Beyond Truth and Appearance: Nietzsche’s Emergent Realism

Abstract

Nietzsche should have known better. His withering critique of the Kantian Ding an sich launched the anti-foundationalism that continues to define the agenda of twentieth-century philosophy. His figural definition of truth issued marching orders to a “movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms,”³ which, having established command centers in Paris and New Haven, quickly colonized a transatlantic empire. His celebrated “perspectivism,” which is now firmly entrenched as the official dogma of post-Kantian epistemology, linked the pursuit of objectivity to the “castration of the intellect.” His textbook debunking of the metaphysical prejudices of folk psychology paved the way for behaviorism, epiphenomenalism, functionalism, eliminative materialism, and various other reductionist approaches to the philosophy of mind. His stirring exhortations to “become what we are,” and thereby own the world that we have pre-reflectively fashioned from our primitive superstitions and archaic fetishisms, have spurred the development of cottage industries in worldmaking and narrative redescription. Widely recognized as a “master of suspicion,” he is revered as the progenitor of post-modern philosophy and the arch-villain of speculative system-building. In short, his anti-metaphysical influences on the career of twentieth-century philosophy are indisputable.

The word “Übermensch.”… has been understood almost everywhere with the utmost innocence in the sense of those very values whose opposite Zarathustra was meant to represent — that is, as an “idealistic” type of a higher man, half “saint,” half “genius.”

— Nietzsche, Ecce Homo ¹

I have found the theologians’ instinctive arrogance wherever anyone today considers himself an “idealist” — wherever the right is assumed, on the basis of some higher origin, to look at reality [Wirklichkeit] from a superior and foreign vantage point.

— Nietzsche, The Antichrist ²