Accueil
"Writing in a letter dated 1866, ‘Kant, Schopenhauer and this book by Lange – I do not need anything else’, Nietzsche tells us quite clearly that the historical soil and climate in which his own ideas are given birth and nourished are those of modern philosophy, with the writings of Immanuel Kant at the top of the list." (p.1)
"The goal is to show that Nietzsche’s views on the perspectival direction of our knowledge and his metaphysics of the will to power are compatible, and that his metaphysics derives from his perspectivism." (p.2)
"Nietzsche applauds the anthropocentric turn of Kant’s Copernican revolution as a welcome methodological rejection of dogmatism, overcoming the presupposition that we can access fundamental truths about reality directly by stepping outside our specifi cally human point of view.8 However, Nietzsche’s approval is less than total. He argues that Kant ultimately fails to execute his task and is responsible for inducing an epistemic gap between self and world. This gap ensues, Nietzsche contends, from both Kant’s constitutive account of knowledge that reduces the object of knowledge to mind-dependent objects of our awareness and his reference to the thing-in-itself, which although mind-independent is radically divorced from the possibility of our knowing it. By focusing on both Nietzsche’s perspectivism and will to power thesis, I argue that he overcomes the epistemic division of self and world by putting forward an anthropocentric conception of knowledge that nonetheless can be objective.
According to Nietzsche, objective knowledge is impossible if reality, like Kant’s thing-in-itself, is external to the conditions under which we come to know. Therefore, naturalising the knowing intellect, rendering it a participator rather than a spectator, Nietzsche argues that our perspectives are always perspectives in rather than on the world, having reality in view to varying degrees. Thus reality, Nietzsche argues, is metaphysically independent of but epistemically accessible to human knowledge. According to Nietzsche, our perspectives do not divorce us from reality but rather mark the seal of our essential and unavoidable engagement with it. His claim that our knowledge is perspectival is therefore an enabling rather than a limiting thesis. Although our perspectives are sometimes simplifications of the complexity of reality, we can, Nietzsche suggests, through careful and rigorous analysis, strive towards achieving more refi ned accounts of the nature of things. This is because, for Nietzsche, human knowers, although part of the natural world, also have the capacity to refl ect on and make intelligible sense of their experiences, to justify their claims to knowledge." (pp.2-3)
"The argument that our knowledge is perspectival yet objective culminates in Nietzsche’s naturalisation of Kantian synthesis in his will to power metaphysics, transferring the ordering principle of reality from human minds to the world. Putting forward an account of intentionally directed reality informed by an intrinsic inner nature, Nietzsche maintains that the fundamental constituents of reality are ordered from within rather than by human minds. This interpretation differs considerably from the predominant anti-essentialist readings of Nietzsche to date, which contend that Nietzsche rejects the idea of intrinsic natures, acceptance of which, it is claimed, would place his will to power in tension with his explicit rejection of substantialist metaphysics. One of the problems with substantialist metaphysics, according to Nietzsche, is its view that empirical reality is grounded in a non-empirical and static substance. Nietzsche’s will to power metaphysics, in contrast, puts forward the view that empirical reality is intrinsically constituted from within, requiring no external substrate, mental or otherwise, in which to subsist. Domesticating the will to power, bringing it safely within the sphere of empirical reality available to but metaphysically independent of human knowledge, the present study offers a distinctive interpretation of Nietzsche’s metaphysics, viewing this metaphysics as emanating from Nietzsche’s desire to overcome the dualisms that, in his view, beset Kant’s efforts to reconcile self and world. Although Nietzsche contends that will to power manifests itself differently in the human and the non-human world, that the human world is demarcated from the non-human by virtue of its being a refl ective world of beliefs, his claim that ‘This world is the will to power – and nothing besides ! And you yourselves are also this will to power – and nothing besides’ nonetheless holds that human knowers, far from being epistemically and metaphysically divorced from a static, unknowable and non-empirical thing-in-itself, in fact have the world in view from within their immersion in its intrinsically constituted but dynamic and empirical nature." (pp.3-4)
"Appropriating the concept of force in his account of causal connection, Nietzsche sides with Kant against Schopenhauer in his identification of force with efficient causality, but ultimately rejects Kant’s view that relational properties are grounded in a non-relational and unknowable substratum. Then, putting forward the idea of intrinsic relational properties contrary to both Kant and Schopenhauer who, according to Nietzsche, take the view that intrinsicality is instantiated at the non-empirical and non-relational level of things-in-themselves, Nietzsche brings to fruition his envisaged reconciliation of self and world through a naturalisation of Kant’s account of synthesis. This naturalisation of Kantian synthesis amounts to the claim that the world is constituted independently of human minds, thus allowing for Nietzsche’s view that although the human knower is immersed in the world, neither the world nor human knowers are ultimately reducible to one another." (p.5)
"Whilst Nietzsche praises Kant’s efforts to save the rational justifi cation of our beliefs contrary to Hume’s challenge, he contends that Kant ultimately fails to demonstrate the objectivity of our beliefs due to his reduction of rational justifi cation to a description of our psychology. Kant, according to Nietzsche, succumbs to the genetic fallacy in his efforts to demonstrate the justifi cation of our beliefs. Nietzsche also contends that Kant’s reconfi guration of what we mean by an object of knowledge reduces objects that are knowable by us to mind-dependent objects of our awareness. According to Nietzsche, the Kantian object of knowledge is narrowly anthropocentric and, when considered in opposition to things-in-themselves, dangerously sceptical. Thus Nietzsche argues that Kant is guilty of perpetuating the distinction between appearance and reality, which in its specific Kantian form holds that empirical knowledge is possible only if the objects of our knowledge conform to the a priori forms of human understanding. Otherwise, reality is accessible only to a God’s Eye View that is beyond us.
Nietzsche’s rejection of Kant’s constitutive account of knowledge and his assimilation of it to the status of regulative belief overturns the appearance/reality distinction by naturalising the human knower and abandoning the Kantian oscillation between merely human knowledge, on the one hand, and a God’s Eye View on the other. Nietzsche contends that the knowing self, as a physiological rather than transcendental self, is not divorced from reality but in fact participates in reality. The forms of our knowledge are not imposed on reality from without but emerge and evolve in the context of the self’s immersion in reality. As such, reality is neither a mind-dependent object nor an unknowable thing-in-itself but something that is in principle available to our knowledge." (p.6)
"Although metaphysical realism, the thesis that reality is metaphysically independent of our knowledge, does not by defi nition entail scepticism, Nietzsche contends that the two ideas have been historically connected. Nietzsche’s reasons for rejecting this scepticism are examined, focusing on his arguments in the later writings from Human, All Too Human.
Fundamental to Nietzsche’s disagreement with metaphysical realism in its historical guise is its dissociation of truth and justifi cation. According to Nietzsche’s metaphysical realist, our best justifi ed beliefs may be in error because they may conceivably be divorced from how things are in themselves. Nietzsche’s perspectivism plays a key role in his overcoming of this sceptical dissociation of our knowledge from how things are in themselves by demonstrating the incoherence of the thing-in-itself and the God’s Eye View of knowledge that supports it. Adopting a contextualist account of justifi cation, Nietzsche argues our truths are always justified from within a particular point of view, concluding that once the idea of extra-perspectival truth has been shown to be unintelligible there is no longer any reason to consider our perspectival truths as anything but objective. Pivotal to Nietzsche’s argument from perspectivism is its rejection of the anti-empirical tendency of metaphysical realism. According to Nietzsche, the empirical world plays a role in the justification of our epistemic claims without acting as an epistemological foundation for those claims. Internal realism, the term I employ to describe Nietzsche’s anti-metaphysical realist position, entails a theory-internal view of truth and justification, holding that our perspectives are rooted in the world and constrained internally from within our practices of contextually seeking out the best reasons for and against our epistemic claims." (p.7)
-Tsarina Doyle, Nietzsche on Epistemology and Metaphysics, Edinburgh University Press, 2009, 207 pages.
