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The emergence of the faculty of imagination entails the illusion of the coexistence of two realms: the empirical and the imagined. Thereby, it provides the structure for what Nietzsche calls other-worldliness. This coexistence however is flawed with a paradox: there are two realms but only one way to be real: the mode of perceptual faith, which is spatio-temporal. In the spatio-temporal mode of being, the coexistence itself is impossible (a certain time and space can be occupied by only one thing). This means that the realm of imagination and the realm of perception cannot be indifferent to each other; they are in competition. Consider:

“Being and appearance, psychologically considered, yield no ‘being-in-itself,' no criterion of ‘reality,’ but only for grades of appearance measured by the strength of the interest

we show in an appearance. There is no struggle for existence between ideas and perceptions but a struggle for dominion.”54

The relations between these two realms are directed by a zero-sum rule. One realm’s increase in reality is the other realm’s loss. It is the individual who attributes reality to one or the other realm. As a result, the individual is placed before a choice and has to affirm a preference. Here, according to Nietzsche, we encounter the structure of valuation. The competition between values (the imaginary world) and empirical reality (‘appearance’) should not lead us to believe that Nietzsche treats them symmetrically. In fact, the superiority of the

empirical world is unchallenged. Firstly, there is a genealogical priority of the empirical world; it is out of this world that the imaginary world arises, and not the reverse. There is also a necessary priority for the world of experience: we attribute truth to such and such idea because we experienced truth in the form of perceptual faith. However, we know that Nietzsche laments that the empirical world (‘this world,' the ‘only world’) is devaluated by our predominantly Christian-ascetic civilisation and that truth is on the contrary attributed to what he calls the ‘backworlds.' How is this reversal possible if the empirical world has such a double priority over the imagined world?

N i e t z s c h e remarks that no moral system has ever been able to liberatevalues from their dependence on reality. On the contrary, the world of values, which he often refers to ironically as the “real world,” is valuable precisely because it presents itself as real; that is, as “close neighbours” with the world of experience: “The ‘real world,' however one has hitherto conceived it— it has always been the apparent world once again.”55 In fact, reality is the ground of value: we do not value reality because it is good; instead, we value values because they are real (or so we think).

55 _{WP, 566}

[Nov. 1887-March 1888], this is a question that intensely occupied Nietzsche in the

second half of 1887. See in particular Notebooks 8, 9 and 11 of 1887. On the “real world” being an imitation of the world of experience, see also TI, IV.

B. S

D

So far, I have been drawing a picture of Nietzsche’s account of the relations of truth and values in his genealogical texts. It is now possible, I think, to draw some consequences as to the ontology which constitutes the theoretical basis for such accounts. In the remainder of this section, I would like to emphasise the structural importance of the view which I find in Nietzsche that both the self and reality are characterised essentially by self-differentiation. By self-differentiation, I shall mean no other thing than the ability to be simultaneously subject and object for oneself.

i.

Reality as Intentionality.

Mankind’s ability to abstract ‘reality’ from the ‘real’ world and to subsequently attribute it to other fantastical objects such as values, so-called “backworlds” or “God,” used to puzzle Kant, who famously pointed out that “Being is evidently not a real predicate, i.e., a concept of something that can be added to the concept of a thing. It is merely the positing of a thing or of certain determinations in themselves.”56 For Nietzsche, the problem is—if it is possible—even more acute. This faculty of abstraction is responsible for imagination, memory, sociability, consciousness, and self-consciousness. Those

56 _{Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 598, B 626; Trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W.}

intellectual faculties have ethical consequences: bad conscience, morals, and religion. This faculty of abstraction is also paradoxical. On the one hand, it presupposes the ability to experience reality as the identity of the thing and its existence (faith as ‘perceptual faith’57); on the other hand, it involves the ability to break this identity in order to abstract the predicate ‘existence’ from it. The result is most disturbing: the world whose experience grounds our concept of reality is rejected in favour of another world whose reality is an usurpation “[w]hen one separates an ideal from what’s real, one casts down the real, empoverishes it, slanders it.”58 Mankind starts taking the original for the copy and the copy for the original. The world thereby established Nietzsche calls –not without irony, and quotation marks—the "real world"59 or the "true world."60