Meeting Nietzsche at the limits of rationality and the limits of Analytic Philosophy

A stranger wanders a stranger land

Note: I am not a Nietzsche Scholar. These are my musings and attempts to form an internal model of something. It is my hope that, even if they are wrong, they are wrong in an illustrative way. In this regard, let me appeal to Nietzsche himself: “It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable; it is precisely thereby that it attracts the more subtle minds.”

I’ve been reading Nietzsche lately. His genius is pretty clear to see, though on most things we disagree. My reading style is a little naive. I’ve picked up copies of his books, and I’m going through them by themselves, rather than reading them with secondary sources. So far I’ve finished Beyond Good & Evil, The Birth of Tragedy, Thus Spake Zarathustra and hope to go through more.

It’s got me thinking about the limits of Analytic Philosophy. Nietzsche’s own contempt of threads that would later weave together into Analytic Philosophy- British Empiricism, British Utilitarianism, and (what was then) Continental Positivism is quite clear. Still, I thought it might be productive to mash some ideas from Nietzsche into a constructive critique of the Analytic tradition.

Again, this is a very strange sort of conversation I am orchestrating. I am reading Nietzsche, as it were, with apparent innocence. Perhaps I’ll be criticized for going outside my sub-sub-specialty, but I figure that when a philosopher publishes a book, even if it’s a demanding tome like Beyond Good and Evil, they entitle anyone willing to honestly read it to take a punt at it.

Being creative and understanding creativity: Into the hidden chamber of discovery

Nietzsche is, in a way, sloppy. He contradicts himself a lot. He doesn’t have a consistent line on questions like Is the truth unobtainable, or is it dangerous? He thinks that the origins of a thinker’s thoughts is a far more telling objection against those thoughts than it really is. Regardless, he has a lot of insights. I am told that he is not the only guy like this in the continental tradition (Fn: Which is not to generalize all continental philosophy as sloppy). Foucault, for example, is sloppy on both history and philosophy, according to philosophers and historians I trust who have read him. Yet, when read in moderation and with a skeptical eye, Foucault offers insights.

In relation to creative endeavors, the argument that sloppiness can be useful isn't controversial. Someone on acid can’t reason as well as a sober person, but there may be many forms of creative work for which they are better suited. LSD was instrumental in creating much brilliant music and poetry for example. In such cases, the impairment of rational thought is glued to the rise of creative powers. I see no reason to think this phenomenon is exclusive to the arts. There may well be true or useful characterizations of the world that are easier to find if rational thought is loosened.

Even if you dispute the insights of Nietzsche, he isn’t the only possible example. Marxism is a great case study. Analytic Marxism was an attempt to translate Marxism from the continental style into the reasoning style of Analytic Philosophy. It’s a cool school of thought, but it's almost impossible to imagine a world in which Marxism was first invented within Analytic Philosophy. Not by accident did Marxism grow on the altogether wilder and more speculative grounds of Left-Hegelian philosophy.

Nor is this phenomenon exclusive to philosophical ideas like Marxism. Many of the great physicists of the early 20th century- think Schrodinger, Einstein, Heisenberg, etc., drew on philosophical ideas that we can politely call “ripe with speculation”. It is impossible to say to what extent such speculative ideas were actually useful in the scientific thought of these men. Certainly, though, these physicists themselves thought these ideas were useful.

So I suspect the sloppiness and the leaps in logic are active ingredients in Nietzsche’s work, allowing him to obtain his biting insights.

If this is right, we face a difficulty. How should we trade off a particular kind of creativity against a particular kind of rigor? How are we to evaluate methodology, if the truth or reasonableness of methodological premises isn’t the only factor in evaluation, at least sometimes, and in certain kinds of inquiry?

The best framework I’ve been able to come up with so far for understanding, though not solving, this impasse is the distinction between The Contexts of Discovery and Contexts of Justification from the philosophy of science. The context of discovery is the context of creating new good “guesses” about the world (e.g. hypotheses). The context of justification is about justifying- or disproving- those hypotheses.

Analytic philosophy has made great strides in understanding not only deductive reasoning but also inductive and abductive reasoning for and against existing views. Evaluating, understanding, and encouraging the creation of new ideas though, remains largely beyond its reach. In other words, Analytic philosophy has proven much better at understanding the process of justification than it has at understanding the process of discovery- through some are trying to remedy this.

Not only has Analytic philosophy been better at understanding justification than at understanding discovery, but it’s also arguably been better at doing justification (and refutation) than the discovery of new positions. This is most true in relation to social philosophy and theory, and in relation to philosophical psychology. This is by no means to downplay the brilliant new positions that have been created by Analytic Philosophy, enough to fill libraries, but it is something to think about.

By contrast, not only does Nietzsche excel at finding novel hypotheses, he is very much at home theorizing about the context of discovery and ushers us into that place. Nietzsche excels in generating novel and interesting- if perhaps not always persuasive- theories of the genealogies/origins of ideas and institutions. Even more so, reading his own work, we are left with a sense of philosophy in motion. Often reading, Beyond Good and Evil, it seemed I was reading thinking, rather than reading the products of thought- philosophizing, rather than philosophy. There is a kind of teaching about the creative process through demonstration to which he treats us.

So what is the way forward? As I mentioned earlier, evaluating scholarly methodology becomes monstrously harder when it’s not a matter of ‘just’ looking for more truth and rigor in the methodological postulates. I don’t have any sense of the right way to balance rigor and soaring when it comes to thinking. My only thought is that one virtue of intellectual diversity is that at least no individual needs to do it all at once.

The human as a believer and the philosophy of belief

I am no historian of thought, but it seems to me that the classical picture of humans in philosophy and “western” thought is that people are believers. we believe things, i.e. we have a stock of things that we hold to be true. At least until the modern period, the status of desire in this picture is unclear. Maybe desires are separate things from beliefs, or maybe to desire X is to believe X is excellent or worth possessing. Regardless, belief takes the lead, especially in premodern philosophy which tends to disdain "the passions". Exactly what the passions are- whether they consist in all motivations, all desires, all emotions- what is the relation between these in turn, etc. etc.- is a little unclear. Nonetheless, the passions are certainly distrusted.

Hume comes along and makes the argument that reason is the slave of the passions. What he means by this is that no amount of reasoning can ever lead you on its own to want something. In practice, Hume means by this means desire is autonomous from belief. No belief/theory/conception can ever imply a desire/passion/motivation and vice-versa. [Aside: this is very closely conceptually linked to Hume’s further claim that one cannot derive an is from an ought and vice-versa.]

So we get a bifurcation- there are beliefs and desires. In more modern times, formal models of mind and agency have become increasingly sophisticated. There are degrees of belief over different possible states of the world, and utility functions over these same states. Belief still retains, at least in the context of our thinking about philosophy, a kind of thematic primacy.

I previously have worried a lot about one aspect of this account- the idea that people have clear beliefs. Rather- I think that there are many different components to what we call belief. Often these components come apart- so you can believe in one thing in one sense of belief, and disbelieve it in another sense. Tamar Gendler was one of the first to pioneer this “splitting” of beliefs into multiple components with her concept of Alief, but I think there are many other components as well- at least four by my count.

Nietzsche, I think, turns this picture on its head in a different way. He imagines a philosophy in which the central object is not what we believe, but what we desire and will.

These two critiques- the one I like to push, that belief is fragmentary, and the one Nietzsche likes to push, that our desire is often more central to who we are than our beliefs, complement each other. In many ways, what we desire in our lives and world may be much more stable between contexts, and much less fragmentary, than what we believe about our lives and the world. To the extent that there is any continuity or wholeness to a person whatsoever, it is much more in what they want than in their internal map of the world, still less the stories they tell about why they are doing things.

There is an interesting analogy here, I think, in inverting the usual priority of belief and desire, with the Marxist inversion of Hegel, in which material circumstances and the means of subsistence are seen as having precedence over ideas and ideology. Beliefs stand for ideas, desire for the material basis of life. But that’s a topic for another essay. I’ll need to do more research because a lot of people have probably already said it.

Jumping ships on moral reasoning

The typical image of moral reasoning in Analytic Philosophy is some variation of the following. Since one cannot derive an ought from an is, one gathers together all of one’s oughts- that is all one’s moral urges. Some of these will be contradictory, one seeks to make adjustments to bring them into line with each other, smoothing out real and potential contradictions, and creating a coherent system of moral requirements. This is the method of reflective equilibrium. The philosopher works the jagged clay of moral intuition into a manageable system. I tend to think that even many Analytic Philosophers who claim not to be following this approach covertly are (much to Kieran’s dismay).

Although the term reflective equilibrium did not exist at the time, Nietzsche makes it clear that he is unhappy with processes like this. The philosopher shouldn’t merely smooth over existing values- they should be a creator of values, or at the very least, an evaluator of values.

But is this possible? Nothing comes from nothing. The only argument in favor of a value can be another value since one cannot derive an ought from an is. The problem, then, with “creating” values without reference to existing values is that we have nowhere to stand.

Otto Neurath, in speaking about beliefs rather than moral principles, said something that can be applied to morals:

“We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this, the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.”

But there is, I think, one sense in which we can critically consider our values in a way that goes beyond reflective equilibrium.

Let’s say you were to sort through your moral views and come to some rough sense of what you stood for. It’s possible that looking out from that vantage, you might decide that another set of values is practically dominant. By this I mean that adopting that set of values, genuinely committing yourself to them, will make you more likely to maximize not only your own current values and goals but also the new values and goals you adopt. The new set of values might be the best option both from the point of view the new values and from your old set of values.

This is a bit abstract, so let me give an example. When I was severely depressed, I found myself contemplating what I stood for. At the time I saw justice as particularly central to my basic, bedrock morality- justice as an important end in itself. I realized though, that this overweening concern for justice was part of what had made me sick and depressed. By leaping from the values I held then, to a system of values based more on compassion, I would be more able to do good both from the point of view of my old, justice-centered values and from the point of view of my new compassion centered values. This practical dominance argument induced me to change. Through a process that was both practical and philosophical, I rejected an old set of values and adopted a new one.

This, I think, is one way in which Nietzsche’s ideal of the philosopher as an evaluator and creator of values- and not merely a smoother and summarizer of them- is possible, but without requiring us to step to an archimedean point outside all value.

[Aside: I do not think this situation I have described is especially rare. It seems to me quite common that two systems of values have mostly overlapping goals, but that one system could be better at getting at those goals than the other. Here’s another way it could happen. You might find that one system of values is very vulnerable to being rationalized- manipulated to get the result you want- due to the intricacy of its fine distinctions and casuistry. This makes you think you should prefer another code that, in practice, overlaps in its ultimate ends to a large degree with your current code, but is less vulnerable to being rationalized in this sense. Thus, you switch.]

The neglected emotional-aesthetic questions of philosophy

Nietzsche draws our attention to what we might think of as emotional-philosophical problems. Problems that are, to speak somewhat inaccurately, non-cognitive.

When I was in high school my teacher, in talking about our essays on King Lear, suggested that we had to grapple with the problem of evil. I was a little perplexed. I was not religious, nor, to my knowledge, was she. What is the problem of evil in a world without God? There exists evil. It’s sad. The end.

I still don’t know what she meant by posing this, perhaps she didn’t mean anything very definite. Having read Nietzsche though, I think I see both the outline of a secular continuation of the problem of evil, and a secular solution.

Nietzsche grapples with Schopenhauer’s pessimism. In a very crude sketch, this pessimism goes as follows. Life is a struggle. We seek what we desire. Satisfaction is only a brief respite, leading to the next round of seeking and frustrated desire. The overall picture given by Schopenhauer is very nearly identical to that propounded by the Buddha. To exist as a being is to want things. To want things is to be frustrated and incomplete.

The new, secular, problem of evil then is this, how can we give meaning to this process in a way which makes the continual frenzy of frustrated desire acceptable?

This problem is what I call an emotional problem. It’s a problem with the aesthetics of life. How are we to understand this overall picture in a way which makes it less horrifying, or, if we cannot do that, how are we to resign ourselves to the horror? It’s not a factual question about the way things are. It’s not even really a moral question about how we should live. It’s a question about how we can keep perceiving life as beautiful and enjoyable.

This kind of aesthetic or emotional problem- of making sense of patterns in a way that allows us to process them or cope with them-, is a lot of what ordinary people mean by philosophy. Sadly, it’s a pursuit that’s often missing from Analytic Philosophy, because what is being searched for is not so much a hidden truth or even imperative- but a method of setting life to the right kind of narrative.

Nietzsche’s solution to the problem of pessimism is that the struggle itself has to be seen as valuable- and not merely success in those struggles. By learning to love the beauty in the struggle to live well, we can reconcile ourselves to the permanent hunger of existence. This is a way of framing the aesthetics of life which makes it something other than ugly, and only cruel. I’m not sure if this is quite the solution- but I think it’s on the right track.

[Aside: I would add, though I don’t know that Nietzsche would agree, that the view that certain kinds of striving against obstacles, might have intrinsic value is no reason to keep brutality, crippling diseases, hunger, etc. Even a life in a utopia of material comfort has forms of striving enough- e.g. for artistic or scholarly greatness, for love, to be a good person, etc. I would rather a world in which people fight for self-actualization in Maslow’s hierarchy than struggle for food and shelter. This is really a strong argument against social Darwinism- we must give people space to struggle with the higher and more beautiful problems.

I would add also that none of this is broadly opposed to an account of ethics focused on welfare- so long as welfare is understood broadly.]

This secular problem of evil is just one emotional problem in philosophy, there are assuredly many others. It is right to expect attempts at solutions to such emotional problems from philosophers, and it must be seen as a limitation in the analytic tradition that it has not, hitherto, often attempted to provide them.

In the not too distant future- things which might have been only a bare hint in Nietzsche’s day- like the possibility of neurologically eliminating thwarted wanting and feeling altogether, might transpire. In a world in which “wire-heading” is possible- the question of the value of striving and thwarted desire may soon become urgent.