Perspectivism
관점주의
Nietzsche's epistemological position that all knowing takes place from a particular perspective and that there is no "truth in itself" apart from perspectives. In On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) he wrote that "there is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival 'knowing'", and in his notebooks, against positivism, that "there are no facts, only interpretations". Because he added that the more eyes we bring to bear on the same thing, the more complete our "objectivity" becomes, whether the position amounts to simple relativism is still debated.
In depth
What does perspectivism say?
Nietzsche set out perspectivism most clearly in section 12 of the third essay of On the Genealogy of Morality (1887). Philosophers had long dreamed of a "pure knowing subject" free of will, pain and time. Nietzsche mocked this as demanding an eye turned in no direction, an eye lacking the active forces that alone make seeing a seeing of something. And he wrote: "There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival 'knowing'."
Es gibt nur ein perspektivisches Sehen, nur ein perspektivisches »Erkennen«; und je mehr Affekte wir über eine Sache zu Worte kommen lassen, je mehr Augen, verschiedne Augen wir uns für dieselbe Sache einzusetzen wissen, um so vollständiger wird unser »Begriff« dieser Sache, unsre »Objektivität« sein.
The second half of the sentence matters: "and the more affects we allow to speak about a matter, the more eyes, different eyes, we know how to bring to bear on the same matter, the more complete will our 'concept' of it, our 'objectivity', be." Nietzsche did not abandon objectivity; he changed its meaning. Objectivity seen from a view from nowhere is impossible; objectivity is the ability to handle many perspectives. To try to eliminate will and affects altogether, he added, would be to "castrate the intellect".
What does "no facts, only interpretations" mean?
In notes of 1886–1887 Nietzsche put it more sharply: "Against positivism, which halts at phenomena, 'there are only facts', I would say: no, facts are precisely what there are not, only interpretations. We cannot establish any fact 'in itself'." The same note continues: "Insofar as the word 'knowledge' has any meaning at all, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it but countless meanings. 'Perspectivism.'"
Gegen den Positivismus, welcher bei den Phänomenen stehn bleibt »es gibt nur Tatsachen«, würde ich sagen: nein, gerade Tatsachen gibt es nicht, nur Interpretationen.
These are notebook entries, not published writing, and they became widely known through Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and Peter Gast's compilation The Will to Power. In published form, section 374 of the fifth book of The Gay Science (1887) states the same idea cautiously: the human intellect, even in analysing itself, cannot help seeing itself under its own perspectival forms, so "we cannot see round our own corner." In another note Nietzsche linked perspectivism to the will to power: every centre of force constructs the rest of the world from itself and measures it by its own strength, and perspective is the expression of that force.
Is Nietzsche's perspectivism relativism?
The term "perspective" was brought into philosophy by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, in whose Monadology each monad mirrors the same universe from its own point of view. Gustav Teichmüller, who taught at Basel in the same years as Nietzsche, also regarded all philosophical systems as perspectives projecting the content of knowledge, and scholars think Nietzsche was influenced by him.
How to read Nietzsche's perspectivism is sharply disputed. Postmodern thought of the late twentieth century took it as a manifesto for dismantling universal truth, and critics replied that if all truth is merely interpretation, Nietzsche's own claim is just one interpretation and refutes itself. Many scholars, however, hold that perspectivity in Nietzsche means neither arbitrariness nor relativism: perspective is the condition under which each of us assembles the world into a picture, an interpretation, and Nietzsche himself wrote that more perspectives lead to a more complete objectivity.
How did Marxism view the relation between perspective and truth?
When Nietzsche was saying that all knowledge is bound to perspective, Marxism too held that knowledge is bound to social position. Marx and Engels wrote that the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas of each age, and the critique of ideology set out to show that apparently universal truths express the interests of a particular class. But Marxism held that this critique must not go as far as denying objective truth.
A dispute over this boundary broke out inside Russian Social Democracy. In Empiriomonism Alexander Bogdanov wrote: "For me Marxism contains the negation of the unconditional objectivity of any truth whatsoever, the negation of all eternal truths." He regarded truth as a form of socially organised experience. In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909) Lenin attacked this claim head on: "Bogdanov's denial of objective truth is agnosticism and subjectivism." Our knowledge, Lenin held, is historically relative and always being corrected, yet it contains objective truth in that it reflects ever more accurately a world existing independently of us.
Отрицание объективной истины Богдановым есть агностицизм и субъективизм.
Lenin did not deal with Nietzsche directly, but the dispute shows exactly the question perspectivism puts to Marxism. The insight that social position conditions knowledge is the starting point of the critique of ideology, but if all knowledge is only interpretation, the grounds for criticising domination disappear too. György Lukács tried to answer this in History and Class Consciousness (1923) by arguing that the standpoint of the proletariat is a privileged standpoint from which society can be seen as a whole, and Jürgen Habermas, in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985), argued that the critique of reason after Nietzsche loses its own ground.