenstein - it makes me want to read him more now.
this reminds me a bit of Cavell, who i am currently reading for a class on Emerson. If i am reading him correctly his notion of achieving the "ordinary" is very much like how you use the term real.
I think it's fairly close to elements of Peirce's notion of common sensism that I discussed a few weeks back as well. The bigger issue is that there is a real world that affects us and if we are honest and don't remain static in our discourse, that world will affect us. That's not really tied to Peirce's common sensism, although Peirce's notion of using abduction to move beyond the vague and make it determinate is fairly intertwined with the idea. The point is to acknowledge our fallibilism and always continue to test and inquiry. Inquiry is never over and those who think it is have in effect forgotten their fallibilism.
Enjoy the Wittgenstein, and keep us posted on your thoughts.
Regarding Socrates, Sarah Kofman (a fine Nietzschean herself) wrote a wonderful book called Socrate(s), that views him through a double matrix of interpreters: through Plato - Xenophon- Aristophanes on one axis, and Hegel - Kierkegaard - Nietzsche on the other.
The way I read Nietzsche and Derrida is actually very close to what I see Gödel doing with respect to Mathematics.
Derrida thought about it much the same, at least in regards to himself.
"Allusion, or 'suggestion' as Mallarmé says elsewhere, is indeed that operation we are here by analogy calling undecidable. An undecidable proposition, as Gödel demonstrated in 1931, is a proposition which, given a system of axioms governing a multiplicity, is neither an analytical nor deductive consequence of those axioms, nor in contradiction with them, neither true nor false with respect to those axioms. Tertium datur, without synthesis." (Dissemination, p219, emphasis in original)
The quote by Peirce on truth I mentioned the other day is fairly close to the notion of undecidability as well.
It seems to me, with respect to Derrida's analogy of Godel, that there are some problems. Godel's proof clearly only applies to certain axiomatic systems. It seems to me that it is far from clear that the writing Derrida deconstructs necessarily fits the form. I note, however, that Plato and the Platonists apparently did see a connection between arithmetic, counting, and writing in general. Catherine Zuckert had an interesting book that discussed that relative to Gadamer. Postmodern Platos. It discusses the engagement of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss and Derrida with Plato. It has a strong political bent, but is quite interesting and relevant. If I have time I'll comment on that tomorrow.
Thanks for the encouragement – I hope to get back to both issues when I get the chance. I think we're using the term "realism" differently; I tend to use it to refer to what you (and Rorty et al) call the "correspondence theory" (that's because I see it more as a metaphysical issue than one about truth). On the other hand, as Cora Diamond points out (see the title essay of her The Realistic Spirit, there is an important sense, perhaps yours, in which Wittgenstein is indeed a "realist". You might also like Crispin Sartwell's "radical realist" Nietzsche – see his Obscenity, Anarchy, Reality (link from my page for excerpts).
As for your comments on Peirce, I'm not sure what you mean by the Heideggerian-sounding language (I'll get to Being and Time eventually!), but I tend to avoid talk of the "limits" of thought – that sounds more like the Tractatus than the PI. It makes it sound like there's something "unthinkable" on the other side of the "limit", which sounds funny to me. I also have some problems with Peirce's "truth at the end of days" epistemology. But yes, there is a connection there (although I stop short of calling Wittgenstein a "pragmatist"); for me it's a shared anti-Cartesianism.
Re: ryan's comment: The "ordinary" is only slightly clearer to me than the "real", but they do seem to be related in Cavell. Cavell is great and I highly recommend The Claim of Reason, his magnum opus.
I don't think one ought view Peirce's notion of "in the long run" in terms of epistemology. If one reads through Peirce, he actually discusses epistemology quite rarely. While he occasionally does use the word "know" it's usually in a loose colloquial sense and only rarely in a more rigorous sense. Here's a relevant quote. (Emphasis mine)
Many logicians conceive that the inquiry trenches largely upon psychology, depends upon what has been observed about the human mind, and would not necessarily be true for other minds. Much of what they say is unquestionably false of many races of mankind. But I, for my part, take little stock in a logic that is not valid for all minds, inasmuch as the logicality of a given argument, as I have said, does not depend on how we think that argument but upon what the truth is. Other logicians endeavoring to steer clear of psychology, as far as possible, think that this first branch of logic must relate to the possibility of knowledge of the real world and upon the sense in which it is true that the real world can be known. this branch of philosophy, called epistemology or erkennthislehre, is necessarily largely metaphysical. But I for my part, cannot for an instant assent to the proposal to base logic upon metaphysics, inasmuch as I fully agree with Aristotle, Duns Scotus, Kant, and all the profoundest metaphysicians that metaphysics can, on the contrary, have no secure basis except that which the science of logic affords.
With regards to the language of limits, it ends up being very tied up into notions of infinity with respect to various things, including knowledge. I think one way of reading Heideegger (both the middle and later periods) is in terms of certain 'entities' being beyond finite thought. Within history they are thus always incomplete and we always reach a point where our discussion of them is undecidable. But a decision must be made which then enables the furthering of history. So it is a way to have something transcendent be fully immanent as well without appeal to the traditional platonic conceptions of forms. But it tends to be a complex topic and I don't think even all phenomenologists talk about it the same way. I fully admit though that I think the medieval notion of realism is quite relevant here. Thus my views of Peirce, Derrida, and Heidegger, all of whom return in a way to certain medieval conceptions of reality. But I find correspondence in a simple sense very problematic.
But, since you bring it up, are you saying Leiter views Nietzsche as advocating a correspondence theory?
Just to add to the above, I think the problem of correspondence is inherently tied to the discussion of iconicity in semiotics and especially in Peirce. It's also where Derrida strongly utilizes Peirce in one of his derivations of decontruction. But more importantly it is where Peirce and Derrida probably differ in subtle but important ways.
I'm afraid I don't know any more about Derrida and the semeiotic Peirce, not to mention Scotus, than I do about Heidegger, so I can't comment on that. In the quote you give, Peirce is concerned to avoid basing logic on epistemology in the sense of a normative theory of empirical justification, which strikes him as not being as far away from (merely) empirical psychology as one would hope (again, as a "basis" for logic). This is now the standard view (though more through Frege than Peirce). On the other hand, he is also concerned to reject the Cartesian conceptual separation of truth from inquiry which results in skepticism. This is why he defines truth as (in one typical formulation) "permanently settled belief," in line with his epistemic fallibilism. This is on the right track, but it seems to me to substitute (for Cartesianism) a sort of skepticism of his own. (In this I follow my teacher Isaac Levi – see e.g. ch. 1-3 of The Enterprise of Knowledge.)
As for Leiter's Nietzsche, the short answer is yes, Leiter's Nietzsche is a standard realist about the "empirical world" as revealed by science, somewhat like Quine. My mixed feelings about this Nietzsche are thus analogous to my mixed feelings about Quine. I'll give a longer answer back at DR one of these days.
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