Suffering truth
Subtitle: interpretation, religion, and science in Nietzsche and Freud (Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud)
By: by William Henry Wahl.
Published: 2006
Language: eng
Number of pages: 279
ISBN-13: 9780494160428
Description: Nietzsche's contention that objective truth is a fiction rooted in forgetting our metaphorical relation to the world seeks to show that knowledge beyond human motives, needs, and concerns is almost unimaginable. He thereby connects an identification between Truth and the 'Given', that is, a belief that language, perception, and sensation are adequate to the world, with the failing of human vanity. Asserting the problematic nature of 'self-evidence' on a number of fronts, Nietzsche emphasizes our interpretive investment in knowledge as well as its moral component. After all, truth amounts to what we believe ought to be true according to a particular set of values. On this basis, he argues that knowledge is inseparable from psychological motivations in relation to potential suffering. Nietzsche thus takes the reliance on metaphysical modes of interpretation, which exaggerate the significance of suffering (to our own detriment), as a crucial developmental problem. Attempting to transform this relation with a view to human flourishing and affirmation, Nietzsche proposes that furthering our interpretive maturation is an unavoidable moral and psychological task. While he finds the critique of metaphysical and epistemological foundations vital, so too is the creation of new cultural values. The guiding paradigm of these values is an interpretive health or strength directly tied to the capacity to hold a broad range of truths and perspectives. This greater interpretive complexity and freedom not only has much in common with Freud's epistemological views, it also reflects his conception of health and his therapeutic vision. In fact, few have emphasized the degree to which Freud's scientific point of departure is qualified by reservations about the limits of what is knowable. While such discretion regarding knowledge places Freud outside of the current scientific mainstream, in developmental terms, his position represents a level of sophistication modern science has neither reached nor come to appreciate. Using examples from scientific and philosophical positivism on the one hand, and the role of anxiety in psychoanalysis on the other, I argue that a facile adoption of science as a social redeemer of suffering does little to advance our psychological, interpretive, or cultural well-being.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-07, Section: A, page: 2617.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2006.

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