NIETZSCHE'S NOMINALISM (3) and another comment on Gaita

 

A passage, quoted at length, from Nietzsche's "Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense." A pure statement of Nominalism, much more radical than Ockham's. Not surprising, given the author. 

In particular, let us further consider the formation of concepts. Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases – which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept “leaf” is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects. This awakens the idea that, in addition to the leaves, there exists in nature the “leaf”: the original model according to which all the leaves were perhaps woven, sketched, measured, colored, curled, and painted – but by incompetent hands, so that no specimen has turned out to be a correct, trustworthy, and faithful likeness of the original model. We call a person “honest,” and then we ask “why has he behaved so honestly today?” Our usual answer is, “on account of his honesty.” Honesty! This in turn means that the leaf is the cause of the leaves. We know nothing whatsoever about an essential quality called “honesty”; but we do know of countless individualized and consequently unequal actions which we equate by omitting the aspects in which they are unequal and which we now designate as “honest” actions. Finally we formulate from them a qualitas occulta, which has the name “honesty.” We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us. For even our contrast between individual and species is something anthropomorphic and does not originate in the essence of things; although we should not presume to claim that this contrast does not correspond to the essence of things: that would of course be a dogmatic assertion and, as such, would be just as indemonstrable as its opposite.

      What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins. – Friedrich Nietzsche, “Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense”

 . . . 

     Ockham denies that universals exist as real entities but still believes that our concepts can correspond to reality, whereas Nietzsche denies both, claiming that concepts arise from the falsification of reality and that truth itself is a human fabrication. For Ockham, only individual things exist, and universals such as “leaf” or “honesty” are mental signs; yet these signs are not arbitrary because they track real similarities and regularities among things. Thus, even without real universal forms, knowledge and truth remain possible: our concepts, though abstract, are constrained by the way the world actually is. By contrast, Nietzsche (in typical fashion) radicalizes the critique of universals by arguing that concepts are formed through the “equation of unequal things,” that is, by ignoring differences and imposing artificial unity on what is in fact irreducibly diverse. In his view, the very idea that a concept corresponds to something in reality is an illusion born of habit and forgetfulness; concepts are metaphors that have lost their vividness, and “truth” is merely a collection of such worn-out metaphors. Where Ockham preserves a weakened but still genuine correspondence between thought and reality, Nietzsche dissolves that correspondence altogether, turning concepts into creative impositions rather than discoveries of an underlying intelligible order.

     I want to offer some reductios of Nietzsche’s position and an explanation of why they wouldn’t convince Nietzsche.

 1) If concepts arise solely by leveling differences and fixing convenient metaphors, then the norms governing their use reduce to internal coherence and practical success within a scheme. But in mature inquiry (e.g., biology), classificatory terms are not only convenient; they are answerable to patterns that constrain explanation and intervention: they justify inferences and guide successful prediction and technological manipulation. This answerability is not well captured by “fit within a system” alone, because systems can be internally coherent yet explanatorily sterile or misleading. A classification that groups whales with fish may be internally coherent and even convenient for certain purposes, yet it fails to capture the explanatory relations, such as mammalian physiology and evolutionary lineage, that make other classifications more adequate to the reality it seeks to articulate. Therefore, if all concepts are merely stabilized metaphors, then the distinction between apt and merely useful classification becomes unintelligible; yet our practices presuppose that distinction. Hence Nietzsche’s account, taken strictly, cannot explain why some classificatory uses are normatively better (not just handier).

 

2) If “honesty” is nothing over and above a convenient grouping of disparate acts, then there is no normative unity that distinguishes a stable disposition from a sequence of superficially similar behaviors. But our evaluative practices hinge on precisely that distinction, as can be seen in ordinary contexts such as testimony in court and trust in friendship. In a courtroom, we distinguish sharply between a witness who tells the truth by accident and one who is honest; the latter’s testimony carries weight across cases because it is grounded in a stable disposition, not a coincidence. Likewise, in friendship, we rely on a person’s honesty not merely in isolated statements but across situations. We confide in them, trust their word when it is inconvenient, and hold them accountable when they deceive. In both practices, “honesty” functions analogically: the honesty of testimony, the honesty of keeping a promise, and the honesty of frank self-disclosure are not identical, yet they are intelligibly related as expressions of a single virtue. This unity is not a mere re-labeling; it organizes expectations, warrants trust, and grounds criticism. If the unity of “honesty” were only a projection, then the normativity of these practices, and the real analogies that bind their different uses, would be illusory, even though social life depends on them. Therefore, the practice presupposes a unity that is more than a metaphor we have forgotten, even if our access to it is mediated by metaphorical language.

 3) If all value-terms are fabricated metaphors stabilized by use, then the experience of the other – for example, where a child or a suffering person is encountered as calling for care – must be redescribed as projection. But our moral practices distinguish sharply between projection and recognition: remorse, for instance, presupposes that one has wronged someone, not merely violated one’s own scheme. This presupposition involves answerability to the other as other, not just to communal norms. If Nietzsche’s view collapses recognition into projection, it undermines the intelligibility of remorse and responsibility as we actually live them. Therefore, unless one accepts that collapse, one must allow that our evaluative responses are constrained by the reality of the other, even if articulated through metaphor.

  I think Nietzsche's argument also suffers from internal tensions if not outright contradictions. If “truths are illusions we have forgotten are illusions,” then the norm governing assertion cannot be that of getting it right, but only that of rhetorical effectiveness or life-serving utility. Yet Nietzsche’s own critique operates by distinguishing more and less adequate ways of speaking about our practices (e.g., exposing reification, criticizing misplaced objectification). This distinction presupposes a norm of better/worse articulation that is not reducible to mere efficacy, since the critique aims to correct, not just to replace, prior usages. Hence there is a tension: the practice of critique presupposes norms of answerability and aptness that the global thesis about truth as forgotten illusion appears to undercut.

     Nietzsche’s critique of truth can account for itself only by abandoning the status of a universal truth-claim and presenting itself instead as a perspectival, genealogical disclosure; yet in doing so it forfeits the normative authority required to decisively displace the views it critiques. If his claim that “truths are illusions” is taken universally, it becomes self-undermining, since it must either count as a genuine truth (thereby contradicting itself) or as an illusion (thereby giving us no reason to accept it). To avoid this collapse, the claim must be weakened into a perspective, i.e., an interpretive stance that redescribes how our concepts arise through abstraction, metaphor, and habit. Under this reading, the argument can make sense, but only as one way of seeing among others, lacking the force to declare rival accounts false in any robust sense. Moreover, even in its weakened form, the critique implicitly relies on distinctions such as more and less revealing, more and less honest, which function as norms akin to truth. Thus Nietzsche’s position survives only by relinquishing the very kind of universal authority it appears to claim, revealing a tension between its genealogical intent and its residual dependence on normative standards it cannot fully justify.

 I don’t think Nietzsche would be moved by these arguments. He can replace “answerability to what is” with life-enhancing success, coherence, and fecundity of a perspective and sort of save the phenomena. He can treat explanatory constraint as a feature of well-entrenched practices, not evidence of a deeper normative tie to reality. Or he can redescribe recognition (in agape) as a powerful, historically formed valuation that we cannot step outside, rather than a discovery of an independent normative demand. He can construe his own critique as perspectival re-valuation, not as an appeal to a higher, non-perspectival standard.

     So the arguments above probably do not strictly refute him; they show the cost of his position: it must reinterpret better, apt, and answerable in thinner, practice-bound terms, thereby relinquishing the stronger sense of truth as normative fit to what is. I suppose I am inclined to see this as one of Goodman’s incommensurable world versions and must make sense of the lives of real people, and not the most gullible or vain either. Or fail to do so.

 . . .

 A Footnote on Gaita

How would Gaita respond to this passage? (I wish I could ask him!) I assume he would reject Nietzsche’s argument not by advancing a competing metaphysical theory but by arguing that Nietzsche’s account fails to do justice to the lived intelligibility of our moral practices and authentic responses.  The idea being that philosophical clarity in morals comes from attending to the “grammar” of our moral life, which is to say, how concepts like remorse, cruelty, honesty, and love actually function, rather than from explaining them in terms of underlying ontological structures. Thus on this account Nietzsche’s reduction of truth to metaphor and illusion would be rejected as a misdescription: it cannot adequately capture the difference between recognition and projection, the authority experienced in remorse, or the seriousness of moral claims. Gaita can thus deny Nietzsche’s conclusions without committing himself to any metaphysical grounding, Thomistic or otherwise, because his appeal is to the adequacy of description and acknowledgment rather than to explanatory depth. I wish I could pin him down, metaphysically, but it seems hard to do. He would question my need for metaphysics, I suppose. I don’t care about sophisticated theories so much. I do think we live with implicit metaphysical views – Gaita’s gift of culture – and that when competing views become culturally dominant as in our time it is important to keep to door open between reality and morality. Morality only makes sense within a range of metaphysical attitudes (Einstellungen) and hinge beliefs. Metaphysics is the attempt to make explicit sense of these perhaps?