Hello Readers and Listeners, welcome to another Martin Monday.
I was flipping channels on Pluto TV yesterday and came across one of my favorite episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It is a third season episode called The Defector. A Romulan admiral defects to try to get the Enterprise to investigate a Romulan base on a planet inside the Neutral Zone. Great story, great writing, great acting all the way around. Even a little Shakespeare (Henry V, awesome) during the open.
There’s a particular line the defector, Admiral Jarok, tells Picard, after Picard challenges the Admiral’s military record. “One world’s butcher is another world’s hero. Perhaps I am neither one.” Powerful line. Has me back pondering the nature of truth and how much one’s perspective colors the perception of events. There’s something that objectively happened, but Jarok thinks both the Romulan and Federation versions are probably full of shit. This aspect of Nietzschean philosophy continues to fascinate me. What does truth mean? Who gets to tell the truth? How can there be multiple versions of the truth?
I believe Nietzsche intended his position to be a repudiation of Kantian and Hegelian ethics, but I could be way off. Guess I will have to break down and do some real research on this. In the meantime, you can listen to our Nietzsche episode!
