Wow Sclorch, that was different. I see a softer side of you than I have ever seen before. However, my subjective opinion of your post aside, I must say I never saw that in Nietzche. I do not give much credence to many philosophers after the Middle Ages. For me Nietzche (and congrats on correctly spelling his name) was a bitter angry man with many unresolved issues. Though his writings were abused by misinterpretation, I still see him as a crazy lunatic that died prematurely with a STD. Perhaps I need to re-read his works.
Most of the others you mentioned had sufficient flaws in their thinking that I "ate the fish but spit out the bones" so to speak.
Reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was a real breakthrough for me. Robert Pirsig that lit a flame in me philosophically has never died. Now, I think he really was nuts. What began with his book ended up with a love for Aristotle that borders on worship. I am sure Mr. Pirsig would be horrified. Still, I collect copies of that book and versions in different languages and colors line the shelves of my library.
With those notes out of the way let me give you a bit of what I think. This is a piece I came up with some time ago. I hope it is not too boring for you.
To begin this section it will be helpful to explore the history of the idea of the unity of truth, how truth was unified in the beginning and how it became two seemingly separate non-overlapping entities.
In the ancient past there was but one field of study that concerned truth in regard to the world and its origins, Theology. In the Western world this was for a time commingled with Philosophy. Later Philosophy pulled away from its roots and established itself independently. After a time Philosophy gave birth to Science and it pulled away from its source of origin as well. The thinkers in these various disciplines used various approaches to arrive at truth and it wasn't long before the different ideas and their proponents clashed.
As far as I know the first clash of substance began in Baghdad circa 1075 AD. There was a Muslim philosopher/theologian named Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, sometimes known as Algazeli who wrote a book called, "The Incoherence of Philosophers" also known as "The Destruction of the Philosopher." The central theme of the book is a critique of philosophy in the light of religion. Algazeli started out as a philosopher and left it to become an Islamic mystic, but not before writing his "Destruction" book. He found that pure philosophy could not lead a person to the truth and his ideas about skepticism predated Hume's by centuries.
Enter the Islamic philosopher Ibn Rushd Averroes, 1126-98 AD from Spain who wrote a book answering Algazeli's called, "Incoherence of the Incoherence" or "The Destruction of the Destruction." In it he proclaimed that there were two different bodies of truth: on the one hand the truths of faith; on the other hand the truths of reason. These two bodies of truth existed in what might be called "logic-tight" compartments. This argument was not a heated one in the way that arguments like this are in the world today. There were no headlines, no flashes on the Internet, no bulletins at the bottom of the TV screen. Many were unaware of the argument at all.
In the time of Isaac Newton the unity was still somewhat preserved though the schism had begun in a remote corner of the world centuries earlier. Newton's religious views were a product of both his era and his temperament. Newton was born on Christmas day in 1642, the year in which Galileo died. For the last ten years of his life Galileo had been under a form of house arrest in Italy-eventually in his own home in the hills above Florence. The Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church had tried him in 1633 for holding heretical views about the motion of the Earth. His heresy lay in believing in the Copernican theory-the thesis advocated by the Polish astronomer Copernicus that the Earth moved around the Sun-which appeared to contradict the Bible. At the time, a man could go to prison-or worse- for holding such heretical views in the name of science. In Newton's time, there was more freedom to engage in science, but the idea that science and religion were separate enterprises would have appeared absurd to Newton. For Newton, the Bible was the literal truth and could be used as scientific evidence in the same way as any other kind of scientific observation. Newton spent a great deal of his time studying the Bible to learn when the universe was had been created and when it would end.
One might give many more examples from the history of the natural sciences or from stages in the development of historical research about past events, but more examples are not needed for an understanding of the point being made.
There is a time for mutually co-existing ideas (pluralism). In matters of taste for example two people can disagree and it can add flavor and variety to the world. I think that chocolate is the best and you think that vanilla is the best. I think that democracy is the best and you think that socialism is the best. The Latin phrase for this is "De gustibus non disputandum est." This means in matters of taste there is no disputing. A less well-known phrase is "De veritae disputandum est" which means about matters of truth we can (and I add should) engage in dispute. The reason for this is that in certain areas only one idea can be true at the same time. In history, mathematics, science, philosophy and religion there is room for competing and conflicting theories, hypotheses, doctrines, or propositions, only as long as no one of them is, at a given time, established as true.
This is what is known in logic as non-contradiction. The logic of incompatible propositions is formulated by modern logicians in a manner that is slightly different from the way it was treated in antiquity. Aristotle, for example, distinguished incompatible propositions that are contradictory from incompatible propositions that are only contrary.
In the case of contradictories, no middle ground is possible. The theistic affirmation "God exists" and the atheistic denial "God does not exist" stand in contradiction to one another: both cannot be true and both cannot be false; if one is true, the other MUST be false.
The opposition of propositions that are contraries, not contradictories, is a weaker opposition; and a middle ground is possible. The monotheistic affirmation that there is only one God and the polytheistic affirmation that there are many gods cannot both be true, but both can be false. The atheist may be right that neither God nor gods exist.
Modern logicians speak of strong and weak disjunctions. A disjunction here is being used in the sense of
proper logic i.e. a proposition that presents two or more alternative terms, with the assertion that only one
is true or neither is true. A strong disjunction is like the opposition of contradictories: either the proposition P is true or the proposition not-P is true, but both cannot be true and both cannot be false. In contrast, a weak disjunction is the opposition of contraries: either P or not-P is true, but both can be false. Here a middle ground is possible. For example, the two generalizations, "All dogs are green" and "No dogs are green" cannot both be true; if one is true the other is false; but BOTH can be false as they are when the truth lies in the middle ground: " Some dogs are green" and "Some dogs are not green."
In religion there are truth claims that are descriptive and truth claims that are prescriptive. A descriptive truth claim is the claim made by the Bible that a person by the name of Jesus of Nazareth lived, died, and was resurrected from the grave in a supernatural or supra-natural way. This is not allegorical nor is it poetical, it is claimed by the Bible as a literal truth. An example of a prescriptive truth claim is the commandment, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy might, heart, soul, and strength." Whenever a descriptive truth claim comes into conflict with a scientific truth claim in the manner of a contradictory one of them has to be right and the other one is wrong. The only exception is if the statements are not contradictories but contraries. In that case they both many be wrong. If the Bible says that such and such a place was where a town used to exist and sciences proves that no town ever existed there, science is right and the Bible is wrong, though both may be wrong if this matter is a contrary.
Cheers,
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