Overcoming self-overcertainty and how ideologues are often wrong

Overcertainty about the world has its psychological correlate of paranoia. When Adam named all the animals, did he not feel uncertainty that he had perhaps named them incorrectly? The names he gave to them were surely arbitrary, having little to do with their actual genus and species. (One presumes that Adam didn't know this kind of science, which was able to apply labels according to some rational criteria.)

Lacan speaks of knowledge as having a paranoiac structure, but I believe what he was really getting at with that idea is that one must generally pay the price for one's indulgence in over-certainty by being visited by the niggling voice of conscience which suggests: "Hey, Buddy, perhaps, after all, you got it wrong?"

My views pertain to Yin and Yang, or rather more generally to the notion that genuine knowledge is never fixed nor set in stone once and for all, but always requires openness to the possibility of error. To assert one's truths is desirable. But to deny the possibility of error in one's truths is one's undoing. Knowledge is not one-sided, and it is a brittle form of knowledge that is forced to play that role of supporting a one-sided system of rhetoric. (It is likely that Lacan's idea fhat knowledge is intrinsically paranoiac is because he saw knowledge in patriarchal terms -- as it it were only Yang -- and did not conceive that receptivity in regard to the possibility of error is the basis for overcoming cognitive paranoia.)

Contemporary interpreters of Nietzsche have also failed to conceive that the Socratic method of interrogating an overblown and exaggerated self-certainty about what one is or is not known is the path to psychological health.   Indeed, as per Nietzsche, there are some modes of questioning that are in fact intended to put noble natures into doubt. Yet genuine nobility should have nothing to fear from Socratic dialogue (so long as it does not become particularly political or forceful) -- for genuine nobility retains its noble nature whether or not it is proven to have got certain things wrong. 

As for making moral integrity a characteristic of perfect knowledge -- this is precisely what undermines the development of actual knowledge,  since it makes everyone too afraid to admit what they don't know. (It would be the equivalent of admitting that one is a moral degenerate for not already having learned a particular, important fact.) 

As for making moral integrity a characteristic of perfect knowledge -- this is precisely what undermines the development of actual knowledge,  since it makes everyone too afraid to admit what they don't know. (It would be the equivalent of admitting that one is a moral degenerate for not already having learned a particular, important fact.)

It is the mistake of contemporary ideologues to link moral integrity to the possession of perfect knowledge.  This linkage belongs to Plato, not to Nietzsche.  All the same, Nietzsche places too much emphasis on being and not enough on knowing.  Being is a form of knowing in some cases, as when one knows what it means to be a lizard by acting and behaving like one -- for one is actually a lizard.  Otherwise (and in the case of humans) knowledge and being are separate but they practically intertwine and thus transform each other.  We have to be open to change and transformation, otherwise, we are all moral reprobates for not knowing from birth all that there is to know. (Interestingly, both Plato and Nietzsche, for totally different reasons, desire us to learn only what it is already intrinsic within us to know.  Nietzsche seems to think one should not attempt revolutionising the mind, but pursue a gentle evolutionary process.  Unlike Bataille, he was also keen to maintain social hierarchies.)