Nietzsche on Epistemology and Metaphysics: The World in View (review)

It is a good time to be a Nietzsche scholar. In the English-speaking world, we are now seeing the fruits of a mature critical tradition, the result of several generations of Nietzsche scholarship. And not only is present scholarship informed by the work of Kaufmann, Hollingdale, and Danto and by Clark, Richardson, and Poellner, but it also now rests on the broader foundation of Heidegger, Jaspers, and Deleuze, on the one hand, and Frege, Russell, and Quine, on the other. That is, to be a Nietzsche scholar today is to enjoy the concrescence of the major traditions of Western philosophy and a new generation of active young scholars at a point, in Nietzsche, where Western thought lifted up one of its most brilliant and exciting minds. It is perhaps a measure of Nietzsche's profound and enigmatic thought that it is fully responding only now to the combined resources of Continental and analytic traditions elaborated in both historical and contemporary works.

Tsarina Doyle's recent Nietzsche on Epistemology and Metaphysics: The World in View is a case in point. Doyle contributes to a sharp, developing analysis of Nietzsche's central metaphysical and epistemological views as they inform our basic understanding of empirical knowledge and the material order around us. The heart of the issue is of course the problem of human access to physical and metaphysical reality, where this problem is vexed by the threat of dogmatism on the one side and skepticism on the other. Perhaps the key figure in this struggle has been Kant, whose critical philosophy promised the nondogmatic defeat of skepticism by incorporation of the empirical into the ideal. Whether Kant avoided either threat remains controversial, but reference to his account is a primary avenue of approach to the issue. Nietzsche himself took Kant as his primary epistemological and metaphysical antipode, "a strong magnifying glass" with which to address the issue of human knowledge of reality (1, citing EH "Why I am so Wise" 7), and this relationship with Kant is the subject of Doyle's discussion. In the following, I summarize Doyle's argument and conclude with some evaluative remarks.

Doyle's study focuses on the heart of Nietzsche's metaphysics and epistemology and in particular on the relationship between his will to power thesis and his perspectivism. The relationship between these two central elements of Nietzsche's thought has long been a source of controversy among Nietzsche scholars, and while prominent scholars such as Arthur Danto and Maudemarie Clark have found the two doctrines to be in conflict, Doyle offers an interpretation in which the will to power is precisely the metaphysical vehicle required to validate Nietzsche's perspectivism. In order to demonstrate this, Doyle first examines Nietzsche's perspectivism as reflected in his intellectual relationship with Kant. Doyle's Nietzsche embraces Kant's Copernican turn but sees Kant as falling short of his own mark, particularly in his critical philosophy, wherein the Ding-an-Sich constitutes the defeat of anthropologized empirical science. For Doyle, Nietzsche's epistemological goal is to establish the possibility of objective, empirical knowledge within the context of a Kantian anthropomorphism. An important feature of this position is the rejection of "metaphysical realism," the doctrine of an-sich reality or perspective-free truth. If there is no such thing, then objectivity must be recast, if possible, in contextualist terms. Doyle calls "internal realism" the resulting position in which knowledge claims are constrained by the terms of the perspective informing them.¹

A welcome addition to this discussion is Doyle's examination of Nietzsche's early work, including The Birth of Tragedy and the oft-cited "On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense." Here, Doyle sees Nietzsche's internal realism as not yet formed but struggling to emerge. Contrary to Clark and others, Doyle sees TL as exceptional to, rather than representative of, Nietzsche's epistemology insofar as it preserves a fundamental appearance/reality...