No end to skepticism. Are we what we are?
Can we ever understand Nietzsche? By his own logic, how can we ever see what he saw through his own eyes? How can we understand what he understood? The human experience is unique and full of different personal moments that can never be re-created. So how can we say we’ve seen the original thing named a ‘leaf’? Apparently it is just blasphemous and illogical to lie and say you’ve seen a leaf! And that is just a tiny tip of the iceberg of an ever-growing mountain of lies called language that endlessly spouts non-genuine references to long forgotten pieces of history.
Why can’t we say we saw a leaf? We are born with just five known senses, and if we cannot trust what we hear or make connections in different things we see, then what good do they do us? These abilities are all that we have to distinguish between things. We need these senses to communicate, and thus, will need to use metaphors to differentiate between things. If I ate what looked like an apple yesterday, and today acquire one that looks and feels very much like yesterday’s, can I trust my senses and bite into it? Is it a lie for someone to sell me an ‘apple,’ if it is not the one I had yesterday? We know the form well enough to distinguish it. We don’t need for everything to be an exact carbon copy of another for them to share a name. If this was the case then civilization could never succeed.
To question every motive in this way is skepticism taken to the extreme. It must have taken many, many moments of pure lunacy and fits of insanity for Nietzsche to piece together ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’. And if these were his true thoughts, carried about day by day, I would say he was an irrational hypocrite. Would he recognize the human form enough to think that there was anyone else in the world like him? Since he could piece together a work of literature using a language he himself did not create, I believe he would. Perhaps knowledge is limited, and doomed to die out time and time again through endless supernovas, but such pessimism doesn’t really fit with a man who believed in evolution. If, through millions of years, an organism could evolve, couldn’t knowledge stand a chance at survival? Wouldn’t there be a chance to find some absolute truth? There are many unknowns in this world. Over time, and through new perspective, these unknowns will have a chance at being discovered.
Like Nietzsche says, we don’t know what motivates us to tell what is true, or what is moral. Perhaps, to those that feel the need to tell truth, they are compelled to do so because it is in some way for personal gain, or because it is the most favorable option. A lie against us is not something we care about if there is no negative consequence, but should there be some negative consequence, then we are compelled to fight against a lie. Maybe there is no truth, and we do what we do solely for personal gain. Lies and truths can be upheld for long periods of time, but I believe lies are dethroned more often than truths. If this is true, then there really must be some drive in humanity for truth. It might be more beneficial to us all, and we can feel that we can grow from it. Science is supposed to be some search for truth, and has proven beneficial to us. Perhaps over time, this search for truth can lead our knowledge to survive and flourish.
