A Nietzchean Epistemology

A Nietzchean Epistemology

A Nietzchean Epistemology – Ben Dempster

1The following discussion will examine Nietzsche’s epistemology from its first principles, to its final conclusions about knowledge, thought, and truth. It must be mentioned, however, that such a formulation is never found in Nietzsche’s own work. Indeed, even the idea that one can take his views on the theory of knowledge without the accompanying ‘ultimate analysis of the world’ is harmful to complete understanding of this German philosopher. Nietzsche’s style is much less obviously structured and progressive than the following exposition will portray it to be. His central notions tend to circulate on the edge of all his pieces of writing, so to pull them apart and rearrange them in another order may seem unfair. Yet, to understand such a great yet unsystematic mind it is impossible to do without a certain deal of restructuring and interpretation. Perhaps this is an example of the Nietzschean concept of necessary error to which the reader is so often drawn back.

The method of inquiry I am using to examine Nietzsche’s epistemology is in a similar vein to Descartes’ method of doubt. This may seem decidedly inappropriate, considering Nietzschean philosophy diverges sharply away from Cartesian thought right from the outset. I would urge the reader to be patient; presenting the insights in a manner familiar to rationalists is a surer way for people with our perspective to understand it1.

2Nietzsche, in keeping with phenomenologists before and existentialists after him, takes being-in-the-world as our most fundamental evidence for anything at all. Existing, rather than the idea of existence, is the crucial element in the Nietzschean picture.

1 At least, for my own perspective; born and bred on British Empiricism and 20th century analytic philosophy

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This is to be starkly contrasted with the Cogito Ergo Sum put forward by Descartes. Nietzsche rejected this in a way many people have done since Descartes’ time: deny the implication that every action needs an actor. From the thinking that Descartes initially recognises, all one can imply is that thoughts exist, or that a thought is existing. To further infer their must necessarily be an agent performing the thought is to step away from the initial claim, and the initial evidence.

Another decisive objection Nietzsche raises against the foundation of the Cogito is that thinking must be compared to other states of being before it can be differentiated as such2. Hence there is a whole host of states of being known to a doubter even before the datum that ‘a thought is existing’ can come about.

Of course, Nietzsche did not reject Descartes in this manner because he didn’t believe we existed. Rather, he thought false the abstracted position Descartes began with. For Nietzsche, the everyday evidence of being-in-the-world is as good a foundation we are ever going to get.

What Descartes did share with Nietzsche was a ferocious attitude of doubting; the desire to be critical in order to find, in stricture, what really stood up to investigation.

3For Descartes, a benevolent non-deceiving God turns up early in the piece. The Cartesian God made the task of epistemology somewhat simpler for the empiricist and rationalist than for the atheist existentialist. One’s reason was guaranteed to supply truth, because God did not deceive; no such luxury is available to the extremely anti-religious Nietzsche.

For Cartesian thought, the existence of God allowed, via our ‘faculty’ of reasoning, many ideas to gain status as knowledge, even absolute knowledge. Nietzsche, in contrast, completely rejected the notion that we

2 Nietzsche, 1966, section 162 | P a g e


could ever have such knowledge: our world is made up of experiences, yet we attempt to represent those experiences in such dissimilar ways from the actual experience that ‘absolute’ knowledge can never be the end result. The notion of immediate certainty, also, was for Nietzsche a contradictio in adjecto3. How could thought, a process of abstraction, possibly reveal certainties about an existing reality, defying all abstraction in its concreteness? It could not.

Nietzsche’s actual attacks on metaphysics are well noted, and hence need no repetition here. It should be sufficient to say that Nietzsche certainly viewed the supposed knowledge gained from religion as at a deeper level of illusion than scientific information4. The wave of atheism that was beginning to sweep Europe during the lifetime of Nietzsche was, for him, the inevitable realisation that all knowledge gained from metaphysics and religion was false. The world turned instead to science and its methods in search of truth.

The first, and most devastating issue that plagues science is, as phrased by modern philosophers of science, the problem of the theory-ladenness of observation. Physics is merely an interpretation of a certain range of experiences. The whole of the science of physics is based on a belief in the senses – and it can do no more than continue that belief; it gives interpretations, it cannot give explanations5.

How can we say science does not offer explanations? Surely this counterintuitive? As an existentialist, the most basic building block of the epistemological world is existing, being in the world with others. So what is science explaining? If it is explaining the experiences of existence we have, it is superfluous, for nothing is more basic than what is trying to be explained originally. Any hint of abstraction that is left can only pull us further from the immediacy of being in the world. Nietzsche likens the 3 Nietzsche, 1966, section 16

4 Morgan, p. 48



schematisation of nature into scientific laws to ‘dressing up’6. It is an attempt by scientists to rationalise nature, to describe reality as a rational sense-making world. This, as existentialists would have us realise, is false: reality is irrational, nature is merciless.

The second major difficulty with the scientific enterprise is that it leaves us with a world without value7. Granted, the scientists introduce their values into the scientific method – this is only to the extent that some ‘explanations’ are chosen over others or certain problems are chosen to study rather than others. The outcomes of science are still left without value. Science represents the physical world as a mechanism; the mythical ‘Final Physics’ is projected as a big description of multiple physical processes. Yet no room is given for purpose. When the question “Why?” is asked of science, it cannot answer, but instead offers a description of how.

It has been often asked why scientific endeavours should give us a world of values. To answer this, we must return again to Nietzsche’s existential foundation: being in the world. We can hardly deny that the world we experience has value – to do so would be to deny our humanity. Exactly what those values are is certainly an open question, but we would be denying a critical part of our existence to say they weren’t there at all. This idea is best made sense of by examining the Zuhanden and Vorhanden Heidegger talked about. We only really grasp the meaning of an object when we learn what it is for. Thus, teleology is an integral part of our world; science can’t give teleological explanations, and is weaker because of it.

4Traditional philosophy, philosophers and logic are Nietzsche’s next targets. All fall short of giving us any unprejudiced information. Nietzsche’s biggest attack on philosophers centres on their similarity with everyday biased commentators. Philosophers see themselves as more capable searchers for 6 from the German Zurechtmachung

7 Hollingdale, p. 34 | P a g e


the truth, because they consider themselves neutral. This, however, must be false; like all humans, philosophers are caught in the subjective trap of perspectival knowledge. Philosophers (and here Nietzsche is primarily referring to the famous philosophers of the past, not just any) are reprehensible because they have a prejudice, and they do not admit to it. Reasons for holding a certain viewpoint are invented after some conclusion is reached8. Just like all people, philosophers have moral intentions. Furthermore, they cannot transcend these intentions as they assume, thus making every piece of philosophy rather like a personal confession9.

The root of the mistakes traditional philosophy has made lie in its beginnings. The initial premise of the philosophy Nietzsche was criticising is almost always some kind of abstraction away from the bare fact of existing in the world. The second difficulty is that philosophers customarily regard the world as a world of being, as opposed to a world of becoming. If understanding the world as becoming were more common, philosophy would not constantly be making the error of ascribing atemporal objectivity to things. The whole fanciful and unattainable goal of absolute knowledge is seen as pointless when we grasp the idea that the world is never the same one moment to the next. If truth is going to be informative about the world we live in, it needs to accommodate the natural flux in it. Thus, truth can change. Not just in the sense that one thing believed true at one time is discovered to be actually false later on, but that the very same thing can be true at one time and false at another.

Philosophy, as characterised by Nietzsche, is a self-creating endeavour. It first ascribes the template upon which further theorising can legitimately be done (e.g. the requirement that one accepts certain initial assumptions, the Cogito, the world of forms, objectivity). In this way, other harmful modes of thinking are ruled out before the battle really begins. A biological analogy sets the scene well: imagine established philosophy is a eucalyptus

8 Nietzsche, 1966, section 5



tree. The other plants in the forest environment are different ways of interpreting the world, different meta-philosophies. Eucalypti, in the real world, are quite cunning in that the leaves that they drop onto the forest floor are exceptionally flammable, yet the tree itself is reasonably impervious to the kind of fires that typically begin from its leaves. Thus, the tree has an offence without appearing to. The same can be said for classical philosophy. Its flammable leaves are the assumptions one must make to enter the intellectual world. If one’s views are different enough, they will not survive the taking on of these assumptions. It is in this sense that Nietzsche sees philosophy as being self-creating.

The fact that philosophy actively promotes itself, and in this fashion aids in its survival, leads us to another Nietzschean insight: Philosophy is a will to power10. Because the will to power is such a loaded term in Nietzschean thought, this has many consequences for philosophy. If Nietzsche is read with consistency in mind, philosophy being a will to power implies that its war on the minds of everyday people is somehow permitted, because the will to power, in its many forms, is not something to be avoided. As a will to power, philosophy can be criticised by Nietzsche, but he will never be able to completely debunk it without raising a rival systematic methodology. After all, a will to power justifies itself, and recognition of falsity within in it is no objection. What is instead the case is that the will to power is crucial, perhaps even necessary, for the preservation of certain styles of life. Once again, the Nietzschean concept of necessary error rears its necessary head. I believe that Nietzsche’s admittance that philosophy is a will to power once again legitimates it to a degree, at least in the sphere of value Nietzsche offers us.

Logic too suffers a vast amount of criticism from the pen of Nietzsche. For Descartes, logic gains acceptance as a giver of absolute knowledge because, as mentioned, our ‘faculty’ of reason is guaranteed by God. No such guarantee is available for our reason in the Nietzschean universe.



Consequently, we have no objectively rational faculty at all. Because logic is, supposedly, a set of the principles distilled from reason, it too is no longer objective11.

I will look at two paradigmatic principles of logic to demonstrate Nietzsche’s theory. The classic case is the law of identicals: A is identical to B if and only if A has all and every property that B has. Now, as everyday existence is our evidence, how is this ever possible? As the classic Zen phrase goes “A man never steps in the same river twice”. After all, the water will be ever changing, so the river, like everything, is never the same from one moment to the next. Thus, the existential idea of becoming denies that logic has grounded its law of identity in concrete reality. It may be defended as an abstraction, but here Nietzsche’s point is already made for him. Abstractions are merely that, not the things we really want to speak about.

Nietzsche took this idea a step further. Because there are so evidently no perfect equivalencies in nature, man, by creating them and imposing them upon nature, is forcing his will onto the world. Logic is yet another outlet of the human will to power. The will to make things equivalent changes them from what they are. In putting our concepts into the limiting scheme proposed by logicians we actually gain greater control over them.

Take another straightforward logical principle: it is impossible that it be the case both that X and that not-X. Now, the only way we can have information about the truth or falsity of this principle, having followed the passage of doubting above, is via our sensations. And it is most certainly not a contradiction to have antithetical simultaneous sensations12. It has to be concluded instead, therefore, not that “X and not-X are both true” is an impossibility, but that it is an incapacity of our present system of logic that

11 Hollingdale, p. 128

12 Hollingdale, p. 129 e.g. hot water on one hand and cold on the other7 | P a g e


it cannot represent this certain situation. So, rather than fortifying our belief in modern logic, this principle is turned on its head and used as evidence for its insurmountable limitations.

5In a sense, what is more basic than any of the doubts raised by Nietzsche about our traditional sources of knowledge, is his attack on language and grammar. Language, for existentialism, is almost crucial to thought – it brings thought into the world, and it that sense, makes it relevant13. So, if Nietzsche can show us the misconceptions involved in language, it seems every thought, because necessarily mediated via language, will be tainted with perspectivality.

The words of our language limit the conceptions they were invented to stand for. Words commit two grave errors that cause fundamental mistakes in the thoughts that get formulated with them. Firstly, they try to impose being onto becoming. Words are stable, fixed descriptions that stand for concepts that are constantly in flux. Furthermore, they tempt us into the false thinking that these concepts are easily separable and simplifiable14.

Grammar too distorts our thought. Nietzsche went so far as to say even though the influence of God is dead in atheist Europe, the tyranny of grammatical structure remains. Grammar functions to dominate the direction of our thought. This is why Nietzsche connects the philosophy of the Germans, the Greeks and the Indians; common grammatical structure, he contends, produces common philosophy15.

An excellent example of grammar imposing on the possibilities of thought is the subject / object structure of many European languages. This distinction has forged the belief in the necessity of an agent for every action. Because

13 MacQuarrie, p. 144




in most correct formulations of thought according to the grammatical rules of English, for example, have a subject and an object, the thought that is being expressed must conform to the rule. This is a startling revelation: the very rules of speaking we use impinge upon our ability to think.

6After such a battering of so many common channels for knowledge and thought, one must wonder, with Nietzsche, how the will to truth ever arose in man. His answer is that, in forgetting these limitations, we believe of ourselves that we can find an objectivity to base our knowledge on.

I contend a better explain is on offer, fitting well within the Nietzschean view. Part and parcel of the distortions and perspectivality occurring in our language, metaphysics, philosophy and logic is the further persuasion that these enterprises are bona fide. The strength with which each field claims truth is great – as Nietzsche highlights well, they are self-replicating entities. Because of this, the insights gained from these endeavours are more ‘paradigmatic’, in the Kuhnian sense, than other things in our minds. Our beliefs about sport, movies and fashion are consequently much more malleable than are those about religion or deep philosophical issues.

Once we acknowledge that we have a will to truth, Nietzsche examines the consequences of such a thing. The result is, to modern eyes, catastrophic. The Nietzschean will to truth is the unveiling of more and more layers of illusion. However, Nietzsche reiterates here that error is necessary to life; hence, the will to truth is also a will to un-life, a will to death16. This shouldn’t be understood in the extreme; what is meant is that our attempt to destroy error and live in uniformity is not something that will truly reveal reality, or chaotic nature, to us.

16 Morgan, p. 519 | P a g e


This leads Nietzsche to question the value of truth17. If our search is so fruitless, and even its attempt is undermined in such a crucial way, then surely everything is false, anything permitted? Nietzsche’s style of nihilism is sometimes this extreme. Nihilism is the intense conviction of the contrast between fact and value18. Facts are valueless; good and evil may both exist but are equally meaningless in a partly factual world.

Does Nietzsche offer a way out of this nihilist hole he has dug himself with his ‘shovel of doubt’? In his earlier years, Nietzsche suggested that even though moral and rational justifications of the world were impossible, aesthetic ones might be19. Taken as a piece of art, the universe may be seen to have both meaning and value. Later, he rejected even this tendril of metaphysics, although his continued fascination with the mythical Dionysus figure suggest it never fully left his thoughts.

In the end, as Morgan suggests, Nietzsche saw himself as a thinker who, in his writings and antagonistic personality, was preparing Europe for the inevitable: the onset of widespread nihilism20.

7This leaves the Nietzschean enterprise with some quite radical views on knowledge, thought and truth, at least in comparison to rationalists. Knowledge is a mere instrument designed and limited by the satisfying of human needs21. In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche explicitly calls thinking instinctive. Thought itself is an end product, not a faculty as traditionally

17 Nietzsche, 1966, section 1

18 Morgan, p. 53

19 Salter, p. 48

20 Morgan, p. 55

21 Hollingdale, p. 13110 | P a g e


seen, and reason just ‘a relation of the impulses to one another’22. The process of thought is abstraction, hence simplification. The purpose of thought is practical guidance in everyday affairs. Yet, thought deceives by fooling us into thinking experience is independent of ourselves.

Truth in a world of becoming can never be absolute. Nietzsche saw the quest for it as continual unveiling of layers of illusion and ignorance, not as an instant transaction the way naïve empiricists view it. Nietzsche heavily questions the value of truth, in one place he formulates it as merely using the ‘usual metaphors’23.


23 Clive, p. 50811 | P a g e


BibliographyClive, Geoffrey (ed.). 1965. The Philosophy of Nietzsche, New York: Mentor

Hollingdale, R.J. 1973. Nietzsche, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul

Macquarrie, John. 1976. Existentialism, New York: Penguin Books

Morgan, G. A. 1941. What Nietzsche Means, New York: Harper & Row

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1966. Beyond Good and Evil, (transl. Walter Kaufmann) New York: Vintage Books

1967. The Will to Power, (transl. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale) New York: Random House

Salter, W. 1968. Nietzsche, the Thinker, New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co.

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A Nietzchean Epistemology