Wednesday, February 25, 2015

HOMO IRRATIONALIS


This entry may serve as an illustration of the point made in the earlier entry Digging, Mining, Undermining.

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Nietzsche the irrationalist. I love it. Where else could irrationalism be better rationalized than in the following two aphoristic entries of his Morgenröte?---

99. WHEREIN WE ARE ALL IRRATIONAL. We still continue to draw conclusions from judgments that we consider as false, or doctrines in which we no longer believe, through our feelings.

123. REASON. How did reason come into the world? As is only proper, in an irrational manner: that is, by accident. We shall have to guess at this accident as a riddle.

In the first aphorism, he says that are allegedly rational judgments are inevitably affected by our irrational feelings. This is first-rate psychology! By the same token, all philosophy, even the most rationalistic, is also subjective and ergo irrational.

As for the second aphorism (I have purposely juxtaposed them in this manner), Nietzsche mentions a riddle here, and I will clarify this as a logical riddle, whose answer can be expressed in the following logical form:

From Morgenröte #99 follows Morgenröte 123.

I am sure that the conundrum is no longer a riddle, when thus formally expressed.

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