“One drop of blood too much or too little in the brain can make our life unspeakably wretched and hard…But the worst is when one does not even know that this drop of blood is the cause. But ‘the Devil’! Or ‘sin’!” - F. Nietzsche, Daybreak.
John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
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ReplyDeleteChristopher,
ReplyDeleteWhat are we to make of this quotation out of context? The only thing that I make of it is that it is meaningless to cite the Devil as the cause of our problems, just as it is meaningless to say the God created the universe. In both cases, the assertion would more honestly be replaced with, "We don't know the cause of our problems" and "We don't know how the universe came to be (if it did not always exists)." As for "sin," Nietzsche may mean that it is just an empty label we apply to actions (our own or others') that make our lives wretched. In any case, if the quotation has profundity, then I've missed it.
In exegetical terms, this is one of the passages that Leiter cites in his scholarly papers (and references now and then on his blog) in arguing against one prominent interpretation of Nietzsche. The prominent interpretation at issue is called "aestheticism" sometimes and "perspectivism" at other times. The idea is that Nietzsche regarded the world as if it were a work of art, open to contending but not mutually exclusive interpretations.
DeleteLeiter is arguing on the contrary that Nietzsche is a naturalist. He believes by understanding the world as matter in motion one understands it rightly, and by trying to give any spiritual construction to it one fails to understands it at all. There is nothing so neutral here as perspectivism suggests. Naturalism is simply right. The above quote is one of the texts Leiter cites for this point.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3008749