- Thus Spoke Zarathustra
I.
Ontology
To understand the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche is to trace the development of Western a priori philosophy to its conclusion. What had begun in Descartes as an effort to justify knowledge upon an absolute certainty (the ego cogito, the self which cannot be doubted away) and had been further refined by Kant in an attempt to establish universal models of conduct called 'categorical imperatives' was finished in the work of eighteenth-century romantic Arthur Schopenhauer.
For Schopenhauer, it is not the rational self which is indubitable: indeed, Schopenhauer claims that the thinking 'I' is of no great importance and is itself nothing more than a highly refined function of the body. Rather, Schopenhauer takes the will (and not the rational will, the will of liberalism and of Christianity, but rather that unbridled bodily instinct one feels immediately prior to any action) to be the primal source of all existence. In its relationship to consciousness, Schopenhauer holds thusly:
"The will, as the thing in itself, constitutes the inner, true, and indestructible nature of man; yet in itself it is unconscious. For consciousness is conditioned by the intellect, and the intellect is a mere accident of our being, for it is a function of the brain which, together with the associated nerves and spinal cord, is merely a fruit, a product, of the rest of the organism, and even its parasite insofar as it does not directly engage with its inner mechanism but merely serves the purpose of self-preservation by regulating the relations of the external world. The organism itself, on the other hand, is the visibility and objectivity of the individual will, the will's image as it presents itself in that very brain."
(Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, Book II)
Arthur Schopenhauer was a neo-Kantian (a very important distinction for our purposes here, for Nietzsche himself could well be called neo-Schopenhauerian, retaining the notion of will in a modified form while absolutely and unequivocally rejecting the Kantian dang an sich), and as such held that the external world of our perceptions was the product of a force called by Kant the thing-in-itself. This dang an sich, which Kant believed to be transcendental to the world of man - that is, existing beyond all knowledge of itself - 'fashions' the structure of existence by imposing upon it form, causality, and everything which we typically take as given to the understanding in regards to the structure of existence. For Kant, the dang an sich was necessarily unknowable, existing as it did beyond the faculties of reason. For Schopenhauer, however, it was not only knowable but always known:
Thus, for Schopenhauer, man's firstmost perception and most immediate certainty is never conscious thought, which comes well after the fact; rather, it is our feeling, our experience of the inner-workings of our bodily existence, which are absolutely prior to rational thought and therefore immune to negation or falsificaiton. From this one can sketch out a roughly 'Schopenhauerian' theory of knowledge which, I will argue, was that which Nietzsche held throughout his philosophical career:"Whatever the thing-in-itself may be, Kant was right in his conclusion that time, space and causality (which we have later recognized as forms of the principle of sufficient reason, which is itself the general expression of the forms of the phenomenon) could not be its properties, but could accede to it only after, and in so far as, it had become idea: that is to say, they belonged only to its phenomenal existence, not to itself. For since the subject perceives and constructs them entirely out of itself, independently of all object, they must appertain to existence qua idea, not to what becomes idea. They must be the form of the idea as such, but not qualities of what has assumed this form. They must be implicit (not in concept but in actuality) in the fundamental polarity of subject and object, and consequently they must be only the more specific condition of any form of knowledge, of which the universal condition is that polarity itself. Now, what in the phenomenon, in the object, is in its turn condition by time, space, causality (in that it can become idea only by means of these ): namely, plurality, through co-existence and succession, change and permanence through the law of causality, matter which can become idea only by means of these - all this is not essentially the property of what is here manifest, what has passed into the form of idea, but belongs merely to this form itself. And conversely, what in the phenomenon is not conditioned by time, space and causality, and cannot be related to them nor explained in accordance with them, is precisely that in which the thing being manifest, the thing-in-itself, directly reveals itself. Accordingly, what is proper to knowledge as such, and hence to the form of knowledge, is necessarily most completely knowable, that is to say, clearest, most distinct and amenable to the most exhaustive investigation; but not what in itself is not idea, not object, but which has become knowable only through entering these forms, in other words, what has become idea, object."
(Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, Book II)
* The body is the most immediate certainty, but is itself never a unity. Rather, the inner-workings of the body are something in and of themselves dreadful: one's heart beats without conscious prompting; one's bowels demand that the body pay them heed even in uncomfortable situations; one's lungs will continue in their function even if the individual should find himself in a situation where oxygen is scarce; even one's blood flow is such that it is entirely possible to feel it moving within oneself at times. The body is, essentially, a disunity and multiplicity of organs which only rarely - and only begrudgingly - get along with themselves even in periods of plenty. Thus Nietzsche criticizes Schopenhauer on his own grounds when he states that
"Is "will to power" a kind of "will" or identical with the concept "will"? Is it the same thing as desiring? Or commanding? Is it that "will" of which Schopenhauer said it was the "in-itself of things"?
My proposition is: that the will of psychology hitherto is an unjustified generalization, that this will does not exist at all, that instead of grasping the idea of the development of one definite will into many forms, one has eliminated the character of the will by subtracting from it its content, its "wither?" - this is in the highest degree the case with Schopenhauer: what he calls "will" is a mere empty word. It is even less a question of a "will to life"; for life is merely a special case of the will to power - it is quite arbitrary to assert that everything strives to enter into this form of the will to power."
(Nietzsche, Nachlass)
* The body, as multiplicity, structures our perception of the world through imposing itself upon our consciousness. For Schopenhauer, this means that we cannot directly know the unity of the will; for Nietzsche, to the contrary, this means that there is no unity - there is no underlying oneness at the center of things, as Western metaphysics has presupposed since the time of Plato (hence Nietzsche's incessant assertions that the thing-in-itself does not exist). Rather,
* The world is, as Heraclitus, the first Western philosopher, held it to be, pandaemonium:
"If the motion of the world aimed at a final state, that state would have been reached. The sole fundamental fact, however, is that it does not aim at a final state; and every philosophy and scientific hypothesis (e.g. mechanistic theory) which necessitates such a final state is refuted by this fundamental fact.
I seek a conception of the world that takes this fact into account. Becoming must be explained without recourse to final intentions; becoming must appear justified at every moment (or incapable of being evaluated; which amounts to the same thing); the present must absolutely not be justified by reference to a future, nor the past by reference to the present. "Necessity" not in the shape of an overreaching, dominating total force, or that of a prime mover; even less as a necessary condition for something valuable. To this end it is necessary to deny a total consciousness of becoming, a "God," to avoid bringing all events under the aegis of a being who feels and knows but does not will: "God" is useless if he does not want anything, and moreover this means positing a total value of "becoming." Fortunately such a summarizing power is missing (- a suffering and all-seeing God, a "total sensorium" and "cosmic spirit", would be the greatest objection to being)."
(Nietzsche, Nachlass)
Thus Nietzsche poises himself firmly against the dialectical idealism of Hegel, which also drew inspiration from Heraclitus and yet presupposed an eventual coming-together of things in an almost apocalyptic fashion. For Nietzsche, to the contrary, there is no end to becoming; such supposes an open system which Nietzsche's conceptualization of the eternal return of the same (which is not, as we shall see, a return of the self-same) does not permit.
In keeping with his general rejection of Kantianism, Nietzsche posits instead a oneness of the objective and subjective worlds which is not in any sense a unity or centrality, and which seems to anticipate Husserl's 'bracketing' of the subject/object division:
"Assuming that nothing real is 'given' to us apart from our world of desires or passions, assuming that we cannot ascend or descend to any 'reality' other than the reality of our instincts (for thinking is merely an interrelation of these instincts, one to the other), may we not be allowed to perform an experiment and ask whether this 'given' also provides a sufficient explanation for the so-called mechanistic (or 'material') world? I do not mean the material world as a delusion, as 'appearance' or 'representation' (in the Berkleian or Schopenhauerian sense), but rather as a world with the same level of reality that our emotion has - that is, as a more rudimentary form of the world of emotions, holding everything in a powerful unity, all the potential of the organic process to develop and differentiate (and spoil and weaken, too, of course), as a kind of instinctual life in which all the organic functions (self-regulation, adaptation, alimentation, elimination, metabolism) are synthetically linked to one another - as a pre-form of life?... Assuming, finally, that we could explain our entire instinctual life as the development and differentiation of one basic form of the will (namely the will to power, as my tenet would have it); assuming that one could derive all organic functions from this will to power and also find in it the solution to the problem of procreation and alimentation (it is all one problem), then we would have won the right to designate all effective energy as: the will to power. The world as seen from the inside, the world defined and described by its 'intelligible character ' - would be simply 'will to power' and that alone."
(Nietzsche, Nachlass)
In the next section we will examine Nietzsche's epistemological conception of 'perspectivism' and how it differs from modern notions of relativism.
