Nietzsche and Rorty against metaphysics

Diego Martínez Zarazúa

In this paper I will attempt to present the contextualist critique of metaphysics carried
out by Friedrich Nietzsche, later on reinterpreted by Richard Rorty in contemporary
philosophic debates. Aiming to this purpose, first I will proceed to explain said critique
(mainly founded upon the analysis of the genesis and use of language); and then I will
appraise this nietzschean attack on metaphysics from the holist standpoint advocated by
Rorty.
In a youth text, both short and interesting, Nietzsche wrote:

Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into
numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented
knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but
nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled
and congealed, and the clever beast had to die.1

Knowledge, as Nietzsche understands it, does not exhibit what things really are,
but it shows them tainted (Michel Foucault even says that between knowledge and
things there can only be a violent relation2). And so, Nietzsche thinks that we live our
lives through illusions: classifications, labels, concepts, and thus the truths, are all
fictitious. But whence does this scandalous statement come? Nietzsche argues that
words and concepts (taken in this paper as equivalents) are generated whenever we even
uneven experiences.

Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that
the concept “leaf” is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by
forgetting the distinguishing aspects. This awakens the idea that, in addition to the
leaves, there exists in nature the “leaf”: the original model.3

Therefore, words pass over what is singular. However, nature only holds pure
individuality; and as a consequence, concepts (that are constructions of the finite spirit)
are nothing but anthropomorphisms. Concepts are human projections, and are not

                                                                                                               
1
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Sobre verdad y mentira en sentido extramoral, España: Tecnos, 2012, p. 21.
2
Foucault, Michel. La verdad y las formas jurídicas, México: Gedisa, 1984, p. 9.
3
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Sobre verdad y mentira, op. cit., p. 27.

  1  
backed up by nature (since the latter lacks of categories and labels)… The world does
not speak. Only we do4, says Rorty.
A renewal of nominalism is set here. We emit statements from abstract concepts
–and thus general–, though what there really exists is a vast conglomerate of
individuals; of which we privilege some attributes and omit some others. However, if
nature itself does not underwrite any forms, concepts or genders, then we are unable to
find in it any guidance towards finding a “rule of omission” –namely a guideline that
points out what to brush off–: nature does not aid us on choosing the best concept for an
object, nor can we appeal to it in order to justify any classification table. Nevertheless,
we arbitrarily objectify subjective categories, and so we feel certain that the world is as
we think it is. This is why, not without irony, Nietzsche asserts that man has no natural
propensity towards truth; if anything, he would have it towards deceit (because he
craves to hold as true what himself has created).
In order to gain some clarity on this matter is useful to draw upon Funes the
Memorious, a character created by Jorge Luis Borges, which is –in some ways–
opposed to the man described by Nietzsche. Funes’ oddity is that “what he once
meditated would not be erased”5. Funes not only he remembered every leaf on every
tree on every wood, but even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it6.

He was, let us not forget, almost incapable of general, platonic ideas. It was not only
difficult for him to understand that the generic term dog embraced so many unlike
specimens of differing sizes and different forms; he was disturbed by the fact that a dog
at three-fourteen (seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog at three-fifteen
(seen form the front). His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him on every
occasion. […] I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very capable of thought. To think
is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes
there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details.7

Funes the Memorious is the ridiculous excess of what man is not capable. We
take shelter from the countless individualities we perceive by deleting their identity,
particularity, and unique appearance. Words are the attempt of stopping the perpetual
river, at no time identical to itself, which is the experience. Hence there is no way we
can anchor –truthfully– any classification to reality (a reality that is, to both Nietzsche

                                                                                                               
4
Rorty, Richard. Contingencia, ironía y solidaridad, Barcelona: Paidós, 1991, p. 26
5
Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones, Colombia: Debolsillo, 2011, p. 132.
6
Ibid., p. 133.
7
Ibid., pp. 133-134.

  2  
and Borges, a flux that slides off our clumsy hands). This thought reflects another much
older. In the Theaetetus, a Plato’s dialogue, is said that the followers of Heraclitus speak
like maniacs, because one cannot talk with them on any subject:

For, in accordance with their text-books, they are always in motion. […] If you ask any
of them a question, he will produce, as from a quiver, sayings brief and dark, and shoot
them at you; and if you inquire the reason of what he has said, you will be hit by some
other new-fangled word, and will make no way with any of them, nor they with one
another; their great care is, not to allow of any settled principle either in their arguments
or in their minds, conceiving, as I imagine, that any such principle would be stationary;
for they are at war with the stationary, and do what they can to drive it out everywhere.8

These ancient people seem to echo in Borges’ Funes. Both heracliteans and
Funes the Memorious distrust the regularity: the formers because of an exacerbated
adherence to their doctrine, and the latter due to a disability for forgetfulness and
abstraction. That is why Nietzsche, whom in this text seems to be a native of Ephesus
rather than Röcken, claims that hierarchies, concepts, and the overall structure that the
mind imprints –but ascribes– to the world, “if not derived from never-never land, is a
least not derived from the essence of things”9.
This has corrosive consequences on truth, because if we suppose that the truth of
a statement depends on whether or not it represents adequately the order of the universe,
nonetheless the latter turns out to be nothing but a human projection, then truth seems to
be a pitiful swagger:

When someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place
and finds it there as well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding. Yet
this is how matters stand regarding seeking and finding "truth" within the realm of
reason.10

Michel Foucault, a relevant hermenut of this Nietzsche’s text, concludes that

knowledge lacks of nature, essence, and universal conditions, for he shares the
nietzschean definition of truth: “a sum of human relations which have been poetically
and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage,
seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding”11. In other words, veracity is

                                                                                                               
8
Platón. Teeteto, 179e-180a, Diálogos V, Madrid: Gredos, 1988, pp. 251-252.
9
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Sobre verdad y mentira, op. cit., p. 27.
10
Ibid., p. 30.
11
Ibid., p. 28.

  3  
nothing else but custom, and that is why Foucault points out that “truth itself has a
history”12.
The point for Nietzsche –and thus for Foucault as well– is that we think through
language and that words are conditioning us. The point is that we would not claim that a
black dog resembles more to a brown dog than to a white cat if we were not already
convinced about a classification that sets them that way. The point is that we are trapped
into perspectives, prejudices or convictions; and it is only on the basis of this historical
a priori that “ideas could appear, sciences be established, experience be reflected in
philosophies, rationalities be formed, only, perhaps, to dissolve and vanish soon
afterwards”13. José Ortega y Gasset, Spanish philosopher and studious of Nietzsche,
claims the same in the following extract:

Every wilful and explicit philosophy moves through the scope of a pre-philosophy or
belief, that is for the individual the reality itself, and thus remains silenced. Is only after
we elucidate said pre-philosophy (radical and unreasoned), that the limitations of the
explicit philosophies come to light.14

But then, he points out acutely, knowledge is, beforehand, the most determinate
opinion about things15.
And what to do with all of these thoughts? American philosopher Richard Rorty
puts them in very simple terms. He has given up on the idea that we have a direct access
to truth because, as Nietzsche, he also paid attention to language. Rorty is part of the
“linguistic turn” that the 20th century philosophy undertook, in which the language came
to claim the throne once occupied by the consciousness (for about two centuries until
then). This means that from now on language is to be considered the philosophical
theme par excellence, and thus every opinion shall be referred to this linguistic
standpoint. Being so, knowledge will also be language, or at least will somehow have to
deal with it. Perhaps with this on mind Rorty says, “Of a thing, it can only known what
is stated in the propositions that describe it”16. And then he continues:

                                                                                                               
12
Foucault, Michel. La verdad y las formas jurídicas, op. cit., p. 3.
13
Foucault, Michel. Las palabras y las cosas, México: Siglo XXI, 2010, p. 15.
14
Ortega y Gasset. José, Apuntes sobre el pensamiento, Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1966, p. 29.
15
Ibid., p. 26.
16
Rorty, Richard. El pragmatismo, una versión, España: Ariel, 2000, pp. 145-146.

  4  
 If there is not a direct access to things, if there is no knowledge that has any other form
than a phrasing attitude, then all that can be known about things are the relations that
they hold with each other.17

Therefore, knowledge depends on relations that surpass it, namely the context in
which its statements make sense. This does not result in the suppression of things
beyond human linguistic experience; in fact, that issue is irrelevant. We should not care
for it, and is inessential to the current argument. In this regard Rorty says:

The anti-essentialist [that is: contextualist] does not question that trees and stars existed
long before there were statements about trees and stars […]. But the fact that things pre-
exist their statements does not help us to make sense of the question “What are the trees
and stars besides the relations they have with other things, besides the statements that
we utter of them?”18

If things exist by themselves, well, good for them, but that is not what our
problem is about. On the contrary, our problem lays on what those things are. And
“what they are”, for a philosophy that has carried out the linguistic turn, is a question
that can only be answered with language. We have seen with Nietzsche the origin of
words: they are not build upon the structure of reality; human words do not mirror the
word of God, etched in the heart of things from the creation until the end of times. Quite
on the contrary, man created words in his image and likeness.
Although the word, being as it is, namely a conventional practice, cannot be
changed by human will. Words do not belong to any man in particular. We learn to
speak an alienated language. Hence is far more accurate to say that man belongs to
language, and not the other way around. Words are not expressions of man; it is him
who is expressed through words. This is one way of paraphrasing what Ortega y Gasset
once said: we have ideas, but beliefs have us. One cannot conquer its own perspective,
but is the latter that rule upon us discretely and to the full extent.
In consequence science and philosophy are, as any other kind of conversation,
contextual, partial, related to our beliefs, in which we are, although not very
consciously.
Rorty sums up these ideas in his conception of a contextualist process of
validation, which he calls holism. According to this, belief is justified when it is in

                                                                                                               
17
Ibid., p. 146.
18
Ibid., p. 152.

  5  
harmony with what a group of people already deems worthy and relevant. This does not
mean that any belief can be true, but only the ones that adjust to the standards of their
day. And actually not only truths, but also the philosophical problems, academic topics,
subjects of study, moral values, ethical dilemmas… in summary, every one of the
human conversations are attached to a particular zeitgeist that embraces them. Each
form of validity falls into a paradigm.
In broad terms this has been the general way in which contextualist thinkers
have criticized metaphysical thought. In this paper we have been against the idea of a
truth that is exempt of an argumentative process, for it is, allegedly, self-evident; against
the understanding of a history that narrates the uninterrupted development of humanity
towards a more perfect civil state; against the notion of a science which depletes the
possibilities of interpreting the world; against the conception of the human rights that
grounds them upon essential human structures. All of these ideas take shelter under a
metaphysical standpoint, and thus we rather turn our backs on them. Inasmuch as
claiming loyalty to one’s beliefs -says Rorty- does not turn them on anything better than
the hope and dreams of a particular human group.
These metaphysical opinions have concurred in erecting enormous conceptual
buildings upon foundations which contextual nature has been ignored. In the same
respect, Nietzsche wrote that “truths are illusions which we have forgotten that are
illusions”19; or that man is worthy of his admiration, for he “succeeds in piling an
infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were,
on running water”20. To sum up, metaphysical thought forgets its own condition of
being a thought. And thus we would do better appraising the contextual contingency of
validity above its necessity and universality.

                                                                                                               
19
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Sobre verdad y mentira, op. cit., p. 28.
20
Ibid., p. 30.

  6  
Bibliography.

Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones, Colombia: Debolsillo, 2011.

Foucault, Michel. La verdad y las formas jurídicas, México: Gedisa, 1984.

______________ Las palabras y las cosas, México: Siglo XXI, 2010.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Sobre verdad y mentira en sentido extramoral, España: Tecnos,

2012.

Ortega y Gasset. José, Apuntes sobre el pensamiento, Madrid: Revista de Occidente,

1966.

Platón. Teeteto, 179e-180a, Diálogos V, Madrid: Gredos, 1988.

Rorty, Richard. Contingencia, ironía y solidaridad, Barcelona: Paidós, 1991.

____________ El pragmatismo, una versión, España: Ariel, 2000.

  7