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July 12, 2004
This article by Gary Madison captures Nietzsche's radical challenge to the modern philosophical tradition.
Madison argues that modern philosophy was infatuated with modern natural science (ie., mathematical physics). Madison says:
"The concept of Science is a Platonic invention, but it underwent a new twist at the beginning of modern times with the emergence of mathematical, experimental science of the Galilean sort. Modern philosophy can be said to have begun when, bedazzled by this new development, philosophers took the new science as the supreme model of genuine, foundational knowledge. They were, ever afterwards, to labor in the shadow cast by this great Idol. Even the "free thinking," godless philosophers of late modernity continued to pay a sort of religious hommage to it."
That tradition certainly existed in Australian philosophy ----with the Australian materialism and the Marxists. Most continental philosophy was deemed to be hostile to science. If it was not a simple irrationalism opposed to the scientific enlightenment, then it was deemed to have made the aesthetic turn to literature and art (eg., Nietzsche) and so was not philosophy.
Pretty crude stuff.
Madison shows that Nietzsche directed his critique of Platonic science at the assumption that science represents reality. It does so by making a distinction between a "true" (real) and an "apparent" (appearance) world. With Hegel and Marx the apperances become inversions of the real world. But science could pierce through the illusory inversion to grasp the essential dynamics and laws of motion.
Why not dump the distinction? Why not dump the true and apparent world? What then? We are left with interpretation. Madison says that is Nietzsche's legacy.
What have people done with that legacy? Apart from denouncing it as leading to relativism and nihilism etc etc.
Rorty says it highlights the bankruptcy of traditional, foundationalist philosophy---the whole epistemological project of modernity-- what he calls "epistemology centered philosophy." This opens the door to setting aside epistemologically centered philosophy and doing something else, which he called hermeneutics.
Hence we have an alternative way of doing philosophy; one based on philosophy being part of the humanities. Such a philosophy (as a pratical reason) is concerned with socially sanctioned narration, story-telling and the interpretation of texts and historical meanings.
That is fairly old stuff-----mid 20th century.Where to now?
In postmodernity I would argue that such a philosophy would be concerned with our emergency technology including the digital media, the genetic shaping of life sciences, techoscience (science+industry) and the way that bio-technology is shaping our life. There, in the genetics of the life industries lies the perfectibility of the human body.
On this account nihilism is the cultural logic of a technological society
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