justification; the second a thesis about the nature of objects. With regard to the first, Nietzsche points to Kant’s aim of overcoming Hume’s chal- lenge regarding the rational justification of our beliefs. The second entails Kant’s transcendental idealist claim that our rationally justified beliefs are objectively applicable to the empirical sphere that conforms to the conditions of our knowledge rather than to things as they are in them- selves. In this way, Nietzsche contends, Kant promises to make the sphere of naturalistic phenomena an object of knowledge. However, Nietzsche argues that despite the merits of his response to Hume, Kant fails to execute either task successfully. Rather, Kant’s philosophy, according to Nietzsche, perpetuates the distinction between appearances and things- in-themselves, oscillating between a position where the world is in view but only to the extent that it reduces to the transcendental and a priori forms of our knowledge and the claim that the world is not accessible to us but only to a God’s Eye View that can never be ours.
Nietzsche’s rejection of Kant’s constitutive account of knowledge and his assimilation of it to the status of regulative belief aim to overcome this dichotomy by allowing for the possibility of objective human knowledge. That is, Nietzsche abandons the Kantian oscillation between a mere human point of view on the one hand, and a God’s Eye View on the
other. According to Nietzsche, once man has been returned to nature5
and all our knowledge claims are justified regulatively rather than con- stitutively, it can be seen that the specifically human point of view is not divorced from reality but rather is in constant engagement with it, having the world in view to a greater or lesser extent. Our epistemic task then becomes that of adjudicating between these narrower and broader human perspectives on things.
Our examination in this chapter comprises two sections. The first examines both Nietzsche’s understanding of and objections to Kant’s constitutive account of our knowledge and the status of objects, whilst the second focuses on Nietzsche’s appropriation and modification of Kant’s epistemology. In so doing, we trace how Nietzsche’s appeal to a naturalistic and regulative conception of knowledge rather than Kant’s constitutive account makes possible objective human beliefs about the world.
NIETZSCHE PRO AND CONTRA KANT
In a revealing passage in The Gay Science Nietzsche explicitly links his own thought to Kant’s where he praises Kant’s response to Hume regard- ing the justifiable applicability of the concept of causality:
Nietzsche’s Appropriation of Kant 25
Let us recall . . . Kant’s tremendous question mark that he placed after the concept of ‘causality’ – without, like Hume, doubting its legitimacy alto- gether. Rather, Kant began cautiously to delimit the realm within which this concept makes sense (and to this day we are not done with this fixing of limits).
6
What Nietzsche praises here is Kant’s effort to save the rational justifica- tion of our beliefs in the midst of Hume’s sceptical attacks. In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche praises Kant’s attempt to overcome Humean scepticism by appealing to both a unified methodology and rigorous
standards.7 Hume had argued that although we do indeed possess the
idea of causal connection, our employment of this concept in a judge- ment is not rationally justified. Kant aims to show, contrary to Hume, that such concepts are rationally justified in a judgement. Kant argues that it is necessary for us to justify the concepts of metaphysics for these concepts are the concepts of our cognition and so necessary for the pos-
sibility of rational thought.8
Informing Kant’s response to Hume, according to Nietzsche, is his proposal of a Copernican revolution, which entails a reappraisal of how we are to construe the order of priority in the relation between subject and object. Central to this is his reappraisal of what constitutes an object of knowledge. Adopting what he calls a transcendental idealist stance, Kant argues that objects, if they are to be knowable by us, must be constituted by us. That is, our knowledge is of empirical objects that conform to the conditions of our knowledge rather than of things as they are constituted in themselves:
Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establish- ing something in regard to them a priori, by means of concepts, have, on this assumption, ended in failure. We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge. This would agree better with what is desired, namely, that it should be possible to have knowledge of objects a priori, determining something in regard to them prior to them being given.9
In his earliest writing, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche has the utmost praise for Kant’s philosophical aims, which amount, in Nietzsche’s view, to setting limits to conceptual and logical knowledge, thus curbing rationalist hubris. According to Nietzsche, Kant’s Copernican turn and his views concerning the legitimate theoretical employment of the con- cepts of the Understanding aim to reject dogmatic metaphysics, denying