The Ontology of Becoming and the Ethics of Particularity

III. Illusion, Appearance, and Perspective: Nietzsche’s Honest Truth

c h apte r t h r ee ................................... illusion, appearance, and perspective: nietzsche’s honest truth To the realists.— You sober people who feel well armed against passion and fantasies and would like to turn your emptiness into a matter of pride and an ornament: you call yourselves realists and hint that the world really is the way it appears to you. . . . You are still burdened with those estimates of things that have their origin in the passions and loves of former centuries. Your sobriety still contains a secret and inextinguishable drunkenness. Your love of “reality,” for example—oh, that is a primeval “love.” Every feeling and sensation contains a piece of this old love; and some fantasy, some prejudice, some unreason, some ignorance, some fear, and ever so much else has contributed to it and worked on it. . . . There is no “reality” for us—not for you either, my sober friends. —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science 1. the question Are we in touch with reality? That may be the question that initiates philosophy , one of the ways of articulating the initial doubt that gives rise to reflection , inquiry, and critique of human knowing. Philosophy begins in the mode of cognitive insecurity. And that is where it will stay indefinitely, as long as we remain finite and embodied. We know, then, from the start, that any answer given to the question—including the one to be presented here—will be insufficient , tentative, subject to change. We also know that how we respond to the question, how we live through the experience of cognitive insecurity, is existentially portentous: a life structured around anxiety and doubt is different from a life of complacent acceptance of a given understanding of what is real. Given that portent, it is well to choose carefully among the answers competing for our credibility. Our latent ontologies—the prethematic sense illusion, appearance, and perspective: nietzsche’s honest truth 29 of what is real each of us has—set global horizons that influence all our thinking and doing. 2. illusion and appearance Are we in touch with reality? Kant formulated this question around three key terms: “illusion” (Schein), “appearance” (Erscheinung), and “thing in itself” (Ding an sicht). Nietzsche initially adopted Kant’s terms—and their attendant philosophical baggage—and worked within and upon the paradigms of Kant’s Cartesian ontology and epistemology.1 That is, Nietzsche accepted Kant’s manner of framing the question, but his manner of answering it evolved into an ontology that displaced the initial Cartesian framework. Nietzsche begins with an ontology of Being and moves toward an ontology of becoming. In the “Transcendental Aesthetic,” Kant takes the phrase “thing in itself” not to require elaborate definition. Later, notably in the “Transcendental Dialectic ,” he will define it in explicitly theological terms: the thing in itself is the thing as known by the infinite and perfect mind of God. “Appearance” is the thing in relation to the finite subject, the thing as it is given to us, mediated by our “mode of intuition,” that is, mediated by the “representations” (Vorstellungen) constituting our “sensible intuitions.” “Illusion” is rather narrowly defined as that which results when we “ascribe objective reality” to appearances, that is, when we take what we see to be identical to what God sees. Kant also says that appearances are not illusions in the additional sense that “objects . . . are always regarded as something actually given.”2 In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche calls upon us to ascribe objective reality to the representations offered in the Apollonian dream created by the artist. In the straightforward Kantian terms just defined, he advocates transforming everything into “mere illusion.” Later, he recants, and under the moral rubric of honesty, makes a commitment to this world: we are now to treat illusions as what they truly are, the result of mistaking our representations for the objective reality knowable only by a defunct god. Illusion being thereby dispelled and the thing in itself remaining beyond our finite grasp, we are left with appearances: we are left with the world as it is given to us, mediated by our forms of intuition, space and time, and the categories of the faculty of understanding. How are we to think of appearances? Space, time, and categorial functions are forms of intuition in the specific 30 art, truth, and illusion: nietzsche’s ontology sense that they provide formal grounds for synthesis and constitution of...