Revision:Nietzsche on the prejudices of past philosophers

Nietzsche presents the idea that past and present philosophers have unknowingly been victims of their own unconscious forces or drives. These drives may be the result of cultural influence, emotions, instincts, or due to the philosopher’s physical condition. They are an unknown influence on philosophers outlooks, and as such are philosophical prejudices. This aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophy is rather Schopenhauerian, as Schopenhauer believed that it was not reason that drives us but will (our desires and instincts). Nietzsche also seems to believe that philosophers thusfar have been asking the wrong questions: for example, rather than asking ‘what is the value of truth?’ they have asked ‘what is true?’. In Chapter 1 of 'Beyond Good and Evil' he presents what he sees as the most common prejudices of past and present philosophers.

Nietzsche’s use of ad hominem attacks

Nietzsche’s approach mainly consists of a series of ad hominem attacks upon individual philosophers. For example, when criticising Spinoza he sees the mathematical form of his logic as armour which he uses to deflect criticism. Although ad hominem attacks are generally accepted as an invalid form of argument, Nietzsche uses them rather masterfully, and they are certainly relevant to his argument (perhaps even the most relevant approach possible – if you want to show that problems with philosophers get in the way of their philosophies, criticise the philosophers, and thus the philosophy!).

The prejudice of the ‘will to truth’

In Section One of Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche identifies a number of things which he believes are prejudices of current and past philosophy, ‘physiological demands for the preservation of a particular kind of life’. One of these is the prejudice to the will to truth. The majority of philosophers hold the opinion that truth is objective, and that it is possible to arrive at it through rational enquiry. However, Nietzsche’s view is that their ‘value drive’ (their values and instincts) has dominated their truth drive, making most philosophers dogmatists – what they called truth was what satisfied their value drive. He uses the example of the Stoics, who, Nietzsche argues, arrived at their account of nature as following rational laws by reading their own ethical ideal into nature, an example of how philosophy ‘always creates the world in its own image’. He tends to lay this criticism upon the doctrines and dogmas of pre-Kantian metaphysical philosophy, and seems to have a more positive interpretation of the current situation, which is increasingly naturalist. An example of the strengthening of the truth drive relative to the value drive is the development of empiricism in epistemology. Given the best theory of how we in fact acquire knowledge, we should turn our backs on the search for a priori knowledge and turn to empiricism.

The prejudice of the antithesis of values

Another is the faith of philosophers in the antithesis of values. He argues that one of the ways in which we falsify reality is to divide it into opposites – what real justification do we have for the generally accepted belief in opposites? One example he uses of this is cause and effect. Hume’s criticisms of this illustrate how things that appear to be opposites are a) not provable and b) unnecessary. Quantum theory illustrates how things such as cause and effect, which to be so rigid, things that appear to be so antithetical, are in fact much more dynamic. Nietzsche also argues that we create opposite values in the moral sense. Why is good the opposite of bad? Moral actions can easily and perhaps correctly be interpreted as self-interest. If you accept this you accept that the two things are not antithetical. If you do not, Nietzsche argues, you create a metaphysical notion of what is good and bad which has nothing to do with reality.

The prejudice of the distinction between apparent and actual realities

A third prejudice that Nietzsche believes past and present philosophers have is that there is a distinction between appearance and reality. He criticises philosophers such as Kant and Plato who believed that reality and our perceptions of it are completely separate. Once again he criticises them on the basis of why they chose this approach. We should not ask, as Kant did, who such ideas are possible, but why belief in such judgements is necessary. The answer for Nietzsche is of course that they are not, at least not for any logical reasons. Rather, they are the result of the philosophers’ drives and will to power. ‘In so far as the word ‘knowledge’ has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings’. Kant and Plato’s mistake, according to Nietzsche, was not in assuming that the world had a single meaning behind it, but that this meaning had nothing to do with their own perspective on things (which in turn is ultimately dictated by their instinctive drives). Such an approach is another example of the prejudice towards antithetical values, as it is assumed that there is a pure reality that is superior to the lowly world of sense perceptions.

The prejudice towards atomism

A fourth prejudice is towards atomism. This prejudice has its origin in the subject-predicate structure of our language. Nietzsche’s argument is that we are so used to speaking in this way that when we come to think about the real nature of things we also end up thinking this way. An example is Descartes: in looking for a unified, central self, or ‘I’, we are already assuming that there is one. Nietzsche does however think that the idea of atomism has been useful: it has helped us to develop as we have. However, we must investigate what purpose it serves and where it leads to restrictive dogma to question its validity. However, just as with most of Nietzsche’s philosophy, he presents no real reasons for why atomism should not be true: he simply points out that we do not know that it is true.

The bewitchment of language

Nietzsche is concerned with the subject-predicate structure of language, and with it that there is a substance to which we denote properties. This structure leads us to a mistaken metaphysics of ‘substances’. Nietzsche is particularly concerned with the grammar of ‘I’, which leads us to think that there is a particular thing ‘I’, ie. a soul. Descartes makes this mistake in his cogito, ‘I think’ showing the illegitimate inference that ‘I’ is a subject involved in an activity ‘thinking’ – that I am thinking, that something is thinking, that we know what it is to think, that ‘I’ exists or we know what it is.