Professional Documents
Culture Documents
LANIER ANDERSON
Given our visual appearances and a description of the object, the laws of
perspective can be calculated. Given the appearances and the laws, along
with additional information derived from visual cues, we can subtract the
influence of perspective and infer to the properties of the independent
object.
Nietzsche denies the coherence of these interrelated notions when they
are extended from the visual to the cognitive case. He insists that we
have no justification for the posit of things in themselves, and denies that
there are any laws of epistemic perspective describing the relation of our
perspectives to things in themselves, in the way the laws of geometrical
optics describe the perspectival relation of the visual system to its objects.
If the influence of cognitive perspectives is perfectly general, as Nietzsche
insists,8 then there is simply no standpoint from which such a precise ‘op-
tics’ of cognition might be developed. We investigate vision by checking
its representations against results obtained from other sensory modali-
ties and from sciences like physics, physiology, and evolutionary biology,
which help us understand the operation, construction, and development
of the visual system. More importantly, our interpretation of visual repre-
sentations depends on information drawn from outside the representations
themselves. “Top down” processing provides us with previously gathered
information about a perceived object’s properties (e.g., size, position, and
rigidity), and physiological visual cues like stereopsis, convergence, and
accommodation help us to determine its distance from the eye. In the case
of cognitive perspectives, by contrast, our situation affords us no broader
standpoint from which we might ‘see’ how perspectives themselves work.
All our information about the world has already been informed by our per-
spective. Developing laws of perspective for cognition, therefore, would
be like trying to work out optics on the basis of the visual appearances
alone, without any independent information about the real properties of
the objects, derived from visual cues or other sensory modalities. Such a
project is hopeless.
Despite this disanalogy, though, Nietzsche’s visual metaphor remains
an informative way to bring out other features of our cognitive perspec-
tives. For example, the potential variety of points of view from which
we might see an object corresponds to the variety of conceptual construc-
tions people can use to organize their experience, and the different ‘looks’
of an object associated with visual points of view suggest the different
appearances of the world arising from conceptual relativity.
The idea of perspective in painting provides further insight into the
kind of limitation perspective places on our representation of the world.
Alberti’s seminal treatment of one-point perspective, for example, empha-
6 R. LANIER ANDERSON
sizes the arbitrariness of the point of view around which the perspective
construction is generated: he advises the painter to locate the centric point
of her construction just “where it seems best” (Alberti 1966, 56). The only
considerations which speak in favor of one point over another are those of
proportionality and aesthetic value. Nietzsche similarly insists that we can
choose among cognitive perspectives only on the basis of our values and
purposes. In neither case are these pragmatic criteria sufficiently strong to
require the adoption of some one point of view over all others.
Moreover, in painting as in the cognitive case, perspectives are holistic
systems. A perspective painting works by representing the relations among
objects. Alberti cites a painting by Timantes which depicts a gigantic
sleeping cyclops, whose size is captured through its juxtaposition with
several satyrs shown in the act of measuring its thumb. The size of the
painted cyclops itself (i.e., its scale) is irrelevant: within the perspective
representation it is the relations between the cyclops and the satyrs, and
not their size properties considered in isolation, that matter.9 Similarly,
our cognitive perspectives determine only relations among the objects they
posit, and not the properties of mutually independent things in themselves.
This parallel is deep, and shows that the disanalogy between visual and
cognitive perspectives discussed above conceals, as its flip side, a deeper
point of analogy. There are no unique answers to questions of ontology
and individuation under perspectivism10 for the same reasons that Timan-
tes’ representation by itself does not provide any determinate answer to
questions about the size of the figures it depicts. The kind of outside
knowledge (about the normal size of satyrs) which helps us to understand
the painting is absent in the cognitive case due to the global influence of
perspective, but this disanalogy should not obscure the deeper similarity in
what the perspectival representations themselves can accomplish in each
case. Without the frame of reference given by outside knowledge, Timan-
tes’ representation could not tell us how large the cyclops really is, just as
no perspectival cognitive representation can reveal the properties of things
as they are in themselves. A picture may be worth a thousand words,
but without substantial background knowledge about the sort of things
it represents, it resists even rudimentary interpretation. The influence of
perspective on our cognitive representations is limiting precisely because
this aperspectival background knowledge is lacking.
All of the points of analogy I have mentioned can be traced back to
a common underlying idea. The visual metaphor highlights the subjective
contribution to our experience of the world. The potential variety of per-
spectives and the element of arbitrariness involved in the choice of any
one arise from the many conditions we may be in as knowers. Perspectives
TRUTH AND OBJECTIVITY IN PERSPECTIVISM 7
The subjectivity claim implicit in the visual metaphor derives its sugges-
tiveness from the idea that a perspective’s influence on our beliefs places
a real restriction on their status as knowledge claims. Perspectivism in-
sists that our beliefs do not capture the way things really are, but only
how they appear from some perspective. Perspectivism itself, qua the-
ory of epistemology, must be subject to these same limitations, on pain
of being a straightforward counterexample to its own thesis. This status,
however, raises serious questions about perspectivism’s internal stability
as an account of knowledge. Given that perspectivism is only one view
(by its own standards), it seems that the perspectivist cannot offer any
principled theoretical grounds for preferring her epistemology over its
dogmatic competitors. The competing metaphysical realists insist that a
8 R. LANIER ANDERSON
the best they can do for themselves: “the ideas of the herd should rule
in the herd” ([WP] § 287; see also [GM] III, §§ 11, 13–16). According
to Nietzsche himself, such people have no reason to (and would be best
advised not to) hold the values in terms of which he criticizes Christianity,
and therefore he must assume that his arguments would hold no force for
them. Their perspective and his are incommensurable. Nietzsche’s critique
of Christian moral values is directed not against this incommensurable
perspective, but rather against the related perspective of those Christians
or Deists who, like Kant or Rousseau, do hold the values of autonomy,
integrity, and self-realization that Nietzsche thinks are undermined by the
Christian morality. Thus, the critique of Christianity presupposes both that
some alternative perspectives are incommensurable, and also that at least
some other opposed perspectives share sufficient overlapping values to
avoid radical incommensurability.
This example suggests an argumentative strategy which can avoid the
self-referential difficulty I sketched above. Nietzsche’s willingness to offer
a critique of Christianity designed to persuade at least some Christians
indicates that his perspectivism is not meant to entail wholesale relativism.
His understanding of conceptual schemes, unlike the one Davidson at-
tacks as incoherent,14 does not assume that they are mutually isolated,
self-sufficient wholes, between which no translation, understanding, or
evaluation of relative merit would make sense.15 On the contrary, for Niet-
zsche, perspectives often overlap with one another, as his overlaps with
Kant’s, or Rousseau’s. In fact, Nietzsche must assume that this sort of
overlap is common: otherwise it would make no sense for him to demand
that a single individual “employ a variety of perspectives . . . in the service
of knowledge” ([GM] III, § 12).
Not only is there often overlap among perspectives, but as we saw
above, the visual metaphor itself encourages the idea that some ways of
organizing experience are better than others, and this raises the question
of what makes for a better interpretation among cognitive perspectives. Of
course, perspectivism implies that there will not always be a clear way of
deciding this question, but in at least some cases overarching values are
shared across incompatible perspectives, and this enables us to evaluate
their relative merits. Many different perspectives, for example, share epis-
temic values like simplicity, plausibility, and empirical adequacy, in terms
of which we evaluate our theories and interpretations. Some standards of
this sort, e.g., the ideal of internal coherence in a system of interpretation,
are so minimal, and so central to our notions of effective organization
of experience, that they are shared very broadly. Such shared standards
enable us to generate arguments in one perspective that will be recognized
10 R. LANIER ANDERSON
as reasons from within another. That is, they can afford one perspective
the resources to give “internal reasons” against another, reasons that have
force not only in the perspective within which they were developed, but
also within the alternative perspective.16
To deploy this strategy in defense of perspectivism, Nietzsche needs in-
ternal reasons showing that its conceptual foundations can provide a better
interpretation of our cognitive practices than the views he saw as the chief
alternatives, viz., metaphysical realism, and Kant’s transcendental ideal-
ism. Perspectivism offers such a reason by arguing that a concept crucial
to both alternative views, the concept of a thing in itself, is incoherent. The
metaphysical realist17 conceives of the world as made up of completely
determinate and independent objects, i.e., of things in themselves, and
Kant’s view also depends on the concept of a thing in itself, since he
understands the world of appearances (i.e., the world we can know) in
terms of its distinction from a world of things in themselves. This concept
involves both self-subsistence and complete determinateness. That is, a
thing in itself would have to be both independent in its being from other
things (and thus also mind- and theory-independent), and fully determinate
with respect to its properties; for every possible property, F, a thing in itself
must either have the property (be F), or have its opposite (be not-F).18 This
means that things in themselves could be adequately represented only by a
fully specific conceptual description of the intellect,19 which is why Kant
calls them “objects of the pure understanding” (A 264/B 320).
I see Nietzsche’s skepticism about this concept20 as arising from one
of the major results of Kant’s critique of previous metaphysics. Kant
showed that we have no power of “real use” of the intellect, or intellec-
tual intuition, that would allow us to grasp the essences of “objects of the
understanding”.21 An intellectual intuition would be a direct representation
of its object, which presented it immediately and in its full detail, the way
our sensory intuitions do, but which at the same time explicitly articulated
the conceptual structure (essence) of the object. (This second requirement
allows us to say what the thing is, and connect our knowledge of it to
other knowledge.) As Kant suggests, it is easy to imagine how an infi-
nite intellect (God) could simultaneously accomplish both these cognitive
tasks.22 As a pure intellect, God would know things via concepts (and thus
in their connections with other things), but because His intellect is one with
His power and His will, God’s act of conceiving the object of knowledge
would at the same time bring it into existence. Thus, God could guarantee
the completeness of His concept of the thing, because the content of His
concept itself determines the thing’s features. In this way, an infinite intel-
lect’s concepts represent things in their radical particularity, just the way
TRUTH AND OBJECTIVITY IN PERSPECTIVISM 11
our sensory intuitions do. Once we consider how God’s intellect would
accomplish this task, however, it becomes apparent that we have no such
power. Our intellect is not creative. Kant concludes that, for us, a thing in
itself can only be a completely unknowable “something in general” (B307,
cf. A 252, A 256/B 312).
In fact, this argument points beyond Kant’s own conclusion about
unknowability, toward a deep tension between the requirements for rep-
resenting a thing in itself, and the basic powers of representation that are
available to us. It thereby brings into question not just the power to know
a thing in itself, but also the more general ability even to represent or
conceive a thing in itself as such. Our concepts and intuitions combine to
represent objects of experience, but cannot represent things in themselves,
because our finite intellect cannot produce complete conceptual descrip-
tions capable of fully exhausting the highly particular content that is given
in sensation, by virtue of its immediate relation to the object. This lack of
completeness is a deep and serious limitation. It means that any conceptual
representation of an object will represent a selection of some part of the
intuitive (sensory) content. Our concept of the object itself depends on this
selection, and thus takes on structure from our way of selecting. To this
extent, the individuation of the object so conceived is theory-dependent,
and this object, therefore, is no thing in itself. We may imagine that the
object as we conceive it approximates a fully determinate, independent
thing, but without intellectual intuition we could never justifiably conclude
that it really has such an underlying, fully determinate structure, and is
therefore a thing in itself. Our finite cognitive abilities could never produce
a complete conceptual description to validate the claim.
Thus, ultimately the unknowability of things in themselves pointed out
by Kant indicates deeper problems with the coherence of the very idea of
a thing in itself. This is so because the unknowability arises not from some
contingent deficiency or incompleteness in our experience or theorizing
to date, but from general and inevitable limitations on our cognitive re-
sources and representational capacities. In attempting to conceive of things
in themselves, we outstrip the legitimate realm of our concepts, and stop
making sense altogether. As Kant himself puts the point, “in the case of
the noumenon, there the entire use, indeed even all significance of the
categories completely ceases” (B 308, my emphasis). But, as Nietzsche
points out, if our cognition has no meaningful application to things in
themselves, then it also has no way to make sense of Kant’s own purported
distinction between them and the things we do know: “we do not ‘know’
nearly enough to be entitled to any such distinction. We simply lack any
organ for knowledge, for ‘truth’ ” ([GS] 354). That is, we lack any power
12 R. LANIER ANDERSON
one than his, he will have to accept it. This does not mean, however, that
some version of metaphysical realism or transcendental idealism may turn
out to be as good a theory as perspectivism. For those of us who share the
cognitive value of internal coherence, the essential dependence of these
views on the incoherent notion of the thing in itself is enough to rule
them out. A worthwhile potential alternative epistemology will proceed
under broadly perspectivist presuppositions: it will not conceive of our
knowledge as making claims about things in themselves, and it will not
provide a transcendental interpretation of our cognitive practices.
we are left with the prospect of alternative and incompatible truths, relative
to different and incommensurable perspectives.
Nietzsche fully embraces this pluralism, even though it compromises
the uniqueness of truth, and trivializes the sense in which truth is
correspondence:28 “There are many kinds of eyes. Even the sphinx has
eyes and consequently there are many kinds of ‘truths’ ” ([WP] § 540).
He acknowledges the counterintuitive character of this view when he con-
cludes that “consequently there is no truth” ([WP] § 540), but the thought
behind this falsification claim is just that our common sense, externalist
ideas about truth are bound up with the incoherent philosophical notion of
the thing in itself.29 In Nietzsche’s view, these common sense intuitions
about truth must be abandoned along with that notion.
Nietzsche’s rejection of these common sense intuitions about truth
raises concerns about the plausibility of a perspectivist account of our
cognitive practices. What is distinctive about theoretical investigation, as
opposed to other kinds of language games, is precisely that the attempt to
get things right constrains an investigator’s remarks about the world. The
truth about things can constrain inquiry in this way because of its assumed
relation to the unique, independent world, but Nietzsche abandons this
feature of truth. This worry is related to the concern that Nietzsche’s claims
about the perspective relativity of truth collapse into wholesale relativism.
In the absence of the unique truth as a standard against which we can
measure our beliefs, it seems that every theory will be as good as any
other, and inquiry starts to look less like investigation and more like mere
storytelling.
Nietzsche also rejects the bivalence of truth, as indicated by his peculiar
but persistent usage of the predicates ‘true’ and ‘false’ in the comparative
and superlative degrees.30 For him, judgments are not simply true or false,
but can be “truer” or “falser”. He recommends this general usage and
connects it to perspectivism in a passage that raises yet a further mystery:
there would be no life at all if not on the basis of perspective estimates and appearances;
and if . . . one wanted to abolish the “apparent world” altogether . . . nothing would be left
of your “truth” either. Indeed, what forces us at all to suppose that there is an essential
opposition of “true” and “false”? Is it not sufficient to assume degrees of apparentness and,
as it were, lighter and darker shadows and shades of appearance – different “values”, to
use the language of painters? ([BGE] § 34)
Attention to the Kantian flavor of this section can both resolve this
mystery, and also point the way toward an understanding of Nietzsche’s
notion of truth that avoids wholesale relativism. At the outset of [BGE] §
34, Nietzsche traces the world’s “apparentness” to the influence of con-
cepts like space and time, strongly suggesting a problematic of Kantian
provenance.31 This indicates that a belief is “more apparent” if it is more
tied to the subjective “human contribution” ([GS] § 57) to experience, i.e.,
if it is more dependent on a perspective’s way of organizing experience.
Following this reasoning, a theory will be truer (less apparent) if it is
more independent of perspective. As we saw, however, the influence of
perspective is completely general, and no belief is literally freer from per-
spective than any other. Therefore, this relative independence can only be
understood as a matter of the breadth of the class of perspectives within
which a belief demands acceptance. The more extensive this class, the
more independent the belief is from any particular perspective. Beliefs
and theories demand broader acceptance precisely by meeting epistemic
standards which are shared across perspectives. Thus, according to Niet-
zsche’s system of “degrees of apparentness”, beliefs are truer when they
are more strongly supported by the epistemic standards we use to evaluate
and choose among theories and perspectives, and truth itself should be un-
derstood as a matter of meeting the epistemic standards governing theory
choice.
These epistemic standards allow us to evaluate the relative merits of
competing interpretations, and taken together, they function as criteria of
objectivity. They seek to ensure that our theorizing is guided by objective
(albeit internal) reasons, rather than subjective caprice, and where such
standards are shared across perspectives, they allow these internal reasons
to influence our choice of perspective. Even though perspectivism blocks
any guarantee that such reasons can resolve every dispute, the possibility of
giving them in at least some cases saves perspectivist epistemology from
the charge of wholesale relativism, since it provides a specific sense in
which some perspectives are better than others. Nietzsche’s internalism
therefore gives us a working notion of truth: theories which meet our
epistemic standards relatively well are true(r).
This internal account of truth depends on a notion of objectivity that
must itself differ from the traditional conception. Perspectivism implies
that our conceptual resources are always situated within some particular
conditions of life, and thus that no absolute objectivity or completely neu-
tral point of view is available to us. In what sense, then, can our beliefs be
objective?
18 R. LANIER ANDERSON
were produced first by talk therapy, later by drug therapy, and still later
by a combination of the two, when drugs alone proved no longer effec-
tive. Doctors were able to produce satisfactory clinical results in this case
precisely because they were willing to take up two different perspectives
toward the illness: (1) a mentalistic perspective in which the illness was es-
sentially a function of the patient’s conscious (or subconscious) emotional
life, and (2) a radically different physiological perspective under which
the disease was an imbalance in the biochemistry of the brain. At least on
the surface, these two perspectives are incompatible: they hold fundamen-
tally different commitments about what the illness is in the first instance.
While we may hope for a theoretical breakthrough which would enable us
to understand how these two perspectives might be unified into a single
broader model of psychological life, it is an empirical question whether
this broader perspective will in fact emerge. Meanwhile, even without
the wanted meta-perspective, going back and forth between the two in-
compatible perspectives contributes to our knowledge about depression, as
manifested in the clinical results.
A similar conclusion is suggested by the case of textual interpretation,
which requires that we remain sensitive to the possibility of conceptual
differences between our world view and that of the text. At times, the
divergent uses of words can indicate deep differences between concep-
tual orderings of the world. Take, for example, Kant’s use of the words
‘Physiologie’ and ‘Psychologie’. Translation of these terms by the Eng-
lish ‘physiology’ and ‘psychology’ fails to capture Kant’s full meaning,
because Kant understands Physiologie as the general science of nature
(physis), which includes both the science of “corporeal nature” and the
science of “thinking nature”, or ‘Psychologie’ as its branches (A 846/B
874), whereas the twentieth century English reader is likely to take the
“physiological” and the “psychological” as incompatible perspectives,
in the manner suggested by the preceding example. Good interpretive
practice here approaches Kant’s meaning by tracing the evolution of con-
ceptions of physiology and psychology through eighteenth and nineteenth
century German philosophy and science, and attending to changes in the
use of relevant terms, as reflected in dictionaries from the period. Under-
standing these other, more recent historical perspectives on the relations
of physiology and psychology provides a more illuminating standpoint,
from which Kant’s usage can be grasped in its difference from our own.
Historical investigations into the pre-Kantian period likewise enhance un-
derstanding, enabling us to see Kant’s concepts in light of the ones that
preceded them. The importance of this kind of movement through the tradi-
tion surrounding a text is clearly indicated by the failures of understanding
20 R. LANIER ANDERSON
tween competing accounts, and these cases are supposed to show that we
cannot make any sense of the idea that one account is nonetheless cor-
rect because it “corresponds” to a completely theory-independent world.36
To the extent they are successful, these examples suggest the same sort
of pluralism we found in Nietzsche. Putnam often balks at this result,
however. In papers like “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’ ” (Putnam 1975), he
manifests a deep concern to deny the incommensurability of competing
theories, and Reason, Truth, and History (1981) explicitly sets out to block
incommensurability claims by opening up some space between truth and
rational acceptability. There Putnam identifies truth with idealized rational
acceptability (not with rational acceptability simpliciter), and he implicitly
assumes that inquiry will tend toward a unique ideal theory, thereby avoid-
ing both pluralism about truth, and the attendant possibility of alternative,
incommensurable, true theories. In later statements of his position,37 talk
of the ideal theory has faded into the background as Putnam has come
to hang his internal realism more clearly on the notion of conceptual rel-
ativity. Nevertheless, as recently as his “Reply” (Putnam 1992) to Gary
Ebbs’s “Realism and Rational Inquiry” (Ebbs 1992), Putnam is clearly
uncomfortable with the apparent pluralistic implications of this view. He
remarks that the alternative descriptions of any given set of data to which
conceptual relativity commits him are “virtually notational variants” (Put-
nam 1992, 356), thereby minimizing any sense in which they are genuinely
alternative accounts.
The frank acceptance of pluralism found in Nietzsche has two impor-
tant advantages for the kind of internalist views we have been considering.
First, it reveals the philosophically interesting and challenging implica-
tions of transforming Kantian epistemology to eliminate the thing in itself.
In Kant, the transcendental status of our conceptual scheme guarantees that
the world of experience will have a univocal character despite its subjective
component. Precisely this “transcendentalism”, however, commits Kant to
the thing in itself, because it requires that our conceptual apparatus and its
“matter” be logically prior to experience. Once we abandon a transcenden-
tal justification of cognition in favor of some empirical derivation of our
basic concepts, we no longer need to posit things in themselves, but we
also lose the necessity of any one conceptual apparatus. Experience may
therefore be constituted in different ways. Since internalists refuse to take
any independent, external standard as the measure of our perspectives, they
are left without any absolute measure, independent of the cognitive values
and standards proper to those perspectives themselves. That is, they can no
longer appeal to any one overarching, neutral procedure for adjudicating
all competing cognitive claims. But this is just to acknowledge the possi-
24 R. LANIER ANDERSON
killed her parents” has a truth value because it (or its negation) would be
rationally acceptable for some possible knower with our cognitive powers,
standards, and values, provided only that she were suitably placed in time
and space (say, in the house at the time of the murders).39 Such examples
do not demonstrate any radical disconnect between truth and our epistemic
standards and practices, but rather serve to indicate the continuing and deep
dependence of truth (and of internalist accounts of it) on a Kantian-style
analysis of the conditions under which knowledge is possible for creatures
like us.
5. CONCLUSION
NOTES
∗ This paper has benefitted from helpful comments on earlier versions by Alexander
Nehamas, Gary Hatfield, Akeel Bilgrami, Paul Guyer, Bernard Reginster, Fred Dretske,
Dagfinn Føllesdal, Chris Bobonich, Alison Simmons, and Tom Blackburn. Thanks also to
Philosophy Department Colloquium audiences at Barnard College/Columbia University,
the College of New Jersey, Hamilton College, Haverford College, Southwestern University,
Stanford University, Earlham College, Texas Tech University, and the University of British
Columbia, and to Prof. Jody Maxmin, for assistance in researching Timantes.
1 See Putnam (1978, 1987 and 1990, 3–29). Richard Rorty has made similar claims
(sometimes in opposition to Putnam’s version of the position) in papers from Rorty (1972)
to Rorty (1993).
2 Gary Ebbs (1992) has argued that Putnam’s “internal realism” does not mark a funda-
mental break with the realism of his earlier work. I follow Ebbs in seeing some continuity
between Putnam’s later position and the concerns that motivated his examples in, e.g.,
Putnam (1975), but Ebbs’s version of this point may be too strong. I am not yet convinced
that Putnam always limited his aims to producing what Ebbs might call an interpretive
understanding of our intellectual practices surrounding reference, rather than attempting to
produce a “scientific theory of reference”. See Ebbs (1992, 20–22).
TRUTH AND OBJECTIVITY IN PERSPECTIVISM 27
3 This formulation of metaphysical realism’s leading idea derives from Bernard Williams
(1985).
4 All citations to Nietzsche are given parenthetically in the text according to the abbre-
viations listed in the references, and refer to Nietzsche’s section numbers, or, alternatively,
both chapter/part and section numbers. I quote the translations listed in the references.
5 One such list, for example, includes “bodies, lines, planes, cause and effect, motion
and rest, form and content” ([GS] § 121). I defend this Kantian reading of perspectivism
in Anderson (1996), and at greater length in some work in progress, which focuses on
Beyond Good and Evil, in particular. As I discuss below, Putnam’s thought shares this
broadly Kantian structure.
6 See also Rosenthal (1968), which found that the Bruner and Goodman results could be
duplicated only in part, and emphasizes that other (non-socio-economic) factors are also
important in size perception of coins. The differences in the results of these two studies lie
beyond the scope of this paper.
7 The locus classicus is Leibniz’s ‘Monadology’, § 57: “Just as the same city viewed from
different sides appears to be different and to be, as it were, multiplied in perspectives, so
the infinite multitude of simple substances, which seem to be so many different universes,
are nevertheless only the perspectives of a single universe according to the different points
of view of each monad” (Leibniz 1969, 648). The pre-established harmony instated by God
guarantees that the ideas of each monad, which constitute its “universe”, reflect, however
confusedly, the one metaphysically real universe He has established, as it is seen from that
monad’s perspective.
8 “There is only a perspective seeing; only a perspective ‘knowing’,” ([GM] III, § 12).
9 Alberti (1966, 55). The painter may even change the scale of her measuring instruments
in relation to her model during her work on the same painting, as long as she respects the
relations of the depicted objects within each scale. Alberti suggests that the painter employ
a veil with a grid marked on it, so that, by viewing her model through the cloth, she can
measure the relative sizes and shapes of its parts (Alberti 1966, 68 ff.). The painter can
vary the distance between her eye and the measuring device at will (e.g., to make the
size of a particular appearance fit exactly between two marks of the grid), so long as the
relative proportions among the parts are maintained when transferring the measurement to
the drawing.
10 Nietzsche conceives of a thing as the “sum of its effects” ([WP] § 551). This implies that
the individuation conditions of each object depend on those of all the others: if one thing
were different, it would have different effects on the other things, and since these things in
turn are nothing but sums of effects, they would also be different things. On this view, any
given system of effects can be parsed into things in different ways. Thus “things” do not
have determinate, unique, or atomistic individuation conditions. See Nehamas (1985, ch.
3).
11 On my reading, perspectivism is first and foremost an epistemological doctrine, and the
self-referential difficulty I have just sketched is one proper to an epistemological view. The
question is whether, given perspectivism, it is possible for us to know that perspectivism
itself is correct, and if not, what grounds we could have for believing it. This self-referential
difficulty is not the same as the widely discussed paradoxes of “truth perspectivism” (see,
e.g., Hales and Welshon 1994), which pertain to Nietzsche’s conception of truth more
than to his perspectivism per se. Nietzsche’s epistemology does have implications for
our conception of truth (see Section III, below), but the self-referential worries raised by
Nietzsche’s notion of truth have been well described elsewhere, most extensively in Clark
28 R. LANIER ANDERSON
(1990). In Anderson (1996) I discuss Clark’s interpretation, and offer a resolution for the
truth paradoxes: See note 26, below.
12 Bernard Reginster has emphasized connections between spiritual freedom and Niet-
zsche’s thinking about perspectivism in useful unpublished work.
13 See [GS] §§ 2, 289, 290, and 299, and [BGE] §§ 212–213 for some of Nietzsche’s
statements about the importance of these values.
14 See Davidson (1984).
15 Nehamas (1983) also emphasizes that Nietzsche’s perspectives are not mutually
isolated.
16 I am indebted to Akeel Bilgrami both for suggesting the use of the term “internal
reasons”, which is inspired by the work of Bernard Williams, and also for pressing me to
hang my argument more clearly on this notion. For Williams’ different use of the notion,
see Williams (1981, 101–113).
17 It is no accident that I have used Putnam’s term “metaphysical realism” to characterize
the position against which Nietzsche was arguing. Although twentieth century metaphysi-
cal realists no longer speak in terms of substances or things in themselves like the rationalist
realists who concerned Nietzsche, the two versions of realism are quite similar. The 20th
c. realist’s world is a fixed totality of determinate theory-independent objects, just as the
rationalist’s world is the set of fully determinate things in themselves.
18 Kant (1781, 2nd, rev. ed. 1787) suggests this way of concerning of the determinacy of
a thing in itself in terms of the applicability of one of each possible pair of opposing predi-
cates at A 568/B 596. (This and subsequent references to Kant’s first Critique appear in the
text and use the standard A/B form, referring to the pagination of Kant (1781) = A and Kant
(1787) = B. I have followed the translation of Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, which Guyer
generously shared with me in advance of its publication by Cambridge University Press.)
The same idea is also implied by Kant’s indirect argument for transcendental idealism from
the Antinomy at A 506–7/B 535–6. There Kant concludes from his two arguments (1) that
the world as a whole is not finite, and (2) that it is not infinite, that the world cannot be a
thing in itself. This follows only if a thing in itself must have exactly one of each pair of
opposite predicates.
19 That is, things in themselves, or traditional substances, admit of description by what
Leibniz called a “complete, or perfect concept” (Leibniz 1969, 268), which implies all the
specific concepts attributable to the thing, and therefore also implies that all other concepts
do not apply to it. Leibniz advances this notion of a complete concept in “First Truths”
(Leibniz 1969, 268–269), “Discourse on Metaphysics”, §§ 8–9 (Leibniz 1969, 307–308),
and “The Nature of Truth” (Leibniz 1973, 95).
20 For Nietzschean texts rejecting the idea of the thing in itself, see [GS] § 54, [GS] § 354,
and [WP] §§ 553–569.
21 In his so-called “Inaugural Dissertation”, Kant makes much of the distinction between
the “real use” of the intellect, and its merely “logical use”. See Kant (1992), 386, 386,
406 (Ak. pp. 393, 394, 411). By the time of the Critique of Pure Reason, however, (and
especially in the second edition), Kant comes to reject the possibility of such “real use”.
See, e.g., B 68, B 71–72, A 51/B 75, B 135, B 138–139, and B 145. (But cf. A 299/B 355,
which introduces a distinction between “logical” and “real” uses of reason, suggesting
that the merely regulative uses of reason (see A 642–668/B 671–696) might be seen as a
different, more limited kind of “real use”.) Gary Hatfield has pointed out that this is one
of the central insights separating Kant’s mature thought from his “pre-critical” writings,
and also that this rejection of any real use of the intellect was of fundamental importance
TRUTH AND OBJECTIVITY IN PERSPECTIVISM 29
in changing our understanding of the powers of the mind. See Hatfield (1990, 59, 78–79,
81, 93, 127, and 213). For the broad story of how this point influenced conceptions of the
mind, see also Hatfield (1997).
22 Kant links the notion of intellectual intuition with the infinite, divine intellect at B 68,
B 72, B 135, B 139, and B 159; also cf. A256/B 311.
23 See Schopenhauer’s “Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy”, which appears as the Ap-
pendix to Schopenhauer (1969), vol. 1. (See esp. pp. 434–437). Nietzsche echoes the point
at [WP] § 553. See also [GS] § 357, where Nietzsche praises Kant’s effort to “delimit the
realm in which this concept [causality] makes sense”, and then adds that “to this day we
are not done with this fixing of limits”. The stricter limits within which Nietzsche wants to
constrain causality (and other concepts) are those imposed by the influence of perspective,
which rule out any causal inference to things in themselves.
24 Kant justifies his move to the transcendental level of analysis by insisting that a tran-
scendental account is required to explain our synthetic a priori knowledge in mathematics
and pure natural science. Nietzsche denies that we have any such synthetic and a priori
knowledge (see [BGE] § 11). He then substitutes a naturalistic account of the origin of
our conceptual resources, based on reflections drawn from evolutionary theory and moral
psychology. I discuss Nietzsche’s argument for this point in detail in some work in progress
dealing with Nietzsche’s account of perspectivism in Beyond Good and Evil.
25 This catalogue of features of the traditional conception of truth is due to Putnam (1988,
107–108).
26 There are some who contend that Nietzsche rejects the notion of truth altogether, but
Nietzsche must have some workable notion of truth, since he routinely makes truth claims
on behalf of his own views (see, e.g., [BGE] § 202 and [GM] I, § 1). In addition, there is
compelling textual evidence that Nietzsche implicitly depends on two different notions of
truth. Occasionally, he makes both particular truth claims and blanket statements that all
our beliefs are false within the space of the same section. For example, in [BGE] 229 Ni-
etzsche claims that the “basic will of the spirit . . . strives for the apparent and superficial”,
and later adds that it is responsible for systematically “retouching and falsifying the whole
[world] to suit itself” ([BGE] § 230). In the very same section (i.e., 229), however, he
makes remarks on cruelty which, he claims, reveal some “palpable truths [that] remain
unspoken for centuries” ([BGE] § 229). If this section is to meet minimum standards
of internal consistency, Nietzsche must be using the semantic terms ‘true’ and ‘false’ in
different senses when, on the one hand, he implies that all our beliefs are false, and on
the other, claims that certain beliefs are palpably true. In Anderson (1996) I extend such a
distinction, proposed in more elaborate form by Schacht (1983), into a general resolution
of the self-referential paradoxes surrounding Nietzsche’s notion of truth.
27 In this respect the interpretation of perspectivism offered here differs markedly from
that developed by Hales and Welshon (1994) who argue that (at least) perspectivism itself
and the laws of logic are “absolutely true” (Hales and Welshon 1994, 112) for Nietzsche,
in contrast to our other claims, which are merely perspectivally true. This solution to the
self-referential paradoxes surrounding perspectivism strikes me as deeply unsatisfying.
Exempting perspectivism itself from the general claim that all knowledge is perspecti-
val seems ad hoc, and numerous Nietzschean remarks about logic strongly suggest that
he thinks the validity of logic is limited by the influence of perspective. I cite only one
such claim: “Behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of movement, too, there stand
valuations or, more clearly, physiological demands for the preservation of a certain type of
30 R. LANIER ANDERSON
life. . . . such estimates might be, in spite of their regulative importance for us, nevertheless
mere foreground estimates . . . ” ([BGE] § 3).
28 True theories still correspond to the world in a sense, but only because we have no
coherent conception of how the world is independently of how it appears from some per-
spective. Thus, the best theory (from our perspective) determines our only notion of what
the world is like. It follows trivially that the theory corresponds to the world so understood.
29 Clark (1990) argues that Nietzsche ultimately abandoned his “falsification thesis”, un-
der which all our belief are false in some sense. I discuss this alternative interpretation in
Anderson (1996).
30 See, e.g., [GM] I, § 3 and [BGE] § 4.
31 Nietzsche begins by acknowledging the force of the Kantian-inspired philosophy of
some of his contemporaries, which insists that “the erroneousness of the world in which
we think we live is the surest and firmest fact that we can lay eyes on”, but he can accept
such a philosophy only in a qualified way: “whoever takes this world, along with space,
time, form, movement, to be falsely inferred – anyone like that would at least have ample
reason to learn to be suspicious at long last of all thinking”, including that thinking which
leads us to the conclusion that our knowledge is of a “false” or “apparent” world opposed
to some “true” world. Nietzsche concludes, as I show in the text below, that our world is
“apparent” in a sense that should no longer be thought of as opposed to a “true world” of
things in themselves. (All quotations from [BGE] § 34.)
32 For example, Nietzsche writes that “the conscience of method demands . . . [that we]
not . . . assume several kinds of causality until the experiment of making do with a single
one has been pushed to its utmost limit” ([BGE] § 36).
33 See, e.g., Leibniz’s ‘Monadology’, § 58: “This is the means of obtaining the greatest
variety possible, but with the greatest possible order; that is to say, this is the means of
attaining as much perfection as possible” (Leibniz 1969, 648).
34 Longino (1990) has recently suggested a similar view, under which the objectivity of
scientific communities crucially depends on the availability of multiple points of view
from which both new and dominant approaches and theories may be subjected to criti-
cism. Unlike Longino, Nietzsche insists that even individual investigators (as opposed to
communities) must employ a variety of perspectives in order to attain objectivity.
35 See Putnam (1987, 52).
36 See, for instance, the example of the “straight line world” in Putnam (1978, 30–33) and
the example contrasting “Carnap’s world” and the “world of the Polish logician” in Putnam
(1987, 18–21, and 32–40).
37 See Putnam (1987) and Putnam (1990).
38 See Putnam (1981), ch. 5. See esp. pp. 105–113 and 124–126.
39 See Putnam (1992, 357). Clark (1990, ch. 2), attributes a similar view to Nietzsche,
in which truth is dependent on our general “cognitive interests”, as opposed to “cognitive
capacities”, which may be contingently limited in ways such as those Putnam’s example
suggests.
REFERENCES
Works by Nietzsche
For Nietzsche’s German, I have used Nietzsche 1980ff. I have made use of the following
translations, cited by abbreviations. Date of first publication appears at the end of the
TRUTH AND OBJECTIVITY IN PERSPECTIVISM 31
references. Parenthetical citations in the text refer to Nietzsche’s section numbers, which
are the same in all editions.
Alberti, L. B.: 1966 On Painting, trans. J. R. Spencer, Yale University Press, New Haven,
CT.
Anderson, R. L.: 1996 ‘Overcoming Charity: The Case of Maudemarie Clark’s Nietzsche
on Truth and Philosophy’, Nietzsche-Studien 25, 307–341.
Bruner, J. S. and Goodman, C. C.: 1947 ‘Value and Need as Organizing Factors in
Perception’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 42, 33–44.
Clark, M.: 1990 Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, Cam-
bridge.
Davidson, D.: 1984 ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, in Inquiries into Truth
and Interpretation, Clarendon, Oxford.
Ebbs, G.: 1992 ‘Realism and Rational Inquiry’, Philosophical Topics 20(1), 1–33.
Hales, S. and Welshon, R.: 1994 ‘Truth, Paradox, and Nietzschean Perspectivism’, History
of Philosophy Quarterly 11, 101–119.
Hatfield, G.: 1990 The Natural and the Normative: Theories of Spatial Perception from
Kant to Helmholtz, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Hatfield, G.: 1997 ‘The Workings of the Intellect: Mind and Psychology’, in P. Easton
(ed.), Logic and the Workings of the Mind: The Logic of Ideas and Faculty Psychology
in Early Modern Philosophy, North American Kant Society.
Kant, I.: 1781(A), 2nd, rev. ed. 1787 (B) Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Hartknoch, Riga.
Trans. by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1998).
Kant, I.: 1992 Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, trans. and ed. D. Walford and R.
Meerbote, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Leibniz, G. W.: 1969 Philosophical Papers and Letters, 2nd ed., trans. and ed. L. E.
Loemker, D. Reidel, Dordrecht.
Leibniz, G. W.: 1973 in G. H. R. Parkinson (ed.), Philosophical Writings, trans. M. Morris
and G. H. R. Parkinson, Dent, London.
Longino, H.: 1990 Science as Social Knowledge, Princeton University Press, Princeton,
NJ.
Nehamas, A.: 1983 ‘Immanent and Transcendent Perspectivism in Nietzsche’, Nietzsche-
Studien 12, 473–490.
Nehamas, A.: 1985 Nietzsche: Life as Literature, Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
MA.
Putnam, H.: 1975 ‘The Meaning of “Meaning” ’, in Mind, Language, and Reality:
Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 215–271.
32 R. LANIER ANDERSON
Putnam, H.: 1978 ‘Realism and Reason’, in Meaning and the Moral Sciences, Routledge
and Kegan Paul, London, pp. 123–140.
Putnam, H.: 1981 Reason, Truth, and History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Putnam, H.: 1987 The Many Faces of Realism, Open Court, LaSalle, IL.
Putnam, H.: 1988 Representation and Reality, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Putnam, H.: 1990 Realism with a Human Face, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
Putnam, H.: 1992 ‘Reply to Gary Ebbs’, Philosophical Topics 20(1), 348–358.
Rorty, R.: 1972 ‘The World Well Lost’, Journal of Philosophy 69, 649–665.
Rorty, R.: 1993 ‘Putnam and the Relativist Menace’, The Journal of Philosophy 90, 443–
461.
Rosenthal, B. G.: 1968 ‘Attitude Toward Money, Need, and Method of Presentation as
Determinants of Perception of Coins from 6 to 10 Years of Age’, The Journal of General
Psychology 78, 85–103.
Schacht, R.: 1983 Nietzsche, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.
Schopenhauer, A.: 1969 The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. P. J. Payne, Dover,
New York.
Williams, B.: 1981 ‘Internal and External Reasons’, in Moral Luck, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, pp. 101–113.
Williams, B.: 1985 Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, MA.
Department of Philosophy
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2155
USA