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ABSTRACT
Nietzsche’s perspectivism has received restricted and unrestricted interpretations. The latter take the cognitive effects of ‘perspectives’ to be pervasive and general; the former argue they are restricted to special subject matters, have limited effects, or are not essentially cognitive at all. I argue on textual grounds that Nietzsche was committed to the unrestricted view. Comparison to A.W. Moore’s treatment of perspectival representation in Points of View illuminates both the nature of perspectivism and key arguments needed to defend it. Nietzschean perspectivism must deny the very possibility of absolute representations (sensu Moore), and to do so, it must block a form of argument that promises to integrate perspectival representations into progressively less restricted, and ultimately absolute, representations of the world. Such arguments depend on a strong assumption about the unity of the independent world, which Moore accepts and Nietzsche denies. Nietzsche’s pluralism about perspectives thereby turns out to rely on pluralism about the world, which shapes his understanding of us as essentially bounded cognitive agents. Nietzsche holds that the longing for absolute representation manifest in Moore, Leibniz, and many other philosophers, which aspires to overcome the limitations of perspective, amounts to ascetic self-denial about our cognitive condition.
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Notes
1 See, in the three categories respectively, Danto (Citation1965), Schacht (Citation1983), and Nehamas (Citation1985); de Man (Citation1979, 79–131) and Rorty (Citation1982, 139–159; Citation1989); and Bloom (Citation1987).
2 The four I discuss represent a useful range of options for a restricted readings, but others (e.g. Alfano Citation2019) have joined the same trend. I have been influenced by the recent unrestricted interpretation of Fowles (Citationunpub. ms.), which highlights the role of interpretation in cognition.
3 The same considerations will also prove helpful for understanding Moore’s account in Section 3, so the digression is worthwhile.
4 Kantian ideas dominated that philosophical landscape. Kant’s ‘Transcendental Analytic’ encouraged the idea that Erkenntnisstheorie (literally, the theory of cognition) should replace metaphysics in the role of first philosophy.
5 On the contrary, the less perfect the monad, the more confused and obscure its representations; much of their content (notably including space and time) lacks any referent at all in reality.
6 Such integrability of perspectival representations is essential to Moore’s argument for the possibility of absolute representations (see Section 3).
7 For Nietzsche’s German, I have consulted Nietzsche (Citation1980 ff.). Published writings are cited parenthetically in the text using the standard English abbreviations listed below, together with Nietzsche’s section numbers (or major part plus section numbers). I consulted the listed translations, though I occasionally depart from them without separate notice in the direction of greater literalness.
GS The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974 (1st ed. 1882, 2nd ed. 1887).
BGE Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1966 (1886).
GM On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan Swensen. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998 (1887). (I also consulted On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1967.)
8 This part of Leiter’s account focuses on GS 354, where Nietzsche ties perspectivism to a falsifying effect of conscious thought and language on our self-knowledge. But he also relies on ideas from GS 110 to fill out what kinds of organizing modes of thought Nietzsche had in mind. That text suggests that the evolutionary process has entrenched certain ‘basic errors’ in cognitive life, including ‘that there are enduring things; that there are equal things; that there are things, substances, bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be; that our will is free; that what is good for me is good in itself’ (GS 110).
9 ‘Intuition [Anschauung]’ should be taken generally, to refer to immediate cognition, based on acquaintance of whatever sort. Kant famously insisted that all our intuition is sensible, but his predecessors held that we could attain immediate cognition through the intellect as well.
10 The contradiction in these cases is between ‘purity’, or an absolute ‘in itself’ character, and the concept of the cognitive faculty or power (reason, cognition). Clearly, then, Nietzsche means to assert that it is in the nature of finite cognition to depend on affective perspectives.
11 In the terms of Nietzsche’s metaphorical comparison with vision, it is through ‘active and interpreting forces’ alone that ‘seeing’ counts as ‘seeing-something’; i.e. the active influence of perspective is a constitutive condition on cognition’s having an object at all. Is constitution here metaphysical or epistemological? Arguably both – perspective is a condition on the content and our access to it, and also on the possibility of cognition’s having an object. As is typical for Erkenntnisstheorie, Nietzsche’s account treats the two kinds of question together.
12 Nietzsche’s gratitude does not depend on his agreeing with the ascetic philosophical claims. On the contrary, he considers these ideas to be mostly false, at least unjustified, and even outright perverse. But precisely because they have overturned what it is most natural to think, they have trained up in the culture a general purpose intellectual capacity to use multiple perspectives in cognition.
13 BGE 6 provides an apparent counterexample to my claims about a general influence of affects on cognition. While Nietzsche begins there by insisting that philosophy is always shaped by drives and a pure ‘“drive to knowledge”’ never runs the show, he then concedes that such a purified pursuit of knowledge might occur in other (non-philosophical) cases:
To be sure: among scholars who are really scientific men, things may be different—‘better,’ if you like—there there might actually be something like a drive for knowledge, some small, independent clockwork that, once well wound, works on vigorously without any essential participation from the other drives of the scholar. [BGE 6]
14 For example, GS 354’s exploration of perspectivism remarks
We simply lack any organ for knowledge [Erkennen], for ‘truth’: we ‘know [wissen]’ (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd … and even what is here called “utility” is ultimately also a mere belief [Glaube], something imaginary …
15 What, exactly, counts as cruel? Nietzsche would be the last to have us underestimate human creativity in expanding culturally specific answers.
16 Issues surrounding Nietzsche’s ‘falsification thesis’, as distinct from perspectivism, are another matter. Nietzsche does occasionally express metaphysical and epistemological views (including thoughts about perspectives) using deliberately paradoxical formulations claiming that all representations are false (in some sense). My view remains that efforts to acquit Nietzsche entirely of this falsification thesis (see Clark Citation1990; Citation2018; Nehamas Citation2017) are textually hopeless. Instead, I read Nietzsche as strategically deploying an implicit distinction between different senses of ‘true’, ‘false’, etc. in these contexts, as a way of providing striking formulation to ideas that can also be stated otherwise (see Anderson Citation1996; Citation1998; Citation2005). Thus, the formulations are paradoxical, but that is a deliberate piece of rhetorical engineering on Nietzsche’s part.
17 Indeed, Nietzsche’s overarching philosophical agenda has been persuasively framed as a program to overcome and remove nihilism; see Reginster (Citation2006).
18 Berry (Citation2013) argues that the evidence for attributing the ‘conventional wisdom’ picture of a chaotically fluctuating reality to Heraclitus is very thin, and that Nietzsche may well not have read him this way. The question of Nietzsche’s Heraclitus interpretation is beyond my scope, but we need not reach it to conclude that Nietzsche himself granted such a metaphysics serious consideration. For example, one text raises doubt about conventional world-pictures by asserting, ‘The total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos—in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, [etc.] … ’ (GS 109). Even if this does not represent his considered view, it was clearly a possibility he counted as live. Related anti-essentialist ideas are extensively explored in the notebooks; Poellner (Citation1995) and Nehamas (Citation1985, 74–105) canvas many relevant texts.
19 Moore assumes that we can specify a point of view only by characterizing its limits ‘from the outside’, making the perspective itself our object. But then, one has already transcended the perspective, and the claim that representations are limited to that point of view is thereby refuted. This move seems to me to brush too quickly past the official Kantian strategy for marking off the limits of the human standpoint, which is to identify expressive limits from within, based on an analysis of the conditions of possibility of paradigmatic successful cognition, where that analysis simultaneously reveals our representations’ expressive limitations. (The analytic/synthetic distinction and the doctrine of the forms of intuition are both cases in point.)
20 My earlier work on perspectivism concentrated on Nietzsche’s arguments denying that any perspective could have a necessary claim on us (Anderson Citation1998; Citation2005, 185–196).
21 Thanks to Christopher Fowles (pers. comm.) for exchanges that deepened my appreciation of these problems. Many accounts that make preliminary good sense of how affects or drives might shape a cognitive perspective focus on the cognitive importance of evaluatively loaded concepts, like thick ethical concepts. But treating them as the main (or only) route for affective influence encourages a Clark/Janaway style restricted reading, rather than the unrestricted reading I favor. Nietzsche does also insist on the inherently perspectival character of theoretical concepts (basic logical and metaphysical concepts, scientific paradigms), but there, the connection to an underlying ‘affective interpretation’ is less clear. A fuller account will require substantive development of ideas in both the theory of cognition (or philosophy of science) and in moral psychology, exploring relations among cognitive and non-cognitive attitudes.
22 One idea that deserves exploration would begin from more obvious cases of affectively inflected concepts, like Williams-style thick ethical concepts, and then mount a continuity argument on Nietzschean grounds, to the effect that no strict distinction can be maintained between such concepts and a broader class of perspectival theoretical constructs. For reasons alluded to in the previous note, much work is needed to make such a strategy stick.
23 This paper attempts to get clearer on issues about the nature and potential ‘eliminability’ of perspectives that have been pressed on me for many years, and I owe my first thanks to Alexander Nehamas, Paul Guyer, and Bernard Reginster, for conversations about these questions going back to the nineties. I hope they can see their longstanding efforts rewarded by some progress in my thinking. I also received helpful comments on an earlier draft from Jessica Berry, Christopher Fowles, and Brian Leiter; special thanks to Fowles for detailed written comments on multiple drafts. Discussions at the 2023 meeting of the International Society for Nietzsche Studies provided many specific pointers, from which I benefitted in this version.