Judgment

Judgments are a form of the lost performative and as such part of the metamodel within NLP and a distortion of reality when they are not accompanied with who is doing the judging.

Judging is our oldest belief, our most habitual holding-to-be-true or holding-to-be-untrue In judgement our oldest belief is to be found, in all judging there is a holding-to-be-true or holding-to-be-untrue, an asserting or denying, a certainty that something is thus and not otherwise, a belief in having really ‘come to know’ – what is believed true in all judgments? What are predicates? – We have regarded changes in ourselves not as such but as an ‘in-itself that is alien to us, that we only ‘perceive’: and we have posited them not as something that happens but as something that is, as a ‘quality’ – and invented for them a being in which they inhere, i.e., we have posited the effect as something that effects and what effects as something that is. But even in this formulation, the term ‘effect’ is still arbitrary: for of those changes that take place in us and of which we firmly believe we are not ourselves the causes, we only infer that they must be effects – according to the inference: ‘Every change has an author’. – But this inference itself is mythology: it divorces what effects from the effecting. If l say: ‘Lightning flashes’, I have posited the flashing once as activity and once as subject, and have thus added on to what happens a being that is not identical with what happens but that remains, is, and does not ‘become’. – To posit what happens as effecting, and effect as being: that is the twofold error, or interpretation, of which we are guilty. Thus, e.g., ‘The lightning flashes’ – ‘to flash’ is a state of ourselves; but we don’t take it to be an effect on us. Instead we say: ‘Something flashing’ as an ‘in-itself and then look for an author for it – the ‘lightning’.

Notebook 2, autumn 1885 – autumn 1886 paragraph 84

Lost performative

All sentences that express a norm, rule, opinion or judgment without stating whose judgement, opinion, rule or norm it is, is a lost performative and is part of the metamodel. It is classified as a distortion of reality whereas one can, of course, also argue that it is a deletion. The word “lost” certainly suggests that.

Man as the measurer. – Perhaps all the morality of mankind has its origin in the tremendous inner excitement which seized on primeval men when they discovered measure and measuring, scales and weighing (the word ‘Mensch’, indeed, means the measurer, he desired to name himself after his greatest discovery!). With these conceptions they climbed into realms that are quite unmeasurable and unweighable but originally did not seem to be.

Human, All Too Human book 3, paragraph 21

Injustice necessary. – All judgments as to the value of life have evolved illogically and are therefore unjust. The falsity of human judgement derives firstly from the condition of the material to be judged, namely very incomplete, secondly from the way in which the sum is arrived at on the basis of this material, and thirdly from the fact that every individual piece of this material is in tum the outcome of false knowledge, and is so with absolute necessity. Our experience of another person, for example, no matter how close he stands to us, can never be complete, so that we would have a logical right to a total evaluation of him; all evaluations are premature and are bound to be. Finally, the standard by which we measure, our own being, is not an unalterable magnitude, we are subject to moods and fluctuations, and yet we would have to know ourselves as a fixed standard to be able justly to assess the relation between ourself and anything else whatever. Perhaps it would follow from all this that one ought not to judge at all; if only it were possible to live without evaluating, without having aversions and partialities! – for all aversion is dependent on an evaluation, likewise all partiality. A drive to something or away from something divorced from a feeling one is desiring the beneficial or avoiding the harmful, a drive without some kind of knowing evaluation of the worth of its objective, does not exist in man. We are from the very beginning illogical and thus unjust beings and can recognize this: this is one of the greatest and most irresolvable discords of existence.

Human, All Too Human Part 1, paragraph 32

Opinion

Any statement that expresses an opinion without stating whose opinion it is, is a lost performative according to NLP and as such a distortion of reality.

Injustice necessary. – All judgments as to the value of life have evolved illogically and are therefore unjust. The falsity of human judgement derives firstly from the condition of the material to be judged, namely very incomplete, secondly from the way in which the sum is arrived at on the basis of this material, and thirdly from the fact that every individual piece of this material is in tum the outcome of false knowledge, and is so with absolute necessity. Our experience of another person, for example, no matter how close he stands to us, can never be complete, so that we would have a logical right to a total evaluation of him; all evaluations are premature and are bound to be. Finally, the standard by which we measure, our own being, is not an unalterable magnitude, we are subject to moods and fluctuations, and yet we would have to know ourselves as a fixed standard to be able justly to assess the relation between ourself and anything else whatever. Perhaps it would follow from all this that one ought not to judge at all; if only it were possible to live without evaluating, without having aversions and partialities! – for all aversion is dependent on an evaluation, likewise all partiality. A drive to something or away from something divorced from a feeling one is desiring the beneficial or avoiding the harmful, a drive without some kind of knowing evaluation of the worth of its objective, does not exist in man. We are from the very beginning illogical and thus unjust beings and can recognize this: this is one of the greatest and most irresolvable discords of existence.

Human, All Too Human, book 1, paragraph 32

Wish

Any statement that expresses a wish but doesn’t mention whose wish it is, is a lost performative and as such a distortion of reality.

Very few people make it clear to themselves what is implied by the standpoint of desirability, by every ‘It ought to be so, but it is not’ or even ‘It ought to have been so’: a condemnation of the entire course of things. For in that course nothing is isolated, the smallest element carries the whole, upon your little injustice stands the whole edifice of the future, every criticism of the smallest part condemns the whole as well. Assuming even that the moral norm, as Kant himself supposed, has never been perfectly fulfilled and remains like a kind of beyond, hanging over reality without ever falling into it: then morality would imply a judgement of the whole, which would, however, permit the question: where does it get its right to this? How does the part come to sit in judgement on the whole? – And if this moral judging and discontent with the real were indeed, as has been claimed, an ineradicable instinct, might that instinct not then be one of the ineradicable stupidities or indeed presumptions of our species? – But by saying this we’re doing exactly what we rebuke: the standpoint of desirability, of unwarrantedly playing the judge, is part of the character of the course of things, as is every injustice and imperfection – it’s only our concept of ‘perfection’ which loses out. Every drive that wants to be satisfied expresses its dissatisfaction with the present state of things – what? Might the whole be composed entirely of dissatisfied parts, all of which have their heads full of what’s desirable? Might the ‘course of things’ be precisely the ‘Away from here! Away from reality!’, be eternal discontent itself? Might desirability itself be the driving force? Might it be – God? It seems to me important to get rid of the universe, unity, any force, anything unconditional; one could not avoid taking it as the highest agency and naming it God. The universe must be splintered apart; respect for the universe unlearned; what we have given the unknown and the whole must be taken back and given to the closest, what’s ours. Kant, e.g., said: “Two things remain forever worthy of admiration and awe”, – today we would rather say: ‘Digestion is more venerable.’ The universe would always bring with it the old problems, ‘How is evil possible?’, etc. Thus: there is no universe, there is no great sensorium, or inventory, or storehouse of forces.

Notebook 7, end of 1886 – spring 1887 paragraph 62