A Free Left Blog

Nietzsche gets blamed for a lot of things, not least nihilism and relativism. This is unfair, but life is unfair. As the philosopher John Gray pointed out in a talk at the London School of Economics on 25th February, a writer has little or no control over how others interpret and appropriate their writings, not least if they are dead. On nihilism and relativism, people often misunderstand Nietzsche for having advocated what amounts to these things. But this wasn’t the case. He was rather describing what he thought had happened as historical development, largely from Christianity’s emphasis on truth which undermined itself, and philosophers like Hume and Kant exposing the insecure foundations of religion (and indeed of much positive philosophy). A portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche Martin Heidegger explained in one of his lecture courses on Nietzsche, ‘The phrase “God is dead” is not an atheistic proclamation: it is a formula for the fundamental experience of an even...

Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is a hugely impressive (but fiendishly difficult) treatment of our knowledge and ignorance. One of its more clear and plainly-written segments comes in a Note to a section entitled: ‘ The Transcendental Ideal ’. In this, Kant writes: “ The investigations and calculations of astronomers have taught us much that is wonderful; but the most important lesson we have received from them is the discovery of the abyss of our ignorance in relation to the universe – an ignorance, the magnitude of which reason, without the information thus derived, could never have conceived. This discovery of our deficiencies must produce a great change in the determination of the aims of human reason.” There is a crucial point here for all of us, that the deficiencies in our claims to knowledge are as much if not more important than all our achievements. Too often we assume that our knowledge is all-pervading or at least at some point in the futu...