Sensualism and unconscious representations in Nietzsche's account of knowledge

International Studies in Philosophy

Volumn 34, Issue 3, 2002, Pages

  Anderson, R Lanier ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60950698179     PISSN: 02705664     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/intstudphil200234310     Document Type: Article

References (42)

1. Nietzsche's "falsification thesis" claims that subjective features of cognitive agents inevitably influence their beliefs so as to falsify them. The term was brought to prominence by Maudemarie Clark, whose Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990) is a notable contribution to the literature on the doctrine.
2. See also Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 42-73.
3. I discuss Clark's views and their importance in R. Lanier Anderson, "Overcoming Charity: The Case of Maudemarie Clark's Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy," Nietzsche-Studien 25 (1996): 307-41.
4. See Peter Poellner, Nietzsche and Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), pp. 218-22.
5. "Sensualismus" was a standard term for empiricism in nineteenth-century German discussions. For examples of the usage, see F. A. Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart, 7th, following the 2nd, ed. , ed. H. Cohen (Leipzig: J. Baedeker, 1902 [1876]), vol. II, pp. 107 ff.
6. and also H. Czolbe, Neue Darstellung des Sensualismus (Leipzig: Costenoble, 1855).
7. Elsewhere in Nietzsche, see, e. g. , GS 370, 372
8. BGE 11,14
9. WP 516.
10. For useful discussion of the point, including citations to similar uses of the term by Heinrich Ritter, Kuno Fischer, Wilhelm Wundt, and Hermann von Helmholtz, see Gary Hatfield, The Natural and the Normative: Theories of Spatial Perception from Kant to Helmholtz (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 273-76.
11. For two quite different approaches to the will to power doctrine, which both emphasize the importance of unconscious drives and affects see John Richardson, Nietzsche's System (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 21, 35-39
12. and Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. H. Tomlinson (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 39-72.
13. Relevant discussions include Stephen Hales and Rex Welshon, Nietzsche's Perspectivism (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2000), chs. 6-7
14. Poellner, Nietzsche and Metaphysics, pp. 213-29
15. Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (London: Routledge, 1983), ch. 5
16. Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of his Philosophical Activity, trans. C. F. Wallraff and F. J. Schmitz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1997), p. 200
17. and Günter Abel, Nietzsche: Die Dynamik der Willen zur Macht und die ewige Wiederkehr (Berlin: de Gruy ter, 1984), pp. 26-27, et passim.
18. See, e. g. , Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, pp. 39-40
19. Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. D. Smith (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 26, 34 ff.
20. and Michel Haar, Nietzsche and Metaphysics, trans. M. Gendre (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), ch. 5, esp. pp. 88-93.
21. BGE 3, 5-6, 19, 20, 23, 32, 34, 54, 191, 192, 230, 231
22. GM II, esp. 1, 16
23. TI "Reason" 5, and "World" 3-6.
24. G. W. Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, trans. P. Remnant and J. Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981), p. 53. Citations use the abbreviation NE.
25. See Alison Simmons, "Changing the Cartesian Mind," The Philosophical Review 110 (2001): 31-75.
26. Poellner, Nietzsche and Metaphysics, p. 219; see more generally pp. 218-22.
27. Poellner does consider Leibniz's view (Nietzsche and Metaphysics, pp. 222-23), and concludes that (on at least one construal) it is unproblematic.
28. Once a logical subject is treated as a condition of its predicates in this way, it is a short step to equate it with a substance, which serves as the condition for its accidents. The association was definitively established in nineteenth-century German philosophy by Kant's argument in the "metaphysical deduction" of the categories, which traced the category of substance to the categorical ("S is P") form of judgment (see Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer and A. Wood [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998], A 70-83/B 95-109).
29. and similar remarks at GM I:13
30. TI "Reason" 5 and "World" 3.
31. See, e. g. , Maudemarie Clark, "On Knowledge, Truth, and Value: Nietzsche's Debt to Schopenhauer and the Development of his Empiricism," in Christopher Janaway, ed. , Willing and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche's Educator (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), pp. 37-78
32. and to some extent also Brian Leiter, "The Paradox of Fatalism and Self-Creation in Nietzsche," in Janaway, ed. , Willing and Nothingness, pp. 217-57, esp. 239, 237-51.
33. Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, vol. II, p. 31. (N. B. : Translations from Lange are mine. )
34. For discussion, see Nadeem Hussain "Nietzsche's Positivism" (Stanford Univ. : unpublished manuscript).
35. This work was originally published in English as Popular Scientific Lectures, trans. T. J. McCormack (Chicago: Open Court, 1894), but all translations here are mine.
36. See also Mach, "The Economical Nature of Physical Research" (from the early 1880s, reprinted in Populär-wissenschaftliche Vorlesungen, pp. 215-42).
37. He developed the ideas in more detail in E. Mach, Contributions to the Analysis of the Sensations, trans. C. M. Williams (Chicago: Open Court, 1910 [1886]), which first appeared the same year as BGE, and was part of Nietzsche's library.
38. Mach, "Economical Nature of Research," p. 222.
39. I have argued elsewhere (R. Lanier Anderson, "Truth and Objectivity in Perspectivism," Synthese 115 [1998]: 1-32, esp. pp. 10-12) that in this passage, Nietzsche means to follow Kant's arguments against the possibility of our possessing a power of intellectual intuition, which would deliver direct knowledge of the essences of independent substances, or "things in themselves. " Without such a capacity, our knowledge is subject to strict limits, which Nietzsche characterizes through the notion of perspectival conditions on knowledge (and Kant through his idea of formal conditions of experience, which limit our knowledge to appearances).
40. For Kant's treatment of the issue, see Critique of Pure Reason, B 68, B 71-2, A 51/B 75, B 135, B 138-9, B 145, et passim.
41. For an interesting discussion of this problem of the " selectiveness" of our representations, and its relation to Nietzsche's falsification thesis, see Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, pp. 47-62. Contrary to the view advocated here, Nehamas suggests that there is a route from the partial or selective character of our representations of the world to Nietzsche's conclusion that they are all false in some sense. (Nehamas emphasizes the thought that our commitments tend to be accompanied by a false higher-order belief that they offer complete accounts of the relevant subject matter, when in fact they are always only partial. ) While some passages do suggest the picture Nehamas paints, it seems to me that the balance of the texts favors attribution of the stronger thesis that even our first-order accounts themselves betray the "falsifying" influence of perspective. I therefore prefer the account I have offered, which takes perspectivism to arise from the systematic transformation of experience by our cognitive activity, not just from its selective character.
42. I argue for this thesis in detail in Anderson, "Truth and Objectivity in Perspectivism. "