The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (91 page)

I argued earlier that Nietzsche’s own perspectivism, though it is a repudiation of the notion of absolute truth, is not a repudiation of the notion of truth
tout court
. It is worth noting that neither this objection to perspectivism nor my rebuttal of it stands in any simple relation to that issue. In a way, a perspectivist who countenances perspectival truth, and who
reckons perspectivism itself to be a perspectival truth, is especially vulnerable to the objection, if only because the first horn of the dilemma is then especially sharp. That said, a perspectivist who countenances perspectival truth can also consolidate my rebuttal of the objection by emphasizing the gap between making
different
sense of things, from different points of view, and making
opposed
sense of things, from different points of view. In the former case, such a perspectivist may say, all the sense-making concerned can be true; in the latter case, at most some of it can.
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However that may be, we have seen nothing in this section to prevent Nietzsche from regarding perspectivism itself as a truth; and a deeply important truth at that, a truth which signals one of the most significant limitations of metaphysics.
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4. Prospects for Metaphysics II: Grammar

The second aspect of Nietzsche’s attitude to metaphysics on which I wish to focus is his continual quarrel with attempts by metaphysicians, if only sometimes subliminal attempts, to infer the nature of what we make sense of from the grammar of how we make sense of it. (Here I am using ‘grammar’ in a very broad sense.) Nietzsche thinks that the grammar of our sense-making often tempts us into making false sense of things. But even when that is not so – even when the grammar of our sense-making is conducive to our making true sense of things – Nietzsche’s work serves as a warning against our supposing that it reveals anything beyond itself. (The comparisons with Wittgenstein, to whom we shall return, are striking.
³⁵
) This is not to say that the grammar of our sense-making
cannot
reveal anything beyond itself. It can. It may well reveal something about the points of view that our sense-making is from for instance. But there can be no general presumption that it will do even that.

We have witnessed many examples in this enquiry of the sort of thing that Nietzsche is opposing. One of the first and most glaring was Descartes’ attempt to deduce characteristics of God, indeed God’s very existence, from his own idea of God (
Ch. 1
, §§3 and 5). But even more telling, perhaps, was what Nietzsche would see as an equally unwarranted attempt on Descartes’
part to deduce characteristics of himself, specifically his status as an immaterial thinking substance, from the workings of the first-person singular.
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Here are two relevant quotations:
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We … ought to get free from the seduction of words! … [The] philosopher must say to himself: when I analyse the event expressed in the sentence ‘I think’, I acquire a series of rash assertions which are difficult, perhaps impossible, to prove – for example, … that it has to be something at all which thinks, … that an ‘I’ exists. (
Beyond Good and Evil
, §16, emphasis in original)

‘There is thinking: therefore there is something that thinks’: this is the upshot of all Descartes’ argumentation. But that means positing as ‘true
a priori
’ our belief in the concept of substance – that when there is thought there has to be something ‘that thinks’ is simply a formulation of our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed….

The concept of substance is a consequence of the concept of the subject: not the reverse! (
Will
, §§484 and 485)

As before, however, it is Kant who is the main villain of the piece. Nietzsche thinks that Kant too was guilty of postulating structures in reality corresponding to grammatical structures in our sense-making.
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Admittedly, Kant was self-conscious enough to acknowledge the latter structures as structures determined by our transcendental point of view – our spectacles – and, thereby, to acknowledge the former structures as structures in empirical reality only, not the reality of things in themselves. But for Nietzsche, that merely compounded the offence. For it introduced the unacceptable notion of a reality beyond all that we can ever experience. (See the next section.) Relatedly, Kant took our transcendental point of view to impose a non-negotiable framework on all our empirical investigations, and to be not itself open to empirical investigation. That made it very different from the kind of thing that Nietzsche wants to recognize as a point of view, which relates to the empirically investigable needs, interests,
et cetera
that accrue from flesh and blood.
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It is in these terms that Nietzsche castigates the whole concept
of the
a priori
on which Kant erected his philosophical edifice, including his belief in the synthetic
a priori
:
⁴⁰

The most strongly believed
a priori
‘truths’ are for me –
provisional assumptions
; e.g., the law of causality,
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a very well acquired habit of belief, so much a part of us that not to believe in it would destroy the race. But are they for that reason truths? What a conclusion! As if the preservation of man were a proof of truth! (
Will
, §497)

In passages that adumbrate the later Wittgenstein’s repudiation of a ‘realist’ model of necessary truth (
Ch. 10
, §§3 and 5), Nietzsche extends this critique to the logical laws that we accept, and warns against viewing these as symptomatic of anything other than our own rules and conventions designed for our own convenience and to meet our own needs. (Here Frege could have served as a prime target.) Thus:
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In the formation of reason, logic, the categories, it was
need
that was authoritative: the need, not to ‘know,’ but to subsume, to schematize, for the purpose of intelligibility and calculation….

… If … the law of contradiction is the most certain of all principles, … then one should consider all the more rigorously what
presuppositions
already lie at the bottom of it. Either it asserts something about actuality, about being, as if one already knew this from another source; that is, as if opposite attributes
could
not be ascribed to it. Or the proposition means: opposite attributes
should
not be ascribed to it. In that case, logic would be an imperative….

… [But the former] is certainly not the case. (
Will
, §§515 and 516, emphasis in original)

The world seems logical to us because we have made it logical. (
Will
, §521)

Logicians … posit
their
limitations as the limitations of things. (
Will
, §535, emphasis in original)
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The dangers that we have seen Nietzsche highlight in this section can be partially overcome by our simply cultivating and adopting as many different points of view as possible, which is something that Nietzsche continually urges us to do.
⁴⁴
For this can expose us to different grammars and thereby lessen the risk of our taking any one to be an image of reality. But the strategy has its limitations. Some of our points of view are ineluctably ours. ‘The human intellect,’ Nietzsche writes, ‘cannot avoid seeing itself in its perspectives, and
only
in these. We cannot look round our own
corner: it is a hopeless curiosity that wants to know what other kinds of intellects and perspectives there
might
be’ (
Gay Science
, §374, emphasis in original).

5. Prospects for Metaphysics III: Transcendence

The third and final aspect of Nietzsche’s attitude to metaphysics that I shall discuss, though independent of the other two, is a very natural accompaniment to them. Nietzsche repudiates the idea of that which is in any remotely ambitious sense transcendent: that which transcends experience; that which transcends knowledge; that which transcends
life
. In particular, though he is not a naturalist in Quine’s sense, he is a naturalist in the more modest sense that he repudiates the idea of that which transcends the world of which the natural sciences treat.
⁴⁵
So he denies that we have any prospect, in practising metaphysics, of making sense of any such thing. (His answer to the Transcendence Question which I posed in §6 of the Introduction is every bit as clear as his answer to the Creativity Question.)

Part of Nietzsche’s reason for taking this anti-transcendent stance is an empiricism of sorts (see e.g.
Beyond Good and Evil
, §134, and
Twilight
, IV.3 and V.4–5) albeit an empiricism which, insofar as it is epistemic rather than semantic, precludes only our access to the transcendent, not the very idea of it (see e.g.
Human
, I.9;
Daybreak
, §117; and
Will
, §555). But the views discussed in the previous section are at work here too. Nietzsche thinks that
one significant impetus for the belief in a transcendent world is that, when we try to read off features of reality from features of our sense-making, we often find, as both Kant and Frege notably found, that we cannot do so without breaking reality apart into a transcendent world and an empirical world, each equipped in its own way to bear some of these features.
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This explains Nietzsche’s memorable claim that ‘we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar’ (
Twilight
, IV.5; cf. ibid., VII.3).

Another significant impetus for the belief in a transcendent world is of course the ascetic ideal. The urge to pursue what is higher fosters the belief that there is something higher to pursue. The transcendent is what has played this role. It is what has been elevated when life has been abased.
⁴⁷

The transcendent is what ‘has’ played this role; again, the transcendent is what has ‘played this role’. The phraseology here is doubly significant. It indicates an extremely important feature of Nietzsche’s rejection of the transcendent. I have in mind its historicism. To explain what I mean by this I need to return to Nietzsche’s view that all sense-making is perspectival. I claimed above that this is independent of his rejection of the transcendent. And there is a sense, I believe, in which the former trumps the latter. In particular, I think there is provision in Nietzsche for saying the following: that when people in the past made sense of things in terms of the transcendent, and specifically in terms of God (understood as transcendent), the sense that they made of things embodied a truth, albeit a truth that was surrounded by trappings of falsehood and that is now irretrievably lost.
⁴⁸

It is a delicate matter how exactly to put this in terms of God’s existence. It would be crass, for example, to say that God used to exist but no longer does, or that God existed from their point of view but does not exist from ours. Nietzsche would see any such prevarication as itself a betrayal of our point of view. It is nevertheless significant, and significant for more than rhetorical reasons, that he does not just deny God’s existence. He says that
God is dead
, and, at least through the mouth of a ‘madman’ whom he depicts, that
we have killed Him
(
Gay Science
, §§108, 125, and 343; cf.
Will
, §331). Really, what Nietzsche is doing is rejecting not a hypothesis but a concept: a
way
of making sense of things.
⁴⁹
He is calling time on something with a history, something which he thinks has run its course. This may seem to be belied by the fact that he himself makes use of the concept to achieve his
end. But – rhetorical considerations once again aside – we can compare this with what Carnap would have seen as the use of the material mode of speech to reject a linguistic framework (
Ch. 11
, §5). (Not that this comparison captures
all
that Nietzsche is up to, of course. In particular it fails to do justice to an idea which Bernard Williams marvellously puts as follows: ‘Nietzsche’s saying, God is dead, can be taken to mean that we should now treat God as a dead person: we should allocate his legacies and try to write an honest biography of him’ (Williams (
2006o
), p. 33).) Be all that as it may, the crucial point is that Nietzsche’s brand of atheism is not just a piece of abstract metaphysics. It is a break, in its time but not of its time,
⁵⁰
with a major cultural force in Western civilization that is itself more than just a piece of abstract metaphysics.
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6. Nietzsche’s Vision. Truth Again

We have now witnessed some of the fundamental restrictions to which Nietzsche thinks the most general attempt to make sense of things is subject. But these still leave the attempt with considerable scope. And, as I claimed in §2, it is an attempt in which Nietzsche himself is engaged. My aim in this section is to sketch some of the main features of his own metaphysical vision.
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