Sonya08: переводы

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→An American philosopher who called for something similar was William James (1842-1910). In James's voluntaristic philoso¬phy, Pragmatism, truth is thought of as belief that works, belief that leads to fruitful and satisfying consequences. If you want to know whether a particular belief or hypothesis that you are enter¬taining is true, be attentive to the consequences of the belief. If the consequences—in attitudes, in actions, and in the products of at¬titudes and actions—are good, if they are somehow satisfying, then you can say that the proposed belief is true; and if the conse¬quences are not satisfying, you can say that the proposed belief is false. If later you find that a fruitful belief has become a fruitless or destructive one or, vice versa, a fruitless or destructive belief has become a fruitful one, you can say that the truth has changed. The idea that truth changes needn't be a source of intellectual embar¬rassment. Truth isn't to be thought of as some sort of eternal quality that certain beliefs have and others don't; it is to be thought of as something that happens (or fails to happen) to a belief as the consequences of the belief get played out. Truth is a process.

→initiated in the ancient Greek world (on Phaedrus' reading) by the likes of Plato and Aristotle (see ZMM, pp. 342-345) and finalized in the modern scientific era, must be overcome. "The dictum that Science and its offspring, technology, are 'value free,' that is, 'qual¬ity free,' has got to go" (ZMM, p. 231). What is needed is an "expansion of reason" (ZMM, p. 150) in which the will's orien¬tation to Quality is given a central place—a replacement of a nar¬rowly rationalistic or empiricistic theory of knowledge with a more voluntaristic one.

→In addition to saying that you can't carry out the pursuit of truth simply on the basis of a detached and disinterested will-to-truth, a voluntarist might be saying that you shouldn't attempt to do so. The attempt is misguided and inhuman. The search for knowl¬edge should be carried out within the context of human values, and knowledge itself should be seen as appropriately, as well as neces¬sarily, value-laden. This insistence is a central and recurrent theme of ZMM. The "genetic defect" at the heart of Western rationality, a defect that produces a "structure of reason" mat is "emotionally hollow, esthetically meaningless and spiritually empty" {ZMM, p. 102) resides in the divorce of reason from value. That divorce,

→cial chaos" (ZMM, p. 101). What was the problem with scientific method? Phaedrus would later see, though he didn't quite put it this way, that in the pursuit of knowledge, scientific or nonscien-tific, a will to Quality is needed to complement and guide the will to truth. A detached will-to-truth, devoid of Quality awareness, is incapable of getting where it wants to go (unless with Nietzsche you suppose that such a will is really a disguised form of a death wish—in which case, the will to truth may well get its wish).

→At this point, you might consider how Phaedrus' laboratory experience contributed to his break with mainstream rational thought and launched him on his philosophical journey "in pursuit of the ghost of rationality itself" (ZMM, p. 97). He discovered in the lab that hypotheses tended to increase rather than decrease as they were being tested. He thus came to see that scientific method, instead of moving us toward a settling of truth,claims, moves us away "from single absolute truths to multiple, indeterminate, rel¬ative ones" and thereby contributes to rather than eliminates "so-

→A classic voluntarist epistemology is that of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Nietzsche held that the "will to power" is at the heart of knowledge. In seeking and attaining knowledge, the knower is seeking and attaining ways of looking at things and talking about things that increase the knower's capacities of self-expansion, full functioning, and practical control. (By "power" Nietzsche meant primarily such capacities rather than the domi¬nation by one individual or group of another individual or group— diough, of course, the drive to increase such capacities can frequently express itself in a drive toward domination.) As a knower, you might claim that your pursuit of knowledge is a detached pursuit of truth for trudi's sake, but in fact, Nietzsche would say, your motivation is less pure than you think it is. The will to power both motivates your search and guides your selection of "facts" and interpretations along the way. If you object that you are conscious of a will to truth but not conscious of a will to power, Nietzsche can respond (as, more generally, any voluntarist tends to respond) that the primary motive for knowing needn't be something of which you are fully conscious—the will can work subtly and in subconscious ways. If you further object that some people claim to know things that make them feel humble, even despicable, rather than proud and powerful, Nietzsche can re¬spond that even that sort of knowledge can mask a secret will to power. Perhaps these humble knowers believe diat their accep¬tance of a humbling self-picture or world picture will eventually bring them a reward and a position of prominence. Perhaps, too, they secredy bear resentment toward the world's "winners" and they take self-aggrandizing glee—secretly or not so secretly—in the belief that such winners will eventually be brought low. (Nietzsche did in fact interpret Christianity alone these lines.)

→the vt>luntarist camp rather than within it—is "truth." If you say that the will to truth is a key element in the pursuit and attainment of knowledge, you've not said anything that an empiricist or a rationalist or an intellectualist has to deny. Empiricists, rational¬ists, and intellectualists can all say that the human' knower is gripped by the will to truth and hence motivated to direct attention to sensory observations or to the rational manipulation of symbols or to the intellectual penetration of data. The voluntarist goes beyond this—or beneath it—and claims that a will to something else is the primary element, the chief motivator and guide, in die attainment of "knowledge."

→What are you doing when you are knowing? If you say that what you are primarily doing is experiencing, you can be labeled an "empiricist." If you say that what you are primarily doing is using reason in one way or another, you can be labeled a "rationalist." If you say that what you are primarily doing is willing or choosing or selecting, consciously or subconsciously, you can be labeled a "voluntarist." If you say that you are primarily feeling, you are an "emotivist." If you say that you are primarily intuiting, you are an "intuitionist." The list could go on.