Nietzsche on the A Priori

I've been thinking about part 1 of Beyond Good and Evil recently, as I've been teaching it.  I like to teach a bit of Nietzsche in intro, and I like to use a large block of text because I think context is important to understanding Nietzsche.  In this particular case, I have now come to think that "On the Prejudices of Philosophers" has as a central goal advancing a certain doctrine of the a priori, one influenced by but in conflict with that of Kant.

Nietzsche of course rejects the a priori claims of traditional metaphysics, on the basis that they purport to represent a true world which is in reality utterly fanciful.  Such is already firmly stated in the preface of BGE.  He also speaks harshly of the synthetic a priori judgments of Kant, insisting forcefully that they are among the "falsest judgments" (5), but he at the same time claims that they are "indispensable," something he never claims about the judgments of dogmatic metaphysics.

What did he mean in saying they were false?  Well, it's clear that they don't represent the true world; nothing does.  There is no true world.  Further, however, they do not represent experience.  Nietzsche doesn't dispute Kant's claim that such judgments constitute part of what makes experience possible for us, but he denies (on my reading) that this means they really tell us anything about the world of experience (a point on which Kant says equivocal things; Nietzsche is clearly reading Kant as either being confused or mistaken when he speaks of the synthetic a priori claims as empirically true and necessary).  Nietzsche is concerned to insist that the judgments are inventions of ours, interpretations imposed by us.  He explicitly opens up the possibility of alternatives to Kantian logic in various places, questioning the causal interpretation of the world (22) and suggesting that the subject/object pattern of interpreting the world is a mistake (12, 17) and an artifact of language (20), but even if we had no alternatives, he would insist that Kant (and more so the Kantians) were nonetheless failing to "distinguish between 'invention' and 'discovery'" (11).

So logic and mathematics are inventions, not in any way given to us, either by a true world or by any kind of fanciful a priori intuitions (the "faculties" he mocks in section 11).  An additional virtue of attributing such a view of the a priori to Nietzsche is that it may further help explain the surprisingly positive reference to Nietzsche in Carnap's "Overcoming Metaphysics through the Logical Analysis of Language," which even has a somewhat Nietzschean title.  The view of logic and mathematics as human inventions accords well with Carnap's conventionalism, and the possibility of alternative interpretations and the focus on the usefulness of the interpretations for us both match up with Carnap's principle of tolerance and his emphasis on pragmatic considerations in language choice.  If this was Carnap's own reading of Nietzsche, it becomes less surprising that Nietzsche earned his praise for "almost entirely avoiding" the confusion which Carnap saw as infecting metaphysics.

Comments

[Jim F.]

Well Aaron, I must say that you took the words right out of my mouth. Last year in a discussion forum(http://www.revolutionaryleft.com/index.php?showtopic=53116), I wrote:

Concerning Nietzsche, it is interesting to note that while the logical positivist, Rudolf Carnap let loose on Heidegger in "The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language," he had nothing but praise for Nietzsche. There, Carnap discerned similarities between Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics as found in say Human, All too Human and his own. He seems to have regarded Nietzsche as a "metaphyscian" who had the good sense to avoid the errors for which he reproached other metaphysicians. He admired the "empirical content" of Nietzsche's work, including especially its "historical analyses of specific artistic phenomena, or a historical-psychological analysis of morals." And he praised Nietzsche for having chosen the medium of poetry in such works as Thus Spake Zarathustra for presenting his ideas rather attempting to present them in a theoretical treatise. The fact that Carnap found much to praise in the work of Nietzsche is significant since in "The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language," Carnap went on the attack against Heidegger, whose metaphysical statements, Carnap dismissed as meaningless. Apparently for Carnap, part of Nietzsche's greatness was the fact that he used poetic means for expressing himself. This fit in with Carnap's view that metaphysics fails because it makes meaningless statements. For Carnap, language had a variety of functions to perform. One of those is the making cognitively meaningful statements. Other functions include the making of what Carnap described as emotive statements. Such language can express Lebensgefühl. Metaphysics attempts to express Lebensgefühl too but fails because it can only issue meaningless statements. The appropriate means for expressing Lebensgefühl is art rather than metaphysics, and Nietzsche was praised by Carnap for realizing that. For Carnap, Nietzsche was the metaphysician who had the greatest artistic talent.

BTW I have recently been reading Arthur Danto's Nietzsche book. There Danto makes the point that Nietzsche in his work anticipated some of the central ideas of 20th century philosophical movements such as logical positivism and existentialism. Curiously, enough, I can find no reference in Danto's book to Carnap.

And as I am sure that Rosa can point out, Wittgenstein was a great admirer of Nietzsche too. In fact, Nietzsche in his anti-metaphysics seems to have anticipated many ideas that would later be developed at greater elaboration by Wittgenstein.