So, on the sceptical side, he claims that ‘facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations’ (WP 481), which echoes his remark in published work that even if his claim about will to power ‘is only an interpretation too—. …well, then, so much the better’ (BGE 22).10 A few sections later in the same work, he asserts that ‘the erroneousness of the world we think we live in is the most certain and solid fact that our eyes can still grab hold of’ (BGE 34), an assertion that, however, seems to suppose that we know one ‘fact’! In The Gay Science, in a famous passage on ‘perspectivism’, he declares that ‘we have no organ at all for knowing, or for “truth”: we “know” (or believe, or fancy) just as much as may be useful, in the interest of the human herd, the species’ (GS 354). And in the most famous passage on perspectivism in the Genealogy, Nietzsche writes that ‘[t]here is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective “knowing”’ though he adds that the more ‘affects’ (or interests) we bring to bear on an object, ‘the more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity” be’ (GM III: 12) (the quotation marks on ‘objectivity’ are Nietzsche’s).
Despite these sceptical-sounding remarks, Nietzsche also announces that, ‘All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses’ (BGE 134), and that ‘reality is not encountered at all’ unless we ‘accept the testimony of the senses’, which means that metaphysics and theology do not give us knowledge of reality (TI III: 3). In passages like these, Nietzsche sounds more like a logical positivist than a postmodern sceptic. So too Nietzsche’s naturalism, noted earlier, leads him to claim repeatedly that naturalistic explanations for phenomena are epistemically superior to alternatives. So, for example, he complains that moral and religious explanations appeal only to ‘imaginary causes’ (TI VI: 6), and thus ‘believ[e] in realities which are no realities’ (TI VII: 1). Or similarly elsewhere: ‘in Christianity neither morality nor religion has even a single point of contact with reality’ (A: 15).
How are we to reconcile the apparently sceptical-sounding remarks in some of the passages just quoted with Nietzsche’s apparent confidence in the correctness of natural as opposed to religious or moral explanations of phenomena? We may distinguish three possible readings.
First, perhaps perspectivism just is Protagoreanism, that is, an endorsement of the most radical form of relativism associated with the Protagorean dictum ‘man is the measure of all things’. All claims about what is true and knowable have no objective standing at all, they are all dependent on the perspective of the person making the claim. We have already seen evidence that Nietzsche thinks all evaluative judgments are affective, that is, products of the non-rational emotional responses persons have to different states of affairs. But Nietzsche, as we have also seen, believes that nature itself ‘is value-less’ and that all value (Werthe) is ‘bestowed’ by humans onto this value-free nature (GS 301). But judgments about what we ought to believe in light of the evidence also depend on values—norms for what we ought to believe—and it is hard to see why those values should be exempt from Nietzschean scepticism. All knowing is, after all, as Nietzsche argues in the Genealogy passage on perspectivism (GM III: 12), animated by affects (or interests), so how could it claim to be epistemically special or reliable? Notice, of course, that the target here is explicitly epistemic, suggesting that norms of epistemic warrant answer to interests and affects that, themselves, have no independent standing as reliable trackers of the truth. But that would mean that there could be an objective truth, but it would forever be beyond the ken of affective knowers like us! Nietzsche’s view then would combine a kind of Protagoreanism about knowledge with a kind of naturalized Kantianism about what is true or real—what is true or real is beyond our ken because of the psychological facts that condition our ‘knowledge’ of the world. That kind of reading would be hard to square with Nietzsche’s professed scepticism about the Kantian distinction between the world as it appears, and the world as it really is ‘in-itself’ (see Leiter 1994: 338), and it also imposes an interpretive burden to explain away all of Nietzsche’s empiricist and naturalistic claims which typically sound as if he thinks they represent an epistemically privileged view of reality. Still, as I wrote nearly 20 years ago, this kind of Protagorean reading might maintain that ‘in best Sophistic fashion, [Nietzsche] appreciates the rhetorical value of epistemically loaded—but semantically empty—language’, and so this reading has to be a live possibility, though one that still awaits a persuasive defence (1994: 339).11
More common in the secondary literature has been a different strategy, namely, trying to ‘explain away’ not Nietzsche’s apparent epistemic confidence in empiricism and naturalism, but rather the apparently sceptical import of his remarks about perspectivism (Clark 1990 is the locus classicus, though see Clark 1998 for modifications; cf. Leiter 1994 for a related account). On Maudemarie Clark’s influential and subtle reading, Nietzsche began his philosophical career as a Neo-Kantian, who thought that all knowledge is of the phenomenal world—the world as it appears to cognizers like us—and thus everything we believed about the world necessarily falsified reality as it is ‘in-itself’, since, of course, we could know nothing of the noumenal world. Gradually, Nietzsche came to abandon the idea of the thing-in-itself as incoherent, and thus in his final works realized there were no grounds for thinking empirical knowledge of the world ‘falsified’ a reality-in-itself that didn’t even exist. At that point, he became an unabashed naturalist and empiricist. Scholars, however, have questioned whether Nietzsche really abandons the idea that our claims about the world falsify it (e.g. Anderson 1996).
One of the key passages for Clark’s interpretation is Nietzsche’s own accounting of the evolution of his views on these topics in Twilight of the Idols, where he writes about ‘How the “True World” Finally Became a Fable’. Here Nietzsche lays out, in six stages, the ‘error’ of our belief in (to use Kantian terminology) the noumenal realm (the ‘true world’ of the title). In this history, the crucial moments come in Nietzsche’s stages 4 and 5:
4.The true world—unattainable? At any rate, unattained. And being unattained, also unknown. Consequently, not consoling, redeeming, or obligating: how could something unknown obligate us?
5.The ‘true’ world—an idea which is no longer useful for anything, not even obligating—an idea which has become useless and superfluous—consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it!
Notice, however, that the grounds for ‘abolishing’ the idea of the noumenal world given here are not, for example, that it is unintelligible, or that reality is necessarily perspectival, but rather that the idea of such a world is not ‘useful’. This suggests a third possible reading, which we might call ‘pragmatic’. Perhaps, the pragmatic reading says, there is a way things really are as seen from no perspective at all; but the possibility of such a world makes no difference to us, since we can know nothing about it. Practically speaking, what Kant calls the ‘phenomenal’ world is all that matters. This certainly seems to be Nietzsche’s posture in the passage from Twilight, and it is at least consistent with the epistemic emphasis of GM III: 12, which, like the view described here, is officially agnostic about the (metaphysical) question of the existence of the noumenal world.
This would also fit nicely with the fact that Nietzsche’s primary objections are to the practical consequences of acknowledging the existence of a world beyond our cognitive ken, not to the existence of such a world. As he puts it in the Nachlass: ‘It is of cardinal importance that one should abolish the true [i.e. noumenal] world. It is the great inspirer of doubt and devaluator in respect of the world we are: it has been our most dangerous attempt yet to assassinate life’ (WP 583; cf. Poellner 2001: 115–19). He makes the same point even more clearly in a series of four ‘propositions’ from Twilight of the Idols written around the same time as the Nachlass passage; I quote only the two most relevant ones:
Second proposition. The criteria which have been bestowed
on the ‘true being’ of things are the criteria of non-being, of naught; the ‘true world’ has been constructed out of contradiction to the actual world. …
Third proposition. To invent fables about a world ‘other’ than this one has no meaning at all, unless an instinct of slander, detraction, and suspicion against life has gained the upper hand in us: in that case, we avenge ourselves against life with a phantasmagoria of ‘another,’ a ‘better’ life. (TI III: 6)
These are, again, practical objections to the idea of a ‘true’ world, not metaphysical ones. Thus, on this third reading, the sceptical remarks in Nietzsche pertain to the pernicious idea of a ‘true’ world beyond our cognitive grasp, but with respect to the world we can know, naturalistic and empiricist methods reign supreme.
These do not exhaust the possibilities. Recently, for example, Nietzsche has been read as a thorough-going Pyrrhonian sceptic (e.g. Berry 2011), a reading which sheds interesting light on many portions of the corpus, though, again, has difficulty with Nietzsche’s confident endorsement of naturalistic claims. A different possibility, noted, for example, in Gemes (1992), is that Nietzsche, self-taught as he was in philosophy, should not be thought to have coherent or sensible views on general questions of metaphysics and epistemology, which were not, in any case, his real interest. His real concern was in the overestimation of the value of truth in the post-Socratic world, a theme Nietzsche treats from The Birth of Tragedy through the Genealogy. Since questions of value are the dominant questions in his corpus, and arguably where Nietzsche’s greatest insights lay, perhaps we should dispense with the attempt to reconstruct a Nietzschean theory of truth or knowledge altogether. I find myself increasingly sympathetic to that view.12
BIBLIOGRAPHY
References to Nietzsche
I have consulted a variety of existing English translations by Walter Kaufmann, R. J. Hollingdale, or Maudemarie Clark and Alan Swensen (except as noted, in this section, for the material in Philosophy and Truth), and then made modifications based on Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, ed. G. Colli & M. Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980); where there is no existing English edition, the translation is my own. Nietzsche’s works are cited as follows, unless otherwise noted: roman numerals refer to major parts or chapters in Nietzsche’s works; Arabic numerals refer to sections, not pages. I use the standard abbreviations for Nietzsche’s works, as follows: The Antichrist (A); Beyond Good and Evil (BGE); The Birth of Tragedy (BT); Daybreak (D); Ecce Homo (EH); The Gay Science (GS); Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (PTAG); Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s, ed. & trans. D. Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979) (PT, cited by page number); Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Z); Twilight of the Idols (TI); The Will to Power (WP).
Other References
Anderson, R. Lanier. 1996. ‘Overcoming Charity: The Case of Maudemarie Clark’s Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy’, Nietzsche-Studien 25: 307–41.
Berry, Jessica. 2011. Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press).
Clark, Maudemarie. 1990. Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Clark, Maudemarie. 1998. ‘On Knowledge, Truth and Value: Nietzsche’s Debt to Schopenhauer and the Development of his Empiricism’, in C. Janaway (ed.), Willing and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s Educator (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Gemes, Ken. 1992. ‘Nietzsche’s Critique of Truth’, reprinted in Richardson & Leiter (eds.) (2001), Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Janz, Curt Paul. 1978/9. Friedrich Nietzsche: Biographie (3 volumes). Munich: Hanser.
Katsafanas, Paul. 2005. ‘Nietzsche’s Theory of Mind: Consciousness and Conceptualization’, European Journal of Philosophy 13: 1–31.
Katsafanas, Paul. 2013. ‘Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology’, in K. Gemes & J. Richardson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Leiter, Brian. 1994. ‘Perspectivism in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals’, in R. Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality (Berkeley: University of California Press).
Leiter, Brian. 2002. Nietzsche on Morality (London: Routledge).
Leiter, Brian. 2007. ‘Nietzsche’s Theory of the Will’, Philosophers’ Imprint 7 (September 2007): 1–15.
Leiter, Brian. 2013. ‘Nietzsche’s Naturalism Reconsidered’, in K. Gemes & J. Richardson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Leiter, Brian. 2014. ‘The Truth is Terrible’, in D. Came (ed.), Nietzsche on Morality and the Value of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Meyer, Matthew. 2014. Reading Nietzsche Through the Ancients: An Analysis of Becoming, Perspectivism, and the Principle of Non-Contradiction (Berlin: de Gruyter).
Nehamas, Alexander. 1985. Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).
Poellner, Peter. 2001. ‘Perspectival Truth’, in Richardson & Leiter (eds.) (2001), Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Riccardi, Mattia. 2013. ‘Nietzsche on the Superficiality of Consciousness’, in M. Dries (ed.), Nietzsche on Consciousness and the Embodied Mind (Berlin: de Gruyter).
Richardson, John. 1996. Nietzsche’s System (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Richardson, John. 2004. Nietzsche’s New Darwinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Richardson, John and Brian Leiter (eds.). 2001. Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Robertson, Simon. 2012. ‘The Scope Problem—Nietzsche, the Moral, Ethical, and Quasi-Aesthetic’, in C. Janaway & S. Robertson (eds.), Nietzsche, Naturalism and Normativity (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Rosenthal, David. 2005. Consciousness and Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
Sinhababu, Neil. 2007. ‘Vengeful Thinking and Moral Epistemology’, in B. Leiter & N. Sinhababu (eds.), Nietzsche and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Wegner, Daniel. 2002. The Illusion of Conscious Will (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press).
* * *
1 Schopenhauer did not, however, recommend suicide for the living, since that would still involve acting on individual desire, namely, the desire for a cessation of suffering.
2 See Katsafanas (2013) for useful discussion.
3 Mostly in work he never published, Nietzsche presents ‘will to power’ as an ambitious metaphysical thesis about the nature of all reality. As Clark (1990: 212–27) argues, however, the most important treatment of will to power as a metaphysical thesis that Nietzsche publishes occurs in a context (the first chapter of BGE) in which he has just finished criticizing philosophers for propounding metaphysical doctrines as post-hoc rationalizations for their evaluative commitments. It would be extraordinary if Nietzsche would then turn around and do the same thing, without irony!
4 See, for example, D 108, 132, 174; GS 116, 294, 328, 338, 345, 352, 377; Z I:4, II: 8, III: 1, 9, IV: 13, 10; BGE 197, 198, 201–2, 225, 257; GM Pref: 5, III: 11 ff.; TI II, V, IX: 35, 37–8, 48; A: 7, 43; EH III: D-2, IV: 4, 7–8; WP 752.
5 Note that while Nietzsche speaks in Thus Spoke Zarathustra of the ‘superman’ as a kind of ideal higher type, this concept simply drops out of his mature work (except for a brief mention in EH in the context of discussing Zarathustra). ‘Higher men’ is an important concept in Nietzsche; the ‘superman’ is nothing more than a rhetorical trope in Zarathustra.
6 ‘Will’ in this context means something closer to desire; it is not a sotto voce smuggling back in of the traditional notion of the will as the locus of agency that, as we have seen, Nietzsche critiques.
7 We shall ignore the answer Nietzsche gave in his first published work, BT, since he later abandons that particular kind of answer, even as he retains allegiance to the idea that only an aesthetic justification of existence is possible.
8 There is a helpful discussion of pertinent passages about Rausch in Richardson (20
04: 229ff.). As Richardson writes, ‘something is beautiful [according to Nietzsche] if and only if it can (or does) produce Rausch’ (230). Less plausibly, and with insufficient textual evidence, Richardson tries to connect this to a selectionist theory of aesthetic experience, but the adequacy of that hypothesis does not matter for my purposes.
9 For doubts about the cogency of the argument of this early essay, and evidence that Nietzsche changed his view significantly thereafter, see Clark (1990).
10 In context, it is clear the target here is a kind of phenomenalist ‘positivism, which halts at phenomena’ (WP 481). That kind of phenomenalism is widely rejected, of course.
11 Meyer (2014) defends a kind of Protagorean reading of Nietzsche’s perspectivism, though one he argues is compatible with a naturalism that privileges the relationalist ontology that is supported by what Nietzsche took to be the best science of his day.
12 Thanks to Justin Coates and Michael Forster for comments on an earlier draft.
CHAPTER 11
FREGE (1848–1925)
PATRICIA A. BLANCHETTE
The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century Page 40