For Nietzsche, the Political is
the continuation of civil war by other [symbolic, metaphoric, false,
conventional] means. This “dissimulation” is simply a ruse to enforce a certain
“polite” life-style that serves to protect the persona of the individual in a
society that needs to keep at bay the state of nature. This “convention” is
simply a means of self-preservation and self-protection – a “device” (cf.
Heidegger’s Zustand and Gestell, or even Foucault’s dispositif) that seeks to elevate mere
“conventions” and symbols, such as language and science, to the status of
“truth”. Truth therefore is not just a perspective but it is also a convention
that humans elevate to “the measure of all things” in an attempt to make the
world “familiar”, “manageable” and “safe” – to male it certain. This truth-as-certainty
is an instance of that Christian-bourgeois quest for Sekuritat that makes liberal democratic regimes constitutionally resistant to political
change (cf. Arendt’s penetrating insights on this topic in On Revolution, discussed in Part 4 of
our Weberbuch).
The question of why human
beings come to place their faith in “science and progress” is one that Nietzsche
will explore meticulously later with the concept of the “self-dissolution” of
Christian-bourgeois society as the culmination of the ontogeny of thought. For the moment, in 1873, he can merely
describe the difficulty in frustrated “constructivist” terms, thinking that
“iteration”, sheer “long use and now-unconscious custom”, mere “persistence”,
can serve as an explanation of the mathesis. For the moment his analysis is
confined to a mere “phenomenology and perspectivism”. Nietzsche makes his
exasperation at his own inability to isolate the relevant causes evident in a
string of oft-quoted passages:
Still we do not yet know whence the instinct of truth
[Trieb der Wahrheit] comes…
(p180)
Wir wissen immer noch
nicht, woher der Trieb zur Wahrheit stammt:
…only by all
this does he [man] live with some repose, safety and
consequence [Ruhe, Sicherheit und Konsequenz:…]. (p.184)
If he were able
to get out of the prison
walls of this
faith, even for an instant only, his "self-consciousness"
would be
destroyed at once. Already
it costs him
some trouble to admit to himself
that the
insect and the
bird perceive a world different from his
own,…(p184)
Surely every
human being who is at home with
such
contemplations has felt a deep distrust against
any idealism of
that kind, as often as he has distinctly
convinced
himself of the eternal rigidity,
omnipresence, and infallibility
of nature's laws
[Naturgesetzen]: he has arrived at the conclusion
that as far as we can penetrate the heights of the telescopic and the depths of
the microscopic world, everything is
quite secure[!], complete, infinite, determined, and continuous.
Science will have to dig in these shafts eternally
and successfully and all things found are sure to
have to
harmonise and not to contradict one another. (p186)
And as the man
of action binds his life to reason and its
concepts, in
order to avoid being swept away and losing
himself, so the seeker after truth builds his
hut close
to the towering
edifice of science in order to collaborate with it and
to find
protection. And he needs protection. (Beginning
of Part 2)
Clearly at this early stage,
Nietzsche’s thought is still confined to the “velleitary and arbitrary”,
metaphorical and anthropomorphic assessment of signification and ultimately of physical
mathematics, of mathesis. He fails to
identify, except for his insistence on “persistence” and “crystallization and
sclerosis”, the problem of why science
and logic as specific practices have
come about, of why they have “triumphed”. And above all he fails to explain how they could have done so, - again,
outside of sheer habit, repetition and therefore con-vention (“persistency” [Verharren] and “crystallisation and
sclerosis” [Hart- und Starr-werden])!
Nietzsche is mixing up the arbitrariness of signifiers (semeiotics) with the
problem of scientific causation – which
is in practice only regularity and predictability. He still fails to see that it
is not the “predictability” that is a “convention”, but rather the “direction
of scientific and technological practice” that responds to “antagonistic
values” being presented as “objectivity” or “necessity” or “causality” when in
reality it occurs in “conventional experimental circumstances” which supply the
problematic, all-important “nexus”. All that can be established then - not
“proven” or “explained” but merely “described” - are the “regularities” that
can be given numerical expression in space and time and be exploited instrumentally by humans. Consequently,
these “regularities” are mere “conventions”, anthropomorphic metaphors or
metonymies.
The very
relation of a nerve-stimulus to the produced
percept is in
itself no necessary one; but if the same
percept has been
reproduced millions of times and has
been the
inheritance of many successive generations of
man, and in the
end appears each time to all mankind
as the result of
the same cause, then it attains finally
for man the same
importance as if it were the unique,
necessary
percept and as if that relation between
the original
nerve-stimulus and the percept produced
were a close
relation of causality: just as
a dream
eternally repeated, would be perceived and
judged as though
real. But the congelation and
coagulation of a metaphor
does not at all guarantee
the necessity and exclusive justification
of that metaphor. (p185)
Selbst das Verhältnis eines Nervenreizes zu dem
hervorgebrachten Bilde ist an sich kein notwendiges: wenn aber dasselbe Bild
millionenmal hervorgebracht und durch viele Menschengeschlechter hindurch
vererbt ist, ja zuletzt bei der gesamten Menschheit jedesmal infolge desselben
Anlasses erscheint, so bekommt es endlich für den Menschen dieselbe Bedeutung,
als ob es das einzig notwendige Bild sei und als ob jenes Verhältnis des
ursprünglichen Nervenreizes zu dem hergebrachten Bilde ein strenges
Kausalitätsverhältnis sei: wie ein Traum, ewig wiederholt, durchaus als
Wirklichkeit empfunden und beurteilt werden würde. Aber das Hart- und Starr-Werden
einer Metapher verbürgt durchaus nichts für die Notwendigkeit und ausschließliche Berechtigung dieser Metapher.
Nietzsche is already searching
for the genealogy of morals and
understands early that the Apollonian/Dionysian opposition between intellect
and intuition, reason and ec-stasis, is a way for “Christian-bourgeois society”
to impose an artificial style of behaviour and life on its members by enforcing
the “superiority” of the intellect over the instincts. Nietzsche comes to see
“consciousness” or intellect as a “mask”, as a ruse, as the beginning of that
“ontogeny of thought” that will shape the “transition” from the neutral state
of the state of nature to the conventional “values” of liberal Christian-bourgeois
society – “the cemetery of intuitions”, the “disgregation of the instincts” -
and its “apparent”, “idealistic” or utilitarian reconciliation of the system of
needs. Ultimately, it is this semiotic “structure of ideas” that permits the social synthesis, the reproduction
of human society, but one that pretends to homologate scientifically the
organization of production with the liberal constitutional order – the
Political with the Economic sanctioned with the seal of “scientific truth” in
the homonymous “science of Political Economy”.
The effectuality of this homologation of disparate and heterogeneous
realities, the “possibility” of the reproduction of liberal Christian-bourgeois
civil society is what seems to confirm and validate
the scientific calculation, regularity
and predictability of the symbolic exchange, of the “Truth” and the
“values” of Christian-bourgeois society – what Nietzsche calls “the eternal rigidity, omnipresence, and
infallibility of nature's laws [Naturgesetzen]”, where “everything is quite secure, complete, infinite, determined, and
continuous” – that is, the inter-subjectivity of its
symbolic interaction - all of which boils down to the “Value” of Political
Economy, the quidditas or “whatness”,
the quantifiable and calculable hard reality that makes possible the social synthesis. (As we shall soon
see, this dual aspect of “what makes society possible” and of “what is possible
for society” is what constitutes the central quest of the great social
theoreticians from Hegel to Marx and Weber. Nietzsche evades this question
altogether, first, because he sees human beings in purely ontogenetic instead
of phylogenetic terms, and second because the “negative thinking” of which he
is the highest expression obliterates the entire meaning of human “potential”
or “fulfillment” which it consigns to the empyrean of “teleology”.
The problem with
Nietzsche's "true phenomenology and perspectivism" is precisely that
the “regularities and predictions” of scientific mathesis are often so strong
that they go beyond the mere notion of “convention” and
"habituation"; that they may be “arbitrary” in their designation but
“necessary”, not in a physical sense but in a socio-political one in that they
lie outside the will of some humans, in their “regularity and predictability”.
Nietzsche is simply not dealing with the fact that it is not our “designation”
of each separate “leaf” with the symbol “leaf” that is the problem: the problem
is that this designation is effectual in the prediction of what a “leaf”
will do in different "experimental" situations created by human
beings that belong to an antagonistic society. And this is what constitutes a
“political practice”! So Nietzsche simply does not confront yet this “political
practice” as inter-subjectively valid science! Although he clearly perceives the problem of what constitutes
this validity, of this effectuality, whereby “truth” and
“science” may be “un-masked” and de-mystified, he simply is unable yet to go
beyond a rudimentary “conventional” explanation of scientific practice as more
than “persistence” or "habituation" and “self-deception” that have
sunk to the level of “necessity” and “instinct”. The question we need to answer
next is whether despite these early failures we can find already in Uber Wahrheit the seeds for a more
thorough-going critique of social and scientific reality in Nietzsche that can
lead us to lay new foundations for the critique of the Christian-bourgeois
society of capital.
We may thoroughly appreciate
now from our foregoing discussion the validity and correctness of Cacciari’s
judgement on the “inexistence of an aesthetics in Nietzsche” separable from and
subordinate to philosophical reasoning.
1. Es
conocida la afirmación de Nietzsche en El
origen de la tragedia por la cual el arte aparece como la verdadera actividad
metafísica del hombre. Aun en el Ensayo de una autocrítica de 1886 él recalca
que aquella juvenile metafísica de artista contenía ya lo esencial de su
pensamiento sucesivo. Es lícito, por lo tanto, considerar en términos
sustancialmente unitarios la concepción nietzscheana del arte. Nietzsche no está interesado en la
elaboración de una estética como un dominio filosófico especial; el arte es
para él problema filosófico-metafísico: en la actividad artística está en juego
una apertura al ser, una iluminación metafísica sobre el sentido del ente.
Producción
artística e interpretación del producto artístico son ambos problemas
filosóficos. No existe autonomía del
arte respecto a lo filosófico, así como no existe autonomía de lo filosófico
respecto al arte. Arte y filosofía sepresentan perennemente unidas en aquella
deconstrucción de la tradición metafísica europea que constituye el objetivo de
la total crítica nietzscheana. (‘El Arte in N.’)
We could not agree more with
Cacciari’s position. As we have shown, art is prior to philosophy for Nietzsche
just as intuition and perception are prior to reflection in terms of his
“onto-geny of thought” in which, once more, memory or re-collection or
re-flection plays a crucial role in the “construction of concepts” out of
“crystallised metaphors”. Once again, however, the metaphysical status of art
in Nietzsche’s conception of it as “the construction of metaphors by an
artistically creative subject” and as “the genius of falsity” is open to
objection on the grounds that (a) meta-phors re-fer (bring back) invariably to
a substratum “beyond which they bring” (meta pherein, to bring over), and (b) it is impossible to separate
(here is another chorismos) – as
Nietzsche himself maintains! - meta-phors from the act of perception itself and
indeed from “concepts” – and therefore it cannot be accurate to describe human
perception and intuition as “the construction of metaphors” and “appearances”!
Cacciari sharply points out
Nietzsche’s ambiguity on the first count: - that if “art is the genius of
falsehood”, then it follows that Nietzsche still posits a “Truth”, a “Fundamentum”, in relation to which art is
“falsehood”!
8 Nietzsche afirma que el arte constituye el
"genio de la mentira". Se trata de un ejemplo evidente de "platonismo invertido", en que
Nietzsche se obstina en separar de una manera demasiado abstracta "razón
clásica" y modernidad. (Cacciari, ‘El Hacer del Canto’)
Quite right! If indeed “art is
the genius of falsity”, this can occur if and only if there is some “thing”
that art can properly “falsify”, some “re-ality” in relation to which art can
actually lie. But this is precisely the starting point of Plato’s vehement
condemnation of art and its dissoi logoi
(“double talk”) and doxa (opinion,
chatter) as against philosophy’s logico-discursive dialectic reasoning (dianoia) leading to episteme (knowledge, science)! In complete contrast, what Nietzsche
meant by this expression was precisely that art is the genius of falsity in
opposition to or transgression against “the cemetery of intuitions” constituted
by that oppressive “structure of concepts” represented by “logic and science” –
by the two activities that pretend to represent “the truth” when in fact they
are “distancing” human beings from the greatest “truth” of all – and that is
that all human perception and reasoning is “based on the construction of
artistic or aesthetic metaphors”! Nietzsche’s expression is ironic to some
extent; and yet its literal “inverted Platonism” points once more to his early
confusion with regard to a “reality” that art “genially falsifies” by creating
“contra-dictory appearances”.
And Cacciari is right also on
the second count because “the construction of metaphors” – that is, art – is
inseparable from the construction of concepts – philosophy.
Pero esta afinidad es revelable por diferencia. La consideración del
hecho artístico es llevada a cabo filosóficamente, no porque el arte sea
representación o se limite a imaginar las ideas filosóficas. El arte es problema filosófico en tanto su
estructura es problema para la filosofía; su presencia, la presencia de su
palabra choca con la dimensión conceptual del trabajo filosófico. Arte y
filosofía se unen polarmente, por oposición. De una vez Nietzsche supera, por esta vía, toda estética decadentista de la
autonomía pura del hecho artístico, así como todo contenido ideológico. Arte y filosofía están indisolublemente
conectados en tanto problema el uno con la otra. Aún más: el arte es siempre
presencia amenazante-inquietante para la pura filosofía.
Because philosophy itself
cannot be com-prehended by its own logos
and must remain therefore an artistic activity, and because artistic activity
is prior to philosophical re-flection or contemplation in that it is
in-comprehensible to the philosophical logos,
it follows that artistic activity reaffirms the primacy of in-vention over
re-flection – which poses an insuperable metaphysical problem for philosophy –
again, not in the sense that art is a
problem for philosophy to consider,
one among many, but rather in the sense that art is the problem of
philosophy, a problem that is ante-cedent to, that pre-cedes philosophical
reflection! As Cacciari genially puts it, “art is a philosophical problem in
that its structure [its nature as activity] is problematic for
philosophy”. This cannot be said even of theology, as Werner Jaeger has shown
with his concept of “natural theology” (in The
Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers), in that the divine is not prior to metaphysics as an activity but forms
only one of its problems or aspects.
This is precisely why art poses
“a menacing and disquieting presence for
pure philosophy” – because of its precedence over philosophy as an activity, as initium. Art shows
the “activist” reality of philosophy – its practical
initium, the fact that even conceptually its “doing”, its being a “beginning”,
is prior to and cannot be com-prehended (grasped
and explained totally) by pure
thought or reflection given that thought is itself an activity, namely, “thinking
about thinking”, where the second
“thinking” stands for the meta-phorical activity of art upon which philosophy is both a “re-flection” and ultimately an artistic activity in itself! Of course, artistic
activity is in-conceivable without thought itself – as Nietzsche reminded us
earlier, without the pro-duction of meta-phors inseparable from the act of
intuition and perception as appearance.
Yet, if it is not pre-conceptual, art is certainly pre-reflective and (as Cacciari would say) pre-discursive activity in that both its “doing” and its “feeling”
or “sense” is prior to philosophic reflection and its logos. It is the “union” of these opposed moments in art – the
“doing” and the “feeling” - that poses a greater problem for philosophy than it
does for art – because the task of philosophy is precisely to com-prehend all
activity, including the artistic, and this it cannot do if philosophy remains
an artistic activity itself, an initium
that is incomprehensible by and inexplicable to philosophy. (This “materiality”
or immanence of thought is what escapes Arendt because of her formalistic-abstract,
trans-scendental approach to it in ‘Life of the Mind’. See our ‘Immanence
Revisited’ and ‘Philosophy of the Flesh’.)
It is precisely for these
reasons that we simply cannot go along with Cacciari and persist with the
terminology he adopts from Nietzsche with regard to “art as the genius of
falsity” and to the “contradictoriness” of the world. However “tragic” may be
the attempt at mimesis, whether artistic or philosophico-scientific, it does
not evince the contradictoriness of
life and the world! Croce’s objection in the Logica against the Nietzschean thesis was precisely that if there
is no “truth”, then it is impossible to prove the “truth” of this thesis! This
is an objection of which Cacciari does not seem to be mindful because, like
Croce, he remains captive to the primacy of “truth” and thus equivocates about
“the truth of non-truth”!
El arte de lo profundo es del todo solidario
con lo Verdadero de la metafísica. Para ambos la apariencia es mentira, y el
signo no otra cosa que vestimenta-escritura del pensamiento. Este arte miente
demasiado; en realidad, miente dos veces: la primera haciendo propia la mentira
del Fundamentum metafísico; la segunda reduciendo las propias configuraciones
sígnicas a seductores velos del logos. El poeta transformado opone a este
exceso de mentira la perfecta medida de
su arte: existen múltiples modos de abrirse
al mundo - el signo es una apertura al mundo; él afirma la verdad de la
apariencia, el carácter abismal (ab-gründlich:
sin fundamento, continuamente desfondante) de la apariencia, la verdad de
aquello que para la metafísica es no-verdad, por lo tanto, mentira, y por otra
parte, el carácter de velo, de ocultamiento de esta verdad de la apariencia que
reviste la Verdad metafísica. Como Derrida ha explicado: la Verdad falsificada
, deviene apariencia, o, mejor dicho, asume el rol que la apariencia tenía a
sus ojos, y la apariencia deviene única verdad, no porque sustituya al antiguo
Fundamento, sino porque indica la verdad
de la ausencia de Fundamento, verdad
de la no-Verdad.
El
arte en cuanto juego de configuraciones sígnicas es entonces, el pensamiento de
la verdad de la apariencia, de la verdad de la no-verdad… pero la Forma [artistica] no tiene nada de
formalístico: ella es universal facultad
falsificante, pone la verdad como no-verdad. La Forma artística abre al mundo,
es apertura al ser, en cuanto divina tirada de dados, abismo del Azar y de sus
combinaciones, teoría trágica del eterno crear-destruir. (El Arte en N.)
Note this critical expression
by Cacciari:
El arte en cuanto juego de
configuraciones sígnicas es entonces el pensamiento de la verdad de la
apariencia, de la verdad de la no-verdad…
Note that this “play of
configurations” can be understood only in relation to the reality of social
formations, only in terms of “the social synthesis”, without which our entire
speculative efforts relapse into sheer mysticism, which is what he slips into
in the last paragraph from the quotation above:
…pero la Forma [artistica] no tiene nada deformalístico: ella es
universal facultad falsificante, pone la verdad como no-verdad. La Forma
artística abre al mundo, es apertura al ser, en cuanto divina tirada de dados, abismo del Azar y de sus combinaciones, teoría
trágica del eterno crear-destruir.
True,
as Cacciari himself shows in ‘El Hacer del Canto’, the mimetic gap does remit
the telos of philosophy and its logos back to the mystical world of “divine inspiration”, of “delirium” – a thesis
advanced long ago by Werner Jaeger in The
Theology of the EarlyGreek Philosophers (see our ‘Postcard from Istanbul’).
The painful realization of this common artistic-metaphorical matrix is what
pro-voked the wrath of Plato’s “condemnation” of art and mythology because
these expose the “tragic” inability of philosophy and science to bridge this
mimetic gap. But the mimetic gap
ec-sists only for philosophy and its transcendental logos; it does not ec-sist in reality for art whose only reality is
that of so-called “appearances” and “meta-phors”!
Un instante hace irrupción, donde una voz que
constituye siempre el a priori de toda idea del artesano, se abate sobre el
hombre, transformándolo en su propio instrumento. A través de él, que no es,
por lo tanto, el sujeto de la creación (y cuyo "hacer" no tiene su
origen en el no-ser), esa voz se manifiesta visiblemente, se expresa
audiblemente, resuena, se transforma en ese canto. Ese canto es mímesis,
en el sentido en que está de acuerdo, en armonía, solo con esa voz, y por lo
tanto realmente con nada, ya que esa voz, en tanto tal, no se da nunca verdaderamente.
Ese canto, en suma, no es la mímesis sino de su propio presupuesto, que
trasciende toda medida, toda utilidad y toda techne normal. Ese
"hacer" que constituye el canto es, pues, verdaderamente un delirio
en relación con el habitus de la poesía, de las technai que
teje el arte de la realeza: y, sin embargo, cuanto más delimitamos su
especificidad, más su carácter arcaico, su ser arche, cuya muerte o
superación ningún logos podrá decretar, puesto que todos se expresan a través
de su principio y en su presencia, aparece como evidente. (El Hacer del Canto)
In a later piece, Cacciari this
time seems to agree with Nietzsche’s thesis that art is “the genius of falsity”
because life and the world are perceptible and knowable only as appear-ances, and there-fore as “contra-dictory”.
El problema filosófico del arte se centraliza
en la relación arte-mentira. En el prefacio a la segunda edición de La Gaya Ciencia, Nietzsche dice:
Nos
ha fastidiado este mal gusto [...] querer la verdad a toda costa [...] esta
fascinación de adolescentes por el amor a la verdad. La artes son excogitadas
como una especie de culto de lo no-verdadero.
Estas indicaciones se articulan plenamente sólo en los Fragmentos Póstumos sucesivos al Zaratustra. En el contexto de La Gaya Ciencia puede aún parecer que se
trata simplemente de descubrir al juglar escondido en nuestra pasión por el
conocimiento - y aquello que en el arte se limite a enfatizar la dimensión
romántica del ejercicio interminable de la ironía, solamente deconstructiva,
sobre el mundo-verdadero. En los Fragmentos
Póstumos, sobre todo en aquellos que pertenecen al período 87-88, es
evidente, en cambio, que Nietzsche no está
interesado en una estética especial -en el caso en cuestión, la irónico-romántica
-, sino en la definición de las estructuras fundamentales del hecho artístico. En el arte él aprehende una facultad
general, un poder-Kraft que tiene validez universal. En el arte está en
juego una dimensión general del ser, una total facultad falsificante. El arte es la facultad-Kraft que niega la
verdad - o, mejor dicho el arte es expresión de esta facultad universal, y
por lo tanto activa en cualquier otro dominio. Pero en el arte el genio de la mentira resurge en su
pureza - el poder de la mentira se muestra en toda su luz y belleza. Aquella
voluntad de poder que nos permite reducir la cruel realidad, contradictoria y sin sentido del mundo
a nuestra necesidad de vivir - aquella voluntad de poder que es la gran
creadora de la posibilidad de vivir - pone sus nervios al desnudo en el
arte.Tenemos el arte para no perecer frente a la verdad.
This is an unnecessary forzatura of Nietzsche’s thought caused
in part by his own careless and misguided manner of articulating the problem in
the early works. As we can see from our quotation below, for Nietzsche it is as
senseless to say that “the essence of things”, and therefore contra-diction,
exists as it is to state the contrary!
For our antithesis of individual and categories
is anthropomorphic
too
[i.e. is of
purely human origin] and does not come from the essence of things,
although on the
other hand we do not dare to say that it does not correspond
to it; for that would
be a dogmatic assertion and as such just as
undemonstrable
as its contrary. (UWL, p.180)
Nietzsche merely contends that
the principle of non-contradiction is inapplicable as a “metre” of both
artistic and of scientific “doing” precisely to the degree that they are
“doings”, initia, and not statements,
what Cacciari calls “logico-discursive reason” and “vestimenta-escritura del
pensamiento”!
Life and the world are not contradictory because they ec-sist only as “appearance”,” - but this term
now no longer stands in opposition to a “re-ality(!)”, to a “true world” – “the
true world has disappeared with the apparent one”, ironises Nietzsche in the Twilight. Rather it indicates the
primacy of perception and its “participation” (methexis) in the perceived, as
well as the impossibility of truth-as-certainty
and of truth-as-totality. The
principle of non-contradiction is applicable only to the concept of truth-as-certainty
and totality, of “reality as the essence of things”, and not to that of “appearance”
which challenges the “objective existence” of such “re-ality” and that therefore
makes the notion of “truth-as-certainty and totality” together with that of
contra-diction superfluous. (We have shown in our Weberbuch and will discuss again soon how Weber misconceived this
essential point in his critique of “objectivity” in science.)
If we understand “appearances”
correctly (as Nietzsche indicates but fails to do consistently), then they can
never be contra-dictory because as
such they do not re-fer to any “under-lying [sub-stantive] reality” or “essence
of things” or “things-in-themselves” against
which they can be judged to be false. This is what allows Nietzsche to
speak of “truth and falsehood in an extra-moral
sense” (ausser-moralisch), that is to
say, “outside” the morality to which
this false opposition of real events gives rise! The polarity here is between
the mani-fold and multi-versality of experience
[appearances] which is re-presented and embodied by the human instinct to the
creation of metaphors, art and myth, against the truth-as-certainty and uni-versality
of “rational science” for which “reality” is definable in terms of ultimately
self-referential “natural laws” subject to the principle of non-contradiction
which they themselves must infringe. (Incidentally, the Popperian test of
“falsifiability” of scientific truth runs against this insurmountable
objection: - that it invalidates the very notion of “scientificity” because
only “false statements” are “falsifiable”! In other words, Popper’s test of
“scientificity” mis-conceives the entire notion of “scientificity” and is quite
simply an ideological attempt to
rescue bourgeois science from the Nietzschean critique of it as “the will to
truth” and “truth-as-certainty” that underlie and sustain it: - it is no test
at all given that even, and especially,
blatant lies are “falsifiable” by definition and that, as we shall argue below
in agreement with Nietzsche, the notion of “scientific truth” cannot stand on
contingency – what Arendt called “verities” - but rather on the physical-mathematical
necessity of “the laws of nature”!)
[In our next piece we will
attempt to draw closer to a novel approach to the social synthesis through the
critique of Cacciari and Vattimo.]