Engineering and Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche was a 19th century philosopher that wrote about religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy, and science. In a passage from the Genealogy of Morals he writes that "there are not facts; there are only interpretations." As with most philosophical writings, the exact meaning and context are always in debate. Some have observed, the problem, differently stated, is not that there are no facts, but that there are too many facts. There are too many in that not all can be registered, and not all can be interrelated. In one sense, then, there are indeed no facts. Documentation and reporting of a single fact entails the exclusion of indefinitely many other facts, any one of which many be relevant to the interpretation of the one reported. Others have speculated that what Nietzsche is articulating is that everything is based on opinion and there's no right or wrong.

Engineering is in a constant battle with the idea and force of Nietzsche's arguments against a knowledge filled and fact based society. To engineers, there's nothing more stubborn than a fact. Observe, analyze, synthesize - the three legs of any engineer's education. To strive, to seek, to find the facts of any problem, debate, discussion or issue. Trust, but verify with the understanding that information is not a fact nor is it knowledge. Engineering is about a fundamental understanding that knowledge of the facts is the basis for any wisdom and for any possibility of coexistence, or social relations.

Uncertainty and indeterminacy are givens in a modern society. The net result is an avalanche of opinions and interpretations for any given issue or discussion. Many of our problems today aren't the result of too little information. Instead they come from the challenge of sorting through a huge (and growing) amount of data; all constantly changing and much of it irrelevant or misleading. But advances in our collective thinking has invariably been from the progression of information to facts to knowledge. Our information overload and systems complexity has produced an atmosphere of mindless rhetoric - all ideology and almost never any facts. Be it climate change, energy independence, our crumbling national infrastructure - the evolution of information to fact to knowledge is constantly distorted by a culture that has embraced Nietzsche at some level - no facts, just opinions. The important idea for engineering is to be proudly pragmatic, problem solving, un-ideological - respectful of opinions and interpretations, but bounded by rational and fact based analysis and thinking