Rocco D’Ambrosca: 05/20/2009
Everyday we depend upon science for its many discoveries, explanations, and principles that allow the modern world to exist. We take our understanding of this world and our position within it completely for granted. Somehow we feel that we have a right and entitlement to control and understand the world around us. This obsessive need to understand everything and have control of our world and ourselves is one of the principle topics of Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. Nietzsche attacks this sentiment of entitlement believing that the knowledge we gain from science is not as certain as we think it is. He attacks science, cause and effect, consciousness, religion, morality, knowledge, and teleology. He also investigates truth and its connection to consciousness and our perception of the world. Nietzsche’s critiques of specific disciplines and our perceptual view of truth, based on consciousness, in The Gay Science will be of focus here with connections to Nietzsche’s On Truth and Lies in a NonMoral Sense and Sigmund Freud’s The Unconscious from General Psychological Theory.
Nietzsche begins his laundry list of critiques with teleology. He comments on the evolution of man to begin his broader attack on science saying, “Gradually, man has become a fantastic animal that has to fulfill one more condition of existence than any other animal: man has to believe, to know, from time to time why he exists; his race cannot flourish without a periodic trust in life – without faith in reason in life” (GS p75). It’s this obsession to know why we are here, to know how we got here, to know what our purpose is that drives science. Nietzsche attacks this directly, himself trying to understand why man strives for this understanding instead of just being like all the other creatures. Why can’t man be happy as he is, why must he try and understand everything with such certainty?
The answer that Nietzsche most quickly comes to is that man has consciousness. But he finds this answer unsatisfactory saying, “This ridiculous overestimation and misunderstanding of consciousness has the very useful consequence that it prevents an all too fast development of consciousness. Believing that they possess consciousness, men have not exerted themselves very much to acquire it; and things haven’t changed much in this respect. To this day the task of incorporating knowledge and making it instinctive is only beginning to dawn on the human eye and is not yet clearly discernible; it is a task that is seen only by those who have comprehended that so far we have incorporated only our errors and that all our consciousness relates to errors” (GS p85). Again Nietzsche is making reference to the way we process and understand our world, but now going directly to the source: consciousness.
Consciousness, as both Nietzsche and science claim, is what makes us human. We are aware or conscious of ourselves, a trait not shared by any other known animal on the planet or otherwise. Nietzsche argues that just because we have consciousness doesn’t mean we earned it or are as great as we believe ourselves to be. We feel as though we earned this apparent superiority and therefore have the right of dominion over the world; an entitlement to understand and control things. Nietzsche attempts to explain how we obtained consciousness saying, “Consciousness has developed only under the pressure of the need for communication; that from the start it was needed and useful only between human beings (particularly between those who commanded and those who obeyed); and that it also developed only in proportion to the degree of this utility. Consciousness is really only a net of communication between human beings; it is only as such that it had to develop; a solitary human being who lived like a beast of prey would not have needed it. That our actions, thoughts, feelings, and movements enter our own consciousness – at least a part of them – that is the result of a “must” that for a terribly long time lorded it over man. As the most endangered animal, he needed help and protection, he needed his peers, he had to learn to express his distress and to make himself understood; and for all of this he needed “consciousness” first of all, he needed to “know” himself what distressed him, he needed to “know” how he felt, he needed to “know” what he thought. For, to say it once more: Man, like every living being, thinks continually without knowing it; the thinking that rises to consciousness is only the smallest part of all this – the most superficial and worst part – for only this conscious thinking takes the form of words, which is to say signs of communication, and this fact uncovers the origin of consciousness” (GS p298-99). It is this definition and explanation of consciousness that Nietzsche uses to attack our obsession to understand everything around us through science. Nietzsche claims that we have a false belief that we even have the capability to truly understand things. Man believes he can know things and should be able to know things because he possesses consciousness. Nietzsche attacks this assertion by claiming that we only have consciousness out of our need to communicate for survival. Nietzsche asserts that consciousness is only capable of processing information and communicating it to another on very basic terms and was never developed to understand the great mysteries of the universe.
Sigmund Freud confirms Nietzsche’s view saying, “In psychoanalysis there is no choice for us but to declare mental processes to be in themselves unconscious, and to compare the perception of them by consciousness with the perception of the outside world through the sense-organs; we even hope to extract some fresh knowledge from the comparison. The psychoanalytic assumption of unconscious mental activity appears to us, on the one hand, a further development of that primitive animism which caused our own consciousness to be an extension of the corrections begun by Kant in regard to our views on external perception. Just as Kant warned us not to overlook the fact that our perception is subjectively conditioned and must not be regarded as identical with the phenomena perceived but never really discerned, so psychoanalysis bids us not to set conscious perception in the place of the unconscious mental process which is its object” (U p121). Freud is agreeing with Nietzsche’s assertion that most of our time is spent in the unconscious just operating like any other animal and that our conscious mind only enters to communicate things.
When we walk, eat, swim, climb, etc we never use our conscious mind as it is not needed. We only use our conscious mind to process information into words and concepts to be communicated to others. These words and concepts are only a representation of the truth and not the reality. Our use of metaphors and concepts are only our conscious mind’s symbolic representation of the real. It is from this stance that Nietzsche attacks science and knowledge. Nietzsche calls truth, “A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and; anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions – they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins” (TL p3). Nietzsche continues, “From the sense that once is obliged to designate one this as “red”, another as “cold”, and a third as “mute”, there arises a moral impulse in regard to truth” (TL p3). Nietzsche is arguing that this totally arbitrary labeling and explanatory system is no more the truth than any other arbitrary labeling and explanatory system. Language for example, the liquid that fills our oceans and seas, is it H20 as science calls it, is it aqua as the Italians call it, or is water as the English call it? The real truth comes in naked perception. Put bluntly, who understands this world and universe the most, Christ and Buddha or Einstein and Hawking?
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