Liebregts Page 1 of 35 Eric Liebregts #115816380 Major Research Paper Wilfred Laurier University, Department of Philosophy Academic Advisors: Dr. Bob Litke and Dr. Renato Cristi August 3, 2012 Nietzsche’s Critique of Thingness and its Implications on Mainstream Beliefs about Science We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we are able to live -- by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith no one could endure living! But that does not prove them. Life is not an argument; the conditions of life might include error (GS 121). The senses do not lie the way the Eleatics thought they did, or the way Heraclitus thought they did, -- they do not lie at all. What we do with the testimony of the senses, that is where the lies begin, like the lie of unity, the lie of objectification, of substance, of permanence (TI ‘Reason’ 2). I have long since declared war [against the] optimism of logicians (LN 38[4]). ABSTRACT Many intellectuals take a naive, realist, metaphysical stance with respect to logic and the related concepts of ego (in terms of I-ness, not in the Freudian sense), thingness, and causality. This is problematic. In this paper, I will explain Nietzsche's reasons for being skeptical towards these concepts and suggest that the transformation of sensory experience into concepts is akin to the conversion of analog information to digital form. It is problematic to take a naive realist stance with respect to the conceptual realm because its representations are inherently lossy with respect to their source, and they create the illusion of exactitude. INTRODUCTION I begin my paper with a sketch of the three levels of reality that Nietzsche identifies: 'the
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Nietzsche’s Critique of Thingness and its Implications on Mainstream Beliefs about Science
Many intellectuals take a naive, realist, metaphysical stance with respect to logic and the related concepts of ego (in terms of I-ness, not in the Freudian sense), thingness, and causality. This is problematic. In this paper, I will explain Nietzsche's reasons for being skeptical towards these concepts and suggest that the transformation of sensory experience into concepts is akin to the conversion of analog information to digital form. It is problematic to take a naive realist stance with respect to the conceptual realm because its representations are inherently lossy with respect to their source, and they create the illusion of exactitude.
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Liebregts Page 1 of 35
Eric Liebregts #115816380
Major Research Paper
Wilfred Laurier University, Department of Philosophy
Academic Advisors: Dr. Bob Litke and Dr. Renato Cristi
August 3, 2012
Nietzsche’s Critique of Thingness and its Implications on Mainstream
Beliefs about Science
We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we are able to live -- by positing bodies, lines,
planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith no
one could endure living! But that does not prove them. Life is not an argument; the
conditions of life might include error (GS 121).
The senses do not lie the way the Eleatics thought they did, or the way Heraclitus thought they
did, -- they do not lie at all. What we do with the testimony of the senses, that is where the lies
begin, like the lie of unity, the lie of objectification, of substance, of permanence (TI ‘Reason’ 2).
I have long since declared war [against the] optimism of logicians (LN 38[4]).
ABSTRACT
Many intellectuals take a naive, realist, metaphysical stance with respect to logic and
the related concepts of ego (in terms of I-ness, not in the Freudian sense), thingness, and
causality. This is problematic. In this paper, I will explain Nietzsche's reasons for being
skeptical towards these concepts and suggest that the transformation of sensory experience
into concepts is akin to the conversion of analog information to digital form. It is problematic
to take a naive realist stance with respect to the conceptual realm because its representations
are inherently lossy with respect to their source, and they create the illusion of exactitude.
INTRODUCTION
I begin my paper with a sketch of the three levels of reality that Nietzsche identifies: 'the
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actual world' from where we commonly assume our stimuli originate, 'the experiential realm' of
raw sensory impressions, and 'the conceptualized realm' -- our world of logicized things 'which
we experience as real' (LN 9[106]). I will argue that the transformation or 'carrying across'
(Ubertragung) of information from the experiential realm to the conceptual realm is like the
transformation of information from analog to digital form. The same problems -- lossiness
and the illusion of exactitude -- pervade our attempts to logicize or conceptualize our sensory
experience.
As Nietzsche's critique of logic shows, logic is not a metaphysical reality but a tool in
service of life imperatives that allows us to function more effectively in the world. As
Nietzsche puts it, the logician 'actually speaks of nothing but instances which never occur in
reality' (WP 478). The concepts of logic, ego, materialism, and causality all presuppose
'identical cases' (LN 40[13]), but such cases cannot be found in the unlogicized realm of raw
sensory experience. Because science is built upon the same presupposition as logic is, i.e.,
realism towards thingness, Nietzsche's critique applies to it as well. Nietzsche sees naive
logical realism as a religious belief, essentially a hangover from the previous Christian
moral-aesthetic picture of the world.
Nietzsche believes that prior to our scientifically-ordered, empirical world, we
experience an immediately perceived 'vivid world of first impressions' (OTL 84), and this
uninterpreted world is pictoral or imagistic in form. I will characterize the fluid, streaming,
confusing multiplicity of this world of impressions as being analog. This is in contrast to our
logicized, conceptual world, which can be thought of as being digital in character. In addition
to Nietzsche's remarks, I offer four arguments for thinking that uninterpreted sensory
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information can be described as being analog in character.
I will use examples of analog and digital representations to highlight two problems that
arise when we attempt to represent an analog phenomenon in a digital form. First, analog to
digital transformations are inherently 'lossy', which is to say that no digital reproduction can
preserve all the information of an analog original because it is impossible to finitize the infinite.
The second problem is a psychological tendency. Digital representations of analog
phenomena create the illusion of exactitude; their stark, bold character makes it easy for us to
overlook that the subject of the digital representation -- the raw sensory information -- seems
to be fuzzy and inexact in character.
Nietzsche's critique of logic aims to show that we must not be seduced by success in the
logicized realm of science into granting metaphysical status to logic, e.g., the idea that the
scientific perspective can provide a complete picture of what happens in the experiential realm.
Of course, the logical perspective is a highly useful tool that we can use to make life decisions,
and it has been very beneficial to the human species. However, we must not lose sight of the
fact that since it is based upon a presupposition -- that identicals are real -- we cannot ascribe
to it metaphysical status, as an arbiter of capital-T truth in the experiential world or the actual
world. We must not grant the imperatives of logic priority over the imperatives of life,
because logic is a tool created to serve the biological, psychological, and linguistic necessities of
life. Since science presupposes logic, a critique of logic is a critique of scientific practice.
Naive realism towards logic, ego, thingness, and causality hide the truth about the unavoidable
loss of information involved in the use of these concepts.
I want to raise the philosophical profile of analog types of representation. Like the
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professional audio engineer, who uses both analog and digital tools in the recording studio, I
hope that intellectuals will learn to use analog representations to complement the digital
representations that are so dominant in modern Western philosophy. I also hope that my
discussion of the critique of logic can shed light on some of the so-called 'illogical' or
'contradictory' passages from Nietzsche's writings and show that when viewed from a
non-naive logical perspective, his thoughts are actually highly lucid and insightful.
I: THE ACTUAL WORLD, THE EXPERIENTIAL REALM, AND THE REALM OF CONCEPTS
Nietzsche suggests that there are three spheres of reality. The first is what I will call
'the actual world', “in which everything is bound to and conditioned by everything else” (WP
584). This is what we commonly believe to be the source of all of our sensory experience, it is
where we live. It is 'the outside world'. Although Nietzsche talks about other realms, both of
these other realms are encompassed within the one actual world. Although we commonly
talk as if we possess knowledge of the actual world, in fact we can have no direct experience of
it because everything we know about it (including the assumption that it exists and is the
source of stimuli) comes to us via our senses. All of our impressions of the actual world arrive
to our brains already filtered by the limits of our sensory apparatii. This makes it difficult (if
not impossible) for us to make direct assertions about the actual world.
The second stage of reality is our 'immediately perceived' 'vivid world of first
impressions' (OTL 84), or what I have been calling 'the experiential realm'. This is the stage at
which stimuli from the actual world first encounter the brain. In this realm, these unlogicized
sensations are chaotic and imagistic in character, and they cannot be expressed linguistically.
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We can focus our attention upon the experiential realm by making a deliberate effort to not
classify, compare, or conceptualize our sensory information. When we do this, we can see the
character of this realm as a continuous, fluid stream in which there are no discrete elements,
but a confusing, flowing multiplicity. Nietzsche describes this realm as “the formless,
unformulatable world of the chaos of sensations” (LN 9[106]). Part of my thesis is that we can
think of this experiential realm as being analog in character.
The third sphere of reality is the familiar, empirical world of scientific assertions and
communication, or what I call 'the conceptual realm'. This is 'the world which we experience
as real (LN 9[106]). In is in this sphere that we make generalizations upon which to base our
behavior. We commonly assume that knowledge in this sphere is legitimate information
about 'the actual world', but of course this is a naive assumption. We rarely pay attention to
our passive reception of stimuli; instead we immediately leap from the reception of a stimulus,
e.g., a loud 'bang!' (the experiential realm), to identifying the source of that sound, e.g., a
cannon firing (the conceptual realm). However, since Nietzsche wants us to avoid being naive
realists, he wants us to resist the temptation to jump immediately to the conceptual realm of
things, to the idea that what one hears is a specific 'thing', without understanding that it is the
sensation, the 'bang', that is actually first received by the brain.
According to this model, a stimulus that we assume originates in the actual world passes
through two stages before reaching the conceptual realm. In the first stage, the move from
the actual world to the experiential world, there is a trimming of information. This stage of
trimming is passive. Only the information that fits within the 'bandwidth' of the sensory organ
can be transmitted:
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Sense perception happens without our awareness: whatever we become conscious of is a
perception that has already been processed (LN 34[30]).
Our eyes can only detect a narrow spectrum of light, and so infrared and ultraviolet light
information is not detected, and of course our vision must be pointed in a specific direction,
meaning that light information from behind us is also not detected. Of course other
organisms may have more (or less) developed sensory receptors, i.e., different 'bandwidths',
but all sensory organs have a limit to what they can receive. This means that before a
stimulus ever reaches our brain, i.e., the experiential realm, many other potential stimuli have
been lost because of the biological limits of our sensory apparatus. I am not particularly
interested in this first stage of processing because we can know very little (if anything) about
how it functions, other than to make the claim that we probably receive less information in our
brain than is available to it. To make any claims about this process, we would require direct
access to the source -- the actual world -- and of course this is problematic if not impossible.
My concern is with the second stage of processing, where the raw sensory data of the
experiential realm is transferred to the logicized, conceptual sphere. I believe that we can
make meaningful observations about this process works because we can examine the original,
raw, experiential information and compare it to the processed, logicized version of it in the
conceptual realm. Although for most people the processing that takes place at this stage is
done so quickly that it seems unconscious, Nietzsche believes that we can make ourselves
conscious of this process.
[The conceptual realm] remains protected and closed off from the immeasurable multiplicity in
the experiences [of the experiential realm][...][.] [It] is presented only with a selection of
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experiences -- experiences, furthermore, that have been simplified, made easy to survey and
grasp, thus falsified -- so that it in turn may carry on this simplification and making graspable (LN
37[4]).
Although the process seems automatic and unconscious for most adults, it takes years
for a newborn to efficiently and properly conceptualize raw sensory information. What
Nietzsche wants us adults to realize is that this transfer of information from the experiential
realm to the conceptual realm can be observed, although he admits that this is not easy for
most people to do:
That every thought [or impression] first arrives many-meaninged and floating, really only as the
occasion for attempts to interpret or for arbitrarily fixing it, that a multitude of persons seem to
participate in all thinking -- this is not particularly easy to observe: fundamentally, we are trained
in the opposite way, not to think about thinking as we think (LN 38[1]).
I accept Nietzsche's challenge and want to make an attempt to characterize this process. My
thesis is that the transfer of information from the experiential realm to the conceptual realm is
like the transfer of analog information to a digital form. Although digitized representations
can be highly useful, we must be aware of the two key issues that arise: lossiness and the
illusion of exactitude.
Like digital audio, our logical world -- the world of 'things' -- requires us to divide up the
world and slot each chunk into discrete categories. However, like a sound wave, the
experiential world doesn't seem to be neatly divisible in this way, and so any time we apply our
logico-linguistic apparatus to our sensory experience, we are making an approximation. No
matter how much detail we manage to achieve in a logical account, information about the
world will always be missing because logic is digital and the experiential world seems to be
analog. It is a mistake to think that logic could ever give us a complete picture of our
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experience, however well-defined and useful such a picture becomes. It is an error to be
prejudiced against alternative, i.e., non-logical or analog, perspectives on the world because no
logical or 'digital' picture of the experiential world can ever be complete, and in many cases, an
'analog' picture might be more appropriate to use than a 'digital' one.
II: THE CRITIQUE OF LOGIC AND A GENEALOGY OF NAIVE LOGICAL REALISM
Such erroneous articles of faith, which were passed on by inheritance further and further, and
finally almost became part of the basic endowment of the species are for example: that there are
enduring things; that there are identical things; that there are things (GS 110).
Logic is tied to the condition: assuming that identical cases exist. Indeed, in order to think and
conclude logically, the fulfillment of this condition must first be feigned. That is: the will to
logical truth cannot realize itself until a fundamental falsification of all events has been
undertaken (LN 40[13]).
[T]he psychological derivation of the belief in things forbids us to speak of 'things-in-themselves'
(WP 473).
We set up a word at the point at which our ignorance begins, at which we can see no further,
e.g., the word 'I', the word 'do', the word 'suffer': -- these are perhaps the horizon of our
knowledge, but not 'truths' (WP 482).
Nietzsche's critique of logic calls into question the realist perspective with respect to
thing-ness. Because the existence of identicals is a presupposition of logic, it is a mistake to
believe that any thing, e.g., your television, that pen, a cat, actually is separated in such a way
in the raw, uninterpreted experiential realm. Although our conceptual apparatus allows us to
speak in terms of televisions, pens, cats, and shoes, when we subject these things to scrutiny,
we find no clear boundary between [SHOE] and [NOT-SHOE] in terms of language or in terms of
physics. Although the main target of Nietzsche’s critique is logic, because scientific practice
presupposes logicality, a critique of logic is a critique of scientific thinking.
In linguistic terms, the lack of a clear distinction between [SHOE] and [NOT-SHOE] is
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readily understandable. There is no end to the debate about what distinguishes [SHOE] from
[NOT-SHOE], e.g., whether the footwear under consideration is more appropriately categorized
[SANDAL] or [BOOT]. The central feature of a linguistic community is an approximate
consensus about the way in which sensory information is grouped into conceptual categories.
The common feature of linguistic communities in general is logical realism, in agreeing to play
the linguistic game of realism about things. If you say, 'the book is in the car', you are
assuming that you and the other person have similar conceptions of what [BOOK] and [CAR]
signify in terms of raw sensory experience. But in order for this agreement on conceptions to
function, we must already accept the fundamental presupposition of logic: that it is really
possible to divide up our sensory experience in such a manner in the first place. In other
words, we have to agree to act as logical realists. This process of "simplification, coarsening,
emphasizing, and elaborating [is what enables] [...] all 'recognition', all ability to make oneself
intelligible" (WP 521). What Nietzsche wants us to realize is that although we must employ a
logical realist perspective to live and communicate, this by no means entails that we must
believe that either the experiential realm or the actual world is structured in this way. We can
be skeptical about logical realism and still continue to employ logical realism in order to
communicate and make generalizations in our lives.
At the microscopic level, there is no clear boundary marking exactly where the heel of a
shoe ends and the air around the shoe begins because infinite divisibility prevents any such
absolute demarcation. The 'atoms' of rubber at the edge of the shoe share electrons with the
'atoms' of air surrounding the shoe. No matter how closely we examine the edge of the shoe,
we cannot achieve a level of resolution where we find a clean break between [SHOE] and
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[NOT-SHOE]. The 'atoms' of rubber appear to bleed into the 'atoms' of air, and so there is no
precise point where [SHOE] becomes [NOT-SHOE]. Of course, one might argue that we simply
haven't explored deeply enough and haven't yet reached a level where we can observe the
division, and this is a definite possibility. However, we have no scientific evidence to suggest
that this is the case, only pure speculation. The weight of scientific evidence suggests that
atomism does not exist in the realm of physics, i.e., that there is no bottom-level, indivisible
substrate of matter.
Logic can only function by being applied to a world that is already divided into 'things',
into discrete linguistic categories, into atomic units. "Our belief in things is the precondition of
our belief in logic" (WP 516), which is simply to say that like the X's and Y's of an algebraic
equation, the categories we employ when making statements about the world, like [FOOD] and
[APPLE], are similarly unreal. The mechanism of logic requires us to be realists with respect to
'things' in the actual world, and we need these approximations to make generalizations about
the world and to communicate with others. Nietzsche's argument is not that people shouldn't
use logical realism to make generalizations about the world, but that philosophers must realize
that logic is built upon the presumption that identicals exist, and so logic is not an a priori
metaphysical arbiter of truth. The danger occurs when philosophers brazenly attempt to
construct theories upon the basic assumption of logic -- that 'things' are real -- without realizing
that it is based upon a presumption.
People projected their three 'inner facts' out of themselves and onto the world -- the facts they
believed in most fervently, the will, the mind, and the I. They took the concept of being from
the concept of the I, they posited 'things' as beings in their own image, on the basis of their
concept of I as cause. Is it any wonder that what they rediscovered in things later is only what
they had put into them in the first place? -- Even the 'thing', to say it again, the concept of a thing,
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is just a reflex of the belief in the I as cause... And even your atom, my dear Mr. Mechanist and
Mr. Physicist, how many errors, how much rudimentary psychology is left in your atom! Not to
mention the 'thing-in-itself', the horrendum pudendum of metaphysicians! The error of thinking
that the mind caused reality! And to make it the measure of reality! And to call it God! (TI:
The Four Great Errors 3)
The concepts of ego and causality all require the same presupposition as logic does --
the existence of identicals -- and so the critique of logic, skepticism towards 'things', applies to
them as well. Nietzsche argues that Descartes' cogito -- 'I think, therefore I am' -- is built upon
a linguistic requirement, not metaphysical truth. Although Descartes extends his radical
skepticism to almost all aspects of his experience, he fails to apply it to the presupposition of
identicals. Although his radical skepticism is sound methodology, his reconstructive strategy,
his identification of a secure starting point as the ego, is problematic. His observation that
thinking is happening by no means entails that there is some accompanying 'thing' that thinks.
Descartes' skepticism doesn't go deep enough; the Cartesian ego retains unquestioned realism
towards thingness.
'There is thinking: therefore there is something that thinks': this is the upshot of all of Descartes'
argumentation. But that means positing as true a priori our belief in the concept of substance --
that when there is thought there has to be something 'that thinks' is simply a formulation of our
grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed (WP 484).
'The subject' is the fiction that many similar states in us are the effect of one substratum: but it is
we who first created the 'similarity' of these states; our adjusting them and making them similar
is the fact, not their similarity (--which ought rather to be denied--) (WP 485).
When we say 'I think', the 'I' here may be no different than the 'it' in the phrases, 'It is
raining', or 'It is important that you brush your teeth', where the subject 'it' is a syntactic
expletive -- a grammatical unit that contributes nothing to the meaning of a sentence, but
merely acts as a grammatical placeholder (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_expletive). The onus