David Breeden is speaking all week about Naive Optimism

Transcription:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, and this is “Coffee and Wisdom” This week we have been looking at the concepts of Naïve Optimism and the idea that “truth shall set you free” And, kind of balancing off, maybe some mutually exclusive ideas that we need to, in our own lives, probably balance out because there is a difference between realism and optimism and that truth that sets you free and those beliefs that are perhaps not exactly true, but do get us through life. Naïve optimism just to define that is the belief that your chances are always better than 50/50. This has been shown over and over again that the average American believes that they are above the fiftieth percentile in just about everything. Well, a book published in 1882 called “The Gay Science”, that’s usually the translation that’s done, it’s become more or less traditional at this point, from Nietzsche. And this is the book in which he says “God is dead”. Now, he he numbers the paragraphs. And I want to look at paragraph 110. “The God is dead” paragraph is 125. So he’s building up toward this particular saying, do note the the year that this was published, 1882. The book I was talking about two days ago, it was done in the 1870s, an earlier book. I’ve mentioned before just contextualization that First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis was founded in 1881 and then this time period, 1881, 1883, that definitely comes at basically the time of this book and that that group who founded the congregation were part of a Darwin reading group looking at natural selection and what these new ideas meant.

Nietzsche was also juggling these ideas at the time, although he probably never actually read any of Darwin’s work. It was in the water of Europe in the day among at least the intellectuals of the time. He has this to say about the origin of knowledge. “Over immense periods of time, over immense periods of time, the intellect produced nothing but errors. A few of these proved to be useful and help to preserve the species; those who hit upon or inherited these had better luck in their struggle for themselves and their progeny. Such erroneous articles of faith, which were continually inherited until they became almost part of the basic endowment of the species, include the following: That there are enduring things; that there are equal things; that there are things, substances; bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be; that our will is free; that what is good for me is also good in itself.” These are assumptions that built up over time that Nietzsche thinks are merely assumptions and do not reflect the truths of our species. “It was only very late that such propositions were denied and doubted,” says Nietzsche. “It was only very late that truth emerged as the weakest form of knowledge. It seemed that one was unable to live with it: our organism was prepared for the opposite; all its higher functions, sense perception and every kind of sensation worked with those fundamental errors which had been incorporated since time immemorial.

Indeed, even in the realm of knowledge these propositions became the norms according to which “true” and “untrue” were determined down to the most remote regions of logic.” So, “truth emerged as the weakest form of knowledge,” claims Nietzsche in his book “The Gay Science” in which he will later claim God is dead and we have killed him. Now you see what he’s doing here.