Abstract
Is the lover of knowledge a lover of truth? Is that not why he is a lover of knowledge, because he is more profoundly a lover of truth? Yet what if these two aims conflict? What if one had to choose between knowledge and truth?
We philosophers and “free spirits” feel, when we hear the news that “the old god is dead,” as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectations. At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never been such an “open sea.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science 343
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Notes
Bertrand Russell probably speaks for many philosophers when he says, “what we firmly believe, if it is true, is called knowledge… what we firmly believe, if it is not true, is called error.” The Problems of Philosophy (London, 1912; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978 ), p. 81.
A. J. Ayer. The Problem of Knowledge ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956 ), p. 25.
On Faustus, see Michael Keefer, Christopher Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus”: A 1604-version Edition (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1991), pp. xxxvii-xlv: and loan P. Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, trans. M. Cook (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), chap.10. On Simon Magus and Ham, see Valerie Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 337–338, 341–342. On forbidden knowledge, my “Forbidding Knowledge,” The Monist 79 (1996): 294–310.
Francis Bacon, Novum Organum I, CXXIV; Paolo Rossi, “Truth and Utility in the Science of Francis Bacon,” Philosophy, Technology, and the Arts in the Early Modern Era, trans. S. Attanasio çNew York: Harper Row, 1970 ), pp. 160–161.
On magic and religious deviance, see C. A. Faraone and D. Obbink, ed. Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. vii. On magic and the Royal Society, see Charles Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), and William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994 ), pp. 332–350.
See Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 158, 173.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1961), 2.201, 2.21.
John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 162. I describe the Greek, or classical interpretation of truth as “onto-logic” because its fundamental assumption is that a logically consistent predication owes its possibility of being true to the ontic possibility of the entity whose being (existence and identity) makes it true. Logical possibilities of truth and untie possibilities of being are therefore exactly coextensive. See my Truth in Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), esp. chap. 1.
See Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 ), pp. 2–12.
Talk of `representation of the facts’… incorporates a philosophically correct — as we might say, seriously dyadic — perspective on the truth predicate.“ Crispin Wright, Truth and Objectivity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 83.
Nietzsche, Nachlaß; cited in Babette E. Babich, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science ( Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994 ), p. 119.
See Babich, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science, pp. 230, 233; and Eric Blondel, Nietzsche: The Body and Culture, trans. S. Hand ( London: Athlone Press, 1991 ), p. 146.
Nietzsche, Nachlaß,cited in Babich, Nietzsche ‘s Philosophy,p. 103; see also GS 107, BGE 24, and WP 493.
James Reason, Human Error ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990 ), p. 9.
Some of the first German thinkers Nietzsche stimulated were aware of an affinity with pragmatism, which Georg Simmel is supposed to have described as “the part of Nietzsche which the Americans adopted.” Rorty suggests that Nietzsche is “the figure who did most to convince European intellectuals of the doctrines which were purveyed to Americans by James and Dewey.” Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 2. On Nietzsche and pragmatism, see M. A. Weinstein, The Wilderness and the City: American Classical Philosophy as a Moral Quest (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), esp. pp. 129137; and my “Truth in America,” Cohesion and Dissent in America, ed. C. Colatrella and J. Alkana ( Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993 ).
Plato, Laws 730c.
Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. xiii.
Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, pp. 132, 128, 88, 23; and Philosophy and the Mirror 1Nature ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979 ), p. 389.
Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age,trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), pp. 232, 239–240.
Cited in E. A. Hitchcock, Alchemy and the Alchemists (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, and Co., 1857; rpt. Los Angeles: Philosophical Research Society, 1976), p. 122; see also E. J. Holmyard, Alchemy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957; rpt. New York: Dover, 1990), p. 158. On Jâbir, see Eamon, Secrets of Nature,p. 42.
On esotericism and self-fashioning see Eamon, Secrets of Nature, p. 355. On “aesthetics of existence,” see Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” in H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); and my “Foucault and Modern Political Philosophy,” The Later Foucault, ed. J. Moss ( London: Sage, 1998 ).
The Magical Writings of Thomas Vaughan,ed. A. E. Waite (Kila, Mont.: Kessinger Publishing Co., 1992), p. ix.
Jerome R. Ravetz, Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971 ), p. 63.
Mario Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 5, 100, 105, 156, 149.
Bacon, Novum Organum II. 3 (my emphasis); and The Advancement of Learning III,5; cf. Novum Organum II, XI. The eleventh-century Byzantine philosopher Michael Psellus defined magic as naturalis philosophiae absoluta consummatio. The definition was repeated by nearly all of the philosophical defenders of magic from Ficino and Pico to Agrippa, Gasper Schott, and friends of the Royal Society, including Elias Ashmole and Seth Ward.
Bacon, cited in R. F. Jones, Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Rise of the Scientific Movement in Seventeenth-Century England,revised ed. (St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1936, 1961; rpt. New York: Dover, 1982), p. 55; and Advancement of Learning,Preface.
See J. C. Briggs, Francis Bacon and the Rhetoric of Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 8–9, 41; and Bacon, New Atlantis (Kila, Mont.: Kessinger Publishing Co., 1992), pp. 303, 321, 330, 331–332.
Nietzsche, Nachlaß,in Babich, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science,p. 104
It is perhaps doubtful that Diderot would subscribe to this characterization of atheism. In a letter to Voltaire (1749) he writes, “It is… very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley; but to believe or not to believe in God is not so important at all.” See M. J. Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987 ), p. 225.
On Nietzsche and Enlightenment atheism, see my “Atheism, Relativism, Enlightenment, and Truth,” Studies in Religion 23 (1994): 167–177.
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Allen, B. (1999). All the Daring of the Lover of Knowledge is Permitted Again. In: Babich, B.E. (eds) Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 204. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2428-9_10
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