Objectivity and Disagreement in Nietzsche’s Perspectivism (original) (raw)

Objectivity and Disagreement in Nietzsche"s Perspectivism Nietzsche"s perspectivism, taken as a description of human cognition and not as a theory of truth or knowledge, seems to imply an unacceptable form of global relativism about epistemic justification. i This is because human cognizers, in virtue of their situatedness with respect to the objects of cognition, never have access to the way things are in themselves but only with things as they appear. ii Furthermore, what determines how the objects of cognition appear to a particular human cognizer are dependent on contingent factors such as natural language, culture, values, and morality, which can and do vary from individual to individual and from culture to culture. This means that the content and structure of appearance may vary, and the standards of rationality according to which an individual makes judgments may vary. If the only kinds of justification for our judgments are relative to the contingent cognitive makeup of an individual and no absolute standards of justification are available, then Nietzsche"s perspectivism seems to imply an unacceptable global relativism about justification. It appears to be the case that when someone makes a claim about the world and justifies it only by affirming that it coheres with his or her perspective"s standard of rationality, someone who wishes to argue for a competing, incompatible claim has no way to respond to his or her interlocutor. This is a problem for the defender of Nietzsche"s perspectivism. To put the point colloquially, Nietzsche"s perspectivism seems to entail that one may justify anything by claiming, "This is how it seems from my perspective." This is a problem for Nietzsche because as virtually every commentator on perspectivism has pointed out, Nietzsche advocates his own philosophical positions, including perspectivism itself, as epistemically superior. If he wishes his philosophical positions to carry any normative weight, i.e., if he wants to recommend them to his readers as not merely what he wants them to believe, but also what they ought to believe, then Nietzsche"s perspectivism must not entail the kind of "anything goes" global relativism about justification I have described above. To put the problem in other