Saying Yes to Reality: Skepticism, Antirealism, and Perspectivism in Nietzsche's Epistemology

Epistemology is a cautious and methodical inquiry undertaken almost exclusively by professors of philosophy. Sober analyses identifying conditions necessary and sufficient for belief to qualify as knowledge are presented with all the solemnity of scientific discoveries. Just as scientists proceed by incrementally narrowing the scope of discovery to something experimentally tractable, so epistemologists partition the components of knowledge into belief, justification, and truth so as to facilitate precise inquiry and accurately map alternatives for each. And just as scientists design empirical experiments against which their proposed hypotheses are tested, so epistemologists design thought experiments against which their proposed necessary and sufficient conditions are tested. Nietzsche was not a university philosophy professor for long, and the way he does epistemology bears little resemblance to what is produced in academic hothouses. True, he considers some standard questions that epistemologists ask. Like other epistemologists, he is interested in the scope and constituents of knowledge, and like them he asks questions such as: How much do we know? What do we know when we know? How do we know what we know? What is the difference between knowing something and merely believing it? What is truth, and how does it differ from falsehood? But his approach to answering the questions is neither solemn nor deliberate, for he is a joyful epistemologist who practices a fröhliche Wissenschaft.

Nietzsche's epistemological exuberance can be gleaned from a handful of passages. He asserts that "no honey is sweeter than that of knowledge" (HH 292) and connects knowledge to pleasure and will to power: "Knowledge [is] linked to pleasure . . . [f]irst and foremost, because by it we gain awareness of our power, . . . [s]econd, because, as we gain knowledge, we surpass older ideas and their representatives, . . . [t]hird, because any new knowledge, however small, makes us feel superior to everyone and unique in understanding this matter correctly" (HH 252). Moreover, pleasure for us moderns is not even worth having without knowledge because "knowledge has in us been transformed into a passion which shrinks at no sacrifice and at bottom fears nothing but its own extinction" (D 429). Even the announcement in The Gay Science that God is dead is taken to be a happy harbinger, for "all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never been such an 'open sea'" (343). Setting out on this sea is cause for rejoicing, "a world of dangers and victories in which heroic feelings, too, find places to dance and play: "'Life as a means to knowledge'—with this principle in one's heart one can live not only boldly but even gaily, and laugh gaily too" (GS 324). Finally, consider the following passage from Ecce Homo: "Knowledge, saying Yes to reality, is just as necessary for the strong as cowardice and the flight from reality—as the 'ideal' is for the weak, who are inspired by weakness" ("Birth of Tragedy" 2).

Two things are immediately apparent from these passages. First, Nietzsche is not a traditional skeptic about knowledge in the way that, for instance, Descartes or Hume is a skeptic. That is, Nietzsche is far from claiming that our beliefs are threatened by the possibility that they attach to nothing and are, thus, one and all false. Second, in every one of the passages quoted, Nietzsche links the possession of knowledge with what are blandly called affective states. Whether that state is sweetness, pleasure, feeling superior, passion, daring, gay laughter, or strength, it is clear that knowledge is anything but the dispassionate pursuit of algorithms of justification or precise formulations of thought experiments. This is why he rarely acknowledges work on the category of knowledge already completed by other philosophers, and then only to ridicule it. Nietzsche is scornful of knowledge as it is conceived in the philosophical tradition, claiming that it is "the biggest fable of all" (WP 555). He is also dismissive of the traditional epistemologist's emphasis on clarity and truth, claiming to the contrary that "delusion and error are conditions of human knowledge and sensation" (GS...