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This section draws out the epistemological dimension of Nietzsche’s dissatisfaction with metaphysical realism, focusing on the specifically extra-perspectival epistemology, which according to Nietzsche is histori- cally inherent in metaphysical realism and which in its identification of reality with the non-empirical ultimately leads to a sceptical dissociation of truth and justification. The interconnection between extra-perspec- tival epistemology and metaphysical realism can be discerned from Nietzsche’s claim that our philosophical heritage has left us with a dual- istic metaphysical system that adopts what he terms the ‘will to truth’ as both a moral and epistemological imperative. Nietzsche construes the will to truth as a desire for disinterested truth expressed in the form of resentment against our instincts and the interests they embody. The will to truth is a form of asceticism that emphasises disinterested and objec- tive truth purely for its own sake:

For let us guard ourselves better from now on, gentlemen philosophers, against the dangerous old conceptual fabrication that posited a ‘pure, will- less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge’ . . . here it is always demanded that we think an eye that cannot possibly be thought, an eye that must not have any direction . . .2

Moreover, this ‘priestly’ form of thinking,3 _{according to Nietzsche,}

demarcates the world of change and instincts from a ‘true’ or ‘real’ world that corresponds to the ascetic demand that the object of truth be unchanging and stable. Nietzsche describes the will to truth as ‘Contempt, hatred against everything that perishes, changes, varies . . .’, arguing that ‘Obviously the will to truth is here merely the demand for a world of the

stable’.4 _{Consequently, Nietzsche contends that philosophers have oper-}

ated within an appearance/reality dichotomy where reality is deemed to be an extra-empirical realm of truth whilst the empirical world of our experience is deemed to be a realm of deception and untruth. Nietzsche thus thinks that metaphysical realism, the doctrine that there is a world independent of our experience of it, has been coupled with both an extra- perspectival epistemology and extra-empirical ontology, ultimately divorcing our knowledge of the empirical world from how things are in themselves. At this point the objection may be raised that metaphysi- cal realism is not by definition a sceptical position. However, Nietzsche maintains that scepticism emerges from the extra-perspectival epistemic thesis that has historically informed metaphysical realism. This epistemic thesis is articulated in metaphysical realism in two ways; we can charac- terise metaphysical realists, according to Nietzsche, as either cognitivists

Nietzsche’s Perspectival Theory of Knowledge 55

or non-cognitivists with regard to the knowability of the metaphysical

‘real’ world.5 _{The cognitivist claims that reality is both accessible and}

knowable by extra-perspectival and non-empirical means whilst those metaphysical realists of the non-cognitivist persuasion argue that reality as it is in itself is inaccessible. Rationalist metaphysicians represent the former. The latter view arrives on the philosophical scene, according to Nietzsche, in the guise of Kant. This non-cognitivist form of meta- physical realism emerges following the demise of the cognitivist version. Kant’s inaccessibility thesis, he contends, derives from the demise of the rationalist idea that we can have extra-perspectival knowledge of non- empirical reality.

Nietzsche argues that the cognitivist metaphysical realist claim to extra-perspectival knowledge has its roots in the rationalist appeal to a priori Reason as the source of knowledge of the ‘real’ world. According to Nietzsche, rationalist metaphysics claims to have unmediated con- ceptual access to an extra-empirical realm of reality as it is in itself. Its concepts are presented as something innate and certain as opposed to Nietzsche’s view that they have evolved over a period of time:

They put that which comes at the end . . . the ‘highest concepts’, that is to say the most general, emptiest concepts, the last fumes of evaporating reality, at the beginning as the beginning. . . . Moral: everything of the first rank must becausa sui. Origin in something else counts as an objection, as casting a doubt on value.6

However, of the cognitivist metaphysical realist model, Nietzsche writes

that ‘reality does not appear at all, not even as a problem’.7 _{He argues}

that this particular interpretation of the world is ‘fabricated solely from

psychological needs’8 _{and that once this has been revealed through}

genealogical and historical inquiry the dissolution of this metaphysical

picture will be inevitable.9 _{Genealogy inquires into the contingent srcins}

of a belief, whilst historical inquiry traces the development of the belief. By examining the srcin and historical development of a belief Nietzsche aims to expose the motivations that inform those beliefs. It is sufficient in his view to expose the suspect srcins of a belief in order to question its reasonableness. However, Nietzsche is not guilty of the genetic fallacy here. He suggests that a belief that is shown to have emerged in a delib- erate attempt to distort reality (for example, to paint a ‘moral’ image of the world) will not have undergone a rigorous process of justifying its epistemic credentials by exposing itself to the public realm of agonistic debate whereby we give ‘an account of the final and most certain reasons