On Judging in a World of Becoming: A Reflection on the ‘Great Change’ in Nietzsche’s Philosophy

Abstract

In a display of the increasingly virulent, reductive sharpness of his later work, Nietzsche reproaches the philosophers for their “Egypticism” in Twilight of the Idols. Their “concept-idolatry” is deadly for all living things, though they do not comprehend this morbidity. “Real” death lies beyond their horizon. The routine changes in life, such as “aging” or “procreation and growth” become illusions. Such a philosophy believes that “whatever is, does not become; whatever becomes, is not.”² Nietzsche pithily sketches the schema of the Eleatics to immediately contrast it with Heraclitus’ doctrine of a becoming devoid of being, which alone he excludes from his critique of philosophy (TI, 480-1).³ If one formerly regarded “alteration, change, any becoming at all as proof of mere appearance,” writes Nietzsche, today, on the contrary, “we see ourselves somehow caught in error, compelled into error precisely insofar as the prejudice of reason forces us to posit unity, identity, permanence, substance, cause, thinghood, being” (TI, 482). “Reason” (or rather, the understanding) in such posits falsifies the “testimony of the senses,” which offers us change and multiplicity. Science can claim to be valid to the extent that it is based upon sense testimony: “insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away and change,” writes Nietzsche, “they do not lie...” (TI, 481). However, to the extent that by means of the senses something is “fixed” as something in perception and thereby withdrawn from becoming, they too deceive us. Did “reason” not also develop out of the erroneous “belief in the truth of the sense-judgments” (KSA 12, 9 [63])? The testimony of the senses, however, is not contested, because what is at issue for Nietzsche in the passage from Twilight of the Idols cited above is to expose the deceptive character of “reason.”⁴