I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
Today I want to briefly review Nietzsche’s idea of perspectivism, which says that all knowledge, truth, and moral values are based on individual perceptions and subjective interpretations. I’m especially interested in exploring how his ideas acted as a precursor to the 20th century postmodernist movement, which rejected the concept of absolute, universal truth.
I’m motivated towards exploring this by reading Damon Linker’s article Welcome to the Postmodern Presidency which argues that while in the past the left has more often embraced the perspectivism and relativism of postmodernism, today the right under President Trump is enacting a new kind of postmodernism. The American right wing has discarded the idea of objective truth and acts under the belief that “there is no such thing as disinterested reason, just various forms of self-interested rationalization,” to use Linker’s words. Not only that, but the right’s version of postmodernism, unlike the left’s, is centered on achieving personal and familial gain rather than on promoting freedom for all.
Linker writes of Trump:
All the way back to The Art of the Deal, he has spoken of truth as a tool for manipulation. Rather than determining what is true and then deciding what to do on that basis, Trump takes the reverse approach, first determining what he wants to do, and then adjusting what he claims to be true in order to help him accomplish it. This is why he is the first truly postmodern president.
This is easily seen in the posts Trump makes on the ironically named Truth Social, so many of which contain lies. But by calling them “truth” he makes them true, at least for his followers. To Trump, what is true is what gets him what he wants.
Trump’s is a cynical and damaging enactment of perspectivism. On the left, postmodernism most often aims at increasing freedoms and supporting individuals in pursuing their highest purposes. On the right, the current postmodernist perspectivism is aimed at enriching the president and his cronies while pursuing vengeance against his enemies on the left.
Nietzsche would say that everyone actually seeks truth based on their own private impulses and purposes. It’s just that Trump is completely up front about it.
Nietzsche’s perspectivism as foreshadowing postmodernist ideas
Nietzsche’s perspectivism grew out of a reaction to philosophers who came before him who acted like they were objectively and unbiasedly pursuing knowledge and truth, when really they were generating philosophical cover for their deepest personal impulses.
In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes:
It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of—namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown. Indeed to understand how the abstrusest metaphysical assertions of a philosopher have been arrived at, it is always well (and wise) to first ask oneself: “What morality do they (or does he) aim at?”
In the Introduction to Nietzsche, Life and Literature, Alexander Nehamas suggests that Nietzsche’s perspectivism does not include the idea that all knowledge and truth frameworks are equivalently good:
I accept Nietzsche’s view that there are no facts that are independent of interpretation and that are therefore capable of providing the common object of which all interpretations are interpretations. I also accept his view that there is, accordingly, no neutral standard which determines in every case which of our interpretations is right and which wrong. But I also think—and so, I believe and argue, does Nietzsche—that some interpretations are better than others and that we can even know sometimes that this is the case.
On this view, while Nietzsche may have provided some groundwork for postmodernism, he wasn’t thinking that anything goes (as the current U.S. presidential administration in its postmodern glory seems to think).
Nietzsche’s perspectivism was the destructive part of his philosophical endeavor; it was where he took down what previous philosophers such as Kant had done. The constructive part of his philosophy arrives with his efforts to move beyond the nihilism of pure relativism and come up with a set of life-affirming practices and conceptual frameworks.
I am more interested in the constructive part of his philosophy but it’s important to understand the foundations, which question objective truth.