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July 24, 2012

The Whole Thing is Tragic

Woody-Allen-01An interview with Woody Allen in The Talks:

Mr. Allen, do you truly believe that happiness in life is impossible?

This is my perspective and has always been my perspective on life. I have a very grim, pessimistic view of it. I always have since I was a little boy; it hasn’t gotten worse with age or anything. I do feel that’s it’s a grim, painful, nightmarish, meaningless experience and that the only way that you can be happy is if you tell yourself some lies and deceive yourself.

I think it’s safe to say that most people would disagree.

But I am not the first person to say this or even the most articulate person. It was said by Nietzsche, it was said by Freud, it was said by Eugene O’Neill. One must have one’s delusions to live. If you look at life too honestly and clearly, life becomes unbearable because it’s a pretty grim enterprise, you will admit.

I have a hard time imagining Woody Allen having such a hard life…

I have been very lucky and I have made my talent a very productive life for me, but everything else I am not good at. I am not good getting through life, even the simplest things. These things that are a child’s play for most people are a trauma for me.

Posted by Robin Varghese at 11:01 AM | Permalink

Comments

It was said by Nietzsche

This is pretty ironic. As a matter of fact, Nietzsche would have said (and did say) that awkward, fumbling little geeks like Allen invent little mantras like "life sucks" and "happiness is impossible" in order to rationalize their own powerlessness.

I mean, when you're so useless with women that you have to troll for new wives amongst the adopted children of your old wives, it's no wonder you think that life sucks. Homeboy should probably go back and read Freud and Nietzsche a little more carefully.

Posted by: Joe | Jul 24, 2012 11:26:38 AM

Isn't there something incredibly immature and adolescent about brilliant successful people complaining about how hard life is?

Posted by: reader | Jul 24, 2012 12:56:01 PM

Woody Allen is full of shit. He has been successful at everything he has ever done. He's been making a good living writing jokes since he was 16 years old. He's had affairs with a plethora of beautiful actresses. He even managed to figure out how to successful make his underage adopted daughter his full time nurse, valet and Happy Ending technician. The man has led nothing short of a charmed life. Yet here he is, once again, flogging the same old schtick. It's sad, what old age does to you. It calcifies your persona into something rigid and non-porous. If Woody were truly as introspective as he thinks he is, he would make movies about what a lucky bastard he is. But then again, his persona was invented so that he could get laid. I shouldn't be surprised how ugly that persona is turning out to be as he nears the end of his life.

Posted by: CV | Jul 24, 2012 1:33:17 PM

Snore. Still a self-obsessed little twit who hasn't grown up -- and of course is proud of same. I guess he should get 1/2 point for declining to play the romantic lead in his movies these days, but his self-pity shaves that back to 1/4 point. He was funny and relevant at one time, long ago, but unlike a truly great artist, he didn't continue to grow and it's all, as someone else mentioned, shtick.

Posted by: Sarah D. | Jul 24, 2012 2:26:36 PM

A lot of haters here! Regardless of what you think of Woody Allen, the idea that everyone should be happy if they are "successful", make a lot of money, own a lot of material goods, get lots of respect in society etc. is about as shallow a perspective as I can imagine. A pessimistic view of life is not really any more "right" than an optimistic one, but a lot of people are driven to pessimistic views by aspects of their nature (biology, early life history, whatever) that can't easily be "cured" by superficial success. Would you guys denigrate other historical pessimists, like Schopenhauer, as "fumbling little geeks", who haven't "grown up" and are "full of shit"? (Joe, do you realize how influenced Nietzsche was by Schopenhauer? Do you think Nietzsche would have dismissed him as a 'fumbling little geek' because of his pessimistic attitude towards life?) I don't share the pessimists' level of negativity, but I find their perspective to often be a lot more interesting, honest, and funny than the self-righteous defenders of Life As It Is who attack anyone who complains as a "whiner" (of course, I do like the perspective of many optimists too, but the wiser optimists are usually relatively free of self-righteous condemnation of others, and are also usually honest about the fact that life contains a lot of suffering, and thus share certain elements in common with the pessimists--some people see Buddhism as a pessimistic philosophy, for example, even though its serious practitioners are often quite cheerful)

Posted by: Jesse M. | Jul 24, 2012 3:20:36 PM

Isn't it interesting that lots of successful people don't think it was all worth it? Is that painful to hear because it interferes with our self-deception that the success we expect will make it all feel worth it?

Posted by: Sister Y | Jul 24, 2012 5:24:40 PM

The point, Jesse, is that Woody Allen hasn't suffered. At all. His pain and extistential musings are contrived. It has taken a while for this to be borne out. No one here is talking about anyone else but Woody Allen. So your whole "Hey, Rich People Suffer Too" seems to me directed not at any of us commenters but at yourself. I'm sure you have suffered greatly, Jesse. No one here is denying your pain. I'm just here to deny Woody's. Once and for all. I bought it years ago and I don't buy it anyone. If he's a pessimist, he's the most cynical kind of pessimist. The kind that is convinced everything is about to go wrong because everything has always gone so right. Woody's pessimism is based in nothing tangible. It's just the mental ditherings of a laid-back sybarite who is always afraid the party is about to end.

Posted by: CV | Jul 24, 2012 5:28:51 PM

If you think about yourself 24/7 then yes, happiness is impossible. It's hard to imagine that level of self absorption. A man all wrapped up in himself makes a small package.

Posted by: Larry | Jul 24, 2012 5:31:04 PM

I stopped loving Woody Allen movies after I saw "Crimes and Misdemeanors" his consequentialist argument for snuffing out an inconvenient mistress.

I stopped liking Woody Allen after he started dating his daughter.

Even so, he is right. The most rational position to take with regard to the world is that of a generally happy pessimist.

To believe anything else requires a consistent lack of attention.

Posted by: DAS | Jul 24, 2012 9:40:03 PM

Actually, Sister Y, it's probably the case that almost all successful people do think it was "all worth it". Therefore, it would not be"self-deception" to expect that success might make it "all worth it". But no, don't let the plain facts stop you from saying basically the same thing you always say on here.

And Jesse, Nietzsche's entire philosophy is a rejection of Schopehnauer's brand of pessimism, which he actually labels a "pessimism of weakness". Get to know him and you'll find that out. The fact that Allen cites him in precisely the wrong way shows exactly what is wrong with his own pessimistic "position": he projects his own sense of meaninglessness onto everyone else, as though there weren't other kinds of persons who experienced the world differently. If Allan had said "life sucks.... for me" there would be no problem.

This is the general problem with this debate. A persons's life can go well or it can go badly, but the idea that one person can decide on very general grounds that human lives go well or go badly is absurd.

Posted by: Joe | Jul 24, 2012 11:08:02 PM

Joe,

So one man's brain chemistry or upbringing leads him to be a pessimist, while one woman's brain chemistry or upbringing leads her to be an optimist.

If that's all there is my friend, then lets go dancing, and bring on the booze!

Posted by: DAS | Jul 25, 2012 1:15:48 AM

The above comments, especially taken in aggregate, sound and read like dialogue out of a Woody Allen movie...

Posted by: SA | Jul 25, 2012 6:10:21 AM

Woody has stated countless times in interviews that he adopted his existentialist pose because it made it easier for him to cop primo quiff. The mask ate his face.

Posted by: TT Yunkko | Jul 25, 2012 11:01:36 AM

"This is the general problem with this debate. A persons's life can go well or it can go badly, but the idea that one person can decide on very general grounds that human lives go well or go badly is absurd."
Exactly, and this was the whole problem with the interminable "case against kids" debate.

Posted by: reader | Jul 25, 2012 11:17:37 AM

Hey, Woody is basically a comic, and nothing he says (or puts on the screen) needs to be taken so seriously as many people do. Don't let all this hot weather get to you, folks!

He's also reputed to be a good clarinetist, but I haven't heard him, so I can't evaluate that aspect of his talents.

Posted by: JonJ | Jul 25, 2012 11:28:27 AM

I used to like his movies. That was a long time ago.

Posted by: reader | Jul 25, 2012 11:39:00 AM

To those who haven't seen Bullets Over Broadway, Match Point, Midnight in Paris, or Deconstructing Harry: your loss.

Posted by: Ray Butlers | Jul 25, 2012 5:42:28 PM

CV:
The point, Jesse, is that Woody Allen hasn't suffered. At all.

How would you know? Have you looked into his soul? Or are you taking the position that someone with money, fame, respect etc. can't have "really suffered"? Do you imagine that depression is generated primarily by external circumstances rather than the inner dynamics of a person's brain, for example?

So your whole "Hey, Rich People Suffer Too" seems to me directed not at any of us commenters but at yourself.

It was multiple commenters who brought up his success in life as a way of denigrating the idea that he found life difficult (your own comment was that you thought he was "full of shit" because "He has been successful at everything he has ever done ... The man has led nothing short of a charmed life"). My position has nothing to do with money specifically, it's just about the fact that life involves a lot of potential suffering for everyone, especially for those with a temperament or personality that makes them feel out of sync with the rest of the world, and that there are no easy cures for that, including "success".

I'm sure you have suffered greatly, Jesse. No one here is denying your pain.

Perhaps I'm taking you the wrong way, but it sounds a bit more like you're trying to wound me by being sarcastically patronizing (if so, nice try) rather than offering any genuine sympathy, especially given that this comment follows a mocking summary of my position as "Hey, Rich People Suffer Too". Anyway, I don't actually think my suffering in life has been particularly great (some periods of loneliness due to a sort of borderline Asperger's personality, but I'm pretty happy at this point in my life)--read what I said before, "I don't share the pessimists' level of negativity, but I find their perspective to often be a lot more interesting, honest, and funny than the self-righteous defenders of Life As It Is" (personal favorites among pessimists include Franz Kafka, the cartoonist R. Crumb and the "cosmic horror" writer H.P. Lovecraft, whose letters are as interesting as his stories). And among the less pessimistic artists and thinkers, the most interesting to me are often those who are like my favorite pessimists in that they are rather "unworldly" and spend more time than most people in inner worlds of thought and imagination and are less occupied with practical matters, who have a need to spend much of their time in solitude, who take an "outsider" perspective on society and its values, who are more sensitive to the harsh elements in human behavior--one of my favorite such personalities is Einstein, read some of his quotes on non-scientific matters here and you get the sense that he did have a pretty optimistic view of the world and of the best quality in humans, but was also very sensitive to the same sorts of tendencies that drive pessimists to despair, like violence, us vs. them thinking, and small-mindedness. Recently in reading this story on Chomsky I got the sense of him as a similar type.

The point is, it's not the pessimism per se that attracts me to various pessimists, but rather certain types of personality traits and ways of viewing the world that they have in common with the pessimists--I could point to more points of similarity but I don't want to bore you--and I have a sense that Woody Allen genuinely shares a lot in common with others I would put in this group, especially the pessimists. He actually reminds me of R. Crumb in many ways (even if his art is a little more "safe" than Crumb's), try watching the documentary "Crumb" back-to-back with the Woody Allen documentary "Wild Man Blues" and you'll see what I mean (or watch Woody Allen's own movie "Deconstructing Harry", where he adopts a particularly Crumb-like persona and makes even less effort to seem likeable than in most of his roles). Allen's complaining about life reminds me of Crumb's "Litany of Hate", copied from the Crumb wikiquote page I linked to above:

"I'm such a negative person, and always have been. Was I born that way? I don't know. I am constantly disgusted by reality, horrified and afraid. I cling desperately to the few things that give me some solace, that make me feel good. I hate most of humanity. Though I might be very fond of particular individuals, humanity in general fills me with contempt and despair. I hate most of what passes for civilization. I hate the modern world. For one thing there are just too goddamn many people. I hate the hordes, the crowds in their vast cities, with all their hateful vehicles, their noise, their constant meaningless comings and goings. I hate cars. I hate modern architecture. Every building built after 1955 should be torn down! I despise modern popular music. Words cannot express how much it gets on my nerves—the false, pretentious, smug assertiveness of it. I hate business, having to deal with money. Money is one of the most hateful inventions of the human race. I hate the commodity culture, in which everything is bought and sold. No stone is left unturned. I hate the mass media, and how passively people suck it up. ... I hate having to eat, shit, maintain the body—I hate my body. ... Nature is horrible. It's not cute and lovable. It's kill or be killed. ... How I hate the courting ritual! I was always repelled by my own sex drive, which in my youth, never left me alone. ... I hate the way the human psyche works, the way we are traumatized and stupidly imprinted in early childhood and have to spend the rest of our lives trying to overcome these infantile mental fixations. And we never fully succeed in this endeavor. I hate organized religions. I hate governments. It's all a lot of power games played out by ambition-driven people, and foisted on the weak, the poor, and on children. Most humans are bullies. Adults pick on children. Older children pick on younger children. Men bully women. The rich bully the poor. People love to dominate. I hate the way humans worship power—one of the most disgusting of all human traits. I hate the human tendency toward revenge and vindictiveness. I hate the way humans are constantly trying to trick and deceive one another, to swindle, cheat, and take unfair advantage of the innocent, the naïve and the ignorant. I hate all the vacuous, false, banal conversation that goes on among people. Sometimes I feel suffocated. I want to flee from it. For me, to be human is, for the most part, to hate what I am. When I suddenly realize that I am one of them, I want to scream in horror."

Posted by: Jesse M. | Jul 25, 2012 6:24:09 PM

"One of the most important comments on deceit, I think, was made by Adam Smith. He pointed out that a major goal of business is to deceive and oppress the public.

And one of the striking features of the modern period is the institutionalization of that process, so that we now have huge industries deceiving the public — and they're very conscious about it, the public relations industry. Interestingly, this developed in the freest countries—in Britain and the US — roughly around time of WWI, when it was recognized that enough freedom had been won that people could no longer be controlled by force. So modes of deception and manipulation had to be developed in order to keep them under control" -Noam Chomsky

“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.” - Aldous Huxley

Posted by: Dredd | Jul 25, 2012 7:15:33 PM

WA is a genius by any standard. I've enjoyed most of his films, which have been remarkably popular worldwide for decades, considering their long dialogs and lack of special effects. I'd have been astounded if he'd confessed to being an incurable optimist with a rosy view of life to match his bank balance, that would have threatened the neurotic NY Jew personality we all know and love. That would be as shocking as if he'd confessed that his mother was a nice, calm person who'd never tried to interfere with his life.
And DAS, "Crimes and Misdemeanors" was an excellent and disturbing movie that was far more truthful than those countless TV detective shows where the stupid baddie always gets caught.

Posted by: aguy109 | Jul 25, 2012 7:30:56 PM

Joe:
And Jesse, Nietzsche's entire philosophy is a rejection of Schopehnauer's brand of pessimism, which he actually labels a "pessimism of weakness". Get to know him and you'll find that out.

I am certainly no Nietzsche expert, and I have probably read more secondary sources discussing him than his actual writings, but my impression was that while his philosophy was a major departure from Schopenhauer's, he had great respect for Schopenhauer's thought, and a lot of his philosophy could be seen as an attempt to explain refute Schopenhauer's pessimistic conclusions at length, which wouldn't be the case if he just saw Schopenhauer as trivially mistaken or dismissed his pessimism as contemptuously as you did with Woody Allen's. Look at this article on Nietzsche and Schopenhauer for example--it says that Nietzsche called Schopenhauer the first honest atheist in modern philosophy, and that he continued to call Schopenheuer a "great teacher" after breaking from his views.

The fact that Allen cites him in precisely the wrong way shows exactly what is wrong with his own pessimistic "position": he projects his own sense of meaninglessness onto everyone else, as though there weren't other kinds of persons who experienced the world differently. If Allan had said "life sucks.... for me" there would be no problem.

He doesn't actually say happiness is impossible, but rather that "the only way that you can be happy is if you tell yourself some lies and deceive yourself." (a theme that crops up in his movies) As I understand Freud, this would not be completely inaccurate as a summary of Freud's view of happiness--in "Civilization and Its Discontents", I think he suggests that sublimation and other forms of conscious denial of our true subconscious sexual and aggressive desires are required to be relatively happy and well-adjusted in the civilized world. And I think it has at least a little in common with Nietzsche's view that the Ubermensch must create his own values in a world with no intrinsic value or meaning (though Nietzsche probably wouldn't have seen these self-created values as "lies"). It's also possible that Allen's comment about Nietzsche was referring more to the first part of his sentence where he said that life is "a grim, painful, nightmarish, meaningless experience", and that he wasn't actually saying that Nietzsche had the same emotional valuation of life, but that this was Allen's own valuation of Nietzsche's view of life as a constant struggle for power in which pity is nothing but a mask for weakness, and where nothing in life had any inherent meaning prior to what we choose to assign to it.

Posted by: Jesse M. | Jul 25, 2012 7:33:48 PM

Albert Brooks' 4-film run of Reel Life, Modern Romance, Lost in America, and Defending Your Life are deeper, funnier, smarter, and more honest than all of Woody's movies, combined. Brooks cut himself absolutely no slack. Woody's rope is very long, seemingly infinite.

Posted by: CV | Jul 25, 2012 8:25:13 PM

Jesse, I agree that Schopenhauer was a massive influence in Nietzsche, as everyone does. But he did come to call Schopenhauer a proponent of a pessimism of weakness. He memorably called Schopenhauer's philosophy a "cadaverous perfume": an attractive pessimism that ultimately had its roots in a decaying form of life.

Now, anyone can "read" Nietzsche as they like (half the world does) but I try to take him at his word when he rejects the pessimism of weakness, rejects nihilism and asserts that some people (not all) will be able to follow him in these rejections. He also says that a chief symptom of a slave-moralist is a kind of blanket pessimism that generalizes from the moralist's relative powerlessness to humanity at large. This was, and remains, my point: anyone who utters sentences of the form "Life is [quality x]" and "Nietzsche agrees with me" is not just falsely generalizing, they're backing their fallacy up with the one thinker who most strenuously denied that such generalizations were valid.

Allen's not a philosopher, so I don't care if he gets philosophers wrong, but in this case reading a philosopher more carefully could have helped him to see why he cannot make the claims he's making:

Causes of nihilism:1. the higher species is lacking, i.e., those whose inexhaustible fertility and power keep up the faith in man….[and] 2. the lower species unlearns modesty and blows up its needs into cosmic and metaphysical values. In this way the whole of existence is vulgarized: insofar as the mass is dominant it bullies the exceptions, so they lose their faith in themselves and become nihilists." (Will To Power 27)

Posted by: Joe | Jul 26, 2012 6:36:03 AM

The first and only time that I went to watch one of his movies I walked out at half time, so I am not  in a position to critique him.

Posted by: Raza | Jul 26, 2012 12:48:31 PM

Joe, I wasn't trying to contradict the fact that Nietzsche ultimately rejected Schopenhauer, or that he rejected pessimism/nihilism (my point about Schopenhauer was that even if Nietzsche found him wrong, his attitude was not one of simple contemptuous dismissal as with your comment imagining how he would respond to Woody Allen's pessimism by dismissing him as an awkward, fumbling little geek). But as I said, Woody Allen didn't try to suggest that everyone should agree with him in his pessimistic attitude, or that Nietzsche would--Allen did say specifically that happiness is possible through various forms of self-deception.

anyone who utters sentences of the form "Life is [quality x]" and "Nietzsche agrees with me" is not just falsely generalizing, they're backing their fallacy up with the one thinker who most strenuously denied that such generalizations were valid.

This is certainly true when it comes to moral values, but when it comes to objective truths about life not based on valuation, Nietzsche may have said at times that truth is wholly relative just like morality, but if he maintained this I think he was, like all relativists, being inconsistent on this point. Elsewhere he wrote all sorts of things that look like truth-claims: historical claims about the origins of Christian morality, psychological claims about the will to power being the most basic urge and about happiness being about the successful exercise of this will, and metaphysical/cosmic claims about the eternal return, etc. So one possible interpretation of Allen's comment that I suggested--that he was referencing Nietzsche not for his valuation of life, but just for his "objective" picture of life as an endless struggle for power, which Allen would see as depressing without claiming that Nietzsche would do the same--is something I don't think could be called a "mistake" in any obvious sense, in the sense that I think there are plenty of professional philosophers who also treat Nietzsche as making objective claims, and any claims by Nietzsche that he wasn't may be simply inconsistent with the claims he made elsewhere.

Also, looking over a historical summary of his writings, I wonder whether Nietzsche continued to assert the lack of objective truth (again different from the lack of objective morality) throughout his life, or if the entire basis for the idea that he didn't believe in objective truths is the 1873 essay "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense", which was written very early in his career before he had developed most of his other doctrines. If he didn't re-emphasize this idea in later writings, it's possible it was an idea he just abandoned, or was unsure about.

Posted by: Jesse M. | Jul 26, 2012 1:41:15 PM

My limited understanding of Nietzsche favours Joe here. I think this gets it:

"... he projects his own sense of meaninglessness onto everyone else, as though there weren't other kinds of persons who experienced the world differently. If Allen had said "life sucks.... for me" there would be no problem."

I think it's a human tendency to assume that everyone else's experience is like our own in some essential way. This was the wall I was banging my head on in the long argument with the antinatalists a few months ago.

Jesse, a quick Google of "Perspectivism" reveals some articles that may help with the "objective truth" issue.

Posted by: Sagredo | Jul 26, 2012 3:20:04 PM

Sagredo, my point is that Allen's statement can reasonably be interpreted as being more of the "life sucks... for me" variety than "life sucks... objectively" (his statements are ambiguous on this score, but he's not a philosopher so he may not have thought in detail about the difference, and he's also speaking conversationally rather than writing a treatise). Again, you can read him as citing Nietzsche more for his "objective" views of psychology and society than for the conclusions he draws about meaning in life. And Allen does say that happiness is possible, just that it must be based on a certain amount of self-deception, which echoes Freud's view in "Civilization and its Discontents".

Thanks for the tip about the term "perspectivism". As expected though, philosophers have different interpretations of what Nietzsche meant, and also whether his statements are consistent/coherent. The wikipedia article says:

Richard Schacht, in his interpretation of Nietzsche's thought, argues that this can be expanded into a revised form of "objectivity" in relation to "subjectivity" as an aggregate of singular viewpoints that illuminate, for example, a particular idea in seemingly self-contradictory ways but upon closer inspection would reveal a difference of contextuality and of rule by which such an idea (e.g., that is fundamentally perspectival) can be validated. Therefore, it can be said each perspective is subsumed into and, taking account of its individuated context, adds to the overall objective measure of a proposition under examination.

And the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Nietzsche says:

Some regard Nietzsche's 1873 unpublished essay, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (“Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn”) as a keystone in his thought; some believe that it is a peripheral, conflicted and non-representative fragment in his writings.

This article defends the idea that Nietzsche was taking a purely relative view of truth, but discusses another philosophy who interprets him differently:

Maudemarie Clark, in her book Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, presents a much different picture of the apparent contradiction between Nietzsche’s perspectivism and his conception of truth. Her interpretation is based on a different idea of what Nietzsche’s perspectivism fundamentally is. She states that to say that there is no “nonperspectival seeing” is not to say that there is not an “omniperspectival seeing” (Clark 145). This is tantamount to saying that just because we can perceive an absolute truth from one individual limited perspective is not to say that there is no absolute truth out there, which is obviously a valid argument. She goes on to say that this situation of seeing from a limited perspective “means not merely that we cannot know all there is to know, but that what we know is only partially true, that it would be completely true only if we supplemented it by the way things appear from other perspectives” (Clark 146). Her point, then, is that Nietzsche, in his last six works (from The Genealogy of Morals to The Antichrist), does not claim anymore that knowledge falsifies and, in fact, seems to believe that science can be a means to reaching this unified, and therefore absolutely true, perspective (Clark 103). So her way of looking at Nietzsche’s perspectivism is far from the earlier stated interpretation in that she allows for a much more impersonal and unified interpretation of Nietzsche’s idea.

The article also notes that Nietzsche expressed a view similar to Allen's statement about the need to lie to ourselves:

However, Nietzsche perceives that a person cannot act while examining his actions with an uncertain eye. A person must believe his or her actions to be the true and just ways to act even if this belief is a lie. In The Will to Power, he writes this idea as “truth is the kind of error without which a certain being could not live” (The Will to Power 493). To see that this “certain kind of being” to which he is referring is definitely humanity, one need only look to Beyond Good and Evil, where he says that “for the purpose of preserving beings such as ourselves, such judgements [synthetic a priori judgements] must be believed to be true; although they might of course still be false judgements!” (BGE I.11). Therefore, we humans need to act as if we are certain of what we are doing even though we cannot be certain.

Despite the author's defense of a purely relative persective, it's hard for me to understand what Nietzsche could mean by "such judgments must be believed to be true; although they might of course still be false judgements!" if he wasn't talking about the judgements being "false" in any remotely objective sense.

Posted by: Jesse M. | Jul 26, 2012 4:17:38 PM

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