Caudal de diseño (UEH)

of significance’ and cannot be articulated in a familiar rational format.48

On the basis of the above arguments Nietzsche concludes that the idea of an inaccessible metaphysical world is epistemically void for us. It carries no practical consequences for the epistemic worthiness of our best justi- fied beliefs. However, Nietzsche claims we are far from arriving at our best justified beliefs. He argues that we have inherited many intellectual

‘errors’ from which we are yet to extricate ourselves.49 _{This is what he}

means when he writes that we exist in the realm of ‘idea’.50 _{He writes:}

‘That which we now call the world is the outcome of a host of errors and fantasies, which have gradually arisen and grown entwined with

one another in the course of the overall evolution of the organic being.’51

Nevertheless, he suggests that we can escape the realm of ideas or inher- ited errors through ‘physical and historical explanations’ that ‘lift us up

out of the entire proceeding’.52 _{Consequently, Nietzsche argues both}

that the notion of a radically inaccessible thing-in-itself is unintelligible and that our ‘ideas’ are capable of refinement through careful ‘scientific’

analysis.53 _{Once the epistemic threat posed by the idea of a thing-in-itself}

is overcome and the distortions posed by inherited errors are in principle surmountable, Nietzsche paves the way for a complete overcoming of the distinction between appearances and inaccessible reality. That is, reality is now defined as that which is in principle available to our knowledge without being reducible to our ‘ideas’. Consequently, Nietzsche allows that reality is subject-independent, but in principle accessible to our knowledge.

According to Nietzsche, every perspective that is justified according to our best standards is a perspective in the world. The fact that the world transcends, in the particular sense of not being reducible to our interests, does not entail that the world is inaccessible and unknowable in principle. What Nietzsche’s perspectival theory of knowledge does rule out, however, is the possibility of a supra-perspectival and therefore God’s Eye view of the world. Rejecting the latter’s commitment to a recognition-transcendent view of truth, what John Haldane terms the ultra-realist insistence on ‘the unconditional transcendence of reality

over our natural means of coming to know about the world’,54 _Nietzsche

puts forward an internal realism, holding that reality is internal to our perspectival practices of justification. According to Nietzsche, a perspec- tive, the condition under which seeing becomes seeing something , is the

determinate manner in which the world is known.55

Nietzsche, then, rejects the idea that objectivity entails a God’s Eye View from Nowhere in favour of a perspectival viewpoint that over- comes the metaphysical realist decoupling of truth and justification.

Nietzsche’s Perspectival Theory of Knowledge 69

This is achieved by rejecting the notion of truth-in-itself in favour of Nietzsche’s conception of truth for us whereby our actual and best

practices of justification determine truth.56 _{Metaphysical realism, as}

Nietzsche understands it, defines objectivity as that which is radically divorced from our human perspectives. That is, even our best justified beliefs might be massively in error. Nietzsche’s account of objectivity, in contrast, entails the consideration of multiple points of view with regard to a matter, writing, as we have seen, that ‘the more affects we allow to speak about a matter . . . that much more complete will our “concept” of

this matter, our “objectivity” be’.57 _{Here Nietzsche suggests that if objec-}

tivity is defined by our perspectival take on the world, then truth cannot globally transcend our best justified human beliefs. This reading takes considerable steps in rebutting the idea that Nietzsche’s perspectivism is a negative thesis that claims that our knowledge is ‘merely’ perspecti-

val.58 _{The negative view sees perspectives as playing a limiting role as in}

Kant where the categories, understood as transcendental conditions of the possibility of experience, limit our knowledge to that of appearances. Owing to the constitutive role of the categories, Kant’s appearances, according to Nietzsche, are mere perspectival objects of knowledge

divorced from how things are in themselves.59 _{The negative reading}

allows for the possibility of a decoupling of justification and truth by conceding that our best perspectival practices of justification may be massively in error. In contrast, Nietzsche puts forward the positive inter- nal realist thesis that our perspectives are rooted within the world and not divorced from it. This thesis culminates in Nietzsche’s empiricism, the focus of our next section. When combined with his perspectivism, Nietzsche’s empiricism puts in place the final step in his overcoming of the traditional metaphysical realist downgrading of empirical reality as an object of knowledge.

NIETZSCHE’S EMPIRICISM

Nietzsche’s empiricism is particularly significant for his attempt to over- come metaphysical dualism. The latter view is rooted, he claims, in a philosophy of resentment that rejects the empirical world of our lived experience by positing another inaccessible world as the standard of the true and the real. Nietzsche argues that overcoming resentment requires an affirmation of the empirical world as a valid arena for philosophical inquiry, stating that all evidence for our most conscientious and trust-

worthy truths come from the senses.60 _{That this appeal to empirical cri-}