Simultaneidad (QMP)

where he insists on ‘intellectual conscience’ and the justification of belief in opposition to what he calls the religious interpretation of experience:

they thirst after things that go against reason, and they do not wish to make it too hard for themselves to satisfy it. So they experience ‘miracles’ and ‘rebirths’ and hear the voices of little angels! But we, we others who thirst after reason, are determined to scrutinize our experiences as severely as a scientific experiment – hour after hour, day after day. We ourselves wish to be our experiments and guinea pigs.40

In addition to establishing the boundaries of human rational thought, dependence on our cognitive interests is designed to facilitate the over- coming of the appearance/reality dichotomy. This dichotomy has tradi- tionally manifested itself in an oscillation between that which is ‘found’ and that which is ‘made’, that is, between metaphysical realism on the one hand, and an idealism that construes reality as metaphysically dependent on subjects on the other. In order to overcome this dichotomy Nietzsche must allow that there are real properties in the world, that reality is subject-independent, without licensing this possibility to cast doubt on our truths. He must hold that reality is not found merely by direct and extra-perspectival means but rather is made known by us without falling into the idea that this reality is constituted by us and so merely appar- ent. Dependence on our cognitive interests, for Nietzsche, stipulates that understanding reality as subject-independent is problematic only if that reality is radically inaccessible to our knowledge. Nietzsche argues, however, that the idea of such a radically inaccessible realm of reality is unintelligible. In so doing, he puts in place the necessary steps for an

overcoming of the appearance/reality distinction.41

Nietzsche puts forward this argument in section 9 of Human, All Too Human and surrounding passages, where he presents an argument from indifferentism, which in turn is based on both an argument from geneal- ogy and an argument from conceivability, against the idea of a metaphys-

ical world that is radically inaccessible to our knowledge.42 _{Nietzsche’s}

reference to the possibility of a ‘metaphysical world’ in section 9 is a little

ambiguous.43 _{He argues whilst it is possible that there is a metaphysical}

world, this possibility can have no practical bearing on the epistemic status of our best justified beliefs. This is because, Nietzsche concludes, the only form of metaphysical world that is intelligible to us is one that, although independent of us, is in principle available to our knowledge.

The indifferentist argument claims that the idea of the thing-in-itself is epistemically impotent; it cannot make any practical difference to us because it is unable to cast our best justified beliefs into massive error.

Nietzsche’s Perspectival Theory of Knowledge 67

There are two reasons why it cannot have such consequences. First, genealogical investigation reveals that the idea of a metaphysical world inaccessible to our human mode of knowing is founded on flawed rea- soning. By tracing the genealogy of our belief in such a metaphysical world, Nietzsche contends that this belief srcinates in a false estimation of the world. He writes:

but all that has hitherto made metaphysical assumptions valuable, terrible, delightful to them, all that has begotten these assumptions, is passion, error and self-deception; the worst of all methods of acquiring knowledge, not the best of all, have taught belief in them.44

Nietzsche argues that once we reveal the erroneous methods informing our belief in a thing-in-itself, this belief will be ‘refuted’. The idea of an inaccessible reality, according to Nietzsche, can be understood as part of a host of inherited errors that wanted to explain the srcin of change

by appealing to an unchanging realm.45 _{Here he suggests that the idea}

of an inaccessible thing-in-itself is in fact a human projection that makes sense only in the context of the many inherited errors that continue to inform our judgements. Second, Nietzsche contends that a metaphysical world defined as radically inaccessible to our knowledge is something completely unintelligible to us in positive terms. A metaphysical world that is radically divorced from our knowledge, he claims, can only be defined negatively. He writes: ‘For one could assert nothing at all of the metaphysical world except that it was a being-other, an inaccessible, incomprehensible being-other; it would be a thing with negative quali-

ties.’46 _{Thus to the purely theoretical possibility of a radically inaccessible}

metaphysical world that remains after the argument from genealogy, Nietzsche contends that theoretical possibility is not very likely to cause men worry since it alone cannot carry any serious epistemic conse- quences for our best justified beliefs. Nietzsche argues that the idea of a thing-in-itself defined thus negatively cannot coincide with the epistemic possibility of casting our best justified beliefs into massive error. This is because the idea of a radically inaccessible thing-in-itself is parasitic on our experience of the empirical world and can be understood only in opposition to this experience. The mere idea of a thing-in-itself cannot therefore bear any weighty epistemic consequences for our knowledge

of the empirical world.47

Consequently, Nietzsche combines an indifferentist argument with one from genealogy and conceivability, suggesting the idea of a metaphysical world that is radically inaccessible to our knowledge cannot make any practical difference to us because the idea of a thing-in-itself is ‘empty