The Sun, The Moon And The Truth

Marcus Aurelius is known to have said: “Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.” Conversely, Buddha proclaimed: “Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.” This clearly shows that the existence of ambivalent stances on truth is an ancient and recurring philosophical problem. However, it is a yet unsolved problem that poses a complex challenge to the human mind. Although we continue to advance in all areas of life, and seem to have ubiquitous insight, the definitions of truth and facts continue, probably will continue, to confuse us. Truth and facts set the stage for an extensive debate about their definitions as well as their importance in fueling science …show more content…
Nietzsche, as Firestein, would doubt established facts, but different from Firestein he wouldn’t celebrate the people who analyze and conclude facts are wrong as their very methods of analysis, is in his eyes, are designations arbitrarily assigned by humans and do not coincide with pure knowledge – probably non-existent, Nietzsche would claim. He regards the core concepts that govern science as man-made inventions and doubts the “fact” in itself, while Firestein only doubted its presumed importance in science and …show more content…
Throughout the essay he delineates the subjectivity of the fact, which thinkers (positivists) take as objective and ‘real’. Nietzsche sheds light on people’s human-centered view and how it deters them from grasping the ‘essence’. He is known for saying: “there are no facts, only interpretations”. This is an epitome of Nietzsche’s perspective on people’s false belief in objectivity, which he deems impossible looking from our self-centered lens. Nietzsche resorts to the analysis of language, ironically utilizing it, to emphasize this point, as he adroitly exposes our failure to consciously recognize truth as “A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations”. All in all, Nietzsche and Firestein present analogous arguments with regards to a ‘fact’. They both, quite forcefully, dismiss its perceived importance and challenge the common culture to place facts as the goal, and ground, for science. Conversely, their ideas deviate in that Nietzsche dismisses the existence of facts and portrays it as only a human-centered designation to things, while Firestein does not repudiate the notion of facts – he ultimately has to utilize them in his career – in fact he views facts as producers of the ignorance that he sponsors in the