Does anyone get what the meaning behind this quote is? I mean my teacher gave us this quote last week and we had to write two paragraphs about it's meaning and to be honest I didn't have the slightest clue what it meant...I still don't. (Obviously I did not do to well on the paragraphs...) "Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms - in themselves such judgments are stupidities." -Friedrich Nietzsche. Thank you to anyone who responds to this. (If anyone does.) (*hug*)
I interoperate it as being a kind of extreme non-cognitivism; our ethical statements, in effect, have no meaning, because they can never be objectively true or false.
This more or less. It's the observation that any statement or judgement is ultimately dependant on the human mind(s) and therefore temporal and subjective.
I think it's a sort of "beauty in the eye of the beholder" sort of thing. Basically, I can look at someone's life and make judgements about it, but those judgements are only true to me. And they only have value because I value it- there is no way to pass judgement without bias; there is no objective idea of "good." So in the end, there is no reason to pass judgement, since there is no way for it to be universally accurate.
Wow, that actually makes tons of sense to me...Too bad my teacher can't explain it like this, she over explains until we are all totally lost... -Thanks.
This is funny, we actually read some Nietzsche in history last year...From what I remember, he was someone who didn't believe in modernism, democracy, equality, etc etc. But yeah, he was also very focused on individualism, so I would say that the quote is about how individuals have different thoughts and opinions (judgements) and that they're "symptoms" as opposed to the whole "disease" (like they matter, but they're not "the whole idea", just parts of it). If that made sense at all!