On critical faith and metacritical agnosticism: Nietzsche, Socrates, and the searches for knowledge

ABSTRACT

This article articulates a case for methodological pluralism while addressing points of contention between Michael Warren Tumolo’s “A Sublimed Experience of the Rhetoric of Plato’s Republic” and John Peterman’s “Sublimation Therapy: Helping Reason Get Back to a Solid Footing.” This discussion addresses explicit and implicit differences regarding the meaning of knowledge, authorship, advice, texts, method, and discipline. Embedded in this larger framework is a discussion of Nietzschean and Socratic understandings of self-knowledge. This essay resists hierarchical approaches to discipline and method, instead arguing for methodological pluralism in which one aims to be critically faithful and metacritically agnostic. This approach is offered as a way to demonstrate a commitment to disciplinary knowledge and to better know oneself.

Notes

¹ References to the original German are from Friedrich Nietzsche’s (1999) Jenseits Von Gut Und Böse; Zur Genealogie Der Moral. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale’s translation was used for all other citations (Nietzsche, 1989b).

² Conway noted that “Erkennen is notoriously difficult to render consistently into English by means of a single word. I have simply retained Kaufmann’s translation or wir Erkennenden as ‘we men of knowledge,”’ retaining “Kaufmann’s gendered translation because I believe that it captures (if inadvertently) Nietzsche’s masculinist predilections when referring in appreciative terms to forms of community” (Conway, 2001, p. 132, n.4).

³ Historical definitions are drawn from Duden’s Herkunftswörterbuch (etymological dictionary).

⁴ See Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language (Nietzsche, 1989a, p. 248).

⁵ It is here that Peterman and I may have more in common than the exchange lets on. In On Plato, he argues that “we do find justice in the Republic and love in the Symposium and the sophist in his dialogue, but we find these within complex webs of particular conditions, reconstructions of ideas and attempted proofs that do not ultimately work. There may be a difference between simpler and more complex invitations to inquiry, but all the dialogues seek to enrich the inquiry to make it as complex as the life situations it seeks to explain rather than simplifying for the sake of an answer or an action” (Peterman, 2000, p. 88).

⁶ One must ask why a scholar should stop there, as authorship is but one border that a scholar could draw. Others may include secondary research on the author, the works from a defined area of an intellectual discipline, a philosophical school, and scholarship on a particular theme or topic.

⁷ The argument is made more directly in the UC Irvine writers’ response to the hostile obituary of Derrida (Atkinson et al., 2004). They stated, “Yes, it is possible to misinterpret; no, deconstruction does not say that texts are confused and can mean anything you like” (para. 2).

⁸ This phrasing is derived from personal scholarly advice offered to me by Dilip Gaonkar (personal communication, June 25, 2003) and is used with his permission.

⁹ See Benson (1974).