Nietzsche's Constructivism: A Metaphysics of Material Objects
2019; Penn State University Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/jnietstud.50.1.0179
ISSN1538-4594
Autores ResumoIn Nietzsche's Constructivism: A Metaphysics of Material Objects, Justin Remhof argues that Nietzsche was a constructivist about material objects. That is, Nietzsche held that material objects—like hammers, planets, and dinosaurs—are “constitutively dependent” (19) for their existence on our conceptual practices. Planets exist in part because we deploy the concept planet. Remhof defends this interpretation against its competitors, argues that it helps us understand other areas of Nietzsche's thought, and shows how it relates to the views of certain pragmatists and to contemporary disputes in metaphysics. Although I'm not convinced by the arguments for the constructivist reading, there is much of value in the work Remhof does to develop the view and to situate it in Nietzsche's thought more broadly.The book begins by laying out the competing interpretations of Nietzsche's material object metaphysics. Remhof dismisses the idea that Nietzsche simply had no view on the metaphysics of objects—his frequent remarks on objects as well as his willingness to engage in metaphysics elsewhere (e.g., regarding free will, causation, and the soul) give reason to doubt that he was simply agnostic (3). The other available views are (1) commonsense realism, according to which objects are what most everyone thinks they are, namely, hunks of stable, persistent matter that exist independently of us; (2) eliminativism, according to which there are no objects, either because the world lacks the intrinsic structure necessary for objects or because there are no subjects around to construct objects; and (3) unificationism, according to which objects are “unified bundles of forces” (38).Remhof rejects the commonsense realist reading pretty quickly on the grounds that it is incompatible with Nietzsche's denial that objects exist in the way we ordinarily think they do and with his suggestion that objects are fictions (see GS 110; KSA 13:14[79]; TI “Reason” 2, 5). An eliminativist reading would take these remarks to entail that there are no objects at all. Remhof argues instead that Nietzsche is a revisionist—objects exist, just not in the way we thought. And unificationists go wrong in thinking that bundles of forces can be unified all by themselves, without the assistance of conceiving subjects.We then get a defense of the constructivist reading. The basic idea Remhof presents is that for objects to exist, they need to have identity conditions. For a hammer to exist, there needs to be something that meets the identity conditions for hammers—e.g., having a head and a handle and being useful for hitting nails into things. But the only way objects get identity conditions is by someone establishing such conditions. If there were no creatures around who determined what it takes for a hammer to exist, then there would be no identity conditions for hammers, so there would be no hammers. To support attributing this argument to Nietzsche, Remhof adduces a variety of passages where Nietzsche suggests that our practices of naming and conceptualizing play a constituting role; an object's identity consists in its having features that we have designated as a basis for categorization. These passages include GS 58, where Nietzsche claims that “in the long run it is enough to create new names and valuations and appearances of truth in order to create new ‘things,’” and KSA 12:2[77], where he says that “a thing = its qualities; but these equal everything which matters to us about that thing; a unity under which we collect the relations that may be of some account to us” (see also KSA 13:14[98], 12:2[150]).This view is, to be sure, subject to a number of objections. You might think that we can determine the identity conditions associated with a term, but not the identity conditions associated with an object. Our practices can change what it takes for the sentence “this is a hammer” to be true of something. But they cannot change what it takes for something to be a hammer. If we started calling things that could be used as flotation devices hammers, that wouldn't make them hammers. It would make the sentence “this is a hammer” true of them, but only because that sentence would assert something new. You cannot make a buoy a hammer by getting your speech community to call it a hammer. Or so this line of thought goes.Of course, Remhof provides responses to this objection, and lots of others. But these responses, and many of the details of the view, are not primarily drawn from Nietzsche. Nietzsche does not explain what counterfactual relations hold between us and objects. If there were no humans, would there still have been dinosaurs? Remhof suggests that there would be (19), but Nietzsche himself doesn't say. In the same way, Nietzsche does not explain how past objects or unperceived objects exist—Remhof borrows answers to those worries from Kant (79–83). Nor does Nietzsche tell us just what you have to do to construct an object. Remhof provides an example—the definition of “planet” established by the International Astronomical Union fixes the identity conditions for planets (53). But we get no account of how they get to be in the position of fixing the identity conditions. And nothing Nietzsche says guides us here.So Nietzsche does not seem very interested in developing constructivism qua metaphysics. However, Remhof argues that the constructivist reading helps make sense of other areas of Nietzsche's thought, namely regarding truth, science, naturalism, and nihilism. If the reading has significant interpretive benefits, then that would give us some reason to accept it.On Remhof's view, Nietzsche endorses a Jamesian pragmatist theory of truth, although not the theory that usually goes by that name. It is not that Nietzsche thinks that true propositions are those that are useful to believe. Rather, truth conditions are useful, because the objects that “constitute truth conditions” are “constructed in accordance with our interests” (95). For a sentence like “hammers are heavy” to be true or false, we must have already constructed hammers, so that the sentence has something to be true or false of. And constructing things in this way is useful for us because we divide the world up according to our interests. Both true and false propositions are “always useful” (95).However, this optimism about our conceptual practices seems implausible. Nietzsche frequently argues that concepts that serve some people's interests (say, those that articulate Christian morality) may be detrimental to other people (higher types). Moreover, there is no reason we couldn't bungle our constructive practices completely. Maybe coming up with the concept race was no good for anyone. So even this attenuated pragmatism posits a relation between truth and usefulness that Nietzsche is unlikely to have thought obtained. And if the view is just that setting up truth conditions is useful sometimes but not always, it is difficult to see how that counts as a pragmatist theory of truth.Next, Remhof argues that Nietzsche's stance toward science turns on whether it is ultimately nihilistic or ascetic. For him, science would be nihilistic if it failed to represent the world the way it is, and not nihilistic if it succeeded in representing the world the way it is (namely, constructed by us). The idea is that if science aims to investigate a mind-independent world, it “affirms another world than that of life, nature, and history” (GS 344), since the world of life, nature, and history is the mind-dependent world that we construct. But affirming a world other than the one we inhabit just is a symptom of the ascetic ideal (100). On Remhof's interpretation, Nietzsche views a good deal of past scientific practice as aimed at investigating a mind-independent world, but himself adopts a conception of science according to which it investigates the world we construct. So Nietzsche doesn't see science itself as ascetic; only one historically prominent way of understanding science is tied to the ascetic ideal. We just need to conceive of the aim of science differently to be able to embrace it.This reading, I think, makes Nietzsche's relation to science too unequivocal. His view of science is fraught in a way that Remhof's interpretation has trouble capturing. In GM III:25, for instance, he says that “science and ascetic ideal” are “necessarily confederates—so that, supposing one combats them, they can only be combatted and called into question together,” and that “science also rests on the same ground as the ascetic ideal when calculated physiologically: a certain impoverishment of life is a presupposition here as well as there—the affects become cool, the tempo slowed […].” These passages are hard to square with the idea that it is just one way of interpreting scientific practice, not scientific practice itself, that is linked to the ascetic ideal. Is constructivist-friendly science supposed to not involve cool affects and a slow tempo? There must be more to science's relation to asceticism, and so its value, than whether its aims are or are not compatible with constructivism.Similar worries arise in the chapter devoted to constructivism's relation to nihilism. Remhof suggests that constructivism, for Nietzsche, constitutes an important step in overcoming nihilism. Nihilism looms because our highest values devalue the actual world and lead us to posit a “true” world in opposition to it, where those values are instantiated, that is, where things are unified and full of purpose. When we realize that there is no such true world, we fall into nihilistic despair. Constructivism helps us overcome this nihilism, though, because when we endorse it, we learn to value the constructed world, and so we affirm “reality as it is” (121). By replacing our former highest values with constructivist-friendly ones, the world becomes a place where our values can be instantiated. Indeed, when we realize that we construct the world, we make available a “more dignified, more affectively positive engagement with the world” (121).I am not convinced that this reading of Nietzsche on nihilism succeeds. First, it is unclear how important adopting the correct view of material object metaphysics could be for overcoming nihilism. Nihilism is rooted in more than valuing a mind-independent world (e.g., Christianity's denigration of the body and the drives that promote life, its inflation of the importance of pity, and its elevation of weakness and timidity). Maybe embracing constructivism will be necessary for overcoming these life-negating values, but not because it's a metaphysical truth—rather, because caring about the mind-independent world expresses a will that is contrary to life.Second, I think the metaphysical reading of constructivism invites new nihilistic worries. Nietzsche wants us to overcome our worries that the world we're in touch with may not be the real world. Remhof's constructivism eliminates one way of construing the real world, namely as existing independently of our conceptual practices. But there are, per Remhof's Nietzsche, metaphysical facts over and above my own conceiving that determine whether what I try to construct really comes into existence. I cannot construct objects through my own conceptual practices; my community has to help me (50). And we have to obey certain constraints, such as “sensory information,” “the epistemic values of conservatism, consistency, scope, simplicity, utility,” and “the mathematical and logical constraints of self-identity and equivalence” (62). If we fail to heed these constraints, we could fail to construct anything at all (79). That invites renewed worries that I may be out of touch with the world. What if my concepts aren't my community's, or our conceiving is limited in its simplicity and utility? I would be out of sync with the way the world really is—my concepts would fail to apply to anything. But this is just the sort of worry we are supposed to overcome when we overcome nihilism.So in my view, Nietzsche is not very interested in defending constructivism as a metaphysical position, and reading him as a constructivist has only limited interpretive benefits. For that reason, I think it preferable to find a way to downplay the metaphysical commitments Nietzsche apparently takes on in the passages Remhof marshals. One way to achieve this is to push for a merely psychological reading of Nietzsche's “constructivism.” Our practices of carving up, organizing, and coloring the world with concepts are preconditions for our grasping the world, and they shape our experience of it. The idea of having unfiltered access to objects, without the mediation of concepts, is absurd. Compare HH 9: “It is true, there could be a metaphysical world; the absolute possibility of it is hardly to be disputed. We behold all things through the human head and cannot cut off this head […]” (and see GM III:12). Further, access to the world as it is “in itself” is not even desirable; wanting such access reveals a kind of sickness (see TI “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable”; BGE 33, 208; GM III:26).This lightweight reading has two advantages. First, it does not saddle Nietzsche with a controversial metaphysical view that he's strangely not very interested in developing or defending. Second, it lets us make sense of the significance of Nietzsche's view that our access to the world is necessarily mediated without filtering any upshot of that view through the metaphysical claim that the world itself is constructed by our concepts. Whether certain affects, motivations, and beliefs are nihilistic, for instance, ought not turn on whether the world is mind-independent or not. It would be surprising if Nietzsche thought that valuing a mind-independent world would be perfectly well life-affirming, if only the identity conditions of objects were fixed prior to our conceptual activity, or that science would have no ties to the ascetic ideal, if only there were some objects around to be investigated before we devised concepts to talk about them.In any case, there is a lot to like about Remhof's book. The discussion of the available views is lucid and useful; the patching up of the holes in constructivism is of independent philosophical interest; and the effort to show how Nietzsche's metaphysical views inform more central areas of his thinking is salutary. People interested in Nietzsche's metaphysics ought to read it.
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