If culture is our highest goal, we might ask, what becomes of metaphysical theories which speculate on the fundamental nature of reality using reason alone?
“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; while the question nonetheless remains, what of the world would still be there if one had cut it off.” Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche.
Theories which try to answer this question are simply outside the scope of human investigation. Historically, this question has always had a fascination for philosophers, but what do we gain if we accept the existence of a metaphysical dimension?
We are inhabitants of a physical world; only there do our thoughts and desires have any application. It is in this world of human action that Nietzsche’s critical insights will have the greatest impact on the thought of our time.
Kant’s Idealism from a Nitzschean perspective
According to Nietzsche, Kant epitomises the tradition of thought going back to Plato which seeks knowledge of final and absolute truths that exist beyond the confines of our every day experience; and similar to the Schopenhauer’s timeless reality, the idea of Will. This represents a transcendental understanding of truth (timeless truth = noumena) that rise above the particular facts of any culture, individual and history itself. This understanding of timeless truth, is characterised by Kant as a “thing-in-itself” (noumenon) and is opposed to objects that are the results of senses, “things-as-they-appear” (phenomenona). In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant defines noumenon as an intangible and only perceivable object. He believes that even if we could bring our perceptions to the highest degree of clarity, we should not thereby come any nearer to the constitution of things-in-themselves. In this sense, noumenal world is a world that we as human beings are never to know, yet Kant still insists that this world exists (Kantian metaphysics I). He supports the idea that we are excluded from it by our senses, which, like colour-tinted spectacles present reality to us in a specific categorical manner. These produced “categories” are fixed (time, space, causality) and we are always to be “captives” of this illusionary state of interpretation. Kant believed that we should limit our inquiry to the question of, what we can reliably know, within the limits of what we describe (Kantian metaphysics II).
Nietzsche, rejected Kant’s idealistic metaphysics. He considered that this lack of historical sense “has become the hereditary defect of all philosophers…”
“Everything has become/evolved (what it is, ahistorical). There are neither eternal facts nor even eternal truths. Therefore what is needed from now on is a historical philosophising, and with it the virtue of modesty” Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche.
It is far from obvious that what separates Kant from Nietzsche is the Nietzschean belief of Becoming (“become what you are”), a belief against an eternal need for a fixed, timeless universe.
Moreover, Nietzsche formulates against the famous Kantian Categorical Imperative (“Act as if the principle of your action were to become a general law”) that this moral imperative is guaranteed by the light of reason alone. Contrarily, “a virtue has to be our invention, our most personal defence and necessity”. At this point Nietzsche concludes that morality cannot be based upon reason alone, or if it is, ones own reason may not be the same as another’s. Every single person devise his/her own virtue; their own categorical imperative. He considers that a person perishes if it mistakes its own duty with a general duty shared objectively in a community.
What follows in Nietzsche’s thought is the association of morality with knowledge were the question of “what can be known?” is replaced by the question of “what is good to know?” …
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