Nietzsche’s Critique of Metaphysics and the Will to Power
Nietzsche’s Critique of Metaphysics
Critique of Ontological Metaphysics
Metaphysics is based on a traditional error: the belief in the antithesis of values. Dogmatic philosophers have believed that things of supreme value have an origin in themselves, that they come directly from God, from another world. For Nietzsche, Western philosophical thought succumbed to the temptation to negatively assess the sensible world, contrasting it with an eternal, true, and good world. The wise man looks at the ideal, which promotes the denial of life. Traditional ontology is static because it considers being as something fixed and immutable.
This criticism is closely related to moral criticism since morality and metaphysics are based on the same error: Platonic dualism, in rejecting the sensible world for the intelligible. It is necessary to assert the world of the senses as the only real one. Practical metaphysics makes the following errors: denial of becoming, denial of the senses, belief in the self in things as substances, and belief in the condensation of truth. Nietzsche bases his critique of metaphysics on the Socratic-Platonic tradition.
Critique of Epistemological Metaphysics
Explain the genesis of categories as becoming reality.
Reality and Concept
It is intended that the concept expresses a multitude of things that, strictly speaking, as Nietzsche said, “are never identical.” Truth is a set of generalizations that use and custom have imposed. Sensation is fixed by custom, producing a metaphor. Any logical process in the formation of concepts is denied. According to Nietzsche, the human being, in the first place, has widespread impressions. The concept, then, refers to their very lives. Understanding uses concepts as axes of coordinates of reality. In effect, the Western tradition states that forms correspond to reality. Nietzsche questions that concepts seize the true being of reality, which is becoming and change.
There would be no truth if perception were exact. But it is impossible; behavior is only possible aesthetically and creatively, and words are ephemeral. Through concepts, one never arrives at an eternal truth.
The Will to Power
For Nietzsche, reality has a dynamic character; reality is life plus perspective. But life interprets; it selects and interprets the aspect under which it faces and relates to reality. It is impossible to carry out a final understanding of reality because the human intellect has served to understand its own forms, subject to becoming. According to Nietzsche, there is also a close correlation between reality and life, between ontology and anthropology.
Interpretation of Reality
The world of reality is multiple and diverse; it is the human being, because he has a plurality of instincts. This multiplicity of impulses and appearances becomes fixed when we are shown a perspective as the only one, with a consequent neglect of all other perspectives. Moreover, being is becoming, ever being done.
Nietzsche’s dynamic ontology combats the static ontology that was becoming a mere appearance. He faces two types of arguments:
- Member of dogmatic metaphysics.
- Nietzsche, that which is irrational is contrary to the reason of Plato.
The New Idea of Truth
The problem of truth takes on a different sense. The question now is not whether a trial is true or false, but whether or not it is conducive to life. Truth is solely the consolidation of a perspective, an appearance that has been set through the usual, but it does not cease to be an error. Truth is an error without which no species of determined beings could live.
The will to power justifies the error of appearance. The will to power is the only relation to knowledge that man can have in this world. But the true reality will be that of becoming.
The New Idea of Language
It exalts the power of the metaphorical imagination of the human being. The metaphor is a real difference for the Nietzschean perspective. Dogmatic metaphysics confuses the concept with being, while the other metaphysics is aware of that.