Modelos Propuestos

“[I]t is by borrowing from the structure ‘world’ [la structure monde] that is constituted for us the universe of truth and of thought [l’univers de la vérité et de la pensée]”

Merleau-Ponty, VI, 13/29.18

“The repudiated world versus an artificially built ‘true,' ‘valuable’ one.—Finally: one discovers of what material one has built the ‘true world’ and now all one has left is the repudiated world”

Nietzsche, WP 37 [Spring-Fall 1887].

18 _{t.a. See also Résumés de cours, 168-9 on the “ground” (“ Boden” ) “ étant le fonds sur lequel}

se détache tout repos et tout mouvement.” this argument, according to which science is always secondary, is strikingly already put forward in the very article where the “origin of truth” is first mentioned. In a note, again, Merleau-Ponty praises Bergson for having “perfectly defined the metaphysical approach of the world” as “the deliberate exploration of this world prior to the object of science to which science refers”. As will be discussed later, the context of the article leaves no doubt that “metaphysical” qualifies the project Merleau-Ponty is assigning to himself. (SNS, “the metaphysical in Man” 97 note #15/118, note # 2)

The view that “there is no truth”19 is of course central to both Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty’s philosophies. Yet, it is almost a triviality to say that criticising truth is a somewhat paradoxical thing to do because it involves that one tells the truth against truth. The sheer rejection of truth is insufficient because it dispenses with an account of the phenomenon of belief whilst at the same time (because it presents itself as true) confirming it. This paradox means that we must think of truth as having two guises. Firstly, there is a truth that is rejected: it is error. Secondly, there is the truth which remains, even in the refutation of truth: it is what I shall call the ‘phenomenon of truth.'

Let me clarify this. For both philosophers, a belief in X is a taking-X-to- be-true and a taking-X-to-be-true is a taking-X-to-be-exemplified in reality.20 Both thinkers see the truth of X as the predication of X to be ‘like’ what we experience, that is to say, reality. This means that even if there is no truth, the concept of truth has meaning, it denotes a fundamentally compelling experience of reality.21 It is this experience which gives their meaning to truth-claims.

19 _{For example, Nietzsche, WP, 13, [Spring-Fall 1887]}

20 _{Let me stress that both Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty’s critiques of truth are critiques of truth} qua correspondence. This has been covered convincingly in the past, and I think we can convince ourselves of this by recalling that their critiques of truth are always related to the critique of the thing-in-itself. One sufficient example is Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990. Even though I disagree with Clark’s account on several key issues which I shall discuss in Chapter One, I remain convinced by her overall arugment that Nietzsche conceives of truth as correspondence.

Merleau-Ponty calls this primary experience the ‘origin of truth’ and Nietzsche calls it the experience of the ‘only’ or ‘repudiated’ world, the world of experience. Thus, all beliefs contain a reference to this ground of reality; they are instances of the ‘phenomenon of truth.' This phenomenon is a faktum which cannot be refuted. The critique of truth means not that truth does not exist (it exists as a phenomenon—the belief in truth), but that it is erroneous. Here, we encounter a disjunction of truth and reality: belief in truth is erroneous, yet it is

real, it is grounded in experience. If truth is an error, we must ask ourselves how error is possible in reality. Here, we are on ontological ground. The task is to include error among the real possibilities of Being22. How must we think of Being so as to include within it the possibility of error?

Consider for example Nietzsche’s conundrum:

“ And if this moral judging and discontent with the real were indeed, as has been claimed, an ineradicable instinct, might that instinct not then be one of the ineradicable stupidities or indeed presumptions of our species? –But by saying this we’re doing exactly what we rebuke: the standpoint of desirability, of unwarrantedly playing the judge, is part of the character of the course of things” 23

This prompts the question: “What is a belief? How does it originate? Every belief is a holding-to-be-true”24. The reality of beliefs (even though they

22 _{In the whole of the thesis, I shall capitalise the ‘b’ of ‘Being’ when it refers to the object of}

ontological inquiries. I shall not capitalise it (mainly in the Nietzsche sections), when it refers to the fact of being or the being of such and such singular being. I shall use the plural ‘beings,’ without capitalisation, to designate singular ontic objects. This does not apply to quotations, where I maintain the original spelling.

23 _{VII, [62] Late 1886-Spring 1887.} 24 _{XI [41] Fall 1887.}

are erroneous) cannot be rejected, it prompts the question of its possibility. Merleau-Ponty states the question in even clearer terms:

“If reflection is to justify itself as reflection, that is to say, as progress towards the truth, it must not merely put one view of the world in place of another, it must show us how the naive view of the world is included in and transcended by the sophisticated one [la vue réfléchie].”25

Here Merleau-Ponty, like Nietzsche, seeks to ‘include’ errors within his view of reality. I shall refer to this question—that is to say, the question of the ground of truth as error—as ‘the question of truth.'