If you said to a medieval man, “Did Christ and die and was he resurrected?” he would have responded, “Yes,” and then you, being modern, would have said, “Do you know that for a fact?” and he would have no idea what you meant.
Sorry to sound like a “postmodernist” but “facts” were invented. The concept did not exist in medieval times: at the time “a fact”, used in Latin and almost exclusively in the legal sense, referred to an event that happened in the past—it was a “doing” word, itself retained in modern English with the phrases “after the fact” (legal) and “matter-of-fact”, i.e. someone who just gets on with it, speaks about actions as they are.
“Facts” come in later, especially with Hume, and belong to the entire scientific apparatus we are taught to work within today (hypotheses, theories, facts). Facts are understood to be empirically verifiable statements—and “facts” were once novel. In Hard Times, Dickens mocks the Victorian “fact craze” with the character Mr. Gradgrind—a dull science-minded man who thinks everything that is not factual should be excluded from life and so eliminates all joy and beauty from his family’s existence (his name is almost onomatopoeia for “factuality”—grinding out the facts, like a fine mineral dust).
The man above, Knowland, likes to play at being a “trad Christian” (although he oddly resembles, via meme magic, the “coomer” meme) with his six children (shades of latter-day patriarch Yoram Hazony). However, if you said to him, “Do you think Jesus died and resurrected as a fact?” he would be liable to say, “No, not for a fact—but I do believe it happened.” This idea that there are events that have to be “believed” as opposed to “brute facts” is modern. The death and resurrection are not empirically verifiable and, therefore, are beliefs that have less “truth value” than facts.
Knowland is after Nietzsche and online Nietzscheans in this tweet. It’s a “gotcha” tweet, not deep analysis—so it’s a little unfair to say that, obviously, Nietzsche was not so unsophisticated as to say “It’s a fact there are no facts, only interpretations” or “It’s true there are no truths, only interpretations.” Nietzschean: “We just say there are interpretations.” “So you’re saying it’s true there are only interpretations?” “No, I’m saying that’s your interpretation.” So would reply a consistent Nietzschean, without contradiction—“Now let our interpretations battle and see who stands at the end!”
That’s by the by, what interests me is that Knowland is very into facts and that’s because he’s not really a Christian—he’s a British empiricist, a Humean; he cares about his facts (and, unlike a medieval, he has a belief that Jesus died and resurrected). You can tell from this tweet about Nietzsche that Knowland is a factual man—he thinks “fact” is a gotcha for Nietzsche; and if you read his feed you’ll find he’s very into “reason” too.
You know, it’s possible to lie with facts—the media does it every day. I read stories every day that are correct in the facts and yet untrue. That’s why “fact-checkers” are just a political prop—what interests us, per Nietzsche, is the interpretation given to those facts. Indeed, it seems “the truth” is made up from facts but is not reducible to facts; and that was known when “facts” first came in; for example, the quote below is from a dictionary in the mid-1800s:
“By fact is also often meant a true statement, a truth, or truth in general; but this seems to be a mere inexactness of language....Fact, as being special, is sometimes opposed to truth, as being universal; and in such cases there is an implication that facts are minute matters ascertained by research, and often inferior in their importance for the formation of general opinions, or for the general description of phenomena, to other matters which are of familiar experience. [Century Dictionary].”
The point made is quite close to Nietzsche. It’s not said there are “no facts, only interpretations” but there’s an acknowledgement that “truth” is not reducible to facts—there has to be some “organisation principle” that is not reducible to fact for us to have the truth. In this respect, Nietzsche’s observation was not new; granted, he took “truth” out of it, but it’s clear that to be factual is connected but not intrinsic to the truth—and, at the very least, the facts are subordinate to interpretation and so the intention behind the interpretation (whether or not it is orientated towards the truth) matters.
Knowland is really in the Hume tradition, despite his trad pretensions—he, like Gradgrind, works with “the facts”; and then there are loony postmodernists who want to destroy “truth” (which is a “fact”). Hence Knowland speaks about the Logos being “reason”—with Nietzsche opposed to “Logos” (along with his descendant BAP, who called death upon “Logocentrism” in a podcast and so sparked Knowland’s homoerotic ire; after all, Knowland did work at an all-boys British boarding school—and we know why people do that).
Yet Knowland’s Logos is purely modern; it’s actually a metaphor—Jesus = Logos = reason = when I do my tax return, I’m “doing a Jesus”. Yes, Logos means “reason” and “speech”—it means many things. What modern people who no longer follow Christianity do—because they are factual people, atheistic British empiricists after Hume—is to metaphorise Jesus (after all, it’s good for boys to have something to believe in—keep ’em stiff, by gosh; something to put your mind on after you’ve all had a hot shower together after a hard day on the rugger pitch…but I digress).
Anyway, Jesus is reason—ordered speech (this essay is *Jesus* in this bloodless metaphorical religion); and the enemy is “postmodernism” which everyone knows was an attack on phallologocentrism (i.e. on reason—the French invented it so we couldn’t have nuclear power anymore; and Nietzsche helped them do it). In actuality, the Logos is a sacred sound; it’s like the Hindu AUM (from which we derive “amen”)—it’s a sound that can sustain and change reality; it’s Beethoven’s 9th Symphony raised to the nth degree. If you want to understand the Logos watch David Lynch’s Dune—the Logos is when black-clad desert warriors emerge from the wasteland and hum in unison, unleash the sacred sound and change reality.
“Phallologocentrism (aka big dick energy)”
What Knowland and company mean by Logos is “ratiocination”—it’s doing your tax returns (which postmodernists want to stop because they’re anti-capitalist or something). That’s a Semitic deviation and fall into matter courtesy Hume and the British empiricists (unfortunately, Aristotle is sometimes used to support this contention because he used “Logos” in a way synonymous with reason). It’s extractive and greedy—it’s “House Harkonen” thought; it’s Satanic—it’s to treat the world as something only to be asked, “How much can I get out of it?” <<rubs hands together>>
Knowland mocks the chakras in other tweets (just hippy shit, I guess) but the chakras are the Logos—they’re activated by particular frequencies. For Knowland, in his fake metaphorical Christianity, that’s “irrational superstition”—Jesus is a nuclear power station, Jesus is your tax return. Fuck you! Jesus is a beautiful eternal sound.
The final irony is that the one philosopher above all—apart from, maybe, in a double irony, Plato—who appreciated music, dance, and rhythm was Nietzsche. His philosophy is a dance philosophy. Nietzsche is much closer to the Logos in its spiritual sense than Knowland—infinitely closer. The vision: a society that marches in rhythm to the eternal sound—selfishness and greed washed away as the nation emulates a divine king and the sound within him; as they follow his beat, they too instantiate the sound—the Golden Age returns.
Knowland has as his Twitter handle “Knowland Knows”, but, as ancient Chinee sage say, “Those who say they know, don’t know,” and Knowland claims he knows twice (he knows nothing). Ignore this prick and set sail for Gnoland.