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Snakes, Skins and the Sphinx: Nietzsche’s Ecdysis

Tom Tyler

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AbstractFoucault claimed that Nietzsche’s philosophy constitutes la granderupture from Kant’s conception of knowledge. The break occurred,

however, only after Nietzsche had shed his own Kantian skin. This

article examines both the debt that early Nietzsche owes to Kant, and

the nature of the break evident in his later work. It highlights three key

facets of the mature Nietzsche’s epistemology: (1) there is no

disinterested truth, only a range of evaluative perspectives; (2) these

perspectives must continually change and multiply; and (3) the subject

of any perspective need not be human. As Nietzsche’s own eyesight

deteriorated, he saw more, and he saw more clearly.

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Keywordsanimal ● ecdysis ● eye ● Foucault ● Kant ● Nietzsche ● Oedipus ●

perspectivism ● skin ● snake ● Sphinx ● thing-in-itself

rnal of visual culture [http://vcu.sagepub.com]

pyright © 2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)

5(3): 365–385 [1470-4129(200612)5:3]

The snake that cannot shed its skin perishes. So do the spirits who are

prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be spirit.

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, 1997[1881], §573)

e Truth about Worms and Snakes

May 1973 Foucault delivered a series of five lectures at the Pontifical

tholic University of Rio de Janeiro on ‘Truth and Juridical Forms’

oucault, 2000). The first of these dealt primarily with Nietzsche, and began

looking at his famous early essay ‘Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’,

itten exactly one hundred years earlier.1 Foucault was interested in this

tremely rich and difficult text’ as a means of approaching Nietzsche’s

10.1177/1470412906062284

radical understanding of the nature of knowledge (p. 6). He quotes the

opening sentences from the essay:

In some remote corner of the universe, bathed in the fires of

innumerable solar systems, there once was a planet where clever

animals invented knowledge. That was the grandest and most

mendacious minute of ‘universal history’. (Nietzsche, quoted in

Foucault, 2000[1966]: 6)

Foucault applauds the ‘insolent and cavalier’ manner in which Nietzsche

asserted that knowledge was invented. In the early 1870s, a time immersed

in neo-Kantianism, such a suggestion was all but unthinkable. Foucault

dwells on this word ‘invention’, Erfindung. Nietzsche’s suggestion that

knowledge is an invention constitutes, Foucault says, the radical break, lagrande rupture, from Kant’s assertion that there is an identity between the

conditions of experience and those of the object of experience (Foucault,

2000: 9). Foucault’s discussion of Nietzsche is approving, laudatory even,

and by no means insolent, but his characterization of the latter’s thinking is,

perhaps, just a little cavalier: Nietzsche’s perspective, at this early stage, was

by no means so unequivocally anti-Kantian as Foucault suggests. As we shall

find, the eyes with which he saw the world depended on the same pale

sunlight as that on which Kant relied.

So just what does Nietzsche say in his rich and difficult essay? The text

comprises a wide-ranging and strongly worded attack on the notion of true

knowledge, and does so by outlining a particularly disparaging assessment of

humanity. Nietzsche continues his opening sketch of that ‘most mendacious

minute’ by describing knowledge (das Erkennen), the quality which sets

these clever animals apart from all others, as wretched, shadow-like, tran-

sitory, purposeless and fanciful.2 Humans themselves, and Nietzsche is

thinking particularly of philosophers here, mistakenly believe that the world

revolves around this intellect. If they were only able to see things as does the

humble gnat, however, they would realize that the gnat too, whilst swimming

through the air, ‘with the same pathos . . . feels within itself the flying centre

of the world’ (Nietzsche, 1911a[1873]: 173). In examining the thinking of the

young Nietzsche, not yet 30 when he wrote this essay, I will consider two of

the means by which he drew attention to the shortcomings of episte-

mological realism. I will then discuss the work of an older Nietzsche, who,

with his eyesight failing, took a rather different perspective. I will argue both

that he rejected the assumptions on which his earlier work depended, and

that the importance of always and continually changing one’s perspective

constituted an integral part of his later outlook.

Nietzsche’s first attack is prompted by his reflections on language. He

questions whether words and things can ever coincide, whether language

can ever be ‘the adequate expression of all realities’ (p. 177). Does it, or even

can it, provide a sufficient, commensurate representation of the way the

world really is? Nietzsche argues that we can convince ourselves that

language is a means of obtaining truth about reality only by forgetting that

journal of visual culture 5(3)366

words are arbitrary and metaphorical. There is never any necessary, causal

connection between a word and its object. For instance, we (Germans)

assign genders to different objects, so that trees are masculine (die bäume)

and plants feminine (die Pflanze) (p. 177). It is unclear quite why inanimate

objects should have a gender at all, let alone the particular one that we rather

arbitrarily designate. Further, the very fact that there are so many different

languages suggests that the terms of any given language can hardly be an

adequate expression of reality. Even a descriptive name like the serpent’s

(die Schlange, from schlingen meaning ‘to entwine’) might just as easily be

applied to another creature, such as the worm (p. 178).3

The creator and user of language cannot reach the ‘thing-in-itself ’: the words

we employ are arbitrary designations which do not correspond to the

original essences. The external world is transformed several times before it

ever filters through into the medium of language. The ‘thing-in-itself ’ is

experienced first simply as a nerve-stimulus in our sensory organs, at the

basest physiological level. This nerve-stimulus is then transformed into a

percept or sensation, that is, the mental phenomenon prompted by that

object.4 At some mysterious level of the mind this percept is then trans-

formed into a sound, a word, a linguistic designation. At each stage we move

from one entirely different ontological sphere to another. The relationship

between the different spheres is at best an aesthetical one, ‘a suggestive

metamorphosis, a stammering translation into quite a distinct foreign

language’ (p. 184). Metaphor, Nietzsche says, is heaped upon metaphor, and

all our talk of trees and flowers, of snow, colours and so on, fails to

correspond to the original essentials (p. 178).

We should be clear at this point: in using the term ‘metaphor’ Nietzsche

describes actual shifts between ontological spheres, and does not simply

attack the inadequacy of the ways in which we might retrospectively describethose individual spheres. The translation of the ‘thing-in-itself ’ into a nerve

stimulus is a halting, inaccurate transformation of an object into something

entirely different in kind, a process which takes place in the human subject

long before we ever get to the level of language. The term ‘metaphor’ refers

then to the ‘artistic metamorphosis’ (p. 182) that occurs between spheres,

between for instance the physiological and psychological levels, and not

merely to non-literal linguistic relations between words. Language is

metaphorical in the sense that it is able to stand for the world only after that

world has been radically ‘æsthetically transformed’ several times over.5

And so Nietzsche is forced, famously, to ask:

What therefore is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies,

anthropomorphisms: in short a sum of human relations which became

poetically and rhetorically intensified, metamorphosed, adorned, and

after long usage seem to a nation fixed, canonic and binding; truths are

illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions; worn-out

metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses; coins

which have their obverse effaced and now are no longer of account as

coins but merely as metal. (p. 180)

Tyler Snakes, Skins and the Sphinx 367

This is not to say, of course, that we can be sure that human inventions don’tcorrespond to reality. Such an assertion would be as indemonstrable as the

claim that they do. Given that our description of reality is always made using

language, we are never in a position to stand outside that relationship and

assess whether it is an adequate one or not. The ‘real’ world remains utterly

inaccessible to us in its true immediacy, and language necessarily lies far

removed from its referents. It is, Nietzsche says, not quite a product of

Nephelococcygia (cloud land), but it certainly does not express the original

entities either (p. 179). Admittedly, there is a ‘stammering translation’ which

implies, however remotely, some kind of connection between sign and

referent, but ultimately humanity is trapped by linguistic forms, leashed at

the end of a tortuous metaphorical chain. The real objects, the ‘things-in-

themselves’, sitting at the opposite end of that chain remain forever out of

reach.

Nietzsche’s linguistic attack on the possibility of transcendental truth is well

known and often quoted. There is another strand to his critique in ‘Truth and

Lie’, however, which is usually passed over. As he hinted at the beginning of

the essay, when the lowly gnat put in a brief appearance, it is not only

humans who perceive the world. Other species need to understand Nature,

and they do so in a multitude of vastly different ways (p. 184).

If each of us had for himself a different sensibility, if we ourselves were

only able to perceive sometimes as a bird, sometimes as a worm,

sometimes as a plant . . . then nobody would talk of such an orderliness

of nature, but would conceive of her only as an extremely subjective

structure. (p. 186)

Only by choosing to ignore a staggering number of other species, each of

which perceives the world in its own distinct manner, could anyone assert

that human understanding is the correct one. To mention just those few

beasts whom Nietzsche himself here befriends, there are the sensibilities of

the gnat, of the various beasts of prey, of tigers, serpents, worms, bees,

camels, insects, birds, spiders, bulls and horses. In fact, there is no way of

choosing between these different world-perceptions. There is no standard or

criterion which would make it possible to decree that humans (or for that

matter gnats or camels) are seeing things as they really are, and that every

other creature perceives inexact phenomenal projections.

Already it costs [man] some trouble to admit to himself that the insect

and the bird perceive a world different from his own, and that the

question, which of the two world-perceptions is more accurate, is quite

a senseless one, since to decide this question it would be necessary to

apply the standard of right perception, ie to apply a standard which

does not exist. (p. 184)

If we take the trouble to consider the perceptions of just three of these

species we can see how different their worlds are. That gnat, swimming

through the air, has compound eyes which perceive an extensive, wide-

angled picture of the world, but arranged as a rather crude aggregate of spots


of light and dark (Smythe, 1975: 123, 157).6 As a bloodsucker the gnat will

often rely not on sight, however, but on thermometric evaluation, discerning

the tiniest variations in the body temperature of potential victims (pp.

158–9). The worm, meanwhile, every bit as sinuous as the serpent, has no

eyes at all, but rather ‘eyespots’ scattered over the whole of the body, and

concentrated at either end. These eyespots are capable of detecting only the

difference between light and darkness (p. 135).7 Finally, most serpents

depend on their fantastically keen sense of smell, rather than on sight. The

characteristic flicking of the snake’s forked tongue is in fact the means by

which she ‘tastes the air’. Most snakes have very poor eyesight, stationary

objects presenting a particular difficulty (Halliday and Adler, 2002: 181–2).

It is only humans who employ words and ideas in their representations, but

all creatures, great and small, use their perceptive capacities to construct for

themselves an understanding of the world. Nietzsche heaves the other poor

brutes into the same boat as deluded humans, so that, rather like the Ark, we

float around the world, disconnected from the solid dependability of dry

land. Further, in his brief discussion of the ‘laws of nature’, Nietzsche

(1911a[1873]) suggests that the primal forms (Ur-formen) of time and space

are innate conceptions (Vorstellungen) through which humans are

compelled to perceive the world:

Everything wonderful . . . that we marvel at in the laws of nature,

everything that demands an explanation and might seduce us into

distrusting idealism, lies really and solely in the mathematical rigour

and inviolability of the conceptions of time and space. These however

we produce within ourselves and throw them forth with that necessity

with which the spider spins. (p. 186)

These conceptions condition our experience of the world around us. When

we ‘discern’ laws of nature regarding the orbits of the stars, or chemical

processes, we see only qualities which we ourselves impose on natural

events. In 1873, Nietzsche’s position was precisely that of an idealist, and, as

we shall see, a rather Kantian one at that.8

Kant’s Heroic Desire

Foucault suggested that Nietzsche’s essay constituted la grande rupture,

representing a decisive break from Kant. In fact, Nietzsche’s relationship to

Kant is by no means so clearcut, as we can see both from ‘Truth and Lie’ itself,

and from Nietzsche’s notebooks of the time. As Foucault rightly points out,

Nietzsche certainly wants to distance himself from any account of knowledge

which renders it objective. To the extent that Nietzsche seeks to demonstrate

how knowledge is invented, he is indeed a long way from Kant’s earnest

attempt to provide a firm foundation for the truth of the sciences (Foucault,

2000: 6). Nietzsche also regards Kant’s influence on philosophy as a whole

to be particularly detrimental: following the publication of The Critique of


Pure Reason we can no longer rely upon the controlling influence that

philosophy had hitherto exercised over the small-minded, indiscriminate,

grubby pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, which characterizes

contemporary science and history. Contrary to his explicit intentions, Kant is

part of the process whereby philosophy has gradually lost its hold on the

reins of science (Nietzsche, 1995[1872–4]: 28, 37, 39, 51).9

Nietzsche’s reception of Kant is equivocal, however. He describes, for

instance, what he calls ‘Kant’s tragic problem’, that is, his ‘marvellous, heroic

desire’, which is of course doomed, to be completely truthful (§104). He

finds especially appealing Kant’s insight into the anthropomorphic nature of

all constructions, including all science (§37, 125, 134, 180). And he com-

mends Kant’s attempt to rescue the domain of faith from that of knowledge

(§34).10 Even beyond this begrudging admiration, though, in the process of

acknowledging Kant’s baleful influence on philosophy Nietzsche inherits key

elements of his method. The controlling principle, upon which we can no

longer rely, thanks to Kant, is the ‘thing-in-itself ’. This Nietzsche retains,

however, as part of his understanding of the relation between the world and

its representation. It features, as we saw, as the initial component in his

discussion of the stuttering translation from individual to idea (Nietzsche,

1911a[1873]: 178; 1995[1872–4]: 28, 66, 140). Further, contributing to this

obfuscating sequence of metamorphoses are the primal forms of time and

space, those innate conceptions through which humans are compelled to

perceive the world. Foucault argues that whereas for Kant time and space are

forms of knowledge, for Nietzsche they are ‘primitive rocks’ onto which

knowledge attaches itself (Foucault, 2000: 6). For all intents and purposes

though, Nietzsche’s two Ur-formen function in the text in exactly the same

way as Kant’s two pure forms of intuition.

Foucault suggests of Nietzsche that

When he says that knowledge (connaissance) is always a perspective,

he doesn’t mean, in what would be a blend of Kantianism and

empiricism, that, in man, knowledge is bounded by a certain number of

conditions, of limits derived from human nature, the human body, or

the structure of knowledge itself. (p. 14)11

In fact, the necessity with which man is compelled to cast forth these forms,

a necessity of a kind with the spider’s web spinning, indicates an episte-

mology which comes rather close to a blend of Kantianism and empiricism.12

Whether the conditions of Erkennen derive for humans from their ‘nature’ or

their body is not so important for Nietzsche as the fact that they aredetermined for humanity, just as they are, in their heterogeneous ways, for

all the other creatures he mentions. By retaining, on the one hand, Kant’s

things-in-themselves, the noumena of his account, and, on the other, the

forms of intuition (time and space) that permit a knowing subject to perceive

modified representations of those things-in-themselves, that is, to perceive

phenomena, Nietzsche revives, albeit in a modified form, Kant’s

representationalism.13


‘What is truth?’ Kant asked, and replied confidently,

The nominal definition of truth, that it is the agreement of knowledge

with its object, is assumed as granted: the question asked is as to what

is the general and sure criterion of the truth of any and every

knowledge.’ (Kant, 1964[1781/1787]: A58/B82/97).14

And Nietzsche does indeed grant this definition, disagreeing with Kant not

on the matter of what would constitute truth, but rather on whether such a

thing is possible. Having retained the essence of Kant’s noumenal world,

which remains utterly inaccessible to us, for Nietzsche the ‘thing-in-itself ’

itself would be the only pure, unadulterated truth, an incoherent notion

requiring knowledge to be identified with its object (Nietzsche, 1911a[1873]:

178).15 For Kant’s phenomenal world he substitutes linguistic description,

but in both these cases what we know is of an entirely different order to the

real objects of the material world.

In a well-known passage from Twilight of the Idols, a much later work,

Nietzsche recounts ‘The History of an Error’, that is, ‘How the “True World”

Ultimately Became a Fable’ (Nietzsche, 1964[1888]: 24–5). He traces the six-

stage process through which philosophers’ understandings of the world have

passed. The third stage, following immediately on the heels of Plato and

Christianity, describes how the true world has become unattainable but still

remains as ‘a thought . . . a comfort . . . the idea has become sublime, pale,

northern, Königsbergian’ (p. 24). Kant was, famously, a native and life-long

resident of Königsberg, and, contrary to Foucault’s claim, in 1873 Nietzsche

himself still saw through Königsbergian eyes.16 This would change: as

Nietzsche later observed, snakes must periodically shed their skins. This

process, known as ecdysis, makes room for the new cells growing beneath.

Having no eyelids, snakes instead rely for protection on a scale called the

brille or spectacle. And when they slough their skins, the dead, outer layer of

the spectacle is shed too (Barten: 1989; Halliday and Adler, 2002: 180–1).

The World Is Full of Eyes

There are many kinds of eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes – and

consequently there are many kinds of ‘truths’, and consequently there

is no truth.

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1968, §540)

The Sphinx was the daughter either of Echidna, one of the immortal

Drakainai who had the upper bodies of beautiful women but the long,

coiling tails of serpents, or of the fire-breathing Chimaera, who, in addition

to her serpent tail, had the hindquarters of a goat, the fore-parts of a lion, and

three fearsome heads. The Sphinx had been sent by Hera, the Queen of the

Gods, as a scourge upon the recalcitrant city of Thebes. From Mount Phikios

she assailed the nearby citizens, devouring all who failed to answer her

infamous riddle:


There is on earth a being two-footed, four-footed, and three-footed that

has one name; and, of all creatures that move upon the earth and in the

heavens and in the sea, it alone changes its form. But when it goes

propped on most feet, then is the swiftness of its limbs the weakest.

(Segal, 2001: 36)17

One after another the local populace were dispatched as they failed to provide

the correct answer. In desperation, when even his own son Haemon was killed,

King Creon promised the hand in marriage of his sister Jocasta, plus all his

kingdom, to whoever could solve the riddle and lift the curse. A wandering

Oedipus, fresh from the unwitting murder of his father, encountered the Sphinx

on the road from Delphi. He answered her riddle correctly and in a rage she

threw herself over a precipice.18 The Thebans were saved and Oedipus not

only took possession of what had been his father’s kingdom, but also married

his own mother. Infamously, dire consequences inevitably followed.

In ‘Truth and Lie’ we saw the beginnings of Nietzsche’s perspectivism. In that

early essay he called upon the aid of a number of different animals in order

to combat the naïve assumptions of metaphysical realists.19 Why, then, when

he returned to this theme in his notebooks of the 1880s, did he single out

the Sphinx? Given that there are so many kinds of eyes, why pick out those

of this particular, curious creature? Is she plucked arbitrarily from the mass

of interchangeable and rhetorically equivalent beasts? But then why even the

Sphinx? What makes her such a special case?

Oedipus is the thinker, the man of reason and intelligence, the truth seeker.

Following his adoptive mother’s reticence, his journey to Delphi had been to

enquire of the Sibyl after his true parentage. Further, his victory over the

Sphinx is achieved by means of the intellect rather than by force. Whereas

Perseus beat the gorgon Medusa in combat, by violent decapitation, Oedipus

succeeds with a single word: ‘Man’.20 Only Man, he explains, is four-footed

as a babe, goes on two feet as an adult, and then, in old age, has recourse to

a third ‘foot’: a walking stick. Oedipus is ideally placed to unravel a riddle

about feet. His father, forewarned by an oracle that his son would be his

undoing, had pierced Oedipus’ ankles when he was newborn and left him

exposed on Mount Cithaeron. Having been rescued by cowherds, his

adoptive mother, Queen Periboea, named him ‘Swollen-Feet’ (Oidipous,from oideô meaning ‘to swell’ and pous meaning ‘foot’). An alternate

etymology, however, suggests a slightly different translation: ‘He who knows

the riddle of the feet’ (oida, ‘I know’, and pous, ‘foot’) (Segal, 2001: 30,

36).21 Oedipus, then, is the one looking to know the truth. The answer he

gives to the riddle of the Sphinx is the only answer that will do, the correct

answer, the true answer. The Sphinx, it turns out, is far from being an

arbitrarily chosen cipher. With her hybrid form and riddling cruelty, there is

a sinister, mysterious ambiguity about her. Nietzsche supposed truth to be a

woman, and, though she is part animal, the Sphinx is certainly all woman.22

The Sphinx points, for Oedipus as for Nietzsche, toward the truth, just as the

riddle points toward Man. The truth may be elusive, even guarded, but it is

there nonetheless for those with the wit or perception to uncover it.23


Nietzsche would have us remember, however, that even the Sphinx, even the

keeper of this most vital truth, has eyes. And in virtue of that fact, she, like

every other living creature, has her own distinctive ways of seeing, her own

distinctive truths. Does this mean, then, that there can be more than one

answer to the riddle of the Sphinx? The answer which Oedipus gives surely

seems like the right answer. It has a certain finality to it, after all. Isn’t ‘Man’

always the final answer, the end to all questions?24 Man recognizes himself,

knows himself: ‘of all creatures he alone uses his intelligence to change his

mode of locomotion as he progresses through life. As the very existence of

the riddle implies, he alone is conscious of his uniqueness in nature’ (Segal,

2001: 36). Can Oedipus’ answer really be just one amongst many? To an

audience familiar with Oedipus’ tragic story, a second answer already

suggests itself: Oedipus himself. When he answers the Sphinx, Oedipus does

so as an adult in full health: Oe-dipous is still dipous (‘two footed’). As an

abandoned babe, though, Oedipus had crawled on all fours, weak and

helpless with his pierced ankles. And it will not be long before, as a result of

his clever answer, Oedipus will stand broken and infirm, ‘a stick tapping

before him step by step’.25 There is, then, more than one true answer to this

particular riddle.

It might seem that Nietzsche’s brief comment about the eyes of the Sphinx

accords with his earlier arguments regarding the perceptions of different

animals. There is a significant difference, however, between his youthful

idealism and his mature perspectivism. The latter, in fact, constitutes a

deliberate attempt to move away from Kant, and to provide an alternative to

those Königsbergian ways of seeing which constituted only the third stage in

the history of that erroneous notion, the ‘true world’.26 During the course of

the final essay of The Genealogy of Morals, published in 1887, Nietzsche

begins to wonder what the ‘ascetic priests’, who have denied the basic

impulses of the body and of earthly existence and who delight instead in

denial and self-sacrifice, will accomplish when they turn their eyes to philos-

ophy (Nietzsche, 1996[1887]). They will look for error, he says, in whatever

was formerly considered most true and real: the body, pain, the ego . . . even

reason itself. This is a kind of sadistic pleasure, ‘a lasciviousness which

reaches its peak when ascetic self-contempt, the self-mockery of reason

decrees: “A realm of truth and freedom does exist, but reason is the very thing

which is excluded from it!”’ (III, 12: 98).27 Kant is, of course, one of those

whom Nietzsche has in mind:

In the Kantian concept of the ‘noumenal’ character of things we may

discern a vestige of this prurient ascetic split which enjoys turning

reason against itself. For the noumenal character, to Kant, signifies that

aspect of things about which the intellect knows only that it can never

comprehend it. (III, 12: 255)28

Starting from his assumption that knowledge is a matter of representing the

world, and combined with what he discerns about the fundamental

structures of the mind, Kant is forced to conclude that noumena, ‘things-in-


themselves’, must exist, but that we can say precisely nothing about them.

The concept of noumena represents, he says, a problem which we can

imagine but not solve (Kant, 1953[1783], §34: 77–8). And here’s the rub. If

it is impossible for us to know anything about noumena, argues Nietzsche,

then we do not even know enough to be entitled to make the distinction

between those noumena and mere appearances (Nietzsche, 1910[1882],

§354: 296–300).

The sore point of Kant’s critical philosophy has gradually become

visible even to dull eyes: Kant no longer has a right to his distinction

‘appearance’ and ‘thing-in-itself ’ – he had deprived himself of the right

to go on distinguishing in this old familiar way, in so far as he rejected

as impermissible making inferences from phenomena to a cause of

phenomena. (Nietzsche, 1968, §553: 300)

The very notion of the thing-in-itself is a contradictio in adjecto (Nietzsche,

1973[1885], §16: 27–8).29 In ‘Truth and Lie’ Nietzsche retained this thing-in-

itself but from his notebooks of the time we can see that he had already

begun to move away from the distinction, or opposition, between noumenaand phenomena:

Against Kant we can still object, even if we accept all his propositions,

that it is still possible that the world is as it appears to us. On a personal

level, moreover, this entire position is useless. No one can live in this

skepticism. We must get beyond this skepticism, we must forget it!

(Nietzsche, 1995[1872–4]: 125)

We must forget this opposition because it is useless, because it does no work.

Noumena are rather like the ‘wheels turning idly’ (leerlaufende Raeder) in

Wittgenstein’s machine: they look like they are an important part of the

mechanism, hard at work performing some vital function, but in fact they

connect to nothing, spinning happily but fulfilling no useful purpose.30 If we

cannot, by definition, know anything about noumena, positing their

existence is altogether pointless.31

Fusty Frogs and Questionable Questions

Nietzsche suggests that we should not be ungrateful for perverse, ascetic

inversions such as Kant’s, however. Seeing things through the wrong end of

a telescope, adopting a new and unfamiliar perspective, is a good prepara-

tion for the intellect, he says, as it journeys down the long road toward

eventual ‘objectivity’ (einstmaligen ‘Objektivät’) (Nietzsche, 1996[1887]: III,

12: 98). This ‘objectivity’ (always within quotation marks) is by no means the

‘inconceivable and nonsensical notion’ (Unbegriff und Widersinn) of

‘disinterested contemplation’ so treasured by the realist, though. This myth

of a ‘pure, will-less, painless, timeless knower’ is entangled within ‘the

tentacles of such contradictory concepts as “pure reason”, “absolute


spirituality”, “knowledge in itself ”’ (p. 98).32 Nietzsche’s position could not

be further from that of the realist philosopher, studiously straining to

become disinterested. As he says elsewhere, ‘I think that we are today at least

far from the ludicrous immodesty of decreeing from our nook that there canonly be legitimate perspectives from that nook’. Rather, the world has

become ‘infinite’: we cannot dismiss the possibility that it contains infiniteinterpretations (Nietzsche, 1910[1882], §374: 340–1). Nietzsche’s

einstmaligen ‘Objektivät’ is, then, ‘the capacity to have all the arguments for

and against at one’s disposal and to suspend or implement them at will’

(Nietzsche, 1996[1887]: III, 12: 98). In this way we will be able, he says, to

exploit the very diversity of perspectives and affective interpretations, in the

interests of knowledge.

The more feelings about a matter which we allow to come to

expression, the more eyes, different eyes through which we are able to

view this same matter, the more complete our ‘conception’ of it, our

‘objectivity’, will be. (III, 12: 98)

Attempting to eliminate the will, the feelings, all that permits us to adopt a

perspective, amounts to the castration of the intellect (pp. 98–9).

‘Objectivity’, or knowledge, is a matter of gaining multiple opinions,

perspectives, eyes, and the more the better. His own form of perspectivism,

then, is Nietzsche’s alternative to Kant.

Nietzsche’s is by no means a relativistic perspectivism, however. Rejecting,

finally, Kant’s representationalism changes the tenor of his own anti-realist

epistemology. On the one hand a perspective depends very much on the

particular pair (or more) of eyes doing the seeing. The realist or the ascetic

priest, who here amount to much the same thing, ask us to imagine

an eye which it is impossible to imagine, an eye which supposedly looks

out in no particular direction, an eye which supposedly either restrains

or altogether lacks the active powers of interpretation which first make

seeing into seeing something – for here, then, a nonsense and non-

concept is demanded of the eye. Perspectival seeing is the only kind of

seeing there is, perspectival ‘knowing’ the only kind of ‘knowing’

(Nietzsche, 1996[1887]: III, 12: 98)33

The eyes that a creature has will affect what it sees, in the most basic, bodily

sense. There are many kinds of truth, in the first instance, because there are

many kinds of eyes. Nietzsche knew that, hybridized monster that she was,

the eyes of the Sphinx were different from those of Oedipus.34 We have

already looked at the multi-faceted eyes of the gnat, the eyespots of the

worm, and the dull vision of the serpents. What one sees, the perspective

that one has, depends on one’s eyes.35 We can see here that, in speaking of

eyes and perspectives, Nietzsche is not dealing with representations. His

insistence on the corporeal nature of perception, on the fact that the

observing subject does experience time, pain, feelings and its own wilful


intentions, is a move away from disembodied, abstract representationalism.

And it is in the interests that arise as a result of this embodiment that we find

a second important characteristic of Nietzsche’s perspectivism.

Like those myopic serpents, Nietzsche himself suffered from poor eyesight,

but perspectivism isn’t simply a matter of visual perception. Nietzsche

stresses that a creature’s perspectives will be determined by its interests and

values. Any and every understanding of the world will be evaluative. The

notion of the thing-in-itself is redundant but so too is the idea that we can

understand a thing, even a phenomenon, without involving our own

interests and evaluations.

That things possess a constitution in themselves quite apart from

interpretation and subjectivity, is a quite idle hypothesis: it presupposes

that interpretation and subjectivity are not essential, that a thing freed

from all relationships would still be a thing. (Nietzsche, 1968, §560:

302–3)

It is our concerns that allow us to know a thing at all. ‘Coming to know

means “to place oneself in a conditional relation to something”; to feel

oneself conditioned by something and oneself to condition it’ (§555: 301).

Attempting to know anything that is unconditioned by our desires and

interests entails a contradiction between wanting to know something and the

desire that it not concern us. ‘(B)ut why know at all, then?’ asks Nietzsche

(§555: 301). ‘The question of values is more fundamental than the question

of certainty: the latter becomes serious only by presupposing that the value

question has already been answered’ (§588: 322–3). Attempting to gain

knowledge about the world is not a matter of trying to achieve certainties,

truths, or absolute knowledge about a thing-in-itself or even a mere

appearance. Rather, knowing something is a matter of interpreting the world

in order to survive in life (§588: 322–3). ‘There is no question of “subject”

and “object,” but of a particular species of animal that can prosper only

through a certain relative rightness; above all, regularity of its perceptions (so

that it can accumulate experience)’ (§480: 266–7). The ‘organs of

knowledge’ of any species are developed not in order that it can avoid being

deceived, but so that it can preserve itself and flourish (§480: 266–7).

Perspectives, then, involve not just a straightforward visual element, but also

the values, in the broadest sense, that permit a creature to go about the

important business of living.

Acknowledging the outlooks and values of different perspectives does not,

for the mature Nietzsche, imply that all perspectives are of equal merit.

Nothing could be further from the perspectival truth.36

That the value of the world lies in our interpretation . . . that previous

interpretations have been perspective valuations by virtue of which we

can survive in life, ie in the will to power, for the growth of power; that

every elevation of man brings with it the overcoming of narrower

interpretations; that every strengthening and increase of power opens


up new perspectives and means believing in new horizons – this idea

permeates my writings. (§616: 330)

Our objective, our einstmaligen ‘Objektivät’, should be the capacity to

suspend or implement any of a number of perspectives at will. These

perspectives, these interpretations, are by no means of equal value. Part of

the journey toward eventual ‘objectivity’ is a matter of acknowledging that

some interpretations are narrower than others, that it is better to overcome

these interpretations, that this overcoming will allow us to elevate ourselves.

Some perspectives are better than others.37

The creatures that entertain these different perspectives, that evaluate these

different perspectives, are not, of course, only human. Even in ‘Truth and Lie’

the different perceptions of the world belonged not just to different language

speakers, but to different species of animal. In yet another of his many attacks

on the scientific belief in a ‘true world’, the mature Nietzsche argues that this

approach leaves out something crucial. It omits: ‘precisely this necessary

perspectivism by virtue of which every centre of force – and not only man –

construes all the rest of the world from its own viewpoint, ie measures, feels,

forms, according to its own force’ (§636: 339–40).38

Perspectivism is not simply a human affair. In an early section of BeyondGood and Evil, for instance, we see Nietzsche evaluating a certain

philosophical perspective by drawing an analogy with the outlook of a

particular, lowly animal. Metaphysicians of all ages, he tells us, have been

inclined to ask themselves how the good and honoured things, those of the

highest value such as truth or altruism, could possibly have originated except

in ‘the womb of being, in the intransitory, in the hidden god, in the “thing in

itself ”’ (Nietzsche, 1973[1885], §2: 15–16). We might do better, Nietzsche

suggests, to regard the very oppositions themselves, these routine antitheses

of the good (the true, the genuine, the selfless) and the bad (appearance,

deception, selfishness), as superficial estimates, as merely provisional view-

points, as perspectives from below: ‘frog perspectives’.39

Now, then, the ‘true world’ has become an ‘idea that no longer serves any

purpose, that no longer constrains one to anything – a useless idea that has

become quite superfluous’ (Nietzsche, 1964[1888]: 24–5). It stands

condemned, like the notion of ‘disinterested observations’ by those damning

quotation marks. It is an exploded idea, says Nietzsche, so ‘let us abolish it!’

The perspectivism which stands in its place, which prompts all free-spirits to

‘kick up a shindy’, is a variety of pragmatism in which one’s interpretations

are variously enabling. No longer concerned with cold, dusty ‘representa-

tions’, knowledge is a means by which one gets things done. It is our needs

and drives which interpret the world (Nietzsche, 1968, §481: 267), and

knowledge works as a tool of power (§480: 266–7).

In order for a particular species to maintain itself and increase its

power, its conception of reality must comprehend enough of the

calculable and constant for it to base a scheme of behaviour on it . . . a


species grasps a certain amount of reality in order to become master of

it, in order to press it into service. (§480: 266–7)40

It is when we set about a scheme of behaviour, when we use objects and

ideas, when we press reality into service, that we formulate understandings,

interpretations and perspectives.41

As a pragmatically inclined thinker, Nietzsche was in fact perfectly happy to

employ the word ‘truth’: it has a utility, a use, which cannot be denied. His

objection was only to those attempts by ascetic metaphysicians to attain theTruth, or arrive at a truth which was not provisional, partial and perspectival:

this understanding of truth, of the ‘true world’, has precisely no use at all.

For Nietzsche, then, the Sphinx becomes not the symbol of Truth but of

‘truth’. The will to truth (Will zur Wahrheit) tempts us to many a hazardous

enterprise (Nietzsche, 1973[1885], §1: 15). It is, says Nietzsche, a Sphinx

who asks us questionable questions (fragwürdigen Fragen). But in asking us

these questions, these riddling puzzles, she teaches us too to ask questions.

Just as Kant’s perverse, ascetic inversions encourage us to see things through

the wrong end of the telescope, and thereby to add fresh perspectives to our

armoury, so the Sphinx prompts us to enquire after the origin and value of

the will to truth itself. ‘The problem of the value of truth stepped before us

– or was it we who stepped before this problem? Which of us is Oedipus?

Which of us Sphinx?’ (§1: 15). At this ‘rendezvous of questions and question-

marks’ we fix our eye on the problem, the hazard, of the value of the will to

truth. The Sphinx asks us a riddle, a question that requires, on pain of death,

a ‘true’ answer, but we are no longer concerned with the business of trying

to achieve these ‘truths’. Nietzsche deals now with truths as perspectives.

Nietzsche’s Spectacles; Nietzsche’s Ecdysis

Richard Rorty, a contemporary pragmatist, has suggested that the desire to

know the truth is the desire to recontextualize, that is, the desire to

accommodate new beliefs and conceptual frameworks by dropping or

altering old ones (Rorty, 1991). This desire is, he says, characteristically

human in the sense that we have little choice but to keep doing it (p. 110).

Just as Nietzsche suggested in his earlier essay that humans can’t help but

conceive the world in terms of Ur-formen, throwing them forth ‘with that

necessity with which the spider spins’ (Nietzsche, 1911a[1873]: 186), so for

Rorty humans can’t help reweaving the webs of beliefs and desires that

constitute a human mind. This desire, when taken to its logical and necessary

conclusion, is the desire to keep coming up with new interpretations, ‘to

recontextualize for the hell of it’. This will to perspectival truth is as

characteristically human, he says, as the opposable thumb.42

As we saw, Foucault applauded this inventive approach to human cognition,

this emphasis on the invented, when he addressed Nietzsche’s ‘Truth and

Lie’. It contrasted favourably, he said, with Kant’s sublime, Königsbergian

ways. But Foucault skipped, rather too quickly, from ‘Truth and Lie’ (1873)


to The Gay Science (1882), and then to The Genealogy of Morals (1887). He

is right, of course, to draw our attention to the emphasis placed on

invention, on interpretation and perspectivism, in Nietzsche’s later texts. But

between the earlier and the mature works this serpent had shed his skin

more than once. As the years went by, Nietzsche’s eyesight continued to fail

and the short-sighted professor found it increasingly difficult to read and to

work, even with his spectacles.43 When a snake sheds her skin, though, she

loses her current set of spectacles too. Her perspective changes, and even

improves on the clouded, murky vision she has during the process of the

slough. There is, however, no single, final moment when the scales fall from

her eyes. With serpentine ecdysis the change in perspective, the shedding of

one’s skin, occurs over and over, indefinitely, throughout one’s lifetime.

Nietzsche, then, was a snake not a Sphinx.44

There is an enduring element to Nietzsche’s epistemology, but it is not to be

found in his relationship to truth, and certainly not to Kant’s truths. Rather,

his evolving comments on epistemology share a vigorous rejection of the

idea that knowledge is an exclusively human preserve. The inventions of

knowledge, all those interpretations and perspectives, depend neither on

linguistic constructions, nor on innate human faculties, Kantian or

otherwise. For Nietzsche truths and interpretations, which amount to the

same thing, are not to be conceived in human terms at all. The centres of

force are many and varied, as the gnat, the worm, the serpent and even the

fusty frog helped demonstrate: the world is full of eyes. Nietzsche himself

may, like the snake, have had dull eyes, but he was always clear sighted. He

saw that there is no final truth, for humans or anyone else, and that

perspectives are many, varied, and constantly changing: even the Sphinx has

eyes, and the snake that cannot shed its skin perishes.


Notes

1. Nietzsche’s essay, titled ‘über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne’,

has been translated many times. I use Kaufmann’s translation of the title

(Nietzsche, 1954[1873]), which is to be preferred both because ‘Lie’ retains the

stately nominative singular of Lüge, and because ‘extra-moral’ retains the idea

of that which is outside, and also additional to, the moral. All quotations,

however, are taken from Mügge’s complete translation, ‘On Truth and Falsity in

their Ultramoral Sense’ (Nietzsche, 1911a[1873]), unless otherwise stated.

2. Das Erkennen has been translated as either ‘cognition’ (Mügge, Spiers) or

‘knowledge’ (Kaufmann). Neither of these two English substantives

adequately convey the process Nietzsche was describing, whereby objects

are perceived, identified or recognized. Much closer is the archaic English

verbal substantive ‘kenning’ meaning mental cognition, knowledge, cognizance

and recognition, which, like das Erkennen, combines a sense both of knowing

and of seeing. ‘Kenning’ and das Erkennen derive from a common Germanic

root, but the former survives today only in Scottish and Northern English

dialects.

3. In his capacity as comparative philologist, Nietzsche might also have added that

the arbitrariness of words will be due in part to a language’s development over

time.


4. Nietzsche is highly suspicious of these ‘percepts’ or ‘phenomena’, and later in the

essay says that he shuns the latter term on account of its ‘many seductions’ (p.

184). Avoiding the term does not, however, prevent him from capitulating to at

least some of these seductions, as we shall see in a moment.

5. Nietzsche thus uses the term ‘metaphor’ in the sense that Jonathan Culler dubs

the via philosophica, which ‘locates metaphor in the gap between sense and

reference, in the process of thinking of an object as something’. Culler (1974)

contrasts this with the via rhetorica, which situates metaphor ‘in the space

between one meaning and another, between the literal or “proper” verbal

expression and its periphrastic substitute’. The distinction, as Culler goes on to

show, does not hold, and each definition slips unhappily but inevitably into the

other (p. 219).

6. For a simulation of the visual perception of a compound eye, see Uexküll’s

well-known village street scene (Uexküll, 1992[1934]: 335, 338).

7. Like Nietzsche, Smythe’s primary interest is in the visual sense, though he

mentions many others, and certainly does not confine himself to the five

traditionally experienced by humans. He shares too a certain misanthropy, and

his Introduction exhibits unanticipated parallels with Nietzsche’s own:

The world is full of eyes . . . Humanity is apt to regard the world as a place

designed especially for its own delectation. It worships a Maker whom it

fondly imagines to be a larger or more erudite replica of itself. Throughout

the world there exist hundreds of millions of other creatures, huge or

microscopic, which for all we know, may quite justly entertain the same idea.

(Smythe: 1975: viii)

8. Nietzsche uses the term ‘idealism’ (Idealismus) twice as a direct contrast to the

naïve realist approaches with which he takes issue (Nietzsche, 1911a[1873]:

185, 186).

9. References are to the paragraph numbers, not pages, of Nietzsche’s Notebook 19.

10. Though not, of course, the particular faith to which Kant himself holds.

11. Connaissance, so often translated into English simply as ‘knowledge’, also

captures in French the active process of cognition implied by Nietzsche’s

Erkennen.12. Maudemarie Clark calls this Nietzsche’s ‘naturalized Kantian theory of

knowledge’ (Clark, 1990: 124). It is not quite a blend of Kantianism with

empiricism due to Nietzsche’s emphasis on the role of language, which adds an

additional element to the mix.

13. Nietzsche’s early understanding of Kant was significantly influenced by his reading

of Schopenhauer: see Clark (1990: 79–83), Magee (1997: 286–300) and Janaway

(1998a). In fact, as Christopher Janaway (1998a: 5) has pointed out, the opening

of Nietzsche’s ‘Truth and Lie’ is a ‘virtual parody’ of the opening of the second

volume of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1966[1818]: 3).

14. References are to the first edition (A), second edition (B) and the English

translation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1964[1781/1787]).

15. Compare Kant’s suggestion that a divine understanding would intuit not

representations of objects, thought according to the categories, but the objects

themselves (B145: 161). For a concise summary of Kant’s position, and the

extent to which Nietzsche shares it, see Clark (1990: 55–61).

16. For a clear discussion of the Kantian elements of ‘Truth and Lie’, see Clark

(1990, Ch. 3, esp. pp. 85–90). On the role of the visual in Nietzsche’s writing,

and indeed in that of Foucault, see Gary Shapiro’s elegantly written

Archaeologies of Vision (2003, esp. pp. 19–26).


17. This is the earliest version of the Sphinx’s riddle to have survived. For an

alternative translation see Sheppard (1920: xvii).

18. The story of Oedipus’ meeting with the Sphinx is recounted by several

ancient authors. See for instance Apollodorus (1921 trans., III: v. 7–9:

343–51).

19. On the vast array of different animals that appear throughout Nietzsche’s work

see Ham (1997), Langer (1999), and especially Norris (1985, Ch. 4).

20. On the contrast between Oedipus’ victory and that of other Greek mythic

heroes, see Goux (1993: 15–18) and Segal (2001: 49–50).

21. On the interplay between knowledge and power in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex see

Foucault (2000: 17–32). On Oedipus’ role as the one who knows, see p. 24 and

pp. 28–30.

22. ‘In various versions of the myth, both literary and pictorial, the Sphinx preys on

young men, carrying them off in a deadly, quasi-erotic embrace and devouring

them’ (Segal, 2001: 33). She is described as a ‘she-hawk’ or as a ‘virgin or bitch’

(Goux, 1993: 17). As Goux points out, it is most often against a monstrous

female opponent that Greek heroes succeed: Perseus overcomes the Gorgon,

Bellerophon the Chimera, et al. (Goux, 1993: 7–8, 15–18). On Nietzsche’s

supposition regarding truth see Nietzsche (1973[1885]: 13), Preface. For an

illuminating collection of responses to Nietzsche’s characterizations of ‘woman’

see Oliver and Pearsall (1998).

23. On the concept of truth particular to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, see Foucault

(2000: 17–24).

24. (M)an, the amazing exception, the super-beast, the quasi-God, the mind of

creation, the indispensable, the key-word to the cosmic riddle, the mighty

lord of nature and despiser of nature, the creature that calls its history “the

history of the world”! Vanitas vanitatum homo. (Nietzsche,1911b[1879–80],

§12: 192–3)

See also Adorno and Horkheimer (1979): ‘Oedipus’ answer to the Sphinx’s

riddle: “It is man!” is the Enlightenment stereotype repeatedly offered as

information, irrespective of whether it is faced with a piece of objective

intelligence, a bare schematization, fear of evil powers, or hope of redemption’

(pp. 6–7).

25. The words are those of the oracle Teiresias in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (quoted

in Segal, 2001: 82). On the two possible answers to the riddle, see Segal (pp.

36–7) and Sheppard (1920: xvii–xviii). There is an ominous irony to the fact

that when he meets the Sphinx, and correctly answers her riddle, Oedipus does

not know himself, that is, does not know the terrible truth about his parentage.

He has eyes but does not know the truth, and soon he will gain the truth and

lose his eyes. The tragedy of his story depends, of course, on the slow but

inevitable process by which he comes to know himself. On the extent to which

Oedipus is ‘the man knowing nothing’, see Vellacoot (1971: 170).

26. On the correspondence between the stages of Nietzsche’s understanding of

truth, and those he describes in Twilight of the Idols, see Clark (1990: 109–17),

briefly summarized in Leiter (p. 335).

27. On the ascetic philosophers’ impulse to deny the body, see also Nietzsche

(1973[1885], I: 10).

28. See also ‘Why Philosophers Are Slanderers’ (Nietzsche, 1968, §461: 253–4).

29. For an elaboration of this point see Nietzsche (1968, §555: 301, §558: 302).

30. Wittgenstein used this wonderful image several times. See Wittgenstein

(1975[1964]: 51) and (1953, §271: 95). My thanks to Roger White for both

references.


31. For a series of vitriolic comments about the notion of the thing-in-itself, see

Nietzsche (1968, §553–69: 300–2). For an extensive discussion of the

development of Nietzsche’s increasing rejection of the thing-in-itself through

his works, see Clark (1990) Chapters 3–5, especially Chapter 4, Section 1. In

rejecting the Kantian elements of his earlier essay – the thing-in-itself and the

implicit idea of some kind of transcendental truth – Nietzsche moves in his last

six books to what Clark calls a ‘Neo-Kantian’ position. This designation is

perhaps not entirely accurate, and has, as Clark concedes, given rise to

misunderstandings regarding her own interpretation. It fails, I think, to reflect

fully the grande rupture Nietzsche does eventually make from Kant (see Clark,

1990: 61). Nietzsche was by no means alone in rejecting the idea of the thing-

in-itself as an incoherent or unnecessary fiction: see for instance the work of

Kant’s contemporary critics Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and Salomon Maimon,

recounted in Beiser (1987, esp. 122–6, 306–9).

32. Janaway (1998b) points out that this ‘pure, will-less, painless, timeless knower’

is a direct but unattributed quotation from Schopenhauer, who conceives of

this passive subject as a ‘mirror’ of objective reality. Nietzsche’s attack on this

conception of objectivity here derives a good deal of its impetus from his

reading of Schopenhauer, who remains, in Janaway’s words, an ‘unnamed but

scarcely disguised subtext’ (p. 16). For an illuminating discussion see Janaway

(1998b: 27–36). For more on Schopenhauer’s continuing influence on

Nietzsche’s conception of truth, knowledge and objectivity, see Clark (1998).

33. See also Nietzsche (1968, §567: 305–6).

34. On the different kinds of gaze, and therefore of knowledge, in Oedipus Rex –

the gazes of the gods, of the slaves and, situated between them, of Oedipus

himself – see Foucault (2000: 23–4, 28–30). Foucault does not, alas, discuss the

gaze of the Sphinx.

35. On the importance of the visual element for Nietzsche’s perspectivism see

Leiter (1994: 334–57, esp. 343–7) and Poellner (2001: 85–117, esp. 88–98).

36. In fact, Nietzsche has quite often been saddled with relativist beliefs in

secondary literature. Brian Leiter calls this the ‘received view’ which has

predominated since the 1960s. For a solid account of the received view,

including an extensive list of those who have propounded it, see Leiter (1994:

334–6). On Nietzsche’s rejection of the claim that all perspectives could be of

equal merit, see section IIB (Leiter, 1994).

37. That Nietzsche was more than ready to pass judgement on the epistemic merit of

a plethora of diverging perspectives is one of Leiter’s key contentions. See sections

IIB (338–9), IIIC (340–1), IIIF (341–2), IV (343–51), and indeed passim. With

his notion of einstmaligen ‘Objektivät’ Nietzsche rejects both the relativist claim

that all perspectives are of equal merit, but also any suggestion that there can be

some kind of absolute or meta-perspective. A perspective is not to be favoured

because it approaches closer to some enduring, objective ideal or truth, but

rather because it serves a creature’s particular, often transitory interests. As we’ve

seen, there can be an edifying utility even to the perverse, ascetic inversions of

Kant and Schopenhauer. On the contentious question of Nietzsche’s anti-relativist

perspectivism see Leiter (1994), Clark (1990: 127–58) and Clark (1998).

38. See also §616: 330, and §567: 305–6.

39. In German a Frosch-Perspektiven is a view from below just as, in English, a

‘bird’s eye view’ is a view from above. Nietzsche seems to have held frogs in

particularly low regard. Zarathustra hears the croak of the frog in the swamp-

smelling wisdom of dusty scholars, and he compares inflated windbags to the

frog who has blown himself out for too long and eventually explodes. See


Nietzsche (1961[1883–5]), ‘Of Scholars’ (pp. 147–9) and ‘The Sorcerer’

(p. 270), and, on the scholar’s lack of intellectual vision, Shapiro (2003: 40).

Blown-out frogs also appear in the 1888 Preface to The Twilight of the Idols(Nietzsche, 1964[1888]).

40. See also §567: 305–6 and §636: 339–40.

41. This is not to say, of course, that Nietzsche, any more than contemporary

pragmatists, is suggesting that we have carte blanche in our formulation of

those understandings, interpretations and perspectives. It is necessary that a

creature or species comprehends what is ‘calculable and constant’, thereby

grasping ‘a certain amount of reality’, before any action or activity is likely to be

successful.

42. Strictly speaking Rorty (1991) argues, indulging his own evaluative perspective,

that this exuberant recontextualization is characteristic ‘not of the human

species, but merely of its most advanced, sophisticated subspecies – the well-

read, tolerant, conversable inhabitant of a free society’ (p. 110).

43. On Nietzsche’s ‘Eye Trouble’ see Shapiro (2003: 39–41).

44. The improvement in Nietzsche’s vision, his approach as a ‘seeker after

knowledge’ toward an einstmaligen ‘Objektivät’ despite his failing eyesight,

was the result of his ‘desire to see differently’ and his increasing capacity ‘to

have all the arguments for and against at one’s disposal and to suspend or

implement them at will: so that one can exploit that very diversity of

perspectives and affective interpretations in the interests of knowledge’

(Nietzsche, 1996[1887]: 98).

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Tom Tyler is a Senior Lecturer in Communication, Media and Culture at

Oxford Brookes University. His research interests include the uses of animals

in philosophy and cultural theory, and the challenges that evolutionary

theory and primatology pose for traditional understandings of what

constitutes human being.

Address: Oxford Brookes University, Harcourt Hill Campus, Oxford OX2 9AT,

UK. [email: [email protected]]

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