The Congenital Defect of All Philosophers

0:01 all philosophers suffer from the same defect and that they start with present day man and think they can arrive at their goal by analyzing him instinctively they let man hover before them as an eternal veritas something unchanging in all turmoil a secure measure of things but everything the philosopher asserts about man is basically no more than a statement about man within a very limited time span a lack of historical sense is the congenital defect of all philosophers some unwittingly even take the most recent form of man as it developed under the imprint of certain religious or even political events as the fixed form from which one must

0:46 proceed they will not understand that man has evolved that the faculty of knowledge has also evolved while some of them even permit themselves to spend the whole world from out of this faculty of knowledge end quote that's from human all to human the first book and it's from section two the section titled the congenital defect of all philosophers which is the title we've taken for this episode nietzsche liked to call out philosophers as a group often writing of the errors of philosophers or the prejudices of philosophers but this coinage here um in what is uh in my opinion this is his most

1:34 it's his first significant full-length book and it's it's my favorite coinage of his for talking about this issue um a congenital defect is a it's another term for a birth defect some kind of disability or malformity which you are settled with from the time that you are born and so you know some people might be born without limbs or born blind you know without the faculty of sight whatever the case may be and so what is the case when it comes to philosophers and dr nietzsche's diagnosis while nietzsche here says that all philosophers are born without a historical sense that is their birth defect just as some children might be born

2:21 blind unable to see philosophers are born so to speak unable to think historically what nietzsche means by thinking historically here is something specific he means historical in an extended sense of the word not really in the sense of the discipline of history which itself is only concerned with you know what is evolutionarily speaking very very recent history nietzsche is concerned with you know a biological or almost like a geological scale that sense of the word history having a historical sense means first and foremost recognizing that all recorded history is

3:07 by its very nature extremely recent history and so he elaborates on this further in the same passage and next paragraph quote everything essential in human development occurred in primeval times long before those 4 000 years with which we are more or less familiar man probably hasn't changed much more in the those years but the philosopher sees instincts in present-day man and assumes they belong to the unchangeable facts of human nature and that they can to that extent provide a key to the understanding of the world in general this entire teleology is predicated on the ability to speak about man of the last four thousand years as if he were eternal the natural direction

3:54 of all things in the world from the beginning but everything has evolved there are no eternal facts nor are there absolute truths thus historical philosophizing is necessary henceforth and the virtue of modesty as well end quote and so notice that in challenging the philosophers and the assumptions that they undertake in doing philosophy nietzsche goes on to attack the very notion of eternal facts the historical sense that philosophers lack is not just a sense that mankind as an animal evolved and is ever evolving but that the world itself for whatever that might mean is also evolving

4:40 this is a vision of an ever dynamic world um you know even though that dynamism may not be apparent to us you know as we we attribute stability to this handful of millennia that's so important all humankind um so this is a heroclitean vision of the world that nietzsche is putting forward a world of becoming there is no eterna veritas which means of course eternal truth and you know certainly humanity in the human condition as we understand it and experience it today is not necessarily revealing of anything about mankind as such or life as such or the world as such and since all philosophers are born with this defect they fail to realize this and so what do philosophers do they take the example of what is near to

5:27 them the example of mankind within their own their own society for example or the example of historical events or great people you know what what man has done within you know nietzsche says past thousands of years but we might even say the past few hundred years or even the past few decades and then they draw these far-reaching conclusions about what people are like philosophers observe what is going on during their particular time in their particular place and from those goings on they draw conclusions nietzsche's uh introduction of the idea of the historical sense would leave a philosopher to recognize that those conclusions are at best provisional they're temporary the observations we can glean about

6:13 mankind today the truth that we can arrive at these are perspectival truths they seem to be absolutely certain from our perspective here and now but are in fact limited by circumstances there's a passage in beyond good and evil that expands on this um so you know thus far we've said the world is an evolving thing but the actual reality that uh we philosophize about is is ever changing but in beyond good and evil aphorism 20 nietzsche says that our philosophies are not autonomously evolving our ideas are not these living things that grow on their own and he says they're not even uh capricious you know as and we don't even

7:00 pull philosophical ideas out of the ether as if by whim rather he writes quote they nevertheless belong just as much to a system as all the members of the fauna of a continent end quote um that's referring to our ideas in other words philosophers keep exploring the same territory he he writes further quote the most diverse philosophers keep filling in a definite fundamental scheme of possible philosophies under an invisible spell they always revolve once more in the same orbit however independent of each other they may feel themselves with their critical or systematic wills something within them leads them something impels them in definite order one after the other

7:46 to wit the innate systematic structure and relationship of their concepts end quote now why would why would that be the case we have this dynamic world with no eternal truths but philosophers with their congenital defect they keep retreading the same territory over and over again why nietzsche points here to the fact that for one we're all children of civilization of this project of civilization that's only been taking place for a couple thousand years but more importantly as he goes on to talk about in the passage he points to language we could probably do a whole episode just on language um and the nietzschean estimation of the importance of language to our thought but the short explanation

8:33 given in this aphorism is that philosophers who philosophize in the same language or even in the same family of languages will often be confronted by the same philosophical problems by the same familiar contradictions and dialectics because the shape of our thought is set by language more or less and so even in indian philosophy we see many of the same familiar patterns in nietzsche's view as we see in the greek or even in german philosophy because indic languages are the the great grandmother language of many of the european tongues including germanic and nietzsche interestingly he speculates that the ural altic languages might offer the possibility of you know a philosopher arising who

9:18 proceeds in quite a different direction because as he says the idea of the subject is least developed in those languages so with less of a foothold for the idea of being nietzsche wonders if maybe you might be able to explore different philosophical territory but again to come back to the point the issue he's pointing at here elucidates the same core criticism of philosophy that we're bounded by the perspective that we inherit so this doesn't just include our set of experiences or our cultural assumptions rather the very way that we think is almost hopelessly faded to produce the same errors or the same prejudices because our linguistic rules which are part and parcel with our cognitive rules um

10:04 they do not present themselves as perspective and arbitrary in fact they're so deeply intuitive that in general we can't even imagine what thinking would be without them and so language is delimiting our cognitive horizons but that very fact of that limitation is not clear to us and so the provisional nature of our thoughts doesn't tend to reveal itself in fact it's the opposite we believe that the way we think is actually a revelation of absolutes an example would be in philosophy the laws of logic so these are um you know i'll just sort of rattle them off the law of identity that's a thing is itself the law of non-contradiction a thing

10:52 cannot be not itself at the same place at the same time and then there's the law of excluded middle a thing cannot be neither itself nor not itself it must be one or the other these laws are generally taken as axiomatic aristotle said specifically of the law of non-contradiction that it was the most certain of all propositions and i would actually argue from that law alone the law of non-contradiction you could actually extrapolate the other two and there have been a lot of philosophers that have gotten quite a bit of mileage out of just seeing what logical conclusions they can draw just strictly from the law of non-contradiction there is no way to argue against these laws of logic within the framework of

11:37 western philosophy and within the english language if you try to argue against the laws of logic you will be by definition being illogical you're you're be making an illogical argument and therefore the argument won't hold water it won't be valid or sound and more importantly it probably won't persuade anyone now consider what i just said is that proof that the laws of logic are unassailable i mean that's what the western intuition says you cannot argue against this without contradicting yourself and therefore it's unassailable it's absolute nietzsche's counterpoint is the fact that you cannot argue against these laws doesn't reveal that the laws themselves

12:23 are absolute but rather that your thinking is relative you think in terms that are relative to these laws as a framework so hopefully i haven't belabored the point too much but i think that's this is all important to cover our philosophy shaped by our perspective purports to reveal these eternal truths but our true truths only seem eternal or absolute because they are self-evident within our given perspective and we can't escape that perspective and that perspective is our time and place our culture and our language now so there's a correlate to this congenital defect of philosophers the lack of historical

13:09 sense which we may say this correlate flows naturally forth from this defect because philosophers lack the historical sense they're prone to a series of pitfalls in their thinking and perhaps the best summary of the general character of these errors is that our reasoning tends to start from a conclusion or from an effect or we might say from the present situation and then move backward to the syllogism to the cause to the thing we imagine must be the justification for the present situation this idea is first drawn out by nietzsche and human all to human section 30 um which is a very important aphorism so i mean i

13:56 kind of take it piece by piece it's called bad habits in making conclusions quote the most common false conclusions of men are these a thing exists therefore it is legitimate here one is concluding functionality from viability and legitimacy from functionality so in quote just to disentangle that idea a thing exists therefore it is legitimate what does that mean oh in the second part you know he says once concluding functionality from viability and legitimacy from functionality

14:41 so viability the mere fact of something existing or persisting leads us to believe that it serves some function which is in nietzsche's view what he's pointing out that's a hidden premise in our thinking the root words here uh or the the the original german uh that uh this is translated from um so he's saying when he says uh we do we we we conclude functionality from viability the term for functionality is zweck masakite and uh viability is leben's fa phi kite so zweig massey kite zvek is a goal

15:28 and uh libens obviously relates to life so something is alive or viable you might say it exists it's a being and therefore it must exist for some purpose and then we derive from this purpose this zweck masakite the idea of a thing's wrecked masikheit or legitimacy what does this mean well wrecked means right or correct um if i saw in one dictionary definition wrecked masakite could mean legality but i think what what were really what the meaning here is rightness or correctness and so what is nietzsche describing so in our thinking we're confronted with um

16:16 we'll use an example we're confronted with a feeling or an intuition or an experience so for example the feeling of guilt or bad conscience we use this um because it relates to a passage we've talked about in previous episodes um that we'll look at again in this one so one experiences guilt and from the fact that the guilt is happening you know there it is i feel it it's real one assumes that the guilt is legitimate that it's correct what do we mean here by legitimate that something's happening for what we might call a good reason that the guilt exists for a purpose and therefore it is valid it has a valid reason for existing what nietzsche is pointing out is that this thinking is based on all these hidden premises

17:02 if something exists it must serve some function and if it serves some function it must be legitimate and so back to the text uh quote furthermore if an opinion makes us glad it must be true if its effect is good it in itself must be good and true here one is attributing to the effect the predicate gladdening good in the sense of the useful and providing the cause with the predicate good but now in the sense of the logically valid the reversal of this proposition is if a thing cannot prevail and maintain itself it must be wrong if an opinion tortures and agitates it must be false the free spirit who comes to know all

17:47 too well the error of this sort of deduction and has to suffer from its consequences often succumbs to the temptation of making contrary deductions which are in general naturally just as false if a thing cannot prevail it must be good if an opinion troubles and disturbs it must be true end quote and so this passage lays the groundwork for a lot of nietzsche's psychological observations about philosophers and you know of course about religion and about society and its moral values he he began to approach ideas and moral systems from the angle of assessing why someone would believe this rather than strictly assessing whether a statement was logically valid or not

18:33 and what he finds is that to put it bluntly and perhaps in maybe an oversimplified way people are going to believe what they want to believe what it feels good to believe and so repeatedly throughout nietzsche's work he assesses a a given philosophical assertion and then quite aside from the question of its validity he uh accuses people of making the assertion because it is pleasurable or gladdening as he puts it and so notice again nietzsche's critique here is concerned with language how we confuse ourselves with what we might call mixed predicates predicates which carry the same linguistic symbol in our language or in our family of languages so good meaning both gladdening and good meaning

19:19 logically valid and nietzsche is careful to point out that just because gladdening and logically valid um actually have no necessary correlation that doesn't mean they have an opposing relationship either in fact he puts this very bluntly towards the end of human all too human this is aphorism 5 17. it's one of my favorite nietzschean sayings i think i may have quoted it before in the episode on truth but here it is anyway quote there is no pre-established harmony between the furthering of truth and the good of mankind end quote so that's nietzsche talking about the reality as he sees it and yet in the passage we've been dissecting bad habits and making conclusions he's

20:04 pointing out that be that as it may our thinking is inclined towards conflating those things truth and goodness because the meaning of terms such as valid or legitimate are double meanings and can always carry the connotation of being either logically valid or morally valid for example now we've just brought these mixed up predicates into the light so to speak so nothing to worry about right well i think you'll find that these bad habits are just that they're habitual habits aren't broken simply by virtue of the fact that you're aware of them are they anyone who's had a strong habit they tried to break should know this just

20:50 because you're aware of your smoking habit doesn't mean you can quit smoking by that token alone just by being aware of it these habitual patterns of thinking are just as pernicious and just as addictive as anything um and so here i think it would be useful to recall um that aphorism i mentioned earlier that we discussed in a past episode i think i've actually brought this up in two past episodes making this now the most brought up aphorism on the podcast but it's a real important one because it touches on the edges of so many core issues for nietzsche that's aphorism 39 of the same book humanol to human where nietzsche is challenging schopenhauer's idea of intelligible freedom schopenhauer admitted along with nietzsche that man's actions weren't free

21:36 not in the sense of a libertarian free will there's no a causal force of the mind acting as a voluntary governor over one's actions but schopenhauer did believe that man had a freedom over his nature so your nature is what dictates your actions you don't have this strictly free will over your actions but you do have some level of volition and shaping your own nature why schopenhauer takes it as evidence for man's freedom that we experience displeasure after doing immoral deeds in other words guilt the phenomenon we discussed earlier so nietzsche and this aphorism in 39 of human ulti human criticizes this idea um and so quote quote this aphorism from the fact of

22:22 man's displeasure schopenhauer thinks he can prove that man somehow must have had a freedom a freedom which did not determine his actions but rather determined his nature freedom that is to be this way or the other not to act this way or the other man becomes that which he wants to be his volition precedes his essence or sorry precedes his existence in this case we are concluding falsely that we can deduce the justification the rational admissibility of this displeasure from the fact that it exists and from this false deduction schopenhauer arrives at his fantastic conclusion of so-called intelligible freedom end quote so again i'm bringing this up again because notice the formula each is employing

23:08 schopenhauer displays bad habits and drawing conclusions a thing exists therefore it is legitimate nietzsche goes on to say that in fact in actuality displeasure um you know or bad conscience or guilt is actually not rational because it rests on errors in thinking it's the false idea that the deed was freely chosen and not something that necessarily had to happen nietzsche thinks that all things do actually necessarily have to happen which means that such a feeling of guilt is totally illegitimate it's invalid actually as in logically it's invalid and so he accuses even his his mentor schopenhauer of having the philosophical birth defect and so this is what

23:54 this is because schopenhauer takes it for granted that the feeling of guilt is legitimate the feeling of displeasure after the deed as he says why does schopenhauer take it for granted well because we all take it for granted within our moral universe which has been fostered by christianity um you know and that's what i mean when i say this is habitual it's not something you just become aware of and decide to stop doing this is in you it's inculcated into all of us and so but importantly this is where the historical sense comes in as nietzsche says this feeling wasn't experienced this displeasure it wasn't experienced by earlier people from different places and times after they did the same deeds i used the example of

24:39 the spartans of ancient greece in a past episode i don't quite remember when but the spartans practiced infanticide as a matter of course they practiced um homosexuality in a form that was more more or less mandatory um and they brutally oppressed the helots whom they enslaved and declared war on every year um they didn't feel guilt about any of this and the way that you know we or various other different societies on earth might have felt guilt about some or all of these things um they lived in a different moral universe than we do but the congenital defect of philosophers is that the perspectival nature of our moral universe is hidden from us and we feel instead that our thoughts and feelings and experiences are these means of understanding

25:24 absolute truths to take this from the the realm of abstract philosophy and into more practical terms i feel you know i should note that in human all to human it's it's full of nietzsche's indictments on the social conventions and institutions of his own society and european society more broadly and there's too much there to cover you know all of it in the episode i mean it's that's the substance of the entire book so it's nietzsche taking this general framework for critiquing ideas and applying it to religion ethics the state the family etc but i i've i've gone ahead and i picked out an aphorism that makes clear how this prejudice works in actual

26:11 practice or how this these errors of thought works in actual practice of taking the predicate good as in gladdening and confusing it with good as in logically valid or true and so this is aphorism 227 which is called reason or unreason deduced from the consequences and uh i'll be quoting from it in an abridged form quote all states and social arrangements class marriage education law acquire strength and permanence solely because of the faith of bound spirits in them they exist then in the absence of reasons christianity which was very innocent in its intellectual ideas demanded faith

26:57 and nothing but faith and passionately rejected the desire for reasons it pointed to the successful result of faith you'll soon discover the advantage of faith it's suggested you'll be blessed because of it the state in fact does the same thing and each father raises his son in the same way just take this to be true he says you'll discover how good it feels but this means that the truth of an opinion should be proved by its personal benefit the usefulness of a teaching should guarantee its intellectual certainty and substantiation this is as if the defendant were to say in court my defender is telling the whole truth for just see what happens as a result of

27:42 his plea i am acquitted end quote i love the example at the end because it shows how logic is being made to work backward in order to justify our cherished beliefs when we when we're able to be detached and consider such an example of backwards logic from a distance you know from an objective view we immediately spot the error but we don't spot it in our own thinking so here we're going to change gears and i'd like to jump into another work this is a well-known section of nietzsche's book twilight of idols called the four great errors now i thought about doing a whole episode just on the four great errors but i decided against it because in many

28:28 ways these four errors are simply a reformulation of many of the things that we've been talking about up to this point in this episode and um they are to some extent a retreading of some of the ground we've already covered on causality and free will and in fact i've actually quoted from the section in the episode on free will but that being said i think re-examining the whole section in the context of the congenital defect of philosophers and their bad habits and drawing conclusions will be very helpful because the four errors are a sort of distillation of about 10 years of nietzsche thinking about this remember congenital defect of philosophers that's something nietzsche writes in 78 and it's

29:14 uh he writes twilight of idols in 88 so this is um this is a refinement of his observations concerning the inherent defects and the way that we philosophize so what are the four errors for great errors they are as follows one the error of confusing cause and effect to the error of false causality three the error of imaginary causes and for the error of free will so notice basically all of these errors concern causality actually not basically they all do even even the last one about free will because free will is inextricably bound up with causality cause and effect so why do all these errors concern

29:59 causality why are these the great errors all of them have to do with causality because when we reason we proceed from cause to effect from premise to deduction from syllogism to the conclusion logic is a governing system over relationships relationships of thought of qualities or values or of ideas so when we misunderstand those relationships such as inverting cause and effect then our logic becomes perverted or it becomes perverse rather so why does this happen nietzsche's general rule for understanding why we commit these errors is to look at what we would prefer to believe what makes us happy to believe and so on and usually then you can

30:46 have a good idea of why our thinking is being motivated in a certain way even though that it's not precisely logically valid even though it's an error in thought and so now i'll read from the first of the great errors the error of confusing cause and effect nietzsche writes quote there is no more dangerous error than that of mistaking the effect for the cause i call it the real corruption of reason end quote what follows in this passage uh nietzsche starts out he he i'll just kind of summarize he he gives a criticism of a health fad that was going on at the time brought on by a book by a man named coronaro nietzsche says that this man's slow metabolism was the cause of his

31:32 long life but the general public believed that his diet was the cause and so coronaro's book you know expounds upon his spares diet and it causes this health fad this excitement that he's unlocked the secret to a long life but nietzsche says in fact the man had a metabolism that led him to eat less and that's why he lived longer so the reason why it's reversed cornaro's diet is a result of his physiology his physiology is not a result of his diet further down in the passage he says quote the most general formula on which every religion and morality is founded is do this and and that refrain from this and that then you will be happy end quote so

32:18 probably sounds familiar he's thinking about many other things he was thinking about when he wrote human all too human um and this is not i just want to say to interject here this is not something nietzsche's pulling out of nowhere this was known as the proof by pleasure among the religious apologists or also known as the proof by strength strength here meaning you know the belief reveals its strength um or it reveals its functionality to us and how it improves our lives how it makes us feel and so again there's the bad habit and drawing conclusions here rather openly stated and admitted by the church that you know you should believe this because it works because it's pleasurable because it seems to have strength or

33:05 functionality so we'll continue here with this passage in the still on the first of the great errors quote the church and morality say a generation a people are destroyed by license and luxury my recovered reason says when a people approaches destruction when it degenerates physiologically then license and luxury follow from this namely the craving for ever stronger and more frequent stimulation as every exhausted nature knows it end quote so again a reversal of cause and effect and you know we might note we see the same argument about licentiousness and decadence employed by

33:50 you know some commentators on the right wing even today they accuse modern society and culture and suggest you know um decadent the decadence of society is weakening weakening us and bringing bringing down our society but nietzsche says you have it backwards it's not that there is decadence and that it therefore wears down a culture rather a culture is wearing down and therefore there is decadence so why do we invert cause and effect well the the key to this as we keep going is because it gives pleasure and this pleasure comes from a feeling of power power comes from that it's a big part of that comes from the feeling of knowledge which is contains in it a feeling of power since knowledge is linked with this

34:37 pleasurable experience of power nietzsche explains this in human all to human aphorism 252 and i will also quote from this in an abridged form quote why is knowledge linked to pleasure first and foremost because by it we gain awareness of our power second because as we gain knowledge we surpass older ideas and their representatives and become victors third because any new knowledge however small makes us feel superior to everyone and unique in understanding this matter correctly end quote and so it's more it's more pleasurable to believe as in the example of coronaro that one's life or health is improved

35:24 because they did the right thing which means knowing the right thing and having the power to do the right thing so we reverse the cause and the effect ordering them in the proper relationship would actually take away the sense of having power in the moral realm or having power in the intellectual realm that i mean they're deeply related because if you know you if you remember those are two premises that are the foundation of civilization know thyself and all things in moderation remember those two maxims of the greeks you know so if if your knowledge and your motivations for your actions are simply a superficial after effect of processes which are unconscious that takes away the feeling of power

36:09 it generally does not gladden the heart to think so and so we don't so the next error the error of false causality as i mentioned earlier we read from this passage before when talking about free will which heavily relates to a lot of what nietzsche is talking about here to summarize this particular era error nietzsche criticizes the belief in the ego or in the consciousness as this unchanged immutable fact says that the inner world is quote full of phantoms and willow the wisps the will is one of them and it's merely a surfaced phenomenon of consciousness

36:54 he brings up the ego knowing the knowing in the acting subject because it's it's precisely this ego to which we attribute this false causality so building on nietzsche's insights in the analysis of the first error we start from the existence of something a thing exists therefore it's legitimate so we have this experience of having a will and we reason backwards from that experience from the effect to the cause you know and in this case from our actions to these this idea of these freely chosen motivations um and that ends up coagulating over over time into this idea of the ego through our habit so

37:39 we're starting from a conclusion reasoning to the premises and we we create the ego as this thing with substance nietzsche writes in this section that mankind quote took the concept of being from the concept of the ego he posited things as being in his image according in accordance with his concept of the ego as a cause end quote and further down in the passage he says even your adam my dear mechanists and physicists how much error how much rudimentary psychology still residual in your atom not to mention the thing in itself the error of the spirit as cause mistaken for reality end quote

38:26 again uh i feel i should bring this up whenever nietzsche criticizes atomism he's not talking about atoms as we understand it today but the idea of the atom in the sense that democritus wrote about the atom as the smallest possible unit of matter as the sort of explanation for matter the sort of the justification for what matter is um you know it's like you go smaller smaller smaller until you get the smallest possible unit the atom and nietzsche is saying that there is still um there's error and rudimentary psychology residual in that idea so the second great error the error of false causality it's the error of reifying a cause

39:12 to reify it's to make something into a thing so causality if we were to accept it as an explanation would be this vast interlinking chain that stretches back into infinity it ultimately results in the requirement that we either believe in a self-caused cause or an infinite regress um which both of those have their logical problems that's the same problem with atomism by the way it's it's atoms all the way down um so eventually you know you just say you get to like there's bedrock of reality bedrock of matter there just is this thing that's the smallest unit of matter or you can keep going see and that's the thing that's kind of where we are now in physics it seems like we can always find smaller and smaller

39:58 particles or subatomic particles um unless you're a string theorist or something like that um anyway to back on back on topic in in the world of becoming right this this heraclitaean world view of nietzsche um that's what nietzsche believes in as opposed to or rather than a world of being in this world of becoming causality doesn't make any sense you know nietzsche believes it's owing to the tricks of language that we have to attribute or invest being into the concept of a cause and so we therefore make things which are phantoms or willow the wisps as he puts it into things with substance so that we can have a cause as a thing and that is the ego

40:44 so the next error is the error of imaginary causes and nietzsche gives the example here of dreams another parallel with human ulti human dreams are are given as an example of our bad habits and drawing conclusions all the way back into in that book in um part one of human ulti human in that book he uses the example of the tolling of a bell here in this passage in twilight of idols he uses the example of a canon shot nietzsche writes that in a dream quote a cause is slipped under a particular sensation for example following a far-off cannon shot often a whole little novel in which the dreamer turns up as protagonist what is really later the motivation is experienced first

41:30 often with a hundred details which pass like lightning and the shot follows what has happened the representations which were produced by a certain state have been misunderstood as its causes end quote so hopefully you can see as we've gone through this how each of these errors that nietzsche is discussing builds one upon the other and all are related as fallacious habits of our thought it's like seeing different angles but it's all the same structure the representation the the image or the concept we have of this experience or the feeling that's what becomes most real to us but this is what this is what should be properly called an effect but we make it

42:16 a cause again the reversal of cause and effect the specific element that nietzsche is pointing out here and error number three is that when an effect is produced and we don't even know the cause we will still just go ahead and invent one the mind will fill that void and produce a cause so he continues quote in fact we do the same thing when awake most of our general feelings every kind of inhibition pressure tension and explosion in the play and counter play of our organs and particularly the state of the nervous sympathicus excite our causal instinct we want to have a reason for feeling this way or that for feeling bad or feeling good end quote

43:03 so notice he says instinct that means there's a use for these errors a use which evolved rather than seeing cause and effect as obvious and universal like those eternal truths we talked about earlier nietzsche not only challenges this framework as being logically perilous but then he focuses on why we would have developed this mode of thought and so before moving on to error number four nietzsche then gives a psychological explanation for this process up to this point and he says quote with the unknown one is confronted with danger discomfort and care the first instinct is to abolish these

43:48 painful states first principle any explanation is better than none since at bottom it is merely a matter of wishing to be rid of oppressive representations one is not too particular about the means of getting rid of them the first representation that explains the unknown as familiar feels so good that one considers it true the proof of pleasure of strength as a criterion of truth end quote so again we have the reference to the proof by pleasure or the proof of pleasure and uh this is also related to the passage we cited earlier but the pleasure of gaining knowledge and the sense of power that comes with gaining knowledge and nietzsche concludes that the whole realm of morality and religion belongs

44:35 to this domain of imaginary causes he then quotes from schopenhauer and this is related to the criticism he made of schopenhauer in human ultra-human about the feeling of guilt to the justification for free will the quotation from schopenhauer he selects here and twilight of idols he he quotes from schopenhauer in world as will and representation book two aphorism number 666 that's kind of funny um and that's pretty metal if you need to pick that one to quote from uh it gives context as to why schopenhauer thought the way he did about guilt quote every great pain whether physical or spiritual declares what we deserve

45:22 for it could not come to use if we did not deserve it end quote so chopin here schopenhauer um he states here what the average person tends to believe even if they don't say it in such explicit terms all bad feelings are produced by sin or they're deserved in some sense according to you know conventional wisdom or to in niches time religious wisdom the explanation of agreeable feelings meanwhile comes from trust in god or from faith or you know the um the consciousness of one's good deeds the good conscience one might have and so nietzsche goes on to write quote in truth all these supposed explanations are resultant states and as it were

46:10 translations of pleasurable or unpleasurable feelings into a false dialect end quote and so we might say that the church's doctrine of proof by pleasure is actually a rather honest uh form of error wouldn't wouldn't we say it's awareness that our beliefs are simply translations of what makes us happy or you know serves our interests or boosts our self-image what comports with the demands of society or with our own irrational moral demands our beliefs are translations of these things into ideological terms so the final error is of course the error of free will which we've already

46:56 covered extensively and which is related to the criticism of schopenhauer above uh that we already went over so i'm not going to focus so much on the arguments for against free will here but rather on nietzsche's psychoanalysis of why people believe in free will which you should have some inkling of um based on everything we've talked about but what feeling what what is the feeling that is being translated into the free will ideology what is that gladdening feeling sitting at the bottom of the free will doctrine that we then transform into an explanation into this philosophical idea and so nietzsche writes quote wherever responsibilities are sought it is usually the instinct of wanting to

47:42 judge and punish which is at work becoming has been deprived of its innocence when any being such and such is traced back to will to purposes to acts of responsibility the doctrine of the will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment that is because one one wanted to impute guilt men were considered free so that they might be judged and punished so that they might become guilty consequently every act had to be considered as willed the origin of every act had to be considered as lying within consciousness end quote and so

48:27 um and i i quoted from that error also in an abridged form i kind of skipped across a big section there in the middle but the message the thrust of that's perfectly plain in my opinion men are considered free so that they can be made guilty it's very clear in the history of christian thought and this same tendency eventually became secularized and made its way into enlightenment that as well and we can definitely see it at work today among people who are not religious at all the free will of man and the story of christianity is more or less a means of making mankind responsible and thus deserving of punishment and so the point of the free will doctrine which rests on all these errors of thinking actually makes perfect sense when we instead look to why someone would want

49:13 to believe in this doctrine and we realize that it's pleasurable to be able to make people responsible to hold people accountable to make them guilty to blame them and so on this satisfies our will to power or rather it's it's one means among many that men use to secretly serve will to power by all these little bypass so there's only one final passage that i want to cover in this episode um but it's it's gonna require that we get into the weeds a bit here so if you've been if you've been with me uh up to this point hopefully you're ready for this um because we're gonna go into overdrive here philosophically a little bit and

49:59 hopefully you've been listening to the podcast from the beginning you've built up all your background and a lot of things we've been talking about but this i wanted to look at basically what i would consider to be an application of all that we've learned about nietzsche's analysis of bad thinking um you know whereas a lot of the other passages we've gone over the application of the idea is actually rather self-explanatory right it's just nietzsche saying well people believe in x y or z because it makes them feel good or something that effect but here nietzsche takes on um perhaps the most influential philosopher in germany and maybe even all of europe up to that point in history and he shows how one of his most

50:44 influential ideas was itself just another example of erroneous thinking brought on by this congenital defect of philosophers and again since we've gone over so much now since talking about the original birth defect remember that defect is the lack of historical sense failure to recognize that humanity and indeed all life is a product of evolution again using evolution in a broad extended sense and all all life in the world is still evolving where it's in a constant dynamic state even saying it's in a dynamic state you can see how he fall into the victim of tricks of language as nietzsche would say the the lack of the historical sense again to recap

51:32 leads to this belief in eternal truths where man is a fixed quantity and then the philosopher then inevitably invests mankind you know as this fixed quantity with the traits and qualities that he perceives in mankind in his own time and place the ideas of mankind the beliefs of mankind within the philosopher's own culture are seen as innate um so what nietzsche discusses in the following passage i'm going to bring up is the idea of synthetic judgments a priori and um so you may have figured out who we're going to be talking about we're going to be talking about immanuel kant now if you aren't familiar with kant

52:17 which i'm just going to assume i'm good i always try you've probably figured it out by now in this podcast but i always try to make it so that if you come in completely cold hopefully you will still have a workable knowledge that all this will be comprehensible there's no pre-reading you have to do to listen to this podcast although it certainly probably helps i would imagine but um we're going to talk a bit about khan's philosophy before we get to the passage i mentioned because his ideas bear some explaining so we have to understand two different distinctions that kant made between types of judgment in order to really understand the basics of kant's philosophy the first is between analytic judgments and synthetic

53:04 judgments analytic judgments can be derived simply through an extrapolation of the meaning of a word or concept analytic judgments are judgments about a thing which add no additional information external to the meaning of the words already used or the concepts already used so this will become clear with an example so all all bachelors are unmarried that's an analytic statement or an analytic judgment because the concept of a bachelor contains the idea of being unmarried we haven't added anything to the concept of the bachelor by saying they're all unmarried the statement is true by definition as it were a synthetic judgment on the other hand

53:49 is a statement in which the predicate is distinct from the subject where the judgment requires that we we bring together the original concept with some external information in order to glean new knowledge so a synthetic judgment might be uh keegan the host of the nietzsche podcast is married so it's not contained in the definition of you know what i am that i must be married in order for the concept of keegan to exist there was a time in fact when i wasn't married so we take the subject keegan me and this synthetic judgment or synthetic statement i've just made provides new information by introducing or modifying that it introduces the the external information of my marital status right

54:37 now analytic versus synthetic judgments that's not the only kind of distinction kant made he also differentiated between a priori and a posteriori judgments and in my opinion the quickest way to get this across is that these roughly correlate with like the traditional divide between the rationalist and empiricist types of epistemology so a priori judgments are those judgments which are made solely by logical deduction whereas a posterior judgments are those which require some information about the external world so sense data or just information you would glean through experience right okay so why have we gone to these

55:23 lengths to describe these types of distinctions between different types of human reasoning well kant's assessment of the empiricist rationalist divide and philosophy that had been going on for hundreds of years at that point is that in so many words the confusion between these two camps is because of the fact that no one had before took made both of these distinctions and then took that through to its logical conclusions so what does that mean to simplify things for the sake of clarity kant would basically say the empiricists were making synthetic a posteriori judgments that means judgments about the external world based on experience

56:08 where new information is added by you know adding uh combining a subject in predicate new information that's not contained in the meaning of the concepts that we already know and understand so these are the facts on the ground so to speak this is a this is a type of knowledge we all understand it's scientific knowledge right empiricism and then the rationalists they're making analytic a priori judgments that's where we take a word or a concept and we try to determine what we mean by that concept what's implied by the meaning of the concept we apply the laws of logic such as the law of non-contradiction to the concept to determine like all of the implications and so this is philosophy done solely within the domain of logic proceeding from

56:53 the logical necessities created by accepting certain definitions and that's should be very familiar to us too because that's what you have to do every time you have a philosophical debate right is agreed to definitions and then you see what logically follows from accepting a series of definitions and concepts so but now what if we start swapping around these categories a bit what could we have analytic a posteriori judgments now kant says those types of judgments don't occur because what would that mean to make a judgment that is both analytic and a posteriori it would mean that we would be appealing to experience or sense data in order to prove like a logical deduction which is entirely contained within the meaning of the concept

57:39 like and so that doesn't make sense you don't need any like sense and any empirical data to prove that all bachelors are married because the concept of a bachelor is defined as an unmarried man and that's note note here that that's completely separate from the issue of whether there actually are any unmarried men or like any claims about the external world you know another example might be two halves always create a whole right the definition of the term half necessarily leads to the conclusion that two halves create a whole it's contained in the meaning of the term half and no amount of sense data could ever change that right if we find two halves that don't create a whole that just means that those quote unquote halves didn't actually fit the definition of a half

58:25 it did nothing will disprove that two halves make a whole and so analytic a posteriori judgments those don't seem to be able to those aren't really possible right so analytically posterior judgments are out but what about the fourth option synthetic judgments a priori this means judgments that are not merely contained within the definition of a term so judgments that actually yield some meaning external to the starting concept that we're trying to learn about judgments which expand our knowledge about the world but which are derived not from sense experience but from logical deduction could such a thing be possible and kant says

59:11 yes and he says that this is the domain of mathematics and geometry and of metaphysics even so synthetic judgments say priori yield new information that is necessarily true but which is not contained within the concept itself so the the interior angles of a triangle add up to a straight line that fact is not contained within the concept of a triangle but it's not within the mere definition and yet it's not proved by experience either we can we can deduce such a thing through mathematics alone and thus kant's sort of triumph and philosophy is in his claim that yes synthetic judgments a

59:56 priori do exist and that when we consider the domain of mathematics for example everyone will be at for be forced to admit that they do but there's a sort of a complication of this because the question naturally arises as to how such a thing could be possible kant has demonstrated that it can be done with mathematics but the question is how we can give an explanation as to how we can make synthetic a posteriori judgments which is to say you know empirical judgments based on experience we take since sense data and we draw these conclusions we we have experiences through our sense organs for example and then we draw conclusions from that by experience but as hume argued and

1:00:42 kant agreed with hume no empirical judgment we make can ever really be known to be universal we right we can make no claims of universality or necessity just based on observing the external world why well because the fact that you've observed something one time or even a thousand times or a million times doesn't mean you might get a different result the next time this is often referred to as the problem of induction meanwhile on the other hand analytic judgments must be done a priori as we've already discussed and because they're necessarily true in kant's view they cannot depend on sensory data they have to be done through deduction and these types of

1:01:27 judgments don't touch what the actual world quote unquote of course it gets a little complicated because of the the world in itself versus mere appearance but we're going to leave that aside for right now so how can we learn things that are necessarily true and universally true without depending on sense data but you know since data which can't get us to universality and without depending on arguing strictly through inference based on definition which cannot actually impart new information again to oversimplify a bit but to try and get the essence the core thrust kant's argument boils down to the fact that synthetic a priori judgments must

1:02:13 be possible in order for us to make the judgments that we do about mathematics or about metaphysics he's pointing to the fact that we do make these judgments we agree therefore implicitly with the basis of these judgments whatever they may be and furthermore argues we make these judgments correctly the proof is in the pudding so to speak the judgments work and so finally we must conclude that synthetic a priori judgments must be possible by means of some faculty of human reasoning that allows us to make these judgments so have you noticed anything yet viability functionality

1:02:59 legitimacy so finally we come to nietzsche this passage is uh in beyond good and evil book one aphorism eleven where nietzsche writes that kant was quote proud of having discovered a new faculty and man the faculty for synthetic judgment say priori end quote and further down in the passage he writes quote but let us reflect it is high time to do so how are synthetic judgments a priori possible kant asked himself and what really is his answer by virtue of a faculty but so circumstantially venerably and with such a display of german profundity and curlicues that people simply failed to note the comical

1:03:46 nesori al-amand involved in such an answer end quote so what is the answer by virtue of a faculty the original german here is vermoga inis vimogans to bring out the the silliness here that nietzsche is pointing to we might say by virtue of some virtue or by means of a means as a kaufman notes in the footnote to the passage and the term nazare alemand is french you could translate it as german foolishness you know through his rigor in his his overt seriousness and the graveness of his self-appointed task kant hides the fact that his conclusion for all its brilliance

1:04:32 rests on the same bad habits so continuing with the passage once again in an abridged form quote people were actually beside themselves with the light over this new faculty and the jubilation reached its climax when kant further discovered a moral faculty and man the honeymoon of german philosophy arrived all the young theologians of tubingen seminary went into the bushes all looking for faculties no one could yet distinguish between finding and inventing end quote and another quick note here finding and inventing the words are finding an erfunden so there's a pun in there that doesn't quite come off in english but

1:05:19 you know they're unable to distinguish between discovering something in the sense of an invention or discovering something in the sense of an observation and nietzsche is suggesting maybe it was really an invention back to the passage quote by virtue of a faculty he has said or at least meant but is that an answer an explanation or is it not rather merely a repetition of the question how does opium induce sleep by virtue of a faculty namely the virtues dormativa replies the doctor in moliere quia es de neo vertus dormativa

1:06:07 end quote and that's nietzsche just to explain again quoting from a play moliere a comedy and the doctors asked how does opium induce sleep and the translation of the doctor's answer is because it contains a sleepy faculty whose nature it is to put the senses to sleep so it's you can see how he's saying it's merely a repetition of the question uh returning now to the passage again quote but such replies belong in comedy and it is high time to replace the kantian question how are synthetic judgments a priori possible by another question

1:06:52 why is belief in such judgments necessary and to comprehend that such judgments must be believed to be true for the sake of preservation of creatures just like ourselves though they might of course be false judgments for all that or to speak more clearly synthetic judgments a priori should not be possible at all we have no right to them in our mouths they are nothing but false judgments only of course the belief in their truth is necessary as a foreground belief and visual evidence belonging to the perspective optics of life end quote so nietzsche's answer to all this

1:07:38 is that the fact that we determine that we need such judgments in order to do mathematics for instance it's not proof of anything it's the same old error of thought of thinking in reverse starting from the conclusion starting from our demands upon the world whether they be moral or metaphysical or religious and then reasoning from that to the conclusion and as nietzsche points out kant discovers not only this faculty for synthetic judgments a priori but also a moral faculty in mankind and what is the result it's the honeymoon of german philosophy so another way of saying this in a much more pithy analysis of kant uh by nietzsche is in the gay science aphorism 193 and it's called kant's joke

1:08:27 quote kant wanted to prove in a way that would dumbfound the whole world that the whole world was right that was the secret joke of the soul he wrote against the scholars in favor of popular prejudice but for scholars and not for the people and quote so i think we see here the congenital defect of philosophers as nietzsche saw it in kant though he he spun out the densest most byzantine most abstruse philosophical texts kant's ultimate aim was the validation of the moral and metaphysical prejudices of common people of christian europe and specifically of germany he was rescuing the metaphysical and the

1:09:12 moral world from the effects of secularism that threatened to render everything relative and questionable and so whereas other philosophers would not tend to see a sort of psychological need in kant's theorizing because it's some of the most unemotional you know cold detached logical stuff you'll ever read nietzsche argues that it's plain as day once you get down to the heart of the matter and recognize that what sits at the center of khan's philos philosophy is a demand it's a need these types of judgments might be valid or they may not be that wouldn't change how necessary they are to beings like ourselves and they might even be false judgments for all that as nietzsche writes

1:09:58 but they would still be just as necessary if they're false and so we can see here the way that nietzsche goes about criticizing other philosophers in full effect notice he doesn't tear down kant doesn't like critique every last point of kant's philosophy he goes straight to the heart he takes a psychological approach and in this respect nietzsche is ironically more devoted to a strict epistemology than kant and arguably more skeptical than hume because he's willing even to indict his own deeply held beliefs and admit they may not be true it's simply that we need them and so the question naturally arises is nietzsche's subject to the condem

1:10:45 congenital defect of philosophers can these criticisms be applied to nietzsche himself does nietzsche reason backwards at times from his own irrational demands does nietzsche choose to believe what gladdens his heart or make judgments about mankind which are indelibly linked to his own time and place the answer to those questions in my view i think is fairly obvious no one escapes and nietzsche doesn't even suggest that he could escape he's simply aware of his own congenital defect and yet you know like what a pandora's box that opens because it leads us to ask what kind of effect would it have on one's philosophy to be aware of how

1:11:31 perspectival the entire project is if everything's provisional a means to an end a demand for beings such as ourselves as he says can we trust somebody who thinks like that can we trust nietzsche um these are all wonderful and terrifying questions to ask and they're questions that nietzsche almost beckons us to ask and they cannot be answered here because the thrust of nietzsche's project is not to instill in his readers an absolute trust in himself as a philosopher but a healthy distrust and not just in nietzsche but in the entire lot of philosophers