Nietzsche against determinism and teleology
Philosophical snippet #1
We definitely underestimated the complexity of the world we live in. Seas, space, animals are some examples of monumental barriers that separate us from how things work. In the following lines, I want to write about another mystery that could be the keystone of all the others, the human being.
I’m currently reading “Will to power” by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In the 142e aphorism, there is this sentence that aroused great interest in me.
“Does every act imply an author?”
In this passage from the book, Nietzsche wonders if a fact emanates from preceding ones? To what extent our present self is the result of the past?
It’s tempting to deduce an individual’s behavior to his experience. Everyone does it, including me!
- You know, that’s the type of person that does this or that.
- It is typically the kind of thing that M.X would have made.
This type of reasoning is so simple, too simple to reflect the reality of things.
Yet, it is the way of seeing the world of the naive. The individuals making this shortcut will see it sometimes confirmed and sometimes refuted. On the one hand, exposed and on the other denied. Nietzsche writes that it is more a matter of belief than of reason. It is more subjective than objective, contrary to what some would have us believe.
“Against determinism and teleology — From the fact that a thing occurs regularly and can be foreseen, it does not follow that it necessarily happens.”
This erroneous way of apprehending our world comes from the way we write and talk. At the root of every action, every means we have to express ourselves, a thought. “I think” means that the “I” is the cause of “think.” Instead of noticing it, we have turned this into a basic assumption. This pattern of causality, deeply rooted in all of us, would force us to explain effects by showing a state of which it is inherent.
“In short, a fact is neither caused nor causative. The cause is a faculty of action invented and added to the phenomenon…”
For Nietzsche, the succession of certain phenomena is more a power relationship between two forces and not an unchanging law. People swear by cause and effect, it’s a mythology that stems from a belief.
Who defines the limits?
Reasoning by analogy like that isn’t accurate, but then what is? Here is the question I asked myself while reading aphorism after aphorism. I mean, not that it was useless to know it — I feel much more aware of this phenomenon when it happens to me — but it left me a sense of unfinished.
My further reading gave me the answer. Do not trust the sense of truth that you experienced when using these shortcuts, and on top of that, do not seek it. The search for axioms of human behavior may be tempting but limited by our own existence.
As written :
“A tool cannot criticize its own practical value; intelligence cannot determine its own limit, nor the fact that it is well or badly constructed.”
According to him, a man that pretends to know the immutable pillars of human behavior is a liar. This one should see himself as greater, as somebody that has succeeded in transcending the limits of his human conditions. A person who is not human. A god in some way.
Thus, Nietzsche here comes to criticize the other philosophers looking for these axioms. He thinks that whoever they are, they don’t have the status to answer.
