It is precisely this that the famous aphorism means when it states that there are no facts but only interpretations. As B. Magnus wrote “Nietzsche’s tropes concerning ‘truth’ and ‘error’, ‘fact’ and ‘interpretation’ are best understood as rhetorical devices to help us confront our preconception (‘intuition’) that there must be something like a final truth about the world as such which is the goal of some discipline or other to disclose”. (Magnus, 1983, p. 100). Magnus adds that a theory of knowledge is not something Nietzsche has precisely something he parodies. This situation is fairly clear and impressive in the following passage of Genealogy of the Morals: “Henceforth, my dear philosophers be on guard against the dangerous, old conceptual fiction that posited a “pure”, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject”, let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as “pure reason”, “absolute spirituality”, “knowledge in itself: these always demand that we should think of an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned into no particular direction in which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking, these always demand of the eye an absurdity and a ‘nonsense’ and, Nietzsche goes on in this decisive passage of his thematization of perspectivism: ‘there is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’; and more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity’ be”. (III, § 12).
We can, therefore, better understand the displacement that the metaphor of perspective introduces in the appreciation of knowledge. As we know, we say seeing is perspective, we are saying that the type of special relation, defined by the distance and the angle that exists between the object that is seen and the eye that sees affects the way in which the object, lets say, “appears”. But the metaphor of perspective points toward two other aspects: by varying the elements of the relation (distance and angle) the object appears in different manners; and that is absurd, impossible, a non-perspective vision that, in fact, would be a vision “from nowhere”. (Clark, 1991, p.129).
The rhetorical device consists, therefore, in characterizing knowledge based on this comparison whit what happens whit vision: the effect, the consideration of the effects, substitutes, in this case, the role of the fundaments. And, this substitution takes place the moment in which, on discovering the rhetorical “nature” of language, one recognizes an equivalence, even a crucial identification: the one which is outlined between the establishing of a perspective and the qualification of a fact. And, at this stage, it is, probably the possibility of a perspectivism whit no nihilism which is, finally configured.
Universidade Nova de Lisboa.
REFERENCES
Carrilho, M. Ma – Rhetoriques de la modernité , Paris P.U.F., 1992.
Clark, M. – Nietzsche on truth and philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Danto, A. – Nietzsche as philosopher, New York, Columbia University Press, 1980.
Gilman, S.L., Blair, C., Parent, D.J. (eds.) – F. Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989.
Habermas, J. – The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1987.
Kaufman, W. (Ed.) – The Portable Nietzsche, Penguin Books, 1976.
Magnus, B. – “Nietzsche Today: a view from America”, in International Studies in Philosophy, 15, no. 2 (1983).
Man, P. de – Allegories of Reading, Yale University Press, 1979.
Nietzsche, F. – On the Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writing of Nietzsche, New York, Random House (Modern Library), 1968
Nietzsche, F. – The Gay Science, New York, Random House (Vintage), 1974.