The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (90 page)

… The faith in science … must have originated
in spite of
the fact that the disutility and dangerousness of ‘the will to truth,’ of ‘truth at any price’ is proved to it constantly….

Consequently, ‘will to truth’ does
not
mean ‘I will not allow myself to be deceived’ but – there is no alternative – ‘I will not deceive, not even myself’;
and with that we stand on moral ground
….

Thus the question ‘Why science?’ leads back to the moral problem:
Why have morality at all
when life, nature, and history are ‘not moral’? No doubt, those who are truthful in that audacious and ultimate sense that is presupposed by the faith in science
thus affirm another world
than the world of life, nature, and history…. But you will have gathered what I am driving at, namely, that it is still a
metaphysical faith
upon which our faith in science rests – that even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which is also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine. (
Gay Science
, §344, emphasis in original)

Three features of this quotation are especially important for our purposes. First, notice that ‘metaphysical’ is once again being used more or less pejoratively. It is being used to signal what Kant would have counted as bad metaphysics, the attempt to make ‘thick’ sense of the transcendent (
Ch. 5
, §§2 and 6). But not only that. It is being used to signal a commitment of
any
kind to the transcendent. We ‘anti-metaphysicians’, who are supposed to have advanced (even) beyond Kant in our repudiation of the transcendent (much like the logical positivists; see further §5 below), are being invited to admit that there is still a lingering commitment to the transcendent in our own veneration of scientific sense-making and scientific truth.

Second, Nietzsche’s questioning of scientific sense-making and his reflection on what kind of sense it involves have turned into a questioning of sense-making more generally and a reflection on what kind of sense
it
involves. The issue has become what manner of conviction and what manner of principle make us pursue the truth rather than accede to falsehoods that may very well be ‘less harmful, less dangerous, less calamitous’ (ibid.). In fact it has become an issue about
morality
. This reflects the point with which we began, that Nietzsche’s project casts sense, in all its guises, as a focal point of philosophical enquiry.

The third important feature of the quotation brings us back to the third response mooted above to the suggestion that Nietzsche’s efforts to take a critical step back from our sense-making are self-stultifying. What Nietzsche is really concerned to take a step back from, as the quotation helps to illustrate, is
the will to truth
: the valuing, for its own sake, above all else, of a truth that is rigorously scientific, utterly detached, and accessible only from on high. But it takes far less than
that
to sustain Nietzsche’s critical reflection. Moreover, the less that it takes can still be classified, for all that has been said so far, as ‘a desire for truth’. (This adumbrates ideas that we shall explore in the next section and again in §6.)

A fortiori
the less that it takes can still be classified as ‘an attempt to make sense of things’. Whatever self-stultification may or may not be involved in this critical reflection, there is absolutely nothing in it to impugn any claim that Nietzsche himself might make to be trying to make sense of things; nor, it seems to me, any claim that he might make to be trying to make maximally general sense of things. For only on some conceptions of sense-making need sense-making involve arriving at beliefs at all,
¹⁷
let alone beliefs that enjoy truth of such a demanding kind. I think Nietzsche is indeed trying to make maximally general sense of things. That is, I think Nietzsche is engaged in metaphysics, on my definition of metaphysics. And I think he would, could, and should feel quite comfortable about acknowledging this.
¹⁸
But what views would, could, or should he adopt concerning the
prospects
for any such endeavour, the prospects for metaphysics, on my definition of metaphysics?

3. Prospects for Metaphysics I: Perspectivism

First, Nietzsche would deny that metaphysics can lead us to absolute truth, understood as that at which the will to truth is ultimately targeted. Nietzsche is a perspectivist. He denies the possibility of any disengaged, disinterested sense-making either in metaphysics or, come to that, anywhere else (including physics: see
Will
, §636). For Nietzsche, all sense-making is sense-making
from some point of view
, that is to say in relation to some constellation of needs, interests, sensibilities, concerns, values, and the like. This is because all sense-making involves some system of classification and organization, whereby it draws attention to some things and away from others, structuring the world into foreground and background; and it is only in relation to some constellation of needs
et cetera
that any such structuring has a point or is even possible.
¹⁹

Moreover, all sense-making, in Nietzsche’s view, really is sense-
making
. Sense is created, not discovered. (Nietzsche has a very clear answer to the Creativity Question which I posed in §6 of the Introduction.) Sense-making is not a recognition of something that is there anyway. The world is a dramatic text, and making sense of it is part of acting out a particular life, adopting a particular style, telling a particular story: the story that will become the narrator’s autobiography.
²⁰
Nor, therefore, is the creation limited to the sense that is made of things. It extends to the things of which the sense is made, which have their place in the story,
²¹
and to the agent making the sense, whose story it is. All sense-making is from a point of view that is itself, partly, a creature of that very sense-making. Sense-making creates the conditions for its own possibility. Its province is deep, very deep, in the mire of appearances – though if Nietzsche is right, the mire of appearances should no longer be thought of either as a mire or indeed as consisting of
appearances, in any sense that suggests a contrast with some independently accessible reality.
²²

Here are two pertinent quotations:
²³

Henceforth, my dear philosophers, let us be on our guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a ‘pure, will-less, painless, timeless, knowing subject’; let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as ‘pure reason,’ … ‘knowledge in itself’: these always demand that we should think of an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing
something
, are supposed to be lacking…. There is
only
a perspectival seeing,
only
a perspectival ‘knowing’. (
Genealogy
, III.12, emphasis in original)
²⁴

Against positivism … – ‘There are only
facts
’ – I would say: No, facts are precisely what there are not, only interpretations….

‘Everything is subjective,’ you say; but even this is interpretation. The ‘subject’ is not something given, it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is. – Finally, is it necessary to posit an interpreter behind the interpretation? Even this is invention….

It is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their For and Against. (
Will
, §481, emphasis in original; cf. ibid., §556)
²⁵

Nietzsche denies the possibility of absolute truth then. But does he deny the possibility of truth altogether? Or is he prepared to countenance ‘perspectival’ truth? (This relates back to the question of whether a ‘desire for truth’ can survive his onslaught against the will to truth.)
²⁶

There are several passages which suggest the former. This, for example:

The world with which we are concerned is false …; it is ‘in flux’ … as a falsehood always changing but never getting near the truth: for – there is no ‘truth’. (
Will
, §616; cf. ibid., §§480, 540, 567, and 625)

But we need to see past the rhetoric. The ‘truth’ that he abjures in such passages, as his own use of scare quotes helps to signal, is absolute truth, not truth as such. In the revealing preface to
Beyond Good and Evil
he casts those who are committed to absolute truth, in their pursuit of the ascetic
ideal, as
violators
, ‘standing truth on her head’ (p. 14).
²⁷
Nietzsche denies the possibility of making disengaged, disinterested sense of things. But he does not deny the possibility of making true sense of things. Nor does he deny the desirability of making true sense of things. Nor indeed does he deny the desirability of expending the very great effort required to do so. We should not find it surprising that Nietzsche is capable of writing this:

Greatness of soul is needed for [truth], the service of truth is the hardest service. – For what does it mean to be
honest
in intellectual things? That one is stern towards one’s heart, that one despises ‘fine feelings’, that one makes every Yes and No a question of conscience! (
Anti-Christ
, §50, emphasis in original; cf.
Zarathustra
, p. 213,
Ecce Homo
, Pref., §3, and
Will
, §1041)

Nietzsche’s perspectivism is emphatically not a license to count all attempts at sense-making as equally worthy, then. Attempts at sense-making may not be answerable to an independently accessible reality. But they are answerable to something. In a way, like all artistic endeavours, they are answerable to themselves. Furthermore, they are always vulnerable to what might be called, in Quine’s famous phrase, ‘recalcitrant experience’ (Quine (
1961b
), p. 44). Sense-making is an exercise in negotiating the world’s contingencies, in an effort to live with them. That is not the same as unbridled wishful thinking. There is something to be negotiated. This is why, despite Nietzsche’s denial that there are any facts, he still celebrates what he calls the Greeks’ ‘sense for facts’, as well as their ‘integrity for knowledge’, something which he thinks we have to ‘[win] back for ourselves today with an unspeakable amount of self-constraint’ (
Anti-Christ
, §59, emphasis removed).
²⁸
It is also why he has no reservations about championing the ‘sacrifice [of] all desirability to truth,
every
truth, even plain, harsh, ugly, repellent, unchristian, immoral truth’ (
Genealogy
, I.1, emphasis in original; cf.
Will
, §172). For, as he immediately goes on to insist, ‘such truths do exist’ (ibid.).
²⁹
I shall have more to say about Nietzsche’s repudiation of absolute truth and his championing of perspectival truth in §6.

Let us now consider a very common and natural objection to perspectivism, which runs as follows. Perspectivism is itself the result of sense-making. Either this sense-making is perspectival or it is not. If it is not, then
perspectivism stands refuted. For perspectivism is the view that
all
sense-making is perspectival. If, on the other hand, the sense-making in question
is
perspectival, then it is possible to deny perspectivism by making sense of things from some opposed point of view. So we have no good reason to accept it.
³⁰

The objection can be rebutted.
³¹
The second horn of the dilemma contains several confusions. If the sense-making is perspectival, then it is certainly possible to make sense of things from some opposed point of view. But that is not to say that it is possible to deny perspectivism. It may be that what makes a given point of view an ‘opposed’ point of view is that the concepts needed even to address the question are not available from there, or that they are available from there but are not applicable with the same effect (as the concepts of left and right are not applicable with the same effect from opposite ends of a tennis court). Making sense of things from an opposed point of view is not the same as making opposed sense of things. And failing to accept perspectivism is not the same as denying it.
³²
But still, the objector may say, if it is possible to make sense of things from an opposed point of view, and thereby even to fail to accept perspectivism, does it not still follow that we have no good reason to accept it? It does not. (It would not even follow if what were at stake were the denial of perspectivism.) We may have good reason to accept perspectivism insofar as we have good reason to acknowledge the relevant point of view – the point of view from which it holds – as our own, something over which we may have no more control, at least while we are thinking about these issues, than we have over our position in time, our temporal point of view. (To say that it is possible to make sense of things from an opposed point of view is not to say that
we
can make sense of things from an opposed point of view.)