To show the relevance of Nietzsche’s epistemological skepticism to practical human affairs, we return to the normative question—this time as a practical question. Instead of asking the epistemological question “Is perspectivism true?” we ask the practical question: “Does Nietzsche believe in his own perspectivism?”43 If so, how can a skeptic believe in his own theory of truth?
It is still an open question, on a skeptical reading anyway, whether Nietzsche can believe in perspectivism as a doctrine with a positive, substantive content. It would sound odd to say he prefers his perspectivism over dogmatic theories, yet does not believe his theory, at least in some reinterpreted sense to be specified; or that he is not willing to act with conviction on those beliefs. What distinguishes skeptics from everyday people is not that they lack substantive beliefs, on Burnyeat’s reading anyway (1997: 25–8, 45–6). Even the ancient skeptics had basic beliefs, which guided them in practical action. But to know what a skeptic believes, as we’ve seen, we can’t just ask him. For what Nietzsche says entangles him in paradoxes arising from nonperspectivalist modes of justification. Rather, we have to observe what a skeptic does. And what Nietzsche does is engage in a natural argumentative practice that minimizes a dogmatic way of speaking and theorizing.
Among the elements that Nietzsche assimilates from the ancient model, he takes over psychological factors as to how one’s mental attitudes toward assertions are affected (Cohen 1984: 405–24). Sextus Empiricus characterized skepticism as a “mental attitude,” ability or “disposition” (Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 8). A nondogmatic attitude is in evidence when Nietzsche tries to avoid asserting “there is no truth.” Instead, he cautiously poses his skeptical critique of truth in the form of a hypothetical question: “What if truth, and the value of truth, were experimentally called into question?” (GS, 110: 171). The open form of the “What if” question avoids a dogmatic form of speech that would carry unwanted conversational implicatures committing him to truth-bearing statements. He does not presume in advance that his theory is indefeasible. In this sense, Nietzsche’s belief in his own perspectivism should be regarded less as an assertion about its truthful content, and more as a psychological observation about what attitude he strikes toward it. Without implying he is abandoning the content of perspectivism as self-contradictory and empty, his nondogmatic attitude avoids stultifying ideas and minimizes a problematic way of speaking and theorizing about it (BGE, 210, 211; A, 7).
But there is a more substantive sense in which Nietzsche thinks a skeptic can have beliefs. His skeptical epistemology does not target all beliefs per se, only guilty beliefs that consider something “true” of an objective world in a nonperspectival sense. He characterizes the guilty sense of belief in a way that anticipates Moore’s paradox: “What is belief (Glaube)? How does it originate? Every belief is a considering-something-true” (WP, 15). That is, “guilty” beliefs admit of a truth-value, which we’ve seen cannot survive paradoxes arising out of reflections of a rational kind. He traces the source of “guilty” theorizing back to motives originating in pathologies of the body—enervation, weariness, decadence, degeneration, and nervous exhaustion—that become internalized in complex and pathologically troubling ways, and which then get manifested in the way we theorize (BGE, 208; GS, P: 2).44 But lacking dogmatic beliefs of this guilty kind need not lead to sinking into despair or apathy. Nietzsche warns the future skeptic from sinking passively into effete indifference, in the manner he portrays the Pyrrhonists (Parush 1975: 536).
There is a second, more permissible sense of belief that accords with a future type of skeptic. He writes, “This skepticism despises belief (of the first dogmatic, guilty kind) and nevertheless seizes; it undermines and takes possession of it; but does not lose itself in the process” (GS, 347). Nietzsche characterizes this skeptic admiringly as a “man of action”; one who is restlessly engaged, always seeking, perpetually troubled—yet value-creating. This “manly skeptic” acts with conviction in a way that does not come into conflict with his theoretical skepticism. For this second, more permissible sense of belief is confined to appearances. Like the ancient skeptics, Nietzsche’s skepticism doesn’t attack appearances: “There would be no life at all if not on the basis of perspective estimates and appearances” (BGE, 34: 46). In this, he follows the Pyrrhonists, who refused to make assertions or entertain speculations beyond reports of the way things appear. Nietzsche’s theoretical skepticism targets the imagined, undistorted facts the dogmatist places behind those appearances, and their philosophical explanations of the causes behind appearances. Accordingly, Nietzsche insists there are no things-in-themselves, only “grades of appearances measured by the strength of interest we show in an appearance” (WP, 588). He neither affirms nor denies anything beyond a belief-in-truth-limited-to-appearances. We may express his second, permissible kind of belief schematically: believing p entails that believing p is in fact “true,” but in the qualified sense of being true of appearances confined to a given perspective. Thus, as long as a skeptic remains aware that the way the world appears is wholly perspective-dependent, he can consistently affirm substantive beliefs about the way the world appears, in this modified sense of being-true-of-appearances-from-within-a-perspective.
Notice that the permissible variety of belief comes in on the back of Nietzsche’s naturalism. As part of his naturalism, he thinks natural conditions prompt the direction that our beliefs take. Our beliefs in how things appear, he thinks, are grounded in our instincts and immediate sensations. They are unreflective and don’t require conscious judgment. It is not possible for us to suspend belief about the way the world appears when appearances are tied unavoidably to meeting the demands of life: health, thirst, hunger, cold, and pain. Even skeptics have to acquiesce passively to beliefs forced on them by appearances tied to everyday experiences of the body. Our beliefs based in appearances are tied to unavoidable conditions: pain/pleasure, denial/satisfaction, sickness/healing, toxins/anti-toxins, poisons/antidotes, intestinal morbidity, nourishment, vitality, infections. These beliefs lie at the basement level of the physiology of the body and are never open to question in daily life. Beliefs forced on us unavoidably by nature don’t require us to “do” anything that involves our conscious intentions. We are just letting things come to us.
We may thus reconcile the apparent inconsistency between Nietzsche’s skeptical epistemology and his norms, reinterpreted along these naturalistic lines. For skeptically suspending judgment in theoretical matters about whether appearances are veridical doesn’t imply one is going to be indifferent to which appearances to act on. If all appearances were on a par, this would present an agent impractically with a dizzying array of choices, making it practically unfeasible to act.45 This would lead to a paralysis of will and the passive, hesitant posture exemplified in Hamlet—the modern analogue for Nietzsche of a skeptic whose unhealthy, nauseating inhibitions prevent him from engaging directly and wholeheartedly with the world (BGE, 28, 208). But on a naturalized reading of perspectivism all appearances are not on the same level (BGE, 4: 11–12). When there is equal weight of evidence on the side of the senses, one is forced to a natural criterion of choice lying within appearances themselves. Nietzsche ranks appearances based on the interest we show in them: “grades of appearances [are] measured by the strength of interest we show in an appearance” (WP, 588). What compels a high level of interest in some appearances over others is a function of how much they contribute to the optimal conditions of a flourishing life.
Nietzsche’s naturalism returns us to the literal sense of perspectivism, based on the model of seeing, that we began with. His use of the eye analogy departs from his predecessors in one important respect. The eye serves as his paradigm of how preferred norms are getting expressed pre-consciously in perception. For Nietzsche, pre-normative judgments enter into our instinctive, unconscious activity of seeing. He exposes hidden norms and values where one might think they would not be: in our directly-experienced sensations and
sense impressions. He bases norms on the optimal health of the body. The perspective from which a healthy seeing organ functions has more authority than a sick, defective organ (Nachlass: 62, 139). The superiority of one perspective over others is a function of how much it contributes to the optimal flourishing of the eye. To the extent that seeing activity involves quantitative simplifications and selections that are optimally adapted to survival, the eye’s perceptual discriminations already have built into them interpretive judgments.
Thus, in place of falsely disinterested, rational arguments about justification, Nietzsche’s naturalism promotes biological conditions necessary to optimal human flourishing that are neutral in terms of truth beyond appearances. Innocent beliefs about what is apparent don’t imply a commitment to believing how things really are. His naturalism bypasses the nest of normative issues that would entangle him in traditional standards of acceptability and justification. His naturalistic standard substitutes the traditional terms of justification (true/false, right/wrong, correct/incorrect, legitimate/illegitimate) with a natural organicism (innocent/guilty, health/pathology, instinctive/voluntary) that can’t be confused with putting forward dogmatic principles or doctrinal rules in need of further grounding. Naturalized beliefs about what is apparent don’t require commitments to ontological claims about reality, which would preempt his theoretical skepticism about the possibility of truth and knowledge beyond appearances. The problem of justification does not arise for self-evident beliefs about appearances because they are intrinsically self-justifying; when understood as springing from a natural source of normativity lying at the basis of our affects, instinctive dispositions, and perceptual discriminations, natural beliefs serve as a catalyst to act in accord with living a robustly healthy life. A concern for living well is natural and requires no further justification than that. There are no reasons for holding such beliefs other than the natural and inescapable fact that we do.
These reflections were intended to persuade critics to rethink the distinction between what is prescriptive and descriptive in Nietzsche’s thought. I have tried to deflect the widespread criticism that he is mixing up evaluations and descriptions. To defuse the normative tensions arising for his theoretical norms, I relocated the debate to an alternative skeptical framework: one that allowed his naturalized epistemology to survive self-referential paradoxes about truth and justification and embrace self-refutation as part of a wider pattern of self-criticism by anti-systematic, skeptical philosophers. Then on the practical side, I argued his skeptical critique of truth left room for a limited, domain-specific sense of belief, which falls within the parameters set down by his theoretical skepticism. A substantive notion of action-guiding beliefs came in by way of his naturalism, which reclaims, reinterprets, and revitalizes the normative terms “valuing” and “judgment” along naturalistic lines. Hopefully, these reflections will prompt a few readers to take Nietzsche seriously, too.46
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Works by Nietzsche
A Antichrist [1895] (1984), ed. and trans. R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Penguin Books.
BT Birth of Tragedy [1872] (1967), trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books.
BGE Beyond Good and Evil [1886] (1966), trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books.
EH Ecce Homo [1888] (1980), trans. R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Penguin Books.
GM Genealogy of Morals [1887] (1967), trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books.
GS Gay Science/Joyful Wisdom [1882] (1974), trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books.
HH Human, All Too Human [1878–80] (1986), trans. R. J. Hollindale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
TI Twilight of the Idols [1889] (1977), trans. Richard Polt. Indiana: Hackett Publishing Co.
TL “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” [1870–3] (1999), and Nachlass materials in Philosophy and Truth, Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the early 1870s, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale. New York: Humanity Books.
UM Untimely Meditations/Thoughts out of Season [1873–6] (1997), ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
WP Will to Power fragments [1883–8] (1967), trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House.
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