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from Section 1 - The Classical Greeks
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
The ascertaining of “truth” and “untruth,” the ascertaining of facts in general, is fundamentally different from creative positing, from forming, shaping, overcoming, willing, such as is of the essence of philosophy.
(WP §605)In this article I attempt to demonstrate that Nietzsche effectively criticizes Aristotle's championing of the primacy of “propositional discourse” as expounded in Book 4 of his Metaphysics. I take the primacy of propositional discourse to be the notion that the “proper” mode of philosophizing aims to establish true propositions about existence, knowledge, and the human being, through the application of rule-based procedures. The characteristic concern with rules, propriety, and necessity means that propositional discourse has a policing relationship with other modes of enquiry, arrogating to itself the power to decide which of them, if any, are “legitimate.”
Nietzsche's criticism bites in several places, all of which are crucial to the conceptual architectonic of propositional discourse, but the treatment of them all is beyond the scope of this short article. I shall therefore focus on three instances where the relationship to Aristotle's version of propositional discourse is relatively clear. First, I treat Nietzsche's questioning of the willingness to halt the regress of questioning that is likely to accompany any quest for foundations for “proper” discourse which will guarantee its propriety. (In Aristotle's case, questioning stops at the law of contradiction, a law which Nietzsche does not always feel obliged to obey.)
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