2.2.4—
Nietzsche's Empiricism and Nominalism

While Nietzsche is concerned to show the evolutionary "necessity" of the so-called transcendental forms of human cognition, he also notoriously refers to them as "the fundamental errors of mankind" (HH 18), our "erroneous articles of faith" (GS 110), or the "lies" and "prejudices" of reason (TI "Reason" 2, 5). Such claims reveal the basic empiricism and nominalism that is at the root of Nietzsche's epistemology.

All of our knowledge, Nietzsche theorizes, originates in sense experience and ends in our various attempts to codify past and present experience so as to predict future experience. Such codification, as we have seen, entails the grouping of items in terms of unity and identity. Yet Nietzsche points out that something is lost or forgotten in this movement from sensation to concept. While sense evidence reveals to us a multiplicity of individuals, conceptual knowledge delivers over a world arranged according to a relatively small number of generalizations and abstractions. Thus, we read in "On Truth and Lies" (p. 83) that words and concepts derive from "unique and entirely individual experience[s]," that they equalize "cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal," and that they "overlook [ . . . ] what is individual and actual," since "nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts and likewise with no species." A similar critique of the Platonizing tendency of language and thought is presented in the first part of Human, All Too Human, where Nietzsche writes:

The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that in language mankind set up beside the world a separate world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world. The sculptor of language was not so modest as to believe that he was only giving things designations, he conceived rather that with words he was expressing supreme knowledge of things. [ . . . ] A great deal later—only

now—it dawns on men that in their belief in language they have propagated a tremendous error. (11) ^[19]

And, in a note from fall 1887, Nietzsche reiterates this nominalist view:

The form counts as something enduring and therefore more valuable; but the form has merely been invented by us; and however often "the same form is attained," it does not mean that it is the same form—rather, what appears is always something new, and it is only we who are always comparing, who include the new, to the extent that it is similar to the old, in the unity of the "form." As if a type should be attained and, as it were, was intended and inherent in the process of formation. Form, species, law, idea, purpose —in all these cases the same error is made of giving a false reality to a fiction. [ . . . ] One should not understand this compulsion to construct concepts, species, forms, purposes, laws—"a world of identical cases "—as if they enabled us to fix the true world; but rather as a compulsion to arrange a world for ourselves in which our existence is made possible. (WP 521)^[20]

In these and other passages, Nietzsche argues that words and concepts make unities and identities out of what are really multiplicities and similarities. Since everything is similar to everything else in infinitely many respects,^[21] Nietzsche implicitly asks why some groups of things are called "unities" and "identities" while others are not. Of course, he himself provides the answer to this question: such presumed unities and identities have aided human beings in their struggle for survival.^[22] Yet, for several reasons, Nietzsche is reluctant to rest with this answer.

First, as we have already seen, the evolutionary establishment of these unities and identities has tended to lead to a Platonistic reification of words and concepts such that they become not only independently existing entities but even the ultimately real entities from which all sensuous particulars are derived. In this way, a reversal occurs whereby the "actual" world—the only world with which we are acquainted: the sensuous world of particulars—gets taken as the "world of mere appearance," derived from the "true" world of forms, concepts, laws, and

[19] Cf. TI "Reason" 5: "'Reason' in language—oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar."

[20] See also HH 19 ("in fact nothing is identical to anything else") and GS 354 ("all our actions are altogether incomparably personal, unique, and infinitely individual; there is no doubt of that").

[21] A poignant remark made by Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (London: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 64.

[22] See GS 110–11. This evolutionary answer has been more recently proposed by W. V. Quine, "Natural Kinds," in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays . (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 126ff. Stack, "Nietzsche's Evolutionary Epistemology," 88ff., discusses the similarities between Nietzsche's and Quine's views on this matter.

so on: "the leaf" becomes "the cause of leaves" (TL p. 83).^[23] Nietzsche's talk of the "errors" of reason and knowledge serves, then, to set this reversal aright by reminding us of the actual derivation of the "true world" from the "world of appearance": "The reasons for which 'this' world has been characterized as 'apparent' are the very reasons which indicate its reality; any other kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable" (TI "Reason" 6). And again, "The 'apparent' world is the only one: the 'true' world is merely added by a lie " (TI "Reason" 2).^[24]

The primacy of this "apparent world" of sensuous particulars, Nietzsche thinks, can be shown through "scientific" inquiry, by which he seems to mean the macroscopic view afforded by historical, philological, and evolutionary research and the microscopic observation of biological, chemical, and physical phenomena. "Rigorous science," he contends, "can quite gradually and step by step, illuminate the history of the genesis of this world as idea [itself 'the outcome of a host of errors and fantasies'] and, for brief periods of time at any rate, lift us out of the entire proceeding" (HH 16). "Knowledge educated in the highest scientificality," he writes, "contradicts [ . . . ] the belief that there are identical things " (HH 18). Scrupulous scientific observation, he says elsewhere, uncovers "a manifold one-after-another [ein vielfaches Nacheinander ] where the naive man and inquirer of older cultures saw only two separate things" (GS 112). The passage continues:

Cause and effect: such a duality probably never exists—in truth we are confronted by a continuum [ein continuum ] out of which we isolate a couple of pieces. [ . . . ] An intellect that could see cause and effect as a continuum and a flux of occurrences [Fluss des Geschehens ] and not, as we do, in terms of an arbitrary division and dismemberment, would repudiate the concept of cause and effect.

Such conclusions, Nietzsche sometimes claims, are even available to attentive ordinary sense perception, which, he argues, is confronted by an

[23] Wittgenstein (The Blue and Brown Books [New York: Harper and Row, 1958], 17–18) uses the same example in a very similar analysis of the "metaphysics" and "philosophical confusion" caused by "our craving for generality." Wittgenstein's warnings about "the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language" (Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953], §109) bear comparison with Nietzsche's critique of "the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language" (TI "Reason" 5). For some comparison between these two thinkers, see Erich Heller, "Wittgenstein and Nietzsche," in The Importance of Nietzsche: Ten Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), and Tracy B. Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, exp. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 78–86.

[24] Cf. EH "Destiny" 8: "The concept of the 'beyond,' the 'true world' invented in order to devaluate the only world there is [ . . . ] our earthly reality!"

ever-changing array of appearances. In praise of Heraclitus, Nietzsche writes in Twilight of the Idols:

When the rest of the philosophic folk rejected the testimony of the senses because they showed multiplicity and change, he rejected their testimony because they showed things as if they had permanence and unity. Heraclitus too did the senses an injustice. They lie neither in the way the Eleatics believed, nor as he believed—they do not lie at all. What we make of their testimony, that alone introduces lies; for example, the lie of unity, the lie of thinghood, of substance, of permanence . . .  "Reason" is the cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses. Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie. ("Reason" 2)

Besides reminding us of the sensuous basis of all our knowledge, Nietzsche refers to the truths of logic, language, and the categories as "errors" for another reason. The evolutionary scenario tends toward a reification and ossification of words and concepts, Nietzsche thinks, because it is essentially conservative; its basic aim is the preservation of the species. To this end, it forbids any tampering with the established conceptual framework and discourages novel sortings of appearances. The process of reification aids this prohibition by encouraging the view that the established unities and identities not only are useful fictions but indeed are given in the nature of things.

Nietzsche, however, continually argues that "the wish to preserve oneself is a symptom of a condition of distress, of a limitation of the really fundamental instinct of life, which aims at the expansion of power and, wishing for that, frequently risks and even sacrifices self-preservation" (GS 349).^[25] In a note from the same period, he reiterates this view:

"Useful" in the sense of Darwinist biology means: proved advantageous in the struggle with others. But it seems to me that the feeling of increase, the feeling of becoming-stronger, is itself, quite apart from any usefulness in the struggle, the real progress [Fortschritt]: only from this feeling does there arise the will to struggle. (WP 649)

These claims have important consequences for a consideration of Nietzsche's epistemology; for, if self-preservation is not the sole or ultimate goal of our cognitive processes, the way is opened for a consideration of

[25] Cf. BGE 13: "Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength—life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results ." Cf. also WP 649–51.

other possible sortings of appearances. These, in turn, provide us with foils that help to expose the contingent nature of our established conceptual framework.

Hence, having reminded us of the sensuous origins of our ordinary conceptual scheme, Nietzsche goes on to remind us of its artistic, "metaphoric" origins, which have been lost or sublimated into the literal truths of scientific fact. This artistic drive, or "intellectual play impulse" (GS 110), according to Nietzsche, is not only the real origin but also the real end of human activity. As with life in general, human beings ultimately seek not to preserve themselves but to become more, better, different; and this requires constant innovation, novel sortings, new interpretations. Intellectual endeavors begin in art and they end in art—which is to say that they do not end at all, because art, for Nietzsche, consists in ceaseless transformation. He writes:

The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself. This drive is not truly vanquished and scarcely subdued by the fact that a regular and rigid new world is constructed as its prison from its own ephemeral products, the concepts. It seeks a new realm and another channel for its activity, and it finds this in myth and in art generally. This drive continually confuses the conceptual categories and cells by bringing forward new transferences, metaphors, and metonymies. [ . . . ] That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the audacious feats of the most liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuitions rather than concepts. There is no regular path which leads from these intuitions into the ghostly land of schemata, the land of abstractions. (TL pp. 88–90)

Years later, Nietzsche again voices this view, arguing that

[w]here need and distress have forced men for a long time to communicate and understand each other quickly and subtly, the ultimate result is an excess of this strength and art of communication—as it were, a capacity that has gradually been accumulated and now waits for an heir who might squander it. (Those who are called artists are these heirs [ . . . ]—all of them people who come at the end of a long chain, "late born" every one of them in the best sense of the word and, as I have said, by their nature squanderers.) (GS 354)

Thus, as we saw in the previous chapter, Nietzsche ultimately sides with the artistic or "intuitive man" rather than with the scientific or "rational man." Unlike the latter, the former "do not lie at all" (in the metaphysical sense). They do not try to pass off words and concepts as entities or conditions for experience; rather, they affirm that all knowledge originates in the sense experience of particulars and that words and concepts are simply groupings of these toward various ends, self-preservation being neither the only nor the ultimate of those ends.