The Nature of Political Theory

234 The Nature of Political Theory

to Nietzsche. He saw himself, to some extent, as a materialist or extreme empiricist.
For Nietzsche, this meant literally the inaccessibility ofanysupramundane reality.
All we know or can know are phenomena. There are no noumena. In effect, there
is no God, no teleology, no inner purpose, no historical progress, no essences, and
no universal reason. His materialism was not however a philosophical support for
positivism or science. Positivistic science was as flawed in its own way as traditional
metaphysics—this point is brought out better in the discussion of perspectivism.^2
There are in other words no changeless empirical facts in the world. It was the mater-
ial world, as the continuously mutating physical condition of our concrete empirical
lives, which really interested Nietzsche. There is no static form or sense of being out-
side of this physical existence, an existence which is itself a ceaseless becoming or flux
of sensation. This idea is reflected in one of Nietzsche’s favourite Greek philosophers,
Heraclitus, who, contrary to Plato or Parmenides, posited a world stripped of any
stability or predictability, a world of continuous becoming.
In his bookThe Twilight of the Idols, in the section entitled ‘How the “Real World”
at last Became as Myth’, Nietzsche gives an inordinately compressed but intellectually
dazzling account of the manner in which humanity has viewed foundational reality.
The whole history is cast in the form of a continuous and compounded chain of
errors. In the first stage, the real world is only attainable by the wise, the thinker is the
embodiment of the truth. Nietzsche associates this with Plato. In the second stage,
reality becomes unattainable, although it is then promised to the wise, virtuous,
or pious. This is the first indication of Christian metaphysics. In the third stage,
the real world becomes unattainable and ‘cannot be promised’. This is the Kantian
metaphysics of theding an sich. In the fourth stage the real world is utterly unattainable
and unknown. There is therefore ‘no consolation, no redemption, no duty: how could
we have a duty towards something unknown?’. This is the world of late nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century positivist metaphysics. In the fifth stage the idea of a
real world is completely abolished. This is the world of ‘free spirits’. This appears to
be Nietzsche’s own transitional moment, elucidated fully in the final, seventh stage,
when it is fully recognized that the real world has been abolished—there is no god,
no reason, no telos, and they are no longer sought. With this stage, says Nietzsche,
we realize that ‘with the real world we have also abolished the apparent world!’ This
is the moment for mankind as Zarathustras (Nietzsche 1968: 40–1). We become the
creators of our own reality—‘overmen’.
The reaction to metaphysics can be further elucidated in what many take to be
the central theme of his philosophy—his epistemological thesis on perspectivism.
The central questions underpinning this thesis are: What is the relation between the
‘chaotic becoming’ of the world and the intellectual structures that we bring to bear
upon them? Further, do our intellectual structures actually give us any insight into the
‘reality’ of this becoming or flux? In addition, does this ‘becoming’ have any meaning
that can be unscrambled through our intellectual structures? These are important
questions for early twentieth-century thought in general. The first assumption to
note, underpinning Nietzsche’s responses to these questions, is his perspectivism.
In hisGenealogy of MoralsNietzsche summarizes the doctrine concisely. He notes