[CENTRAAL] Het grote F&L video topic #3

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Op maandag 23 september 2024 19:35 schreef Akathisia het volgende:

Nietzsche's Greatest Fear is Coming True...

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@satireofcircumstance6458
4 days ago

Kant didn't claim to "know" the Thing-in-itself, or be able to know it, the postulation of a Thing-in-itself was more of a negative inference. That is, if, by Kant's hypothesis, we can only know objects mediately as mental "representations" given to us via first, the senses and secondarily, the application of the categories of the understanding to bare sense data, and we can only know anything about non-mental reality to the degree that it conforms to the a priori conditions of any possible experience, then anything that doesn't conform to these conditions constitutes the unknowable (but to Kant, inferable) Thing-in-itself transcending all possible experience.

Of course, later German Idealists went further and rejected the Thing-in-itself outright, simply because it was unknowable and therefore inferring its existence was unjustifiable. If all we can know is mental, subject-dependent and experiential, then there's no reason to posit an "outside" world beyond the mental, except as an article of faith.

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Interviewer: Would you say that pure beauty exists? I think I know the answer, but...

Rorty: I think the Platonic emphasis on purity... The emphasis on purity seems to me characteristic of what Nietzsche called "the ascetic priest", and a bad thing. And it was an impulse I felt very strongly when I was young. And then as I went along I began writing essays against the very idea of purity. I began to agree with Freud and Nietzsche that the quest for purity was.... sick.

Interviewer: Why?

Rorty: There's something sado-masochistic about it. I can't explain it very well. But Freud and Nietzsche are always saying: "beware of the man who wants purity. Keep out of his way. These people are dangerous". And they're right! There's a kind of ruthlessness that comes from this desire, that I think is perfectly real. I don't, for instance, think purity played any role in Nabokov's life. I don't think that was one of his ideals. There's nothing ascetic about him.

Interviewer: So, pure beauty?

Rorty: It's, uh... Pure anything seems to me...

Interviewer: A trap leading to sentimentalism?

Rorty: I can't distinguish it from... The philosophical view which I've come to adopt and which I think of as ingredient in pragamtism is: everything is what it is in virtue of its relationship to everything else. You can't and shouldn't try to capture x; in it's purity; because there isn't anything to x except for those relationships.So whenever I think about the subject of purity I sort of translate it into metaphysical terms, and contrast: the metaphysical quest for purity, the ineffability of God, the ineffability of the Platonic forms, the non-relationality, the unexpressibility, the unrepresentability and so forth. I contrast this as the frantic efforts of the ascetic priest to cleanse himself, with what Freud thought of as the healthier attitude that, we're all dirty, we always will be dirty, and it doesn't matter, you know...