Nietzsche
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• Nietzsche’s nihilism was not a belief in ‘nothing’ and the resulting view that ‘anything goes’. Rather, it is a rejection that there are objective values of any kind.
• Nietzsche adopted the stance of amor fati – that you should love your own fate and embrace the doctrine of eternal recurrence.
Fact-check
1 Who, historically, was Zarathustra?
a A Greek god
b A Persian prophet
c A biblical prophet
d A Persian king
2 What is the title of Nietzsche’s book featuring Zarathustra?
a Beyond Zarathustra
b The Good and Evil of Zarathustra
c Thus Spoke Zarathustra
d Zarathustra the Superman
3 What does the term amor fati mean?
a Love your fate
b Love your faith
c Love your fat
d Fast in the morning
4 What is the literal translation of Übermensch?
a Underman
b Overman
c Other man
d After man
5 What is the correspondence theory of truth?
a Sending letters to other people reveals truths about them
b Terms we use do not correspond to reality
c Terms we use do correspond to reality
d The words we use are meaningless
6 Which of the following best describes a nihilist?
a Someone who likes to list things
b Someone who has faith in God
c Someone who wants to blow up things
d Someone who rejects contemporary values
7 Which of the following best describes an Orientalist?
a Someone who presents a romantic, distorted image of the East
b Someone who likes to travel to Asian countries
c Someone who collects antiques from the East
d Someone who was born in the East
8 In which one of the following did Nietzsche read about eternal recurrence?
a Heinrich Heine
b William Shakespeare
c Johann von Goethe
d William Wordsworth
9 In which one of the following did Nietzsche read of the Übermensch?
a Heinrich Heine
b William Shakespeare
c Johann von Goethe
d William Wordsworth
10 Which one of the following is not a Nietzschean doctrine?
a Will to power
b Eternal recurrence
c Übermensch
d Nihilism
Dig deeper
Douglas Burnham and Martin Jessighausen, Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra: An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010)
Clancy Martin and Daw-Nay Evans, Nietzsche’s ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’: A Reader’s Guide (London: Continuum, 2014)
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. by R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1974)
Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche’s Teaching: An Interpretation of ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989)
8
On truth and perspectivism
In this chapter you will learn:
• what Nietzsche means by ‘truth’
• about his use of the term ‘perspectivism’
• about the value he placed on reason and on language.
Imagine you are staring at a painting, and that this painting represents the sum of all life and experience. The painting, you might think, is finished. The paint is dry and it hangs upon the wall. For Nietzsche, however, this is not a finished painting – it is still evolving and it will continue to evolve for ever.
Most people accept ‘common sense’: that there is a world out there, that when you kick a stone there is an actual stone, that the laws and behaviour so embedded within our lives are so real that they are not questioned. (The painting is thick with paint and it is difficult to wipe aside the colours and shapes of earlier generations.)
For Nietzsche, however, our ‘common sense’ is merely an interpretation. This is Nietzsche’s perspectivism: we see the world from our own accumulated lives and experiences, but this does not make it right. The painting is not an accurate representation of something ‘out there’, but the imaginings of the human mind.
The theory of knowledge
‘Granted that this is only interpretation – and you will be eager enough to make this objection? – well, so much the better.’
Beyond Good and Evil, 22
One important field of philosophy is known as epistemology, or the theory of knowledge. A number of philosophers would argue that this field is the most important one for philosophers to enter: what can we know with any certainty? The word ‘philosopher’ is from the Greek ‘lover of wisdom’ and, while the term ‘wisdom’ seems to be rarely used these days to describe knowledge, the primary task of philosophers is the same, and it goes right back to the Greeks who asked the questions that still engage us today. How ‘wise’ can we be? That is, how much can we know and what do we mean when we say we ‘know’ something to be the case?
For example, someone may feel inclined to make a seemingly innocent remark such as ‘the sky is very blue today’. The philosophical response to this would be to raise questions concerning the validity of the statement ‘the sky is very blue today’. Is the sky very blue for everybody? When we say it is blue, what colour are we perceiving in our heads? Is the sky itself actually blue or do we only see it as blue? What is meant by very blue as opposed to just blue? How blue can blue be? Would the sky be blue if there was no one around to see it? Can we really know for sure what colour the sky actually is? And so on! In fact, the last question gets to the heart of epistemology. We are unable to step outside our own bodies. We cannot ‘see’ the world as it actually is because we see it via our senses. Can we always trust our senses?
Case study: varieties of truth
It might seem odd to talk about ‘varieties’ of truth, for surely there is just truth. But philosophers have presented a number of different understandings of truth. There is absolute truth (something is true absolutely under any circumstances); contingent truth (the truth is dependent upon place, time and so on); necessary truth (given a set of statements, something has to be true and cannot be otherwise); scientific truth; mathematical truth; relative truth and so on. However, most philosophical understanding of truth can be divided into two: the correspondence theory of truth and the coherence theory of truth.
The correspondence theory of truth
This is the most common notion of truth. This asks whether a proposition actually corresponds to something in the real world. For example, if someone says ‘that car is red’ while pointing to a red car, then that statement corresponds to a reality. If, at the time, they are actually pointing to a brown dog, then it can be shown that the statement does not correspond. Effectively, the correspondence theory states that there is a relation between statements of belief (‘that car is red’) and the actual state of affairs (there is an actual red car there). Its attraction is in its intuitive appeal, but Nietzsche sets out to attack this theory especially.
The coherence theory of truth
This evaluates the truth of statements by relating them to other proven truths within a system of thought. It might help to conceive of truth as a web of beliefs: those beliefs at the centre of the web are the most enduring, such as the belief that other people exist, that we all have to die some day, that the sun gives heat and light and so on. The further we go from the centre of the web, the less solid and permanent are our beliefs. Some beliefs that were central may drift to the edges but, so long as they fit together, the web remains intact. If a belief is so inconsistent with our other beliefs, it is so far on the outskirts of the web as to be ignored by most, or rejected altogether. In this view, there may be no claims to absolute truths, only their coherence.
Nietzsche’s perspec
tivism
‘What then in the last resort are the truths of mankind? They are the irrefutable errors of mankind.’
The Gay Science, 265
Nietzsche would not deny that we want truth; he states in The Genealogy of Morals and elsewhere that we will truth. However, if we look for Truth in an objective sense, with a capital ‘T’, it involves turning our back on this life and looking for something ‘out there’ – something that, for Nietzsche, does not exist in any comprehensible way. It is therefore a pointless exercise and also detrimental for humanity because of its deflection from this life. Whatever knowledge we have is always from a perspective and this fact is unavoidable. Even though the world we experience is shaped by our own perception and perspective, and it has no more substance than a supposed ‘other world’, it is nonetheless the one we are able to live in.
Nietzsche’s perspectivism raises more questions than it answers because Nietzsche does not really go out of his way to explain in any detail what he means by perspectivism. For example, are there groups of perspectives such as the religious perspective or the scientific perspective, or are there individual perspectives so that each person has a different perspective from everyone else?
One important point that Nietzsche makes in, for example, The Anti-Christ, is worth stressing: ‘truth and the belief that something is true: two completely diverse worlds of interest’ (AC, 23). In other words, a perspective is not the same as a belief or a set of beliefs; to say ‘I believe the sky is very blue today’ is not the same as having a perspective. Nietzsche is being much more radical than that, but if it isn’t a belief then what is it? Nietzsche, to put it bluntly, does not help us out here.
It may help to go back to one of Nietzsche’s earlier works, an essay called ‘Of Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense’, written just a year after The Birth of Tragedy but not published during his lifetime. In this work, Nietzsche looked at Greek culture through ‘the perspective of life’ rather than from any kind of absolute standpoint, and here we already have the germ of Nietzsche’s perspectivism – that it is simply impossible to see things from a ‘perspectiveless perspective’. In the essay, Nietzsche says that there is a generally accepted way of seeing things. For example, in morality, it is generally considered that lying is bad and telling the truth is good. But from the ‘perspective of life’ things can look different: weaker people often preserve themselves by lying, cheating, flattering, deceiving and so on. So from that perspective – the perspective of surviving – lying can be seen as a positive thing.
The influence of Kant can be seen here in the sense that Nietzsche acknowledged that human beings can only know things from a human perspective, but Nietzsche went much further than Kant in denying that there is a single human perspective. Rather, there are many different human perspectives depending upon time, place, group, physiology, environmental conditions, stronger and weaker types, and so on.
‘In fact all tables of values – all “you ought tos” – which we know from history or ethnological research, in any case, first require a physiological examination and interpretive explication, before even a psychological one; similarly, all of them stand in need of a critique from the side of medical science.’
On The Genealogy of Morals, Essay 1, Section 17
Common sense – the acceptance that things are how we think they are – is not only seen as necessary for life, but also useful. Nietzsche would not disagree with this. Our ‘painting’ of the world is not a random collection of colours and shapes, but a purposeful process of understanding the world and adapting to it; that is, our world view is necessary for our very survival. To this extent, common sense is true in that it allows us to function.
This understanding of truth is equated with utility: how useful is a particular interpretation of the world? By declaring that God is dead, Nietzsche is stating that the belief in God no longer serves a useful purpose. Nietzsche’s ‘nihilism’, then, is not a rejection of common sense; it is not the discarding of a painting that has taken generations to construct. To discard it would not only be foolhardy but impractical. Rather, Nietzsche’s nihilism is a rejection of common sense being really true in any objective sense – that it is perfect, immutable and complete.
Truth, therefore, is an evolving process. This may suggest a pragmatic theory of truth in his rejection of the belief in God, and it is understandable that a number of scholars have suggested this, but Nietzsche remains ambiguous. While he generally accepts that what is true has been throughout history equated with what is stable, reliable and workable, this is not to say that Nietzsche himself therefore accepts these things as true in a pragmatic sense, especially as his interest in health requires himself at least to be unpragmatic and prefer falsehoods. At the same time, it could be argued that Nietzsche is being pragmatic here in advocating health as life-enhancing.
Also, at times, Nietzsche can be quite dismissive of illusions because they do not represent what is really true. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche speculated that there might indeed be a metaphysical world, but at the very best this is just a bare possibility and so it would be much too inadequate to look to it for salvation.
Here, however, there seems an inconsistency in Nietzsche’s thought: is there a real world or isn’t there? Truth, for Nietzsche, seems to be equated with workable fictions, yet he also seems to want to say what the world is actually like. Here he becomes muddled, on the one hand declaring that the world is a matter of perspective, while on the other not entirely denying the possibility that we can have endurable facts. As an example, it is a fact that humans need oxygen to breathe. Are we to say that this is a matter merely of perspective, a truth that we need to survive but that we cannot say that there really is oxygen, and we really need it? Are we then presented with a hierarchy of knowledge, in which some things are more true than others? Even if Nietzsche were to say, as he seems to, that our understanding of the world all boils down to aspects of the will to power, he would run the danger here of introducing his own metaphysics: a force that prevails across the universe.
Spotlight
It is difficult to appreciate Nietzsche’s epistemology without having some background understanding of the views of previous philosophers. In particular, the reader would gain much by having some knowledge of, especially, Hume’s empiricism and Kant’s response to this.
Reason and the senses
Not only was Nietzsche frequently labelled a nihilist but he was also called an anti-rationalist. Nietzsche, however, was not against reason. What he was against was anything that is not useful, anything that makes life impossible. His criticism was not against reason, but against rationalist philosophers such as Plato. Plato emphasized reason at the expense of the senses and this world. His rationalism took him into another realm, a belief in rational truth. As a result, Plato considered this world an illusion and a distraction from rational meditation.
The senses can give us grounds for belief, but never true knowledge. Nietzsche held that reason couldn’t be accepted at the expense or neglect of the senses. Even in his later work The Twilight of the Idols (1889), Nietzsche continues to hold that the senses allow us to sharpen our beliefs and teach us to think. Nietzsche here is not being irrational in an emotive, animal sense. Although he also believed that the passions are important and that they can teach us, he saw the senses as an educative tool that enables us to observe the world and fine-tune our perspective of it.
Spotlight
Nietzsche cannot be so easily ‘pigeonholed’ when it comes to ascribing his views on knowledge. Sometimes he seems to come close to Hume’s empiricism, while at other times he resembles Kant. Perhaps the best approach is to see his perspectivism as uniquely Nietzschean.
The importance of language
Nietzsche was one of the first philosophers to appreciate the importance of language in the construction of our beliefs. This needs to be borne in mind when Nietzsche himself uses such words as ‘soul’, ‘truth’ and so on.
&
nbsp; The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) famously stated that, ‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.’ If we consider the history of thought, we become aware that this history is almost entirely full of a belief in gods, a God, an afterlife and the eternal soul. It is only very recently, representing a small fraction of the timeline of human history, that people have begun to question these concepts. Returning to our painting once more: if every brushstroke represents a century in the history of humankind, the questioning of metaphysical concepts amounts to only one such brushstroke, hidden among thousands of others. If our world view is painted in such a way, Nietzsche asserted that so, also, is our language. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche famously declared that we would not get rid of God until we get rid of grammar. The British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) later echoed this view: he believed that everyday language embodies the metaphysics of the Stone Age. If we are to establish a better philosophy, then we must work out a new language.
Spotlight
In 1929 Wittgenstein arrived at Cambridge to take up a post as lecturer and fellow. By this time, he was already a famous philosopher. However, he did not have a Ph.D. and so could not be a real don. He agreed to submit his great work Tractatus as his Ph.D. thesis, which was judged by the two philosophical giants Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore. When they asked him questions about it, Wittgenstein responded with, ‘Don’t worry. I know you’ll never understand it.’ Moore wrote in the examiner’s report: ‘I myself consider that this is a work of genius; but, even if I am completely mistaken and it is nothing of the sort, it is well above the standard required for the Ph.D. degree.’