Nietzsche on Knowledge and Reality

For some time I have been reading people that tell me to forget the conceit of logic and reason. Everything in the world is "affect," or feelings.

Except that when I have a "feeling" it is the rising to consciousness of an event that took place in my pre-frontal cortex up to seven seconds ago. And the fact that I have a feeling is because, after the chaos of sense impressions bombarding my body, something unusual has tripped an alarm that has brought this something to my consciousness.  What is going on here?

What is going on is that the Freuds and Jungs -- and latterly Jordan Petersons -- peddling this stuff all go back to Nietzsche.

In The Will to Power: Book Three: Principles of a New Evaluation Nietzsche blows everything apart.

For instance, "everything of which we become conscious is a terminal phenomenon, an end", in other words the opposite of our common belief in understanding the world through "thinking, feeling, willing!"

Or this: "'inner experience' enters our consciousness only after it has found a language the individual understands". Thus, "'to understand' means merely: to be able to express something new in the language of something old and familiar."

Or this:

There exists neither "spirit," nor reason, nor thinking, nor consciousness, nor soul, nor will, nor truth: all are fictions that are of no use. There is no question of "subject and object," but a particular species of animal that can prosper only through a certain relative rightness; above all, regularity of its perceptions (so that it can accumulate experience)--

Knowledge works as a tool of power. Hence it is plain that it increases with every increase of power-- 

In order for a particular species to maintain itself and increase its power, its conception of reality must comprehend enough of the calculable and constant for it to base a scheme of behavior on it.

See what he is up to? That everything that we "think" and "feel" and "know" about the world is an epiphenomenon that wells up out of our body and its six senses and its sensors and its ganglia of nerves and brain cells and who-knows-what as part of its project of staying alive. And we really do not have a clue what is going on!

Whatabout the "ego" and the "subject" and "facts?"

There are only facts -- I would say: No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations... 

[Even the] "subject" is not something given, it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is.

"It is our needs that interpret the world." And we better hope that our interpretation is correct. This time.

Here's a concept that I find useful:

Everything that enters consciousness as "unity" is already tremendously complex: we always have only  a semblance of unity.

What is going on here? I think that it reflects our modern knowledge -- call it the paradox of our modern knowledge -- that things are a lot more complicated and a lot weirder than we ever imagined, and that we ever could imagine.

One of the things that helps deal with this unsettling thought is this piece from Nature in 2008: "Your brain makes up its mind up to ten seconds before you realize it, according to researchers."

Because if that is true, that stuff is going on in what we call the "unconscious" that the "ego" knows nothing about, then what other stuff is going on that we know nothing about?

Here is Nietzsche on "words:"

We set up a word at the point at which our ignorance begins, at which we can see no further, e.g., the word "I," the world "do," the word "suffer":-- these are perhaps the horizon of our knowledge, but not "truths."

I guess Lewis Carroll knew all about this when he had Humpty Dumpty opine on "words."

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."

But Lewis Carroll -- real name Charles Dodgson, academic and mathematician -- was not a student of Nietzsche; he wrote Through the Looking Glass in 1872, and Nietzsche was writing his late stuff in the 1880s. But the question is: were Charles Dodgson and Friedrich Nietzsche swimming in the same intellectual pond?

Because, when Humpty Dumpty talks about "which is to be master" is he not talking the same language as Nietzsche's Will to Power?