What might be meant by Nietzche's comment that "rational thought is interpretation according to a scheme which we cannot escape". What implications might this have for knowledge acquisition?

International Baccalaureate Theory of Knowledge

06/12/01 Florencia del Rio

Words 1588 KWB

What might be meant by Nietzche’s comment that “rational thought is interpretation according to a scheme which we cannot escape”. What implications might this have for knowledge acquisition?

To be able to explain what is that Nietzche was trying to say, I think that first I should define some terms that are found in the statement he made, as well as in the actual question. "Rational thought" is also called logic thinking, what would imply then that the line of thought would follow a determined set of stages, which consist in the interpretation of a giving premise or the attempt to follow a given rule, what will then enable the thinker to arrive to a valid, if not true, conclusion. "Knowledge" is something we claim to be true, justifying this belief with evidence. I think that what he means is that no matter what is that we are analysing, our mind will always go through the same process to reach a conclusion about new knowledge gained, trying to make it fit in one or other classification, so as to be comfortable with it. This classification could be simply true or false, or would come to form part of other evidence that would either support or question a previous conclusion we had arrived at before that seems to be true because, nothing, to our knowledge, seems to disprove it. I agree with what Nietzche states and I will try to explain why this is and how this affects the way we acquire knowledge further on in this essay.

Logical thinking does not require previous knowledge, just a rule or statement that can prove, disprove or have no relation at all with the conclusion we arrive at. Respectively, the conclusion at which we arrive will be valid, invalid or undetermined. I think this does affect every thought we have, and every time we gain knowledge the same process will occur in our minds; We cannot disprove information unrelated to previous knowledge. Then, if we receive new information about the same subject there are three possible conclusions to which we can arrive: either is true, false or this new information does not prove or belie what we already knew. The line of though in the three cases would be something like: this information is related to what I knew before about the subject. Because of this new information, now I believe that, what I knew before is probably “true/false/ I still don't know” because the new information “supported it/contradicts it/ it neither supports nor contradicts it”. As you can see the way of thinking has not changed at all, only that the premises that conditioned the conclusion to which we arrive does. More information will again pass through the process and end validating or invalidating what we had previously concluded. In both cases we again face two possibilities: either we accept what we just concluded or investigate more about it.

During my TOK course, we discussed the problem if all knowledge was processed logically before we stored it in our minds and creates a conclusion or reacted to its content. At first I could not agree that this was possible, because the same happenings make people feel differently, and I also could not agree to the idea that emotions would develop from a logic base. Then, after discussing it thoroughly with my colleges and teacher, I reached a totally different conclusion: we discussed why it was that we reacted as we did when confronting the same situation, and what factors ...

This is a preview of the whole essay

During my TOK course, we discussed the problem if all knowledge was processed logically before we stored it in our minds and creates a conclusion or reacted to its content. At first I could not agree that this was possible, because the same happenings make people feel differently, and I also could not agree to the idea that emotions would develop from a logic base. Then, after discussing it thoroughly with my colleges and teacher, I reached a totally different conclusion: we discussed why it was that we reacted as we did when confronting the same situation, and what factors had an influence in this. At the end, I noticed a pattern in our answers: we all thought of previous situation that we had confronted that were similar to the ones we had to confront now, how we had dealt with them, had that way been effective, what were the consequences of the decision we made when confronting them and if we wanted to obtain similar results. If we did, then we reacted again in a similar way to the one we had reacted previously, if we didn't then we tried to deal with it differently, thinking in which way we think might get us what we want. Why did some of us cry when we heard about the death of some one we knew and some of us don't? Well, some of the ones who cried thought that crying was a way of dealing with the problem quickly, releasing the tension caused by it and others just did because they had understood sadly that a change in the world they knew had been produced and they did not like what that implied. Some of the ones who did not cry thought that it was a useless thing to do so, because it does not allow you to understand the situation in its full magnitude and others because they did not like to lose control of themselves. Anyway, it all came from a logic base, and that will condition even art to be based in logic. I believe this to be true too. Even artists such as Picasso that intended to do everything different followed a rule that was to do only things that were original. This concept of originality immediately dismissed what he already knew about art, so he kept himself out of those boundaries that had been previously stated by other artists, but this option conditioned his following work and created a scheme to follow. In addition, I believe spontaneity also comes from the desire to do something because you feel that it would be fun, and you have your motives to believe so.

Now, how does this influence the way we acquire knowledge? I think that it conditions which things actually we remember and which we don't. I mean, some sort of religious leader, for example, might want to dismiss some scientific theory (not proof, but theory) because it seems to disproof some religious belief which is important in their religion. For example, Galileo discovered that the earth was the one that orbited around the sun and not the other way round, as it was thought. The church and the pope forced him to publicly deny this because it contradicted one of their beliefs. The fact that one of the things they utterly believed in could be wrong, set up the question that maybe other parts of their religious beliefs were too. This created conflict in their scheme of thinking, of which they could not escape. Another example, that will prove that opposite ways of thinking follow a similar scheme, is the one of Pithagoras and its theorem. He discovered that if you summed up the two squared sides of a right triangle, and then square root the result, you could work out the length of the hypotenuse of it. The problem was that, when you have a triangle which sides values are 1 (meters, centimetres, it does not matter) the length of the hypotenuse then should be √2, which is an infinite number. A length that is bounded by the length of two other sides cannot be infinite, therefore it seemed to be wrong. Worried that the people might think that if one part of the mathematics is wrong, all of it might be too, he foreboded his students to speak about those irrational numbers he had discovered, In both cases, the only way the mind could react was dismissing that what could not be absorbed because it does not fit in their scheme of thinking, or modifying this scheme, that would then again control the way we see things. We can extend this I think, to the how people of different cultural levels interpret books such as the bible or the Koran, that are known to be, by those who have studied them and do not dismiss scientific nor historical discoveries that they are almost completely symbolic. Still, people with little education cannot see why the things said are not literal, and things like the creation happening in six days and the words of Jesus that “it will be easier for a camel to pass through a needles’ eye than to a rich man to enter heaven” were not seem as symbols of how the world evolved with time, nor of how those “rich in sins” could not enter heaven. Their scheme of thinking has got no other knowledge that would induce them to analyse what they are reading, and just interpret everything as been meant as it was said. In this I agree with Roger Bacon when he says: "There are two modes of acquiring knowledge, namely by reasoning and experience. Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt so that the mind may rest on the intuition of truth, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience."

To conclude, I just want to say that all knowledge that we absorb cannot contradict out scheme of thinking if we are not willing to change it and, in some cases, this cannot be done. People base the way they act in some beliefs and, if this ones are proved wrong to them, they will probably will not accept this so easily because it would change not only the way in which the will react in the future, but will also give different meaning to what they did in the past. The mind will only absorb that what it can understand and accept that does not create conflict in its convictions.

http://home.swipnet.se/ulf_p/tok/tok.htm