It is always a pleasure to get a challenge from a professional philosopher who appreciates the intricacies of the issues and knows the moves. The comments below address things I say here. My responses are in blue.
A few questions about this idea:
"As Nietzsche saw, if there is no God, then there is no truth. And if no truth, then no intrinsic intelligibility. Next stop: perspectivism, Nietzsche's central epistemological doctrine."
1) Suppose that if p, nothing is true. Does that make sense? Surely whatever p is, if p then at least p itself is true.
BV: What you are saying is something I agree with, namely, that it is incoherent, indeed self-refuting, to maintain that nothing is true. For either it is true that nothing is true or it is is false. (Assume Bivalence to keep it simple.) If true, then false. If false, then false. Therefore, necessarily false.
Now could it be true that if there is no God, then there is no truth? Easily. A true conditional can have a false antecedent and a false consequent. We have just seen that the consequent is false, indeed, necessarily false. That the antecedent is true is not excluded by anything we know. So assume it true. Where's the problem?
2) A related problem: How do we understand or reason about anything in some scenario where, supposedly, nothing is true? How do we understand things like 'if ... then ...' except in terms of what is or would be true given the truth of the antecedent?
BV: Well, can't we reason about incoherent ideas, among them necessarily false propositions? Consider the following subjunctive conditional
A. If, per impossibile, God were not to exist, then there would be no truth.
Both antecedent and consequent are necessarily false; yet the conditional is (arguably) true! The antecedent is necessarily false because God is a necessary being. I accept Anselm's Insight (but not his Ontological Argument). The Insight is that nothing divine can have contingent modal status: God is either necessary or impossible.
Surely we can argue, correctly, to and from necessarily false propositions such as Nothing is true. Of course, when we engage in such reasoning we are presupposing truth. If that is your point, then I agree with it.
3) If there's a 'total way things are', and that's 'the truth' or the truth about the actual world, then surely there has to be a truth about a world where God does not exist--there's a total way things are, including various states of affairs but not including the existence of God. How are we to understand the idea that, if the actual world is Godless, there's some total way things actually are, and yet no truth? What more is needed for there to be truth, or the whole truth, in a Godless world? Or do you mean to say that in a Godless world there is no 'total way things are'? But then how would that even count as a world, or a scenario? (Is there even a less-than-total-way-things-are, at least? And in that wouldn't there have to be some particular truths, if not total truth or Truth?)
BV: I accept Anselm's Insight: If God exists, then he exists in every metaphysically possible world; if God does not exist, then he exists in no metaphysically possible world. I also accept Nietzsche's Insight that if there is no God, then there is no truth. no total, non-relative, non-perspectival way things are independent of the vagaries of human belief and desire. So I disagree when you say "surely there has to be a truth about a world where God does not exist."
4) In some of your other entries on this topic you are suggesting that truth might be a property of God's thoughts, or maybe just the totality of His thoughts. (Is that right?) But intuitively there is a distinction between the truth of a thought and the thought itself, so that even though God's thoughts are necessarily true, those same thoughts could have been false thoughts (though not while being His thoughts, of course). Suppose this is right. Then, in a Godless world, there is some totality of thoughts--merely possible thoughts, maybe, for lack of a suitable Thinker--that fully characterizes that world. Why can't we say that there's truth in that world simply in virtue of the totality of thoughts that would have been true if God had existed there?
BV: Let's distinguish some questions:
a) Is there truth? Is there a total way things are that is not dependent upon the vagaries of human (or rather ectypal-intellect) belief and desire? Answer: Yes, truth is absolute, hence not a matter of perspective.
b) What is the truth? This is the question about which propositions are true. Obviously, not all are. It presupposes an affirmative answer to the first question. Only if there are some true propositions or other can one proceed to ask which particular propositions are true.
c) What is truth? This question concerns the property -- in a broad sense of 'property' -- the possession of which by a truth-bearer makes it true. If a truth is a true proposition, then all true propositions have something in common, their being true; what is this property?
Frege uses Gedanke, thought, to refer to what we refer to by 'proposition.' Let's adopt this usage. A proposition, then, is a thought, not an act of thinking, but the accusative or direct object of an act of thinking. Frege held that thoughts have a self-subsistent Platonic status. That's dubious and can be argued against. Arguably, there is no thought without a thinker. Thoughts/propositions, then, have a merely intentional status. But some thoughts are necessarily true. It follows that there is need for a necessary mind to accommodate these thoughts. I lay this out rigorously in a separate post to which I have already linked.
I don't say that the truth is the totality of God's thoughts since some of these thoughts are not true. Socrates dies by stangulation, for example, is false, but possibly true. And yet it is a perfectly good thought. God has that proposition/thought before his mind but he doesn't affirm it. This is equivalent to saying that God did not create a world in which Socrates dies by strangulation.
Of course, I distinguish between the thought and its truth value, and I don't think every thought is necessarily true. Why do you say that God's thoughts are necessarily true? Of course, God, being omniscient, knows everything that it is possible to know. But only some of what he knows is necessarily true. He can't know false propositions, but he can think them by merely entertaining them (with or without hospitality).
Think of a possible world as a maximal proposition, a proposition that entails every proposition with which it is logically consistent. God has an infinity of these maximal propositions/thoughts before his mind. He entertains them all, but affirms only one. After all, there can be only one actual world. I of course reject David Lewis' theory of actuality.
If God does not exist, then God is impossible. (Anselm's Insight again.) He then exists in no world including the actual world. But then there are no truth-bearers in the actual world, and hence no truths. But if no truths, then no total way things are.
You speak of "merely possible thoughts." But that's ambiguous. Do you mean a thought/proposition that actually exists but is merely possibly true? Or do you mean that the proposition itself is merely possibly existent? I am assuming that there are all the propositions there might have been; that some are true and some false; and that among the false propositions some are necessarily false (impossibly true) and that some are possibly true.
5) If there is no truth, how could that rationally support perspectivism? Maybe I just don't understand perspectivism, but suppose this is the idea that any old thought can be true (perspectivally, at least) just in case it seems true to someone, or enhances their feeling of power, or whatever... In a truth-less world, THAT is also not true: it's just not true that any old thought can be true or be rationally considered true under circumstances x, y or z. Perspectivism isn't true, or isn't any truer than anti-perspectivism. In other words I don't understand why granting that God is necessary for truth justifies Nietzsche in affirming some other, merely perspectival concept of truth; he should just be a nihilist about truth, I guess.
BV: I insist that truth, by its very nature, is absolute and thus cannot be perspectival. I reject perspectivism. So there is no question of rationally supporting perspectivism. It is an irrational and self-defeating doctrine.
You say, "I don't understand why granting that God is necessary for truth justifies Nietzsche in affirming some other, merely perspectival concept of truth; he should just be a nihilist about truth, I guess."
I am not claiming that Nietzsche rationally justifies his perspectivism. But one can understand how he came to the doctrine. He has a genuine insight: no God, no truth. (By the way, for me 'insight' is a noun of success in the way that 'know' is a verb of success: there are no false insights any more than there is false knowledge.) There are no truths, but there are interpretations and perspectives from different power-centers; these interpretations and perspectives are either life-enhancing and 'empowering' or not. This can be (misleadingly) put by saying that truth is perspectival.
Is perspectivism identitarian or eliminativist? Is Nietzsche saying that there is truth but it is perspectival in nature, or is he saying that there is no truth? I would say that the identity collapses into an elimination. Truth cannot be perspectival; so to claim that it is amounts to claiming that there is no truth. So I agree that one could say that he is a nihilist about truth.
What makes this all so relevant is that cultural Marxism is heir to Nietzsche. To understand the Left you have to understand Nietzsche and his two main claims, one ontological the other epistemological. "The world is the will to power and nothing besides." Truth is perspectival. This sires the leftist view that everything is power relations and social construction. Reality and its intrinsic order are denied.
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