09/07/2022
My interpretation of Nietzsche’s aphorism “How the ‘Real World’ at Last Became a Myth.” In this aphorism, Nietzsche traces out the real/appearance distinction throughout the history of philosophy: from Plato to Nietzsche’s own mature philosophy.
Citations:
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Human All-To-Human. Buy here!
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Daybreak. Buy here!
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Buy here!
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Buy here!
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ. Buy here!
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic. Buy here!
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HISTORY OF AN ERROR
Is the world real? Do we have access to it? Or, because of our imperfect senses, are we trapped in a mere world of appearances? A world of half-truths, illusions, masks, metaphors, metonymies, tragic & farcical falsities, dreams.
German Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote the history of the “real world” in his 1888 pamphlet Twilight of the Idols or How To Philosophize With a Hammer. Nietzsche wrote this work as an introduction to his philosophy. In Section 4, entitled “How the ‘Real World’ at Last became a Myth: History of an error, Nietzsche describes the entire history of the “real world” in about 250 words broken up into six stages.
Stage 1: I, Plato, Am The Truth
1. The real world, attainable to the wise, the pious, the virtuous man—he dwells in it, he is it.
(Oldest form of idea, relatively sensible. Simple, convincing. Transcription of the proposition ‘I, Plato, am the truth.’)
Here, Nietzsche travels to the beginning, 2,500 years ago in Ancient Athens. Plato, one of the greatest philosophers in history, is this beginning. Plato believed there was a “real world”, but it is not this world down here. The “real world” was the world of Forms, the True, eternal, unchanging, and essential nature of reality, easily available to the great Gods who feasted on their beauty. We puny mortals down here are mere reflections of the Forms, imperfect. There are two Ancient Greek words Plato uses when describing the Forms. The first is morphe, the form that all matter, or hule in Ancient Greek, takes or, more precisely, the boundaries or limits any thing has. While a form limits a thing, it also de-limits its essential characteristics, which leads us to the second word, Idea. What is de-limited or revealed to us by a form is the Idea of a thing.
But the idea of a thing we experience down here is only the puny, muddled flash of the pure Idea as it exists in the “real world” of Forms. Most cannot even see the flash, but the wise, pious, virtuous philosopher can learn to see these flashes and potentially more. Through careful study of the Forms and the Platonic love of teenage boys, one could gain access to the “real world.” The True world. This means the “real world” is actual, it is in the here & the now.
With Plato is the first delineation of the real from the apparent, the True from the false. Plato, the one who dwells and is the way to the Forms, reveals the Truth. The Truth has a firm foundation, in the eternal existence of the Forms.
Stage 2: Christianity
2. The real world, unattainable for the moment, but promised to the wise, the pious, the virtuous man (‘to the sinner who repents’). (Progress of the idea: it grows more refined, more enticing, more incomprehensible—it becomes a woman, it becomes Christian…)
In this stage, the idea progresses beyond to the Neo-Platonists and later to the Church Fathers of Christianity, especially St. Augustine of Hippo. The “real world” cannot be attained in this life, this apparent, fallacious life of the sinner’s body. But, it can be promised. The “real world” is no longer actual, but possible. Follow the ideals of Christianity in this life of suffering—castigate and defy your sinful flesh—for the promise of Heaven in the eternal afterlife with God and the J-Man himself. The truth becomes more refined, less abstract, with the myth of the Godmanboy Jesus, and his sacrifice. And, the Truth became incomprehensible for God and the Truth are one and the same, and, by definition, God is that which no greater thing can be conceived.
And this line: it becomes a woman… there’s no hidden meaning. Nietzsche is just a misogynist. Nietzsche is the OG Incel!
Step 3: pale, sublime
3. The real world, unattainable, undemonstrable, cannot be promised, but even when merely thought of a consolation, a duty, an imperative.
(Fundamentally the same old sun, but shining through mist and scepticism; the idea grown sublime, pale. Northerly, Konigsbergian.)
Step three is the Zeitgeist of Modernity, formulated in Kantian Transcendental Idealism. Philosopher Immanuel Kant spent most of his life in the northerly Prussian city of Konigsberg. Kant, like previous philosophers, divided the world between real & apparent. There was the phenomenal world, which we access with our limited & puny senses, and the noumenal world, the thing in-itself as it Truly is beyond our puny understanding. Unlike the previous steps, the noumenal or “real world” is a world we have no access too. We’re simply too puny to fully grasp it.
But Kant is still the same old sun. Despite being both unattainable & undemonstrable, Kant still assumed the noumenal world MUST exist for… reasons. Kant is still a foundationalist; Truth is founded in a perfect, theoretical world. The “real world” has gone from actual, to possible, to merely theoretical (or perhaps, merely hypothetical).
Reason itself demanded the “real world” exist as a consolation, duty, and an imperative. Kant’s moral philosophy is called deontology. Deon is Ancient Greek for “Duty”. We have a duty to reason itself to believe the ‘real world’ is the noumenal world forever only in our heads.
Intermezzo
Between stage 3 & stage 4 is a major break in this aphorism. Stages 1-3 all exist within the historical period that Nietzsche elsewhere refers to as practical nihilism. Practical nihilism is any doctrine that preaches the ascetic ideal, an ideal which posits the True Reality as some existence we have no access too (and therefore can never prove). For Nietzsche, because there is no access to this other but more real world, the ascetic ideal is a willing towards nothingness. This nihilism is practical in that ascetic priests certainly don’t believe they are willing towards nothingness. No one can reasonably claim that the Plato, the various and multi-faced authors of the Bible, or even Kant lacked incredible imaginative powers. But through ones action’s, in acting towards what is not, one is practically nihilistic.
On the other hand, stages 4-6 are very different. It was easy to see that the philosophies of Plato, Christianity, & Kant were what Nietzsche is referring to in Stages 1-3 respectively. But, with the second trilogy, it is more difficult to ascertain who Nietzsche is referring too. The second trilogy exists within the historical period of theoretical nihilism, a period which we still exist in today. Theoretical nihilism is the devaluation of the highest values, i.e., the ascetic ideals of practical nihilism. It’s clear (to Nietzsche, at least) that upon reflection that these beliefs are nothing, that believing in them is a willing towards nothingness. Stage four is arguably the stage where the Death of God occurs.
Finally, it very likely in this second trilogy that Nietzsche is referring to his own philosophical development.
Let us continue.
Stage 4: Cock-Crow of Positivism
4. The real world—unattainable? Unattained at any rate, And if unattained also unknown. Consequently, also no redemption, no duty: how could we have a duty towards something unknown?
(The gray of dawn. First yawnings of reason. Cock-crow of positivism.)
If, as Kant argued, the real & true world is forever out of our grasp, then why bother even thinking about it. The best we can do is rely on our senses in the apparent world to guide us through life. The last sentence in the parenthetical, “Cock-crow of positivism” is probably the most pregnant sentence in this stage. The positivism of the 19th century is often attributed to French Philosopher Auguste Comte. The Stanford encyclopedia describes positivism as coming “closer & closer to truth, without reaching it. There is no place for absolute truth, but neither are there higher standards for the fixation of belief.”
In the apparent world, our senses, applied via the sciences are all that can give us any semblance of truth.
This stage fits with Nietzsche’s middle period, when he published the works Human All-Too-Human and Daybreak (“the grey of dawn” is a clear reference to Daybreak).
Nietzsche called scientific truths unpretentious and a sign of a higher culture when compared to metaphysical truths, because science achieved its truths through rigorous work. Nietzsche does not outright deny the existence of the noumenal world.
“It is true, there could be a metaphysical world; the absolute possibility of it is hardly to be disputed. We behold all things through the human head and cannot cut off this head; while the question nonetheless remains what of the world would still be there if one had cut it off. This is a purely scientific problem and one not very well calculated to bother people overmuch; but all that has hitherto made metaphysical assumptions valuable, terrible, delightful to them, all that has begotten these assumptions, is passion, error & self-deception, the worst of all possible methods of acquiring knowledge, not the best of all, have taught belief in them. When one has disclosed these methods as the foundation of all extant religions and metaphysical systems, one has refuted them! Then that possibility still remains over; but one can do absolutely nothing with it… for one could assert nothing at all of the metaphysical world except that it was a being-other, an inaccessible, incomprehensible being-other; it would be a thing with negative qualities. -Even if the existence of such a world were never so well demonstrated, it is certain that knowledge of it would be the most useless of all knowledge: more useless than even the chemical composition of water must be to the sailor in danger of shipwreck.”
Human All-To-Human a. 9
At the same time, Nietzsche saw scientific truths as undermining morality based in the transcendental. The way the world behaves has nothing whatsoever to do with morality. The world understood by science is neither good nor bad, and each scientific discovery destroys countless imaginary causalities morality supposedly effected upon the world. Ultimately, the moral holdovers of Christian asceticism appear as lies we can no longer tell ourselves.
Finally, when Nietzsche says the “first yawning of reason”, he’s likely referring to the fact that Kant died peacefully in his sleep. Metaphysical reason no longer has any work to do. Scientists do not study metaphysics, yet, they continue to believe a number of presuppositions which Kantian reason elaborated. What could science be hiding?
Stage 5: Plato Blushes
5. The ‘real world’–and idea no longer of any use, not even a duty any longer—an idea grown useless, superfluous, consequently a refuted idea: let us abolish it!
(Broad daylight; breakfast, return of cheerfulness and bons sens (common sense); Plato blushes for shame; all spirits run riot.)
Here, Nietzsche finally abolishes even the theoretical possibility of the noumenal world. The only world which exists is the world of appearances. We finally break our fasting of the apparent world for the real world.
But, with the abolition of the “true world” comes the abolition of the truth itself. Now, the truth is refuted. We live in a world full of false illusions and masks. Here, theoretical nihilism matures as the highest values are devalued into the fictions of the world of mere appearance. This is a negative relativism where all truths and morals are equally useless.
In stage four, the sciences still relied on the conception of the Truth as invented by Plato. The Truth is out there. We may never get it fully in our grasp in stage four, but it is still out there beyond our senses: an eternal truth. LET US ABOLISH IT!
Even the sciences become dubious to Nietzsche. He calls science a cult of untruth whose insight only provides “delusion & error as conditions of intelligent & sentient existence.” (GS a 107) Elsewhere, Nietzsche says “science at its best seeks most to keep us in this simplified, thoroughly artificial, suitably constructed and suitably falsified world.” (BGE a 24)
In stage 5, Plato blushes, an act which causes a physical change in him, and for Plato the Truth does not permit any change. Nietzsche even goes so far as to deny the truths of mathematics and logic.
In his aphorism, “Let us be on our Guard” in the Gay Science, Nietzsche denies that the cosmos is a living being, or a well-oiled machine, or eternal, or any other thing we could attribute to it. These are all puny, anthropomorphisms we have foisted on the world. On the contrary, Nietzsche says, “The general character of the world is to all eternity chaos; not by the absence of necessity, but in the sense of the absence of order, structure, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever else our aesthetic humanities are called.” (GS a 109)
The Forms which limited, now superfluous, now we spirits are no longer restricted by any form but maybe common sense (mere custom or habit), and run riot without these chains, even if our cheerfulness is merely a delusion.
Yet, the error is not over. We still have one more stage.
Stage 6: INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA
6. We have abolished the real world: what world is left? The apparent world perhaps?… But no! with the real world we have also abolished the apparent world!
(Mid-day; the moment of the shortest shadow; end of the longest error; zenith of mankind; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA)
The final stage; the stage where the longest error finally ends. This is Nietzsche’s most mature period. The philosophy of Thus Spake Zarathustra and On the Genealogy of Morals is the final stage.
The idea that the world we live in is merely apparent comes from the insistence that there is a true, real world somewhere else. The idea that the world of appearances is false and illusory again comes from the belief in another world which is real & true. The distinction between real & apparent is abolished, leaving only the world.
Without the real world and the Truth it founded, we have no reason to believe the world we live in is false. Nietzsche’s prophet Zarathustra is the meaning of the earth, of the only world there is, in its full positivity. We affirm the world fully. Contrary to Plato’s beliefs, the truth does change & it is a thing of this world.
‘The’ Truth, as understood by the ascetic ideal, does not exist. But ‘our’ truths do exist. In the final stage, Nietzsche’s perspectivism comes to the fore. There are many truths in our world; these truths are not equal; they differ in power, in utility, in strength. Truths exist as socially & culturally constructed. This understanding allows us to answer ‘our’ truths with solutions in our world. Nietzsche’s answer to understanding ‘our’ truths is the transvaluation of all values. Nietzsche overcomes the negative relativism from stage five.
Unlike Kant, who posits there is a single, universally applicable system of morality (Nietzsche at one point questions how everyone, everywhere in the world could possibly all know of such a thing), Nietzsche claims we must understand our own truths and our own morals, so that we may overcome them. For that is the meaning of life: the eternally recurring command to overcome oneself. We create our own boundaries by our ability to overcome them or not.
Our world is agonistic, from the Ancient Greek word “agon” which means conflict. Our world of becoming is one of constant conflict & overcoming. To overcome is to affirm one’s existence over & over again in our world.
