I’m starting to get the impression that Nietzschean perspectivism doesn’t seem to be as mysterious as it might sound. Many of you already hold this view, I’m sure. But this topic is something that I’ve never quite gotten the motivation to delve into very seriously. So today I am going to take a stab at it. My resource for this venture will be the “Third Essay, Section 12″ in the Genealogy of Morals.
My first question (though not explicitly stated in the section from Nietzsche) is: What is universalism, especially the kind against which Nietzsche seems to be rebelling?
Answer: Universalism is the proposition that there are pristine ideas of things (or even actual isolated things themselves, if there is a difference) out there in the world which are barely or not at all attainable by the human subject. That is, ontologically speaking, concepts or things are independently complete somewhere. If, somehow, complete knowledge of these concepts or things (pure objects) as reality could ever be achieved empirically by human subjects, then the advancement to a “God’s Eye Perspective” would occur. Perception would be completely universal, and essentially, everywhere and everything would be nowhere and nothing. This is more or less what I think of when it comes to universalism. It roughly corresponds to what I take to be Kant’s transcendental idealism/empirical realism. The noumena are out there, but that’s pretty much all we can know about them. By projecting our universal rational subject “tinted glasses” their way, we get experience, and a nice and neat division between the Absolute and the cognitive apparatus. In short, this process leaves no mess. Nietzsche wants that mess.
Section 12 is very much aimed at Kant. The key, I think, to Nietzsche’s critique is the notion of affect. For Nietzsche (and this is my supposition) the subject is very much palpable. The subject is out there in the world with objects, and the objects affect the subject in all sorts of ways, not just ways that limit concept creation/formation to the understanding.
To quote Nietzsche: There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective “knowing”; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity,” be. But to eliminate the will altogether, to suspend each and every affect, supposing we were capable of this–what would that mean but to castrate the intellect?–
Difference, multiplicity, and affects are primary over sameness, uniformity, and pure concepts. Concepts are plastic, and they can turn out to be very very murky…
Let me know what you think.
-E.N.D.
