Nietzsche’s Critique of Traditional Metaphysics
Traditional metaphysics has introduced an ontological dualism by distinguishing between the real world of the permanent, grasped by reason, and the apparent world of change, perceived by the senses. As a result:
- Ontology is considered static because the Self is seen as something fixed and immutable.
- True reality, the Self, cannot be perceived as it truly is in this world, where everything is appearance and falsehood according to the senses.
- The Self has a world of its own. Since what we know in this world is unreal, we must look to the other for being in possession of the truth. Thus, the dogmatic philosopher is dedicated to finding, to speculating beyond the movement of the world: what is the being of the world that we cannot study in the whirlwind of comings and goings of this life, as it is, for him, the cause of error.
Traditional metaphysics and ontology are based, according to Nietzsche, on philosophers’ biases against life, such as the horror of death, old age, change, procreation, etc. Man invented the fiction of metaphysics to escape aging and give his life infinite meaning. There is no eternal world of ideas; there is only the space-time world experienced by the senses. There is no apparent world and a real world, but only the constant evolution of the Self—life—creating and destroying the world. We must deny, says the vitalist philosopher, absolutely any ontology that involves a disregard for life as it is.
Nietzsche’s Four Propositions Against Traditional Metaphysics
Nietzsche’s critique of the ontological division is clarified with these four propositions, contained in Twilight of the Idols, on the misconception of traditional metaphysics:
The reasons why this world has been described as apparent by the underlying metaphysicians, rather, prove its reality; another kind of reality is quite different and unprovable.
An artificially constructed reality based on concepts or mental categories such as unity, identity, causality, purpose, substance, etc., is absolutely unprovable. Claiming that something is apparent because it fits within these categories is to say just the opposite, namely that it is real. While these concepts have been useful to know what to expect and survive in a world of becoming, we cannot take them in themselves as the true reality because they are our creation to be prevented.
The distinctive signs that have been assigned to the true being of things are the hallmarks of non-being, of nothingness.
Traditional philosophers were convinced that becoming is a mistake of our senses, so they built their real world safe from becoming, in denial, reified into concepts. The end result has been the negation of being and the affirmation of anything contained in its concepts.
To invent fables about the world beyond this makes no sense, assuming that an instinct does not dominate in us (…) of suspicion toward life.
The static perspective, one that denies its becoming, is the product of resentment toward life, a doubt in the value of this: whoever invents another world is because they think it would be better than this one.
Dividing the world into a true and an apparent world, either in the manner of Christianity or in the manner of Kant (…) is a symptom of declining life.
Inventing logical fictions and concepts that allow us stability against the chaotic nature of the world is a sign of a lack of strength, of decadence. The result is a mummification of happening and the subjugation of man to a higher principle than himself, whether God, reason, or science.