Nihilism and Revaluation.

An essay on the role of perspectivism in the overcoming of nihilism.

Leonardo Sias Student Number: 3699846 Research Master Philosophy Graduate School of Humanities Utrecht University August 2014

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Bert van den Brink Second Reader: Prof. Dr. Rosi Braidotti Third Reader: Dr. Joel Anderson

“Humans first placed values into things, in order to preserve themselves — they first created meaning for things, a human meaning!” On a Thousand and One Goals Thus Spoke Zarathustra Contents

Introduction 2

1st Chapter: The concept of nihilism 13 1.1 The theoretical roots of nihilism and its historical necessity. 14 1.2 The theoretical necessity of overcoming nihilism. 30

2nd Chapter: The meaning of the earth 40 2.1 Bodies and meaning. 41 2.2 Perspectives and objectivity. 51

3rd Chapter: Our new infinite 62 3.1 Truth and interpretation. 63 3.2 The transcendental principle of revaluation. 74

Conclusion 83

Bibliography 86

Introduction

This work deals with the problem of nihilism, mainly as we find it articulated in Nietzsche’s work, and some of the innumerable interpretations that followed. Jacobi first introduced this term in his Spinoza Letters (1785), where he meant with it the tendency philosophers had, particularly during the Enlightenment, to interpret reality according to conditions of explanation that are too abstract to account for our personal experience, where the meaning of reality itself is revealed. The improper use of rationality as an instrument to determine existence led in his opinion to an ethical void, because truly free subjects could not be affirmed as existing anymore; they were instead reduced to phenomena that had to answer the rational rules required for their explanation.1 As we will see, Nietzsche’s conception of nihilism, however different, mainly because he employs it to characterize Christianity instead of defending it, presents similarities with this intuition. The term was then appropriated by Russian writers and political activists during the 19th Century,2 and finally became widely famous through the work of Nietzsche and his huge influence in contemporary thought. Given this complex history of the concept, it should not come as a surprise that no agreement exists as to what the definition of nihilism should be. Nevertheless, even if conflicting in various ways, mostly because of the accentuation of only one of its many possible forms, all interpretations share a common denominator, which the famous Nietzschean formulation ‘God is dead’ aptly synthetizes. This is taken to be here the ‘nihilistic thesis’, which consists in affirming that meaning and value cannot be grounded metaphysically. In other words, the possibility of meaning on all levels, from our words to our lives considered in their wholeness (as a sum of connected events), and the purpose of life in its most general character (abstracted from any particular life), cannot be grounded, made possible, and guaranteed through the affirmation of anything beyond the world in which life itself takes place: our world.

One of the most employed alternatives to this conception of nihilism is that, following from the nihilistic thesis, meaning and universal values cannot be grounded at all. This is often expressed in sentences such as “Existence is meaningless”, “Everything that happens is meaningless”, and “Everything is permitted.” Here, this problem will be called the ‘nihilistic

1 On Jacobi’s concept of nihilism, see, for instance: G. Di Giovanni, 2010. 2 Nihilism Now!: 22-31. 2 crisis’. This is considered to be the case because, in this world, a universal, necessary, and univocal meaning associated with what is presented to us in experience is never to be found. The alternative to a transcendental ground of meaning and value, then, would be only mere relativism. Meanings and values are only expressions of the contingent experiences each of us encounter in our own, limited, and particular life. There is not one meaning, and there is not one value, to which the presence of life in the universe can be led back and justified. Life is unjustified, meaningless, and consequently not worth living.

In this work, I will argue that Nietzsche hopes to overcome nihilism by going through and fully accepting it. This is to be understood in one, precise sense: that the overcoming of the nihilistic crisis is possible for Nietzsche only by accepting the nihilistic thesis, and by bringing it to its extreme consequences. This means that, in order to find an alternative to the mere relativism to which the rejection of any transcendent foundation seems to conduct, metaphysics must not only be rejected, but also understood as valuable in a certain context, and explained within a broader framework. The nihilistic thesis denies in fact all metaphysical grounding whatsoever, so the value of metaphysics in the history of Western thought must be conceived as dependent on the contingent need to which it was an answer. To deny this value from our current perspective represents in Nietzsche’s account an implicit reassertion of metaphysics through the criteria we use to evaluate metaphysics itself. Even though this evaluation is negative with regard to metaphysics, since it explicitly denies it, it remains nonetheless metaphysical in character, as it will hopefully be shown during the course of the first chapter. From this point of view, then, the nihilistic crisis is the result of an incomplete, partially naïve understanding of nihilism. Its problematic character springs from its incompleteness, which constitutes a deadlock for reason when left implicit, unaddressed, and neglected. By contrast, Nietzsche – who called himself the perfect nihilist – hoped to offer a means of overcoming the nihilistic crisis that he saw coming from a cultural, incomplete awareness of the nihilistic thesis. This reading has the advantage of coherently interpreting Nietzsche as both the nihilistic philosopher par excellence and the philosopher who first undertook the heavy task of overcoming nihilism. This task brought him to elaborate a possible alternative to our metaphysical need, a theory that could offer a different ground for meaning and value. The question around which this thesis revolves is precisely whether Nietzsche managed to offer a coherent solution to this problem: how to ground meaning and value in a non-metaphysical, non-dogmatic interpretation of the world, without falling in a relativistic philosophy that would only nourish a solipsistic individualism. The theory he 3 comes up with is widely acknowledged, and bears the name of perspectivism. Yet, the question of whether this theory withstands the twofold challenge mentioned above is left unanswered. The challenge is thus to show whether Nietzsche, the perfect nihilist, succeeded in offering a viable path to overcome nihilism.

Before approaching a detailed explanation of what perspectivism is, and why Nietzsche saw in this theory a solution to the nihilistic crisis, a preliminary exposition of nihilism is necessary, which will also be useful to understand the research question lying behind this work. After this part, I will be in a suitable position to explain how the entire work has been organized in order to reach its aim.

Nihilism, conceived as the impossibility of a metaphysical foundation of meaning, concerns primarily human reason. For practical reasons, in Nietzsche’s opinion, prehistoric humanity started to conceive of objects and events as being identical to the concepts with which we refer to them. Through this practice, we have eventually come to consider the possibility of this use of concepts as guaranteed by the existence of things in themselves, to which our concepts are supposed to correspond. Even if the world is a constant flux of becoming, where nothing is really the same as it was before, we learned how to master it – foreseeing what it would become and adapting our behavior accordingly – by taking different things to be expressions, however imperfect, of the same thing. Even if this operation was justified insofar as it could help us surviving and overcoming the fear of an always-unknown world, we then forgot its arbitrary character. We reconstructed the world through concepts, and then we posited that world as prior, antecedent, and truer than the world of impressions that we experience in our everyday life. This is, for Nietzsche, the origin and character of metaphysics.

The abstraction of identity from differences responds directly to what is called our ‘metaphysical need’: the need to conceive of the world as something already determined, which can be known in advanced and predicted. Something is true, from this point of view, when it corresponds precisely to the concept we use to refer to it. This correspondence is thought to be possible because there are transcendent entities to which we implicitly refer when applying particular concepts to the imperfect, accidental, and contingent phenomena constituting our existences. From the basic, pragmatic abstractions of different events and objects concerning our survival – like, for instance, two different tigers behaving in more or less the same way, that is, like ‘a tiger’ – we have slowly come to abstract from those operations underlying abstraction itself. This is clearly visible, from Nietzsche’s point of view 4 – that of a learned and renowned philologist – in the pragmatic origin of our abstract concepts. A few examples should clarify this position: first, the concept of ‘concept’ is, etymologically – and, from a Nietzschean perspective, genealogically – related to the Latin word concipere, which literally means ‘to give existence to another being’, notably a child. Second, the concept of ‘abstraction’ itself: this concept directly comes from the Latin abstràhere (abs + tràhere), literally ‘to take something from something else’ or ‘to pull something from something else’. It means to consider, in things or ideas, one or more of their parts separately from the others. The concept ‘consideration’ comes from Latin consideràre, formed by con (with) and sidus (star). It initially meant ‘to divine our destiny by looking at the stars’. And so on.

This is not to say that we still mean those original things when using those concepts, not even implicitly. As we will see, in Nietzsche’s theory, the meaning of concepts is generated, maintained, and transformed through the practices in which they are employed. Instead, what philology should suggest us in this case is that, without basic, pragmatic, and inter-subjective action-related words, abstract concepts would have never come to existence. If we can grasp their meaning, it is because we first learned to grasp something; yet, to grasp someone’s arm does not have the same meaning as grasping a concept or an idea. The character of meaning, insofar as it is expressed through language, is thus metaphorical. Starting from basic concepts—directly related to inducing a certain immediate behavior in our counterparts, to make him or her act in a particular way with respect to our primitive understanding of the world—we literally built a complex structure of meanings the more and more abstract, far away from the pragmatic object-action orientated words we initially had. Without the metaphorical character of language, however, this construction would not have been possible. The value of these abstract concepts – their aim, importance, and utility – in particular that of ‘truth’, is for Nietzsche to be looked for in the hierarchical structure needed to organize human societies on larger scales. Meaning, through its capacity of coordinating behaviors through a common understanding of the world, forms power-relations that allow the imposition of individual interests, which represent those internal drives that have imposed themselves within particular bodies. Living bodies, in that they are organized multiplicities, are already expression of the imposition of a particular drive, which coincides with the ‘will- to-live’. Yet, as long as they are internally differentiated, they contain multiple and competing drives striving to impose themselves over the others. There are several levels on which these drives compete with each other, and the concept of ‘truth’ has been serving as a means to

5 prevail on the level in which bodies organize their reciprocal activity through meanings, which constrain and shape a common understanding of the world.

For Nietzsche, there is a point in the history of thought where the concept of truth we have held so far becomes no longer credible. The ‘real world’ is revealed as an anthropomorphic construction: a fiction that cannot be concealed anymore behind the ‘mask’ of truth. This fact creates serious problems for our conception of truth itself, which was supposed to be absolute, and was powerful only insofar as this presupposition was taken for granted. The property of being absolute is a distinctive feature of every metaphysical conception of the world, in that it prescinds from the epistemological standards provided by the perspectival position that a knower always occupies. Since all our perspectives upon the world share common standpoints, because we are similarly constituted, all reconstructions of the world will always be anthropocentric. The claim to an absolute knowledge of things in themselves, as they are independently from the ‘human, all too human’ character of our judgments, is therefore a lie, an illusion. All knowledge is always relative to those beings that create it; it is historical and contingent. Therefore, no absolute knowledge in a metaphysical sense can be claimed as true. Nonetheless, the ‘cessation of the metaphysical outlook’ brings about the risk of being overcome by despair or disorientation: the revelation of our arbitrary and unsecure interpretation of the world weakens our capacity to take responsibility for our own decisions. The historical answer that imposed itself throughout the modern age considers the scientific method – which is limited only to what can be measured, reproduced, and predicted – as the only secure interpretation of the world. It is our only absolute truth. However, our ethical life is excluded from the scientific warranty of truth, since it does not comply with the required standards.

This crisis explodes in the Enlightenment’s movement, where scientific reason is imposed as the standard, and, together with its intrinsic suspicion, it contributes to criticize all aspects of human life. This movement, while denying metaphysics, implicitly reinstates it on a deeper level. As anticipated in the explication of the research aim, this reinstatement is due to the neglect of metaphysics’ value, which is historical and contingent, and an understanding of values as either ‘good or evil’, ‘true or false’, independently of the historical conditions from which they emerged and through which they will eventually disappear. This universalistic and essentialistic way of conceiving values is a reflection of our metaphysical need, and, when applied to metaphysics itself, leads to nihilism. The nihilistic crisis is thus a result of a denial

6 of the metaphysics operated through metaphysical criteria, i.e., as conceiving value as something absolute and not dependent on the conditions of its determination. In other words, God is dead, and we cannot go back to the conception of truth we had before, but we pursue the research of a new ground for truth applying unconsciously the same criteria of the old one in order to find it.

The consequences of this crisis unfold on all levels for which reason should provide an account. On the one hand, we are not allowed anymore to claim that values are universal and should be necessarily endorsed by everybody. They become relativistic expressions of particular cultures and views of the world, and cannot be defended as we would, for instance, with a scientific result. Everybody – the large majority of us would say – must accept the latter on rational grounds. Science and its truth belong to the same reason shared by everybody. On the other hand, life-negating values are perpetrated through our incapacity of justifying the reasons for which reason operates.3 By setting a certain standard for truth, we prevent the rational justification of the values for which reason operates. The identity thinking, in this reading, is seen as strictly connected with a functionalistic understanding of reason: human reason becomes a tool that functions in such a way that it cannot account for its own aims.

Nonetheless, certain values cannot but be endorsed in the moment in which reason is instantiated. Conceived as a tool, reason always serves those aims that are selected at the expenses of other ones. To be sure, while pursuing particular objectives, reason always structures power-relations between different forces. To overcome nihilism, from this point of view, is to re-legitimize reason so that it can be able to account for its own aim; not the aim justified in a specific and contingent use of reason, which coincides with the function it fulfills in that particular context, but the goal pertaining to the reason we all share, which in Nietzsche’s opinion can be expressed in the doctrine of the will to power. The problem of nihilism becomes thus the problem of the perversion of the will to power.4 It is very important to understand the essential role of reason in this perversion. In Nietzsche’s view, everything is an expression of the will to power: reason as much as unreflective action, feelings, and instincts. Ontologically, reality is characterized by an interaction of forces that, striving to increase their intensity, establish power relations between each other. These

3 Stanley Rosen describes this incapacity as follows: “Contemporary man desperately needs a rational interpretation of reason. Instead, he has been furnished with epistemologies, or technical discussions of how reason works. Even these technical discussions, for all their genius, have been theoretically compromised by the inability to ask why reason is working.” (1969: pp. 56-7) 4 See Habermas, 1987: pp. 128. 7 relations encompass all levels of reality: physical, perceptual, emotional, linguistic, ideal, etc. Since these forces are always unstable, their relations change constantly, and the world is nothing but pure becoming. Reason comes into existence when power takes into account the temporal dimension of this becoming. It fixes stages that follow one another, in order to foresee the direction in which the becoming of the world goes. Through calculating and predicting, reason determines particular actions whose task is to constrain this becoming in such a way that the power embodied in reason increase in time. Hence, the will to power can be perverted only once it has already found expression in reason: the perversion of power as undermining itself acquires meaning only in a temporal dimension. Outside the prediction of a possible, alternative becoming, the will to power structures an immediate reality in which forces discharge their intensity without reflection on their activity.5

As long as the will to power is perverted, as long as it contributes to the undermining – only with respect to its capacity for prediction – of the conditions for its increase in the long run, reason turns against itself. The values implicitly represented by this perverted reason are life- negating values, insofar as reason is conceived as a means for self-preservation. The problem lies in the ambiguous character of our concept of self-preservation, together with the twofold character of reason as both subjective and inter-subjective instrument of interpretation of the world. In its being general and shared by all human beings, reason allows for a common understanding of the world, necessary to coordinate inter-subjective practices. Yet, as being a tool whose function is serving the drives of determinate bodies, it privileges individual and contingent interests at the expenses of the general well being of the community, whose existence makes possible the instantiation and preservation of reason itself. The self- preservation of the individual is thus competing with the self-preservation of the community of individuals, but the community is the condition for the self-preservation of the individual. In particular, it is in the relation of different individuals organized in a society that reason can be instantiated and developed. With the nihilistic crisis, and the consequent impossibility of justifying a general aim for reason, as well as the value of life – whose self-understanding is possible precisely within reason – the functionalistic and individualistic character of reason prevails, undermining in the long run the conditions of possibility of reason and of life itself. Nihilism defines from this perspective our present condition, and as such, the impossibility of

5 To be sure, these forces coincide with their activity. The illusion of a distinction doer/deed in this case is for Nietzsche only a consequence of the metaphorical character of our language. See for instance Owen, 1994: 19- 21) 8 setting ‘ecumenical goals embracing the whole earth’, as Nietzsche had foreseen since Human, all too Human. (HAH, §25) To this extent, the relevance of nihilism for the understanding of our global issues is of the utmost importance.6

The research question of this work is thus whether Nietzsche’s philosophy, in his attempt to overcome nihilism, provides a viable alternative to our metaphysical need. In other words, whether he manages to ground meaning without recurring to a metaphysical foundation, offering in such a way a new evaluative criterion that allow us re-legitimizing reason. The alternative to this new grounding is, providing the acceptance of the nihilistic thesis – to which Nietzsche would never renounce – the fall in a mere relativism, especially on the ethical level, whose psychological correlates consist in despair and disorientation. The main argument against this thesis claims that nihilism undermines its own overcoming. As I hopefully will show in this work, any defense of this alternative is based on the confusion of the nihilistic thesis and the nihilistic crisis.

In order to answer this question, I will start by examining the emergence of Nietzsche’s conception of nihilism in his early texts On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, and Human, all Too Human. The main tasks of the first part will be to show how the nihilistic crisis consists in the reinstatement of metaphysics through its negation, and that, in order to find an alternative to the metaphysical foundation of meaning, we must first of all understand its value. If this argument is right, then those who claim that nihilism undermines its own overcoming by precluding any foundation of meaning at all fail to distinguish properly the nihilistic thesis from the nihilistic crisis. Put differently, they implicitly assume that any alternative ground to metaphysics should comply with metaphysical criteria of identification. Since this is not possible, they conclude that such identification is precluded by nihilism itself, and that the only outcome is the disorientation brought about by the lack of a ground for meaning and value.

6 “Nihilism,” Clemens and Feik claim, “is not yet a world that can simply be dispensed with, for nothing else seems quite as appropriate for any possible global critique of contemporary capital, modern technology, Western democratic ideology, nuclear proliferation, ecological mismanagement, global administrative politics, mass-media hyperbole, and so on.” Nihilism Now: 18. 9 Nietzsche’s stance toward this issue will be then confronted with Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. I take them in fact to represent the position explained above: starting from a nihilistic conception of metaphysics and of the contemporary situation with regard to the status of reason, they seem to defend their thesis as though there is no way out. The result is a retirement in aesthetic forms of liberation from the omnipresence of inescapable forms of alienation and reification in contemporary nihilistic society.7 Their negative interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy can be thus explained through their implicit assumption concerning the unavoidable path on which Western reason has been conducted since the Enlightenment. Any process of emancipation, where mankind should eventually inhabits reason so as to be responsible for its ethical dimension, reverts instead into myth, trapping humanity in the naturalistic image we have built in order to understand ourselves. Reason, therefore, must turn against itself; this destiny is inscribed in its unfolding through modernity and the scientific development. The more mankind learns to master nature, the more mankind is mastered by it.

Nietzsche, it will be argued, tries instead to elaborate a different strategy in order to overcome nihilism. By fully accepting it, he sought a different kind of grounding, and not only a different ground. In doing so, the very value and meaning of truth and knowledge must be questioned. The result he comes up with is the theory known as perspectivism. This theory plays the central role in the overcoming of nihilism. However, it is necessary to first understand his conception of the body and its relationship with consciousness and reason. Only by blurring the distinction between them, an alternative to our metaphysical conception of meaning becomes possible. This is not to say that they cease to be different, but that their distinction is justified on reasons other than hitherto. Moreover, focusing on this problem, it will be possible to show why a naturalistic conception of reason – where consciousness is seen as a physiological process, and particular understandings of the world are seen as bodily symptoms – does not undermine the possibility of reason and philosophy to overcome nihilism by directly affecting the body. In dealing with this issue, Bernard Reginster’s recent book The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism will be examined, since he

7 Habermas describes their position with these words: “Anyone who abides in a paradox on the very spot once occupied by philosophy with its ultimate groundings is not just taking up an uncomfortable position; one can only hold that place if one makes it at least minimally plausible that there is no way out. […] Horkheimer and Adorno made the really problematic move; like historicism, they surrendered themselves to an uninhibited skepticism regarding reason, instead of weighing the grounds that cast doubt on this skepticism itself.” (1987: 128-9) 10 argues for the incapacity of philosophy to overcome nihilism once its physiological roots are revealed.

Two forms of nihilism that Reginster privileges, disorientation and despair, will be connected to the general thesis of the impossibility of a metaphysical foundation of meaning, and shown as only potential, psychological consequences of the nihilistic crisis. By doing so, the theoretical discussion of perspectivism will be introduced. It will be argued that, by distinguishing a different kind of foundation for meaning, concepts can be used differently. If our conception of meaning changes, then also our concepts acquire a new connotation. This move is fundamental to allow for the possibility of a revaluation of values on the metaethical level, which Reginster claims to be unable to overcome the disorientation pertaining to the nihilistic crisis. The problem, in this case, is precisely the meaning of ‘objectivity’. Perspectivism, it is often thought, rules out any possible validity of this concept. If every knowledge claim depends on the perspective of the knower, than objective statements are simply impossible. Disorientation concerning values should therefore be an inevitable outcome of our lack of any objective standing. However, the meaning of ‘objectivity’ can be re- founded on a non-metaphysical ground, and disorientation avoided. This way, ‘objectivity’ is a perfect example to show the double meaning and use our concepts can have: metaphysical and perspectivist.

An objective criterion for the revaluation of all values will be offered in the last part of this work. Nietzsche needs in fact a criterion to rationally assess our ethical position with respect to our values. Perspectivism, as elaborated throughout the chapters, is essential insofar as it shows the inter-subjective constitution of our values and their being determined on rational presuppositions that are intrinsic to our perspectives. This criterion consists in the life- affirming character of our values. However, here life is considered not as a value in itself, but as the condition of the possibility of all values. The argument presented is thus transcendental, where life represents a process of creation of values in virtue of which it must be affirmed and preserved. If this argument is right, then sustainability can be considered one of the substantive ethical principles derived from the transcendental principle of revaluation. Since it must be in agreement with a perspectivist conception of meaning, its application will not be dogmatic, but sensible to context-dependent variables. Concrete examples with regard to central contemporary issues will be briefly examined in order to clarify the practical application of this principle, as well as its soundness with the theory outlined in the work.

11 Starting from a conceptual and genealogical account of Nietzsche’s concept of nihilism, his understanding of the role of the body in the creation of meaning and value will follow, in order to interpret correctly perspectivism. This interpretation is necessary if this theory is to satisfy the conditions established by a revaluation of life-negating values. These conditions are necessary insofar as nihilism is not to undermine its own overcoming, and once established will allow us to elaborate the principle upon which this revaluation can be grounded.

The interpretation of Nietzsche’s epistemological theory – whether we truly know things from our contingent perspectives – has been the matter of endless debates.8 From his philosophy, countless different positions have been elaborated in both Analytic and Continental philosophy.9 This work has the ambition to offer a coherent approach to this theory, with regard to the issues of the overcoming of nihilism, the re-legitimization of reason, and the individuation of common values that we should rationally endorse. It can be considered an attempt to establish, through an analysis of Nietzsche’s work, the presuppositions necessary to answer “the ethical question addressed to bodies”, which is “one of gaining self-knowledge concerning their dynamic and evolutionary conditions of existence in order to cultivate both joyful passions and enhanced relations with other bodies.” (1999, 13) To be sure, in no way an exhausting discussion of all the possible outcomes of this theory can be presented here, nor is that my intention. Perspectivism is in fact an extremely complex theory, first of all because it tries to push the limits of our conventional language, both natural and philosophical. It constitutes an attempt to rethink meaning, starting from its ground. This fact can also explain why all those exegetical efforts achieved in the last 150 years have always to some extent reduced, cut off, contained, and misused its hermeneutical potential. This fact could also

8 A perfect example is constituted by Maudmarie Clark’s extremely influential book, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy. (1990) See in particular the first chapter, where she illustrates the positions endorsed by several authors throughout the last Century with regard to Nietzsche’s conception of truth. She individuates four different main strands, plus her own proposal; but there are probably many others. Another illustration of the possible controversies revolving around Nietzsche’s epistemological theory can be found in Reginster’s paper The Paradox of Perspectivism. (2001) 9 Clark, for instance, quotes Rorty, who “suggests that we think of the history of twentieth-century Continental philosophy not in terms of the distinctions and transitions between such movements as phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism, and post-structuralism, but as a series of attempts to come to terms with Nietzsche’s claim that truth, like God, is dead.” She goes on noticing that “striking resemblances between Nietzsche’s view of truth and that of the early American pragmatists have been noted, as well as resemblances to Wittgenstein and such contemporary philosophers as Quine, Sellars, Goodman, and Putnam. Furthermore, there can be no question that Nietzsche’s epistemological and anti-metaphysical views have exerted enormous influence on the contemporary intellectual scene in both Europe and the United States, perhaps especially among literary critics, to such an extent that he is plausibly regarded as “the central figure of postmodern thought in the West” (Cornell West, 1981, 242).” (Clark, 1990: 2-3) 12 explain in the first place why Nietzsche can result contradictory, even within the pages of a single book. Surely, he could not always keep together and properly express the innumerable consequences of his own insights. These consequences spread through all that is meaningful and valuable, and values are indeed what justify their relevance and intertwine them. What I hope to provide is the starting point for a fruitful approach to this theory, together with solid examples of its use in understanding the nature and dynamics of the globalized, nihilistic problems of our present condition. If this attempt is successful, it will contribute to the individuation of ethical guidelines that orient us in this problematic world.

13 1st Chapter: The concept of nihilism

This first chapter has a twofold task. First, it will show how the nihilistic crisis consists in the reinstatement of metaphysics by its negation. Second, it will argue that, by fully accepting the nihilistic thesis, Nietzsche hopes to overcome nihilism through a new ground of meaning, and it will try to defend the presuppositions on which this new ground can be justified and explained. As clearly specified in the introduction, these two points are essential to show that nihilism does not undermine its own overcoming. This also coincides with a defense of the legitimacy of Nietzsche’s whole enterprise; hence preparing the way for the explanation of how perspectivism represents the alternative ground that we are looking for.

In order to do so, the first part of the chapter will start with an examination of the emergence of nihilism in Nietzsche’s early texts On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense and Human, all too Human. The theoretical and epistemological problem of nihilism is the result of the ‘cessation of the metaphysical outlook’, and consists in a historical and contingent characterization of human reason and its self-understanding. Enlightenment, as the celebration of universal reason, is seen as the explosion of the crisis, because a neglect of the extreme consequence of its own reasoning – the undermining of the value of truth – takes place. The utmost example of this process is represented, in Nietzsche’s opinion, by Kant’s transcendental philosophy, in that it tries to secure a metaphysical necessity of the correspondence between concepts and objects.10 Knowledge becomes thus necessary and universal, without depending on the values it embodies. His argument will be briefly treated in order to delineate Nietzsche’s contrasting conception of historical necessity. The result of our necessity to interpret conceptually the world in order to master it leads to a tension between the values of life and knowledge, because language now undermines the criteria for its own justification. This tension underlies the alienation of human beings in contemporary society, which prevents the setting of ‘ecumenical goals embracing the whole earth’. (HAH, §25) To overcome nihilism, it is necessary first to understand the value of metaphysics, because otherwise its negation will only mean its implicit perpetration.

10 Nietzsche employs the term metaphysics in several different ways, throughout his whole production. Yet, there always is a common denominator, which consist in the thing-in-itself. With it, we have to understand the presupposition of an outer world, beyond our living experience, that ensures particular characteristics of the imperfect (with regard to their transcendent origin) entities we encounter in our world of appearances. Plato’s concept of ‘idea’ is probably the best example in Nietzsche’s opinion of a metaphysical conception of the world. 14 The second part of the first chapter will offer a confrontation between Nietzsche’s nihilism and some of the theses expressed in Dialectic of Enlightenment. As it will be noticed, both positions present striking similarities, but the conclusions are also very different. In Adorno and Horkheimer’s work, the celebration of reason is thought to lead inexorably to the alienation of human beings, who are not able to understand reason other than functionally. The sovereignty of science as the only method to derive truth entails a concept of self- preservation that in turn justifies the subjugation of man, its alienation and reification. The social character of reason is thus in contrast to its functional exploitation. The failure to recognize this problem condemns Enlightenment to revert into myth, in a dialectical process where human beings, in their mastering nature conceived as blind mechanism, turn out to be mastered by this image of the world, in that they themselves are part of it. Nietzsche is, indeed, presented in Dialectic of Enlightenment as a philosopher who anticipates this moment without offering a coherent alternative. Here, instead, it will be argued that Adorno and Horkheimer’s position represents an instantiation of the reinstatement of metaphysical thinking at a deep level, since they hypostatize the dialectical feature of Enlightenment as a (metaphysically) necessary consequence of the nihilistic thesis. Nietzsche, by accepting the challenge imposed by the impossibility of a metaphysical grounding of meaning, tries instead to revaluate knowledge and life through a new conception of meaning, which will be delineated in the following chapters. For the moment, it is important to clarify the presuppositions on which this new foundation is based, and why it is so difficult for most philosophers, even critics of the Enlightenment such as Horkheimer and Adorno, to grasp the import of such a radical shift of perspective.

1.1 The theoretical roots of nihilism and its historical necessity.

The problem of nihilism as the characterization of modernity already appears in Nietzsche’s work at the time of Human, All Too Human, even though he did not use this term yet. He defined this book the ‘monument of a crisis’. (EH, 115) This phrase can be read as referring to both his personal life, constellated by severe problems concerning both his health and career, and to “the larger crisis toward which he came to see our entire culture and civilization moving, and subsequently came to call ‘the death of God.” (HAH, vii) This can be considered

15 the book, then, where Nietzsche’s philosophical enterprise begins, with the explicit aim of rescuing humanity’s fate. Some of the core theoretical insights presented there, though, can be traced back to an essay he wrote five years earlier, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, which he never published. The crossed examination of these texts here can be particularly useful, in order to show, first, how the roots of nihilism are of a conceptual, epistemological type, and second, why they are not so easily discernible from the historical and psychological expressions of the nihilistic crisis. Later on, I will try to explain how a possible solution to it is constituted precisely by a subtle shift of perspective on the views expressed in these early works.

Since the beginning, Nietzsche is concerned with the problem of the essence of human nature. He writes, in the second paragraph of Human, All Too Human, about the ‘family failing’ of all philosophers, a manifestation of what he calls in the same book ‘the philosopher’s rage for generalization’. (HAH, 2, §5) What philosophers have always been doing is, in his opinion, to start from the ‘most recent manifestation of man’ in order to understand, first, what a human being eternally has been and always will be and, second, what the world eternally is. The human is, therefore, a ‘sure measure of things’, the ‘fix form from which one has to start out’, as he could provide a ‘key to the understanding of the world in general’. The similarities with the points expressed in On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense are quite striking, for instance in passages such as: “At bottom, what the investigator of such truths is seeking is only the metamorphosis of the world into man. He strives to understand the world as something analogous to man, and at best he achieves by his struggles the feeling of assimilation… His method is to treat man as the measure of all things, but in doing so he again proceeds from the error of believing that he has these things (which he intends to measure) immediately before him as mere objects.” ( TL, 85)Knowledge is instead to be understood, in his opinion, as a historical and contingent product, as well as the reason that produces this knowledge and the organism that reason belongs to. We are “clever animals” who “invented knowledge.” (TL, 78)

For Nietzsche, the intellect and reason in general are made possible by language, and consists in the creation of concepts, whose function is the improvement of our capacity to survive. Put differently, starting from perception, we create meaning through abstraction from differences. Social conventions secure this conversion as truth. The intellect therefore “unfolds its chief powers in simulation,” since “its most universal effect is deception.” (TL, 80) This

16 deceitfulness resides in the belief we have that identical things exist. Language is responsible of the identity thinking that characterizes the development of human reason. But “what about these conventions of language?” Nietzsche asks, “Are they really the products of knowledge, of the sense of truth? Do the designations and the things coincide? Is language the adequate expression of all realities?” (TL, 81) Perceptions, though, are never really identical, and when we pretend to express a truth about them, we use concepts that never fully coincide with the object they refer to: “we possess nothing but metaphors for things—metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.” (TL, 82) His argument is that our use of words and concepts, in order to convey meaning and organize inter-subjectively the behavior of a community of individuals, must “fit innumerable, more or less similar cases—which means, strictly speaking, never equal—in other words, a lot of unequal cases.” The pragmatic, historical, and conventional character of this operation is then forgotten through the ages and customary habits, and we take words to be ‘natural’ expressions of the character of things. “Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal.” (TL, 83) Through different levels of abstraction, we eventually come to the ‘essence’ of things. Paradoxically, though, as being the most abstract characterization of things, it is also the furthest from the particular and unequal plurality of the perception that concept is supposed to refer to. The essence of things is thus seen as the least true expression of their nature: in them nothing is expressed more than the pure convention of our use of those words. Nothing about the real world can be really explained through such concepts. “Only through forgetfulness can man ever achieve the illusion of possessing a ‘truth’ in the sense just designated.” (TL, 81)

The thing in itself represents no more than the human character of abstraction, the mechanism through which human reason operates. This is why the knowledge produced by this reason is only an anthropomorphic interpretation of reality: “It is the human intellect that has made appearance appear and transported its erroneous basic conception into things.” (HAH, §16) The thing in itself is the peak of the pyramid; the result of what man has been doing since ever through the creation and use of concepts: “the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, and clearly marked boundaries.” (TL, 84) To those who are able to see its true, pragmatic character, abstraction is underlain by human motivations that have nothing to do with a disinterested, pure desire for knowledge in itself. On the contrary, it’s the highest development of our need to secure the world in a comprehensible and recurring phenomenon, so that we can control it better and avoid unexpected and unpleasant events. The 17 representation of the world in language is for Nietzsche “a new world, one which now confronts that other vivid world of first impressions as more solid, more universal, better known, and more human than the immediately perceived world, and thus as the regulative and imperative world.” (TL, 84)

Metaphysical philosophy, in that it is considered a philosophy with no historical perspective upon reality, the utmost expression of our forgetfulness of the origin of concepts, is the main target of this attack. In Nietzsche’s view, all metaphysical theory tries to secure our knowledge of the world of appearances, the world of our everyday life, through a transcendent grounding. In other words, by positing a thing in itself that is supposed to ‘lay beneath’ the surface of things, we pretend to know the ‘true world’: things in themselves are the cause of the world of appearances, becoming, and transience to which our lives are condemned in their corporeal existence. By knowing things in themselves, we can secure the validity of our knowledge of the world as absolute, intrinsic, and dogmatic. This is how Nietzsche describes the metaphysical attitude philosophers had throughout the history of Western thought: “Philosophers are accustomed to station themselves before life and experience – before that which they call the world of appearance – as before a painting that has been unrolled once and for all and unchangeably depicts the same scene: this scene, they believe, has to be correctly interpreted, so as to draw a conclusion as to the nature of the being that produced the picture: that is to say, as to the nature of the thing in itself, which it is customary to regard as the sufficient reason for the existence of the world of appearances.” (HAH, §16) Metaphysics’ sin, in Nietzsche’s view, is to deal with two of the most ancient errors produced by the human culture, as they were the highest truths ever conceived: substance and the freedom of the will. (HAH, §18) An essence of human nature is, in fact, justified only by assuming a feature that never changes, that is always identical to itself. But this is precisely what Nietzsche is trying to refute: that, despite our strong and perhaps necessary inclination to believe this, ‘there are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths.’ Whether his attack is convincing or not, at least at this early stage of his philosophy, he starts reflecting, in the years between these two works, about the consequences of this insight, realizing that can be of great import to the cultural history of mankind.

In Human, All Too Human, he started wondering what right could in fact someone still have of believing in metaphysics once he has started doubting it. (HAH, §21) But what problem exactly is the loss of faith in not only metaphysics as a set of beliefs, but especially what for

18 Nietzsche is the metaphysical way of thinking? It’s no coincidence that in the paragraph above, called a few steps back, Nietzsche questions ‘the very high level of culture’ attained when emerging from superstition and religious concepts: the Enlightenment. One at that point has, with ‘the greatest exertion’ of mind, to overcome metaphysics as well. But to do this, a ‘retrograde step’ is necessary, for this means at once to understand that in metaphysics resides a historical justification: “The most enlightened get only as far as liberating themselves from metaphysics and looking back on it from above: whereas here too, as in the hippodrome, at the end of the track it is necessary to turn the corner.” (HAH, §20)

Just because metaphysics cannot be believed anymore from a metaphysical perspective, it must acquire a historical value concerning the reasons for which it has been so important so far. Consequently, it must be looked at as an idea, a way of reasoning, which partially answered those same needs and fulfilled those same functions that we still find present in our age. In other words, the fact that metaphysics doesn’t have a metaphysical value doesn’t mean that it has no value at all. To think that is a metaphysical way of undermining metaphysics, as well as the reason of the confusion between the nihilistic thesis and its crisis. Without understanding the value of metaphysics, the alternative grounding that is sought after ‘the cessation of the metaphysical outlook’ will always respond to transcendent criteria of individuation. Metaphysical ideas have been ‘most responsible for the advancement of mankind’, in that metaphysics in its purest form coincides for Nietzsche with the use of language itself. Even though language is, by its own standard of truth, false, it has been the most useful error with regard to the human development. The most enlightened, who regards superstition and myth as something of the past, must be ready to face, once confronted with the abandonment of metaphysics, the consequences of undermining the value of truth.

This moment is not accidental, but already enveloped in a certain usage of language and reason, which imposed itself in Western culture. The crisis Nietzsche is referring to is thus exploding as a result of a certain historical movement, which is why David Owen could sum this process so succinctly as ‘the will to truth becoming conscious of itself as a problem.’ (1994: 3) This moment of becoming conscious takes place precisely in the Enlightenment, and its critical attitude towards reason and the conditions for which we can claim something to be true. This moment finds echo in Kant’s famous opening sentence of the Critique of Pure Reason, where he writes: “Our age is, in especial degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism everything must submit. Religion through its sanctity and law-giving through its majesty may

19 seek to exempt themselves from it. But they then awaken just suspicion, and cannot claim the sincere respect which reason accords only to that which has been able to sustain the test of free and open examination.” (1999: A xii)

There is, it seems, a new form of thought dominating the cultural and scientific environment at that time, which for Nietzsche neglects the extreme and unavoidable consequences of its own reasoning. He is too, at this moment of his life, openly supporting the view of the supremacy of science as the main way to acquire knowledge.11 What he’s contesting, though, is the character of knowledge itself. Reason and experience as determining a standard of truth need in fact metaphysical assumptions in order to secure their absolute character, but these assumptions cannot be justified in their turn by reason. Kant’s transcendental argument in the first Critique is probably one of the greatest attempts to rescue metaphysics, but for Nietzsche he fails, because he tries to derive metaphysical principles about the nature of knowledge from experience, while justifying at the same time the possibility of experience through metaphysical assumptions. Therefore he writes: “When Kant says that the understanding doesn’t draw its laws from nature, it prescribes them to nature, this is wholly true with regard to the concept of nature which we are obliged to attach to nature.” (HAH, §19)

There is a twofold message in this aphorism. The first is that there is more than one concept of nature that can be applied to nature. Here the reference is precisely to those ‘eternal facts’ and ‘absolute truths’ he’s trying to deny. Another way of conceiving nature is possible, which doesn’t have laws that, once known, allow a purest knowledge of the essence of things. And to know the essence of things is to know with absolute certainty how they will be: what way they will become and in what they will always remain the same. This is the argument on which his initial criticism to the common philosophical understanding of human nature is grounded. Moreover, this concept of nature reflects better the form of thought on which the domination of science is grounded, in the sense that it is reflected better in the results obtainable through the scientific method and the standard of truth set by critical reasoning. This fact expresses once more the neglect that took place in the Enlightenment with regards to the logical conclusions embedded in its own results.

11 This can be seen throughout the whole first part of HAH. For instance, the beginning of §3 reads as follow: “It is the mark of a higher culture to value the little unpretentious truths which have been discovered by means of rigorous method more highly than the errors handed down by metaphysical and artistic ages and men, which blind us and make us happy.” See also the discussion in Paul Franco’s Nietzsche’s Enlightenment (2011): 17-19. 20 The second aspect, though, is more disturbing. It says in fact that we are obliged to attach this concept of nature to nature. This is because the metaphysical way of thinking is deeply rooted in our language, and Western culture as such, especially the one expressed in that use of reason celebrated by the Enlightenment, cannot prescind from it. Mankind has in fact, for Nietzsche, “set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it.” (HAH, §11) Moreover, Nietzsche clearly thinks that a historical necessity links the history of mankind and the metaphysical character of language. He is quite explicit about it at the end of On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, where he writes: “The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself.” (TL, 87) It is important, though, to properly characterize this necessity that defines ‘man himself’, for otherwise the same metaphysical critique, which he constantly moves against his opponents, could be seen as applying to his own argument. In order to do so, a closer inspection of Kant’s conception of the necessity and universality of knowledge can be useful.

In his Critique of the Pure Reason, Kant makes an important distinction between the concepts of ‘reality’ and ‘existence’ (or ‘actuality’). The argument is developed mostly in the 4th Paralogism of the Ideality, in the first edition, and in the Refutation of Idealism, in the second edition. What he is trying to oppose there is the skeptical attack to the certainty of outer reality, in order to defend the possibility of an objective knowledge of the world. In fact, if the world is only known ‘internally,’ and here the explicit target is Descartes, then what we infer to be the case with respect to the external world could just be an illusion. The skeptical doubt put forward by problematic idealism (how Kant calls Descartes’ philosophy) is one about “our incapacity for proving an existence outside us from our own by means of immediate experience.” (B275) It thus assumes two distinct kinds of existence: one outside us, the real; and one inside, the ideal; and claims only the latter to be proven by experience, because of the immediacy of our access to it. In other words, it reaches the paradoxical conclusion that we can never be certain of the existence of what is real, but since what exists is real, the only real thing is what is ideal, that is, what is inside us. All the internal determinations that we think as external are then only imagined as external, because inferred from the experience we have of them, which is only ideal, that is, internal. What is ideal is thus real because immediately perceived, where real means existing, while what is real, that is, believed to be external to our mind, could always be just imagined to be real, because inferred from what is internal. 21 Kant calls ‘skeptical idealist’ the philosopher who holds such a position, and he famously defines him a ‘benefactor to human reason’, because he forces us to ‘grasp the ideality of all appearances’: “to regard all perceptions, whether they are called inner or outer, merely as a consciousness of something that depends on our sensibility, and to regard their external objects not as things in themselves but only as representations, of which we can become immediately conscious like any other representation, but which are called external because they depend on that sense which we call outer sense” (A377-78) Once we consider the outer world as a sum of representations, which are as ideal as the internal ones, Kant must show how an objective, necessary and universal knowledge of the objects of these representations is possible. The problem, through which the distinction between reality and existence becomes clear, is how to discern a mere illusion from an actual object. These two things, as being both representations, share in fact the same degree of reality, but while the latter exists, the former does not. Kant’s answer to the question of how we can distinguish between them is quite straightforward, even though at first it might appear obscure: “Whatever is connected with a perception according to empirical laws, is actual.” (A376) What Kant is defending is what we could call a ‘relational’ conception of existence. I can prove the objective existence of something only in the relation it has with all the other representations I have. These laws are represented by the three analogies of experience, which are “principles of the determination of the existence of appearances in time.” (B262) These principles establish a relation of the appearance to time itself (magnitude), to a series in time (one after the other), and to the sum of all existences (simultaneous). What he is arguing is that the actuality of a representation depends on the relation the appearance has to itself through time, as persistence or duration; the relation it has to other appearances that follow one another; and the relation it has to all other appearances at the same time. In other words, when we encounter an appearance we must ask: how long and under which conditions does this appearance persist? How does it change in time, and which appearances precede and follow it? How does it relate to the other appearances in the moment where I represent it in my experience? The answers to these questions will tell us whether the appearance in question exists or is just an illusion.

To answer the question as to why actual objects obey the empirical laws, Kant employed the transcendental deduction of the categories. The knowing subject, in his theory, operates a synthesis of what he calls ‘the manifold of intuition,’ organizing a priori the information gathered through perception a posteriori, that is, empirically. The different representations are connected to one another in order to arrive at a new representation with cognitive 22 content. His argument is aimed at proving that the unity of consciousness constitutes the relation of representations to an object, and consequently their objective validity. The faculty of the understanding, that applies concepts to reality, plays a fundamental role in this operation. In structuring our knowledge of reality, the subject bestows upon it certain features that are necessary and universal, in that they are conditions of the possibility of our experience of the world. The correspondence of concepts and objects is in this way secured by the fact that otherwise we could not have any experience of reality. Kant’s assumptions, though, are that (1) we have knowledge of the necessity of a succession of representation, and that (2) this knowledge is grounded in a priori concepts applied by the understanding. Even though Nietzsche could admit the first premise, because we are forced to some extent to expect specific representations to follow one another, he would not certainly accept the second premise. In his reading, in fact, the necessity we find in nature is assumed in Kant’s argument to justify the application of a priori concepts, while at the same time the faculty of the understanding is supposed to explain this necessity itself. This argument, rather than demonstrating that we have an objective knowledge of nature, starts from the assumption that we have such knowledge, and it tries to establish how this is possible. By doing so, it wants to establish that the concepts through which we interpret nature, for instance those of cause and effect, correctly apply to the representations we have. One must assume that we actually know those objects as we think we do.12

We should be now in a better position to understand Nietzsche’s remark on Kant’s philosophy. In his opinion, the necessity we find in nature has a historical character, similar to Hume’s theory of association, rather than a transcendental one. We are forced to apply certain concepts to our representations because we used to do it since a very longtime, and we have forgotten about their arbitrary and metaphorical character. “But when the same image has been generated millions of times and has been handed down for many generations and finally appears on the same occasion every time for all mankind,” he writes in On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, “then it acquires at last the same meaning for men it would have if it were the sole necessary image and if the relationship of the original nerve stimulus to the generated image were a strictly causal one. In the same manner, an eternally repeated dream would certainly be felt and judged to be reality. But the hardening and congealing of a metaphor guarantees absolutely nothing concerning its necessity and exclusive justification.”

12 For a thorough but concise examination of Kant’s transcendental deduction, see D. Pereboom, Kant’s Transcendental Arguments, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2013. 23 This historical solidification on metaphors into necessary correspondences permitted the constant abstraction through time and the construction of a complex conceptual building that mimics the world of appearances, translating it into a world of ideas. As for any translation, something is lost in the process, in this case the particularity and non-identity of the objects designated by the same concepts. From this translation, the metaphysical way of thinking has come into existence. The basic feature of this way of reasoning is to consider the ideas as the true, real world, in that they are supposed to make possible the application of concepts to imperfect things, even if these things do not fully coincide with the idea they are the representation of in the world of appearances. If a thing falls under a certain concept, without being a perfect representation of it, then those features that make this partial identity possible are considered the true idea of that thing, and thus prior to it. The world of appearance can be judge only by an ideal standard, which is reified because is considered the necessary condition for concepts to be applied. This belief is grounded for Nietzsche in the forgetfulness of the arbitrary and metaphorical translation of perception into concepts. We ourselves have literally put that necessity that we later on find in nature.

As the awareness of this process arise in the path of Western thought, nihilism unfolds in history, and explodes in the scientific attitude of the Enlightenment, only to be re-asserted on a deeper level, as the next section will try to show. However, it is important to underline this historical necessity, in order to understand how the present situation is to be interpreted in Nietzsche’s work. The history of metaphysics could be in fact considered as a neurotic symptom of a removal, which only in the process of modernization reaches its peak and reveals itself as problematic. Before that moment it can be hardly considered a problem, since it was the way man opted for in coping with the world. To grasp the full import of Nietzsche’s nihilistic intuition, it is important to value this symptom as a need of mankind. It is a social, emotional, and physiological necessity of those men who organized themselves in societies and started producing knowledge. The instantiation of language and the construction of metaphysical explanations of the world — for which the conceptual world is the real world and a means for the evaluation of the world of appearances — answers precise needs, whose character has nothing to do with a pure and disinterested knowledge. On the contrary, such a kind of knowledge does not even exist, because for Nietzsche we are the ones who invented it, and particular interests have always underlain this invention. The pragmatic character of knowledge as a means to empower man against an inhospitable and frightful world is enacted only insofar as we forget its fictional character, and so was born the metaphysical conception 24 of reality, which will eventually lead nihilism. This is clearly stated in this passage: “Only by forgetting this primitive world of metaphor can one live with any repose, security, and consistency: only by means of the petrification and coagulation of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid, only in the invincible faith that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself, in short, only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency.” What happens in modernity, though, is that this awareness is partially revealed within the conceptual building constituting Western knowledge: “A great deal later – only now – it dawns on men that in their belief in language they propagated a tremendous error.” (HAH, §11) Yet, this dawning took place through nothing but language and reason, and their historical necessity is not something we can easily get rid of.

The true dilemma is thus the revelation (becoming conscious), in the history of thought, of a conflict between the tendency language has to think metaphysically and the undermining by language itself of this metaphysical thinking. This is the core thesis of nihilism, from which the crisis of values follows. If we accept it, then we are not able anymore to justify the belief in the existence of identical facts and isolated facts, while at the same time the concept itself of ‘justification’ requires this language, this structure of reason, in order to be applied. This is why Nietzsche writes in the famous first aphorism of the Wanderer and his Shadow: “Probability but no truth, appearance of freedom but no freedom – it is on account of these two fruits that the tree of knowledge cannot be confounded with the tree of life.” (HAH, II, 2, §1) To say that these two trees cannot be confounded, means that there is now a gap between knowledge and life. But it also wants to suggest that the two trees are still continuously confounded, precisely in virtue of the tension constituted by language, which belongs to both trees. On the one hand, if we accept the logical conclusions derived from the abandonment of metaphysics, we must then accept our inability to secure knowledge by eternal laws which tell us how the world will be, coupled with the strongest determinism possible (note: discussion of the coherence of this couple). On the other, we live as though absolute truths exist and we are free to determine our course of actions and choose how to modify the world around us. What bridges the gap in such a problematic way is language, and the reason of this is that the tree of knowledge, so to speak, was born out of a fruit of the tree of life.

Language is thus the responsible of this fecundation, at least in the form it acquired during the history of Western thought, and it is now responsible for its own undermining. It bridges and

25 separates the two trees at once. The problematic results produced by the tree of knowledge, such as the loss of faith in metaphysics, the awareness that the logical is grounded in the illogical, rationality on irrationality, and truth in untruth, must have repercussions on life itself. This is so especially because these conclusions are accompanied with the awareness of the necessity of this process, not only in that this historical becoming conscious was unavoidable as a result, but also in that there were specific reasons for which a conception of knowledge as absolute in principle had imposed itself during the history of Western culture. The common root of the different problems generated by the tension between life and knowledge is in fact the necessity to recognize this change, while holding at the same time the same reasons we had to consider knowledge as it was. On the one hand, writes Nietzsche, “it’s too late for the evolution of reason […] to be put back again” (HAH, §11), while on the other, man “has to grasp the historical justification that resides in such ideas (metaphysical), likewise the psychological,” (HAH, §20) with the risk to discover that this justification is still valuable nowadays without being available. This is the reason for which Enlightenment has not been pushed forward, because it would mean to recognize that truth is not always useful. So, all those who negate positive metaphysics are not taking ‘a few steps back’, recognizing the value of our metaphysical errors, “for one may well want to look out over the topmost rung of the ladder, but one ought not to want to stand on it.” (HAH, §20)

The main question consequently deals with the relationship between the value of life, once life is considered an object of non-metaphysical knowledge, and the value of knowledge, once knowledge is re-located within life as an instrument whose aims are not justifiable by those elements – logic, truth, and rationality – which makes knowledge possible. Nietzsche understood this problematic relationship already in On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, where in the beginning he writes: “That haughtiness that come with knowledge and feeling deceives man about the value of life, by carrying in itself the most flattering evaluation of knowledge itself.” (Tl, 79) This question is, in Nietzsche’s view, the heritage of that important shift in the history of Western culture that is the Enlightenment. He was, since the beginning of his ‘monumental crisis’, aware of the consequences of such a big change, which are deployed on many different levels, all intertwined. The theoretical level was probably, in his opinion, one of the least problematic, with regard to the personal life of individuals. Just a few men could in fact be led to despair by the realization that knowledge constitutes such a problem for life. Concerning the value of life, every judgment about it would be false, because every value must take place within life itself and cannot be applied to life as a general 26 phenomenon. Who succeeds in “encompassing and feeling within himself the total consciousness of mankind” would consequently “collapse with a curse of existence – for mankind has as a whole no goal” and must be “reduced to despair”, because a life as object of knowledge would be just a deterministic sequence of events, a flow of becoming where no consciousness has really the power to decide anything, an aim from no perspective, so to speak, and consequently not an aim at all. Nonetheless, Nietzsche writes, “the great majority endure life without complaining overmuch; they believe in the value of existence, but they do so precisely because each of them exists for himself alone, refusing to step out of himself as those exceptions do: everything outside themselves they notice not at all or at most as a dim shadow. Thus for the ordinary, everyday man the value of life rests solely on the fact that he regards himself more highly than he does the world.” (HAH, §33)

The consequences produced by the conceptual problem posed by a non-metaphysical philosophy as to how is possible to value life and knowledge, consequently, are not catastrophic in themselves, for most human beings will continue their lives without realizing, or even having the means to conceive, such a problem. A bigger problem at the social level is constituted instead by the emergence from superstition constituted by the Enlightenment and its scientific attitude, because of those historical and psychological needs that were once fulfilled by metaphysical ideas such as God and the soul, and are now left unanswered. He writes: “An essential disadvantage which the cessation of the metaphysical outlook brings with it lies in the fact that the attention of the individual is too firmly fixed on his own brief span of life and receives no stronger impulse to work at the construction of enduring institutions intended to last for centuries.” (HAH, §22) In other words, the tendency thriving on Enlightenment’s ideas is one of not valuing anymore everything that falls out one’s own span of life. But, again, Nietzsche knows that as long as knowledge requires language to be pursued, metaphysics will continue to be reasserted, even though scientific knowledge, having ‘doubt and distrust for its closest allies’, constantly undermines it. Most people will continue to perform actions whose conscious, psychological motivation is a metaphysical one, guided by values ‘beyond’ their own life.

What really constitutes a problem for humanity as a whole is a much more subtle question than it might at first appear. The effects of the tension between life and knowledge run underneath the surface of individual and collective awareness, and are produced by those attitudes which consist in perpetrating in the everyday life, at all levels, the negation of the

27 fact that such a problem exists at all. Nietzsche’s work in its totality could be in fact considered as, first, a denunciation of a problem whose existence nobody except him (at his time, and in his opinion) seems to be keen to accept, and second, as a possible solution to it. In his opinion, “man has to set himself ecumenical goals embracing the whole earth.” While the tendencies he notes and against which he writes cannot satisfy such a ‘tremendous task’. These tendencies can be roughly divided into two main categories: first, there are all those who keep comforting themselves in superstition and religion, and who do not want to face the consequences of the enlightened celebration of reason. This might be considered the superficial level. Second, there are all those who, proud of representing the advancement of mankind and rational knowledge, refuse nonetheless to take those ‘few steps back’ and face the terrible consequences of the crisis that knowledge represents for the value of life. These are the ones who think a rational and abstract morality can be conceived and defended, such as Kant’s moral system. This was a ‘very naive thing’, says Nietzsche, because it “demanded of the individual actions which one desired of all men […] as if everyone knew without further ado what mode of action would benefit the whole of mankind, that is, what actions at all are desirable.” If metaphysics is to be dismissed, and the demands of knowledge embraced in their totality, such a theory would not be conceivable, for the first question to which knowledge could not answer would be what the benefit for the whole of mankind is. This is because errors such as those perpetrated through language have been extremely useful for the advance of mankind, but they would be dismissed by knowledge in that they are, indeed, errors. In its turn, knowledge can instead promote truths that can be dangerous and pernicious to humanity, as for instance the void left by the ‘cessation of the metaphysical outlook’ in the moral space. “For there is no longer any ‘ought’; for morality, insofar as it was an ‘ought’, has been just as much annihilated by or mode of thinking as has religion.” (HAH, §34)

The fact that Kant was one of the main exponents of this category of thinkers, who refused to accept what for Nietzsche was the true process of enlightenment – nihilism –, is clear in the preface of Daybreak, written many years later. In order “to create room for his ‘moral realm’,” he writes there, “he (Kant) saw himself obliged to posit an undemonstrable world, a logical ‘Beyond’ – it was precisely for that that he had need of his critique of pure reason! In other words: he would not have had need of it if one thing had not been more vital to him than anything else: to render the ‘moral realm’ unassailable, even better incomprehensible to reason – for he felt that a moral order of things was only too assailable by reason!” Instead of 28 truly answering the question “Why is it that from Plato onwards every philosophical architect in Europe has built in vain? That everything they themselves in all sober seriousness regarded as aere perennuis is threatening to collapse or already lies in ruins?” (D, 3) he contributed to reasserting metaphysics on a deeper level, because, like all other philosophers before him, he was building ‘under the seduction of morality’. Even if this sentences were written more than six years later, the core position they express is the same we find in Human, All Too Human: even if reason moves towards nihilism, and metaphysical ideas such as God can be revealed as irrational, metaphysical thinking is pursued by all those philosophies which do not take those ‘steps back’. This way, though, they prevent the overcoming of nihilism, because knowledge and life maintain the same metaphysical value they had before, while their meaning cannot be grounded metaphysically anymore.

The first, most important message Nietzsche wanted to leave in Human, all too Human, is thus that we have to do justice to our metaphysical need, and its embodiment in Christianity.13 This can be done only correcting “the mode of historical interpretation introduced by the Age of Enlightenment”, which can be seen as the predecessor of what will later be called ‘genealogy’, even earlier than Daybreak. This mode of interpretation must understand the unfolding of history through the imposition of certain values at the expenses of other ones. It should not be concerned with collecting simple facts, as there could be a history of mankind to be laid down in front of us, but with the study of the reasons for the cultural transmission of particular interpretations of the world. In this specific case, the correction consists in, while dismantling all metaphysical pretension to truth, revealing the reasons of our need for metaphysics, i.e. the real value of our metaphysical grounding of meaning. Only doing this, that is, understanding why error can be useful to life, we can hope to reassess the problematic status of knowledge, and “may we bear the banner of the Enlightenment further onward.” (HAH, §26) If the Enlightenment stops where it had, continuing on the same path, then it will be only reasserting metaphysics even more, because it wouldn’t understand its value. Concerning the dominant scientific thought, the attitude to “wait and see what science will one day determine

13 Nietzsche’s concept of the metaphysical need comes from Schopenhauer’s philosophy. In the chapter ‘On Man’s need for Metaphysics’ of The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer describes this need as arising from the wonder we feel when facing death and the finiteness of life, and defines the role of religion in human culture as responding to this need. (1969, vol. 2, sec. 17) However, once Nietzsche rejects all metaphysical foundation, this concept acquires a completely different connotation for him: it becomes the need to posit a world beyond in order to secure our common interpretation of the world of appearance and our capacity to master it. Its origin and nature are explained thus pragmatically, while Schopenhauer’s philosophy is seen as a romantic, pessimistic attempt to preserve the spirit of religion. 29 once and for all concerning the first and last things” is simply “the impulse to desire in this domain nothing but certainties”, which is “a religious after-shoot, no more – a hidden and only apparently skeptical species of the ‘metaphysical need’.” (HAH, II, 2, §16) To understand the contingent value of metaphysics means thus to conceive knowledge in a different way, and from this different conception a re-evaluation must follow.

It is in paragraph §34, called In mitigation, that Nietzsche tries a first attempt to deal with this problem. “A question,” he writes, “seems to lie heavily on our tongue and yet refuses to be uttered: whether one could consciously reside in untruth?” Once we have understood that metaphysics had a particular value, historical and psychological, we cannot accept it anymore as truth, and therefore we have no right to believe in it, even if we did still need it. Nonetheless, life forces us to make use of language, sustaining continuously that parallel world to which ours, the world of appearance, must be confronted in terms of truth. The solution cannot be simply to get rid of truth, or to think that there is no value in life and knowledge, just because a metaphysical conception of truth cannot be justified anymore. Here, Nietzsche suggests, the solution looks more like a matter of attitude. How much are we equipped to sustain the ‘after-effect of knowledge’? “Is all that remains a mode of thought whose outcome on a personal level is despair and on a theoretical level a philosophy of destruction?” Apparently not, for one can look at knowledge and life from this same perspective having a different ‘after-effect’, “by virtue of which a life could arise much simpler and emotionally cleaner than our present life is: so that, though the old motives of violent desire produced by inherited habit would still possess their strength, they would gradually grow weaker under the influence of purifying knowledge.” (HAH, §34)

In other words, the need of a world where certainty is guaranteed by a metaphysical conception of knowledge and truth is nothing but a desire that can be gradually and partially extinguished by looking at knowledge and life in a different way. At first, despair and destruction might be seen as inescapable deadlocks, but this is because what has only be reached is the ‘negative’ outcome of undermining metaphysics, the realization that these ideas do not really correspond to the world they themselves demand. As long as this demand is not properly understood in terms of values, the metaphysical need will remain unfulfilled, and no means of satisfaction will be at hand. What is thus necessary to overcome this situation is not a devaluation of metaphysics per se, but a re-evaluation of knowledge and life on a non- metaphysical ground. This moment is for Nietzsche unique and must be understood

30 historically, as a specific shift in the history of thought. If we consider human nature metaphysically, that is, as an immutable substance through which we can understand the essence of the world, and master it, then we will never be able to master ourselves. Rather, we will remain victim of the unanswerable paradox created by our own reason and its consequences, alienated by that ‘human nature’ that we have built to understand ourselves, and that has instead trapped us in an image to which no ‘real’ world can correspond.

2.1 The theoretical necessity of overcoming nihilism.

This first part was intended to introduce two possible perspectives on the problem of nihilism, and to show that Nietzsche was aware of them since the early Human, all too Human. Both of them depart, indeed, from the same core idea: what has been revealed in the history of human thought – the will to truth becoming conscious of itself as a problem – is the impossibility of a metaphysical grounding of meaning. This can be considered the intuition Nietzsche had and held throughout his whole life from On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense up to Ecce Homo. There is nonetheless a profound difference in the possible approaches to this discovery, a different degree, so to speak, to which someone can be aware of this fact. The sets of conclusions and their correlation that are drawn from this statement can be very different from one another. We can find a clear example of this in the influential book, by Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, whose aim was to reveal and denounce the dark side of the celebration of reason and the exit of mankind from myth. Many are the points of contact with Nietzsche and the ideas exposed above, for instance in the preface to the new edition (1969), where they write: “We do not stand by everything we said in the book in its original form. That would be incompatible with a theory which attributes a temporal core to truth instead of contrasting truth as something invariable to the movement of history.” In the first preface (1944 and 1947), the passages that sound Nietzschean are even more, such as: “The aporia which faced us in our work thus proved to be the first matter we had to investigate: the self-destruction of enlightenment.” ; “If enlightenment does not assimilate reflection on this

31 regressive moment, it seals its own fate.” ; “We believe that in these fragments we have contributed to such understanding by showing that the cause of enlightenment’s relapse into mythology is to be sought not so much in the nationalist, pagan, or other modern mythologies concocted specifically to cause such a relapse as in the fear of truth which petrifies enlightenment itself.” ; and the probably most famous sentence “What is at issue here is not culture as a value, as understood by critics of civilization such as Huxley, Jaspers, and Ortega y Gasset, but the necessity for enlightenment to reflect on itself if humanity is not to be totally betrayed. What is at stake is not conservation of the past but the fulfillment of past hopes.”

The following part will try to understand where and why the theories put forward by Nietzsche on one hand and Dialectic of Enlightenment on the other at some point part, even though they share such similar premises. Indeed, if Horkheimer and Adorno can write of Nietzsche’s work that it represents, together with Kant’s and Sade’s, “the implacable consummation of enlightenment”, at some point the theses of these authors must enter in conflict. The reason of this lies in the depth of one’s possible insight into the conclusions drawn from the nihilistic thesis. It can be argued in fact that Adorno and Horkheimer, despite the sharpness of their analysis of how enlightenment reverts into myth, fail in offering a viable alternative to this reversion, in other words, the means for a re-evaluation of knowledge and life. This signifies at the same time to neither have completely embraced nihilism nor have gone all the way through it. If there is to be an overcoming of nihilism, Nietzsche argues, this must be within nihilism itself. Nietzsche’s own attempt to solve this problem is not taken into account in Dialectic of Enlightenment, and his position is presented only to show “how the subjugation of everything natural to the sovereign subject culminates in the domination of what is blindly objective and natural.” (DE, xviii)

The task of their book is clear from the beginning: the diagnosis of an evolution in apparent contradiction with its own premises. On the one hand, the ‘advancement of thought’ – enlightenment in the widest sense – “has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters”, while one the other “the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.” (DE, 1) Apparently, something must have gone wrong: the enlightenment’s program of disenchanting the world did not work as it was supposed to. The celebration of reason is the certainty that light is always better than darkness. What is enlightened is clearer and apt to be properly used, therefore there is a pragmatic value of reason that is related with the satisfaction of one’s own desires through the improvement of

32 one’s own ability to interact with reality and change it. “Power and knowledge are synonymous”, they write. (DE, 2) Since superstition and prejudice hamper the scientific development and the control over nature offered by it, they are considerer the principal enemies of reason. They constitute an obstacle to the deployment of power in the form it came to assume during Modern Age. One of the outcome of Enlightenment and its critical attitude has been thus the establishment of a truth-criterion based on the better argument: what one claims to be true in front of others has to be proven true within a common standard everyone can relate to at the individual level. This way, Adorno and Horkheimer write, enlightenment becomes ‘totalitarian’, for “no matter which myths are invoked against it, by being used as arguments they are made to acknowledge the very principle of corrosive rationality of which enlightenment stands accused.” (DE, 4) The totalitarian character of Enlightenment derives from its conviction in the power of the better argument, whose presupposition lies in the universal character of rationality. In the very moment you try to oppose it, you must comply with its rule. Even the undermining of rationality must be conducted in rational terms. This corrosive principle cannot be grounded in anything but reason, since it belongs personally to each of us while being at the same time a common feature of mankind. However, there are two main problems with this concept of reason. The first is that reason eventually becomes represented only by science, because the latter is seen as the best model possible of the former, its purest and highest form, so to speak. Apparently, there seems to be a shift from the celebration of reason as procedural test for coherence to a celebration of science as the only procedure possible to derive truth: since the scientific method is taken to be the best model of the better argument, everything must submit to its evidence. This is the heaviest charge against the Enlightenment seen as the historical father of our era: that the test of reason to which everything must submit, and about which Kant writes in the opening of his first Critique, eventually is nothing but the scientific experiment, which requires quantification, calculation, and prediction. We can see this thesis clearly expressed in passages such as: “For enlightenment, anything which does not conform to the standard of calculability and utility must be viewed with suspicion.” (DE, 3); and “For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry.” (DE, 4); but especially: “Enlightenment, however, is the philosophy which equates truth with the scientific system.” (DE, 66) Consequently, only what can be put under this standard and ‘pass the test’ can be used as truth. The severity and implacability of this method is what revealed metaphysics as false, and “science could manage

33 without such categories.” Indeed, the power of such a procedure is devastating, and we truly managed to make of nature what we wanted to. The problem, though, is precisely this ‘what’ that ‘we wanted’. The restrictions provided to what we can claim to be true has been demonstrated to be too strict, for a reflection on the ‘reasons of reason’, on its values and aims, remains cut off from the candidates to the category of universal truth. Nietzsche, already in Human, all too Human, considered this problem when he asks: “Knowledge can allow as motives only pleasure and pain, utility and injury: but how will these motives come to terms with the sense of truth?” (HAH, §32) In other words, the reasons for which we use reason in a certain way, the aims for which we want to master nature, are not justifiable by the scientific method and the positivist doctrine erected to defend it, since “Science itself has no awareness of itself; it is merely a tool.” (DE, 66) This attitude is related in fact with the Enlightenment’s suspicion towards personal values, which are considered subjective and relative stances preventing a pure, impersonal knowledge of the world. Any obstacle to the scientific subjugation of the world to mankind is seen with suspicion as a possible expression of obscurantism and superstition. The power to know and control all that is natural must not know limits. The world, in Horkheimer and Adorno’s view, is becoming a blind mechanism triggered by principles of lucid rationality, which nonetheless cannot be considered reasonable, because incapable of justifying any reason whatsoever for its own movement, except that of increasing the more and more the perfection with which it transforms reality, calculates effects, and increments profit. But the reasons for which it does so escape its capacity for judgment. “The notion of self-understanding of science conflicts with the concept of science itself” (DE, 66) they write, because any self-understanding presupposes a transcendence that cannot be implemented in the system of intensities and transformations with which science can deal. Its righteousness is only assumed by its own praxis.

Apart from the problematic shift from reason to science as the only procedure to derive truth, and the difficulty in claiming as right particular aims in the use of the scientific method, there is another problem concerning the relationship between two conflicting grounds for reason: one subjective and the other inter-subjective. The same characteristic that makes reason the standard by which true can be asserted, and that triggers the circularity by which every argument asserted against it reinforces its status quo, leads also to a contradiction that undermines its rationality. We can start from a passage from page 65: “The system which enlightenment aims for is the form of knowledge which most ably deals with the facts, most effectively assists the subject in mastering nature. The system’s principles are those of self- 34 preservation. Immaturity amounts to the inability to survive. […] The difficulties within this concept of reason, arising from the its subjects, the bearers of one and the same reason, are in real opposition to each other, are concealed in the Western Enlightenment behind the apparent clarity of its judgments.” The are four essential points here: (1) knowledge assist the subjects; (2) the use of knowledge is for self-preservation; (3) subjects are the bearers of one and the same reason; and (4) subjects are in real opposition to each other. As said above, reason is grounded both subjectively and inter-subjectively. As for the first, reason is seen as a feature of the individual subject, because it is used to acquire knowledge that serves purposes of self-preservation. With respect to the second, though, reason belongs to the subject only in the moment it is legitimized by the interaction with other subjects. Other people constantly remind us about the rationality or irrationality of our actions and decisions. Indeed, the rational character of actions and discourses is a matter of dispute that can be settled, when possible, only inter-subjectively. They provide the standard itself through which we assess our use of reason and withstand its consequences. So we use others in order to enhance our capacity for self-preservation, but at the same time we are the condition of possibility for others to enhance their self-preservation at our expenses. Theoretically, this dialectic could finds its balance if the enhancement of our self-preservation coincided with the self- preservation of society as a whole. But this depends on the understanding we have of self- preservation. The only understanding possible from the perspective of the Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer claim, if it really has to make sense of it, is a scientific one. Following this interpretation, self-preservation is seen as an instinct, a product of physiological impulses, a merely biological function having certain actions as a result. “According to Kant” they write, “from the standpoint of scientific reason moral forces are neutral drives and forms of behavior, no less than immoral ones, which they immediately become when no longer directed at that hidden possibility but at reconciliation with power. Enlightenment expels difference from theory. It considers “human actions and desires exactly as if I were dealing with lines, planes, and bodies.” (Spinoza, Ethics, Pt. III, Pref., 84)” Reason is thus, considered from a subjectivist perspective, a tool that allows the enhancement of self-preservation. It answers a biological need of the individual, justifying this way its own functioning by the only means through which something can be justified: science. From a sociological perspective, though, the primate of reason as a standard to impose truth and produce knowledge is guaranteed by the transversal utility that truth and knowledge should have for the society implementing them. Without the cooperation of all, individual reason cannot be instantiated,

35 and its explicit aim as a tool for mankind to exit is state of minority would lose its meaning. The problem is thus the ‘real opposition’ between those subjects who, pursuing their own self-preservation, prevent instead other people’s thriving, undermining at the same time the conditions of possibility of their own individual use of reason. “The citizen who renounced a profit out of the Kantian motive of respect for the mere form of the law would not be enlightened but superstitious – a fool.” (DE, 67) The paradoxical outcome of this ambivalence in the character of reason is thus that individuals, justifying their actions by means of a concept of self-preservation interpreted as the result of a necessary and scientifically explainable biological constraint, tend to subjugate and annihilate other subjects, who in their turn constitute the fundamental environment for the legitimization of a totalitarian use of reason as the only way for the progress of mankind. The scientific justification of self- preservation undercuts so its own means for rational justification, for these are provided only inter-subjectively. In other words, this interpretation of self-preservation, the only possible replacement of any morality, since “moral philosophies are acts of violence performed in the awareness that morality is non-deducible” (DE, 67), leads as inevitable outcome to a collective self-destruction. The absolute positive character of truth, as Nietzsche anticipated, is revealed as metaphysical on both levels: subjective and inter-subjective. Not only truth is not always good, indeed, but also its real consequences are even the opposite of its presupposed outcomes. If knowledge is synonym with power, then power is eating itself away, and ‘reason turned against itself’. The irrational character of rationality has been revealed in all its unsettling clarity. Enlightenment has cast a shadow on the history of Western thought: light is not always better than darkness; actually, it was better not to unveil what was lying deep in darkness.

However, the real problem in Adorno and Horkheimer’s diagnosis is mainly constituted by the fact that none of the two problems above are part of the self-understanding of contemporary society. The ‘few steps back’ Nietzsche was referring to have never been taken seriously. What people don’t openly admit is what they fail to recognize. This failure is for Adorno and Horkheimer the dialectical component in the process of enlightenment that they hypostatize implicitly as a metaphysical feature of the system. The relapse into myth of the enlightenment is the real tragedy, and in that unavoidable, of the destiny of mankind. Throughout the whole book, in fact, it is hard not to feel despair caused by the suggestion that any attempt to subvert the situation would be immediately assimilated in the same process of alienation it tries to oppose. In other words, it is not possible for society to take those steps back, and reflect on its 36 situation as a whole. Those who recognize it, who succeed, recalling Nietzsche, in “encompassing and feeling within himself the total consciousness of mankind” would consequently “collapse with a curse of existence – for mankind has as a whole no goal” and must be “reduced to despair.” On the one hand, the majority of society will fail in recognizing the dark consequences of the development of enlightenment, condemning history to proceed in its circular path and fall back into myth; on the other, the intellectuals who manage to see the path traced in front of mankind will be forced at the same time to recognize the impossibility of a reversal, the impossibility of a self-understanding and awareness that gives mankind the possibility to determine its own path. Reason is thus condemned to be a strange to itself, a mechanism put constantly in action without really understanding the reasons for why it does so. The myth, into which enlightenment relapses, consists in alienation and reification. Ethical life is governed by principles which must compulsorily answer to imperatives dictated by a functionalist, instrumental rationality, incapable of justifying ethics except that on a scientific conception of self-preservation. This conception is again, after the demolition of metaphysics, metaphysical. Society is, in Adorno and Horkheimer’s view, a place where the Nietzschean last men eventually affirmed themselves, without having any awareness of the process that led them to ‘victory.’ We are literally sleepwalking towards extinction.

For both Nietzsche and the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment, then, the path of Western thought leads inevitably to a nihilistic moment. The distrust in metaphysics brought about by the celebration of science and reason corresponds to a crisis of values. Reason becomes incapable of justifying its own aims as Reason; it only serves the pursuit of particular interests, which in their turns undermine the possibility of reason itself, revealing in such a way the underlying irrationality of its own character. Nietzsche, “like few others since Hegel” write Adorno and Horkheimer, “recognized the dialectic of enlightenment,” however, they continue, his attitude to it remained ambivalent, because it was taken to be both “the universal movement of sovereign mind, whose supreme exponent he believed himself to be, and a ‘nihilistic’, life-denying power.” (DE, 36) However, as they say, Nietzsche was aware of this twofold character of enlightenment. They seem to think, though, that he couldn’t keep them coherently together, and that eventually only the second moment prevailed in his philosophy, constituting so the heritage to his ‘pre-fascist followers’. At this point, then, Nietzsche becomes in Dialectic of Enlightenment the philosopher who reveals how the domination of what is ‘blindly objective and natural’ follows the ‘subjugation of everything natural to the 37 sovereign subject.’ Where does lie, then, the fundamental difference between them? Where do their theories start to become irreconcilable? A possible answer is that, contrary to Adorno and Horkheimer, Nietzsche fully embraces and accepts the nihilistic thesis, while insisting at the same time on the necessity to overcome it. He believes that only overcoming nihilism in such a way, ‘the banner of the Enlightenment’ can be borne further onward. This position can appear, indeed, as extremely paradoxical. Adorno and Horkheimer, instead, think that in order to overcome nihilism we must find an alternative to it. If we accept the nihilistic core thesis, that meaning cannot be grounded metaphysically, then in their opinion the reversal of enlightenment into myth is unavoidable, because meaning eventually is always metaphysical. The problem with this, though, is that the intellectual finds himself short of solutions that are sharable at the inter-subjective level. A proper description of this situation can be found in van den Brink’s exposition of Adorno’s situation: “Adorno never stops pointing to the possibility of a state of freedom, of human flourishing, that has overcome the reification – a state of redemption or reconciliation that, throughout his career, he has tried to unearth from the ruins of failed Enlightenment. However, this ‘pointing to’ remains notoriously vague.” In order to spell out a positive theory about how to free oneself from the dialectic of enlightenment, that is, from alienation and reification, would require “the abandonment of an instrumental rationality and its identity thinking.” But this coincides with abandoning the possibility of a rational theory that can be shared and accepted inter-subjectively. So “Lacking any firm knowledge about what it would mean to reason in such a way in practice, this very spelling out would involve a use of concepts that cannot escape the pitfalls of identity thinking.” (RP, 81) This mode of thinking can in fact be understood as the interpretation of the world in terms of correspondence between the objects we know and the concepts we use to refer to them. This correspondence is guaranteed by a metaphysical foundation of meaning, for which we correctly apply the concept to something when that thing satisfies the criteria of individuation provided by the thing-in-itself that is supposed to render the concept meaningful. In stating that a morality, to overcome nihilism, must think in a non-identitarian way of thinking – “a mode of thought that does not assume that a concept fully captures and thereby determines its object” – (RP, 87), one is already using identity thinking. We can see then why Adorno finds in the ‘ineffable insights’ offered by things such as art and love the only refuge left open. (As the one Kant saw in the ideality of all appearances with respect to the skeptical idealist doubt. A377-8) Rational discourse does not supply the means for developing a way out of nihilism, consequently we must look for it somewhere else, through other forms

38 of expression. Indeed, Nietzsche as well thought something similar, as shown by his constant research into different styles, but it is also true that he never renounced in the power of concepts as means to convey a new kind of meaning. The fact that Adorno wrote other books after Dialectic of Enlightenment might be seen as an instantiation of a similar hope, but without the belief in the possibility of creating a coherent philosophical theory. What justified his distrust in this possibility? Fundamentally, the fact that such a theory should have to renounce, in his opinion, to ‘openness to particulars’. (RP, 87) The abstraction and generalization required by reason in the moment in which it develops a theory cannot account for the particularity of meaning and sense. Its richness is lost in the process, it is the price to pay in order to master nature, to ‘resolve everything into numbers, and ultimately into one,’ as already anticipated in the Dialectic by the sentence: “Enlightenment expels difference from theory,” (DE 67) and it does so in virtue of its inescapable mechanism. This can be seen as yet another characterization of nihilism: the identity (metaphysical) thinking is the only modus operandi of reason, and this path leads to a void of meaning.

Nietzsche, on the other hand, tries to overcome nihilism first of all by accepting its thesis. His attempt might be described as an experiment, initiated during the period of Human, all too Human, on what he called ‘the after-effect of knowledge’. In that text, though, we can’t find an answer to such a problem, a part from a small hint in §34. For this he had to wait a few years, until that particularly fertile period in which he wrote The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. So, in his last book, he characterizes the paradoxical character of his philosophy: “The psychological problem apparent in the Zarathustra type is how someone who to an unprecedented degree says no and does no to everything everyone has said yes to so far, – how somebody like this can nevertheless be the opposite of a no-saying spirit; how a spirit who carries everything that is most difficult about fate, a destiny of a task, can nonetheless be the lightest, spinning out into the beyond – Zarathustra is a dancer –; how someone with the hardest, the most terrible insight into reality, who has thought ‘the most abysmal thought,’ can nonetheless see it not as an objection to existence, not even to its eternal return […]” (EH, 131) He thus think as possible to say no and nevertheless say yes as well. Both Adorno and Nietzsche see an impossibility to renounce to the ‘identity thinking’, because this would basically mean renouncing to meaning, and eventually to life. The two attitudes towards this insight are anyway completely opposite. For Adorno and Horkheimer, Nietzsche’s attitude consists eventually in the acceptance of what is blindly objective and natural, for if you understand and accept the nihilistic thesis then you must look at life as a purposeless, 39 biological phenomenon where reason is only the instantiation, through identity-thinking, of knowledge as power and subjugation, and not the expression of man’s freedom through choice. Even if this conception is delegitimized by the ‘cessation of the metaphysical outlook’, it is imposed at the same time as condition for self-preservation. We are always forced to ‘attach this concept of nature to nature.’ For Nietzsche, we could argue, Adorno and Horkheimer did not have that ‘great exertion of mind’ required to fulfill the past hopes they write about. Through their complete distrust in reason, and also in life in that reason is an expression of it (both at the subjective and inter-subjective level), they negate the premises necessary to overcome the problem. The outcome of Enlightenment must consist in a re- evaluation; otherwise alienation and reification are the only alternative left.

If it’s true that for Adorno “only the damaged subject can experience and – albeit imperfectly – reflect upon the damages that are done to its life” (RP, 85), then we could say that Nietzsche thought of himself to be the most damaged philosopher, the ‘perfect nihilist’, someone “with the hardest, the most terrible insight into reality, who has thought ‘the most abysmal thought,’” and consequently the philosopher who best reflected on the nature of these damages. The result of this process consists, if this reading is right, in the overcoming of nihilism by finding not an alternative to it, but a completely new perspective on the issue at stake. This shift consists in a re-evaluation of knowledge, life, and their relationship, and must start first of all by a non-metaphysical grounding of meaning. Since meaning for Nietzsche as much as for Horkheimer and Adorno is always, as it have been hopefully shown above, metaphysical in its linguistic and rational instantiations, then a new grounding of meaning must embrace and include its metaphysical manifestation, not denying it. Through metaphysics, meaning is nonetheless conveyed, just not the one professed with regard to truth and the different truth-criteria with which knowledge is to be regarded; in other words, as an absolute truth. The answer to this problem is for Nietzsche, his theory of perspectivism. The relation between the damaged subject, and his capacity to reflect upon problems in a different way, can be useful to understand how this theory is possible only conceiving of a different relation between reason and the body.

The aim of this chapter was to find an answer to the question of the possibility of overcoming the nihilistic crisis. In order to do so, it tried to show that the nihilistic thesis requires the searching for a different kind of grounding for meaning. To understand the value of 40 metaphysics, and to begin a historical philosophy concerned with the value of our thirst for knowledge and the different forms it has acquired, are essential ideas for Nietzsche’s attempt to provide an alternative to our metaphysical need. Insofar as we will not take seriously the problems posed by the cessation of the metaphysical outlook, the nihilistic crisis will continue to be reasserted. The values underlying our use of reason will continue to be out of reach, and mankind, alienated and unable to act accordingly to collectively shared goals, will be unable to properly face the global threats caused by its inconsiderate subjugation of the natural world. The next chapter will consequently try to carefully relate the ‘meaning of the earth’ with a different conception of the relation between reason, the body, and life, in order to defend perspectivism as the only way to overcome nihilism and open up the possibility of a revaluation.

41 2nd Chapter: The meaning of the earth

This chapter will focus on the role of the body in Nietzsche’s theory of meaning. A different conception of the relation between consciousness and the body is in fact necessary if reason is to be legitimized on a different ground, and nihilism is to be overcome. The role of the body is essential in understanding perspectivism, because only when properly conceived it allows explaining the creation of meaning as a bodily inter-subjective activity, the aim of which is to constrain one’s own body with respect to others. This way, our perspectives can be characterized since their very beginning as constituting, and constituted by, all other perspectives. This element is fundamental if the solipsism and disorientation entailed by the nihilistic crisis, with regard to the lack of objective standing of our values, is to be avoided. The importance of this chapter with regard to the overall aim of the thesis is thus to offer a different conception of the nature of meaning, on which perspectivism can be grounded. The relation between consciousness and the body presented here plays the pivotal role in the revaluation of life-negating values and the overcoming of nihilism.

There is a point in Nietzsche’s life when illness acquires a therapeutic value insofar as it allows the disclosure and embodiment of new perspectives. Experimenting with himself, passing through various kinds of health, he examines the correlated differences in his mode of philosophizing and, consequently, in the different world-views he comes to endorse. This crucial point takes place during the composition of the Gay Science, where thinking is described as a physiological activity dependent on the overall state of the organism. The emergence of consciousness within the organic coincides with the need of organisms to communicate with each other. In human beings, therefore, the capacity to express and convey meaning linguistically, i.e. by means of concepts, always responds to constraints dictated by their own body. In this scenario, the task of assimilating knowledge and making it instinctive becomes central. The Nietzschean concept of ‘the meaning of the earth’ is supposed to solve two problems related with this task. First, it must show how the knowledge Nietzsche is referring to differs radically from the metaphysical mode of thinking that has been incorporated at the beginning of the history of Western thought. Second, it must explain how consciousness can actively affect the body and change it, even though its possibilities are always constrained by unconscious drives.

42 Specifically, this second problem represents a challenge to the possibility of overcoming nihilism, because, when considered as a symptom of physiological decadence, it might be considered immune to philosophical, rational solutions. Through the discussion of Reginster’s book, the second part of this chapter will argue in favor of the possibility of a revaluation based on Nietzsche’s concept of the meaning of the earth, which considers meaning as the mechanism through which bodies transform themselves by taking into account other bodies’ practices. Through this characterization, an alternative conception of truth and objectivity should be able to justify a metaethical revaluation, rejected by Reginster, who regards as a solution a substantive revaluation grounded on Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power. However, this strategy runs the risk of dangerous outcomes on the ethical level, since its loose character gives rise to completely different and contrasting interpretations. In particular, it reduces nihilism to a simple personal issue and its overcoming to an individually centered revaluation, based on a psychological interpretation of the will to power. The affirmation of life would concern in such a way our particular lives, and not ‘life’ as a process of evaluation and creation of meaning. As it will be shown in the last chapter, this would consist for Nietzsche in a metaphysical reinstatement of life-negating values, since to evaluate life in a substantive way presupposes a perspective grounded ‘outside’ life, which is metaphysical and therefore illusory.

2.1 Bodies and meaning.

At the end of the first chapter, Adorno’s damaged subject was compared with Nietzsche, in order to draw the attention on the relation between one’s capacity to reflect on one’s own condition and what enables the development of this capacity. One has to perceive the problem in a determinate manner to be able to properly reflect on it. In this respect, The Gay Science represents a step forward in Nietzsche’s philosophy, in that it provides the basis for a new interpretation of the relation between reason and the body. The preface to the second edition, written after the completion of the Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, revolves around this topic, furnishing precious details through which we can interpret other parts of the book. There he writes, referring to himself: “A philosopher who has passed through many kinds of health, and keeps passing through them again and again, has passed through an equal number of philosophies; he simply cannot but translate his state every time into the most spiritual form and distance – this art of transfiguration just is philosophy.” (GS, 6) Nietzsche, thus, 43 believes that the activity of thinking responds to precise constraints: if someone is in a certain kind of health, his philosophy will compulsorily be different than if he were in another condition. There is a correspondence between one’s philosophy and one’s own health, and the former is seen as a transfiguration of the latter. This idea is an evolution of his earlier theory for which concepts and language in general are transfigurations of perceptions. The first point to appreciate here is that philosophy represents, indeed, a kind of health, but only as transfiguration, as an interpretation in a spiritual form of something other than spiritual. What grounds this claim is the idea that everything that has spiritual form is nothing but a transfiguration of a physiological state into the ‘realm of reason’, and that consequently reason is not an independent reality, in respect to its functioning (and not content), but reflects in a distorted way a particular physical state. Nietzsche shifts from reason as a transcendental faculty to reason seen as a physiological means to symptomatize a state of health. This conception of reason allows him to ask: “What will become of the thought that is itself subjected to the pressure of illness?” The nature of this question must be intended in the sense of a new possibility in our use of reason when our physiological state changes. It is not, therefore, a ‘mere’ question of which thoughts we have when we are ill, but one of revealing a whole new way of reasoning, a new interpretation of the world, “so too we philosophers, should we become ill, temporarily surrender with body and soul to illness.” The benefit of such an attitude consists in the development of a particular ability: that of learning how these transpositions take place: their rules and their mechanisms. “After such a self-questioning, self-temptation,” he writes, “one acquires a subtler eye for all philosophizing to date; one is better than before at guessing the involuntary detours, alleyways, resting places, and sunning places of thought to which suffering thinkers are led and misled on account of their suffering; one now knows where the sick body and its needs unconsciously urge, push, and lure the mind.” If the problem is how we think, if it comes from our metaphysical conception of meaning, then the solution comes from looking after the different instantiations of this process. The illness acquires a new, therapeutic value, but only insofar as thoughts are considered symptomatic transfigurations of physiological states. If one does not recognize this connection, one will lack the means to actively participate in the formation of a new perspective. The common trait of all metaphysician is in fact that of having operated under the ‘seduction of morality’, without recognizing their philosophizing as manifestation of these unconscious drives. This intuition gives him the pretext to interpret the whole history of Western philosophy under a new light: “The unconscious disguise of physiological needs

44 under the cloaks of the objective, ideal, purely spiritual goes frighteningly far – and I have asked myself often enough whether, on a grand scale, philosophy has been no more than an interpretation of the body and a misunderstanding of the body. Behind the highest value judgments that have hitherto guided the history of thought are concealed misunderstandings of the physical constitution – of individuals or classes or even whole races. All those bold lunacies of metaphysics, especially answers to the question about the value of existence, may always be considered first of all as symptoms of certain bodies.” (GS, 5)

To conceive of nihilism as a problem that can be accepted and overcome at once, thus, Nietzsche needs a radically new interpretation of the body, and he thought to have reached it by experimenting with himself. He literally investigated, through illness and the fluctuant variations of his health, the correspondent changes in his way of thinking. Considering his thinking only as a transfiguration of the state of his body, he thought to arrive at a better understanding of the mechanism that regulates every transfiguration by comparing their differences. This strategy allowed the formation of new, disturbing perspectives on the whole relationship between reason and physiological constraints, and consequently on the value of knowledge and truth. He describes the result as follows: “from such abysses, from much severe illness, also from the illness of severe suspicion, one returns newborn, having shed one’s skin, more ticklish and malicious, with a more delicate taste for joy, with a more tender tongue for all good things, with merrier sense, joyful with a more dangerous second innocence, more childlike, and at the same time a hundred times subtler than one had ever been before.” (GS, 7) This sentence expresses, indeed, a radically different approach, attitude, and mood, compared with the dark tone of Dialectic of Enlightenment. We can suppose, then, that some of Nietzsche’s insights and intuitions gave him reasons not to be so pessimistic after all. The only standpoint from which we can evaluate our global condition must be, in his opinion, ‘beyond good and evil’, because any value finds his perspectival justification only within our condition. The application of theses values judgments to people and their actions as though we could know their essence is metaphysical, as though they were good or evil in themselves. A transcendent ground, in relation to which we can claim something to be either good or evil, is in fact necessary. Instead, when we consider this world in its widest sense, or something in its ‘intrinsic’ nature, no value can be applied to it, because any value of this kind would be grounded in a perspective ‘beyond the world’, which is metaphysical and consequently false. From this awareness, a ‘second innocence’ must follow, because no human action can be evaluated as ‘good’ or ‘evil’ with respect to the business of the whole universe. Moreover, it 45 allows him to look at all universal values with a different, subtler eye, because he recognizes the implicit physiological state underlying the metaphysical character of those values.

Now that we have outlined Nietzsche’s path as exposed in the preface, we can examine in depth his various arguments concerning reason, the body, and the problem of nihilism. The departure point of Nietzsche’s conception of reason is a theory of the nature of consciousness. In his view, consciousness can be intended in two quite different senses: the first, thinnest and ‘allowed’ meaning coincides with the simple fact of being aware of something. The other one is instead the reification of the aforementioned activity, induced by our use of language that tends to identify a subject to itself through time, as though there were a transcendent substance allowing the correct application of the same name to something that is always in a process of becoming. The latter is discarded as metaphysical, while the former is seen as a function of the organism: “Consciousness is the latest development of the organic, and hence also its most unfinished and unrobust feature.” Since its capacities are not fully developed, the risk is that consciousness brings about more dangers than benefits. If it was maintained as an activity useful for the preservation of individuals, it is only because it was heavily constrained by our instincts, which are seen as the power of the organism to take over its consciousness when needed: “If the preserving alliance of the instincts were not so much more powerful, if it did not serve on the whole as a regulator, humanity would have to perish with open eyes of its misjudging and its fantasizing, of its lack of thoroughness and its incredulity – in short, of its consciousness.” Nonetheless, precisely by means of this misjudging, we came to hypostasize this activity as something ahistorical, eternal, which could actually have a life on his own, once the body is dead: “One thinks it constitutes the kernel of man, what is abiding, eternal, ultimate, most original in him!” But, especially, the real problem is its supposed identity, its being what in us never changes, because it brought us to conceive of it as something that cannot improve, as a function always identical to itself: “One takes consciousness to be a given determinate magnitude! One denies its growth and intermittences! This ridiculous overestimation and misapprehension of consciousness has the very useful consequence that an all-too-rapid development of consciousness was prevented.” The question now open is the one of what consciousness might become. If there was a time where consciousness functioned better when mastered by the instincts, now the situation might be different, precisely in virtue of our (Nietzsche’s) new conception of truth. We come to see all the errors that consciousness, mastered by our instincts, propagated through history, first of all those concerning its own self-understanding. The awareness of this fact must bring along a renewal, 46 not only in our conception of consciousness, but in its own functioning: “The task of assimilating knowledge and making it instinctive is still quite new; it is only beginning to dawn on the human eye and is yet barely discernible – it is a task seen only by those who have understood that so far we have incorporated only our errors and that all of our consciousness refers to errors!” (GS, §11)

This idea that knowledge can be incorporated and made a function of the body can be seen as problematic in at least two ways. First, this process is not as new as he seems to claim, since elsewhere, for instance in §110 of the same book, he writes that the origin of knowledge lies precisely in the production of useful errors, which have been permutated in an essential feature of our mankind: “Such erroneous articles of faith, which were passed on by inheritance further and further, and finally almost became part of the basic endowment of the species, are for example: that there are enduring things; that there are identical things; that there are things, kinds of material, bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be; that our will is free; that what is good for me is also good in and for itself. Only very late did the deniers and doubters of such propositions emerge; only very late did truth emerge as the weakest form of knowledge. It seemed that one was unable to live with it; that our organism was geared for its opposite: all its higher functions, the perceptions of sense and generally every kind of sensation, worked with those basic errors that had been incorporated since time immemorial.” Consequently, how should someone who has understood this set for himself the task of assimilating knowledge and making it instinctive, if it is precisely that which always happened and that constitutes now the problem? The second issue is instead that, on the one hand, our task is to make knowledge instinctive, in other words, we must modify our physiological state through our consciousness; while on the other, consciousness is governed by the organism, and its functioning must respond to physiological constraints. How is then consciousness supposed to actively constrain the body, if the intellect operates under the control of the instincts?

Nietzsche offers a possible solution to both problems in Zarathustra’s speech ‘On the Despisers of the Body’. Allow me to quote it at length:

“Body am I and soul” – so speaks a child. And why should one not speak like children? 47 But the awakened, the knowing one says: body am I through and through, and nothing besides; and soul is just a word for something on the body.

The body is a great reason, a multiplicity with one sense, a war and a peace, one herd and one shepherd.

Your small reason, what you call “spirit” is also a tool of your body, my brother, a small work – and plaything of your great reason.

“I” you say and proud of this word. But what is greater is that in which you do not want to believe — your body and its great reason. It does not say I, but does I.

What the sense feels, what the spirit knows, in itself that will never have an end. But sense and spirit would like to persuade you that they are the end of all things: so vain they are.

Work – and plaything are sense and spirit, behind them still lies the self.

The self also seeks with the eyes of the senses, it listens also with the ears of the spirit. Always the self listens and seeks: it compares, compels, conquers, destroys. It rules and is also the ruler of the ego.

Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, stands a powerful commander, an unknown wise man — he is called self. He lives in your body, he is your body.

There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom. And who knows then to what end your body requires precisely your best wisdom?” (Z, 22-3)

If reason is a feature or a product of consciousness, and consciousness is constrained by our physiological processes, then it is difficult to see how we could choose which knowledge we assimilate and make instinctive. Here, though, reason is described as ‘the great reason’, and it belongs to the body in a different way than it normally does to consciousness. We start to see here Nietzsche’s strategy to explain the value of the metaphysical conception of meaning within a broader framework, which includes the latter instead of denying it. The reason we normally refer to, in fact, is nothing but a reflection through language of our ‘great reason’. This reflection, which consists in translating meaning into concepts, is at the same time a

48 distortion of the ‘original’ meaning, so that we do not have direct access to it in our consciousness, intended as a discursive faculty where meaning is represented by concepts.

This is clear in the sentence: “It does not say I, but does I.” While consciousness can do nothing except saying, the body creates meaning as an activity. Language acquires in this conception a different function than it is normally thought to have. It is, as been noticed in many contemporary interpretations, the ‘essence’ of consciousness.14 This is, of course, not to be meant as metaphysical essence, for the historical and contingent character of language is reflected in the structure of our consciousness and reason. In book 5 of the Gay Science, Nietzsche characterizes consciousness as the product of our need to communicate: “it seems to me that the subtlety and strength of consciousness is always related to a person’s (or animal’s) ability to communicate; and the ability to communicate, in turn, to the need to communicate. […] Assuming this observation is correct, I may go on to conjecture that consciousness in general has developed only under the pressure of the need to communicate; that at the outset, consciousness was necessary, was useful, only between persons (particularly between those who commanded and those who obeyed); and that it has developed only in proportion to that usefulness. Consciousness is really just a net connecting one person with another — only in this capacity did it have to develop; the solitary and predatory person would not have needed it.” (GS, §354) This is, nonetheless, a genealogical account of the origin of consciousness as the means through which different bodies with similar instincts related each other and acted accordingly. However, one can see its function from another point of view, for adapting one’s own behavior in relation with other bodies means first of all to constrain one’s own body. The function of language as transfiguration acquires thus a precious characteristic: it is the way through which the body, the ‘great reason’, communicates with itself with respect to other bodies’ constraints, in order to unconsciously select particular drives at the expense of others.

Our consciousness is consequently a ‘knowing ourselves’ only insofar as this knowledge establish a relation between our bodies to other people’s bodies, and this relation constitutes an active means for our body’s own self-transformation. So, in the same aphorism, he goes on writing: “My idea is clearly that consciousness actually belongs not to man’s existence as an individual but rather to the community– and herd-aspects of his nature; that accordingly, it is finely developed only in relation to its usefulness to community or herd; and that

14 See for instance Owen, 1994, p. 22-3 49 consequently each of us, even with the best will in the world to understand ourselves as individually as possible, ‘to know ourselves’, will always bring to consciousness precisely that in ourselves which is ‘non-individual’, that which is ‘average’; that due to the nature of consciousness — to the ‘genius of the species’ governing it — our thoughts themselves are continually as it were outvoted and translated back into the herd perspective.” Our bodily constitution is thus what determines our consciousness and our thoughts in relation to others bodies. We can look at this theory as a transcendental argument for a pragmatic, non- metaphysical meaning. The interaction of different bodies, and their physical constitution, is the condition of possibility for the self-transformation of bodies through meanings that are created inter-subjectively. Therefore, we know ourselves only as reflection of the interaction of our bodies. In the prologue of the Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes:

“The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth!

I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth and do not believe those who speak to you of extraterrestrial hopes! They are mixers of poisons whether they know it or not.” (Z, 6)

This invitation, which is clearly connected with the speech ‘On the Despisers of the Body’,15 is a call to understand meaning in a different way. All knowledge, among which the knowledge that we can have of ourselves, is nothing but a reflection of the meaning of the earth, and so it should be conceived. This meaning has no content; it is not a ‘principle’ that we can express through language. Otherwise, it would acquire a metaphysical value; it would refer back to ‘extraterrestrial hopes’. Instead, it is a way of conceiving meaning and using language in a particular way. It means that all possible meanings, also the metaphysical ones, are grounded only in this world, they are nothing but a reflection of our bodies interactions with other bodies, both human and not. Insofar as metaphysical concepts are used in this way and affect the bodies that use them, their meaning is grounded pragmatically, and their value is

15 The despisers of the bodies are in fact those who speak of extraterrestrial, incorporeal hopes. To be faithful to the earth means to understand it as constitutive of meaning. Our values need to be grounded in the earth and not in a metaphysical ‘world beyond’; this is the assumption behind the revaluation of life-negating values. Life cannot be affirmed if what gives value to it are ‘extraterrestrial hopes’, for which that which makes life valuable is situated ‘outside’ life. The meaning of the earth is thus the principle of a revaluation of values, and we must remain faithful to it if we want to affirm life and invert the negative direction constituted by the nihilistic crisis. 50 determined precisely by their contribution to the modification of those bodies that use those concepts and for which those concepts have meaning.16 This theory accounts for both reason as a physiological process, which is not independent from our bodily constitution; and reason as an active process to modify our bodily constitution through knowledge. It answers this way the second problem we individuated above. So, metaphysics cannot be true in the sense of an absolute truth independent of our use of language, but can have a value as long as truth is conceived pragmatically.

This evolution of Nietzsche’s theory is in continuation with the theoretical insights of On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, while constituting an important shift in his conception of truth. In his early essay, in fact, there was no correspondence between our concepts and the world: concepts were only metaphors that are supposed to refer to things that do not actually exist. Now, instead, the existence of something to which our concepts correspond is grounded in the capacity of its meaning to affect bodies. Of course, they continue to be metaphors; they continue to refer to things that do not exist, but only insofar as we conceive of existence metaphysically. The correspondence between concepts and the world is thus secured pragmatically. Language will continue to instill in us the tendency to think metaphysically, but if we are properly reminded, we can avoid the consequences of this tendency.17 The identity of a person, for instance, forces us to look at this person as though she were always the ‘same’ person. This fact can be looked at in two quite different ways: if we conceive its meaning as justified only through the practices with which we relate to that person, then we are justified in using that concept. If we conceive of its meaning as something metaphysical, instead, and believe that in that person there is a ‘thing-in-itself’ which constitutes an identity that does not change through time, and that only in virtue of this essence we are allowed to apply the

16 Pippin, in his seminal lecture at the Collège de France on the Gay Science, correctly points out the pragmatic character of meaning in what he calls Nietzsche’s ‘primordiality problem’: “To know what we ought to believe or are entitled to assert or ought to do, we need to understand the nature of practical commitments to some governing standard that we have accepted, one governing what ought to be believed or asserted or done. To assert that something is the case, I unavoidably undertake a set of many related commitments to those to whom I make the assertion, commitments about what else I must affirm to be true and what I must refrain from asserting, given what I claim.” (2010, 25) The standard to which he refers is not established by any deliberative procedure, but is instead created by those same practices to which our assertions have to comply in order to be meaningful. 17 Here my reading of Nietzsche’s understanding of truth differs in an important way from the otherwise compelling account presented in Clark’s Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy. There she writes: “unless Nietzsche has a reason to reject our ordinary use of “true,” his new use would seem to reflect only an arbitrary linguistic decision of no philosophical interest.” (1990, 33) Nietzsche does not reject “our ordinary concept of truth because of its metaphysical nature”, as in her reconstruction claim those influenced by Deridda, but because of its metaphysical use. The nature of meaning is always pragmatic, but the use of concepts we have incorporated and that we have to change corresponds to a metaphysical understanding of their nature. 51 concept of identity, then we derive from it many arguments which are false, in that they’re not reflecting coherently the inter-subjective practice on which that meaning is grounded. In other words, by doing so we instill ‘extraterrestrial hopes’ and go against the meaning of the earth. Once we understand that those arguments are not true with respect to the metaphysical concept of truth, for instance that our consciousness survives the death of his body, we need to find another ground for truth which allows us to continue using the concept of identity.

We are finally in the position to make sense of the first problem: what does Nietzsche mean with the task of assimilating knowledge and making it instinctive? What humanity needs to do, if it is to overcome nihilism, is to ground meaning non-metaphysically, which coincides with serving the meaning of the earth. This means to start conceiving knowledge pragmatically, that is, as a set of beliefs that our bodies use to change themselves in respect to other bodies, and not as a set of beliefs that correspond to a ‘world’ independent of us. This task is enabled by our understanding that knowledge has always been assimilated and made instinctive, i.e. by our understanding of the pragmatic value of knowledge. If this task is new, then, is for two reasons: first, because, with respect to metaphysical knowledge, we have understood only now that it was assimilated in such a way. Second, because now we have to assimilate a new, different kind of knowledge, if we are to overcome nihilism.18 This insight makes sense only by taking seriously Nietzsche’s conception of the role of consciousness and language as means for the body to change itself, taking into account other bodies’ praxes and behaviors. This conception of meaning is the ground of Nietzsche’s theory of perspectivism, with which he thought to provide the basis for a re-evaluation of knowledge and life. Further on, in the aphorism 354 of the Gay Science that we examined above, he gives us good reasons to see it this way: “At bottom, all our actions are incomparably and utterly personal, unique, and boundlessly individual, there is no doubt; but as soon as we translate them into consciousness, they no longer seem to be… This is what I consider to be true phenomenalism and

18 Pippin focuses on a different aspect of the problem of assimilating knowledge, that is, “what we cannot do with what we take to be true.” (2010, 39) In other words, the death of God coincides with the advent of a failure of desire: “the problem of nihilism does not consist in a failure of knowledge or a failure of strength or courage or will but a failure of desire, the flickering out of some erotic flame.” (2010, 54) This interpretation is by no means in contrast with the one presented here. However, the search for an alternative foundation of meaning grounded in our body as the ‘great reason’ is essential if nihilism is not to undermine its own overcoming. Without accepting this aspect, which I defend in this chapter, the only solution left would be to wait and hope that this ‘erotic flame’, for some unknown reason, start to flicker again. We would not be in a position to actively make this happen: our consciousness and reason would just be at the mercy of our physiological constitution and its independent development. 52 perspectivism.” The role of the body as site of our great reason, and the meaning of the earth in which this reason is grounded, allow for an interpretation of existence in terms other than metaphysical. Once we articulate the creation of values in terms of the perspectives we embody, which are incomparable and unique and yet constituting each other from their very beginning, we will be in a adequate position to circumscribes the rational presuppositions embedded in our perspectival existence, which allow a revaluation of life-negating values and the positing of collectively shared goals.

2.2 Perspectives and objectivity.

The second part of this chapter, will introduce the problem of perspectivism. In order to do so, I will examine the recent and influential book by Bernard Reginster The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism. This analysis will be useful to clarify the fundamental role of the relation of body and meaning for the theory of perspectivism, and will argue that only accepting it nihilism does not undermine its own overcoming. One of the main arguments against this possibility is in fact based on the fact that nihilism conceives reason in a naturalistic way. This is, indeed, true, for consciousness is, from a nihilistic point of view, just the result of a physiological need of communicating with other and induce particular behaviors of one’s own body. Reason’s justifications and results are thus only ‘masks’ of physiological processes whose aims lie outside the space of reason. Our capability to influence these processes is thought to be only an illusion, because this capability is always in its turn enabled only by our physiological constitution. If the nihilistic crisis is a pathology caused by natural causes, philosophical discourses are unable to reverse the process. There is no ‘theoretical’ cure to illness.

This is exactly the thesis endorsed by Reginster, who writes: “In exposing the physiological roots of nihilism, philosophy would also, ipso facto, expose the limits of its own power to overcome it. For philosophical argument is powerless in the face of physiological decadence.” (39) In the light of the first part of this chapter, some of the reasons as to why Nietzsche would have had to reject this claim will be offered. Afterwards, these arguments can be compared with some interpretations of Nietzsche’s philosophy in Reginster’s book, in order to test them.

53 David Owen, in his review of Reginster’s book immediately points out: “philosophical argument (or if you prefer, philosophical prose) is not powerless in the face of physiological decadence but, rather, is concerned to effect the affects of a decadent audience in an effort to work on, to transform, their physiological condition.” (2009: 599) If one accepts Reginster’s claim about the relation of philosophy and physiology, in fact, then the overcoming of nihilism becomes not only difficult to justify, but especially to understand. Another point to underline is that, even if it is legitimate to say that philosophy exposes the physiological roots of nihilism, at the same time it could be said that nihilism exposes the physiological roots of philosophy. The decadence is not, in this reading, constituted by nihilism, but is revealed by the latter as the persistence of our conception of philosophy as a non-physiological phenomenon, even though this view is no longer accountable by Western Reason. Nihilism is seen from this point of view as the symptom of decadence only insofar as it is a reaction to the neglect of this decadence. Philosophy, moreover, in its countermovement against the acceptance of the nihilistic conclusions – the impossibility of a metaphysical grounding of meaning and its consequent crisis of values –might be seen as the only solution offered to physiological decadence. This should coincide with the ‘true’ continuation of Enlightenment, which Nietzsche professes since Human, all too human: a philosophy that grounds meaning in a new way by being aware of its physiological roots, enabling in such a way a revaluation of all values. On the contrary, if consciousness and our psychological features are not seen as physiological processes, as expressions and transfigurations of our ‘great reason’, it becomes difficult to understand how nihilism can be overcome, because metaphysics is implicitly reasserted in the criteria through which we have to assess any possible solution to it. Only in this reading philosophy becomes impotent in the face of the physiological roots of nihilism: we lack the means to create a theoretical solid ground on which to affirm any value whatsoever, because reason is not able to justify the reasons for which it operates. Put differently, we would not be able to evaluate ‘the value of values’.

With this in mind, Reginster’s interpretation can be approached starting from his own explanation of what nihilism is. The highly plausible claim around which his book is structured, is that Nietzsche’s whole philosophical project revolves around the problem of nihilism and its overcoming. Instead of departing from a single doctrine, such as the ‘will to power’, the ‘overman’, or the ‘eternal recurrence of the same’, and analyzing all the others as

54 dependent on it, they are all seen as possible solutions to the same central issue. This argumentative strategy has been praised by many of his reviewers (note), and is the same that is used here. Nonetheless, the risk is to interpret the whole body of Nietzsche’s work (including the Nachlass, in the case of Reginster) from a single perspective, which is quite dangerous when dealing with such a complex material. Moreover, the whole interpretation depends heavily on the analysis of this single ‘lens’. If some essential detail is overlooked, then the whole interpretation risks missing important outcomes and possible alternatives.

At the beginning of the first chapter, he writes: “In its broadest description, nihilism is the belief that existence is meaningless” (22) He goes on noticing that the best understanding of the term ‘meaningless’ in this case would be that life in general is not worth living, and that consequently meaning is equated with value. Nietzsche, in fact, uses interchangeably the terms ‘meaningless’ [sinnloss] and ‘valueless’ [Werthloss]. (23) From this consideration, nihilism is understood as a claim that “all that happens is meaningless.” Another distinction is made between goals, defined as particular states of affairs that should be attained, and values, the reasons for which we want that state of affair to be the case. In this case as well, Nietzsche uses the two terms interchangeably, and so does Reginster, although the latter also uses this distinction to individuate two forms of nihilism: disorientation and despair. The first consists in “the devaluation of the goals in the realization of which our life has hitherto found its meaning”; while the second is “the conviction that these goals are unrealizable.” (24) Without entering now into the details of both forms and the reasons for which he opts for nihilism as despair, when choosing which one best ‘represents’ Nietzsche’s position, we could immediately point out with Owen that “we might reasonably wonder whether these two forms of nihilism are not better construed as distinct, but related, expressions of a more basic notion of nihilism, namely, life directed against itself.” (599) Going beyond Owen’s proposal, one could argue that nihilism means the recognition of the impossibility to ground meaning metaphysically. This awareness immediately distinguishes two main attitudes towards itself: to believe that, consequently, meaning cannot be grounded at all – which consists in the reinstatement of metaphysics in an even more deep level (the implicit criteria for which something is meaningful) – and to believe that another ground for meaning is conceivable, given a particular account of the relation between our reason and our bodies. This is what Nietzsche calls ‘the meaning of the earth’, while the first attitude is what Owen means with ‘life directed against itself’. Disorientation or despair would be, from this point of view, particular psychological forms of nihilism, which are expressed only in a few individuals, and 55 whose relevance might be questionable if seen from a global perspective: that of the history and fate of Western thought. They would actually be only the explicit instantiations of nihilism. It might be argued that they are the inevitable consequences of the nihilistic thought; because what nihilism entails is that everyone should endorse such a position if he were to be rational. However, it was Nietzsche himself who wrote, already in Human, all too Human, about the possibility of different after-effects of knowledge. Despair and disorientation can be in fact considered only contingently related to the acceptance of the nihilistic thesis.

The relevance of the role of the body for a new ground of meaning is highly overlooked throughout the whole book, and this fact entails interpretative problems about the overcoming of nihilism itself. This could explain why nihilism is seen not only as the death of God, but also as the fact that we necessarily need a God and we necessarily cannot believe in him. With God, Nietzsche means the possibility of a metaphysical grounding of meaning, and consequently of value. If one thinks that meaning and values are possible only metaphysically, as things in themselves independent of our contingent perspectives, and that we cannot know these things because we cannot step out of our perspectives, then disorientation and despair are two perfect states to describe our reactions. Nietzsche, though, tries throughout his whole work to offer an alternative to this kind of nihilism, because he accepts the second thesis but not the first. He is a nihilist only insofar as the death of God is concerned, but not in respect to our need of him. This is why he thinks to be able to accept nihilism and overcome it at once. On the one hand, he accepts the nihilistic thesis, for which we cannot rationally accept anymore a metaphysical foundation of meaning and value. On the other, he tries to negate the thesis embedded in the nihilistic crisis: that we need a metaphysical foundation if absolute knowledge and universal values are to be possible. To be sure, as long as we conceive the concepts of ‘absolute’ and ‘universal’ as metaphysical, then no solution is ever to be found. Nietzsche’s attempt is thus to offer an alternative conception of meaning, grounded in the body as site of our great reason, in order to reconstruct the meaningfulness of those concepts on different premises, and re-legitimize reason as the tool allowing us to overcome nihilism.

If this analysis is right, then, two basic perspectives, which Nietzsche alternatively endorses while stating his claims, are often confounded. When, for instance, Reginster says that ‘no value is objective’ (25), the interpretation of this statement depends on the meaning assigned to the property of being ‘objective’. Otherwise, no re-evaluation of all values could follow from their devaluation. A theoretical discussion of the relation between meaning and value seems

56 also to be missing, even though Reginster himself notices this relation. The point, thus, is not to state that no value is objective, but rather that of conceiving a new, non-metaphysical conception of objectivity. Understanding differently the meaning of ‘objectivity’ is at the same time a re-evaluation of this concept and its possible uses. This is the same with other concepts of metaphysical flavor such as ‘intrinsic’, ‘necessary’, ‘universal’, ‘absolute’, ‘substance’, ‘essence’, ‘natural’, etc. In other words, the character itself of any process of abstraction operated by reason must be put under scrutiny, using a pragmatic conception of meaning. As we have seen, this conception is possible only grounding meaning in the activity of a body that changes itself with regards to other bodies’ praxes. The ‘nature’ of meaning is thus differential: it is the result of inter-subjective practices and not of the supposed correspondence to something ‘in-itself’. (Note: as Anderson (1998) reminds us: “Nietzsche conceives of a thing as the ‘sum of its effects’. This implies that the individuation conditions of each object depend on those of all the others: if one thing were different, it would have different effects on the other things, and since these things in turn are nothing but sums of effects, they would also de different things. Note 10) Moreover, this differential conception of meaning should account in the first place for the meaning of identity, if it is to overcome and at the same time explain the value of metaphysics. Two things would be identical, from this perspective, only insofar as our practices concerning these things allow our use of this concept. They would be identical only in respect to the relational properties that are considered in the linguistic context in which we refer to them. In this case there is no reason to refuse the use of such a concept. If, on the contrary, when we use this concept we refer to a supposed form or idea in itself – the origin of meaning itself, which is absolute, necessary, and eternal in a metaphysical sense – then two identical things are never to be found. Thus, if Nietzsche writes that identical things do not exist, this sentence is to be understood in the second case, not the first. Otherwise, he would not be allowed to make any statement, for all our concepts would be meaningful only insofar as they are metaphysical.

Now that this distinction has been made, we can look at some of Reginster’s claims. Describing nihilism as disorientation, he writes: “If there are no objective moral facts for our moral judgments to report, these must be the expressions of a merely subjective “perspective.” And if this is all they are, they lose their normative authority. But this inference rests on the assumption that the legitimacy of our values depends on their objective standing, their independence from our subjective perspectives. I will call this assumption normative objectivism.” (26) Nihilism as despair, instead, is different: “The wide scholarly consensus over 57 the interpretation of nihilism as a claim about values has effectively masked another conception of nihilism in Nietzsche’s work. This other conception is not a metaethical claim about our values but an ethical claim about the world, and our existence in it: “it would be better if the world did not exist”(WP, 701). In this interpretation, nihilism results not from the devaluation of our highest values, but from the conviction that they cannot be realized. Since nihilism, in this sense, is the conviction that our highest values cannot be realized, I propose to conceive of it as despair, since despair is the belief that what is most important to us in unattainable.” (28) In both cases, it seems that there is a failure in applying the distinction specified above. In the latter, nihilism is simply the denying of metaphysics coupled with its reassertion. This is clear because to the negation of a ‘world beyond’ that establishes the value of our world, what follows is a negative judgment about our world. However, this is the opposite of a philosophy ‘beyond good and evil’. The world Nietzsche is referring to, for instance also in statements such as “Our pessimism: the world does not have the value that we believed” (WP 32), is the metaphysical idea of the world that we have. Reginster claims that the last statement is to be understood as “the world is worth less than we thought,” (29) but we could interpret it instead as ‘the world is not evaluable on the same ground that we thought before’: the world does not have the kind of value (metaphysical) that we thought; indeed, it does not have a metaphysical value at all, because it is revealed as a metaphysical ideal. Its value can be assessed only in the different ways this concept is used, because the meaning of the concept ‘world’ is pragmatic and subject to historical and contextual changes. This is not to say that there are no people who draw the (wrong) conclusion that this world is worthless because there’s not a ‘world beyond’ in which its value is grounded. Indeed, there are, and they can be called nihilists and pessimists. Those people are actually those who, by denying metaphysics, continue to reassert it. Nietzsche, though, seems concerned with this problem on another, deeper level: that of establishing a perspective from which we can evaluate without needing a metaphysical ground. The world, in this sense, becomes the only means to evaluate, that is, to ground meaning. From this perspective, the world is actually worth much more than it was before, because it is our only option left to find values in our life, and consequently to have a meaningful life.

An interesting fact to notice as well is that this form of nihilism as despair finds confirmation only in the Nachlass, and not in the published works, as Reginster himself admits. He thus privileges this interpretation to nihilism as disorientation only for reasons of internal coherency in his interpretation, but these reasons are dependent on the definition of nihilism 58 that Reginster assumes at the beginning of the book: the belief that life is meaningless. If this definition is seen instead simply as a possible consequence of a broader definition, in which the theoretical problem (a non-metaphysical ground for meaning) is central with respect to the psychological problem (one’s own belief in the value of life), then nihilism as despair loses its priority for our understanding of nihilism, and becomes just one among many possible instantiations of it. Nihilism as disorientation is another of these possible instantiations, but it finds much more support in the published writing of Nietzsche. This might strengthen the interpretation that nihilism is first of all the sudden lack of the ground we have always had for evaluating, and whose consequence is thus the temporary research of a new means for orientation – a principle for evaluation. Also this reading, however, can be misleading, because the death of God already represents a point of orientation, even though it might considered barely sufficient: if we are to find a meaning, it is in this world that we will find it. Nihilism as disorientation is represented by those people who become aware of the impossibility to ground meaning metaphysically, but who at the same time do not know where to look for another ground. Disorientation is the result of what Reginster calls ‘normative objectivism’, for which our values are devalued once they are not objective anymore. Moral judgments are seen thereby as expressions of a ‘merely subjective’ perspective, and lose their normative authority because this authority is dependent on their ‘objective standing’. But, again, this interpretation depends on the meaning that we assign to ‘objective’, which in the condemnation of the values we have had so far is clearly meant in his metaphysical sense. However, Reginster does not take into account the possibility that disorientation could consist in the searching for a new conception of ‘objective’, which could maintain its meaning – that of not being expression of a ‘merely subjective’ expression – without being equated with the thing-in-itself, that which is independent of any possible perspective. “According to nihilism as disorientation,” he writes “there is nothing wrong with the world and something wrong with our values. According to nihilism as despair, by contrast, there is nothing wrong with our values but something wrong with the world.” (34) The two readings are from this point of view not only different, but also contrasting. This is so because “the devaluation of values appears to undermine despair, since we have no reason to trouble ourselves over the world’s being inhospitable to the realization of values we consider devalued.” (Ibid) Reginster consequently thinks that one of the two must be privileged. This understanding of the difference between these kinds of nihilism appears to suffer from the failure to recognize one’s own metaphysical thinking, because the world and our values are

59 seen as two distinct entities which are not dependent on each other. By contrast, the devaluation of our metaphysical values, which in Nietzsche’s view are nihilistic, has strong repercussions on our capabilities to evaluate the world and the lives that take place in it. Put differently, if there’s something wrong with our values, then there is something wrong with the world, because it is the context in which our values have been created and transmitted. Vice versa, if there’s something wrong with the world, then there is something wrong with our values, because they cannot be realized in it and consequently lose their value. From this perspective, instead of being contrasting, these two nihilistic attitudes become blurred. Nihilism as disorientation can in fact turn into despair in the moment someone realizes that is not able to find another source of normative authority other than a metaphysical conception of objectivity, because the world (with which something is wrong) does not provide any.

The issue of the relation between objectivity and perspectives in defining the disorientation- form of nihilism is very important for Reginster’s reconstruction of Nietzsche’s theory. More in general, showing the lack of objective standing in our values might be considered as a possible way to overcoming nihilism as despair, but it is rejected because it would results in disorientation. Reginster devolves his entire second chapter to this topic. As he puts it: “In Chapter 2, I suggest that one inviting form of revaluation consists in showing that the nihilistic values lack the sort of objective standing on which the legitimacy of any value depends. It does overcome despair, since, once again, there is no reason to deplore the unrealizability of values that are deemed illegitimate. However, this strategy proves unsatisfactory, because it trades one variety of nihilism (despair) for another (disorientation). I argue in Chapter 2 that Nietzsche takes his denial of objective values not to imply nihilistic disorientation. If this is true, however, this is also true of nihilistic values: their lack of objective standing no longer counts as an objection against them—it no longer devaluates them. But then we seem to be driven back to nihilistic despair.” (34)

This argument is based on the assumption that the perspectival character of our values coincides with their lack of objective standing. The result of admitting that our values are intrinsically bound to our ‘merely subjective’ perspectives entails a sort of moral relativism in which we have no means to privilege a value over another because we recognize that all values are not sharable on rational common grounds. We might endorse a value on reasons that are justified by our single perspectives, but we don’t have any argument to convince others that our values are the right ones, and consequently they lose their normative

60 authority. Nonetheless, a different interpretation of perspectivism renders this assumption implausible. Moreover, if perspectivism is an alternative to the metaphysical grounding of meaning in the thing-in-itself, nihilistic values cannot be equated anymore to objective values in general, at least without specifying that in that case ‘objective’ be considered possible only in its metaphysical conception. To appreciate this point, let’s focus on the quotation above: revaluation might consist in showing the lack of objective standing on which the legitimacy of values depends. However, the objectivity Nietzsche refers to is the metaphysical conception of ‘objective’, for no thing-in-itself guarantees the independence of our value judgments from our perspectives. Reginster, instead, equates the undermining of the (metaphysical) objectivity of nihilistic (metaphysical) values with the possible objectivity of any value whatsoever. Consequently, nihilism as despair is overcome, since all values are devalued and it does not matter anymore whether they can be realized in this world or not. However, it is really difficult to see how this strategy can be considered a revaluation at all, and in fact Reginster claims that this way of overcoming despair leads back to disorientation (even though he also claims, quite contradictorily, that it is ‘one inviting form or revaluation’). Nonetheless, if Nietzsche can show that a different conception of ‘objective’ is possible, then the devaluation of nihilistic values by undermining our conception of ‘objective’ as metaphysical is no longer identical to a devaluation of values in general, because another kind of objective values is possible. This would, indeed, consist in a proper revaluation, which targets only nihilistic values in that they require a metaphysical kind of objectivity, and allows avoiding disorientation.

In order to justify another conception of objectivity and truth, whose ground is the pragmatic character of meaning as bodily activity of self-transformation, a particular version of perspectivism needs to be outlined. This task will be carried out in the first part of the next chapter. This perspectivism, in which the ‘meaning of the earth’ guarantees the priority of our ‘great reason’ over the metaphysical tendency of our consciousness – since in Nietzsche’s view consciousness consists in the development of language (GS, §354)–, will have to be contrasted with the characterization of our perspectives as ‘merely subjective’. In Reginster’s opinion, in fact, these are responsible of the necessary disorientation following the devaluation of nihilistic values. He thus abandons the project of revaluation as the undermining of nihilistic values by showing their metaphysical character, and looks in the doctrine of the will to power for a possible alternative. However, the question remains open as to why the will to power represents a standard for the revaluation of values, if it is 61 supposed to constitute also the standard through which we can analyze nihilistic values as well. In Nietzsche’s ambitious opinion, in fact, the will to power is the principle through which any possible phenomenon becomes accountable by any possible perspective. In most literature, instead, it is seen as the principle of evaluation of our actions.19 This is the result of a failure in appreciating the difference between the will to power and reason as an expression of it. Only by a rational perspective, in fact, a will to power that undermines its own conditions of existence is devalued in that it goes against itself. However, life considered as an irrational phenomenon expresses as much as reason does the will to power. Therefore, this doctrine is not enough to evaluate our actions, unless we already consider the perpetuation of the will to power as valuable, for which reason is necessary. The will to power is what lie behind all process of evaluation, and as such it cannot constitute in itself the criterion through which evaluate those values, unless we first establish, for instance, that its perpetuation is more valuable than its self-destruction. This can be seen, for instance, by looking at this passage in the Zarathustra:

“Much that was called good by this people was called scorn and disgrace by another: thus I found. Much I found that was called evil here and decked in purple honors there.

Never did one neighbor understand the other: always his soul was amazed at his neighbor’s delusion and malice.

A tablet of the good hangs over every people. Observe, it is the tablets of their overcomings; observe, it is the voice of their will to power.” (Z, 42)

Reginster, by considering the will to power as the normative standpoint, goes on affirming that the revaluation consists in considering suffering valuable, because it is a component of our will to power. The latter is seen, from a psychological perspective, as both the will to reach one’s own goal and the desire for obstacles that prevent us from reaching that goal: “the will to power is the will to overcoming resistance.” (126) This is so, in short, because the value of our goals is directly proportional to the difficulty to attain them; if there is no resistance, then there is not desire and consequently value. Suffering is then considered as “the experience of dissatisfied longing or desire.” (176) An unconditioned affirmation of life

19 Franco, for instance, writes: “The will to power does not merely describe the basic motive that lies behind our actions; it names the fundamental principle of life. As such, it becomes the basis for evaluating our actions and ultimately our values themselves. Those actions or values that express or promote the will to power are more in accord with life and therefore more valuable than those that do not.” (2011, 170–171) 62 follows from this revaluation in terms of suffering. To examine his argument in depth is not the task of this work, partly because it is already the focus of most of his reviewers. It is enough to notice here one ambiguous conclusion that can be derived from this characterization of the affirmation of life. As both Robert Pippin and Dana Villa have noticed in their reviews, in fact, a ‘rich and substantive ethics’ was promised at the beginning of the book as an outcome of Reginster’s interpretation of Nietzsche. Nonetheless, we find instead a characterization of the will to power such that the “Nazi expansionism might count an as expression of it” (Pippin, 290), and a characterization of the affirmation of life that makes us wonder whether “the ‘ethics of power’ itself has been made safe for liberal (market) society.” (Villa, 515) For both reviewers, in fact, the definition of the will to power as the ‘overcoming of resistance’ is in the end too formal and abstract, and consequently far too inclusive. “If Nietzsche’s ‘good’ lies in the ‘overcoming of resistance’—if that, indeed, is what the will to power is—“ Villa writes, “then it becomes plausible to think that Ayn Rand and other capitalistic ‘Nietzscheans’ got it right.” (Ibid.) “But if this is so,” reminds us Pippin, “what has happened to the ‘rich, substantive ethics’ we were promised? What we are left with seems neither rich, nor substantive.” (291)

This chapter tried to show one thing: that, in order to overcome nihilism and interpret perspectivism coherently, it is necessary to focus on the role of the body, and to relocate reason within it. If a new relationship between the organism and consciousness is individuated, then meaning assumes a pragmatic connotation as that which, embodied in the language we use to communicate with each other, allows our bodies taking into account other bodies’ practices, and constraining our own behavior accordingly. This new foundation of meaning is not metaphysical, and actually permits to explain why metaphysics imposed itself through history, leading eventually to nihilism. It also establishes an important fact, which is essential for the correct interpretation of perspectivism: that our perspectives are, since the very beginning, interrelated and constituting each other. A re-legitimization of reason, as able to individuate collectively shared values and goals, is possible precisely on the implicit rational commitments and epistemic standards that our perspectives partake in, since they come into existence through and are maintained within the interaction of our bodies.

63 3rd Chapter: Our new infinite

Reginster claims that normative objectivists cannot avoid nihilism as disorientation, since his interpretation of perspectivism entails the lack of objective standing of values,. He conceives it as an epistemological theory that relates any knowledge claim to an isolated, subject centered perspective. The lack of a relocation of reason within the body renders impossible the conception of meaning as co-constituting our perspectives. Any interpretation of the world is hopelessly disconnected from any pretension we could have to know ‘the real world’. Therefore, we have no external guidance in choosing particular values, and in claiming that others should endorse them as well. Reginster offers two alternative solutions at the metaethical level: subjectivism and fictionalism. Nietzsche is seen as endorsing a form of the latter, for which values are fictions that we take to be true. His cult of the untrue is thus seen as a cult of illusion: we create fictional worlds were values are objective as rules in a game, and we have the capacity to live them. Nonetheless, this strategy trades disorientation for despair, and for Reginster this means that no solution to nihilism is available on the metaethical level.

This chapter will offer a different interpretation of perspectivism, in order to ground a metaethical theory that can allow the overcoming nihilism. This version of perspectivism is supposed to provide a different understanding of concepts such as those of truth and objectivity. The problem is in fact that of turning the negative effect of a perspectival interpretation of existence – the disorientation despair entailed by the inability to found common standpoints through which we understand and evaluate the world – into a positive means of foundation allowing for the individuation of common goals. The role of our shared epistemic standards, justified by our bodies as site of our ‘great reason’, is essential with respect to this task. These standards are set by the common practices defining our perspectives and allow them to change in accord with each other. Within these practices, then, reason has the role of evaluating particular behaviors and contributing to the affirmation of their ethical relevance in a particular cultural environment. The possibility of overcoming nihilism lies in the capability of reason to actively shape our physiological condition, which has been defended in the previous chapter, and to justify this aim in rational terms. In other words, it lies in reason’s ability to account for the reasons for which it operates. Here, it will

64 be offered a metaethical and transcendental version of Nietzsche’s criterion of revaluation: the affirmation of life. The transcendental character of this criterion derives from considering life not as a substantive value – since no perspective could provide the conditions for such evaluation – but as the condition of the possibility of all values. This transcendental principle should guide the assessment of the correspondence between our actions and their underlying values, with respect to ethical presuppositions embedded in our perspectives. Its task is to promote values that do not undermine life as a process of value-creation. In other words, it must contribute to the structuring of power relations that allow the perpetration of power, new interpretations of the world, and the creation of new perspectives. This principle overcomes nihilism in that it counter-acts the perversion – with respect to reason – of a will to power that, in affirming life-negating values, undermines the conditions enabling its perpetuation. Since the individuation of these conditions depends on a historical, non- metaphysical understanding of the world as a process of becoming, this principle has an open- ended character. Sustainability will finally be presented as an ethical principle derived from the transcendental principle of revaluation. However, the universal (understood in perspectival terms) character of this principle is a rare characteristic, because it hinges on conditions that empirically belong to all current perspectives. This is the only possibility for the ‘universality’ of a value, since the standpoints from which we interpret the world are normally more restricted, and render the ethical assessment of our values an extremely complex operation.

3.1 Truth and interpretation.

Reginster cannot accept a revaluation based on the undermining of the objectivity of nihilistic values. This would in fact entail the undermining of all possible values, since without objectivity they would lack normative authority. Consequently, those who accept this solution are, in his opinion, trading despair for disorientation. It should not come as a surprise, then, that the discussion of perspectivism in his book takes place only in the second chapter, called ‘Overcoming Disorientation’. The lack of objective standing of values is the consequence of their perspectival character, which is only contingent and gives one reasons to doubt the value of his values in the face of the value of other values. As he puts it: “The talk of

65 ‘perspective’ itself is evidently intended to underscore the contingency of these judgments”(81) Along these interpretative lines, he seeks to show that the possibility to question a perspective in its wholeness is prevented by the fact that the terms in which we would question it are provided only within it. We are bound to a perspective and therefore we cannot evaluate it as it were something we could ‘see from outside’. We can only question some aspects of our perspective “by invoking other aspects of it.” (82) Therefore, the position endorsed by ‘normative objectivists’ is not coherent, because the objective standpoint they seek from which to evaluate is not conceivable in a perspectivist framework.

In Reginster’s opinion, there are only two alternatives left: ‘subjectivism’ and ‘fictionalism’. In the first case, values are nothing but subjective projections onto the world that we take to be real, independent on us; and we just act accordingly. In the second case, instead, we create values fictitiously but then we act ‘as if’ they really exist. This way, we can continue believing in them without assuming them as independent of our perspectives. Also these interpretations, which cannot be treated in depth here, have problematic outcomes. The ‘subjectivist’ approach simply leaves us “with no evaluative judgment at all”, because we have not access to other points of view that can legitimate our values: there is no value of values. (85) With respect to the ‘fictionalist’ approach, there is the problem of how we can continue to be committed to our values once we know that they are fictions. Once I know that my belief is false, I cannot continue to believe it. In a perspectivist jargon, it can be said that the belief does not comply anymore with the principle of coherency internal to the perspective, and the latter therefore changes itself accordingly by discarding that belief. In other words, I do not see that thing anymore as I used to do. Reginster takes into account this problem, and formulates and alternative version of ‘fictionalism’ in which values consist not in standard beliefs but in ‘imaginative beliefs’. In his example: “A child engrossed in his play may imagine himself a Trojan warrior, and this imagining may motivate pretend actions and emotions on his part: he subscribes to a warrior code of ethics, and he is saddened by the death of Hector. If his older brother derides him for imagining himself a Trojan warrior, he may well feel embarrassed, but it will not be for holding a false belief, for he certainly is well aware that he is no Trojan warrior, he may well feel embarrassed, but it will not be for holding a false belief, for he certainly is well aware that he is no Trojan warrior and only make-believes he is one.” (94) This version of ‘normative fictionalism’, in which values are seen as rules of a game that we arbitrarily decided to play, is the view attributed to Nietzsche. Reginster interprets thus the ‘cult of the untrue’ not as a cult of deception, but as one of illusion, “or our imaginative 66 ability to create fictional worlds and, to some extent, live in them.” (Ibid.) However, this view leaves Nietzsche in a difficult position; for on the one hand it is not clear why people should participate spontaneously to the same game, and on the other the same evaluative problem with respect to which game should be chosen remains. As Reginster too admits: “But what normative resources does the fictionalist have to answer this question? He recognizes that all values are fictions of his own invention. As a consequence, when he stands back from the game of normative make-believe in which he has been engaged, and asks whether this is a game worth playing, he seems to have no normative resource to call upon, for he needs to appeal to a value that may not itself be a fiction, since it is intended to determine whether he should allow himself to become captivated by fictions of this sort in the first place.” (96) In other words, the problem concerning the possibility of questioning a perspective in its wholeness – the perspective from which we should evaluate our reasons to play the game – comes back. This time though, what the overcoming of disorientation by the ‘fictionalist’ (and also the ‘subjectivist’) approach brings about is nothing but nihilistic despair. The metaethical strategy to overcome nihilism is ultimately ineffective because it cannot avoid despair but only disorientation: “For if the value of our values no longer depends on their actually having objective standing, then neither does the value of our highest values. And the essential inhospitability of this world to their realization becomes again a source of despair.” (100) Reginster, instead, uses the metaethical strategy as a way to justify the will to power as a substantive principle of revaluation. As we have seen at the end of the second chapter, this revaluation entails serious problems insofar as the interpretations of power and the affirmation of life are concerned. Is there another way to conceive objectivity from a perspectivist position, so that another metaethical account of revaluation –neither ‘subjectivist’ nor ‘fictionalist’ is possible? Since Reginster’s analysis is coherent, given his premises, an alternative is to be found only through a different interpretation of perspectivism.

Another brief examination of the Gay Science can set the basis for this alternative conception of perspectivism. In the famous aphorism 125, where the madman comes announcing the death of God, we read: “We are all his murderers. But how did we do this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving to now? Where are we moving to? Away from all suns? Are we not continually falling? And backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an up and a down? Aren’t we straying as though 67 through an infinite nothing?” These questions clearly express a particular state: disorientation. What we lack, after we killed God, is a perspective from which to interpret the directions we can take. The possibility itself of distinguishing different directions seems precluded to us: we can no longer orient ourselves. We wiped away the entire horizon, and now we’re straying ‘as though through an infinite nothing’. It should not come as a surprise that the madman arrived in the marketplace looking for God. But which god is he looking for? An answer to this question coincides with the perspectivism Nietzsche needs to elaborate, a theory that can allow us to orient ourselves again in the world, which cannot but continue to be infinite, because we have killed God. We cannot live as though we had never done it. It is not by chance that the preceding aphorism is called In the horizon of the infinite: “We have forsaken the land and gone to the sea! […] But there will be hours when you realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that has felt free and now strikes against the walls of this cage! Woe, when homesickness for the land overcomes you, as if there had been more freedom there – and there is no more ‘land’!” The homesickness for land is the ‘metaphysical need’ that might reemerge from time to time when disorientation overwhelms us. It is the need to go back to a world that is not infinite, because we think that only there we will be free to choose our direction again. However, Nietzsche reminds us that this is illusion, that we have killed God and therefore there is no more ‘land’. But what this infinite precisely means?

It is been often noticed that Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God finds little resonance in his other writings. Reginster argues that the reason be merely ‘historical’: Nietzsche would have thought that this fact was somewhat acknowledged by his contemporaries, and there was no need to insist on this point. (39-40) The reason might well be another: this event in fact takes place in the middle of Nietzsche’s philosophical path. It marks the transition from his ‘enlightened’ period of Human, All Too Human, where science was praised above all other means to produce knowledge, to his ‘mature’ period, where science is instead conceived as only one among many other ‘masks’ worn by the will to truth. It also represents the shift from an epistemological theory where there is no correspondence between meaning and the world, to a more refined theory of perspectivism where many kinds of correspondences ground the possibility of meaning as related to our practices. Indeed, the announcement of the death of God entails a new condition that we must face: that of being in an infinite world and the necessity to find a way to orient ourselves in this infinity. If this announcement is confined to this transitional period, it can be just because what comes after 68 must constitute an attempt to overcome disorientation without going back to a ‘land’ that does not exist anymore. The announcement of the death of God is therefore implicitly contained in all other aphorisms where Nietzsche discusses about perspectives and interpretations, even if he does not explicitly talk about it.20

The answer to this need of orientation can be found in an extremely important aphorism. It is always contained in the Gay Science, although this time in book 5, interestingly called We Fearless Ones and published in 1887, one year after the publication of Beyond Good and Evil and the new prefaces of Human, All too Human and Daybreak. It is called Our new ‘infinite’; allow me to quote it in its entireness, given its seminal relevance:

“How far the perspectival character of existence extends, or indeed whether it has any other character; whether an existence without interpretation, without ‘sense’, doesn’t become ‘non- sense’; whether, on the other hand, all existence isn’t essentially an interpreting existence – that cannot, as would be fair, be decided even by the most industrious and extremely conscientious analysis, the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself under its perspectival forms, and solely in these. We cannot look around our corner: it is a hopeless curiosity to want to know what other kinds of intellects and perspectives there might be; e.g. whether other beings might be able to experience time backwards, or alternately forwards and backwards (which would involve another direction of life and a different conception of cause and effect). But I think that today we are at least far away from the ridiculous immodesty of decreeing from our angle that perspectives are permitted only from this angle. Rather, the world has once again become infinite to us: insofar as we cannot reject the possibility that it includes infinite interpretations. Once again the great shudder seizes us – but who again would want immediately to deify in the old manner this monster of an unknown world? And to worship from this time on the unknown as ‘the Unknown One’? Alas, too many ungodly possibilities of interpretation are included in this unknown; too much devilry, stupidity, foolishness of interpretation – our own human, all too human one, even, which we know…” (GS, §374)

Our new infinite is the everlasting possibility of interpreting this world in an always new and different way. In this reading, from the core nihilistic thesis of the death of God we must draw the conclusion that meaning is dependent on the ‘perspectival character of existence’. In other words, meaning is always created from a perspective. Why is this a solution to the

20 See for instance Sini, 2007, 134-5. 69 impossibility of a metaphysical ground for meaning? How can we overcome our ‘metaphysical need’? This need represents for Nietzsche the necessity of sharing meaning. To assume that there are identical facts and things in-themselves can be seen as a way to structure certain power relations between human beings and the world, and between individuals and classes. The fear of the unknown, to which Nietzsche often refers, arises when we are not capable of tracing back the unknown to the known. We do this in order to render the world a phenomenon that can be foreseen to some extent, and consequently mastered. We adopt particular perspectives, which are constrained at different levels – physiological, psychological, social, historical, ideological, etc. – in order to interpret the world in such a way that can be controlled, and we eventually come to see it as if it were the only possible interpretation. Once we realize that metaphysics is not justifiable by the new enlightened perspective we occupy, and that at the same time this perspective is possible only given metaphysical assumptions, the nihilistic crisis dawns upon us. The metaphysical assumption of the thing-in-itself and the perspectival character of existence cannot be reconciled; therefore, the fear of discovering that this world is always potentially unknown assails us. This is the ‘great shudder’ that seizes us. Perspectivism has the task to provide us an alternative to this metaphysical need. It must overcome disorientation and despair at once. The will to power has indeed an important role in Nietzsche’s theory: the will to power must account for the mechanism through which particular perspectives eventually impose themselves over different ones, in a constant perspectival becoming of the world. Whichever normative position we eventually come to endorse, the reason of its choice will always be explainable through the doctrine of the will to power. In Nietzsche’s opinion, it must explain both Plato and Christ. It is a doctrine conceived first of all to explain the reasons for which the metaphysical interpretation of the world imposed itself during the history of Western thought. If Plato’s philosophy (especially his ‘Socratic’ philosophical attitude, and his equation of truth and the good), and Christianity have come to impose themselves as standards of evaluation, it is because they expressed the will to power in its most effective form, with regard to the historical and social context in which they emerged.

As Owen has written in a brilliant essay on genealogy and revaluation: “What connects this explanatory problem to Nietzsche’s evaluative problem is that, at a general and abstract level, Nietzsche’s concern to translate man back into nature entails that his account of the motivation for a re-evaluation of Christian morality must be continuous with his account of the motivation for the Christian re-evaluation of the morality of antiquity. […] While Nietzsche 70 acknowledges that self-preservation can be a powerful motive for action, this limitation (that self-preservation doesn’t fit well with forms of human activity aiming at self-destruction) lead him to propose another candidate: will to power.” (Owen 2003, 257) In other words, what Owen is showing is that the will to power is the right concept to explain the imposition of particular values in history. Self-preservation, by contrast, cannot account for life-negating values, which lead to self-destruction, such as those perpetrated by Christianity, and that Enlightenment continued to perpetrate through its implicit reassertion of metaphysics. Given the will to power’s explanatory character, a normative direction in terms of revaluation must take into account also the historical condition in which the nihilistic crisis unfolds. By itself, the will to power does not suffice to justify why this revaluation takes place, because if the nihilistic crisis continues and self-destruction is the only possible destiny of mankind, this will also be perfectly accounted by the will to power, which is sufficient to explain and justify the imposition of any possible value, life-affirming as well as life-negating ones. By contrast, to explain why and how the metaphysical interpretation must be challenged and substituted needs an account of the perspectival character of our present condition, in which the will to power finds its expression. The general character of the will to power is too abstract to provide a substantial account of the overcoming of nihilism. The task of revaluation and the re-legitimation of reason find their justification in the avoidance of a self-destructive expression of the will to power, which eats itself away in an all-consuming fervor. Reason’s task is precisely that of furnishing collectively shared motivations for reverting this process, through the imposition of life-affirming values.

If we can provide an account of perspectivism for which the need of sharing meaning, thereby structuring power relations between bodies, is satisfied, than a viable path to overcome both disorientation and despair is accessible. This is because a different conception of truth and objectivity can still support the individuation of common values. These values will be objectively valid not because they are claimed true on a transcendent, metaphysical ground, whose justification lies in a ‘world beyond’. They will be objective because different perspectives should endorse them, given the implicit rational commitments and epistemic standards pertaining to those perspectives. To understand what is meant with that, the role of the body as site of our ‘great reason’ is essential. As we said in the second chapter, consciousness is for Nietzsche the instantiation of meaning; it has a ‘narrative’ character, which is the transfiguration of physiological processes. Even feelings of pleasure and pain are meaningful transfigurations of this kind. Through this meaning, the body engages in a 71 constant activity of self-transformation, taking into account its own activity and the activity of other bodies. This pragmatic and inter-subjective conception of meaning is supposed to constitute our perspectives: our different interpretations of the world come to existence through common practices between bodies and their ‘subjects’, from which meaning emerge and is organized in systems through which we understand ourselves, others, and the world in which our inter-subjective relations take place. Since consciousness is what allows us to communicate with other human beings, our perspectives are from the beginning inter- subjective and in constant transformation. This fact explains why perspectives share common epistemic standard and implicit rational presuppositions. We do not only accumulate and discard meanings, but we actually learn and forget throughout our whole life to organize meanings in particular ways. This is the result of the differential character of meaning. Our perspectives finds their original site in the body, which is not a static entity but the sum of different competing drives – instincts, emotions, desires, and rationality – where some of them prevail at different points in time. Moreover, the reasons for their momentary victory are not limited to our bodily constitution, but are determined by the activity of other bodies to which ours constantly relate. Perspectives, in this reading, are open and dynamic systems of organization of meanings, whose task is to interpret the world in order to allow our bodies to adapt to a continually changing environment and set of inter-subjective relations.

It is true, then, what Reginster says about the transcendental character of our perspectives: “Perspectives are inescapable, then, but this inescapability is to be understood as transcendental in a radical sense: they are conditions of possibility, rather than limitations. They supply the concepts in which we form judgments, as well as the standards in which we reason about them. We cannot escape our perspectives precisely because they provide the terms in which we think and reason.” (84) However, the character of this inescapability depends very much on our understanding of how perspectives work, that is, the ‘nature’ of meaning which underlies them. In Reginster’s account, in fact, even though he tries to highlight their transcendental character as openness, perspectives are described as a sort of inescapability. The fact that we cannot escape perspectives because any meaningfulness immediately constitutes a particular interpretation of the world does not mean that we cannot escape a particular perspective. Otherwise, the whole Nietzschean project of overcoming nihilism and escaping our metaphysical interpretation of meaning (without falling in either disorientation or despair) would be hopeless. If his project is to be taken seriously, the possibility of radically changing our perspective must be possible. This radical 72 change concerns precisely the ‘terms in which we think and reason’. The transcendental feature of our perspective should be understood in a particular way: the meaning can be instantiated only in interpretations, but the structuring of this interpretation into a coherent whole is subject to change itself. If we conceive meaning in a different way, that is, no longer as correspondence to a thing-in-itself, our whole way of interpreting the world changes radically. The difference lies in the structure through which meanings are put in relations to each other: we use concepts in a different way, and the conclusions to which we arrive using those same concepts are different. If the outcome of our reasoning is different, then also its consequences are different. These effects in the world immediately contribute to shape all other interpretations about the same things, because meaning fulfills its function in the relational property of influencing one’s own bodily activity with regard to other bodies practices, which in turn are influenced by other particular interpretations of the world, and so on. This everlasting perspectival becoming of the world is what Nietzsche calls ‘our new infinite’. From this point of view, a ‘mere subjective’ perspective is nothing but another reinstatement of the old metaphysical thinking, and is never to be found in the world. It would go against Nietzsche’s understanding of consciousness as fundamentally relational, and it would implicitly assume the correspondence to a thing-in-itself – a perspective – while explicitly denying it in its predicament. By contrast, a perspective is always shared to some extent. The solipsism, in which the ‘normative objectivist’ finds himself because of the perspectival character of values, presupposes a metaphysical conception of what a perspective is, and a metaphysical conception of objectivity: instead of having a thing-in-itself to which all our meanings correspond, we have a plurality of things-in-themselves to which our ‘mere subjective’ perspectives and their interpretations are supposed to correspond, condemning each of us to live confined and isolated in a different ‘perspectival’ world. Instead of trading disorientation for despair, or despair for disorientation, with such a conception of perspectivism we are trading metaphysics for metaphysics.

The central role of the body for each perspective, together with a pragmatic conception of meaning, is essential to ground the intertwinement of all perspectives. They do not only communicate their respective interpretations, they first of all shape all interpretations that belong to different perspectives. Differential concepts of truth and objectivity emerge from this activity of reciprocal influence and determination. We find an elegant description of them in the paper Truth and Objectivity in Perspectivism, by Lanier Anderson (1998): “a theory will be truer (less apparent) if it is more independent of perspective. As we saw, however, the 73 influence of perspective is completely general, and no belief is literally freer from perspective than any other. Therefore, this relative independence can only be understood as a matter of the breadth of the class of perspectives within which a belief demands acceptance. The more extensive this class, the more independent the belief is from any particular perspective. Beliefs and theories demand broader acceptance precisely by meeting epistemic standards which are shared across perspectives. […] These epistemic standards allow us to evaluate the relative merits of competing interpretations, and taken together, they function as criteria of objectivity.” (17)

Another kind of truth and objectivity, other than the metaphysical ones, can thus be worked out from within perspectivism. This is because there are epistemic standards shared across perspectives, and these standards find their justification in the body as original site of our perspectives.21 The main reason for which these epistemic standards are shared is because our bodies are homologous, and because, if we are to organize our activity accordingly to constraints provided by other bodies, we need to know the world in the same way, to an extent delimited precisely by the commonality of our practices. The independence of a judgment coincides, in a perspectivist framework, with the fact that all perspectives agree on that judgment. If meaning is supposed to allow the body to transform and constrain itself taking into account other bodies practices, then bodies must furnish epistemic standards ensuring the possibility that meaning to be shared. Put differently, we must know the world in the same way to a certain extent, if the world is to have the same meaning (to that same extent) for different perspectives. We literally share, in various degrees, the same perspective on the world. Through this open and interrelated character of our perspectives, it becomes possible to understand how we can actually change and broaden our perspectives, and especially how we can occupy fictitiously perspectives other than our own: by playing on those epistemic standards that we recognize as being the same ones of another perspective. Of course, since human beings are homologous, the possibilities to inhabit other people’s perspectives are extremely higher than the possibility to inhabit the perspective of another animal, for instance a bat. However, the only confirmation we can find of the correctness of our fictitious interpretation is its reflection in the practices of those bodies whose perspective we were trying to understand. This can be the only confirmation that we share, indeed, the

21 As Franco reminds, “Nietzsche’s claim that our knowledge relates only to a constructed, simplified, and even falsified world does not deprive us of the ability to make meaningful distinctions between better and worse, or more and less honest, interpretations.” (2011, xi) The reading of perspectivism offered here explains how this is possible. 74 same epistemic standards, and through several confirmations of this kind we can arrive at objective truths. The objectivity of such a truth will never be ‘absolute’, but it will be truer and more objective than all these interpretations that are more dependent on particular perspectives and do not find resonance (confirmation) in others. To better grasp the implications of this theory, we can confront it with the mainstream analytic interpretations of perspectivism, as we find them summed in Reginster’s The Paradox of Perspectivism (2001): “Nearly all existing interpretations fall within one of two categories. On the one hand, this relativity to perspective is thought to underwrite a generalized skepticism: we are irretrievably locked up in a perspective, which may distort our apprehension of reality. On the other hand, perspectivism is interpreted as anti-essentialism: there is no independent reality the apprehension of which our perspective might distort; accordingly, our judgments are less a matter of correspondence to objective reality than expression of subjective attitudes. Unsurprisingly, this anti-essentialism is often associated with relativism. On both kinds of interpretation, perspectivism is thought to generate a self-referential paradox: if every view is irretrievably bound to a perspective, how could Nietzsche advocate views in ethics and metaphysics, and indeed how could he consistently advocate perspectivism itself?” (217) By contrast, in the reading of perspectivism offered here, neither skepticism nor relativism is endorsed.

Skepticism is possible only insofar as a judgment is not provable by the standards provided by the judging perspectives; and all judgment is relative only to the epistemological conditions characterizing the judging perspective. There is not a view which can be ‘irretrievably bound to a perspective’, without being at the same time bound to countless other perspectives. The possibility or impossibility of forming views, opinions, beliefs, and knowledge is always determined by the confrontation of different but overlapping perspectives: “That individual philosophical concepts are not arbitrary and do not grow up on their own, but rather grow in reference and relation to each other; and that however suddenly and randomly they seem to emerge in the history of thought, they still belong to a system just as much as all the members of the fauna of a continent do: this is ultimately revealed by the certainty with which the most diverse philosophers will always fill out a definite scheme of possible philosophies.” The common features of our perspectives, their shared epistemic standard as well as their implicit rational commitments, render our interpretation of the world more similar than what we could think, as the continuation of the aphorism quote above seems to claim: “However independent of each other they might feel themselves to be, with their critical or systematic 75 wills, something inside of them drives them on, something leads them into a particular order, one after the other, and this something is precisely the innate systematicity and relationship of concepts. […] Where there are linguistic affinities, then because of the common philosophy of grammar (I mean: due to the unconscious domination and direction through similar grammatical functions), it is obvious that everything lies ready from the very start for a similar development and sequence of philosophical systems, on the other hand, the way seems as good as blocked for certain other possibilities of interpreting the world.” (BGE, §20) The confrontation of different interpretations, and the very possibility of different and more or less similar ones, is due to the fact that we share epistemic standards, which are grounded in the common practices of our bodies; consequently Nietzsche’s claim is that, granted these common standards, perspectivism should be endorsed on reasons shared by all those perspectives which interpret the world through concepts, i.e., human perspectives.

A revaluation of values is thus possible precisely to the extent that our epistemic standards coincide, and it will have to take into account the different perspectives and their context, where their practices take place with respect to those values. The next section of this chapter will thus delineate the principal characteristic of this revaluation, and the specific sense in which the affirmation of life underlies this revaluation.

3.2 The transcendental principle of revaluation.

As we have seen at the end of the second chapter, Reginster’s substantive revaluation grounded on the doctrine of the will to power is apt to dangerous interpretations on the ethical level. Here, an alternative on the metaethical level will be presented. This alternative is thought to be possible because, elaborating a perspectivist theorist grounded on the priority of the ‘meaning of the earth’, a different understanding of objectivity and truth is now available. Every perspective is irreducible and unique; yet, its very possibility depends on its inter-subjective character, which secures common standpoints from which we know the world in the same way. This opens up the possibility to evaluate values differently. A revaluation does not mean, in fact, that all our values should be changed, but that we should look at them in another way, from another perspective. Consider this passage of Daybreak: “It goes without saying that I do not deny – unless I am a fool – that many actions called immoral 76 ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged – but I think that one should be encouraged and the other avoided for other reasons than hitherto. We have to learn to think differently – in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently.” (D, §103) Here two important things need to be noticed: first, that the reasons for which a value underlying our actions is judged as good or evil are different than the ones normally employed. The perspective from which we evaluate our values needs to be changed, and not those values themselves; this is the revaluation Nietzsche had in mind. The other is that this shift of perspective is supposed to entail a physiological change. If we evaluate differently, than our emotional patterns and our desires will change along. Consciousness, through reasoning and employing concepts in a certain way, can actively constrain the body and guide its adaptation to a new context. However, how do we identify these different reasons? Interestingly, Owen writes, immediately after quoting the same passage from Daybreak: “Thus, Nietzsche conceives of the project of a re-evaluation of values as a project in which, as the concluding sentences of this passage make clear, intrinsic values can be re-evaluated as intrinsic values.” (Owen 2003, 251) Here, the concept of ‘intrinsic’ is revaluated exactly in the same way as the concepts ‘objective’ and ‘true’, that is, from a perspectivist position. The meaning of ‘intrinsic’ acquires thus this characteristic: values are intrinsically valuable or non-valuable because of internal reason belonging to all those perspectives to which those values belong. The property of being intrinsic does not consist anymore in the correspondence to some transcendent feature of the values we examine, but to the conditions for which a value is justified by looking at the world from a particular perspective.

There is a specific sense in which perspectives and values are linked. Every value judgment, in fact, expresses a particular perspective, a way to look at things with respect to a certain goal. Normally, we interpret things by implicitly evaluating them; certain values always constitute certain perspectives. One can learn, in Nietzsche’s opinion, to recognize the values embedded in one’s own perspective. In such a way, one can create a perspectival distance from which to look at oneself and the different perspectives one inhabits. This allows understanding the conditions for which a value is ‘intrinsic’, with respect to the perspectives sharing that value. This kind of self-awareness coincides with the capability of becoming the master of one’s own virtues, granting us in such a way the freedom of being responsible for ourselves:

77 “You shall become master over yourself, master also over your virtues. Formerly, they were your masters; but they must be only your instruments beside other instruments. You shall get control over your For and Against and learn how to display first one and then the other in accordance with your higher goal. You shall learn to grasp the sense of perspective in every value judgment – the displacement, distortion, and merely apparent teleology of horizons and whatever else pertains to perspectivism; also the quantum of stupidity that resides in antitheses of values and the whole intellectual loss which every For, every Against costs us.” (HAH, 9)

The higher goal this passage refers to is not specified, because it is as well a matter of perspective. It is important to stress this point now: no matter which distance we can create to understand our perspective, this analysis will always be perspectival as well. Every evaluation needs a perspective, and there is always a reason guiding our actions. Our higher value must be the stance from which we look at our possible perspectives. Yet, a proper use of this perspectival game can allow us to free our actions from the nihilistic path on which they are settled. In getting control over our being against metaphysics, for instance, it is essential to understand the perspective from which we deny metaphysics and want to overcome it. Nietzsche often stresses the importance that the metaphysical way of interpreting the world had, first for the survival of mankind, and second for its flourishing. We have to understand its value, as the ‘few steps back’ discussed in the first chapter require us to do. But now our present condition has radically changed, because the will to truth has pushed us beyond the point where metaphysics can be held as a value. Our new perspective entails a higher value, and metaphysics is irremediably devalued. The value of perspectivism as alternative to the metaphysical interpretation of the world is ‘intrinsic’ because the conditions justifying it are internal to all perspectives. To avoid the nihilistic threat, Owen writes, “Nietzsche needs to provide an account of how we can stand to ourselves as moral agents, as agents committed to, and bound by, moral values that does not require recourse to a metaphysical perspective.” (Owen 2003, 256) These conditions coincide with the linguistic structure of consciousness of all those perspectives that can take this value into account. The devaluation of metaphysics and the value of perspectivism are thus ‘universal’ in a perspectivist sense. Given another historical, social, and cultural context, the conditions internal to these perspectives might be radically different, and consequently the standard of evaluation would be different as well. On this account, values are indeed relative, but only to the perspectival conditions of their determination. 78 In this work, values are presented as cultural means through which bodies constrain their actions at the social level. In virtue of their rational and linguistic form, values can enhance particular desires at the collective level, while constraining drives at the individual level. The particular standpoint that consists in sharing the same culture is for instance one of the conditions to rationally justify a certain value as intrinsic. Since the body is already the site of competing drives, and consequently of possible perspectives and interpretations of the world, the inter-subjective character of values represents a powerful means to select particular drives at the expenses of other ones. If values can be rationally evaluated with respect to particular, perspectival standpoints, then consciousness can actively choose how to constrain the instinctive part of the body in view of justified goals. This can be considered as an attempt to free mankind from the metaphysical interpretation of itself, which entails alienation and reification. It is supposed to give to our reason the means to justify the values for which it operates. Once this capacity is enabled, then, some values will change and some other will not, but the latter will not be evaluated as they were before. This fact has interesting implications, because the same value can be used to justify different kinds of actions, in other words, it can constrain the body in different ways, even though it is considered to be always the ‘same’ value by being represented by the same concept. Once values are revaluated, only some of these ways will be preserved or eliminated, not the value itself with all the different ways in which it was expressed, as they were a ‘single pack’.

For all standpoints shared by different perspectives, then, the revaluation will have different consequences. In this way, Nietzsche thought, the ‘openness to particular’ can be preserved through a different use of concepts. Reason is no longer only a cold abstraction that operates for reasons it cannot understand. Nonetheless, a question still needs to be answered: how to ‘revaluate’ the value of revaluation? In his opinion, in fact, all perspectives, or at least all those participating of the nihilistic condition, need this revaluation. In other words, it can be said that once the will to truth becomes problematic in the history of thought, all perspectives should value perspectivism and the revaluation that it entails. The ‘universality’ of this value is in fact justified by the fact that nihilism is a crisis of meaning, and all perspectives suffer from this crisis in that they presuppose meaning. But is there a standpoint common to all perspectives, which provides the conditions to revaluate value? Is there a perspectival distance that provides a criterion to evaluate value from all perspectives, even if we can occupy only one of them? Is there an internal reason to all perspectives that allows us the rational justification of a normative principle, considering that its outcomes must be different 79 depending on the context in which every singular perspective takes place? Nietzsche thought to have found it in life and its affirmation.

How is life to be understood as a principle for the evaluation of value? In this interpretation, it has to be considered a transcendental principle. It has often been noticed the Kantian heritage in Nietzsche’s work. First of all, through the influence of Schopenhauer on his philosophical formation; second, through the countless comments that Nietzsche made about Kant and his philosophy throughout his whole work. Even though the reject of the thing-in-itself renders Nietzsche’s theory incompatible with transcendental idealism, there are points of contact. One can for instance compare these two passages from the Critique and the Twilight of the Idols:

“For truth and illusion are not in the object, insofar as it is intuited, but in the judgment about it insofar as it is thought. Thus it is correctly said that the senses do not err; yet not because they always judge correctly, but because they do not judge at all. Hence truth, as much as error, and thus also illusion as leading to the latter, are to be found only in judgments, i.e., only in the relation of the object to our understanding.” (B350)

“When all the other philosophical folk threw out the testimony of the senses because it showed multiplicity and change, Heraclitus threw it out because it made things look permanent and unified. Heraclitus did not do justice to the senses either. The senses do not lie the way the Eleatics thought they did, or the way Heraclitus thought they did, – they do not lie at all. What we do with the testimony of the senses, that is where the lies begin, like the lie of unity, the lie of objectification, of substance, of permanence… ‘Reason’ makes us falsify the testimony of the senses.” (TI, ‘Reason in Philosophy’, §2)

The similarity is striking, even though in Nietzsche’s opinion Kant’s philosophy falls in the category of falsification. It also has been noticed that transcendental idealism can be considered a particular version of perspectivism: “Kant’s argument is that all human beings occupy the same transcendental perspective—that there are conditions of our experience to which all empirical properties are relative—and that no alternative perspective in that sense is available to us.” (Franks 2005, 160) Nietzsche means something similar when he writes that our bodies, as original site of our ‘great reason’ and hence of the creation of meaning, are what first of all determines our perspectival possibilities.22 The contrast with Kant is indeed about what kind of knowledge – its necessity and universality – these empirical properties bring

22 Clark too interprets Nietzsche’s perspectivism in post-Kantian terms. (1990, 65) 80 about. The application on the epistemological level of the transcendental argument is in fact aimed at securing our knowledge of the world through a necessary and synthetic application of concepts to objects, for instance those of cause and effect. As shown in the first chapter, this option is precluded to Nietzsche, given the aesthetic and contingent character of concepts. Also Anderson, in his paper on truth and objectivity, points out the ‘Kantian flavor’ of some parts of perspectivism, even though Nietzsche “rejects both Kant’s transcendental interpretation of our cognitive capabilities and his appeal to the thing in itself.” (1998, 15-7)

The transcendental with respect to life as a principle of revaluation acquires here a particular connotation. It is not an argumentation aimed at guaranteeing a universal and necessary knowledge of the world. Rather, it must posit life as condition of the possibility of values. The level on which the argument applies is thus normative, in the sense that it should allow to assess the correspondence between actions and the underlying values, judging those actions as coherent with the ethical presuppositions embedded in our perspectives. Life is, in this respect, the criterion to evaluate meaning that is the most independent from all perspectives, in the sense explicated by Anderson. It can also be considered our higher value, because it can guide all our For and Against, but it is important to notice that it is not a substantive value, as this aphorism makes clear:

“Even to raise the problem of the value of life, you would need to be both outside life and as familiar with life as someone, anyone, everyone who has ever lived: this is enough to tell us that the problem is inaccessible to us. When we talk about values we are under the inspiration, under the optic, of life: life itself forces us to posit values, life itself evaluates through us, when we posit values.” (TI, ‘Morality as Anti-Nature’, §5)

Life itself is not a value, but it is the condition of the possibility of all values. The same thing applies to meaning; in that life and the world cannot be considered as ends from any perspective. In that sense they are meaningless. This can be seen as the true acceptance of the nihilistic thesis. To judge morally life itself and world, you need a metaphysical principle like God, and you do so by implicitly endorsing values that are already grounded (justified within) in life and the world in which we live. Nonetheless, life as a principle can transcendentally provide a means to evaluate values, since it is their condition of possibility. Otherwise interpreted, Nietzsche’s affirmation of life, whenever expressed in actions, would take life as a substantive value and would go against the presuppositions themselves of his whole philosophy. The task of life as transcendental principle consists in promoting substantive 81 values that do not undermine life as a process of value-creation. Since we cannot know all the possible consequences of our actions, and the context in which we try to understand them changes continually, this ethical assessment has an open character. Since meaning and values are pragmatic, their existence is justified in their application. A concept is valuable only insofar as it is meaningful; otherwise it has no use. In the moment in which it is used, in the moment it means something, it immediately acquires a value. The consequences of this use, however, can undermine the conditions of possibility of the creation and use of values themselves. In a perspectivist account, this is incoherent, because any perspective evaluates the world by interpreting it. In other words, all interpretations entail an evaluation with respect of how the world should be or become. Implicitly, then, all means that allow this evaluation are in turn valuable. On the one hand, reason through abstraction can account for all possible values by valuing what can make them possible. On the other, the practical instantiation through actions of the different values secures the openness to particularity that is normally lost in any metaphysical, dogmatic morality. Through a perspectivist account grounded in the pragmatic character of meaning, thus, Nietzsche thought to legitimate reason in such a way that it would no longer ‘turn against itself’. In fact, whether the expression of a value satisfies the criterion of the affirmation of life is a matter of context and perspectives. But, independently of any value we consider, their expression must not undermine their own condition of possibility, if those values are to be considered rational. The more rational they are, the more they acquire coherency with respect to the different perspectives. Consequently, they would be considered more ‘objective’ and they would be shared in an easier way.

An example can clarify this theoretical insight. One possible substantive value that can be derived by applying the transcendental principle of the affirmation of life is that of sustainability. This, indeed, could be seen as one of those ‘ecumenical goals embracing the whole earth’ that humanity should be able to set for and by itself. The sustainable consumption of resources is, from a rational point of view, necessary to maintain life as process, and consequently to ensure the instantiation of particular values. On the general level, this principle should rationally apply to all perspectives; consequently, all perspectives should value sustainability because it is a condition of the possibility of their own different values, no matter which they are. If you want to be coherent, you are committed to value what enables and allows the instantiation of your values, what makes possible for the world to be what you desire. At the particular level, the context provides the conditions to ethically judge a behavior with respect to the underlying values. If grounded in the transcendental principle of 82 revaluation, therefore, a substantive value cannot be translated into a dogma. Given the value of sustainability, for instance, you cannot derive from it moral judgments whose metaphysical character would be clear: you shall not eat meat; you shall not travel by plane; you shall not keep you house warm with fossil fuels; and so on and so forth. On the contrary, you are supposed to have a meaningful criterion to judge ethically particular actions always contextually determined and justified. Therefore, to eat meat, at least in great quantity, could be rationally seen as ethically incoherent for most people living in reach countries, because they have access to any other kind of food (meat is on average the most expensive one), and are contributing drastically to undermining the possibility to sustain the consumption of resources on a global scale. By contrast, in several developing countries, meat is one of the few ingredients of basic meals. If someone living there, in order to comply with a supposed ‘dogma of sustainability’, were spending the few money he had to, let’s say, eat fresh vegetables instead of studying and developing particular capacities, which on a much longer term could be way more useful from than the meat he did not eat, it would be an ethical choice no longer defensible from a rational perspective. In exactly the same way, if someone takes a plane to go from Amsterdam to Paris, which takes more than by train, just to spend the weekend shopping because he has got nothing better to do, than his choice is ethically less defensible than someone who takes a plane to go from Europe to Australia to conduct an experiment on the biological control of insects, in order to produce organically grown food without using pesticides produced by Monsanto. These are, of course, very simple examples; in everyday life, the contexts determining our perspectives are extremely more complex, and the ethical assessment of our actions and their underlying values must take into account also other kinds of details. Nonetheless, they are proposed here to clarify in which way perspectivism can provide on the one hand ‘objective’ and general values, which are grounded in the transcendental principle of life, while accounting for countless possible particular situations on the other. Indeed, values so general as the one of sustainability are just a few, because they hinge on perspectival standpoints that are shared collectively by all human beings, like the fact of living on one planet whose resources are very limited. Given all the possible standpoints – geographical, physiological, linguistic, cultural, etc. – the range of values that apply only to some perspectives and not other is much wider, and this makes the task of revaluation infinite, like the world in which the perspectival character of existence unfolds. Nonetheless, it can hopefully provide the ground for a rich and substantive ethics.

83 This work comes thus to an end by arguing for a substantive value: sustainability. This value should be rationally endorsed on reasons depending on the historical and contingent conditions defining our present condition. However, the overcoming of nihilism – understood as the crisis of a common reason that is unable to understand itself and justify its own aim – is shown to be possible only through a revaluation of life-negating values, guided by a transcendental principle. This principle affirms life as a process of creation of values, independently of their substantive content. If we want to understand how Nietzsche thought to overcome nihilism by pushing it to its extreme consequences, it is necessary to appreciate the nihilistic character of this principle. Life, and all the perspectives –human and not – through which life knows itself, are devoid of any purpose, value, sense, and meaning whatsoever. Nihilism is the recognition of this fact: the crisis of a culture that construed its identity by understanding the world on completely different, metaphysical presuppositions. However, nihilism is also the point of departure for the establishment of a new ground for meaning and value, and for this reason it constitutes the basic assumption on which humanity can build a different image through which it can understand itself and be responsible for its own decisions. If the interpretation of Nietzsche’s perspectivism defended here is right, then this approach is not only a deeper understanding of ourselves, in the sense of a more coherent account of the presuppositions behind the mechanisms through which we produce knowledge and understand the world, but it is also the way out of the crisis in which we dwell, since it provides a guidance for the production and use of this knowledge.

84 Conclusion

Overcoming nihilism is possible only through a revaluation of life-negating values. By trying to answer the question of whether Nietzsche provided an alternative to our metaphysical need, and by defending an interpretation of nihilism for which it does not undermine its own overcoming, this work has shown that perspectivism is the only theory we find in Nietzsche’s work that provides the basis for this revaluation. Nonetheless, its complicated nature, rendered even more complicated by Nietzsche’s exposition throughout his work, is an obstacle to its proper interpretation. The main intended contribution of this text is thus that of having offered a coherent reading of this theory and its presuppositions so that it can be used as a means to revaluate life-negating values. In particular, it stresses the importance of the role of the body for the correct understanding, from a perspectivist stance, of the creation of meaning and the imposition of values. If an alternative to our metaphysical foundation is possible, we have to establish a different correspondence of our concepts, through which reason works, and the world in which our values take place. Otherwise, reason is condemned to ‘turn against itself’, and disorientation with regard to which values should be collectively shared on rational grounds is the only possible outcome. This correspondence is conceived pragmatically, and secured by those bodies to which these practices belong. In contemporary literature on Nietzsche, and particularly the analytic interpretations of perspectivism, the role of the body has been highly overlooked. This is one of the main motivations lying behind this work. From this fact, a series of deadlocks automatically follows. First of all, the belief that nihilism undermines its own overcoming, which is the cause of the confusion between the nihilistic thesis and the nihilistic crisis. Second, the impossibility to conceive a different use of concepts, and consequently a hopeless renouncement of the validity (and value) of truth, and that of related concepts such as ‘objective’, ‘intrinsic’, ‘universal’, etc. These misunderstandings lead, as we find it in Reginster’s book, to the belief that disorientation cannot be avoided on the metaethical level. In other words, that our perspectives, instead of grounding the possibility of individuating common values through revaluation, preclude this very possibility, isolating each of us in a solipsistic interpretation of the world that does not coincide, if not incidentally, with that of others. This reading should thus answer the twofold challenge mentioned in the introduction: the avoidance of metaphysical dogmatism on the one hand and of ethical relativism on the other. Perspectivism, here, is presented as a third 85 and distinct option: the only viable solution to the problem posed by the nihilistic crisis. Reginster is one of the few authors in contemporary analytic literature to have understood the centrality of nihilism to Nietzsche’s entire philosophical enterprise. Yet, his account suffers from a lack of attention to the role of the body and the nature of meaning. This facts hamper the proper interpretation of perspectivism and consequently its importance in the overcoming of nihilism. This work, by examining closely these notions, arrived in fact at a completely different characterization of Nietzsche’s doctrine of the affirmation of life. As it has been shown, this interpretation is more consistent with the solution it is supposed to provide: the revaluation of life-negating values and the legitimacy of reason in accounting for its own value.

Perspectivism must be understood not only as the open-ended character of our interpretation of the world, but also as grounded in a pragmatic conception of meaning. The latter ensures the correspondence between our perspective and the world, as reflected in the perspectives of everybody else; not only those whom we know, but especially those whom we could potentially come to know at any moment. The body is the original site of our ‘great reason’, through which the ‘meaning of the earth’ finds expression, opening the possibility to fulfill those past hopes that the Enlightenment represented for mankind and that its dialectical movement, in Horkheimer and Adorno’s dark vision, seemed to preclude. This is not, of course, a solution to all problems we are facing now in this extremely complicated world, nor this work is an exhaustive study of the possibilities opened up by perspectivism. Further study is necessary, besides the exegetical interpretation of the huge amount of Nietzsche’s texts, mostly on two other levels: first, a deeper comprehension of the mechanisms that underlie the emergence of meaning from different kinds of practices.23 Second, a study of the different values implemented in our contemporary society, in order to evaluate them with respect to their possible life-affirming character. Both of these fields, indeed, involve a great deal of empirical study: the first within cognitive psychology and neuroscience, and the second through social and political sciences. This work has the ambition to offer a sound theoretical and epistemological interpretation of perspectivism with regard to the problem of nihilism, which can be used as a departing point to justify the direction in which these

23 Sinigaglia and colleagues’ recent work on motor intentionality constitutes a promising approach in this respect. In their work, they try to show how the basic experiences we entertain of our selves as bodily selves are from the very beginning driven by our interactions with other bodies as they are underpinned by the mirror mechanism. The properties of the mirror mechanism seem to indicate that the same action possibilities constituting our bodily self also allow us to make sense of other bodily selves inasmuch as their action possibilities can be mapped onto our own ones. See in particular Butterfill and Sinigaglia (2014), Gallese and Sinigaglia (2010; 2011) 86 empirical studies should be conducted, first of all by re-legitimizing our ‘universal’ reason. The latter is in fact necessary for the creation of a universal knowledge of a common world, and especially for the determination of our practical use of this knowledge.

Perspectivism should give us the means to free ourselves from the metaphysical image we built to look at us ‘from outside’: interpreting nature as a pure, functionalistic mechanism without telos, we implicitly implemented life-negating values, whose instantiations in practical life make us part of those mechanisms, robbing reason of the capability to evaluate its own aim. This is what Nietzsche’s perspectivism, together with the transcendental principle of revaluation proposed here, is supposed to obviate to. This is not to claim that life has an ultimate value, an aim in itself. This is exactly what the nihilistic thesis, with its denial of all metaphysical truths, tries to refute. Rather, it is the recognition that the single perspectives we inhabit, the single lives and existences we go through, are meaningful because they are expressions of life. They are within it, and they cannot but make this world ‘real’ by interpreting it. Since our lives and our interpretations of the world are deeply intertwined, we must justify the possibility of establishing collective desires with regard to it, which can constrain our drives while at the same time be respectful of the uniqueness of all our singular stances. This is the infinite task we are confronted with, and perspectivism can allow us to orientate ourselves again, while going through all the contradictions that the perspectival character of our existence set in front of use, like putting traps in a cage. The important thing is to understand that it is not in a ‘world beyond’ that we will break free. If freedom exists, then it is in the meaningfulness of our existence alone that we will find it, with all the problems, dangers, and suffering that are involved: “Oh, the poor bird that has felt free and now strikes against the walls of this cage! Woe, when homesickness for the land overcomes you, as if there had been more freedom there – and there is no more ‘land’!” (GS, §124)

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Ecce Homo (EH), 1888. Translated by Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

The Gay Science (GS), 1882. Translated by Josefine Nauckhoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Human, All Too Human (HAH), 1878-1880. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Twilight of the Idols (TI), 1888. Translated by Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

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