PART ONE—
NIETZSCHE'S PHILOSOPHICAL POSITION
Chapter One—
Being and Its Others:
Nietzsche's Genealogy of European Thought
We know the way, we have found the exit
out of the labyrinth of thousands of years.
Nietzsche, The Antichrist §1
1.1—
Interpreting Nietzsche
In a late text, having declared himself to be the first German master of the aphorism, Nietzsche writes, "it is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book—what everyone else does not say in a book" (TI "Skirmishes" 51). A year earlier he remarked in the preface to On the Genealogy of Morals that "an aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been 'deciphered' when it has simply been read; rather, one has then to begin its interpretation [Auslegung], for which is required an art of interpretation" (GM P: 8). He goes on to say that the third essay of the Genealogy —some seventy pages in the standard German edition—is simply commentary upon an aphorism drawn from his monumental prose-poem, Thus Spoke Zarathustra . Nietzsche thus gives his interpreters an essential role: that of unpacking his terse, rhetorically dense remarks and elaborating them into an explicit philosophical view.
This is certainly the case with Nietzsche's most famous aphorism: "God is dead" (GS 125, 343). These words will be familiar to anyone even casually acquainted with Nietzsche. Yet the meaning of this phrase is by no means transparent. It can be, and has been, taken in any number of ways. On my reading, this audacious claim condenses an entire genealogy of European thought that has profound consequences for epistemology and ontology. To see this, however, we need to take Nietz-
sche's advice and read him "slowly, deeply, looking cautiously fore and aft" (D P:5). That is, we must trace this notion through the host of passages in which it appears, allowing each passage to elucidate the others and attempting to draw out what they merely suggest.
1.2—
The "Death of God" as the Turning Point of European Thought
The notion of "the death of God" first appears in 1882, in Book Three of The Gay Science . In the following few years, it finds its way into several passages of Thus Spoke Zarathustra . But it is not until 1887, with the composition of Book Five of The Gay Science, On the Genealogy of Morals, and the Nachlaß[1] from this period, that Nietzsche makes clear the full significance of the madman's cry: "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him" (GS 125).
In Gay Science §343, which opens Book Five, we discover that Nietzsche's announcement of the "death of God" is not at all a personal confession of atheism or loss of faith; nor is it so for the various characters who make this proclamation (the madman, Zarathustra, the last pope, the ugliest man, etc.).[2] Rather, it becomes evident that, for Nietzsche, the "death of God" is a cultural and historical event ("a generally Eu-
[1] See, for example, The Will to Power, Book I, titled "European Nihilism," which collects a group of notes written primarily from late 1886-early 1888. Nietzsche refers to this set of notes in GM III: 27, where, discussing the "death of God" as "Europe's longest and bravest self-overcoming," he announces a future project that "shall probe these things more thoroughly and severely [ . . . ] (under the title 'On the History of European Nihilism' [ . . . ] contained in a work in progress: The Will To Power: Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values )." Though this project was later abandoned, it was still very much alive as the Genealogy and Book Five of the Gay Science were being composed; and the conception of "European nihilism" that Nietzsche presents in the notes from this period clearly informs these published texts. On the history of Nietzsche's Will to Power project, see Mazzino Montinari, "Nietzsche's Nachlaß 1885–1888 und der 'Wille zur Macht,'" KSA 14: 383 – 400; Bernd Magnus, "Nietzsche's Philosophy in 1888: The Will to Power and the Übermensch," Journal of the History of Philosophy 24 (1986): 85–93; and Wayne Klein, Nietzsche and the Promise of Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 181–99.
[2] This has been stressed by a number of Nietzsche's commentators. See, e.g., Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity, trans. Charles F. Walraff and Frederick J. Schmitz (South Bend, Ind.: Regnery Gateway, 1979), 242; Martin Heidegger, "The Word of Nietzsche: 'God is Dead,'" in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 57ff.; George A. Morgan, What Nietzsche Means (New York: Harper and Row, 1941), 37ff.; Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ, 4th ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 99ff.; and Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 144–46.
ropean event," he calls it in §357). Thus the passage begins, "The greatest recent event—that 'God is dead,' that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable—is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe."
Furthermore, it becomes clear that this event concerns far more than theology and religion; that it is an intellectual event, a crucial moment in the history of European thinking in general. Thus, reiterating the madman's conclusion, Nietzsche goes on to write:
The event is far too great, too distant, too remote from the multitude's capacity for comprehension even for the tidings of it to be thought of as having arrived as yet. Much less may one suppose that many people know as yet what this event really means—and how much must collapse now that this faith has been undermined because it was built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown into it; for example, the whole of our European morality. This long plenitude and sequence of breakdown, destruction, ruin, and cataclysm that is now impending—who could guess enough of it today to be compelled to play the teacher and advance proclaimer of this monstrous logic of terror, the prophet of a gloom and an eclipse of the sun whose like has probably never yet occurred on earth?
Here, we get an inkling of what Nietzsche will later make clear: that the "death of God" involves nothing less than a dismantling of the basic structures of belief and value upon which European thought has been founded. Moreover, we soon learn that this event is not brought about from the outside, by some external cataclysm; nor is it some chance occurrence. Rather, the "monstrous logic of terror" set in motion by the "death of God" is brought about from the inside, through a critique necessitated by the very presuppositions of European thought. In short, for Nietzsche, the "death of God" marks the beginning of a self -over-coming of the foundational structures of European thought.[3]
These themes are more thoroughly elaborated in §357 of The Gay Science, where Nietzsche writes:
[T]he decline of the faith in the Christian god, the triumph of scientific atheism, is a generally European event in which all races had their share and for which all deserve credit and honor.[ . . . U]nconditional and honest atheism [ . . . is] a triumph achieved finally and with great difficulty by the European conscience, being the most fateful act of two thousand years of discipline
[3] Recall Nietzsche's description of nihilism: "what does nihilism mean?—that the highest values devaluate themselves " (WP 2). This notion of "self-overcoming" appears frequently in the texts of 1887–88. See, e.g., GS 357; GM II: 10, III: 27; EH "Destiny" 3; WP P, 3, 5, 404–5.
for truth that in the end forbids itself the lie in faith in God. . . . You see what has really triumphed over the Christian god: Christian morality itself, the concept of truthfulness that was understood ever more rigorously, the father confessor's refinement of the Christian conscience, translated and sublimated into a scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price. Looking at nature as if it were proof of the goodness and governance of a god; interpreting history in honor of some divine reason, as a continual testimony of a moral world order and ultimate moral purposes; interpreting one's own experiences as pious people have long enough interpreted theirs, as if everything were providential, a hint, designed and ordained for the sake of the salvation of the soul: that is all over now, that has man's conscience against it, that is considered indecent and dishonest by every more refined conscience—mendaciousness, feminism, weakness, and cowardice. In this severity, if anywhere, we are good Europeans and heirs of Europe's longest and most courageous self-overcoming [Selbstüberwindung ].
After quoting this passage in the penultimate section of the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche continues:
All great things bring about their own destruction through an act of self-overcoming [Selbstaufhebung ]: thus the law of life will have it, the law of the necessity of "self-overcoming" [Selbstüberwindung ] in the nature of life—the lawgiver himself eventually receives the call: "patere legem, quam ipse tulisti " [submit to the law you yourself proposed]. In this way Christianity as a dogma was destroyed by its own morality; in the same way Christianity as morality must now perish too: we stand on the threshold of this event. After Christian truthfulness has drawn one inference after another, it must end by drawing its most striking inference, its inference against itself; this will happen, however, when it poses the question, "what is the meaning of all will to truth? " . . . And here I again touch on my problem, on our problem [ . . . ]: what meaning would our whole being possess if it were not this, that in us the will to truth becomes conscious of itself as a problem? . . . As the will to truth thus gains self-consciousness, from now on—there is no doubt about it—morality will go to ruin [geht . . . zu Gründe ]: this is the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe—the most terrible, most questionable, and perhaps also the most hopeful of spectacles. . . . (GM III: 27)
Taken together, these passages present a genealogy that is of utmost importance for understanding Nietzsche's later thought. In these passages, he attempts to explain both the sequence of events leading to the "death of God" and its inevitable consequences. This account is highly condensed and elusive, to be sure. But, fortunately, these passages do not stand alone. They form part of a network of texts, written in 1887 and constantly cross-referenced by Nietzsche. Following the various strands of this network, we can piece together a genealogy that
links "God" and "morality" with "truth" and shows that a "refinement" of the "European conscience" eventually leads to the "self-overcoming" of metaphysics, theology, morality, and science and to a "revaluation" of "truth."
1.3—
From Metaphysics and Theology to Science
Like Hegel's "phenomenology of spirit," but with a very different motivation and trajectory, Nietzsche's genealogy is concerned with the quasihistorical movement of European thought.[4] Like his heirs, Heidegger and Derrida, Nietzsche considers all of Western thought—from Plato through positivism—as forming a single epoch, the closure of which is at hand. This epoch is characterized by the accordance of an absolute value to "truth" conceived as the determination of "being" apart from all "becoming" and "appearing" (or "seeming") (see, e.g., BGE P, 2, 34; GM III:24; TI "Reason" and "World").[5] Since the history of this epoch is a history of self-overcoming, this self-overcoming will have something to do with truth—more specifically, with a contradictory development of the concept of truth.
Since its inception, Nietzsche maintains, European thought has attempted rigorously to distinguish "what is" from "what merely seems or appears to be," "what is not yet," and "what is no longer."[6] Yet the earliest philosophers (e.g., the Eleatics) already noted that, within the physical world in which we have bodily existence and sensuous experience, we nowhere encounter this "truth as being." On the contrary, as physical, embodied creatures, we are continually confronted by a volatile sensory experience in which things incessantly appear and disappear. This experience repeatedly embroils us in deceptions, for what the eye sees the hand may not feel, and what the eye sees from one point of view it sees differently from another. Furthermore, every thing in this world, including our own bodies, exists only for a relative duration, in which it
[4] For further comparison of Hegel's "phenomenology" and Nietzsche's "genealogy," see §5.3.3, below.
[5] Note that der Schein (semblance) and die Erscheinung (appearance) derive from a common root and, while not identical, are often used interchangeably by Nietzsche in contrast with "truth," "being," and "essence."
[6] For a Nietzschean account of the traditional subordination of becoming and seeming to being, and the modern inversion of this hierarchy, see Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 59–69, and The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 253–66.
undergoes constant local movement and qualitative change. And within this world, each thing owes its existence to other things and to a sequence of events that stretches into an infinite past. In short, the world of which we are a part seems to be, in its entirety, a domain of temporal, spatial, contingent, and conditional particulars. If truth is being, it is not to be found within this domain. Convinced of the existence of truth and knowledge, the founders of the Western tradition thus resolved that truth resides in another, meta physical world, an eternal world of necessary, unconditioned, universal, and absolute being: for the Platonist, the world of the Forms; for the Christian, the kingdom of God.[7]
Yet Nietzsche remarks that the Platonic-Christian notion of truth subtly changes with the institutionalization of religion. With "the father confessor's refinement of the Christian conscience" (GS 357), truth comes to be formulated as the commandment not to lie, to tell the truth no matter how terrible and regardless of consequence. As such, truth is partially dislodged from its otherworldly residence. No longer strictly defined by the belief in and search for a "true world of being," the will to truth becomes the demand to tell the truth, to say, unconditionally, what is the case and what has occurred. With this development is born a key figure in Nietzsche's genealogy: what he variously calls "the European conscience," the "intellectual conscience" [Gewissen ], "intellectual integrity" [Rechtschaffenheit ], or "honesty" [Redlichkeit ].[8] For Nietzsche, this "intellectual conscience" involves a "training in truthfulness" (GM III:27), the "discipline for truth," "the concept of truthfulness [ . . . ] understood ever more rigorously" as the demand for "intellectual cleanliness at any price" (GS 357; cf. GM III: 24ff.). Further refined, the "father confessor's" demand for truth gives rise to a profound skepticism: the requirement that beliefs, convictions, and ideals
[7] Note that Nietzsche considers Platonism and Christianity to be, in their basic orientation, the same, deeming Christianity "Platonism for 'the people'" (BGE P).
[8] On "intellectual conscience," see AOM 26; GS 2, 99, 335; BGE 205, 230; GM III:24; TI "Skirmishes" 18; A P, 12. On "intellectual integrity," see A 36, 50, 53, 59; WP 460. On "honesty," see D 84, III, 370, 456, 482; GS 107, 110, 114, 319, 335; BGE 5, 227; Z: 4 "Retired"; GM III:26; A P, 12, 52; EH "Books" CW:3. One might add to this list Nietzsche's notion of "justice" [Gerechtigkeit ], discussed more fully in chapter 3. The importance for Nietzsche of these philological virtues has been discussed by Jaspers, Nietzsche, 201–11; Kaufmann, Nietzsche, 354–61 and passim; Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 138, 145; Jean-Luc Nancy, "'Our Probity!' On Truth in the Moral Sense in Nietzsche," in Looking after Nietzsche, ed. Laurence A. Rickels (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990); Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 99ff.; and Alan D. Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction (New York: Routledge, 1990), 165–67, 188–90. In what follows, I treat these notions as more or less interchangeable.
be tested rigorously to determine whether or not they are justified and certain.[9]
In fact, this development of the "intellectual conscience" leads to a questioning of the "true world" of Christianity and Platonism. It provokes the suspicion that the existence of God, of otherworldly being, and of innate ideas cannot adequately be demonstrated. It points out, in contrast, that so much else is perfectly clear and demonstrable, particularly the regularities of nature confirmed by repeated experimental observation. And with this, "the Christian conscience" is "translated and sublimated into the scientific conscience" (GS 357). No longer concerned with the unjustifiable claims of metaphysics and theology, science turns its attention to the natural world, which it aims to master through scrupulous empirical inquiry.
1.4—
Science as Theology by Other Means
One might suppose that, with the triumph of science, Platonism and Christianity are finally overcome, that, within the scientific worldview, "God is dead" or at least forgotten. This certainly is what contemporary scientific culture believes, says Nietzsche. When the madman appears among the atheists in the marketplace crying "God is dead. [ . . . ] And we have killed him," they ridicule and taunt him. He finally leaves, muttering: "I have come too early [ . . . ], my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering: it has not yet reached the ears of men. [ . . . ] This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves " (GS 125). A similar description is found in the Genealogy of Morals . It is said, Nietzsche writes, that modern culture has finally vanquished the otherworldly, this-world-denying "ascetic ideal,"
that it has already conquered this ideal in all important respects: all of modern science is supposed to bear witness to that—modern science which, as a genuine philosophy of reality, [ . . . ] has up to now survived well enough without God, the beyond, and the virtues of denial. [ . . . T]hese hard, severe, abstinent, heroic spirits who constitute the honor of our age; all these
[9] Cf. WP 4–5 (KSA 12: 5 [71]): "in sum: morality was the great antidote against practical and theoretical nihilism . But among the forces cultivated by morality was truthfulness; this eventually turned against morality [ . . . ] and now the insight into this inveterate mendaciousness that one despairs of shedding becomes a stimulant. To nihilism"; also WP 3 (KSA 12: 10 [192]): "Radical nihilism [ . . . ] is a consequence of highly developed 'truthfulness': thus itself a consequence of the faith in morality."
pale atheists, anti-Christians, immoralists, nihilists; these skeptics, ephectics [ . . . ]; these last idealists of knowledge in whom alone the intellectual conscience dwells and is incarnate today—they certainly believe they are as completely liberated from the ascetic ideal as possible [ . . . ] (GM III: 23–24)
Yet they are mistaken, argues Nietzsche. Science does not represent the triumph over God, the otherworldly, and the ascetic ideal. Though it potentially prepares the way for that triumph, science itself represents, rather, the "kernel " of the ascetic ideal, "this ideal itself in its strictest, most spiritual formulation, esoteric through and through with all external additions abolished" (GM III:27). Nietzsche elaborates:
No! this "modern science"—let us face this fact!—is the best ally the ascetic ideal has at present, and precisely because it is the most unconscious, involuntary, hidden, and subterranean ally! [ . . . ] The ascetic ideal has decidedly not been conquered: if anything, it became stronger, which is to say, more elusive, more spiritual, more captious, as science remorselessly detached and broke off wall upon wall, external additions that had coarsened its appearance. (GM III: 25)
This seems a rather odd claim. One might well ask how it is that modern science, which explicitly rejects metaphysics and theology, represents the inner essence of "the ascetic ideal." Nietzsche explains:
[T]o disclose to them what they themselves cannot see—for they are too close to themselves: this ideal is precisely their ideal, too [ . . . ]—if I have guessed any riddles, I wish that this proposition might show it—They are far from being free spirits: for they still have faith in truth [ . . . ]; it is precisely in their faith in truth that they are more rigid and unconditional than anyone. [ . . . ] That which constrains these men, however, this unconditional will to truth, is faith in the ascetic ideal itself, even if as an unconscious imperative—don't be deceived about that—it is the faith in the metaphysical value, the value of truth in itself [einen Werth an sich der Wahrheit], sanctioned and guaranteed by this ideal alone (it stands or falls with this ideal). (GM III: 24)
Modern science, that is, represents both the essence and consummation of the ascetic ideal insofar as it strips that ideal of all external coverings and reveals what is essential to it and, indeed, to the entirety of Western thought, which has been predicated upon this ideal.[10] Having rejected the Platonic Forms, the Christian God, and other representatives, modern science retains the one conviction with which Western thought com-
[10] See GM III:24.
mences: faith in the absolute and unconditional value of truth. While it may no longer believe that "God is the truth," science nonetheless still believes that "truth is divine" (GS 344), that truth must govern every inquiry and serve as its incontestable goal. Nietzsche thus makes the striking assertion that the "death of God" has only derivatively to do with theology and Christianity, that it primarily involves what Heidegger has called a "fundamental structuring" of thought, based upon the accordance of an ultimate value to truth.[11] In this sense, according to Nietzsche, even the scientists and "godless anti-metaphysicians" (GS 344) have yet fully to comprehend the meaning of the "death of God."
It might be objected that the "truth" sought after by science is quite different from the "truth" desired by Platonism and Christianity. For this latter pair, truth is something otherworldly, not to be found within the natural world; while, for science, truth is entirely this-worldly, aiming simply at the discovery of demonstrable, empirical "facts" about the natural world. Nietzsche acknowledges this difference and, indeed, often praises science for its this-worldliness.[12] Yet he points out that science still retains the essence of the ascetic ideal insofar as it accords truth an absolute, unconditional value . This conviction, Nietzsche insists, is nothing other than a "metaphysical" faith.
Again, one might ask how this is so. Science does indeed claim truth as its ultimate goal. But the truth it demands is not metaphysical; it is, rather, physical and empirical, available for all to see. To explain his strange accusation, Nietzsche cites another passage from Book Five of The Gay Science: §344, entitled "How We, Too, Are Still Pious." This passage begins by praising science for its "intellectual conscience," for its "mistrust" of "convictions" and its decision to demote them "to the modesty of hypotheses, of a provisional experimental point of view, of a regulative fiction." Yet he notes that, while the scientific method grants admission only to such provisional, revisable hypotheses, the entire enterprise of science rests upon a prior conviction that it is unwilling to relinquish:
We see that science also rests on a faith; there is simply no "presuppositionless" science. The question whether truth is needed must not only have been affirmed in advance, but affirmed to such a degree that the principle, the
[11] Heidegger, "Word of Nietzsche," 64–65.
[12] See, especially, A 47-49, where, against the otherworldly "lies" of Christianity, Nietzsche calls science "the 'wisdom of this world.'" See also GS 293, 355, 357, and TI "Reason" 3.
faith, the conviction finds expression: "Nothing is needed more than truth, and in relation to it everything else has only second-rate value." (GS 344)
Nietzsche does not object to this conviction on the grounds that it is a "presupposition," because he denies the possibility of a "'presuppositionless' science."[13] What he does object to, however, is the dogmatic nature of this conviction, a dogmatism that proves to be metaphysical. This becomes apparent, Nietzsche argues, if we inquire into the motivations and reasons behind the conviction that truth is of ultimate value. He asks what justifies this conviction and considers two possible answers. Perhaps the justification is pragmatic: "One does not want to allow oneself to be deceived because one assumes that it is harmful, dangerous, calamitous to be deceived. In this sense, science would be a long-range prudence, a caution, a utility." Yet he argues that this explanation fails to justify the ultimacy of the will to truth, because, on pragmatic considerations, we can see that it is not unconditionally harmful to allow oneself to be deceived. While the will to truth certainly does serve the interests of life in important ways (e.g., by helping us to determine more or less accurately the conditions that obtain in the world so that we can respond accordingly), it is one of Nietzsche's recurrent insights that the opposite will, the will to ignorance, is equally beneficial for life.[14] He continually points out that human survival is predicated upon conceptual and linguistic abstractions that allow us to reify the ever-changing world and to simplify and select from our multifaceted experience. In this way, he argues, we "lie" in "an extramoral sense"; that is, we strategically, and often unconsciously, overlook and forget features of the world that are not relevant or crucial to our survival or to our particular purposes, interests, values, and goals. Furthermore, Nietzsche points out that, in art and dreams, we continually allow ourselves to be deceived and take pleasure in this deception. If not beneficial, such "lies" cannot be considered harmful, except to the most obstinate Platonist.[15] Hence, the ultimacy of the will to truth is not to be justified on pragmatic grounds.
[13] See also GM III: 24 and II: 12. This notion is discussed more fully below.
[14] For some instances of this line of thought, see TL; HL (on the "value for life" of "forgetting" and "the unhistorical"); GS 110–12, 354; BGE 1, 4, 9, II, 24; TI "Reason," "World," "Errors"; WP 466–617. See also Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), chap. 2. I discuss these issues further below (§1.5.2).
[15] On the "deception" of dreams, see TL, 80. On the "deception" of art, see BT SC: 5 and GM III: 25.
If this will does not receive a naturalistic, conditional, pragmatic justification, from where does its justification come? If it is not justified by the role it plays in the actual process of inquiry and the actual exigencies of life, what justifies it? Nietzsche argues that it must rest on the moral prescription never to deceive, not even oneself. Science, then, would represent simply a "translation and sublimation" of the Christian commandment: "thou shalt not lie" (see GS 357). Were it to be strictly enforced, however, this unconditional proscription would be extremely harmful to natural life, which, in so many ways, requires the "extramoral lie." Nietzsche thus concludes that the absolute and unconditional value accorded the will to truth by science is antinatural, otherworldly, metaphysical:
For you only have to ask yourself carefully, "Why do you not want to deceive?" especially if it should seem—and it does seem!—as if life rested upon semblance, I mean error, deception, simulation, delusion, self-delusion, and when the great sweep of life has actually always shown itself to be on the side of the most unscrupulous polytropoi . Charitably interpreted, such a resolve might perhaps be a quixotism, a minor slightly mad enthusiasm; but it might also be something more serious, namely a principle that is hostile to life and destructive. . . . "Will to truth"—that might be a concealed will to death.—Thus the question "Why science?" leads back to the moral problem: Why have morality at all when life, nature, and history are "unmoral"? No doubt, those who are truthful in that audacious and ultimate sense that is presupposed by the faith in science thus affirm another world than the world of life, nature, and history; and insofar as they affirm this "other world"—look, must they not by the same token negate its counterpart, this world, our world? . . . But you will have gathered what I am driving at, namely, that it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests—that even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith [Glaube ] that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine. . . . But what if this should become more and more incredible [unglaubwürdig ], if nothing should prove to be divine any more unless it were error, blindness, the lie—if God himself should prove to be our most enduring lie?—(GS 344; cf. WP 1011)
Briefly put, Nietzsche argues that, while the "intellectual conscience" that animates modern science demands a rejection of every unconditional faith, science itself is "still unconditional on one point," regarding its belief in "the absolute value of truth" (GM III:24). This unconditional belief is not only unconscionably dogmatic but also unconscionably metaphysical, insofar as—against the requirements of "this world,
our world," "the world of life, nature, and history"—it receives its justification solely from the otherworldly domain of Christian morality. The "intellectual conscience" thus demands that this final conviction be put into question.
Yet this final conviction is not just one among many. Nietzsche takes it to be the conviction upon which all of Western thought is based. A questioning of this conviction, then, amounts to a questioning of Western thought itself. Nietzsche makes clear that this is just what the "death of God" entails and just what the "intellectual conscience" requires. Impelled by the "intellectual conscience," science demands its own self-overcoming. Insofar as science represents the kernel and esoteric form of the ascetic ideal, this self-overcoming of science is, at the same time, a self-overcoming of the ascetic ideal:
This pair, science and the ascetic ideal, both rest on the same foundation—I have already indicated it: on the same overestimation of truth (more exactly: on the same belief that truth is in estimable and cannot be criticized). Therefore they are necessarily allies, so that if they are to be fought they can only be fought and called in question together. A depreciation of the ascetic ideal unavoidably involves a depreciation of science: one must keep one's eyes and ears open to this fact! (GM III: 25)
And this self-overcoming of the ascetic ideal points to the self-overcoming of the foundations of European thought:
Consider on this question both the earliest and most recent philosophers: they are all oblivious of how much the will to truth itself first requires justification; here there is a lacuna in every philosophy—how did this come about? Because the ascetic ideal has hitherto dominated all philosophy, because truth was posited as being, as God, as the highest court of appeal—because truth was not permitted to be a problem at all. [ . . . ]—From the moment faith in the God of the ascetic ideal is denied, a new problem arises: that of the value of truth. The will to truth requires a critique—let us thus define our own task,—the value of truth must for once be experimentally called into question . (GM III:24; cf. BGE 1; A 8)
[W]hat meaning would our whole being possess if it were not this, that in us the will to truth becomes conscious of itself as a problem? . . . As the will to truth thus gains self-consciousness, from now on—there can be no doubt about it—morality [read: the ascetic ideal and the otherworldly, generally] will go to ruin: this is the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe—the most terrible, most questionable, and perhaps the most hopeful of all spectacles. . . . (GM III: 27)
With this, the trajectory of Western thought nears its end; or rather, it nears its midpoint, because, for Nietzsche, our modernity marks not the end of history but the inauguration of a new history, "a higher history than all history hitherto" (GS 125), not the "dusk" of infinite wisdom, but the innocence of "daybreak." Even so, that dawn is as yet merely announced. At present, we remain at "midnight," between the old day and the new. This dark night is characterized by "nihilism," the general malaise brought upon European culture by its recognition that "the highest values [i.e., truth, God, being] devaluate themselves" (WP 2). This nihilism, Nietzsche argues, still essentially belongs to the old day; it remains a "shadow of God" (GS 108). For, though the nihilist acknowledges that all absolute values have devaluated themselves, he or she still laments the loss, and what remains still appears valueless. The nihilist does not yet affirm the "death of God" and its consequences.
Nietzsche, however, urges us to push what is falling (see Z: 3 "On Old and New Tablets"; A 2). Wishing to become "the first perfect nihilist of Europe who, however, has [ . . . ] lived through the whole of nihilism, to the end, leaving it behind, outside himself" (WP P:3), Nietzsche encourages an "active nihilism" (WP 22–23) that will bring the old epoch to a close. This is the momentous task toward which Nietzsche directs his energies; and the achievement of this task will bring us to the final phase of his genealogy of Western thought.
Thus far, we have seen that metaphysics and theology overcome themselves through science, and that science, too, ends in a self-overcoming. What follows this self-overcoming of science? To answer this question, and to move from science to its successor, we must first take up the task announced above, the initial phase of the revaluation of values: the revaluation of truth.
1.5—
The Revaluation of Truth I:
Being, Becoming, and Appearing
Nietzsche's genealogy of Western thought culminates in a "critique" of the "will to truth," a demand that "the value of truth [ . . . ] for once be experimentally called into question " (GM III:24). What does this critique entail? And what, for Nietzsche, remains of truth?
Nietzsche clearly considers the issue of truth to be of central philosophical and cultural importance. From the early essays through the final
notes, he constantly returns to this topic, offering remarks that are as bold as they are elusive. These texts have recently attracted much attention, and the quantity of commentary on Nietzsche's discussions of truth has grown rapidly over the past few decades.[16] For the most part, these discussions have attempted to extract from Nietzsche's elusive comments a "theory of truth." Yet no consensus has been reached. Indeed, every major theory of truth (correspondence, pragmatic, coherence, semantic) has been attributed to Nietzsche by one commentator or another,[17]
[16] See, e.g., Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), passim; Jean Granier, "Perspectivism and Interpretation," in The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, ed. David B. Allison (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977); Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, Nietzsche: Seine Philosophie der Gegensätze und die Gegensätze seiner Philosophie (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1971), chap. 5; John T. Wilcox, Truth and Value in Nietzsche: A Study of His Metaethics and Epistemology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974), and "A Note on Correspondence and Pragmatism in Nietzsche," International Studies in Philosophy 12 (1980): 77–80, and "Nietzsche's Epistemology: Recent American Discussions," International Studies in Philosophy 15 (1983): 67–77, and "Nietzsche Scholarship and 'the Correspondence Theory of Truth': The Danto Case," Nietzsche-Studien 15 (1986): 337–57; Mary Warnock, "Nietzsche's Conception of Truth," in Nietzsche's Imagery and Thought: A Collection of Essays, ed. Malcolm Pasley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Daniel Breazeale, "Introduction," in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870's, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979); Bernd Magnus, "Nietzsche's Mitigated Skepticism," Nietzsche-Studien 9 (1980): 260–67; Lawrence M. Hinman, "Nietzsche, Metaphor, and Truth," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 43 (1982): 179–99; Schacht, Nietzsche, chap. 2: Nancy, "'Our Probity!' "; Willard Mittelman, "Perspectivism, Becoming, and Truth in Nietzsche," International Studies in Philosophy 16 (1984): 3–22; Kenneth R. Westphal, "Nietzsche's Sting and the Possibility of Good Philology," International Studies in Philosophy 16 (1984): 71–89; Alexander Nehamas, "Immanent and Transcendent Perspectivism in Nietzsche," Nietzsche-Studien 12 (1983): 473–94, and Nietzsche: Life as Literature, chap. 2, and "Will to Knowledge, Will to Ignorance and Will to Power in Beyond Good and Evil, " in Nietzsche as Affirmative Thinker, ed. Yirmiyahu Yovel (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986); Steven G. Crowell, "Nietzsche's View of Truth," International Studies in Philosophy 19 (1987): 3–18; Robert Nola, "Nietzsche's Theory of Truth and Belief," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 47 (1987): 525–62; Rüdiger Bittner, "Nietzsche's Begriff der Wahrheit," Nietzsche-Studien 16 (1987): 70–90; Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, chap. 6; Ken Gemes, "Nietzsche's Critique of Truth," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (1992): 47–65; Steven D. Hales and Robert C. Welshon, "Truth, Paradox, and Nietzschean Perspectivism," History of Philosophy Quarterly 11 (1994): 101–19.
[17] The correspondence theory of truth holds that a statement or belief is true if and only if it accurately represents "reality," "the world," "states of affairs," or "the facts." Versions of the correspondence theory of truth are explicitly attributed to Nietzsche by Westphal, "Nietzsche's Sting"; Nola, "Nietzsche's Theory of Truth and Belief"; and Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, chaps. 2, 4, and passim . A "metaphysical" version of the correspondence theory of truth is implicitly attributed to Nietzsche by many writerswho argue that Nietzsche conceives of the ultimate nature of reality as "becoming," "chaos," or "will to power," whether or not we can adequately think or communicate the character of the world as such. See, e.g., Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, 80, 96–97; Granier, "Perspectivism and Interpretation"; Wilcox, Truth and Value in Nietzsche, 132–33; Rüdiger Grimm, Nietzsche's Theory of Knowledge (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1977), 30 and passim; and Mittelman, "Perspectivism, Becoming, and Truth." A version of the correspondence theory also seems implicit in many writers' emphasis upon Nietzsche's language of "honesty," "aptness," and "justice." See, e.g., Jaspers, Nietzsche, 201–11; Kaufmann, Nietzsche, 354–61; Schacht, Nietzsche, 63, 66, 95–117; and Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 155, 188ff. The pragmatic theory of truth holds that a statement or belief is true if and only if it is, in some respect, useful. This theory is attributed to Nietzsche by Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, chap. 3; Grimm, Nietzsche's Theory of Knowledge, chap. 2 and passim, and "Circularity and Self-Reference in Nietzsche," Metaphilosophy 10 (1979): 289–305; and George Stack, "Kant, Lange, and Nietzsche: Critique of Knowledge," in Nietzsche and Modern German Thought, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (London: Routledge, 1991), 36, and "Nietzsche's Evolutionary Epistemology," Dialogos 59 (1992): 77. Other commentators argue that Nietzsche affirms the pragmatic theory of truth on at least one level within a multileveled theory of truth. See Granier, "Perspectivism and Interpretation," 198–99; Warnock, "Nietzsche's Conception of Truth," 49, 51ff.; Schacht, Nietzsche, 71ff.; and Nola, "Nietzsche's Theory of Truth and Belief." The coherence theory of truth holds that a statement or belief is true if and only if it coheres or fits within the system of connected statements and beliefs that constitutes our knowledge. Schacht (Nietzsche, 63, 66ff.) and Magnus (Nietzsche's Existential Imperative [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978], 29, 201, and "Nietzsche's Mitigated Skepticism," 265) argue that Nietzsche's theory of truth is, at least in part, a coherence theory. The semantic theory of truth, formulated by Alfred Tarski decades after Nietzsche's death, holds that a sentence is true, in a given language, if it satisfies the rules by which sentences in the language and objects are picked out and correlated with one another. (It is of some debate, among Nietzsche scholars and philosophers generally, to what degree this theory is a correspondence theory). This conception of truth is attributed to Nietzsche by Nola, "Nietzsche's Theory of Truth and Belief," 538ff.; and Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, 32, 38–40, 61, 135. It should be noted that many commentators attribute to Nietzsche a hybrid or multileveled theory of truth that combines several of the theories described above.
while still others have argued that Nietzsche does not provide a theory of truth and is not interested in doing so.[18]
Oddly enough, I think each of these views is, in some respect, right; and later I will give some indication of why I think this is so (see §1.6.3). However, the debate over which theory of truth to attribute to Nietzsche seems to me improperly framed, so I will not enter into it directly here. Rather, I want to suggest that we arrive at a better sense of Nietzsche's conception of truth by examining what he himself takes to be the crucial consideration: the question of "the value of truth," or rather, how truth is to be revalued in light of his genealogy of European thought.
[18] See Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, 54–55; and Gemes, "Nietzsche's Critique of Truth," 48.
1.5.1—
Truth, Being, and Becoming
This revaluation obviously presupposes some preliminary characterization of truth. For Nietzsche, such characterization is provided by the history of metaphysics, which, he argues, retains essentially the same conception of truth from Plato through positivism: truth considered as the absolute priority of determining "what is" apart from "what becomes" and "what merely seems or appears to be."
With regard to this conception of truth, as we have seen, the advent of modern experimental science represents, for Nietzsche, a decisive step in the history of metaphysics. Science turns its attention away from the Platonic-Christian "world of being" toward the "world of becoming"—the spatiotemporal, physical, natural, and empirical world. Moreover, as it develops, science casts off its residual ties with theology, gradually rejecting the deism to which it was initially wedded.[19] The scientific revolution, then, brings us closer to an affirmation of what Nietzsche calls "a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature" (GS 109) and a restoration of what he terms the "innocence of becoming" (TI "Errors" 8).
Yet Nietzsche argues that the dominant scientific theories and methods of the nineteenth century—mechanism, evolutionism, and positivism—still harbor a residual theology that corrupts the "innocence of becoming": they still attempt to discover a "world of being" as the ground and essence of the "world of becoming." The "necessity," "law," "atomism," and "equilibrium" central to mechanistic physics, the "struggle for preservation" and inherent teleology of evolutionary theory, and the "facts" and "disinterested observation" desired by positivism—all of these, according to Nietzsche, are but further attempts to place becoming in the service of being, to claim that becoming and change are always governed by, tend toward, or are reducible to some static, enduring, and isolable thing or state.
Nietzsche's arguments against these various scientific theories are manifold and complex; and a discussion of his philosophy of science and nature would take us too far afield.[20] But his general point is fairly simple. Nietzsche does not object to these or any other scientific theo-
[19] See GS 357, quoted above on pp. 17–18. Cf. BGE 209: "science has most happily rid itself of theology, whose 'handmaid' it was too long."
[20] I discuss these theories further below (§§1.5.2, 2.3.2, 5.2.1, and 5.2.3). On mechanism, see GS 109, 373; BGE 21, 22, 36, 213; GM II:12; WP 618–19, 634–35, 689, 708, 712, 1066. On evolutionary theory, see TL; HL; GS 349; GM II:12–13; WP 647-50, 684–85, 709, 881. On positivism, see GS 347, 373; BGE 10, 204, 210; GM III:24; WP 1, 120, 481.
ries on the basis of their pragmatic aims—their desire to select, simplify, quantify, and map relative tendencies and to hierarchize appearances for the purposes of increasing our ability to cope with our environment. What he objects to is the scientific propensity to forget that these are indeed pragmatic constructions and the consequent claim simply to have sketched from reality itself this picture of a simple and stable world. Nietzsche writes:
One should not understand this compulsion to construct species, forms, purposes, laws—"a world of identical cases "—as if they enabled us to fix the true world; but as a compulsion to arrange a world for ourselves in which our existence is made possible—we thereby create a world which is calculable, simplified, comprehensible, etc., for us. (WP 521; cf. BGE 14)
What is objectionable and ultimately indemonstrable, for Nietzsche, is the idea that the world follows some grand plan that involves a resolution of becoming into being, into some terminal state or thing. Once we give up faith in the "true world" of the Platonists and Christians, we should come to see our world in a new light: as a becoming without beginning, end, origin, purpose, goal, or privileged aspect (see GS 109; BGE 22; TI "Errors" 8; WP 708, 711, 1062–67). While, within this becoming, we may be able to isolate some tendencies, regularities, and solidities, we should remember that, in doing so, we are only marking relative movements, regularities, durabilities, and phenomena that, considered within a different perspective or framework (e.g., from different points in the universe, over much larger or smaller time spans, with keener faculties of perception) would appear otherwise (i.e., as having other modes of individuation, as ongoing processes rather than stable states, as moving in contrary directions, etc.).[21] Nietzsche writes in a note from 1887:
Duration, identity with itself, being are inherent neither in that which is called subject nor in that which is called object; they are complexes of events apparently durable in comparison with other complexes—e.g., through the difference in tempo of the event (rest-movement, firm-loose: oppositions that
[21] See, e.g., D 117: "If our eyes were a hundredfold sharper, man would appear to us tremendously tall; it is possible, indeed, to imagine organs by virtue of which he would be felt as immeasurable. On the other hand, organs could be so constituted that whole solar systems were viewed contracted and packed together like a single cell: and to beings of an opposite constitution a cell of the human body could present itself, in motion, construction and harmony, as a solar system." See also GS 228, 301–2.
do not exist in themselves and that actually express only variations in degree that from a certain perspective appear to be oppositions. There are no opposites: only from those of logic do we derive the concept of opposites—and falsely transfer it to things). (WP 552; cf. GS 110–12; WP 521, 523)
In short, Nietzsche maintains that, contrary to metaphysics, being and becoming are not opposed to one another. Rather, being is a mode of becoming—becoming conceived under a particular description, which, however, will always conflict with others and can claim no ultimate priority.
This re-orientation of the relationship between being and becoming also changes the character of truth. If, for metaphysics, truth consisted in the separation of being from all becoming, the result of Nietzsche's argument is that truth must now take its place within the world of becoming—within a world that is in constant movement and alteration, and which appears differently from every point (see WP 568). In this new guise, truth is concerned not with the determination of absolute and ultimate being, but with a specification of the perspectives and interpretations relative to which the world appears as being such and such.
1.5.2—
Truth, Being, and Appearing
This reorientation of truth points toward what can be considered the central concern in Nietzsche's discussions of truth and knowledge: the attempt to reconcile truth with its traditional arch enemy—semblance (der Schein ) or appearance (die Erscheinung ). Indeed, for Nietzsche, this reconciliation is already implied in the reconciliation of truth and being with becoming. For, following Heraclitus, Nietzsche conceives of the "world of becoming" not simply as a world of "constant change" but also as a world of "changing aspects," a world that takes on different appearances when considered within different frameworks.[22] To
[22] According to Terence Irwin ("Plato's Heracleiteanism," Philosophical Quarterly 27 [1977]: 4–5), the notion of "becoming" or "flux," for Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle, involves not only "local movement" and "qualitative alteration"—what Irwin calls "selfchange"—but also "aspect change," "things with compresent opposite properties [ . . . ] resulting from dependence on different situations." John Richardson has argued that "becoming" holds this sense for Nietzsche as well, helping to account for the doctrine of perspectivism. Thus, on Richardson's reading of Nietzsche, "to say that things become is to say that they 'come to be' one way from one point of view, and another way from another, and that some at least of these opposing perspectives are equally legitimate" ("Reply to Professor Robin Small," International Studies in Philosophy 21 [1989]: 136). These two conceptions of "becoming" are discussed more fully in chapter 4.
situate truth within the world of becoming, then, is also to situate it within the world of seeming and appearance; it is to say that "the 'apparent' [»scheinbare «] world is the only one" (TI "Reason" 2; cf. BGE 34; TI "Reason" 6; WP 566–68) and that, if there is to be truth, it must take its place within this "apparent" world.
Again, Nietzsche conceives of his task as a continuation and radicalization of the project of modern science, which turned the intellect's attention away from the otherworldly claims of Platonism and Christianity toward the earthly domain of nature and becoming. Following the lead of science, and having rejected the otherworldly conception of truth and knowledge as the attempt to achieve absolute certainty and to grasp unconditional, necessary, and eternal entities, Nietzsche attempts to resituate truth and knowledge within what he calls "the world of life, nature, and history" (GS 344). Yet in this same passage, he tells us that "life aim[s] at semblance, meaning error, deception, simulation, delusion, self-delusion [Anschein, . . . Irrthum, Betrug, Verstellung, Blendung, Selbstverblendung]" (GS 344), or, as he puts it in the 1886 preface to The Birth of Tragedy, "all of life is based on semblance, art, deception, points of view, and the necessity of perspectives and error [Schein, Kunst, Täuschung, Optik, Nothwendigkeit des Perspektivischen und des Irrthums]" (BT SC: 5).[23] If so, it seems unlikely that anything akin to truth will be discovered within the realm of "life."
This certainly was Plato's conclusion, and that of metaphysics ever since. Yet Nietzsche thinks otherwise. It is his contention that, when we investigate the actual conditions and processes of human knowledge and inquiry, we find that, as with truth and becoming, truth and semblance (i.e., "art, deception, points of view, and the necessity of perspectives and error") are not at all opposed but rather are constantly and necessarily intermingled with one another (see, e.g., BGE 2, 24, 34). The impulse to reject this supposition, he argues, merely betrays a "hostility to life," a metaphysical desire to negate "the world of life, nature, and history" in favor of "another world," which, however, remains "indemonstrable" (see BT SC: 5; GS 344; TI "Reason" 6; GM III: 28; EH "Destiny" 8).
The scientific rejection of metaphysics, according to Nietzsche, allows
[23] Compare the 1886 preface to Human, All Too Human (1): "Enough, I am still living; and life is, after all, not a product of morality: it wants deception, it lives on deception . . . but there you are, I am already off again, am I not, and doing what I have always done, old immoralist and bird-catcher that I am—speaking unmorally, extramorally, 'beyond good and evil'?"
the emergence of a question that had thus far remained foreclosed: the question concerning the value of both truth and deception. Having repudiated morality as the ultimate tribunal, Nietzsche asserts that truth ought not to be determined in advance as unquestionably "good," nor ought deception to be determined in advance as unquestionably "evil." Rather, the respective values of truth and deception ought to be determined "experimentally" (see GM III:24) through investigations carried out "beyond good and evil" (BGE 4, 2). The new tribunal, according to Nietzsche, is that of "life," which concerns the actual conditions for the existence, preservation, and flourishing of natural beings, human beings included (see WP 495). This change of tribunal means that the "will to truth" is no longer to be considered a divine gift or command, and neither are the "will to semblance" or "will to deception"[24] to be considered signs of immorality. Rather, both "wills" are to be viewed as natural, physico-psychological impulses developed within a particular species of life to help it to cope with its conditions of existence.
The results of Nietzsche's "experiments" concerning truth can be summarized as follows: (1) to the degree that it is satisfiable, the "will to truth"—the desire accurately to represent the world as it really is—is not necessarily what is most useful, beneficial, or of highest value for "life"; (2) the "will to deception"—the will consciously or unconsciously to select from, simplify, embellish, or ignore features of the world—[25] is not necessarily pernicious but, indeed, can be of tremendous value; (3) the "will to truth" and the "will to deception" can both be seen to affirm and to negate the interests of "life"; and (4) the "will to truth" and the "will to deception" can be seen to require and to supplement one another in even the most rigorous intellectual inquiry.
Nietzsche consistently makes the point that, in the actual practice of our everyday and scientific inquiry, truth is not solely what we are after. For instance, we are selective with regard to what concerns us. We do not make it our task to provide an infinitely detailed description of the state of everything in the universe at every given moment. Were it pos-
[24] There is a close association between what Nietzsche calls "the will to semblance [der Wille zum Schein ]" (GS 107), "the will to deception [der Wille zur Täuschung ]" (BGE 2; GM III: 25), and "the will to ignorance [der Wille zum Nicht-wissen or Unwissen ]" (BGE 24). Nehamas discusses "the will to ignorance" in relation to "the will to knowledge [der Wille zum Wissen ]" in Nietzsche: Life as Literature, chap. 2.
[25] In the Genealogy (III: 24), Nietzsche names this "will to deception" "interpretation" (Interpretation ), which requires the "forcing, adjusting, abbreviating, omitting, padding, inventing, [and] falsifying" of particular features of the world in the service of "life."
sible, such a description would not only be too complex and full of trivia but would also be too fleeting, requiring infinitely many such descriptions every second. Therefore, we make do with vastly simplified representations of even the small portion of the universe with which we are, for the most part, concerned (see BGE 230). We describe this limited domain using a host of generalizations that smooth over myriad particularities, differences, irregularities, and anomalous cases to satisfy cognitive interests other than that of precise description (see TL 83). Weighing the demands of precision and scope against those of coherence, utility, clarity, and explanatory and predictive power, we try to achieve a balance that describes as much as possible about the world (or some part of it) with the greatest possible economy and systematicity.[26] We see the world as composed of subsistent, self-identical "beings," even though, examined closely, the world is always in flux and beings are constantly becoming-other, either through spatial, temporal, physical, chemical, and biological changes, or through reconsideration within new perspectives, modes of inquiry, and linguistic and conceptual sortings (see GS 110, 112, 121).[27] We subsume temporally diverse sensory experiences under a single name, identifying them as composing the "same" object or person (see TL 83; GS 335; WP 508ff.); and we view the world in terms of species and kinds that are sorted by classificatory schemes that determine features as "important" or "unimportant" relative to our particular purposes (see TL 83, WP 521).[28] The more successful these simplifications, selections, and classifications prove to be for us, the more entrenched they become, and the more "real" and "true" they are taken to be. In other words, rather than simply describ-
[26] On economy of method, see BGE 13, 36. This point has been repeatedly made, within the context of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy of science, by Nelson Goodman. See Goodman, Languages of Art, 2d ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), 262–65, and Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), 18, 120–21. See also Nancy Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), chap. 2, for an argument that the great explanatory power of the fundamental laws of physics is proportional to their falsehood.
[27] Note that Nietzsche joins company with more recent philosophers such as W. V. Quine, who maintains that such things as "physical objects," "forces," and "the abstract entities which are the substance of mathematics" are simply "myths," "posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer," "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," in From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 44–45.
[28] For a similar point, see Catherine Z. Elgin, "The Relativity of Fact and the Objectivity of Value," in Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation, ed. Michael Krausz (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989). Cf. Stephen Jay Gould's critique of essentialist taxonomies in The Flamingos Smile: Reflections in Natural History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 160ff., and Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin (New York: Harmony, 1996), 38–42.
ing the world as we find it, we as much fabricate it to suit our needs: we individuate, sort, select, classify, and weight features of the world so as to make it more comprehensible, calculable, predictable—in a word, more habitable for human beings (see BGE 14). "Science at its best," Nietzsche writes, "seeks most to keep us in this simplified, thoroughly artificial, suitably constructed and suitably falsified world—[ . . . ] it loves error, because, being alive, it loves life" (BGE 24).
Yet this is not to argue that truth is equivalent to utility or that Nietzsche supports a "pragmatist theory of truth." Nietzsche constantly reminds us that the demands for utility and for truth are quite often at odds with one another. He writes in The Gay Science: "We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live—by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content: without these articles of faith nobody could now endure life. But that does not prove them. Life is no argument; the conditions of life might include error" (GS 121; cf. BGE 39; EH P:3; WP 493).
Even so, he is quick to add that this is no condemnation of the will to error and deception:
The falseness of a judgment is not for us necessarily an objection to a judgment; in this respect our new language may sound strangest. The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating. And we are fundamentally inclined to claim that the falsest judgments [ . . . ] are indispensable for us; [ . . . ] that renouncing the falsest judgments would mean renouncing life and a denial of life. To recognize untruth as a condition of life—that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil. (BGE 4)
Each of these passages claims that, strictly speaking, the simplifications and categorizations taken for granted by our science and common sense are not "true," that, from some other perspective and by other criteria, they could be seen as "erroneous" or "false"; and yet these passages seem to point in opposite directions—one toward truth in spite of utility, the other toward utility in spite of truth. This is no inconsistency on Nietzsche's part. When these passages are read together, it becomes clear that Nietzsche does not want to condemn or celebrate either the "will to deception" or the "will to truth." While he aims to reveal the extent to which the "will to deception" is operative and highly useful in our everyday and scientific formulations of the world, he is also concerned to remind us that these formulations are artificial and relative to particular sets of interests and concerns.
We can see that, on both sides, Nietzsche's target is metaphysics and its kin, theology and morality, which claim that truth is of absolute value and that the will to truth leads to the disclosure of a "true world." On the one hand, Nietzsche argues that, contrary to demands of metaphysics, theology, and morality, our inquiry does not unconditionally strive for the truth—for the "plain facts"—but instead has constant recourse to useful fictions and artificial constructions. On the other hand—and this point is crucial—he argues that a recognition of this artificiality should tempt us away from the essentialist view that science (or any other discourse) discovers a "real" and "true" world. Indeed, for Nietzsche, the conviction that there exists such a "true world" is simply a metaphysical faith (see BGE 2, 3, 34; TI "Reason" 2, 6, "World"; WP 566–67). Hence, a recognition of the artificiality and contingency (what Nietzsche hyperbolically calls the "falsehood") of a particular construction of the world is simply a recognition that it could be constructed otherwise and that what resists such novel construction is not "the way the world really is" but the inertia of established conceptions of the world.[29] Thus, in a telling passage, he writes:
[W ]hat things are called is incomparably more important than what they are. The reputation, name, and appearance [Anschein ], the usual measure and weight of a thing, what it counts for—originally almost always erroneous [ein Irrthum ] and arbitrary, thrown over things like a dress and altogether foreign to their essence [Wesen ] and even their skin—all this develops from generation to generation, merely because people believe in it, until it gradually grows onto and into the thing and becomes its very body. What at first was semblance [Schein ] becomes at last, almost invariably, the essence [Wesen ], and functions [wirkt ] as essence. How foolish it would be to suppose that one only needs to point out this origin and misty shroud of delusion in order to destroy the world that counts for real, so-called "reality " [»Wirklichkeit«]. We can destroy only as creators!—But let us not forget this either: it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create in the long run new "things." (GS 58)
Initially, this passage seems to maintain an opposition between essence and appearance; yet as it proceeds, this distinction is undercut. Retrospectively, we come to see that even those "original essences" were once constructions or "semblances" that gradually established themselves and came to "count for real." Thus, Nietzsche regards the dis-
[29] See GS 110: "the strength of knowledge does not depend on its degree of truth, but on its age, on the degree to which it has been incorporated, on its character as a condition of life."
tinction between "essence" and "appearance" as one of degree, not one of kind. "What is" has become so through its articulation within an interpretation that has managed to secure itself (see GM II:12). To see things otherwise is to have created a new interpretation that individuates things differently and ascribes to them different origins, ends, and purposes. And for this new, "wrong," interpretation to become "right," for this "semblance" to become "essence," one must campaign on its behalf until it comes to be taken for granted.[30]
I will return to these issues below. For the present discussion, the important point is that we are never concerned with a world of "truth" and "being" (in the strict, metaphysical senses) but always with a world of "seeming" and "appearance": a world that seems or appears to be such and such for a particular perspective or interpretation.[31] "Let at least this much be admitted," writes Nietzsche, "there would be no life at all if not on the basis of perspective estimates and appearances; and if, with the virtuous enthusiasm and clumsiness of some philosophers, one wanted to abolish the 'apparent world' altogether—well, supposing you could do that, at least nothing would be left of your 'truth' either" (BGE 34; cf. WP 567).
Nietzsche recognizes and affirms that it is a constitutive feature of natural creatures that they construe the world from a particular perspective and cannot avoid doing so. Such creatures are always situated
[30] My reading of this passage thus differs significantly from the skeptical reading offered by Stephen Houlgate, who argues that the passage's apparent collapse of the opposition between essence and appearance actually presupposes that very opposition. Houlgate reads Nietzsche as beginning from the presupposition that there was once a legitimate distinction between essence and appearance but that this distinction is now impossible to discern, because alien appearances have veiled and, by now, fused with essences to such a degree that the latter are no longer distinguishable or knowable ("Kant, Nietzsche, and the 'Thing in itself,'" Nietzsche-Studien 22 [1993]: 118, 141–42, 145–46). I maintain, on the contrary, that Nietzsche rejects the very notion that the distinction between essence and appearance is one of kind, arguing instead that it is simply one of degree—that essences are simply established appearances. Several other passages support my antiskeptical reading, e.g., HL (3, P. 77), where Nietzsche notes that every "first nature was once a second nature and [ . . . ] every victorious second nature will become a first," and GS 290, which offers a similar conception of the interpretive construction of "first natures" out of "second natures." (See also the account of "things" and their role in "interpretations" given in GM II:12, which is discussed at length in chapter 3.) Note that the scenario in GS 58 also recalls the famous passage from "On Truth and Lies," where Nietzsche describes truth as an ever-shifting system in which the strange and new has become the familiar and taken for granted, and those passages in Nietzsche's later work where he argues that "knowledge" consists simply in the reduction of the strange to the familiar (see, e.g., GS 355; TI "Errors" 5; WP 499, 501, 551).
[31] Here, I treat these notions as more or less equivalent. The relation between these two notions in Nietzsche's work is discussed more fully in chapter 3.
at a particular time and place and relate to their environment in ways shaped by their prior development and their current capacities, habits, and skills. This is no less the case for human beings. Each of us sees from a particular point of view, defined as much by what it excludes as by what it includes. Theorists of film and photography note that the camera image is defined by a host of exclusions: by what lies outside the four sides of the frame, beyond its depth of field, and behind the position of the camera; by what has gone into the composition of the image before the shot was taken; and by one's previous training in the various semiotic codes that allow one to see the image as representing such and such.[32] The same is true of human vision itself, which not only has a spatially limited purview but also functions as part of an organism with a range of biological, cultural, and individual needs and desires that determine in advance horizons of significance.[33]
This analysis can be further extended to "perspectives" in the broader sense that Nietzsche has in mind: that is, to "disciplines," "methodologies," "styles," "worldviews," and "ideologies." Each such "perspective" marks out a field of concern on the basis of particular presuppositions, needs, desires, goals, aims, and objects of inquiry. And, while it may be relatively easy to take up different visual perspectives, it is considerably more difficult to master different "disciplines," "methodologies," and "styles" and notoriously more difficult still to take up different "worldviews" and "ideologies." Moreover, simply combining all these different perspectives will not yield a total view, because each will be in conflict with many others with regard to prominent presuppositions, methods, aims, and conclusions.[34]
"Truth" and "knowledge," then, always take their place within the world of "perspective" and "interpretation"—that is, within the world of "appearance" and "semblance." We should note that this is not a mere reversal of the metaphysical view, according to which the "will to
[32] See, e.g., Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 201–22, and Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), chap. 2 and passim .
[33] Cf. Marx's poignant comment that "[t]he development of the five senses is a labor of the whole previous history of the world" (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in Marx: Selections, ed. Allen W. Wood [New York: Macmillan, 1988], 59). Also cf. Goodman, Languages of Art, 3–19.
[34] Nehamas (Nietzsche: Life as Literature, 51) points out the impossibility of such conjunction through a poignant aesthetic example: "the understanding of everything would be like a painting that incorporates all styles or that is painted in no style at all—a true chimera, both impossible and monstrous."
truth" and the "will to deception" are, respectively, good and evil. That is, Nietzsche is not arguing for a rejection of every notion of truth in favor of semblance, error, and deception. Among other difficulties, such a move would maintain the "faith in opposite values" that Nietzsche deems "the fundamental faith of the metaphysicians" (BGE 2). On the contrary, Nietzsche's "experimental" antimetaphysical investigation, which situates itself "beyond good and evil," must renounce this faith and instead recognize that nature, life, and history countenance no "opposites" but "only degrees and many subtleties of gradation" (BGE 24; cf. HH 1; WS 67; GS 1, 375; BGE 2, 3; WP 37, 552). Thus, Nietzsche comes to reject the supposition "that there is an essential opposition of the 'true' and 'false'" and discovers instead that there are only "degrees of apparentness [Scheinbarkeit ] and, as it were, lighter and darker shadows and shades of appearance—different valeurs [values], to use the language of painters" (BGE 34). Rather than seeing them in opposition, then, Nietzsche comes to see that, at their best, the "will to truth" and the "will to deception" supplement one another, that they are not opposites but "refinement[s]" of one another (BGE 34).
Accordingly, Nietzsche does not argue for an unqualified indulgence in the "will to deception." Rather, he contends that, on the chromatic spectrum of "truth" and "deception," both extremes are to be avoided. Having noted the dangers of "the unconditional will to truth," and having reinstated "semblance," "appearance," "error," "deception," and "perspective" to their rightful place within "the general economy of life" (BGE 23), Nietzsche is also concerned to show that the "will to deception" can be put to use against the interests of "life."
The most egregious case is that of the "believers," the metaphysicians and theologians who "lie" in an objectionable, moral sense. According to Nietzsche, these "believers" have not yet made the scientific turn and are thus out of step with the "intellectual conscience" of the age. They do not adequately scrutinize their convictions and beliefs but instead claim them to be exempt from consideration by the mistrustful gaze of science, which demands a restraint of the "will to deception" and an attention to both reason and sense-evidence.[35] Thus, Nietzsche writes:
[35] Note that, while Nietzsche often criticizes the ability of sense-evidence to deliver unqualified "facts" about the world (see, e.g., GS 114; BGE 14; WP 516), he nonetheless considers its testimony an important criterion (see, e.g., BGE 134; TI "Reason" 3); and while Nietzsche often criticizes reason for its opposition to the natural world of becoming (see, e.g., TI "Reason"), he nonetheless often praises reason as that which demands "hon-esty" and "intellectual conscience" (see GS 319, cited immediately below; A 12). The notions of "honesty" and "intellectual conscience" are discussed below.
One sort of honesty [Redlichkeit ] has been alien to all founders of religions and their kind:—they have never made their experiences a matter of conscience for knowledge. "What have I actually experienced? What happened in me and around me at that time? Was my reason bright enough? Was my will opposed to all deceits [Betrügereien ] of the senses and bold in resisting the fantastic?"—none of them has asked such questions, nor do any of our dear religious people ask them even now: rather, they thirst after things that are contrary to reason, and they do not wish to make it too hard for themselves to satisfy it,—so they experience "miracles" and "rebirths" and hear the voices of little angels! But we, we others who thirst after reason, are determined to scrutinize our experiences as severely as a scientific experiment, hour after hour, day after day. We ourselves wish to be our own experiments and guinea pigs. (GS 319)
In a number of passages that resonate with this one, Nietzsche argues against taking as the only criterion of truth what he calls "the proof of strength": the notion that beliefs are to be held true solely on the basis of the strength of our belief in them or the beneficial effects of such belief (see HH 120; GS 347; BGE 210; GM III:24; TI "Errors" 5; A 12, 50; WP 171–72, 452). Nietzsche suggests that this crude pragmatist conception of truth has biblical origins[36] and easily accommodates the otherworldly agendas of metaphysics and theology. He writes:
We "knowers" [Erkennenden ] have gradually come to mistrust believers [Gläubige ] of all kinds; our mistrust has gradually brought us to make inferences the reverse of those of former days: wherever the strength of a faith [Glaubens ] is very prominently displayed, we infer a certain weakness of demonstrability [Beweisbarkeit ], even the improbability of what is believed [Geglaubten ]. We, too, do not deny that faith [Glaube ] "makes blessed": that is precisely why we deny that faith proves [beweist ] anything,—a strong faith that makes blessed raises suspicion against that which is believed; it does not establish "truth," it establishes a certain probability—of deception . (GM III:24; cf. HH 484; BGE 210; WP 456, 459)
In these and other passages, Nietzsche argues against the "deceptions" of the "believers" in favor of the "honesty" of the "intellectual con-
[36] In his note to GS 347, Walter Kaufmann writes: "the reference is to I Corinthians 2:4, where the King James Bible has 'in demonstration of the Spirit and of power' and Luther 'in Beweisung des Geistes und der Kraft .' In theological and homiletical quotations the old-fashioned Beweisung gave way to Beweis (proof—the word Nietzsche uses) during the nineteenth-century. Since Schleiermacher this passage became very popular, and the parallelism of Geist and Kraft was replaced by either Geist or, as in Nietzsche's case, Kraft ."
science." The latter refuses to accept the former, which seeks to exempt itself from rigorous scrutiny and refuses to enter the space of questions and reasons, demonstration and proofs. It is precisely this that Nietzsche finds "contemptible" and that leads him to reject all claims regarding transcendent entities.
Yet, having endorsed the "will to deception," how is Nietzsche to challenge this ignoble form of it? What differentiates this "bad" deception from the other "good" deception? If Nietzsche wants to accept the latter, must he not accept the former as well? Two related criteria distinguish these varieties of deception and justify Nietzsche's attitude toward them. Whereas moral-metaphysical deceptions are both unconditional and otherworldly, practical-vital deceptions are conditional and this-worldly. The former claim for themselves an absolute and ultimate status. As such, they plead exemption from scientific inquiry and affirm the existence of a prior science (a meta-physics) and a super-natural realm. Yet Nietzsche argues not only that the supposedly unconditional and otherworldly posits of metaphysics and morality are explicable in naturalistic terms but also that such explanation reveals these posits to be pernicious and contemptible. He diagnoses these deceptions as products of an irrational self-hatred: a hatred of "the world of nature, life, and history" (in all its sensuousness, physicality, conditionality, and contingency) on the part of a natural, living being—"fundamentally, life's nausea and disgust with life" (BT SC:5). Posits such as "God," the "Forms," and the "thing in itself," he insists, are simply ideal projections that betray a human desire to be other-than-human, a desire for self-negation or annihilation.[37] Seen in this light, moral-metaphysical deceptions turn out to be not only superfluous, because they can be given an "internal" account, but also deplorable, because they deny the most palpable features of natural life in favor of indemonstrable claims and because they rest upon psychological motives that are, by all accounts, odious.
Practical-vital deceptions, on the other hand, are both conditional and worldly. Such deceptions always justify themselves with regard to particular aims and goals that, in the final analysis, serve to increase the ability of human beings to preserve or enhance themselves as individuals, as groups, or as a species. In relation to other ends, or for other
[37] Such arguments were, of course, a central feature of nineteenth-century German thought. Forms of this argument against religion had previously been asserted by Hegel and the Young Hegelians, particularly Feuerbach, Bauer, and Marx; and such a theory of projection was later elaborated by Freud and his followers.
individuals, groups, or species, such deceptions might certainly be inadequate or counterproductive. And while, in our hubris, we sometimes forget the relative, conditional, and pragmatic origins and aims of these useful fictions, recognition of their fictional status does nothing to destroy their value. This, then, is a primary difference between the two sorts of deceptions: recognition of the fictional nature of metaphysicalmoral deceptions destroys them, since absolute being and unconditional value is of their essence. The world in which we live, however, is contingent and conditional through and through. It countenances neither absolute entities nor absolute values. On the contrary, every entity in the natural world is enmeshed in a web of contingent relations and enjoys only a temporary existence. Such entities have limited, relative, and conditional horizons and posit for themselves limited, relative, and conditional goals. Such is "life"; and only those interpretations that affirm this conditionality, contingency, and relativity will affirm life. And it is precisely on this account that metaphysical-moral deceptions are found wanting, while practical-vital deceptions pass the test.
The "will to deception," then, is justified by Nietzsche only insofar as it places itself in the service of "life." This is also the case with the "will to truth." We have seen that Nietzsche rejects the "unconditional will to truth," which desires the eradication of every form of semblance and deception and thus ends up willing the eradication of "life"—because "life rest[s] upon semblance, [ . . . ] error, deception, simulation," etc. (GS 344). Any search for "the true world" betrays this otherworldly, antiworldly desire, for it is nothing other than a desire for the absolute, the unconditional, and the genuinely certain, which are not to be found within "the world of life, nature, and history" (see GS 344, 373; GM III:23–28).
It is precisely this "unconditional will to truth" that Nietzsche still finds in science and that, despite his praise of scientific method, is the crux of his frequent criticisms of science. He argues that science has not yet broken from theology and metaphysics insofar as it retains "a metaphysical faith " (GS 344), namely, faith in the unconditional value of truth. Nietzsche's prime target here is positivism, the scientific and philosophical project that aims to discover simple, presuppositionless "facts" and to ground all knowledge on these primitives.[38] According
[38] Though Nietzsche's target is positivism in its nineteenth-century incarnation—the tradition of Comte, Mill, and Spencer—I think this critique applies equally well to its major twentieth-century manifestation, logical positivism. Nietzsche's response to nineteenth-century positivism, i.e., his development of a holistic empiricism (see chap. 2), hasmuch in common with the responses to logical positivism offered by Heidegger and Gadamer, Quine and Davidson.
to Nietzsche, this remains a metaphysical desire; for, no less than Platonism or Christianity, positivism is motivated by the demand for ultimate foundations and for a knowledge that excludes every form of semblance and deception.[39]
This attempt to eliminate all perspective and interpretation in order to get at "the facts" is, once again, not only impossible but deplorable; for, in essence, it is nothing but a rejection of nature and life, for which all knowledge is perspectival or interpretive and thus involves the kinds of "extramoral" deceptions discussed above. In a passage from the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche makes just this point. With philosophical and scientific positivism clearly in mind, he writes:
[T]hat desire to halt before the factual, the factum brutum, [ . . . ] through which French scholarship [Wissenschaft ] nowadays tries to establish a sort of moral superiority over German scholarship; that general renunciation of all interpretation (of forcing, adjusting, abbreviating, omitting, padding, inventing, falsifying, and whatever else is of the essence of interpreting)—all this expresses, broadly speaking, as much ascetic virtue as any denial of sensuality (it is at bottom only a particular mode of this denial). That which constrains these men, however, this unconditional will to truth, is faith in the ascetic ideal itself, even if as an unconscious imperative—don't be deceived about that—it is the faith in a metaphysical value, the value of truth in itself, sanctioned and guaranteed by this ideal alone (it stands or falls with this ideal). There is, strictly speaking, no such "presuppositionless" science, the thought of such a thing is unthinkable, paralogical: a philosophy, a "faith," must always first be there to give science a direction, a meaning, a limit, a method, a right to exist. (Whoever has the opposite notion, whoever tries, for example, to place philosophy "on a strictly scientific basis," first needs to stand not only philosophy but also truth on its head [ . . . ]). (GM III: 24)
In short, we must reject not only a priori but also empirical attempts to provide perspectiveless, ultimate foundations for our knowledge. Science, facts, and truth are possible only within the framework of one or another interpretation, each of which construes the world according to a set of presuppositions that receive only relative, conditional justifica-
[39] On positivism as the demand for ultimate foundations, see GS 347; on positivism as the demand for knowledge without distortion and deception, see GM III:24, cited below. For other critiques of positivism, see BGE 204, 210; WP 1 and 481.
tion.[40] There is no such thing as absolute or unconditional truth.[41] Thus, as with "the will to deception," Nietzsche sanctions "the will to truth" only insofar as it acknowledges its conditionality and contingency—only, that is, insofar as it takes its place within the actual conditions of existence and inquiry of living beings.
1.6—
The Revaluation of Truth II:
Truth and the "Intellectual Conscience"
What, then, remains of "the will to truth," and what sort of "truth" does it "will"? The answer lies in Nietzsche's conception of "honesty" and "intellectual conscience." These terms, however, are easily misunderstood, and their Nietzschean significance eludes a casual reading. Before offering an account of how these terms ought to be understood, then, I first want to indicate how they ought not to be understood.
1.6.1—
Utility, Correspondence, and the "Intellectual Conscience"
In several of the passages in which Nietzsche speaks of "intellectual conscience," "intellectual integrity," and "honesty," he tells us that these philological virtues are characterized by "the demand for certainty " (GS 2.) and the demand that everything be surrendered in the service of truth (A 50). This has led prominent commentators such as Walter Kaufmann to argue that Nietzsche's consistent calls for "intellectual integrity" and the like manifest his rejection of the notion of truth as utility and his unwillingness to give up reason's desire for truth as correspondence, despite the recognition that this desire is destructive of life.[42] On the other side, Arthur Danto has taken issue with Kaufmann's
[40] See WP 481: "Against positivism, which halts at phenomena—'There are only facts'—I would say: No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations."
[41] Through analyses of the "Preface" to Beyond Good and Evil, both Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, in "On Associating with Nietzsche," trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Journal of Nietzsche Studies 4–5 (1992–93): 28ff., and Derrida, in Spurs, make this point. Derrida more explicitly argues that truth, for Nietzsche, must take its place within the world of semblance.
[42] Kaufmann, Nietzsche, 359–61. Admittedly, Kaufmann makes no explicit reference to "the correspondence theory of truth." Yet something like it is clearly what he has in mind. For, according to Kaufmann, Nietzsche conceives of truth as a heroic resistance to every illusion and all considerations of utility or pleasure so as to be able to state simply what is the case. This is corroborated by Mary Warnock ("Nietzsche's Conception ofTruth," 57–58 and passim ), who both expresses agreement with Kaufmann's interpretation of Nietzsche's view of truth and argues that the conception of truth ultimately presupposed by Nietzsche is a correspondence theory. Also see n. 47, below.
view. Without offering an alternative account of the notions of "honesty" and "intellectual conscience," Danto argues that Nietzsche's discussions of the life-negating results of "the will to truth" provide sufficient evidence that Nietzsche does indeed relinquish the desire for truth as correspondence and instead sanctions useful fictions insofar as they are life-promoting.[43]
This debate has become a centerpiece in the literature on Nietzsche, and each side has attracted a number of advocates.[44] Indeed, it has been suggested that, with regard to Nietzsche, "the distinction between correspondence truth and pragmatic truth. [ . . . ] deserves to be called The Official Distinction."[45] Yet, again, I think the debate is improperly framed and that, contrary to both sides, Nietzsche identifies truth neither with utility nor with correspondence. A reconsideration of the passages concerning "honesty" and "intellectual conscience" bears this out.
Kaufmann is certainly right to point out that, in these and other passages, Nietzsche argues against the notion that truth is equivalent to utility of belief. Indeed, Nietzsche seems to argue that "intellectual integrity" consists precisely in a constant "doubt," "mistrust," and "skepticism" with regard to convictions, faiths, and beliefs, especially those one holds dearest (see BGE 34, 39; GM I: 1, III:24; A P, 12–13, 54). Yet Nietzsche does not reject pragmatic criteria altogether. He simply claims that utility of belief is insufficient for the determination of truth and that, unchecked by other criteria, the pragmatic criterion of truth quickly becomes dogmatic and deceptive (see GS 113; GM III: 24; A 50; WP 456). We have seen that, taken as the sole criterion of truth, the pragmatic conception can support even the wildest metaphysical beliefs. By establishing a domain that in principle excludes every other criterion, metaphysics and morality come to sanction beliefs solely because of the strength that accrues to them due to their benefit for the believer.
[43] Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, 72, 99, 191ff.
[44] See n. 16 above. An interesting variant of this debate can be seen in the exchange between Jean Granier, Le problème de la vérité dans la philosophie de Nietzsche (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966), 303–36, and Sarah Kofman, "Appendix: Genealogy, Interpretation, Text," in Nietzsche and Metaphor, trans. Duncan Large (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), discussed by David C. Hoy in "Philosophy as Rigorous Philology? Nietzsche and Poststructuralism," New York Literary Forum 8–9 (1981): 178–80, and Schrift in Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 166–68.
[45] John T. Wilcox, "Nietzsche's Epistemology: Recent American Discussions," International Studies in Philosophy 15 (1983): 67–77, 72.
Thus, in several passages that take up this issue, Nietzsche inveighs against Christianity and Kantianism, both of which maintain that, ultimately, reason must yield to faith (see D P:3; GS 335; GM III:12; TI "World" 2–3; A 10, 12, 50, 54). It is this that the "intellectual conscience" finds contemptible:
All these great enthusiasts and prodigies behave like our little females: they consider "beautiful sentiments" adequate arguments, regard a heaving bosom as the bellows of the deity, and conviction a criterion of truth. In the end, Kant tried, with "German" innocence, to give this corruption, this lack of any intellectual conscience, scientific status with his notion of "practical reason": he invented a special kind of reason for cases in which one need not bother with reason—that is, when morality, when the sublime command "thou shalt," raises its voice. (A 12)
What does it mean, after all, to have integrity in matters of the spirit? That one is severe against one's heart, that one despises "beautiful sentiments," that one makes of every Yes and No a matter of conscience. Faith makes blessed: consequently it lies. (A 50)
The strength and utility of a belief, then, cannot be the only criterion of its truth. "Making unhappy and evil are no counterarguments," Nietzsche writes. "Something might be true, while being harmful and dangerous in the highest degree" (BGE 39). Those who accept the pragmatic criterion of truth, he concludes, show themselves to be "unaware of the most basic requirements of intellectual honesty" (A 12).[46]
But this is not to argue for a notion of truth as "correspondence with the way the world really is." In fact, Nietzsche argues that the correspondence conception of truth bears a fundamental affinity with the pragmatic conception—that, like the latter, the former achieves its force by a "proof of strength." In §347 of The Gay Science, having ridiculed the pragmatic "proof of strength," Nietzsche goes on to argue that—no less than pragmatist "believers," who deem their dearest beliefs "true"—the "scientific-positivistic" "demand for certainty" is simply the strong belief "that something should be firm [ . . . ] the demand for a support, a prop [ . . . ] the need for a faith, a support, a backbone, something to fall back on," which is then deemed "actual," "real," and "true." That is, for Nietzsche, the conviction that there is some absolute foundation—that there are indisputable "facts," or
[46] Cf. WP 172: "That it does not matter whether a thing is true, but only what effect it produces—absolute lack of intellectual integrity . Everything is justified, lies, slander, the most shameless forgery."
some final "way that the world really is"—is nothing but a need that has been transformed into a belief or faith, which, because of its necessity and strength, comes to be considered truth itself:
Here, the sudden feeling of power that an idea arouses in its originator is everywhere counted proof of its value: —and since one knows no way of honoring an idea other than by calling it true, the first predicate with which it is honored is the predicate true . . . . How otherwise could it be so effective? [ . . . ] [I]f it were not real it could not be effective. [ . . . ] An idea that such a decadent is unable to resist, to which he completely succumbs, is thus "proved" to be true !!! (WP 171)
Of course, nowhere in these or any other passages does Nietzsche directly mention the correspondence theory of truth.[47] Yet this realist con-
[47] In a number of articles, John Wilcox ("Note on Correspondence and Pragmatism in Nietzsche"; "Nietzsche's Epistemology," 72–74; "Nietzsche Scholarship and 'the Correspondence Theory of Truth'") takes issue with the notion of the "correspondence theory of truth" in general and in Nietzsche. Wilcox argues, first, that there does not seem to be any such thing as "the correspondence theory of truth." "Too many philosophers have used the word 'correspondence,'" he writes ("Nietzsche's Epistemology," 73 ), and each of them has "construed that relation in different ways—indeed, to some extent they had to, since the relata were so different" ("Nietzsche Scholarship and 'the Correspondence Theory of Truth,'" 340). Second, he argues that "there is not much in Nietzsche's writings that might plausibly be translated as 'correspond' or 'correspondence'" ("Nietzsche Scholarship and 'the Correspondence Theory of Truth,'" 339). With regard to the first issue, I grant that there is no single, canonical, and unequivocal formulation of "the correspondence theory of truth." Nevertheless, I think the phrase is still a useful label for realist theories that hold that a statement or belief is true if and only if it matches up with some antecedent, extralinguistic, extraconceptual reality or a piece thereof. While I believe that such a view is incoherent, one can still find philosophers who hold it; and so the phrase allows one to distinguish such philosophers from those who hold other theories of truth, e.g., those according to which the criterion of truth lies in the consistency or coherence of beliefs or statements with one another or in the utility of beliefs. (Of course, such theories can themselves be realist and thus, in the final analysis, "correspondence," theories if they argue that coherence or utility is ultimately only an index of a belief's correspondence with a pregiven world.) With regard to the second issue, I note that Nietzsche does, at times, refer disparagingly to a canonical form of the "correspondence" theory of truth, namely the Scholastic notion of truth as an "adequation" between things and thought: Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus (see A. N. Prior, "Correspondence Theory of Truth," in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 2, ed. Paul Edwards [New York: Macmillan, 1967], 224). So, for instance, in "On Truth and Lies," Nietzsche asks: "Are designations congruent with things? Is language the adequate expression of reality? [decken sich die Bezeichnungen und die Dinge? Ist die Sprache der adäquate Ausdruck aller Realitäten?]" (p. 81, cf. p. 82) and concludes that "what would be called the adequate expression of the object in the subject [ . . . ] is a contradictory absurdity [das würde heissen der adäquate Ausdruck eines Objekts im Subjekt [ . . . ] ein widerspruchsvolles Unding]" (p. 86). Similarly, in a note from 1887–88, he writes: "That a sort of adequate relationship subsists between subject and object [ . . . ] is a well-meant invention which, I think, has had its day [Daß zwischen Subjekt und Objekt eine Art adäquater Relation stattfinde [ . . . ] ist eine gutmüthige Erfindung, die, wie ich denke, ihre Zeit gehabt hat]" (WP 474). This notion is somewhat more obliquely criticized in The Gay Science (373), where Nietzsche ridicules the scientific realist's "faith in a world that is supposed to have its equiv-alent and measure [Äquivalent und Maass ] in human thought and human valuations—a 'world of truth' that can be mastered completely and forever with the aid of our square little reason." See also WP 4, 625. Of course, Nietzsche never explicitly speaks of "the correspondence theory of truth" or, for that matter, of "the pragmatic theory," "the coherence theory," or any other theory of truth. But that does not mean that such theories cannot be attributed to him. Nietzsche characterizes truth in many different ways and on many different levels; and the attempt to sort out those ways and levels in terms of presentday terminology is, I think, of real value.
ception of truth is clearly one of his targets. For he is arguing against the very notion that truth could be found, that the "true world" is there somewhere awaiting adequate representation by thought or language. It is this belief that motivates both the metaphysician and the positivistic scientist. But this belief betrays an "instinct of weakness, " a "disease of the will "(GS 347), because, for Nietzsche, truth is not something given that might be found but something that must be perpetually constructed and reconstructed .[48]
Will to truth is a making -firm, a making -true and -durable [ . . . ]. Truth is therefore not something there, that might be found or discovered—but something that is to be created and that gives a name to a process, or rather to a will to overcome that has no end—introducing truth, as a processus in infinitum, an active determining—not a becoming-conscious of something that is "in itself" firm and determined. (WP 552)
Those who hold that truth is "already there" waiting to be discovered simply prove to be not up for this creative task. Instead of undertaking the difficult and endless job of constructing interpretations and campaigning for their truth, such realists put their faith in an established construction, which they take to be given in the nature of things:
Faith is always coveted most and needed most urgently where will is lacking; for will, as the affect of command, is the decisive sign of sovereignty and strength. In other words, the less one knows how to command, the more urgently one covets someone who commands—a god, prince, class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience. [ . . . ] Once a human being reaches the fundamental conviction that he must be commanded, he becomes "a believer." (GS 347)
The affect of laziness now takes the side of "truth" [ . . . ] it is more comfortable to obey than to examine . . . it is more flattering to think "I possess the truth" than to see darkness all around one—above all: it is reassuring, it gives confidence, it alleviates life—it improves the character, to the extent that it lessens mistrust . "Peace of soul," "a quiet conscience": all inventions made possible by the presupposition that truth has been found [or: that
[48] See GS 58 and the discussion of it above. See also BGE 210. This notion is discussed further below.
truth is there (daß die Wahrheit da ist )].—[ . . . ] This is the proof of strength. (WP 452; cf. WP 279)
The scientific realist, then, is just as much a "believer" as the pragmatist: both elevate their most strongly held beliefs and desires to the status of "truth." Indeed, lacking the self-consciousness of a more enlightened pragmatism, scientific realism shows itself to be the mirror image of metaphysics and theology. It, too, is inspired by a need for foundations, for what is ultimately real; and it, too, claims to have found this true world. In a section entitled "'Science' as Prejudice," Nietzsche writes:
It is no different with the faith with which so many materialistic investigators of nature rest content nowadays, the faith in a world that is supposed to have its equivalent and its measure in human thought and human valuations—a "world of truth" that can be mastered completely and forever with the aid of our square little reason. [ . . . ] That the only justifiable interpretation of the world should be one in which you are justified because one can continue to work and do research scientifically in your sense [ . . . ]—an interpretation that permits counting, calculating, weighing, seeing, and touching, and nothing more—that is a crudity and a naiveté, assuming that it is not a mental illness, an idiocy. (GS 373)
Here, we see that what is objectionable about scientific realism, for Nietzsche, is precisely what is objectionable about unchecked pragmatism, metaphysics, and theology: namely, its dogmatism .[49] And what is objectionable about dogmatism, Nietzsche argues, is that it "castrates the intellect" (GM III:12).
The claim that truth is found [or: that truth is there (daß die Wahrheit da sei)] and that ignorance and error are at an end is one of the most potent seductions there is. Supposing it is believed, then the will to examination, investigation, caution, experiment [der Wille zur Prüfung, Forschung, Vorsicht, Versuchung] is paralyzed: it can even count as sinful, namely as doubt concerning truth. . . . "Truth" is therefore more fateful than error and ignorance, because it cuts off the forces that work toward enlightenment and knowledge [Aufklärung und Erkenntnis ]. (WP 452)[50]
[49] On the dogmatism of metaphysics and morality, see, e.g., A 9, 54.
[50] Cf. WP 457: "The words 'conviction, ' 'faith, ' the pride of martyrdom—these are the least favorable states for the advancement of knowledge." On the "sinfulness," "wickedness," and "evil" of doubt, see also GS 4; BGE 212, 229–30; A 52; WP 459. Cf. also HH 630: "Conviction is the belief that on some particular point of knowledge one is in possession of the absolute [unbedingten ] truth. This belief presupposes that absolute truths exist; likewise that perfect methods of attaining to them have been discovered; finally, that everyone who possesses convictions avails himself of these perfect methods. Allthree assertions demonstrate at once that the man of convictions is not the man of scientific thought"; and HH 483: "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Dogmatism cuts off all further inquiry and questioning—and this the "intellectual conscience" cannot tolerate:
[T]o stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and interpretive multiplicity of existence [der ganzen wundervollen Ungewissheit und Vieldeutigkeit des Daseins][51]and not question, not tremble with the craving and the rapture of such questioning [ . . . ]—that is what I feel to be contemptible . (GS 2)
Here Nietzsche hints at the most important reason why dogmatism is intolerable and why further inquiry must always be promoted: that "the interpretive multiplicity of existence" cannot be successfully captured within a single interpretive framework. Dogmatism is reductionist; and this reductionism, according to Nietzsche, is ascetic and antinatural, because it denies the multiplicity, struggle, and change that are constantly manifested in the world of our experience (see WP 470, 600, 655, 881, 933). ("Everything simple [einfach ] is merely imaginary, is not 'true,'" Nietzsche writes. "But whatever is real, whatever is true, is neither one [Eins ] nor even reducible to one [Eins ]" [WP 536]).[52] One ceases to be a genuine inquirer when one becomes a "fanatic," whose inquiry is limited by "a sort of hypnotism of the whole system of the senses and the intellect for the benefit of an excessive nourishment (hypertrophy) of a single point of view" (GS 347).[53] Again referring to the dogmatism of the natural scientists, Nietzsche writes:
What? Do we really want to permit existence to be degraded for us like this—reduced to a mere exercise for a calculator and an indoor diversion for mathematicians? Above all, one should not wish to divest existence of its
[51] Here Nietzsche uses the term Vieldeutigkeit and, in GS 373, the term vieldeutigen, both of which Kaufmann renders as "rich ambiguity" and which I render, respectively, as "interpretive multiplicity" and "multiply interpretable." Whereas, in both English and German, "ambiguity" often means "unclear" or "having a double meaning" (zweideutig, doppeldeutig ), my translations serve to emphasize that Nietzsche speaks not of two (zwei -, doppel -) but of many (viel -), that, unlike "ambiguity," this sort of multiplicity does not seem to call for a resolution or clarification, and that this "multiplicity" has to do with interpretation: deuten . The point, then, is that existence, for Nietzsche, is not unclear or equivocal but rather capable of supporting many different interpretations.
[52] This text appears in the Nachlaß within a series of aphorisms titled "Maxims of a Hyperborean." It is immediately preceded by an aphorism that also appears in the "Maxims and Arrows" section that begins Twilight of the Idols: "'All truth is simple [einfach ].'—Is that not doubly [zwiefach ] a lie?" (TI "Maxims" 4; cf. KSA 13: 15 [118]).
[53] For more on this dogmatic reduction to a single perspective, see BGE P; A 9, 54. See also the discussion of "inverse cripples" in Z: 2 "On Redemption."
multiply interpretable character [seines vieldeutigen Charakters ]: that is a dictate of good taste, gentlemen, the taste of reverence for everything that lies beyond your horizon. (GS 373)
He then continues, offering a simple case in point: "Assuming that one estimated the value of a piece of music according to how much of it could be counted, calculated, and expressed in formulas: how absurd would such a 'scientific' estimation of music be! What would one have comprehended, understood, grasped of it? Nothing, really nothing of what is 'music' in it!" (GS 373).
That the "exact sciences" are plainly irrelevant for an understanding of the aesthetic, historical, cultural, and social aspects of music, Nietzsche suggests, should make it clear that the world of our experience cannot be suitably explained through a single interpretive framework. Indeed, a consideration of such examples, Nietzsche feels, should even tempt us in the opposite direction: toward a recognition of the endless variety of interpretive possibilities: "I should think that today we are at least far from the ridiculous immodesty that would be involved in decreeing from our corner that perspectives are permitted only from this corner. Rather has the world become 'infinite' for us all over again, inasmuch as we cannot reject the possibility that it may include infinite interpretations" (GS 374).[54]
Nietzsche thus pledges "to take leave of all faith and every wish for certainty" (GS 347), to have done with "a will to truth [ . . . ] that ultimately prefer[s] even a handful of 'certainty' to a whole carload of beautiful possibilities" (BGE 10). Leaving the land behind, he sets out
[54] Nehamas, "Immanent and Transcendent Perspectivism," 475ff., and David Hoy, "Nietzsche, Hume, and the Genealogical Method," in Nietzsche as Affirmative Thinker, ed. Yirmiyahu Yovel (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986), 24ff., have raised legitimate concerns about the claims of this section of The Gay Science . Nehamas focuses on the ways in which this section seems to sanction a sort of "species solipsism," insofar as "our corner" is meant to refer to "the human intellect" and the possibility of "infinite interpretations" to the possibility of "other kinds of intellects and perspectives" to which "the world" would appear fundamentally different. Hoy focuses on the ways in which this section seems to commit Nietzsche to a problematic metaphysical ontology about which Nietzsche claims knowledge while at the same time arguing that it is unavailable to us. These readings are persuasive and point to real problems in Nietzsche's language, if not his conception. However, as both Nehamas and Hoy go on to argue, Nietzsche elsewhere sanctions a different view of perspectivism, according to which there exist multiple, equally legitimate interpretive frameworks, to each of which we have access in principle and none of which is reducible to another. While acknowledging the aforementioned problems with the language of this section, I cite a portion of it above in support of this latter version of perspectivism.
onto the dangerous, open seas of interpretation in search of a new kind of knowledge (see GS 124, 283, 289, 343; BGE 23).
1.6.2—
Dogmatism, Pluralism, Certainty, and "Intellectual Conscience"
The "intellectual conscience" thus consists neither in the will to truth as utility nor in the will to truth as correspondence. How, then, are we to characterize this elusive kernel of Nietzschean inquiry? We have already gone some way toward answering this question. We have discovered, for instance, that the "intellectual conscience" is relentlessly antidogmatic, antireductionist, antifoundationalist, and ever in search of new interpretations. Given such a characterization, however, the "intellectual conscience" appears to endorse a relativism that bears little resemblance to what we would usually consider "intellectual integrity" or concern for "truth." Yet Nietzsche aims to show that the actual conditions of our existence and the actual process of our inquiry necessitate such a view and that such inquiry results in "truths" that, though never absolute or ultimate, deliver all that we actually need from truth and, in any case, all we can ever have of it.
In the famous preface to Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche likens truth to a woman who will not allow herself to be won by any dogmatic suitor. This assessment of the dogmatist is reiterated in The Antichrist, where Nietzsche writes: "Not to see many things, to be impartial at no point, to be party through and through, to have a strict and necessary perspective in all questions of value—this alone makes it possible for this kind of being to exist at all. But with this they are the opposite, the antagonists, of truthfulness—of truth" (A 54).[55]
Thus, it is precisely a concern for "truth" that inspires the vigilant antidogmatism and antireductionism of the "intellectual conscience." An examination of these negative traits will perhaps give us a clearer sense of both the "intellectual conscience" and its "truth."
Indeed, Nietzsche primarily characterizes the "intellectual conscience" in such oppositional terms. Wherever the notion appears, we
[55] Cf. BGE 43: "Are these coming philosophers new friends of truth? That is probable enough, for all philosophers so far have loved their truths. But they will certainly not be dogmatists." See also BT SC: 1, SC: 5, for an argument to the effect that the dogmatism of science and morality is contrary to "truth" and "life."
are told that it involves "mistrust," "skepticism," "suspicion," "severity," "hardness," "evil," "scrutiny," "caution," and "questioning" with regard to all "faiths," "convictions," and "presuppositions" (see HH 631, 633, 635; GS 2, 4, 113, 293, 319, 344, 346, 357; Z: 3 "On Old and New Tablets"; BGE 25, 34, 39, 209–10, 212, 230; GM III:24; A 12–13, 47, 50, 54; WP 452). Yet we should be clear that this is not a call for "presuppositionless" inquiry; because, as we have seen, Nietzsche denies that any such thing is possible. "There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as science 'without presuppositions,'" he writes; "the thought of such a thing is unthinkable"; because "a philosophy, a 'faith,' must always first be there to give science a direction, a meaning, a limit, a method, a right to exist" (GM III: 24; cf. GS 344). Elsewhere he writes that "'contemplation without interest'" is "a nonsensical absurdity," because it demands "that we should think of an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking" (GM III: 12). He then concludes, "There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective 'knowing'; and the more affects we allow to speak about a thing [eine Sache ], the more eyes, different eyes we can use to observe a thing, the more complete will our 'concept' of this thing, our 'objectivity,' be" (GM III: 12).
Here we witness an interesting transformation. Instead of the skeptical relativism that might seem to result from such a perspectival thesis, Nietzsche tells us that "knowledge" and "objectivity" are still possible, provided that we understand them differently. Rather than conceiving of "knowledge" and "objectivity" as "contemplation without interest," Nietzsche proposes that we understand them as "the ability to have one's For and Against under control and to engage and disengage them, so that one knows how to employ a variety of perspectives and affective interpretations in the service of knowledge" (GM III:12).
With this, we begin to see the cognitive value of Nietzsche's interpretive pluralism.[56] It is the role of the "intellectual conscience" relentlessly to question the "faiths," "convictions," and "presuppositions" of any particular evaluative or interpretive framework. Such questioning of presuppositions surely presupposes something against which to measure individual interpretations. Having rejected the notion of a presup-
[56] See also Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 181–94, for a valuable discussion of Nietzsche's "interpretive pluralism."
positionless standpoint, Nietzsche maintains that interpretations can only be measured against other interpretations and perspectives.[57] A proliferation of such interpretations, he suggests, will not only provide us with many different ways to construe the world but will also give us multiple criteria against which to measure any given interpretation. In Nietzsche's usage, then, "honesty," "intellectual conscience," and "intellectual integrity" are not only compatible with the necessarily perspectival character of all knowledge; they even require such a condition.[58] For they involve relationships among perspectives, namely the constant weighing and measuring of interpretations against one another—of existing interpretations against other existing interpretations, of new interpretations against old interpretations, and old interpretations against new interpretations. Refusing unquestioningly to endorse the dominant interpretations, no matter how "useful" or "necessary" they appear to be, the "intellectual conscience" constantly affirms the "evil" instincts that question existing frameworks and experiment with new or forgotten ones:
The strongest and most evil spirits have so far done the most to advance humanity: again and again they have rekindled the passions that were going to sleep—all ordered society puts the passions to sleep—and they reawakened again and again the sense of comparison, of contradiction, of the pleasure in what is new, daring, untried; they compelled man to pit opinion against opinion, model against model . (GS 4, my emphasis; cf. GS 34)
This weighing and measuring of interpretations against one another serves a number of critical and heuristic purposes. First, it demonstrates the partiality of any one interpretation or perspective. It thus prevents
[57] A similar sort of epistemological relativism has more recently been articulated by W. V. Quine ("Ontological Relativity," in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays [New York: Columbia University Press, 1969], 50), who writes, "The relativistic thesis to which we have come is this, to repeat: it makes no sense to say what the objects of a theory are, beyond saying how to interpret or reinterpret that theory in another."This position has also been developed by Nelson Goodman, e.g., "The Way the World Is," in Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), and Ways of Worldmaking; Hilary Putnam, e.g., "Realism and Reason," Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 50 (1977): 483–98, and Reason, Truth, and History (London: Cambridge University Press, 1981), chap. 3; and Rorty, e.g., "Inquiry as Recontextualization: An Anti-Dualist Account of Interpretation," in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), differences between these philosophers notwithstanding.
[58] Thus, the "antinomy" Jean Granier sees in Nietzsche's commitment to both perspectivism and philological probity turns out to be no antinomy at all. See Granier, "Perspectivism and Interpretation," 197–99.
any interpretation from taking itself to be uniquely correct and opens it up to critique and scrutiny from without. Second, this procedure calls attention to the rules of formation of interpretations and the different sets of these that govern different interpretations, thus highlighting the decisions in favor of one or more of the many criteria that compete for satisfaction in the composition of any interpretation. Thus, entrenchment is weighed against innovation; habit against novelty; simplicity, coherence, utility, and explanatory power against comprehensiveness and precise description, and so on. Third—and highly important for Nietzsche—a consideration of the dominant interpretations of an individual or group produces a whole symptomatology and genealogy of the dispositions and values that motivate these choices, revealing the affirmative or negative, healthy or sickly, active or reactive, noble or base states of being that underlie decisions in favor of a particular interpretation or set of interpretations.[59] Last, such recognition of the plurality of interpretations and their irreducibility to a single base reveals what Nietzsche calls "the whole marvelous uncertainty and interpretive multiplicity of existence" (GS 2) and thus affirms the world of becoming, change, and semblance (see GS 373; WP 600).
This construal of the "intellectual conscience" as a reciprocal calibration of interpretations also allows us to account for Nietzsche's apparently contradictory remarks concerning "the demand for certainty." In Gay Science §2, Nietzsche writes that one who has intellectual integrity will "account the desire for certainty [Verlangen nach Gewissheit] as his inmost craving and deepest distress—as that which separates the higher human beings from the lower." Yet in §347 of the same text, he argues that "that impetuous desire for certainty [Verlangen nach Gewissheit] that today discharges itself in scientific-positivistic form" betrays an "instinct of weakness " and "disease of the will ." There are
[59] It should be noted that this procedure is not, for Nietzsche, a simple calculus but a complex symptomatology. Thus, for instance, while Plato is criticized for his hatred of becoming and semblance, he is praised for his "sharpened senses" and his "noble resistance to obvious sense evidence"; while Christianity is criticized for its repression of the active impulses, it is praised for its development of subtlety, depth, and cunning; while science is criticized for its residual metaphysics, it is praised for its development of skepticism, mistrust, and critical acumen; and while art and artists generally receive the highest praise from Nietzsche, he also argues that—in the case of Wagner, for instance—the artistic enterprise can be motivated by and can harbor the most objectionable metaphysical-moral dispositions and values. On this symptomatology, see Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), chap. 2; Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, 127ff.; and Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 171ff.
clearly two different conceptions of "certainty" at work here. The latter type, as we have seen, consists in the desire for an indubitable ground, for a final determination of "the way the world is." Such a desire is reprehensible to Nietzsche in that it wishes to deny the necessarily perspectival character of all knowledge and the "interpretive multiplicity of existence" in favor of some otherworldly standpoint and some simple, unchanging world. The "desire for certainty" affirmed in §2, however, is something else entirely. There Nietzsche makes clear that he has in mind simply the requirement that, in coming to rest on a particular interpretation, one has taken alternatives into account and has made explicit to oneself the reasons for, and the consequences of, one's decision. In this sense, the will to "certainty" is directed against those who tolerate "slack feelings in [their] faith and judgments," those who do not "consider it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without first having given themselves an account of the most certain reasons for and against" (GS 2; cf. BGE 5). Against the blind acceptance of one's judgments and values, it asks that one scrutinize them to determine precisely why one holds on to them (see GS 33 5; HH 630).[60] And such scrutiny, as we have seen, can only come from serious consideration of counterinterpretations. Rather than sanctioning the desire for truth as correspondence, then, the "desire for certainty" that Nietzsche considers so central to the "intellectual conscience" achieves its force only within an interpretive pluralism that refuses to grant the ultimacy of any particular world-picture. It is not a demand that the world be rendered "the way it really is" but rather a demand for "honesty" regarding the presuppositions, inclusions, exclusions, aims, and goals that motivate any given perspective.[61]
[60] In his note to GS 347, Walter Kaufmann makes a similar point.
[61] Both Hoy, "Philosophy as Rigorous Philology?" 180, and Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 222, have rightly noted that Nietzsche's interpretive pluralism bears a certain resemblance to the "principle of proliferation" and "pluralistic methodology" more recently advocated by Paul Feyerabend in Against Method (London: Verso, 1978). Yet both Hoy and Schrift go on to criticize Feyerabend's slogan, "anything goes," as endorsing a problematic relativism. But I think Feyerabend is close to Nietzsche here, too. First, the relativism or pluralism advocated by both Nietzsche and Feyerabend is primarily methodological rather than substantive . (Feyerabend explicitly advocates the adoption of "a pluralistic methodology " [Against Method, 30].) That is, it does not claim that every individual interpretation is as good as any other but rather that no interpretation is final and that every interpretation must be rigorously tested from the point of view of other interpretations (p. 30). While both Nietzsche and Feyerabend grant that there will always be more than one valid interpretation (i.e., in different domains, given different interests and goals, etc.), neither argues that every interpretation is valid. (Both, for instance, reject theological interpretations; and, while Feyerabend rejects antidemo-cratic interpretations, Nietzsche rejects democratic ones). Second, neither Nietzsche nor Feyerabend advocates relativism or antidogmatism for its own sake. Rather, for both, relativism and pluralism is endorsed because of its heuristic and critical value. (Feyerabend, for instance, puts interpretive pluralism in the service of "progress" [23 and passim] and "objective knowledge" [46]). I have argued above (and continue to argue below) that Nietzsche advocates a perspectival pluralism "in the service of knowledge" and "objectivity" (GM III:12, my emphasis). Such too is the aim of Feyerabend's pluralism. "Knowledge so conceived," he writes, "is not a series of self-consistent theories that converges towards an ideal view; it is not a gradual approach to the truth. It is rather an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible (and perhaps even incommensurable) alternatives, each single theory, each fairy tale, each myth that is part of the collection forcing the others into greater articulation [my emphasis] and all of them contributing via this process of competition, to the development of our consciousness [my emphasis] [ . . . ] Variety of opinion is necessary for objective knowledge " (Against Method, 30, 46).
1.6.3—
"Intellectual Conscience," Truth, and Method
We now have a better sense of what the "intellectual conscience" is, for Nietzsche. One important issue, however, remains outstanding. We know that the "intellectual conscience" is concerned with truth; but we still do not know precisely what truth is, for Nietzsche. To answer this question, I want to return to a remark made above. At the outset of this discussion, I noted that every major theory of truth has been attributed to Nietzsche by one commentator or another, while some commentators have argued that Nietzsche neither provides nor is interested in providing any theory of truth at all. I went on to suggest that each of these views is, in some respect, correct. We are now in a position to see why this is so.
We have seen that Nietzsche rejects the notion that truth is simply utility of belief. Yet, clearly, he does not reject pragmatic criteria entirely. There is no such thing as "contemplation without interest," he claims; and "to eliminate the will altogether" would be "to castrate the intellect" (GM III:12). That is to say, truth is relative to our interests and goals—not, perhaps, to any particular interest, but certainly to the interests of inquiry in general. Truth is the answer to our questions; it is what fulfills our epistemological projects and satisfies our will to know. The truth matters to us; it makes a difference . At least in part, it is what allows us to predict or manage the world in which we find ourselves. That said, it is still not the case that every expedient belief must be counted as true. There remain truths that are useless, trivial, inexpedient, or even dangerous and beliefs that might be useful but are nevertheless false.
Nietzsche's attitude toward the criterion of coherence is similarly
equivocal. While the coherence theory of truth does not figure explicitly in his texts, the criterion of coherence is nevertheless at work in Nietzsche's discussions of epistemological issues. He notoriously rejects the notions of "facts in themselves" and "things in themselves," arguing that there are "facts" and "things" only within the context of an interpretation or from the point of view of a particular perspective (see GM II:12, III:12, III:24; WP 481, 553–69). That is to say, what is known is so only insofar as it is part of a system or epistemological framework; and what is true is so only insofar as it "coheres" with the other terms of that system or framework. Furthermore, Nietzsche often remarks that new discoveries necessarily take place against the background of our previous knowledge and that they are accorded a place within our system of beliefs only once they have accommodated themselves to that system or once that system has modified itself to accommodate them (see GS 57, 114, 355; BGE 230; TI "Errors" 5; WP 499–501). Nonetheless, Nietzsche argues that some interpretations (e.g., moral and metaphysical ones) are false regardless of their coherence or systematicity while other highly systematic interpretations (e.g., those of logic and mathematics) are too skeletal and abstract to be considered unequivocally true. Moreover, he argues that the previous knowledge that grounds our current system of beliefs is no final guarantor of truth, because systems of belief often include central tenets that are later shown to be false or founded on narrow prejudice.
Even with regard to the correspondence theory of truth Nietzsche's attitude is not unequivocal. He frequently rejects the notion that truth consists in the correspondence between thought or language and a pregiven world. There are no "bare facts" or "pre-given things," he argues; there are "facts" only within the context of some interpretation. Nevertheless, one might justly say that, within a given interpretation, or relative to a particular description, one speaks truly when one speaks of the things and facts countenanced by that interpretation or description and falsely when one speaks otherwise.[62] Thus, from the viewpoint of everyday, practical discourse, we have no trouble judging the truth or falsity of statements like "it is raining" by observing whether or not it is, "in
[62] Thus Nietzsche writes, in "On Truth and Lies," (p. 81) that, within the context of a system of valid designations, "the liar" is one "who misuses fixed conventions by means of arbitrary substitutions or even reversals of names." Schacht, Nietzsche . 60–71, discusses in further detail how Nietzsche seems to sanction this sort of internal, or "discourse-relative," correspondence conception of truth.
fact," raining.[63] Nevertheless, on a broader and more theoretical level, Nietzsche follows many contemporary philosophers in rejecting the correspondence theory of truth.
Nietzsche's ambivalent relationship to each of these major theories of truth is just the reason why I think some commentators have been right to argue that "Nietzsche is not ultimately interested in (theories of) truth."[64] In the end, neither utility, coherence, correspondence, nor any other single criterion serves, for Nietzsche, as the determinant of truth. Rather, the truth of a statement or belief is the more or less stable result of its having been relativized to a particular theory or interpretation that itself has been found viable according to at least some of the most rigorous criteria of justification available.[65] There are many such criteria, and no interpretation will fulfill all of them. Different criteria will be considered appropriate to different domains of knowledge and inquiry; and competing interpretations within a particular domain will take different criteria as dominant. But neither these domains and interpretations nor these rules of inclusion and exclusion are fixed and final. Like everything else, for Nietzsche, interpretations and their "truths" become,[66] and this becoming is a matter of struggle and power—not, as some have argued, a matter of what the strongest decree, or of what gives a particular individual the greatest feeling of power,[67] but of what
[63] This conception of correspondence seems similar to that delineated within the semantic theory of truth and perhaps accounts for some commentators' attribution of that theory to Nietzsche. See n. 17, above.
[64] Gemes, "Nietzsche's Critique of Truth," 48. Cf. Nehamas: "Nietzsche . . . is not interested in providing a theory of truth" (Nietzsche: Life as Literature, 55).
[65] Here, Nietzsche is in agreement with Richard Rorty ("Solidarity or Objectivity?" in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 23), who writes that "there is nothing to be said about either truth or rationality apart from descriptions of the familiar procedures of justification which a given society—ours —uses in one or another area of inquiry." Note that, while Rorty is perhaps the most prominent heir to the pragmatist tradition, he does not accept the pragmatic theory of truth. Rather, following Donald Davidson, he endorses a conception of truth that makes use of various aspects of the pragmatic, coherence, and correspondence theories, but that, ultimately, endorses none of these, preferring to consider truth the result of successful inquiry and interpretation rather than something that might be measured according to a single criterion. For a discussion of Rorty and Davidson on truth, see Donald Davidson, "Afterthoughts, 1987," in Reading Rorty, ed. Alan R. Malachowski (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). Cf. also Samuel C. Wheeler, "True Figures: Metaphor, Social Relations, and the Sorites," in The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture, ed. David R. Hiley et al. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).
[66] See HH 2: "But everything has become: there are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths. Consequently what is needed from now on is historical philosophizing, and with it the virtue of modesty."
[67] See Grimm, Nietzsche's Theory of Knowledge, 17ff.
rules of formation and criteria of justification prevail or hold sway in a particular discourse at a specific cultural and historical moment.[68]
Nietzsche is not interested in providing a theory of truth, then, because truth is not something that admits of final determination by a fixed set of criteria. Truth is the fleeting calm between battles within a war that has no preordained or final victor. What does interest Nietzsche, however, is ensuring that the struggle continue and that inquiry not come to an end with the enforced peace of dogmatism. Toward that end, he seeks to proliferate and sharpen the weapons to be used in this battle. Those weapons, Nietzsche tells us, are "methods."[69] He writes:
Truth, that is to say, the scientific method, was grasped and promoted by those who divined in it a weapon of war—an instrument of destruction . (WP 457)[70]
[W ]e ourselves, we free spirits, are nothing less than a "revaluation of all values," an incarnate declaration of war and triumph over all the old conceptions of "true" and "untrue." The most valuable insights are developed last; but the most valuable insights are the methods. All the methods, all the presuppositions of our current scientificity, were opposed for thousands of years with the most profound contempt. [ . . . ] We have had the whole pathos of mankind against us—their conception of what truth ought to be, of what the service of the truth ought to be: every "thou shalt" has hitherto been aimed against us. Our objectives, our practice, our quiet, cautious, mistrustful manner—all these were considered utterly unworthy and contemptible. (A 13; cf. WP 469)
All the presuppositions for a scholarly culture, all the scientific methods, were already there [in the ancient world]; the great, the incomparable art of reading well had already been established—that presupposition for the tradition of culture, for the unity of science. [ . . . ] Everything essential had been found, so that the work could be begun: the methods, one must say it ten times, are what is essential, also what is most difficult, also what is for the
[68] In BGE 211, Nietzsche speaks of "former positings of value, creations of value which have become dominant and are for a time called 'truths'." See also WP 552, cited above, and BGE 210.
[69] For more on this, see Jaspers, Nietzsche, 172ff.
[70] Cf. WP 455: "The methods of truth were not invented from motives of truth, but from motives of power, of wanting to be superior." It should be said that Nietzsche goes on to say, "But that is a prejudice: a sign that truth is not involved at all." He thus seems to endorse a pure will to truth against the notion of truth as motivated by considerations of power. Yet this contradicts so many of his texts on truth (from TL to GS 344 and GM III:23–28), which generally argue that the notion of "disinterested truth" is absurd and impossible. I suggest that what Nietzsche condemns is not the notion that the will to truth is a will to power but that the obsession with power can make one a "fanatic" and thus can "prolong [ . . . ] the dominion of antiscientific methods." See HH 629–38 for Nietzsche's affirmation of the "struggle" and "conflict" that drive the will to truth.
longest time opposed by habits and laziness. What we today have again conquered with immeasurable self-mastery [ . . . ]—the free eye before reality, the cautious hand, patience and seriousness in the smallest matters, the whole integrity in knowledge—that had already been there once before! (A 59)
In these passages, Nietzsche lauds "scientific methods" and argues that they constitute a "declaration of war and triumph" against the faiths and convictions of metaphysics, theology, and morality (see also HH 629–38). This triumph, however, does not lie in securing some truth that was covered over by the adversaries of scientific method; rather, it lies in the latter's "integrity in knowledge," its attempt to satisfy all our cognitive demands. What is "essential" is not the result of scientific inquiry but its methods, which are praised for their "quiet, cautious, mistrustful manner," for their scrutiny of faiths and convictions in the service of knowledge. Indeed, in Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche writes: "[T]he pathos that one has the truth now counts for very little in comparison with that other, gentler and less noisy pathos of seeking truth that never wearies of learning and examining anew . . . for the scientific spirit rests upon an insight into method, and if every method were lost all the results of science together would not suffice to prevent a restoration of superstition and nonsense" (633, 635, my emphasis).
But this praise of "method," then, is nothing but a reiteration of Nietzsche's praise of the "intellectual conscience." Here as well as there, Nietzsche advocates the creation of a multiplicity of tests to determine the value of values and systems of belief.[71] Against the "habits and laziness" manifested in the dogmatic notion that truth is simply to be found, Nietzsche argues that "the spirit of all severe, of all profoundly inclined, spirits teaches the reverse . At every step one has to wrestle for truth" (A 50, latter emphasis mine). Recalling his discussion of the Greek agon, which never allows or admits a final victor (HC ), Nietzsche encourages a notion of inquiry as perpetual struggle, in which truth exists only while the victor is uncontested.[72] Thus, in a section from Daybreak entitled
[71] See HH 637: "Opinions grow out of passions; inertia of the spirit lets them stiffen into convictions .—He, however, whose spirit is free and restlessly alive can prevent this stiffening through continual change. [ . . . W]e advance from opinion to opinion, through one party after another, as noble traitors to all things that can in any way be betrayed—and yet we feel no sense of guilt." Cf. GS 295.
[72] Or, as another writer has recently put it: "truth is the momentary balance of power in a many-sided war among various guerrilla bands" (Wheeler, "True Figures," 217). This Nietzschean conception of truth and inquiry as a perpetual "agonistics" has been advocated by Michel Foucault, "Truth and Power," trans. Colin Gordon, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. by Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 144 and passim; and Jean-François Lyotard, ThePostmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 10 and passim . Without reference to martial metaphors, Jean-Luc Nancy offers another characterization of the point I want to make here. He writes ("'Our Probity!'" 72) that Nietzsche "turns this Redlichkeit into a strange probity that would in some way precede the truth of which it ought to be the guarantor or the witness, and which would precede or defer indefinitely the reference of its truthfulness."
"To What Extent the Thinker Loves His Enemy," Nietzsche writes: "Never keep back or bury in silence that which can be thought against your thoughts! Give it praise! It is among the foremost requirements of honesty of thought. Every day you must conduct your campaign also against yourself. A victory and a conquered fortress are no longer your concern, your concern is truth—but your defeat is no longer your concern, either!" (370).[73]
Finally, with this, we have perhaps also unraveled the aphorism that heads Nietzsche's examination of truth and the ascetic ideal in the Genealogy of Morals: "Unconcerned, mocking, violent—thus wisdom wants us: she is a woman and always loves only a warrior." Having spurned the dogmatist, truth and wisdom find their proper suitors in the warrior, who despises peace and settles for no final victory (see also Z:1 "On War and Warriors").
1.7—
Art as Successor to Science
We can now return to and complete Nietzsche's genealogy of European thought. Where we left off, Nietzsche had described the self-overcoming of metaphysics and theology in science and then the self-overcoming of science itself. This last event finally accomplished "the death of God," for it signaled the end of the metaphysical-theological conception of truth as an otherworldly ideal—as "divine"—and ushered in a "revaluation of truth." Yet, as I remarked above, if Nietzsche's genealogy is a story of sunrise and sunset, it is one that covers more than a single day. At the end of the metaphysical day, Nietzsche offers a forecast of the day to come. Having outlined the rudiments of Nietzsche's "revaluation
[73] Cf. GS 283, in which Nietzsche looks forward to an "age that will carry heroism into the search for knowledge and that will wage wars for the sake of ideas and their consequences"; and GS 285, in which Nietzsche tells the postmetaphysical thinker: "You will never pray again, never adore again, never again rest in endless trust; you do not permit yourself to stop before any ultimate wisdom [ . . . ]; no resting place is open any longer to your heart, where it needs to find and no longer seek; you resist any ultimate peace; you will the eternal recurrence of war and peace." Cf. also HH 638: "He who has attained only some degree of freedom of mind cannot feel other than as a wanderer on the earth—though not as a wanderer to a final destination: for this destination does not exist."
of truth," we are now in a position to present that forecast, with which his genealogy ends.
Again, this genealogy is impelled by a constant process of self-over-coming, the gradual accumulation and exacerbation of tensions that eventually lead to a takeover by an element that had thus far been subordinate. The changes it describes are not radical breaks but significant reconfigurations that nonetheless maintain much of the old order in the new.[74] Thus science comes into existence through a "translation and sublimation" of the father confessor's demand for truth at any price (see GS 357; GM III:27); and thus, too, does science's successor retain something of science itself.
Metaphysics and theology are overcome through an internal tension (the demand for faith vs. the requirement of truth-telling); and such, too, is the fate of science. As we have seen, Nietzsche criticizes science for its residual metaphysics—its refusal to question the absolute value of truth and its attempt to discover a "true world" of "facts" that disregards all becoming, seeming, perspective, and interpretation. Yet he also praises science for its development of a contrary drive that ultimately clashes with and overwhelms the desire for unconditional truth. This triumphant drive manifests itself in science's relentless "mistrust," "suspicion," "scrutiny," and "questioning" of all faiths, convictions, and presuppositions—a tendency that leads not to the valorization of presuppositionless inquiry but to the proliferation of interpretations and "methods" with which to test any given interpretation. This movement is succinctly summarized in two texts from 1888. In an unpublished note, Nietzsche writes, "It is not the victory of science that distinguishes our nineteenth century, but the victory of scientific method over science" (WP 466); and, in The Antichrist, "The most valuable insights are discovered last; but the most valuable insights are the methods " (13). That is, the greatest legacy of science is not its ends or results, its discovery of truths, but its means or methods, its questioning of all truths and its construction of alternative frameworks within which the world can be viewed differently.
Yet science is not ultimately the discourse that most fully affirms this
[74] As Gilles Deleuze (Nietzsche and Philosophy, 5) puts it, "a new force can only appear and appropriate an object by first of all putting on the mask of the forces which are already in possession of the object." Deleuze refers to Nietzsche's discussion, in GM III: 10, of the way in which philosophy established itself only by taking into itself central features of religious asceticism.
project. Indeed, according to Nietzsche, a thoroughgoing movement in this direction would lead to the self-overcoming of science and its passage into another discourse—that of art . Hence, in the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche writes:
Art —to say it in advance, for I shall some day return to this subject at greater length—art, in which precisely the lie is sanctified and the will to deception has a good conscience, is much more fundamentally opposed to the ascetic ideal than is science: this was instinctively sensed by Plato, the greatest enemy of art Europe has yet produced. Plato versus Homer: that is the complete, the genuine antagonism—there the sincerest advocate of the "beyond," the great slanderer of life; here the instinctive deifier, the golden nature. (III:25)
Taken in the broadest sense, art (or, the aesthetic)[75] affirms everything to which Nietzsche's genealogy has directed us. Against the otherworldly claims of metaphysics and theology, art affirms this-worldly sensuousness and materiality. It counteracts the ascetic demand for desensualization and extirpation of the passions by indulging the senses and passions and encouraging their multiplication and cultivation.[76] Yet, contrary to the scientific hypertrophy of the receptive faculties, art also affirms the active powers of creation and transformation. Within the aesthetic, discovery and creation go hand in hand: every act of sensation is also a construction of the world according to a particular perspective and interpretation (see GS 57, 114; WP 500, 505, 520). Indeed, Nietzsche maintains that a denial of perspective and interpretation would mean the denial of sensuality itself and, by extension, an ascetic denial of life (see GM III:24).
[75] Mark Warren, Nietzsche and Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 179, rightly states that "Nietzsche understands art not as a set of artifacts and works, but rather as an archetype of practice; he is interested in the process more than the products." To this one might add: more than the products and works of the artist, Nietzsche is interested in the artist's values and affirmations, specifically, the affirmation of appearance, perspective, and interpretation. This is what I focus on here.
[76] Nietzsche's notion of the aesthetic no doubt draws upon the original Greek sense of aisthesis (sense perception). See WP 820: "In the main, I agree more with the artists than with any philosopher hitherto: they have not lost the scent of life, they have loved the things of 'this world'—they have loved their senses. To strive for 'desensualization': that seems to me a misunderstanding or an illness or a cure, where it is not merely a hypocrisy or self-deception. I desire for myself and for all who live, may live, without being tormented by a puritanical conscience, an ever-greater spiritualization and multiplication of the senses; indeed, we should be grateful to the senses for their subtlety, plenitude and power and offer them in return the best we have in the way of spirit [ . . . ]: it is a sign that one has turned out well when, like Goethe, one clings with ever-greater pleasure and warmth to the 'things of this world.'" See also WP 800, 809–10.
This brings us to what is perhaps most important about art for Nietzsche: its affirmation of appearance, semblance, perspective, and interpretation and, consequently, its affirmation of life—"for all of life rests upon semblance, art, deception, points of view, and the necessity of perspectives and error" (BT SC: 5; cf. GS 54; BGE 2, 34). Once again, this is not an unqualified rejection of truth and reality in favor of falsehood and lies. Nietzsche's use of the terms "lie," "deception," and "error" is clearly polemical, directed against Platonists and positivists who search for absolute truth and for whom art is at best a diversion and at worst a seduction to untruth. Against this view, Nietzsche asserts that
there would be no life at all if not on the basis of perspective estimates and appearances; and if, with the virtuous enthusiasm and clumsiness of some philosophers, one wanted to abolish the "apparent world" altogether—well, supposing you could do that, at least nothing would be left of your "truth" either. Indeed, what forces us at all to suppose that there is an essential opposition of "true" and "false"? Is it not sufficient to assume degrees of appearentness and, as it were, lighter and darker shadows and shades of appearance—different valeurs [values], to use the language of painters? (BGE 34)
The aesthetic analogy is important, here (as is the move from a moral to an aesthetic conception of "value"). Nietzsche points out that we are inextricably bound to perspective and interpretation and that the world presents itself to us as a kaleidoscopic array of appearances. This is instinctively realized and affirmed by the artist, who acknowledges the impossibility of capturing the "interpretive multiplicity of existence" within a single work and is content to construct reality from within a particular perspective and style, which inevitably requires a focus or emphasis on certain aspects and a deemphasis or omission of others.[77] Such limitation, Nietzsche remarks, is necessary for any sort of creative activity (see BGE 188). Yet, while the artist acknowledges the necessity of limitation, he or she also recognizes it as a limitation; and this recognition serves as a further impetus to activity, spurring the artist to further creation. Indeed, more so than any other discourse, the aesthetic prizes experimentation and innovation and thus affirms change and becoming. In this way, too, art affirms life as an endless process of destruction and creation, becoming and overcoming. Moreover, though it is in some sense cumulative, this becoming is not teleological. The
[77] This and related aesthetic themes are nicely formulated by Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, chap. 2.
aesthetic shows little tolerance for absolute standards of style or interpretation and does not seem to sanction the notion of progress as convergence toward a final or totalizing viewpoint.[78] The history of art countenances a multiplicity of different styles and interpretations, a few of which may be dominant at a particular moment, but none of which forever reigns supreme. It thus grants that there are "truths" but denies that there is any "Truth": "There are many kinds of eyes [ . . . ] and consequently there are many kinds of 'truths,' and consequently there is no Truth" (WP 540).
But Nietzsche is not interested in art for art's sake (see WP 298). His principle interest in art is philosophical. More specifically, he wants to encourage the development of a new type of philosopher: the artist-philosopher, an "artistic Socrates" (BT 14) who says "yes" to becoming, semblance, perspective, and interpretation and sees these as an incitement, rather than an impediment, to inquiry.[79] Such a philosopher will find in "art [ . . . ] a necessary correlative of, and supplement for science" (BT 14) and will combine the scientist's relentless questioning and search for knowledge with the artist's affirmation of appearance and search for ever-new perspectives and interpretations. Of course, this requires a new conception of truth and knowledge; and the philosopher-artist will be able to appear only after the "revaluation of truth," which, we have seen, results in a conception of truth as relative to particular interpretive frameworks and a conception of knowledge as the accumulation of a plurality of such interpretations under the administration of a practical wisdom that dispenses them appropriately.[80]
The new philosopher's goal, then, is not the discovery of absolute truth but the cultivation of a broad-based and flexible understanding through the incorporation and integration of a number of natural drives, some of them "scientific," others "aesthetic." The development of this
[78] Of course, Nietzsche himself does not hold back from asserting bold aesthetic standards. His repeated criticisms of Romanticism are a case in point. Yet those judgments are based upon how fully an artist, artistic attitude, or work affirms its aesthetic nature, that is, affirms becoming, semblance, appearance, perspective, and interpretation. Just as, for Nietzsche, the ascetic ideal constitutes a paradoxical "life against life itself," "nature against something that is also nature," "will against all willing," he sees Romantic art as a sort of "art against art." See GS 370 and GM III: 2–4.
[79] This point was tirelessly advocated by Walter Kaufmann. See, e.g., BT "Translator's Introduction," 3; Nietzsche, 395; and Kaufmann's comments in Paul de Man, "Nietzsche's Theory of Rhetoric," Symposium (Spring 1974): 48.
[80] This seems to me to be the main point of the highly important passage GM III: 12, discussed briefly above and more fully in chapter 3. Cf. BGE 212; WP 259 and 928.
scientific-aesthetic synthesis is nicely summarized in a passage from The Gay Science entitled "On the Doctrine of Poisons." Nietzsche writes:
So many things have to come together for scientific thinking to originate; and all these necessary strengths had to be invented, practiced, and cultivated separately. As long as they were still separate, however, they frequently had an altogether different effect than they do now that they are integrated into scientific thinking and hold each other in check. Their effect was that of poisons; for example, that of the impulse to doubt, to negate, to wait, to collect, to dissolve. Many hecatombs of human beings were sacrificed before these impulses learned to comprehend their coexistence and to feel that they were all functions of one organizing force within one human being. And even now the time seems remote when artistic energies and the practical wisdom of life will join with scientific thinking to form a higher organic system in relation to which scholars, physicians, artists, and legislators—as we know them at present—would have to look like paltry relics of ancient times. (113)
The development of this "synthetic human being" (WP 881, 883), Nietzsche suggests, is slow, and its realization still a long way off. Despite the fact that "God is dead," there remain many "shadows of God" (GS 108) that must still be "vanquished" before such a being and such a worldview can take root and flourish. This preparatory task Nietzsche makes his own; and it is to this that I turn in the following chapter.
Chapter Two—
Naturalism and Interpretation:
Nietzsche's Conception of Epistemology and Ontology
We laugh as soon as we encounter the juxtaposition of "man and world," separated by the sublime presumption of the little word "and"!
Nietzsche, The Gay Science §346
2.1—
The "Death of God" and the Naturalist Project
In the previous chapter, I argued that Nietzsche's notorious claim, "God is dead," condenses an elaborate genealogy of Western thought, a sequence of worldviews stretching from metaphysics and theology through science and art. The "recent event" of "God's death," I maintained, marks a turning point in that genealogy, ushering in a "revaluation" of all the "values" that have hitherto reigned supreme. Foremost among those values is the value of truth; and, thus, we saw that "God's death" immediately calls for a revaluation of truth. In this chapter, I want to continue this exploration of Nietzsche's "revaluation of values" as it concerns broader issues of epistemology and ontology.
We have seen that the "death of God" leads to a sort of naturalism, that is, to a rejection of all other- or unworldly frameworks and posits, and to a resituation of knowing and being within "the world of life, nature, and history" (GS 344).[1] In what follows, I elaborate on this idea,
[1] Again, "naturalism," in contemporary philosophy, is often associated with scientism; and we have seen that Nietzsche is critical of science's ability to give a full account of human experience. This seems to be the reason for Heidegger's suggestion that the term "naturalism" poorly characterizes the project of Nietzsche's later philosophy (see Nietzsche, vol. 2, The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. David F. Krell [San Francisco: Harper, 1984], 93–94). However, I argue that Nietzsche accepts a broadly scientific view of the world and only criticizes science for its residual theology, its claim to describe pureand unmediated "facts" about the world. I aim to show that Nietzsche's "de-deification of nature" leads to a rejection of this claim and instead forces upon science a feature commonly associated with the aesthetic: the irreducibility of interpretation. Thus, as I suggested at the end of chapter 1, Nietzsche holds that the naturalistic discourse par excellence would be one in which science and art were inextricably intertwined. For this reason, I support neither the aestheticist, antinaturalist reading of Nietzsche offered by Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 29–35, nor the naturalist, antiaestheticist reading offered by Brian Leiter, "Nietzsche and Aestheticism," Journal of the History of Philosophy 30 (1992): 275–88. For other discussions of Nietzsche's naturalism, see Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ, 4th ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 102; Eugen Fink, "Nietzsche's New Experience of the World," trans. Michael A. Gillespie, in Nietzsche's New Seas: Explorations in Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Politics, ed. Michael A. Gillespie and Tracy B. Strong (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 206; Richard Schacht, "Nietzsche's Gay Science, Or, How to Naturalize Cheerfully," in Reading Nietzsche, ed. Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 68–86; and David C. Hoy, "Two Conflicting Conceptions of How to Naturalize Philosophy: Foucault versus Habermas," in Metaphysik nach Kant? ed. Dieter Henrich and Roll-Peter Horstmann (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1988), 743–66.
showing that Nietzsche's naturalism leads him to replace metaphysical and transcendental explanatory principles and entities with a naturalized epistemology and ontology.[2] Yet we will see that, rigorously pursued, naturalism demands a rejection of both the epistemological ideal of a "God's-eye view" and the ontological ideal of a "pre-given world," leading Nietzsche to a holistic or hermeneutic position that accepts the primacy and irreducibility of interpretation.[3] Nevertheless, I will argue that Nietzsche's naturalism constrains the potential relativism of this position, allowing him to claim that some interpretations (namely naturalistic ones) are better than others. Indeed I suggest that Nietzsche's conception of the world as "will to power" or "innocent becoming" is an example of such an interpretation—one that cannot and does not claim to be uniquely correct but that still has reasonable grounds for claiming to be better than rival interpretations.
I take my departure from §108 of The Gay Science, where Nietzsche
[2] Following Kant's usage, I call "metaphysical" or "transcendent" those features that are dogmatically claimed to exist, though their existence cannot be empirically demonstrated; and I call "transcendental" those nonempirical features the existence of which is said to be established through a deduction that shows them to be the necessary conditions for the empirical.
[3] This distinguishes my construal of Nietzsche's naturalism from the more realist version offered by Brian Leiter in "Nietzsche and Aestheticism." Leiter argues that, for Nietzsche, the natural, organic world is a "fact of the matter," the ground and basis of all interpretation, and that the will to power is the most faithful, least distorting construal of this world. Contrary to this view, I argue that Nietzsche's thoroughgoing naturalism leads him to reject such primitive "facts." As I noted above, instead of rejecting aestheticism, as Leiter would have it, Nietzsche's naturalism indeed demands a sort of aestheticism, though not, perhaps, of the Nehamasian sort Leiter criticizes.
first announces the "death of God" and the concomitant demand that all the remaining "shadows" of God be "vanquished." He writes: "New struggles .—After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave—a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of humanity, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will still be shown.—And we—we still have to vanquish his shadow, too!"
In §109, Nietzsche informs us that the struggle against these "shadows" must take place on two fronts, requiring both a "naturalization of humanity" and a "de-deification of nature." Having rejected a host of theological worldviews, Nietzsche asks rhetorically: "When will all these shadows of God cease to darken us? When will we complete our de-deification of nature? When may we begin to naturalize humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?" (GS 109).
I argue that the "naturalization of humanity" foregrounds Nietzsche's commitment to a thoroughgoing naturalism in epistemology and ontology, while the "de-deification of nature" foregrounds his commitment to the view that there is no "pre-given world" but only ever perspectives (or interpretations) and the entities internal to them.
2.2—
The "Naturalization Of Humanity"
2.2.1—
Naturalism Versus Metaphysics
The "death of God" leads to a devaluation of all super- or extra-natural posits and explanatory principles. In the wake of this "death," Nietzsche calls for a revaluation of all those features of natural life previously maligned by theology and metaphysics: sensation, instinct, and affect; change, temporality, and history; contingency and conditionality; procreation, nutrition, growth, decay, and death; psychology, physiology, biology, and sociology; and so forth. Nietzsche's attempt to "naturalize humanity" is guided by the conviction that these characteristics of "the world of life, nature, and history" can give us a full account of being, knowing, and valuing that does without the superfluous and mendacious claims of the super-natural.
As a philosophical program, this naturalism is directed against metaphysics (or first philosophy, or transcendental philosophy), which Nietzsche suspects of doing theology even when it forgoes explicit talk of God. A discourse is metaphysical, for Nietzsche, if it maintains a strict
division between the natural (the empirical, affective, physical, apparent, contingent, transitory, etc.) and the extra-natural (the rational, moral, mental, essential, necessary, eternal, etc.) and grants to the latter an ontological and epistemological superiority and priority. Metaphysics, he argues, attempts to avoid any contamination of the extra-natural by the natural and is thus led to the supposition that its two realms have entirely separate origins. Hence, he writes in Human, All Too Human:
Almost all the problems of philosophy once again pose the same form of question as they did two thousand years ago: how can something originate out of its opposite, for example rationality in irrationality, the sentient in the dead, logic in unlogic, disinterested contemplation in covetous desire, living for others in egoism, truth in error? Metaphysical philosophy has hitherto surmounted this difficulty by denying that the one originates out of the other and assuming for the more highly valued thing a miraculous source in the very kernel and being of the "thing in itself." (1)
This line of thought is taken up again in the second section of Beyond Good and Evil, where Nietzsche parodies this dualism and its hierarchy, attacking that "fundamental faith of the metaphysicians [ . . . ] the faith in opposite values ":
"How could anything originate out of its opposite? for example, truth out of error? or the will to truth out of the will to deception? or selfless deeds out of selfishness? or the pure and sunlike gaze of the sage out of lust? Such origins are impossible; whoever dreams of them is a fool, indeed worse; the things of the highest value must have another, peculiar origin—they cannot be derived from this transitory, seductive, deceptive, paltry world, from this turmoil of delusion and lust. Rather from the lap of Being, the intransitory, the hidden god, the 'thing in itself'—there must be their basis, and nowhere else." This way of judging constitutes the typical prejudgment and prejudice which give away the metaphysicians of all ages. (cf. TI "Reason" 4)
And in The Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche continues this parody of metaphysical dualism, elaborating on its degradation of the "world of life, nature and history":
You ask me which of the philosophers' traits are really idiosyncrasies? For example, their lack of historical sense, their hatred of the very idea of becoming. They think that they show their respect for a subject when they dehistoricize it, sub specie aeterni —when they turn it into a mummy. All that philosophers have handled for thousands of years have been conceptmummies; nothing real escaped their grasp alive. [ . . . ] Death, change, old age, as well as procreation and growth, are to their minds objections—even
refutations. Whatever is does not become; whatever becomes is not. . . . Now they all believe, desperately even, in what has being. But since they never grasp it, they search for reasons why it is kept from them. "There must be mere appearance [Schein ], there must be some deception which prevents us from perceiving that which has being: where is the deceiver?—We have found him," they cry ecstatically; "it is the senses! These senses, which are so immoral in other ways too, deceive us concerning the true world." Moral: let us free ourselves from the deception of the senses, from becoming, from history, from lies;—history is nothing but faith in the senses, faith in lies. Moral: let us say No to all who have faith in the senses, to all the rest of humanity; they are all "plebs" [Volk ]. Let us be philosophers! Let us be mummies! Let us represent monotono-theism by adopting the expression of a gravedigger! And above all, away with the body, this wretched idée fixe of the senses, disfigured by all the fallacies of logic, refuted, even impossible, although it is impudent enough to behave as if it were real!" ("Reason" 1; cf. HH 2)
Against the perverse and extravagant claims of metaphysics, which embroils itself in this host of dualisms and degrades the very world with which we are most intimately acquainted, Nietzsche argues that "conscience of method " (BGE 36) and "economy of principles" (BGE 13)[4] demand that we question these dualisms and attempt to provide an account of all phenomena on the basis of "this world, our world," "the world of life, nature, and history" (GS 344). That is, he seeks to explain the binary oppositions erected by metaphysics as responses to the contingent needs and desires of natural beings. He comes to reject the metaphysical notion that there exist essential differences in kind, revealing instead that these represent nothing more than differences of degree within the natural. Thus, Human, All Too Human §1 continues:
Historical philosophy [ . . . ] which can no longer be separated from natural science, the youngest of all philosophical methods, has discovered in individual cases (and this will probably be the result in every case) that there are no opposites, except in the customary exaggeration of popular or metaphysical interpretations, and that a mistake in reasoning lies at the bottom of this antithesis: [ . . . opposites] are only sublimations, in which a basic element seems almost to have dispersed and reveals itself only under the most pains-
[4] This phrase appears within a discussion of the hypothesis of "will to power," but it applies equally well to Nietzsche's broader naturalistic project; for, as we will see, the notion of will to power is, for Nietzsche, the naturalistic interpretation par excellence, one that envisions the natural domain as a continuum in which the inorganic, the organic, the animal, and the human represent merely differences of degree but not of kind.
taking observation. All we require, and what can be given us only now that the individual sciences have attained their present level, is a chemistry of the moral, religious and aesthetic conceptions and sensations, likewise of all the agitations we experience within ourselves in cultural and social intercourse, and indeed even when we are alone: what if chemistry would end up by revealing that in this domain too the most glorious colors are derived from base, indeed from despised materials?[5]
If the problem with metaphysics, then, is its otherworldly dualism, the solution, Nietzsche proposes, is a this-worldly antidualism. The means for realizing this solution lie in Nietzsche's "genealogical" method, which plays a double role: on the one hand, it criticizes "the highest concepts" (TI "Reason" 4) by offering counterinterpretations that reveal their probable pudenda origo; on the other hand, it constructs new interpretations that replace these metaphysical dualisms with a thoroughly naturalized ontology and epistemology. Rejecting the notion that there exist fundamental divisions between the natural world and humanity, or between humanity and God, Nietzsche argues that the "death of God" serves to place human beings squarely within the natural world as creatures like any other and without special ontological status. Rejecting the "peculiar" origins and functions of such features as reason, morality, logic, and language, Nietzsche instead attempts
[5] This critique of opposites and the dissolution of differences-in-kind into differences-of-degree is a central feature of Nietzsche's philosophy. He writes, e.g.: "between good and evil actions there is no difference in kind, but at the most of degree" (HH 107); "The general imprecise way of observing sees everywhere in nature opposites (as e.g., 'warm and cold') where there are only differences of degree" (WS 67); "Let us beware of saying that death is opposed to life. The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type" (GS 109); "Cause and effect: such a duality probably never exists; in truth we are confronted by a continuum out of which we isolate a couple of pieces" (GS 112); "It might even be possible that what constitutes the value of these good and revered things is precisely that they are insidiously related, tied to, and involved with these wicked, seemingly opposite things—maybe even one with them in essence" (BGE 2); "'being conscious' is not in any decisive sense the opposite of what is instinctive" (BGE 3); "Even if language, here as elsewhere will not get over its awkwardness, and will continue to talk of opposites where there are only degrees and many subtleties of gradation" (BGE 24); "what forces us at all to suppose that there is an essential opposition of 'true' and 'false'? Is it not sufficient to assume degrees of apparentness" (BGE 34); "Health and sickness are not essentially different. [ . . . ] In fact, there are only differences in degree between these two kinds of existence: the exaggeration, the disproportion, the nonharmony of the normal phenomena constitute the pathological state" (WP 47; cf. WP 812); "rest—motion, firm—loose: opposites that do not exist in themselves and that actually express only variations in degree that from a certain perspective appear to be opposites. There are no opposites: only from those of logic do we derive the concept of opposites—and falsely transfer it to things" (WP 552).
to provide hypothetical, contingent, and pragmatic explanations of their origins and functions that draw upon the resources of physiology, psychology, history, sociology, philology, and evolutionary theory.
2.2.2—
Nietzsche's Naturalized Ontology
To translate man back into nature, to become master over the many vain and overly enthusiastic interpretations and connotations that have so far been scrawled and painted over that eternal basic text of homo natura; to see to it that the human being henceforth stands before human beings as even today, hardened in the discipline of science, he stands before the rest of nature, with intrepid Oedipus eyes and sealed Odysseus ears, deaf to the siren songs of old metaphysical bird catchers who have been piping at him all too long, "you are more, you are higher, you are of a different origin"—that may be a strange and insane task, but it is a task —who would deny that? (BGE 230)
Nietzsche makes this task his own. He argues that with the repudiation of God (and the otherworldly in general) must come a repudiation of the metaphysical and theological notion that human beings are "higher" and "of a different origin" compared to the rest of the natural world. For Nietzsche, the human being "has become an animal, literally and without reservation and qualification, he who was according to his old faith, almost God ('child of God,' 'God-man')" (GM III:25). "We no longer derive the human from 'the spirit' or 'the deity,'" he writes, "we have placed him back among the animals" (A 14; cf. HL 9 and D 49).
Such statements no doubt reveal the influence of Darwin (see §§5.2.3–5.2.4, below). With the broad acceptance of evolutionary theory in the twentieth century, they may seem uncontroversial and commonplace to us today. Yet Nietzsche goes further, attacking more persistent philosophical and scientific notions that, he feels, ought to go the way of creationism. Prominent among these is the notion that human beings possess something extra-natural (whether consciousness, mind, spirit, rationality, language, or morality) that sets them apart from, and places them above, other natural creatures. While granting that there are certainly significant differences between human beings and insects, for example, Nietzsche argues that this difference is not hierarchical. On his view, the allegedly extra-natural features of human beings are simply "the means by which weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves—since they have been denied the chance to wage the struggle for existence with horns or the sharp teeth of beasts of prey" (TL p. 80).
"Man is by no means the crown of creation," he writes; "every living being stands beside him on the same level of perfection" (A 14).[6]
Metaphysics has always conceived of human beings as divided creatures: half-beast and half-God, at once animal and rational, natural and super-natural. As natural beings, humans are said to be endowed with the animal capacities of sensation, perception, and desire; and it is by virtue of these capacities that they are contingently bound up with the rest of the natural world. Yet, as rational beings, humans are said to be endowed with the capacities for logical thought, language, and morality; and it is by virtue of these capacities that they confer necessity upon their actions and the world. Such capacities, it is said, allow human beings, at least partially, to extricate themselves from the contingencies of nature and ascend to a rational world of freedom.[7]
Against this conception, Nietzsche submits all the putatively transcendent or transcendental faculties and capacities to a deflationary critique. Detailed discussion of these critiques would take us too far afield; but a general characterization should suffice for the project at hand: to reveal Nietzsche's commitment to a thoroughly naturalized ontology. Against the description of human beings as divided between reason and nature, mind and body, consciousness and instinct, Nietzsche argues that the former terms are explicable on the basis of the latter. He writes that "'being conscious' is not in any decisive sense the opposite of what is instinctive" (BGE 3), that it "is actually nothing but a certain behavior of the instincts toward one another " (GS 333), that "thinking is merely a relation of [ . . . ] drives to each other" (BGE 36), and that "reason"
[6] Cf. GS 115, where Nietzsche writes that one of the "four errors" of "man" is that "he placed himself in a false order of rank in relation to animals and nature." Cf. also WP 684: "man as a species does not represent any progress compared with any other animal. The whole animal and vegetable kingdom does not evolve from the lower to the higher—but all at the same time, in utter disorder, over and against each other." Cf. Stephen Jay Gould: "much as we may love ourselves, Homo sapiens is not representative, or symbolic, of life as a whole. We are not surrogates for arthropods (more than 80 percent of animal species), or exemplars of anything either particular or typical. We are the possessors of one extraordinary evolutionary invention called consciousness—the factor that permits us, rather than any other species, to ruminate about such matters (or, rather, cows ruminate and we cogitate). But how can this invention be viewed as the distillation of life's primary thrust or direction when 80 percent of multicellularity (the phylum Arthropoda) enjoys such evolutionary success and displays no trend toward neurological complexity through time—and when our own neural elaboration may just as well end up destroying us as sparking a move to any other state that we could designate as 'higher'?" (Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin [New York: Harmony, 1996], 15).
[7] Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (books I, VI, and X) offers an early version of this account, one that continues to inform the history of philosophy through Kant and beyond.
is "rather a system of relations between various passions and desires" (WP 387). Elsewhere, he writes, "body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body" (Z: 1 "On the Despisers of the Body");[8] "the 'pure spirit' is a pure stupidity; if we subtract the nervous system and the senses—the 'mortal shroud'—then we miscalculate —that is all!" (A 14).[9]
These terse formulations condense a theory of consciousness as simply an extension of bodily instinct, impulse, passion, and desire.[10] According to Nietzsche, consciousness is not what directs the body and its instincts but is only a residuum of the body's instinctual processes. He conceives of the body as a host of competing instincts, drives, desires, and passions, some of which join together in an alliance so as to dominate, control, and subordinate the others. In "higher creatures," the result of this struggle "enters consciousness," which provides a vastly simplified picture of the myriad "unconscious" instinctual processes and allows these creatures to perceive themselves as a unity.[11] This supplemental consciousness has a specific evolutionary function: "consciousness has developed only under the pressure of the need for communication " (GS 354; cf. BGE 268). That is, the result of the struggle among the instincts enters consciousness only insofar as human beings, "the most endangered animal," need to be able to express their conditions to others, to make their needs felt, so as to make others sympathize and come to their aid. "The development of language and the development of consciousness," then, "go hand and hand" (GS 354). In brief, for Nietzsche, consciousness and language do not set human beings apart from nature but have developed merely as tools aiding a particular natural creature that is otherwise poorly endowed.
Hence, "rational animals," on Nietzsche's view, turn out to be simply animals with particular capacities and not others. But Nietzsche goes even further than this. His suspicion of metaphysical dualism leads him to suspect that the same prejudice that separates the rational from
[8] Cf. BGE 230: "actually 'the spirit' is relatively most similar to a stomach."
[9] Cf. WP 526: "there is no ground whatsoever for ascribing to spirit the properties of organization and systematization. The nervous system has a much more extensive domain; the world of consciousness is added to it. Consciousness plays no role in the total process of adaptation and systematization."
[10] This theory can be gleaned from such texts and passages as TL; GS P: 2, 111, 333, 354; BGE 19; Z:1 "On the Despisers of the Body"; A 14; WP 504–5, 523–30. In chapter 3, I discuss in further detail Nietzsche's theory of affects and the body.
[11] See GS 333: "the greater part of our spirit's activity remains unconscious and unfelt."
the nonrational also separates the organic from the inorganic; and so he comes to wonder whether there is any essential difference between these latter. Indeed, in the same passage in which he first calls for a naturalization of humanity, Nietzsche suggests that "the organic" is simply a "derivative, late, rare, accidental" extension of the inorganic and concludes that we must "beware of saying that death is opposed to life. The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type" (GS 109).
This view foreshadows Nietzsche's bold and often misunderstood supposition that all natural entities, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, are "'will to power' and nothing besides" (BGE 36; cf. WP 1067). Generalizing from his theory of the body as a complex of drives and affects, each of which seeks to dominate and assimilate the others, Nietzsche decides "to make the experiment and to ask the question whether [our world of desires and passions] would not be sufficient for also understanding on the basis of this kind of thing the so-called mechanistic (or 'material') world." "In the end," he concludes, "not only is it permitted to make this experiment; the conscience of method demands" that we "determine all efficient force univocally as—will to power ."
In chapter 5, I explore this difficult and enigmatic doctrine in greater detail. For the present discussion, we need only see that this theory is developed as an attempt to construct a naturalized ontology that accepts no essential differences of kind in the natural world. Seen in this light, the doctrine of will to power is not an a priori account of the universe as a whole but rather an empirical hypothesis that pushes to its limits Nietzsche's rejection of the metaphysician's "faith in opposite values." The doctrine becomes less mysterious once we consider it as incorporating and extending certain basic scientific insights. Chemistry, for example, shows us that every known entity is simply a certain combination and arrangement of a limited number of materials and forces. Organic chemistry teaches us that the organic differs from the inorganic only by the structural incorporation of carbon compounds. Chemical analysis of both inorganic and organic matter also reveals that some compounds are more stable than others, that certain forces or the presence of particular materials can cause these compounds to break down and form new compounds, and that, in the course of these reactions, these elements and compounds are attracted to some elements or compounds and repelled by others. Nietzsche suggests that there is no fundamental difference between these sorts of chemical reactions and the biological phenomena of procreation, growth, and extension of influence that we witness from the level of the protoplasm to that of the hu-
man being. Reversing the direction of this analysis, he suggests that the human activity of "interpretation" (which, he argues, involves assimilating, adapting, taking over, transforming, subduing, forcing, adjusting, abbreviating, omitting, padding, inventing, and falsifying)[12] is discernible throughout the natural world, from the scholarly activities of human beings to the nutritive and procreative activities of the amoeba and the actions and reactions of inorganic chemical compounds.
Thus, despite significant differences between these various levels and kinds of activities, Nietzsche comes to construe the natural world, via the doctrine of will to power, as a continuum with many differentiations but no radical breaks. Gone are the "God-like" capacities that served to separate human beings from animals and the miraculous pneuma that brought dead matter to life. Instead, Nietzsche argues for a thoroughly naturalized ontology, one that explains all entities on a single model, as assemblages of "dynamic quanta," the incessant change and transformation of which is the result of successful and unsuccessful attempts by each assemblage to extend its control over environing assemblages.
2.2.3—
Nietzsche's Naturalized Epistemology
No less does Nietzsche attempt to naturalize epistemology.[13] Against metaphysical accounts that claim to reveal the indubitable, extranatural, and extra-empirical conceptual foundations for knowledge and experience, Nietzsche offers an alternative account that explains from within "the world of life, nature, and history" the origins and functions of these alleged transcendent or transcendental foundations. This account turns out to be, broadly speaking, evolutionary—or, in more Nietzschean terms, "genealogical."
[12] This catalogue is culled from two important later texts on "interpretation," GM II: 12 and III: 24. Cf. also BGE 230, which attributes these operations to "everything that lives, grows, and multiplies." For more on this issue, see §5.3, below.
[13] Nietzsche's naturalized epistemology has also recently been discussed by George Stack, "Kant, Lange, and Nietzsche: Critique of Knowledge," in Nietzsche and Modern German Thought, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (London: Routledge, 1991), and "Nietzsche's Evolutionary Epistemology," Dialogos 59 (1992): 75–101. I disagree with Stack that Nietzsche's evolutionary version of Kant's transcendental deduction commits Nietzsche to a Kantian skepticism or agnosticism. Nietzsche makes clear that what such tools of knowledge as language, logic, and the categories "falsify" is not an unknowable world in itself but rather a realm of experience that is available to us through science and ordinary perception (see, e.g., HH 16, 18, 19; GS 110, 112) and the senses (see, e.g., TI "Reason" 2). I discuss this idea in §2.2.4 and in chapter 4.
As we have seen, Nietzsche accepts the basic tenets of evolutionary theory, rejecting only the progressivist, teleological assumptions that construe the course of evolution as a process of development resulting in the survival of the most perfect individuals and species.[14] Genealogy dispenses with these assumptions and instead considers evolution to be a continual struggle for power, the movement of which is not a steady climb along an ascending line but a series of irregular displacements within a field of forces:
[T]he entire history of a "thing," an organ, a custom [ . . . is] a continual sign-chain of ever new interpretations and adaptations whose causes do not even have to be related to one another but, on the contrary, in some cases succeed and alternate with one another in purely chance fashion. The "evolution" of a thing, a custom, an organ, is by no means its progressus toward a goal, even less a logical progressus by the shortest route and with the smallest expenditure of force—but a succession of more or less profound, more or less mutually independent processes of subduing, plus the resistances they encounter, the attempts at transformation for the purpose of defense and reaction, and the results of successful counteractions. (GM II: 12)
The "evolution" of knowledge and its faculties, according to Nietzsche, is no different. The framework of our knowledge has no extra-empirical or extra-natural source; nor is the development of our cognitive faculties evidence of progress toward perfection. Rather, these faculties and capacities are only chance endowments that have happened to aid human beings in their struggles with other natural creatures and forces.
Genealogical accounts of this sort can be found throughout the Nietzschean corpus (e.g., TL; HH Part I; GS 110–12, 344, 354–55; BGE 268; TI "Reason" and "Errors"; WP 466–617). The early essay "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense," for example, explains the origin of the human conceptual and linguistic apparatus as the attempt of physically ill-equipped creatures to secure survival by controlling their environment through cunning and strategic alliance. Bombarded by sensory stimuli, Nietzsche explains, the human intellect learns to se-
[14] Nietzsche's attitude toward evolutionary theory is explored more fully in chapter 5. Like his heirs, Deleuze and Guattari, Nietzsche criticizes the traditional notion of "evolution" for its subordination of "becoming" to "being" and attempts to reconceive the notion as a "becoming" without origin, destination, or purpose. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 238ff. For more on Nietzsche's own evolutionary model, see TL; HL 9 and passim; BGE 13, 262; GM I:1–4, II:12–13; A 4; WP 90, 647–50, 684–85. Also, see Hoy, "Two Conflicting Conceptions," 745–51, and Stack, "Kant, Lange, and Nietzsche" and "Nietzsche's Evolutionary Epistemology."
lect a set of these salient to its survival and to encourage a forgetting of the rest. Toward the same end, these feeble creatures form herds and develop language as "a uniformly valid and binding designation [ . . . ] for things" that serves "to banish from [their] world at least the most flagrant bellum omni contra omnes " (TL p. 81; cf. GS 354).
This naturalistic story also accounts for the origin of metaphysics. It explains the evolutionary benefit involved in the move from sensation to concept and concept to word, showing that the conceptual and linguistic framework provides human beings with a theory of nature that simplifies and codifies their sensuous experience so as to make it manageable, predictable, and communicable. Yet Nietzsche argues that the evolutionary primacy of the repression or demotion of a whole range of experiences, along with the promotion of a simplified and stable world, comes to be transmuted into a metaphysical primacy, that the pragmatic "necessity" of this late-born conceptual and linguistic framework gets taken for a stronger, metaphysical necessity given in the structure of the world: "This awakens the [Platonic] idea that, in addition to leaves, there exists in nature the 'leaf': the original model according to which all the leaves were perhaps woven, sketched, colored, curled, and painted—but by incompetent hands, so that no specimen has turned out to be a correct, trustworthy, and faithful likeness of the original" (p. 83). Or, in a more critical moment, this a posteriori "necessity" awakens the (Kantian) idea that the conceptual and linguistic apparatus must be more than merely contingent, that it must be a priori, given in the structure of the human mind "—as though the world's axis turned within it" (p. 79).
Against these "arrogant" and "mendacious" suppositions, Nietzsche suggests that "the human intellect [ . . . ] has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life" (p. 79), that it is merely a device for securing human survival. Moreover, it is only a means for securing a particular sort of human life. Thus, alongside the "rational man" Nietzsche imagines the "intuitive man" who (though he lives a more precarious and uncertain existence) sees the world as "eternally new" and constantly reveals the contingent, conditional, pragmatic, and sensuous origins of the conceptual edifice reified and elevated by his more conservative and secure opponent (TL pp. 89–91).[15]
[15] This praise of the fleeting exceptions appears throughout Nietzsche's work. A characteristic passage from Beyond Good and Evil runs: "The human beings who are more similar, more ordinary, have had, and always have, an advantage; those more select,subtle, strange, and difficult to understand, easily remain alone, succumb to accidents, being isolated, and rarely propagate. One must invoke tremendous counter-forces in order to cross this natural, all too natural progressus in simile, the continual development of man toward the similar, ordinary, average, herdlike—common! " (268). Similarly, in a note from 1888, Nietzsche laments "the elimination of the lucky strokes, the uselessness of the more highly developed types, the inevitable dominion of the average" and remarks that "strange though it may sound, one always has to defend the strong against the weak" (WP 685). Cf. also HL 9; Z (on "the last men"); BGE 269; GM I:8–9; WP 684.
This naturalistic account of the development of our cognitive faculties is expanded in part 1 of Human, All Too Human, the first section of which, we have seen, urges the replacement of "metaphysical philosophy" with "historical philosophy." "Lack of historical sense," Nietzsche writes, "is the family failing of all philosophers" (2). With Kantian transcendental philosophy clearly in mind, he explains that philosophers "take the most recent manifestation of man [ . . . ] as the fixed form from which one has to start out. They will not learn that man has become, that the faculty of cognition [das Erkenntnissvermögen ] has become; while some of them would have it that the whole world is spun out of this faculty of cognition" (2).
Continuing this critique several sections later, Nietzsche writes:
Philosophers are accustomed to station themselves before life and experience—before that which they call the world of appearance—as before a painting that has been unrolled once and for all and unchangeably depicts the same scene: this scene, they believe, has to be correctly interpreted, so as to draw a conclusion as to the nature of the being that produced the picture: that is to say, as to the nature of the thing in itself.
Yet this is to "overlook the possibility that this painting—that which we humans call life and experience—has gradually become, is indeed still fully in course of becoming, and should thus not be regarded as a fixed object on the basis of which a conclusion as to the nature of its originator [ . . . ] may either be drawn or pronounced undrawable" (16).
Against this sort of transcendental account of human experience and the cognitive faculties, Nietzsche advocates the development of "a history of the genesis of thought " (16), which would replace "metaphysical explanations" with "physical and historical explanations" (17), those having to do with "the physiology and history of the evolution of organisms and concepts" (10).[16]
Putting this methodological recommendation into practice, Nietz-
[16] Cf. GS 354, where Nietzsche argues that "the problem of consciousness" is now explicable via "physiology and the history of animals."
sche proceeds to a task that would occupy him throughout his career: that of providing naturalistic, evolutionary explanations for the existence and operation of all the so-called transcendental faculties of human knowledge: language, logic, mathematics, and the "categories of reason."[17] Without engaging in an extensive examination of these critiques (which, though frequent, are often tersely formulated and thus call for careful explication), we can provide an overview that should suffice to give a sense of their role in Nietzsche's more general project of developing a naturalized epistemology.
One notices at the outset that Nietzsche often blurs the lines of distinction between the operations of language, logic, mathematics, and the categories. That is because he sees them as thoroughly bound up with one another and serving, in slightly different ways, the same basic evolutionary role. All four are functions of consciousness (which we have seen to be a late-born and superficial extension of the sensuous, affective animal); and, as such, each of these forms serves to simplify and schematize the sensuous manifold into a calculable and communicable system. Logic and mathematics are said to have the basic role of equalization: the reduction of sensuous differences and similarities to cognitive identities (on logic, see HH 18; GS 111; TI "Reason" 3; WP 508–22, 554; on mathematics, see HH 11, 19; GS 112, 355; TI "Reason" 3; WP 516, 530, 554). The categories are said to have the role of individuating the sensuous manifold and subsuming it under a small set of cognitive forms (see TL p. 83; GS 110, 112; TI "Reason," "Errors"). Finally, language is said to make manifest and communicable this simplified and schematized cognitive world (see GS 354; BGE 268). Words, Nietzsche writes, unify groups of sensations and apply to these groups general designations that allow quick and abbreviated reference (see TL p. 83; BGE 268). Grammar serves the equalizing function through the copula "is" and reverses the genetic sequence by placing the conceptual and logical abstractions ("subjects," "substances," "causes") syntactically before the different manifestations ("actions," "accidents," "effects") from which they are, in actuality, derived (see BGE 17; GM 1: 13; TI "Reason").
[17] Nietzsche's language here is imprecise. At times, he refers individually to the various categories (causality, substance, etc.), while at other times he simply uses the general notion of the "concepts," "categories of reason," or "presuppositions of reason." In each of these instances, however, Nietzsche seems to have in mind something like the Kantian a priori concepts or categories of the understanding.
From his earliest to his last writings, Nietzsche is keen to point out the specific role that these "transcendental" forms play within the overall conditions of human life.[18] As with consciousness, of which they are a function, he characterizes logic, language, and the categories of reason as simply products of natural selection that have aided human beings in the "struggle for existence" (see TL p. 80; cf. GS 354). He assures us that they are entirely contingent, stemming from "the earthly kingdom of desires" (WP 509) rather than from some inherent and necessary faculty or other nonempirical source. "All our categories-of-reason are of sensual origin: derived from the empirical world" (WP 488), he writes. Elsewhere he argues that
The inventive force that invented categories labored in the service of our needs, namely of our need for security, for quick understanding on the basis of signs and sounds, for the means of abbreviation:—"substance," "subject," "object," "being," "becoming" have nothing to do with metaphysical truths. (WP 513)
In the formation of reason, logic, the categories, it was need that was authoritative: the need, not to "know," but to subsume, to schematize for the purposes of calculation . . . the development of reason is adjustment, invention, with the aim of making similar, equal—the same process that every sense impression goes through! Here, there was no pre-existing "idea" at work, but rather the utilitarian fact [die Nützlichkeit ] that only when we see things coarsely and made equal do they become calculable and usable to us [ . . . ] life miscarries with any other kinds of reason, to which there is a continual impulse—it becomes difficult to survey—too unequal—. (WP 515)
As we have seen with regard to consciousness in general, logic and language deal only in superficialities and superfluities and do not evidence any deep, rational core. Our categories, logic, and language, and eventually our senses, "merely glide over the surface of things and see 'forms.' [ . . . ] We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species." (TL pp. 82, 83)
Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept precisely insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar
[18] We find such empirical deductions of logic and language throughout Nietzsche's work, and with a remarkable consistency of argument. From "On Truth and Lies" through Book Five of The Gay Science (e.g., 354) and the later Nachlaß (e.g., WP 508–22), Nietzsche's genealogies of logic and language are nearly identical.
cases—which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept of "leaf" is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects. (TL p. 83)
Logic is said to arise due to the same practical necessity of overlooking particulars or reducing them to generalities and identities:
Logic is bound to the condition: assume there are identical cases . In fact, to make possible logical thinking and inferences, this condition must first be treated fictitiously as fulfilled. (WP 512)
On the origin of logic . The fundamental inclination to posit as equal, to see things as equal . [ . . . ] This whole process corresponds exactly to that external, mechanical process (which is its symbol) by which protoplasm makes what it appropriates equal to itself and fits it into its own forms and files. (WP 510; cf. WP 501)
This last analogy is important. Having externalized logic and language—revealing them as trading in superficialities rather than pointing toward some deep structure of thought—Nietzsche here makes the further claim that the seemingly immaterial operations of logic are really no different in kind from such a basely physical and material process as ingestion, the incorporation and conversion of matter into a form that is usable for a particular body's nourishment and sustenance. Elaborating on this analogy in another note, Nietzsche claims that it is not some special a priori determination that governs the categorization of our sense impressions but rather simply the historical embeddedness of a primeval physiological need: "The same equalizing and ordering force that rules in the idioplasma, rules also in the incorporation of the outer world: our sense perceptions are already the result of this assimilation and equalization in regard to all the past in us; they do not follow directly upon the 'impression'" (WP 500).
For Nietzsche, then, logic, language, and the categories cannot be derived from anything but the contingent development of human beings as natural creatures. Reasoning and speaking are perhaps peculiar to a certain species of animal, but this "rational animal" is not different from other animals by virtue of some extra-natural faculty. Rather, it is different only due to the means it has developed to relate its peculiar constitution to its particular environing conditions. In considering our dealings with the environing world, Nietzsche argues, we should be
careful not to posit, in the manner of Plato and Kant, two realms—a realm of logic, language, and reason and a realm of the sensual or empirical—because, according to Nietzsche, language and logic are themselves thoroughly empirical in origin and function and are no less bound up with our contingent existence than are such patently noncognitive features of animal life as ingestion and growth.
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.
2.3—
The De-Deification of Nature
In his attempt to naturalize epistemology, then, Nietzsche endorses a basic form of empiricism. Against the Platonic and Kantian priority given to the conceptual, Nietzsche warns of "confusing the last with the first" by placing "the most general, the emptiest concepts, the last smoke of evaporating reality, in the beginning, as the beginning" (TI "Reason" 4). Instead, he argues, "all credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses" (BGE 134).
Yet Nietzsche is not uncritical of empiricism, traditionally conceived. Anyone who would characterize him as a straightforward empiricist must confront prominent passages in which he decries "the coarse sensualistic prejudice that sensations teach us truths about things" (WP 516) and scoffs at "the eternally popular sensualism" according to which "what is clear, what is 'explained,'" is "only what can be seen and felt" (BGE 14). These and neighboring passages affirm Copernicus's and Boscovich's "triumph over the senses" (BGE 12) and "the Platonic way of thinking," which, contrary to the "fundamentally plebeian tastes" of the sensualists, he calls "a noble way of thinking [that] consisted precisely in a resistance to obvious sense evidence" (BGE 14; cf. GS 372). How are we to reconcile such claims with the positive revaluation of the sensual called for by Nietzsche's naturalism? The answer, I think, can be found in the second part of the project to eliminate the "shadows of God": namely, the "de-deification of nature."
We have seen that the "naturalization of humanity" (the first part of the project to eliminate the "shadows of God") requires a rejection of the notion that human beings possess some divine feature that separates them from, and raises them above, the natural world. It thus rejects the ideal of knowledge as providing a God's-eye view on the world that could secure necessary, unconditional, and objective truths. We saw Nietzsche oppose metaphysical epistemology and ontology with a natu-
ralism that firmly resituates human beings within the contingent, sensuous world and refigures human reason as one more device aiding the struggle for survival and flourishing. Thus, Nietzsche argues that knowledge is always contingent and conditional, relative to some interest, purpose, or perspective.
The "de-deification of nature" (the second part of the project to eliminate the "shadows of God") itself has two aspects. On the one hand, it is a corollary of the first part of the project. It maintains that, if we want to get rid of all the "shadows of God," we must reject the notion of a pre-given world—the world "as it really is," as it would be given to a God's-eye view. The "death of God," Nietzsche argues, enjoins us to reject both the notion that there is an absolute perspective from which the world could be viewed "as it really is" and the notion that there is such an absolute world. Instead, it asks us to refigure knowing as relative to some perspective, theory, or interpretation[26] and being as relative to the ontological commitments of a particular perspective.[27] On the other hand, the "de-deification of nature" also leads Nietzsche to privilege a certain set of perspectives and interpretations: namely, naturalistic ones that withdraw from our conception of nature all theological posits. Once we have done so, Nietzsche thinks we will come to see the world as an "innocent becoming" or as "will to power."
2.3.1—
Nietzsche's Holism:
The Primacy and Irreducibility of Interpretation
If Nietzsche's epistemology supports an empiricism, it is not what more recently has been called a "reductionist" empiricism, which holds that
[26] I make little differentiation, here, among the terms "perspective," "interpretation," and "theory." "Perspective" and "interpretation" are quite often found together in Nietzsche's writing and are never sharply differentiated, a point I discuss at the beginning of chapter 3. I also see little difference between what Nietzsche calls "perspective" or "interpretation" and what contemporary philosophers call "theory"—namely, a more or less systematic web of beliefs that arranges and makes sense of the world (or a portion of it) according to a set of purposes and desires.
[27] This view can be gleaned from Nietzsche's critique of positivism. He argues that the positivist belief in pre-given facts about the world is an ascetic, ultimately theological belief that attempts to get beyond the conditionality and contingency of interpretation and perspective toward some "true world of being" (GM III: 24). Against this view, Nietzsche claims that there are no essences-, facts-, or meanings-in-themselves; that, on the contrary, there are only "definitions," "facts" and "meanings" within an interpretation, which answers from a particular perspective the question "what is that?" (see WP 556, 481). For a brief but poignant discussion of this antirealism in Nietzsche and Hegel, see Robert C. Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 328–29 n 15.
all knowledge and experience is reducible to immediate observations that deliver a unique and full meaning.[28] In a passage partially cited above, Nietzsche shows his contempt for this kind of empiricism:
It is perhaps dawning on five or six minds that physics, too, is only a world-interpretation and -exegesis [eine Welt-Auslegung und -Zurechtlegung ] (to suit us, if I may say so!) and not a world-explanation [eine Welt-Erklärung ]; but insofar as it is based on belief in the senses, it is regarded as more, and for a long time to come must be regarded as more—namely, as an explanation. Eyes and fingers speak in its favor, visual evidence and palpableness do, too; this strikes an age with fundamentally plebeian tastes as fascinating, persuasive, convincing —after all, it follows instinctively the canon of truth of eternally popular sensualism. What is clear, what is "explained"? [Was is klar, was »erklärt«? ] Only what can be seen and felt—every problem has to be pursued to that point. (BGE 14)
This passage appears in Beyond Good and Evil, part I, entitled "On the Prejudices of the Philosophers." Neighboring passages make clear that prominent among these "prejudices" is a "myth of the given," what Nietzsche calls the belief in "immediate certainties" (16, 17, 34). This myth encompasses the beliefs of rationalists and empiricists alike: the Cartesian cogito ("as though knowledge here got hold of its object purely and nakedly" [16]) [29] as well as "Locke's superficiality regarding the origin of ideas" (20). In §12, Nietzsche presents a critique of materialistic atomism that celebrates Roger Boscovich's and Copernicus's "triumph over the senses." Boscovich in particular is credited with having criticized Newton's and Leibniz's conception of the atom as the ultimate unit of matter in favor of a relational notion of the atom as a quasi-material nodal point within a network of force.[30] In
[28] The term "reductionist empiricism" is taken from W. V. Quine, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," in From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961). One of the "two dogmas of empiricism," Quine writes, "radical reductionism" is the doctrine that "every meaningful statement is [ . . . ] translatable into a statement (true or false) about immediate experience" (p. 38). Though he is concerned to attack the theory as it survives in contemporary analytic philosophy, Quine argues that the doctrine "well antedates" analytic philosophy and can be found, for instance, in Locke and Hume (p. 38).
[29] Nietzsche's critique of the Cartesian cogito continues in the following passage, BGE 17.
[30] For further discussion of Boscovich's conception of the atom and Nietzsche's fascination with it, see §5.2.1, below; George Stack, "Nietzsche and Boscovich's Natural Philosophy," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 62 (1981): 69–87, and Lange and Nietzsche (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1983); Claudia Crawford, The Beginnings of Nietzsche's Theory of Language (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988), 87–89, 298–99: and Alistair Moles, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Nature and Cosmology (Berlin: Peter Lang, 1990), chap. 5.
each of these seemingly disparate cases, Nietzsche uncovers the myth of "immediate certainty," a basic conviction that there exists some foundational, simple, present item (whether it be the "I" of consciousness, immediate sense data, or the atom as the ultimate, indivisible unit of matter) that provides the basis of all knowing and being and is the goal of all inquiry.
Against these "immediate certainties," Nietzsche argues for a more complex, relational, and holistic conception of knowledge and its objects. Rejecting the Cartesian notion that the "I" is an irreducible, intuitive given, Nietzsche conceives of it as "a social structure," a complex of sensation, thought, and affect (BGE 19; see chapter 3, below). Contrary to the Schopenhauerian conception of "the will" as "something simple, a brute datum, underivable, and intelligible by itself" (GS 127), Nietzsche contends that "willing is above all something complicated, something that is a unit [Einheit ] only as a word" (BGE 19). And, "by way of rejecting Locke's superficiality regarding the origin of ideas," Nietzsche explicitly puts forward the holistic view "[t]hat individual philosophical concepts are not anything capricious or autonomously evolving, but grow up in connection and relationship with each other; that, however suddenly and arbitrarily they seem to appear in the history of thought, they nevertheless belong just as much to a system as all the members of the fauna of a continent" (20).
Combining this conceptual holism, the evolutionary analogy that appears in this last phrase, and the claim that this section as a whole is meant as a rejection of Locke's reductionist empiricism, the passage can be read as arguing that perception is not pure and simple but rather is overdetermined by the other physiological, psychological, and intellectual functions that coexist with it in a complex organism whose constitution and activity has been shaped by a long evolutionary history.
These theses are presented much more explicitly in a passage from The Gay Science addressed "To the realists." Nietzsche writes:
You sober people who feel well armed against passion and fantasy and would like to turn your emptiness into a matter of pride and an ornament: you call yourselves realists and hint that the world really is the way it appears to you. As if reality stood unveiled before you alone. [ . . . ] But in your unveiled state are not even you still very passionate and dark creatures compared to fish, and still far too similar to an artist in love? [ . . . ] You are still burdened with those estimates of things that have their origin in the passions and loves of former centuries. Your sobriety still contains a secret and inextinguishable drunkenness. Your love of "reality," for example—oh that is a primeval "love"! In every sensation and every sense impression there is a
piece of this old love; and some fantasy, some prejudice, some unreason, some ignorance, some fear, and ever so much else has woven it and worked on it. That mountain there! That cloud there! What is "real" in that? Subtract the phantasm and every human ingredient from it, you sober ones! If you can! If you can forget your descent, your past, your training—all of your humanity and animality. There is no "reality" for us—not for you either, you sober ones. (GS 57)
Here, Nietzsche states outright the twin theses (1) that there is no such thing as naked perception and (2) that what perception perceives is not a pre-given world. Rather, he argues, perception functions as part of the total human organism, and what it perceives is a world that is a palimpsest of previous interpretative construals. Perception and interpretation are inextricably intertwined.[31]
Nietzsche underscores these positions in his critique of a contemporary form of reductionist empiricism: the positivism that flourished in the latter half of the nineteenth century. A famous note from 1886–87 runs:
Against positivism, which halts at phenomena—"there are only facts"–I would say: no, facts is precisely what there are not, only interpretations [Interpretationen ]. We cannot establish any fact "in itself": perhaps it is nonsense [Unsinn ] to even want to do such a thing. [ . . . ] In so far as the word "knowledge" has any meaning [Sinn ], the world is knowable: but it is interpretable [deutbar ] otherwise, it has no meaning [Sinn ] behind it, but countless meanings [Sinne ]—"Perspectivism." (WP 481)[32]
This insight finds its way into the Genealogy, written shortly thereafter. Discussing the relationship of modern science to theology and metaphysics, Nietzsche asserts that the positivist's "renunciation of all interpretation" in the effort to discover unmediated "brute facts" constitutes
[31] Cf. Nelson Goodman (Languages of Art, 2d ed. [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976], 7–8): "The eye always comes ancient to its work, obsessed by its own past and by old and new insinuations of the ear, nose, tongue, fingers, heart, and brain. It functions not as an instrument self-empowered and alone, but as a dutiful member of a complex and capricious organism. Not only how but what it sees is regulated by need and prejudice. It selects, rejects, organizes, discriminates, associates, classifies, analyzes, and constructs. It does not so much mirror as take and make; and what it takes and makes it does not see bare, as items without attributes, but as things, as food, as people, as enemies, as stars, as weapons. Nothing is seen nakedly or naked. The myths of the innocent eye and of the absolute given are unholy accomplices. Both derive from and foster the idea of knowing as a processing of raw material received from the senses, and of this raw material as being discoverable either through purification rites or by methodical disinterpretation. But reception and interpretation are not separable operations; they are thoroughly interdependent."
[32] Dated late 1886-spring 1887 (KSA 12:7[60]).
an "ascetic [ . . . ] denial of sensuality" (III: 24, see 1.5.2, above). And, during the same period, in Book Five of The Gay Science, Nietzsche criticizes "that impetuous demand for certainty that today discharges itself among large numbers of people in a scientific-positivistic form. The demand that one wants by all means that something should be firm." No less than Christianity and metaphysics, he continues, "this, too, is still the demand for a support, a prop" (GS 347).
This group of passages makes clear what Nietzsche finds objectionable in the positivist project: its belief in the existence of, and its desire to represent, some given and certain ontological foundation for our knowledge—"the world as it really is." This belief and desire, Nietzsche contends, is simply "metaphysical" (GM III:24), for, as he argues in the first passage, "we cannot establish any fact 'in itself," "the world has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings." That is, the world we know is the world as constructed by one or another interpretation or perspective, of which there are many. The notion of the world "as it really is" or "as it is in itself" is simply fabricated through a negation of, a desire to transcend, the world we know (the world as it is constructed by the many interpretations/perspectives).[33] It is this metaphysical belief and desire that allows Nietzsche to say that positivism, which claims to be the most empirical doctrine, expresses an "ascetic" "denial of sensuality": in its desire for some firm, solid, "real" or "true" world, positivism disavows the actual conditions of our knowledge (the necessity and irreducibility of interpretation) and the world that this knowledge reveals (a world with "no meaning behind it, but countless meanings"). This putative "true" world, Nietzsche argues, is simply the world as it would be given to a God's-eye view. And having abandoned the notion of a God's-eye view, Nietzsche also abandons its correlate: the notion of a pre-given world.
Thus, Nietzsche criticizes every reductionist attempt to discover something "in itself," which always involves such ascetic "renunciation of interpretation."
"Things that have a constitution in themselves"—a dogmatic idea with which one must break absolutely. (WP 559)
That things possess a constitution in themselves totally apart from interpretation and subjectivity is a totally futile hypothesis: it presupposes that inter -
[33] See TI "Reason" 6 and 2, quoted in §2.2.4, above.
pretation and subjective-being are not essential, that a thing freed from all relationships [i.e., all perspectival construal] would still be a thing. (WP 560)
A "thing in itself" just as perverse as a "sense in itself," a "meaning in itself." There are no "facts in themselves," for a sense must always first be projected into them before there can be facts . The "what is that?" is a determination of meaning [eine Sinn-Setzung] from some other viewpoint. "Essence" [Die »Essenz«], "being" [die »Wesenheit«] is something perspectival and already presupposes a multiplicity. At bottom there always lies "what is that for me? " (for us, for all that lives, etc.). A thing would be defined once all beings [Wesen ] had asked "what is that?" and had answered their question. Supposing that one single being, with its own relationships and perspectives for all things, were missing, then the thing would not yet be "defined." In short, the being [Wesen ] of a thing is always only an opinion [Meinung ] about the "thing." Or rather: "it is considered" is the actual "this is," the only "this is." (WP 556)
Against the very notion of the "in itself," Nietzsche advances a view akin to what more recent Anglo-American philosophers have called the doctrine of "ontological relativity," according to which (1) questions concerning "what there is" can only be answered relative to (what Nietzsche calls) an "interpretation" or "perspective"; (2) the only alternative to one "interpretation" is another; and (3) it is nonsense to ask (or answer) what things are absolutely, or "in themselves."[34]
Rejecting the notion of a pre-given world, then, Nietzsche's "dedeification of nature" requires that we revise our conception of empirical knowledge. We must give up the idea that sensation delivers some pure, unmediated content, that it mirrors a world with pre-given partitions and essences. This is not, however, to assert the Kantian, transcendental view that sensuous intuition can only ever appear to us already
[34] The phrase "ontological relativity" is Quine's; but similar theses (deemed "irrealism," "internal realism," "antirealism," etc.) are found in the work of Goodman, Putnam, and others. Cf. Goodman ("The Way the World Is," in Problems and Projects [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972], 31): "For me, there is no way that is the way the world is; and so of course no description can capture it. But there are many ways the world is, and every true description captures one of them. The difference between [the realist] and me is, in sum, the difference between absolutism and relativism"; Quine ("Ontological Relativity," in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays [New York: Columbia University Press, 1969], 50): "What makes sense is to say not what the objects of a theory are, absolutely speaking, but how one theory of objects is interpretable or reinterpretable in another"; and Putnam (Reason, Truth, and History, 49, 52): "what objects does the world consist of? is a question that it only makes sense to ask within a theory or description. [ . . . ] 'Objects' do not exist independently of conceptual schemes. We cut up the world into objects when we introduce one or another scheme of description." I discuss this idea more fully in §3.4.3.
shaped by the a priori forms of intuition and categories of the understanding.[35] Unlike Kant, Nietzsche does not separate cognition into passive and active faculties. Having dismissed the very idea of the "in itself," Nietzsche rejects the notion that sensation receives from "the world" a raw material that is then processed by our various interpretative schemes. Sensation and interpretation, for Nietzsche, are inseparable activities. "Our sense perceptions," he writes, "are already the result of [ . . . ] assimilation and equalization with regard to all the past in us; they do not follow directly upon the 'impression'" (WP 500). That is, sense perception is not new and innocent every moment; rather, what we experience each moment is the result of an entire evolutionary history. Elsewhere, he argues that "all sense perceptions are permeated with value judgments " (WP 505),[36] namely, interpretive decisions concerning what counts as "what there is." [37] Against both the reductionist empiricist and the Kantian transcendentalist, then, Nietzsche advances the naturalistic, evolutionary view that sense perception only functions within an ongoing network of interpretations—within what he calls an "already-created world, constructed out of nothing but appearances but become firm to the extent that this kind of appearance has preserved life" (WP 520).[38]
According to Nietzsche, then, impressions, sensations, and perceptions do not offer any pure, simple, or unmediated picture of the world. Yet neither do judgments or statements of fact. "There are no isolated judgments!" Nietzsche writes: "An isolated judgment is never 'true,'
[35] Babette Babich, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Ground of Art and Life (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 95 and chap. 3 passim, attributes to Nietzsche this Kantian view.
[36] Cf. GS 114: "How far the moral sphere extends .—As soon as we see a new image, we immediately construct it with the aid of all our previous experiences [ . . . ] All our experiences are moral [i.e., evaluative] experiences, even in the realm of sense perception."
[37] See WP 556, cited above, on how ontological ascriptions are judgments made according to one perspective or another.
[38] My interpretation here relies fairly heavily on the Nachlaß, where Nietzsche discusses epistemological issues more directly and extensively than anywhere else. Nevertheless, I find this interpretation entirely consistent with (and, indeed, helpful in making sense of) much of the published material on these matters. Nietzsche's rejection of the "thing in itself" can be found throughout his published work (see, e.g., GS 335, 354; D P:3; and the other passages discussed in §4.3, below). Nietzsche's basic empiricism is stated fairly plainly in BGE 134; TI "Reason" 1–3; and A 4 (and discussed in §2.2.4, above). His resistance to positivist or reductionist versions of empiricism is presented in such passages as BGE 12, 14; GS 347; and GM III:24 (discussed in the present section). And his assertion of the primacy and irreducibility of interpretation can be found in such passages as GS 57 and GM II: 12, III: 24 (also discussed in the present section).
never knowledge; only in the connection and relation of many judgments is there any surety" (WP 530). Thus, against a reductionist empiricism, Nietzsche espouses a holistic empiricism, which maintains that, while all knowledge is generated out of sensuous affection, the unit of empirical significance is neither the individual sensation nor the isolated statement of fact but the theory or interpretation as a whole in which sensations and statements are lodged.
This naturalistic, holistic view is not a skeptical view. It does not claim that human interests, desires, perspectives, and interpretations get in the way of some "true" knowledge that would reveal "the way the world really is." Nietzsche altogether dismisses the notion of a God's-eye view and, with it, the notion of a standard of truth transcending all contingent perspectives (see GM III: 12). Yet this does not mean that there is no common measure for interpretations or perspectives. After all, Nietzsche holds that perspectives and interpretations are, in large part, developed to help us cope with our sensuous imbrication in the natural world. A basic standard for interpretations, then, is how well they do this. Considerations of entrenchment, simplicity, scope, coherence, utility, and novelty, as well as political considerations of ideology and power, will also figure significantly in the acceptance or rejection of interpretations.[39]
Despite these constraints, however, Nietzsche grants that the "dedeification of nature" permits a proliferation of interpretations.[40] There will be different interpretations over time, because no interpretation is immune from revision (see GS 58 and WP 616). And there will be different coexisting interpretations, because there are different purposes and goals in different areas of life and areas of life where several interests, purposes, and goals compete.[41] Yet Nietzsche also maintains that
[39] Nietzsche emphasizes entrenchment, e.g., in GS 57–58, 110, and BGE 188. He emphasizes simplicity ("economy of principles" or "conscience of method") in BGE 13 and 36. Considerations of scope permeate his discussions of "will to power," which aim at giving a comprehensive account of all natural knowing and being, from the human to the inanimate (see, e.g., BGE 36). Coherence is stressed in such passages as GS 54; BGE 20; WP 530. Utility is stressed throughout Nietzsche's work (e.g., BGE 4; WP 493ff.). Novelty is stressed, e.g., in TL pp. 88—91 and GS 110. Finally, considerations of ideology and power fill his writings, particularly his analyses and critiques of Christianity and "slave morality."
[40] The locus classicus for this view is GS 374 (partially quoted at the end of §1.6. 1, above, where some of the critical problems with the passage are noted). See also GS 2, 347, and 373 (also quoted and discussed in §1.6.1) and WP 410, 470, 481, 600.
[41] In GS 110, for example, Nietzsche shows how, in the area of truth and knowledge, two impulses come to compete with one another: on the one hand, an impulse to-ward self-preservation that strives to produce and maintain a simplified and selective version of the world and, on the other hand, an "intellectual play impulse" with a penchant for honesty and skepticism that delights in showing the contingency of the preservative "primeval errors."
there will be different interpretations of "the same phenomena"; and that, because there is no pre-given world and no God's-eye view, there is no absolute fact of the matter as to which one is correct.[42]
In Beyond Good and Evil §22, Nietzsche provides a basic example. He argues that "the physicists'" notion of "nature's conformity to law" is a "bad mode of interpretation" motivated by the desire to show that the physical world conforms to the democratic values of modern European politics. Deeply suspicious of such ascriptions, Nietzsche offers a counterinterpretation. He claims that, "with opposite intentions and modes of interpretation," one "could read out of the same nature, and with regard to the same phenomena," a view of the world as "will to power," as "the tyrannically inconsiderate and relentless enforcement of claims of power"—an interpretation that, like the physicists' view, would also see the course of the world as "necessary" and "calculable" "not because laws obtain in it, but because they are absolutely lacking, and every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment."
Bracketing, for now, the substantive view proposed in this passage, let us focus on its methodological point. Nietzsche prefaces and concludes his account of the "laws of nature" model with the claim that it is "no matter of fact" but rather an "interpretation." Yet things are no different, he grants, with his alternative model, following the proposal of which he writes: "Supposing that this also is only interpretation—and you will be eager enough to make this objection?—well, so much the better." The point of this concluding remark seems to be that, without a God's-eye view on a pre-given world, there are only interpretations with no absolute fact of the matter as to which one is correct. To challenge an existing view, one cannot simply present "the plain facts" but can only offer a counterinterpretation.[43] As Nietzsche puts it in The
[42] Nietzsche's genealogies make clear his commitment to the notion that "the world [ . . . ] has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings" (WP 481). In the Genealogy of Morals and elsewhere, for example, Nietzsche maintains that, while both parties agree that affective life involves change, suffering, passion, pain, and pleasure, the strong, active person, who affirms affective life in its entirety, gives a wholly different interpretation to this "fact" than does the sickly ascetic, who rejects the sensuous world precisely on account of its changeability, pain, and suffering. See also GM II:12–14, where Nietzsche catalogs the multiple interpretations of punishment, revealing how "one and the same procedure can be employed, interpreted, adapted to ends that differ fundamentally."
[43] Contrary to the view of some Nietzsche scholars (e.g., Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher [New York: Columbia University Press, 1965], 82ff.), Nietzsche is not a veri-ficationist who can do away with metaphysical and theological beliefs simply by pointing to the lack of empirical evidence for them. On Nietzsche's view, as we have seen, interpretations can be criticized only on the basis of other interpretations, not by recourse to some bare, uninterpreted fact. Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics and theology, then, will have to be much more complex and hypothetical. Thus, it takes the form of genealogy, an elaborate attempt to retell the story of theology and metaphysics in a way that reveals them to be rooted in base and pathetic impulses. Nietzsche will argue not only that the supposedly unconditional and otherworldly posits of metaphysics and morality are explicable in naturalistic terms but also that such explanation reveals them to be pernicious and contemptible, generated through a psychological projection that sets up, as the antithesis of "the world of life, nature, and history," another world that allows us to escape life's sufferings and deceptions. The desire for the otherworldly, Nietzsche concludes, is nothing but "life's nausea and disgust with life" (BT SC:5; cf. WP 12).
Gay Science: "We can destroy only as creators!—But let us not forget this either: it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create in the long run new 'things'" (GS 58).
2.3.2—
Will to Power and the Innocence of Becoming
Yet this is not the end of the story. While Nietzsche's "de-deification of nature" allows for a proliferation of interpretations and admits that no interpretation could be uniquely correct, it does not concede that every interpretation is as good as any other. We saw, in the passage from Beyond Good and Evil quoted above, that Nietzsche deems the physicists' interpretation "bad 'philology,'" a "bad mode of interpretation." Conversely, everywhere that Nietzsche presents his own picture of a "de-deified world" (e.g., GS 109; BGE 13, 36; and TI "Errors" 8), he seems to want to promote it as a better interpretation. One might reasonably ask what criteria Nietzsche has for such an evaluation.
The answer is that naturalism itself provides the criterion. While the "death of God" leads to a rejection of all necessary, unconditional, or absolute perspectives and facts, we have seen that it also leads to a rejection of theological interpretations of nature, those that posit supernatural entities and explanatory principles. This is made particularly clear in the section of The Gay Science that immediately follows Nietzsche's first pronouncement of the "death of God"—a passage that bears quoting in full:
Let us beware! —Let us beware of thinking that the world is a living being. Where should it expand? On what should it feed? How could it grow and multiply? We have some notion of the nature of the organic; and we should not reinterpret the exceedingly derivative, late, rare, accidental, that we perceive only on the crust of the earth and make of it something essential,
universal, and eternal, which is what those people do who call the universe an organism. This nauseates me. Let us even beware of believing that the universe is a machine: it is certainly not constructed for one purpose, and calling it a "machine" does it far too much honor. Let us beware of positing generally and everywhere anything as elegant as the cyclical movements of our neighboring stars; even a glance into the Milky Way raises doubts whether there are not far coarser and more contradictory movements there, as well as stars with eternally linear paths, etc. The astral order in which we live is an exception; this order and the relative duration that depends on it have again made possible an exception of exceptions: the formation of the organic. The total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos—in the sense not of a lack of necessity but a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms. Judged from the point of view of our reason, unsuccessful attempts are by all odds the rule, the exceptions are not the secret aim, and the whole musical box repeats eternally its tune which may never be called a melody—and ultimately even the phrase "unsuccessful attempt" is too anthropomorphic and reproachful. But how could we reproach or praise the universe? Let us beware of attributing to it heartlessness and unreason or their opposites: it is neither perfect nor beautiful, nor noble, nor does it wish to become any of these things; it does not by any means strive to imitate man. None of our aesthetic and moral judgments apply to it. Nor does it have any instinct for self-preservation or any other instinct; and it does not observe any laws either. Let us beware of saying there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses. Once you know that there are no purposes, you also know that there is no accident; for it is only beside a world of purposes that the word "accident" has meaning. Let us beware of saying death is opposed to life. The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type.—Let us beware of thinking that the world eternally creates new things. There are no eternally enduring substances: matter is as much of an error as the God of the Eleatics. But when shall we ever be done with our caution and care? When will all these shadows of God cease to darken our minds? When will we complete our de-deification of nature? When may we begin to naturalize humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature? (GS 109; cf. WP 12)
This is a rich and difficult passage. For most of it, Nietzsche seems to be arguing that none of our human, anthropomorphic conceptions provide sustainable interpretations of the world. Yet the coda suddenly speaks of these as "shadows of God " and calls for a "de-deification, " rather than a "de-humanization, " of nature. In retrospect, we can see that what Nietzsche has been urging all along is that we withdraw from the world all those things that we have imagined God to have put there and orchestrated: purpose, order, aim, form, beauty, wisdom, eternal nov-
elty, law, hierarchy, and so forth. What we are left with, Nietzsche tells us, is a world that is "in all eternity chaos."
This last remark has led some commentators to suppose that Nietzsche is committed to a form of metaphysical realism: to the view that the world "in itself" is a "chaos" that only appears to us, filtered through our "aesthetic anthropomorphisms," as ordered, arranged, or formed.[44] Yet we can and should read this passage otherwise (see also §4.7.1, below). Recall that Beyond Good and Evil §22 argued against the naive anthropomorphisms involved in the "physicists'" conception of "nature's conformity to law" and advocated instead a view of the world as a "tyrannical" and "inconsiderate" "will to power" with no laws or aims, expending itself fully at each moment. Such a world might approximate the "chaos" of the Gay Science passage. Indeed, having criticized a prevailing view, each passage advocates a view of the world as "necessary" yet lacking order, law, purpose, et cetera, one passage calling this "will to power," the other calling it "chaos." Recall, too, that Nietzsche conceded that his view of the world as "will to power" was "only interpretation" and not text or fact. Reading these passages together, then, we can see that the world as "chaos" is not offered as a fact—as what the world really is like before it is conceptualized by us—but as another, perhaps better (because atheological), interpretation. We can see that it is not a question of distinguishing the real from the apparent world but of distinguishing different ways of constructing apparent worlds. Seen in this light, Nietzsche is far from advocating metaphysical realism. Rather, he is seen consistently to hold the view that there is no fact of the matter that could be determined by a correct apprehension of the world in itself but only a host of competing interpretations.
As with the passage from Beyond Good and Evil, then, the one from Gay Science asserts Nietzsche's two-sided argument: on the one hand, there are only interpretations with no fact of the matter as to which one is absolutely correct; on the other hand, "better" interpretations are
[44] Jean Granier, "Perspectivism and Interpretation" and "Nietzsche's Conception of Chaos," both in The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, ed. David B. Allison (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977), and, at times, Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 2, The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. David F. Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1984), 94–95, read Nietzsche this way. Despite her critique of Granier's reading, Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor, trans. Duncan Large (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 138–39, reads Nietzsche this way as well. I discuss Nietzsche's conception of "chaos" more fully below, in §§3.4.1 and 4.7.
those that attempt to eliminate all the "shadows of God." This elimination, Nietzsche contends, leaves a world without theological efficient causes (God as causa prima ), formal causes (the world-as-organism, -cycle, -machine, -melody, -law abiding), final causes (equilibrium, progress, happiness), or material causes (materialistic atomism, pantheism).[45] The effort to imbue the world with such causes was an attempt to see the world from outside, to view its natural, internal features as representations of, or as guided by, some grander plan.[46] But this is just what Nietzsche's naturalism cannot allow. There is no "judging, measuring, comparing, or sentencing the whole" of life and nature (TI "Errors" 8; see also TI "Morality" 5), for that would require a position outside of life and nature, the possibility and intelligibility of which, Nietzsche points out, is not afforded living, natural creatures such as ourselves (and, of course, there are no creatures other than natural ones).[47]
Nietzsche urges us to give up the desire for such impossible and superfluous perspectives and instead to try to see the world "from inside." If we do so, he believes, we will come to see it as "'will to power' and nothing besides" (BGE 36): a world without beginning, end, aim, purpose, foundation, or privileged aspect (see GS 109; WP 55, 1062–67). To see the world in this way is to restore "the innocence of becoming" (TI "Errors" 7–8). It is to see that there is no unique way the world is, that the world is capable of many formulations and transformations precisely because it has no essential character.[48] It is to see that there are
[45] Against God as causa prima, see TI "Reason" 4–5, "Errors" 7–8; and WP 1066–67. Against the world as organism, etc., see GS 109, 357. Against the world as teleological, see TI "Errors" 8; Z Prologue and passim (on the last man); WP 55, 627, 708, 1062, 1066, 1067; and the discussion in §5.2.3, below. Against materialistic atomism, see BGE 12, 17; WP 624; and the discussion in §5.2.1, below. And against pantheism, see GS P:4 (the view that "God is everywhere" is precisely what the "de-deification of nature" sets out to reinterpret) and WP 55, 1062.
[46] GS 357 makes this especially clear.
[47] See TI "Socrates" 2: "Judgments, judgments of value, concerning life, for it or against it, can, in the end, never be true: in themselves such judgments are stupidities. One must by all means stretch out one's fingers and make the attempt to grasp this amazing finesse, that the value of life cannot be estimated . Not by the living, for they are an interested party, even a bone of contention, and not judges; not by the dead, for a different reason."
[48] Nietzsche's advocacy of an interpretation in which "laws [ . . . ] are completely lacking" is, I think, nothing more than the advocacy of a thoroughly antiessentialist, antitheological view of the world and of ourselves. He asks only that we give up the strong, ontological notion of necessary laws inherent in nature or in the human mind, not that we give up the notion of "law" altogether. I do not see that he has trouble with the notion of "law" understood in a weaker sense, as describing a regularity or priority internal to a particular interpretation.
as many ways the world is as there are "perspectives and affective interpretations" (GM III: 12). Even apparently antinaturalistic perspectives and interpretations are admissible, provided that they are reinterpreted as disguised naturalistic interpretations—as, for instance, expressions of an ascetic desire for the otherworldly.
2.4—
The Circle of Naturalism and Interpretation
Let me summarize what I have argued thus far. The "death of God"—incredulity toward theological and metaphysical interpretations—enjoins us to give ourselves and our world a naturalistic reinterpretation. It asks that we stop seeing human beings as demi-Gods or as the center and goal of the universe and that we begin to see them as natural organisms who do not differ fundamentally from other natural organisms. It asks us to stop seeing human reason as a divine feature that provides access to the necessary, the universal, and the unconditional and to start thinking of it as a complex device for managing past, present, and future experience. The "death of God" also enjoins us to stop believing that there is some absolute point of view from which the world could be seen "as it really is." Instead, it tells us that "the way the world is" can only ever be determined by our various ongoing perspectives and interpretations, none of which is inherently unchangeable, and not all of which are of a piece or entirely consistent with one another. And it tells us that we can hope for no convergence of these perspectives, that no "absolute knowledge" is forthcoming. Finally, and coming full circle, Nietzsche's affirmation of the "death of God" asks that our interpretations do without theological entities and explanatory principles. It asks that we see ourselves as thoroughly enmeshed in a world that is contingent, conditional, temporal, and affective through and through, a world without absolute beginning, essence, purpose, or aim.
This naturalism yields Nietzsche's central epistemological and ontological doctrines: perspectivism, becoming, and will to power. With the doctrine of perspectivism, Nietzsche rejects the theological ideals of a God's-eye view and a pre-given world. He argues instead that there are only ever contingent perspectives (or interpretations) and the entities internal to them and that there is no absolute fact of the matter about which of these is uniquely correct. With the doctrines of becoming and will to power, however, Nietzsche gives his own naturalistic rendering
of a world without the "shadows of God." Taken together, these doctrines tread between relativism and dogmatism without yielding to either extreme. The apparent relativism of perspectivism is held in check by Nietzsche's naturalism, which offers the doctrines of will to power and becoming in place of all theological interpretations; the apparent dogmatism of will to power and becoming is mitigated by perspectivism, which grants that will to power and becoming are themselves interpretations, yet ones that are better by naturalistic standards.
Of course Nietzsche grants that even his naturalism is an interpretation and not a matter of fact. He acknowledges that "God's death" is capable of being interpreted in a variety of ways (see GS 108, 125, 343; WP Book I).[49] Yet he maintains that his own naturalistic interpretation has "honesty" and "intellectual conscience" on its side, insofar as it takes up and pushes to the limit a centuries-old "will to truth" that finally forbids itself the lie involved in absolutist interpretations (see GS 344, 357; GM III:23–28; WP Book I). In short, Nietzsche grants that his view is itself an interpretation, which is all it could ever be; but he challenges objectors to come up with a better one. He is indeed committed to his naturalistic position yet well aware that it does not settle matters once and for all but only ushers in "new struggles" (GS 108)—which, like all struggles and contests, Nietzsche encouraged and relished.
Having presented this general picture of Nietzsche's epistemology and ontology, I can now provide a more thorough explication of his epistemological and ontological doctrines: perspectivism, becoming, and will to power.
[49] For an elaboration of this point, see Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 152–59.