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1 Bas van Fraasen in Scientific Representation starts from the visual model of perspectivism in painting and draws lessons for scientific models. Among its many modern applications, perspectivism has been applied to scientific models because it offers a way of tolerating what look like incompatible intrinsic properties as ascriptions of properties from different perspectives. For examples of scientific perspectivism, see Alexander Rueger, “Perspectival Models and Theory Unification,” British Journal of the Philosophy of Science v. 56 (2005): 579–94; Anjan Chakravartty, “Perspectivism, Inconsistent Models, and Contrastive explanation,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, v. 41 (2010): 405–12; Bas van Fraasen, Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008; and Ronald Giere, Scientific Perspectivism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
2 That is, each monad perceives the world from its own perspective, and each viewpoint looks different. Leibniz, Monadology §57.
3 Chladenius gave the first systematic treatise on hermeneutics in German. His neglected theory of perspectivism is treated extensively in Frederick C. Beiser in The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). See ch.1, “The Concept and Context of Historicism,” sections 4–5, on “Perspectivalism,” 23f. Cf. Chladenius, Einleitung, ch. 8 and Allgemeine Geschichtswissenschaft, chs. 5–6. See also his “Foundations of Hermeneutics” (1752) and “On the Concept of Interpretation.”
4 The transition from historical-literary perspectivism to religious perspectivism comes by way of the German Romantic hermeneutical tradition, which systematically formulated general principles for understanding and interpreting all texts, sacred as well as secular. Since Chladenius believed faith and divine revelation are based on scripture, this gave perspectivism an application to solving conflicts among religious beliefs.
5 Beiser suggests the eye metaphor may have come from the Baumgarten School: see Beiser (2011), 25, n.43. Baumgarten could have been stimulated by other sources. But given the chronology and explicit reference, it is more likely that both Chladenius and Baumgarten got the seeing analogy from Leibniz. Chladenius explicitly credits Leibniz’s Monadology §57. See Chladenius, Allgemeine Geschichtswissenschaft, ch. 5: §3, 93.
6 Chladenius C5, §26, 113–14.
7 On Fogelin’s “Two Humes” interpretation, Hume’s theoretical writings exhibit inconsistent positions depending on which “perspective” things are considered from. From one point of view, Hume may be regarded as a realist; from another, not. Fogelin concludes that Hume does not have a final philosophical position on any issue; he has merely judgments depending on perspectives. Thus, we need not attribute any contradiction to Hume since his inconsistent views are held from distinct perspectives. For this perspectivalist “Two Humes” reading, see Robert Fogelin, Hume’s Skepticism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), xii, and 149–150; “Hume’s Skepticism” in
Cambridge Companion to Hume, ed. David Fate Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 113; and “Garrett on Hume’s Crisis,” Hume-Studies XXIV.1 (1998), 165–8.
8 Fogelin gestures toward this further application, without working it out in any detail. See Walking the Tightrope of Reason: The Precarious Life of a Rational Animal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), ch. “Matters of Taste,” 145–162.
9 “On the Standard of Taste,” in Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene Miller, revised edition (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985). Originally published in his Four Dissertations (London, 1757); and reprinted in Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (London, 1777). Other essays relevant to matters of taste in the Miller volume are: “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion,” 3–8; “Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences,” 111–37; “Of Tragedy,” 216–25; and “Of Refinement in the Arts,” 268–80. For Hume’s earliest discussion of taste, see Book II of Treatise of Human Nature [1739–40], 2nd ed. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).
10 “On the Change of Taste” (1766) was a counterpoint to a universalism in taste. Herder observes that there is a natural diversity in taste, based on cultural and historical differences in national character and preferences. He thinks this arises naturally and results in an irreconcilable diversity in judgment. “On the Change of Taste” is in Herder: Philosophical Writings, ed. Michael N. Forster. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002): 247–56.
11 In the debate about ancient versus modern art, we get a prime example of the sense in which Hume thinks tastes stay the same in art. Things are lost to us now, he thinks, which existed in a more complete form at an earlier time. He cites the ancient Greeks and Romans (Homer, Pindar, Cicero), as knowing things that we have lost due to degeneration in our modern tastes.
12 Chladenius tries to refute scientific skepticism by putting forward perspectivalism is his major work on the history of science [1750] (Beiser, 2011: 15).
13 See Susan Hahn (2013), “How Can a Skeptic Have a Standard of Taste?” British Journal of Aesthetics, v.53, n.4.
14 Nietzsche’s perspectivism has to be pieced together from aphorisms, fragments, and bits of texts scattered loosely across his corpus. The key texts range from the early essay, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral (außermoralischen) Sense” (1870–3), Genealogy of Morals (GM, 3: 12), Beyond Good and Evil (BGE, 4, 22), to supplementary material drawn cautiously from the later Nachlass, The Will to Power fragments (WP, 481, 516, 535, 540, 636).
15 See Poellner 1995, chs. 2–3.
16 Nietzsche passed through a phase of scientific positivism in Human All too Human (1878–80), in which he seemed to laud natural science as a paradigm of genuine knowledge. He commends certain positive methods in scientific investigations. His distinction between good and bad scientific method seems to come in by way of a naturalism, which in some respects is not hard to identify with nineteenth-century empirical sciences of his day. But elsewhere, he dismisses the idea that scientific method is disinterested and objective as delusional: “Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as science ‘without any presuppositions’” (GM, 3:24). This sentiment is echoed in Gay Science: “we see that science also rests on a faith; there simply is no science ‘without presuppositions’” (GS, 344).
17 Only a year after the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche privileges the same artistic norms in “On Truth and Lie,” where he allows for the possibility that certain rare, artistic types have access to originary, unique, unrepeatable primordial experiences (“Urerlebnisse”) through some unconscious, nonlinguistic forms of artistic understanding and expression.
18 Paul Rée, “Origin of the Moral Sensations” (1877) and David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste” (1775). See GM, Preface: 17–18. On Nietzsche and genealogical method, see Hoy 1994: 259.
19 Michael Forster writes that it is ambiguous whether Nietzsche is guilty of making explicit value judgments within an ongoing genealogy. Forster writes that the “relevance for evaluating such outlooks and practices is in a sense secondary and also somewhat ambiguous. …[Nietzsche] sees genealogy as a preparation for evaluation, rather than as already involving it.” Forster (2011), “Genealogy,” American Dialectic: 232. See also Alasdair MacIntyre, “Genealogies and Subversions,” in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1990); reprinted in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality, ed. Richard Schacht (California: California University Press, 1994).
20 Similar normative tensions arise on Foucault’s early, Nietzsche-derived, structuralist discourses on power. Foucault also claims to be bracketing claims about norms and values in his reductive, minimalist language, which approaches power and social conflict “strategically,” not normatively. He follows Nietzsche’s perspectivism in thinking there is no objective, interest-free standpoint, which is untainted by the very repressive forces of power and control that it is critiquing. Thus Foucault attempts to give an anti-humanist analysis of the mechanisms of power outside their relation to forms of ethical discourse. He replaces humanist concepts of human agency, intentions, and principles of freedom with talk of techniques, processes, neutral operations of opposed forces, and strategic alignments. Normative tensions similarly arise in his concept of power, which is inextricably bound up with notions of effective political engagement and resistance. It would seem Foucault is unable to explain the emergence of effective resistance in his anti-humanist analyses without illicitly referencing normative meanings. To distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate forms of resistance would seem to require some criterion or norm, hence, violating his official stance of neutrality. On these normative tensions arising in Foucault, as a result of Nietzsche’s influence, cf. Axel Honneth, “Foucault’s Theory of Society: A Systems-Theoretic Dissolution of the Dialectic of Enlightenment,’ Honneth 1991: 124, 131, 174. Honneth claims that one loses a meaningful notion of resistance in Foucault if one drops talk of a normatively motivated agreement. He concludes Foucault’s theory of power “does not allow for a dimension of normative agreement” (162), and excludes in principle the possibility of a normatively-guided consensus (174). Similarly, Nancy Fraser writes, “(Foucault) adopts a concept of power which permits him no condemnation of any objectionable features of modernity” (Fraser, 286, cf. 283, “Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions,” in Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory, chs. 1–3: 283, 284–5, 286). Charles Taylor makes a similar move in “Foucault on Freedom and Truth,” 178, 153, 156, 167, 177; 40. See also Habermas, “Questions Concerning the Theory of Power: Foucault Again,” 276, 286; Rorty, “Foucault and Epistemology.” In addition to Habermas, Rorty, Taylor, Fraser, Honneth, and Walzer, there are similar criticisms in David Hoy, Hubert Dreyfus, Paul Rabinow, and Hacking. As with Nietzsche’s critics, Foucault’s critics similarly dismiss Foucault’s Nietzsche-inspired thought as “ambiguous,” “self-refuting,” “contradictory,” “confused,” and “incoherent.”
21 Brian Leiter downgrades the normativity in Nietzsche’s ethical claims to the status of subjective expressions of likes or dislikes (Leiter 2002). Others attempt to solve the normative problem by introducing surrogate norms such as a quasi-aesthetical standard of life as a work of art (Alexander Nehamas); philosophical honesty (Lanier Anderson); and philological and hermeneutical commitments governing philosophical conduct (David Hoy). But surrogate values are still too derivative on the idea of full-blooded normativity. Each commitment would seem to draw on hidden norms operating from within a specific context, which in turn require an independent normative grounding and justification. To search for the basis grounding these surrogate norms would entangle Nietzsche in traditional, nonperspectivalist forms of justification.
22 Nietzsche characterizes the forerunners of a higher type of humanity as possessing a “soulful conscience,” intellectual conscience, an exaggerated sense of responsibility, integ
rity of the spirit, honesty, autonomy, and truthfulness. These higher types (“free spirits”) represent to Nietzsche a superior perspective and standard of achievement by which to reevaluate, invert, and create new values. See GM, II, 2; BGE, 272; GS, 2; A, 50; GM, I, 10; III, 9; GM, II, 2; GM, I, 5; BGE, 44, 203, 117; A, 3, 50.
23 So far the literature has been conspicuously silent about Nietzsche’s skeptical relation to logic. This is not a settled matter, by any means, and needs to be addressed. While there is a growing literature relating Nietzsche’s naturalism to skepticism in general (Paul Van Tongeren 1999), and to ancient skepticism in particular (Berry 2004: 507, 510, 513; expanded further in 2011), my analysis differs from general attempts to reconcile Nietzsche’s skepticism and naturalism: I speak to the tension arising between the two as specifically normative tensions.
24 Danto 1965: 44, 80, 230. To give a small, and by no means exhaustive, list of commentators who have taken on the self-refutation charge: Habermas in Knowledge and Human Interests (1971: 26–7), concludes that Nietzsche has no answer to this problem. See also Ken Gemes 1992: 48; Anderson 1998; Hales and Welshon 1994; and Clark 1990: 3–4. For defenses, see Schacht’s solution (1983, chs. 1–2; 1984: 82f.); Wilcox, Truth and Value in Nietzsche, chs. III–IV; and Hales and Welshon 1994. For attempts to address the paradox as it arises for practical norms and aesthetic values, see Nehamas 1985: 65–7; 1998: 147–8; and Reginster 1997: 301–3. In connection with the doctrine of eternal recurrence, see Kain 1983: 375–9; and Leiter 1995: 334–57.
25 A circular logic also infects ordinary questions such as, “Why should I be rational?” One betrays a minimal commitment to rationality by demanding to know “why.” To ask “why” is implicitly a request for a rational explanation. The circularity forces one to use the rational tools being called into question. But the circular logic doesn’t render the question “Why should I be rational?” incoherent. One could, and probably should, pose this question in connection with Kant’s rationalist ethics.
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