Note: This is a paper I wrote for university in early 2011. The prompt was to take one concept from Friedrich Nietzsche's Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn (On Truth and Lies in a Non-(Extra-)moral Sense), and to deconstruct it. I figured that using a genealogical deconstruction was appropriate, as this was how I imagined Nietzsche would have done it himself. The concept I picked was his "rational man," and throughout the essay, I map the genealogical change in this concept, and relate each step to Nietzsche's own (mature) epistemology.
Yes, I realize that this paper is somewhat simplistic, and has its problems. This was written over a year and a half ago, and it would probably look very different if I were to write it today. Plenty of sections need rewording or even rehauling. This is also only the second draft, as I could not find a final draft. I've made a few revisions to this draft that would have been just embarrassing to post. Perhaps at some point I'll write a post critiquing this paper, and maybe even outlining a new genealogical deconstruction.
Many
words have more than one meaning, and these meanings can change over
time. One such word is “rational” or, equivalently, “reason.”
Nietzsche uses this word to characterize one possible archetype of
person, as opposed to the “intuitive man.” In order to
understand what Nietzsche means when he puts forward this dichotomy,
an understanding of precisely what the “rational man” is, as
opposed to the “intuitive man,” is necessary.
Why does
this matter? Who cares what Nietzsche thought of the concept? Well,
we often take advice, at least to some extent, from other people on
how to live our lives. Nietzsche is another person, one who arguably
anticipated Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis (Sorgner, Metaphysics...
84-85), and so, it could be argued, has some valuable
contributions to make on the subject. Nietzsche counterposed his
“rational man” psychological state to an “intuitive man” one,
which Nietzsche preferred. So, if we are to take his advice, it is
advisable to know where precisely the distinction lies.
The best
method, or at least the best start of a method, to this end is to
have an idea of what the word has meant throughout history.
Nietzsche himself was well aware of the ever-shifting nature of
language (Nietzsche, On Truth...
2). The shift in meaning of this particular word has been not
in its denotation, but in its connotation. While the word itself has
Latin origins (“rational, n.1”), the concept itself can be traced
to ancient Greece (in both the sense of the word ratio
and the sense of the word reason,
but I will only look at the second case here), when Socrates
claimed that the “unexamined life is not worth living,” and
proposed a method of dialogue in which ethical propositions were
examined and their basic assumptions scrutinized.
Some may
object to this examination of the philosophical usage of the term,
rather than its popular usage. I, however, think that the
philosophical usage is quite appropriate. The main reason for this
is that Nietzsche, obviously, was a philosopher, and one very
literate in his predecessors. Nietzsche often used terms that seem
downright bizarre in the context, because he was using the
traditional philosophical definitions of his time (which also differs
from the definitions of today, but this is irrelevant to this paper).
One such case is Nietzsche's rejection of “the Truth”; however,
understood in its philosophical sense, Nietzsche was exclusively
using this term to refer to the traditional correspondence version of
truth, which many had already recognized by Nietzsche's time as
outdated (Sorgner, Metaphysics...
80).
Plato,
speaking through his character of Socrates, decided to apply this
method to other areas as well, such as ontology (the study of being),
and that one could thereby gain knowledge of the world as it is, as
per his “Allegory of the Cave,”
in which he compares the rational mind to a person who can escape
from a cave to perceive the source of shadows which existed inside
that cave. Plato was also among the first to refer to “philosophy”
as the love of wisdom.
Nietzsche
would have agreed wholeheartedly with the idea of ethics as the
foundation of philosophy, although not, as we shall see below, the
idea that ethics can be based on this pure form of examination,
independently of values. However, Plato's idea of an outside of the
cave in his Allegory was rejected by Nietzsche. This, for him, would
be as much “an absurdity and a nonsense” as “an eye turned in
no particular direction” (quot. Sorgner, Metaphysics...).
Aristotle was the next to change the standards of rationality, by
requiring that things be based on experience, and came up with his
own physical theory on this basis. He also repudiated the
application of the Socratic method to ethics, and claimed that ethics
was simply the application of reason to achieve happiness. Finally,
Aristotle came up with the first formal logical syntax, which we now
call syllogistic or classical logic.
Nietzsche
agreed that ethics were ultimately based on a person's values, though
not on happiness (“Man does not strive for pleasure; only the
Englishman does” being the most well-known quote on the subject).
For Nietzsche, ethics were based simply on the philosopher's
prejudices (Sorgner, Metaphysics...
27-28), whatever they may be, and the philosopher devised a
metaphysical system in an attempt to justify ad-hoc
these ethics, often in the form of positing a God who holds the same
position. Reason, then, for Nietzsche, does not apply to ethics, in
the same fashion as Aristotle.
After
the fall of Ancient Greece to the Roman Empire, there were no major
revisions to the connotations of the word until the late
Rennaissance, when René
Descartes began the era of modern thought by asking what he could
know with absolute certainty. He concluded that, while he may be
dreaming, or deceived by a malicious demon, one thing that he could
be certain of was his own existence. If he were deceived thusly, he
would still have to exist to be deceived. Thus, Descartes returned
to the Socratic method of examining basic assumptions, but applied
this to all knowledge, rather than simply ethics or ontology.
Descartes effectively founded a school of philosophical thought
called Rationalism, which was prevalent during the Age of
Enlightenment. Its main exponents were Benedict de Spinoza and
Gottfried Leibniz; its tenet was that all thinking beings, humans
included, began with innate knowledge, which they know intuitively.
These ideas were an inherent property of reason and of humans, just
as four sides is an inherent property of a quadrilateral. Using this
knowledge, such as the Law of Non-Contradiction (a proposition and
its negation cannot simultaneously be true) and the Principle of
Sufficient Reason (everything that happens had a reason why it
happened one way rather than another), they could build an entire
system of knowledge that transcended experience, and perceived the
world as it truly was, thus returning to the Platonist ideal of
knowledge through “pure reason,” independent of experience
(Schopenhauer 7).
Nietzsche,
as is well-known, rejected the ideas of the rationalists, and of pure
reason: “There are many kinds of eyes...consequently there are
many kinds of 'truths', and consequently there is no
truth...Henceforth, my dear philosophers...let us guard against such
contradictory concepts as 'pure reason'” (quot. Sorgner,
Metaphysics... 88).
Nietzsche was also opposed to many other conclusions of the
Continental rationalists; particularly, the immaterial, unified soul.
This was the rationalists' pet solution to the mind-body problem
(the problem of the relation of the mind to the brain); the
possession of an immaterial logos
by humans, which separated them categorically from the rest of nature
(Sorgner, Beyond Humanism...
14).
Nietzsche
rejected this immaterial soul, and posited that the human (and überhuman) is “entirely body” (Nietzsche, Thus Spoke...
32), rather than a combination of body and soul. Given the context,
Nietzsche may be accused (and has been) of denying reason itself by
denying the soul. However, this is contradicted by the fact that
according to Nietzsche himself, reason is to be highly valued
(Sorgner, Beyond...
14). The utility of reason for Nietzsche was not in any sort of
inherent property of the concept, as it was for the Rationalists, but
in its utility for our survival and attainment of power, as it helps
us map out the world and “impose Being on Becoming” which for
Nietzsche is the highest form of power (Sorgner, Metaphysics...
56).
Directly
opposed to this school was the “Empiricist” school, the main
proponents of which were the British philosophers John Locke, George
Berkeley, and David Hume. This school held, contra the Rationalists,
that all knowledge
comes to us through experience, rejecting the concept of “innate
ideas.” Locke started the trend by stating that we only had
knowledge of our “ideas,” which in the Empiricist tradition meant
our thoughts and perceptions. Berkeley took this further by claiming
that we have no empirical evidence of the material world, and thus it
does not exist. Hume went even further than Berkeley by claiming
that not only the material world was without empirical support, but
so were inductive reasoning, causality, and even the self as unified
subject. It was this extreme scepticism that aroused another
philosopher, Immanuel Kant, from “dogmatic slumbers.”
As
was hinted earlier, Nietzsche disputed the unified subject which
before the empiricists had been so taken for granted. For Hume, the
subject was a “bundle of perceptions” that were loosely held
together by their similarities, and that this creates the illusion of
unity (Schopenhauer xii). As it was for Hume, so it was for
Nietzsche. Nietzsche broke up a person's psyche into their
conscious, rational side and their unconscious, emotional side, thus
anticipating Freud's famous threefold division of the subject
(Sorgner, Metaphysics
85). However, the most important similarity with the empiricists was
their emphasis on “this world” as opposed to some other, and thus
their (barring Hume) emphasis on science as the most reliable method
of gaining knowledge: “Whereas the man of action binds his life to
reason...the scientific investigator builds his hut right next to the
tower of science” (Nietzsche, On Truth...
7). Reason, then, was to be derived from experience.
Kant was the first major philosopher to attempt a reconciliation
between the two schools of rationalism and empiricism. His own
school of epistemology, called “Transcendental Idealism,”
reasoned thus: neither experience nor reason alone can provide
knowledge; while certain “innate ideas,” such as the rules of
logic, may exist, they cannot be applied outside of experience
without leading to “dialectical antinomies.” Kant thus justified
causality: not as an outer feature of the world, but as an innate
idea, which people use to map out the world and make it intelligible.
We cannot, however, transcend this map to gain knowledge of the
“thing in itself” by pure reason. Kant therefore seems to return
to the Aristotelian view of epistemology, by synthesizing reason and
experience (Schopenhauer 13).
Nietzsche
concurs significantly with this. The word “perspectivism” is
often used to describe Nietzsche's epistemological stance, that truth
is inseparable from the perspective or language used to describe the
world. As noted earlier, Nietzsche compared a perspective to an eye
turned in a specific direction, and used this analogy as a way of
dismissing the idea of pure reason. This resonates significantly
with Kant's idea that we cannot gain knowledge of the thing in
itself, although Nietzsche criticized Kant for positing such a thing
in the first place. Even so, Nietzsche regarded Kant as an important
step in the evolution of perspectivism in his “History of an Error”
(quot. Sorgner, Metaphysics...
90).
After Kant came the Romantic period, which was varied in its
epistemology. On the one hand, we have philosophers such as Johann
Fichte and Georg Hegel, who took Kant's “dialectical antinomies”
not as a sign of the failure of pure reason, but as the path that
reason must take; to gain knowledge of the thing in itself, we must
only apply a new form of logic, often called “dialectical logic.”
Others, such as Arthur Schopenhauer, kept true to the necessity of
experience, and claimed that inner experience, of one's own mind, was
the key to the thing-in-itself (Schopenhauer xiii).
Nietzsche was, of course, heavily influenced by Schopenhauer, but he
also came to reject many of Schopenhauer's views. Schopenhauer's
dictum that “The world is my idea” (Schopenhauer 1), in other
words, the only source of knowledge about the world lies in our
representation of it, anticipated Nietzsche's perspectivism by nearly
half a century. Nietzsche spoke of his “sense for hard facts, his
good will for clarity and reason” (quot. David Berman, Schopenhauer
xxxvi). However, Nietzsche also heavily criticized what he referred
to as Schopenhauer's “mystical embarrassments” (Sorgner,
Metaphysics... 102);
most notably, the idea that one can gain knowledge of the thing in
itself, even through inner experience.
This
is the context in which Nietzsche was writing. As we have seen,
there are significant similarities and significant breaks with many
traditional philosophies. Perhaps the most significant break,
however, was not mentioned. All these versions of reason rely on a
correspondence theory of truth; that is, a definition of the word
“truth” to mean that an idea corresponds with reality.
Nietzsche, however, rejects this, claiming that there is no way to
actually know what corresponds with reality, and that truth is
inseparable from a person's perspective on the world and from the
language he uses to describe it (Sorgner, Metaphysics...
80). So, in reality, Nietzsche's epistemology cannot be reduced to
any of its antecedents.
Saying that, can we assess the similarities? Well, Nietzsche's
perspectivism is much closer to Kant than to anyone else mentioned.
Although Kant, unnecessarily in Nietzsche's opinion, posited a “true
world” that existed, but was unknowable, he still noted that it was
indeed unknowable. Indeed, without Kant, the philosophies of
Schopenhauer, and thus of Nietzsche, would have been nearly
unthinkable (Schopenhauer 16). So, it seems that Nietzsche's use of
the word “rational”, while different in many ways, most
represents the acceptance of reason as useful, for mapping out the
structure of the world, but not for gaining knowledge of any sort of
true world. This is what we should keep in mind when we assess
Nietzsche's opposition of the rational man to the intuitive one
Works Cited
Nietzsche,
Friedrich. On Truth and Lies in a
Nonmoral Sense.
1873. eBook.
Nietzsche,
Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A
Book for All and None.
New York, NY: Barnes & Noble Books, 2005. Print.
Schopenhauer,
Arthur. The World as Will and Idea.
London, UK: Orion Publishing, 1995. Print.
Sorgner,
Stefan. "Beyond Humanism: Reflections on Trans- and
Posthumanism." Journal of
Evolution and Technology
21.2 (2010): 1-19. Web. 20 Apr 2011.
Sorgner,
Stefan. Metaphysics Without Truth: On
the Importance of Consistency Within Nietzsche's Philosophy.
Rev. 2nd ed. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2007. Print.
