Apologies for the lack of responses: I’m on a short vacation and won’t be able to dedicate any significant kind of time to this forum until I return in a week. Until then, I’ll try to make the odd post. I’d also like to state here, definitively, that I am far from dogmatic regarding any of the views I express: I am still in my undergraduate years, and my posts here reflect my experimental development of a positive philosophy. That said, I’d like to take this post to briefly revise the view I expressed regarding interpretation and reality. This is addressed, then, primarily to Only_Humean: I appreciate your counters to my sloppy points.
I believe, at bottom (which is, to be sure, only as far as we can see; for we suppose the limits of our vision to be the island’s shore), the world is a fluid, constant play of appearances, a theater of change. To locate “things” behind the appearances is to take them as signs for something more basic – to read these signs, to induce from them. This is the task of metaphysics: it is a reading of the apparent as if it were sign. But no two signs are the same; no two snowflakes, no two grains of sand can ever be identical, and so the metaphysical concept “being/thing” is but one more appeal to Platonism. To suppose that the infinity of different snowflakes are but different appearances for the “thing”, snowflake, is to locate a uniform essence behind all appearances to the contrary. Indeed, logic itself depends upon such suppositions. In Human, All Too Human 11, Nietzsche declares that “logic… .rests on assumptions that do not correspond
to anything in the real world, e.g., on the assumption of the equality of things, the identity of the same thing at different points in time.” Reality, then (and again, supposing that the boundaries of our “sight” are more than just human limitations) is a thingless, formless chaotic flux, a ceaseless play of appearances. To such chaos, truth is nothing, logic unintelligible, language senseless. All truth, all logic, then, can apply only to the world we’ve invented for ourselves: the world of unified “things” and fixed “beings”. Such a world, however, is nothing if not false. But since to such chaos, truth is meaningless, any attempt to characterize the flux is but interpretation – indeed, to speak of it at all is to interpret. And so: what does it mean to say that his Dionysian monster of formlessness, of ceaseless change and becoming is real, is reality? What can it mean?
To begin: logical axioms like the law of non-contradiction and self-identity cannot be said to apply, nor can conceptual thinking even begin to. Thus: is it any-thing at all? No. Then it cannot be real.
In short: if we cannot speak of this flux of becoming in terms of true and false, if any attempt to speak of it at all is necessarily to interpret, then my position that there is no reality behind interpretation should be slightly clearer.