Kriterion vol.3 no.se Belo Horizonte 2007 The argument of the knowledge creator in Nietzsche Evaldo Sampaio Graduate Philosophy student at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais , Belo Horizonte, Brazil. [email protected] ABSTRACT This essay proposes to identify the argument of the knowledge creator in Nietzsche's philosophy. Based on this, it is neither intended to reduce the argument to Nietzsche`s, nor the latter to the former. Identifying them in this study means to lead them to converge into elements which make them almost undistinguished, claiming that such similarity already predicts their differences. It is planned with such procedure to intensify the creative aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy, as well as to suggest a new scope for our intellectual capacity by taking a connection between knowing and creating as a matter of human condition itself. Keywords: Knowledge; Maker's Argument; Friedrich Nietzsche To Ivan Domingues, friend and knowledge creator. In this article I intend to discuss the argument of the knowledge creator in Nietzsche. First of all, I present the argument, then, I identify it - direct or indirectly - in a selection of passages scattered throughout Nietzsche's work. I am well aware that such passages belong to specific contexts that cannot be reduced to one another; nevertheless, I propose to unify them methodologically, interpreting them from the standpoint of the relation between language and representation . Such choice is due to the conjecture according to which the relation between language and representation is a privileged way to clarify what Nietzsche has to say about knowledge, as well as to justify why knowledge is and must be creative. The argument of the knowledge creator consists in the thesis that the only thing we can effectively know about reality is what we create ourselves. To Vico, who supposedly was the first one to formulate this argument explicitly, this meant the superiority of human sciences over natural sciences. Once nature is not our creation, only an approximate and hypothetical knowledge can be attributed to natural sciences. The same could not be said of human sciences, whose object is a product of conventions and institutional agreements and could be fully known. 1 1 The formulation of the argument of the knowledge creator here presented follows Ivan Domingues in his Epistemologia das Ciências Humanas. Tomo I. São Paulo: Ed. Loyola, 2004, part I, chapter 1. 1 This evaluation presupposes (a) difference and lack of symmetry between objects themselves and as they present themselves to us, and (b) difference and internal asymmetry among objects as they present themselves to us. We cover reality with our representations and only know it that way, whatever cannot be represented being, therefore, unknowable. Among those that become objects of knowledge, some are projected into reality from our representations, while others are apprehended by them. The objects that are apprehended by representations, because they are distinct from them, do not become used up in the representable; those that share the same nature with representations - that is, those that are also conceptual creations - can be fully known. Hence the fact that the knowledge of natural phenomena, only apprehendable by our representations, is approximate and hypothetical, while the knowledge of social phenomena, which share the same status with our representations, can be complete. There are variants of the argument that differ essentially from Vico's original formulation because they adopt other meanings for terms such as "knowledge" and "reality", besides diverging as to the criteria used to determine the truth value of propositions, as well as to what types of representations can only be known insofar as we create them. 2 For some of these variants there is also certain instability concerning the term "creation" as we come across questions such as "who creates?", "how do they create?" and "where do they create from?". I warn that we should not underestimate the deep changes that the argument, in its countless variations, brings to the theory of knowledge. When we take "knowing" and "creating" as co-extensive, a whole set of issues, considered fundamental so far, become irrelevant or even pseudo-problems. Note, for example, the so called "Münchhausen Trilemma". According to it, any pretension to founding a theory philosophically, that is, to determining a starting point in the proof chain of a given proposition, fails because it implies either (a) a regression to infinite, (b) an arbitrary choice, or (c) a petitio principii .3 The trilemma is an attempt at responding to the project of establishing an inexorable and legitimate foundation to knowledge, or showing the impossibility of doing it. It is as if knowledge were a building that is kept together at its base; once this base is discovered, what supports the whole is discovered likewise, that is, what gives it security and stability. Therefore, this base cannot be unstable - assuming it is so, one falls back on to moderate skepticism and, if one considers that the base does not exist, one seems to adopt radical skepticism. What increases the difficulties described by the trilemma is the belief that the determination of a starting point in the chain of proof of a given proposition must have an epistemological character distinct from the proposition itself. The epistemic distinction would reflect an ontological difference - the starting point would be the representation of a datum , while the other formulations of the chain of proof would be like its effects, therefore, different from its cause. In other words, the starting point would not be a representation projected into reality, but rather a representation apprehended instantly from reality. Such assumption is incompatible with a model that is implicit in the creator's argument, for, if one takes knowledge as "creation", a supposed datum would already be a representation, that is, the delimitation of what can be known in something that eludes full apprehension. Since one only knows what is created and one creates all that is known, no instance beyond creation belongs to what we know. Assuming the subject is the demiurge of his own knowledge, one admits as 2 One of these variants is presented by Bernardo Oliveira (Francis Bacon e a Fundamentação da Ciência como Tecnologia . Belo Horizonte: Ed. UFMG, 2002, chap. 9) who, referring to Vico's suggestion as the first explicit presentation of the creator's argument, discusses its relevance, specially in Francis Bacon, focusing on the changes implied by its adoption to the traditional opposition between episteme and techne. 3 The authorship of the Münchhausen trilemma, as well as a study of some of its main consequences, was attributed to Hans Albert ( Tratado da razão prática. Rio de Janeiro: Tempo Brasileiro, 1976). However, it is known that the mentioned trilemma restores three arguments from those which form the pentalemma originally developed by Agrippa, quoted explicitly by Diogenes Laertius ( Vida e Obra dos Filósofos Ilustres - Lives and Opinions of eminent philosophers, IX, 88-89) and by Sextus Empiricus (Hipotiposes Pirrônicas - Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 164-170) as a part of the skeptical strategies to obtain judgment suspension. 2 well that the referred ontological difference, even if it is the case, is irrelevant to what is known. The problem which leads us to the trilemma, in strict sense, does not even present itself to the knowledge creator. Taking into account that such question is spread out in our culture and has dominated a significant part of modern epistemology, 4 one can imagine the extent of the philosophical displacement immanent to the creator's argument. 5 Even metaphysical notions seem to acquire another dimension when they are presented next to the argument. Take, for example, the idea of self cause. Causa sui was a current expression among scholastic theologists and philosophers. 6 One says that something is the cause of itself if it came into existence and keeps itself in existence by itself alone, that is, if it is its only and fundamental cause of existence. Especially from the 19th century on, the term "existence" acquired an ambiguity that has taken it beyond the limits of traditional ontology, indicating, from another perspective, an investigation about human condition itself. 7 The question about the existence of x could also be interpreted as a question on the meaning of the existence of x. On this other level, saying that something is the cause of itself would consist in stating that one is the only factor directly responsible for one's existential condition, that is, for the meaning of one's life. Transferred to this scope, the knowledge creator's argument would say, then, that man gives himself his own existence, that is, he creates the meaning of his own existence. This seems to me to be the first shift internal to the creator's argument that Nietzsche's philosophy suggests. In the self-critical preface he had published in the second edition of The Birth of Tragedy , his first masterpiece, it is stated that “this audacious book dared to tackle for the first time: to look at science in the perspective of an artist, but at art in that of life”. 8 This is the moment when the discovery of what was then designated as “the problem of science itself” is revealed, namely: what is the value of knowledge for Life? This problem, it is reported, cannot be recognized in the field of science itself, hence the reason to submit it to another instance, in this case, art, and this, in its turn, to an even more elementary level. In a temporary and schematic way, one can state that Nietzsche's strategy consists in taking both science and art as symptoms of a way of life.