For Nietzsche, as for Kant, the distinction between phenomena and noumena¹ culminates in a critique of reason. It is therefore important that if we are to understand Nietzsche’s critique of reason we begin with this distinction. As we will see Nietzsche ‘radicalizes’ Kant’s distinction and redirects his Critique.

Nietzsche’s distinction is most clearly explained in his notebooks². In Will to Power, Nietzsche writes that “(t)he measure of that of which we are in any way conscious is totally dependent upon the course utility of its becoming-conscious”.(Nietzsche,WP,474) What we are conscious of is phenomenal insofar as it is conditional upon this becoming-conscious (this epistemic relation). The noumenal object would be an object considered exempt from epistemic relation and therefore it cannot be known.

The apparent world is ‘true for us’. “The reasons for which ‘this’ world has been characterized as ‘apparent’ are the very reasons which indicate its reality; any other kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable.”(TI,‘Reason’ in Philosophy,6). The ‘true’ world is the world taken in-itself. We cannot assume that this thought of an in-itself corresponds to an actual object. Nietzsche, like Kant, limits us to the phenomenal. “The ‘apparent’ world is the only one, the ‘true’ world is merely added by a lie…”(TI,’Reason’ in Philosophy,2). The unconditioned, he argues, “cannot be known; otherwise it would not be unconditioned! Coming to know…is always ‘placing oneself in a conditional relation to something’.” Therefore “there are no things-in-themselves!”(WP,555). There are no things-in-themselves as objects of experience, since experience means to place oneself in a conditional relation. For Nietzsche a noumenal object would require an Absolute consciousness (a perspective that wasn’t really a perspective).

Like Kant, Nietzsche understands the consideration of an object as a thing-in-itself to be a consideration (epistemological insight). When he argues that there is no thing-in-itself, he is not arguing that there is no Metaphysical world (world in-itself in a metaphysical sense). He simply says that we cannot know whether there is a Metaphysical world or not. This world would not be ours (epistemologically speaking). In arguing that there is no thing-in-itself he is arguing against the idea that something corresponds to the noumenal thought. Consider the following quote;

Metaphysical world.— It is true, there could be a metaphysical world; the absolute possibility of it is hardly to be disputed. We behold all things through the human head and cannot cut off this head; while the question nonetheless remains what of the world would still be there if one had cut it off. This is a purely scientific problem and one not very well calculated to bother people overmuch; but all that has hitherto made metaphysical assumptions valuable, terrible, delightful to them, all that has begotten these assumptions, is passion, error and self-deception; the worst of all methods of acquiring knowledge, not the best of all, have taught belief in them. When one has disclosed these methods as the foundation of all extant religions and metaphysical systems one has refuted them! Then that possibility still remains over; but one can do absolutely nothing with it, not to speak of letting happiness, salvation and life depend on the gossamer of such a possibility.— For one could assert nothing at all of the metaphysical world except that it was a being-other; it would be a thing with negative qualities.— Even if the existence of such a world were never so well demonstrated, it is certain that knowledge of it would be the most useless of all knowledge: more useless even than knowledge of the chemical composition of water must be to the sailor in danger of shipwreck. (HATH,1[9])³

When Nietzsche rejects the ‘consideration’ of the noumenal world, he rejects it as a peculiarity of thought. Also, when he is talking about phenomena he is talking about our consideration of the world according to the epistemic relation (he will not presume that this tells us any Metaphysical fact). For such Metaphysical assumptions are born of the peculiarity Nietzsche wishes to curb.

Nietzsche has argued that ‘what we come to know’ is wholly dependent on the epistemic relation. He understand the apparent world (or phenomena) to be subject to a kind of pre-conscious positing of certain forms. “(b)efore ‘thought’ there must have been ‘invention’…”(WP,544) Nietzsche even seems to agree with Kant over the ends of such a schematism; he lists the results of our positing as “the ‘thing, the ‘identical thing,’ subject, attribute, activity, object, substance, form”(WP,520). This is thought that “is interpretation according to a scheme that we cannot through off.”(WP,522) We cannot get outside this thought, to do so would be to cease thinking.

So far Nietzsche is in agreement with Kant; however his departure begins when Nietzsche formulates an answer to Lange’s request. Lange had argued that Kant failed to provide material origins for the categories (by requesting this Lange asked for empiricist rather than transcendental conditions for our schematism.)⁴ Nietzsche finds these origins in the place Lange had proposed – in evolutionary theory. It is at this point that Nietzsche develops his ‘falsification theory’. Nietzsche argues that the schematism we considered above is “developed only with regard to conditions of preservation”(WP,507). These are beliefs, which “can be a condition of life and nonetheless be false.”(WP,483). Thus “the ‘thing, the ‘identical thing,’ subject, attribute, activity, object, substance, form”(WP,520) are errors, learnt for the utility of the species. This is Nietzsche’s ‘falsification thesis’ it holds that phenomena (what we come to know and experience) is the result of a falsified reality.

Nietzsche also answers to Lange’s second request, Lange had asked after the ‘unknown third’ that underlay the phenomenal and noumenal. This is a catalyst for Nietzsche’s formulation of his more ‘metaphysical statements’. Here Nietzsche argues that “the antithesis of this phenomenal world is not ‘the true world,’ but the formless unformulable world of the chaos of sensations- another kind of phenomenal world, a kind ‘unknowable’ for us.”(WP,569). Spir had argued that the object partakes of both the unconditional (he interpreted this as Being) and the conditional (he reformulates this as becoming)⁵. Nietzsche uses the latter (the former presupposes the unconditioned) insight as ‘the unknown third’ that Lange had argued Kant lacked. Here Nietzsche’s ‘metaphysical statements’ start emerging and find their culmination in the theory of will to power.

The apparent contradiction between Nietzsche’s ‘falsification theory’ and ‘Metaphysical statements’ has led to interpretations like the following; “(h)owever critical (Nietzsche) may later have become of the distinction between ‘reality’ and ‘appearance….He seems to have thought of the metaphysically real world as a primal, unformed chaos, a world (uncoincidentally) related to our world of knowledge and experience very much in the way that Schopenhauer’s world of ‘will’ is related to the world of ‘representation’.” Thus in some senses Nietzsche “subscribed to the correspondence ideal” as “he held that the world has a ‘true nature’…” (Breazeale,xxxii,fn21). This view is widely shared.⁶ However it seems to contradict Nietzsche’s rejection of a thing-in-itself. If Nietzsche argues that we cannot know anything of the unconditioned, how is he justified in making his ‘metaphysical statements’? For this seems to propose the exact converse result of his discussion of the distinction; now phenomena appears erroneous in relation to the world in-itself, which although unknowable, can be hypothesized as ‘pure becoming’. His ‘falsification theory’ contains then a radical skepticism, while his ‘Metaphysical statements’ seem to hold to a correspondence theory of truth (albeit an ambiguous one).

The apparent contradiction between Nietzsche’s ‘falsification thesis’ and his insight into the world as will to power is the contradiction between phenomena and noumena. Once the distinction between phenomena and noumena is clarified, one no longer reads a contradiction into Nietzsche’s work, but an epistemological insight into the contradictory nature of the mind. It is Nietzsche (and Kant’s) insight that the mind cannot resist positing a thing-in-itself and making this the source of sensation and the object of knowledge. Ironically, this ‘linguistic and conceptual trap’ which Nietzsche is trying to free us from becomes the very web which we find ourselves entangled in when interpreting Nietzsche’s epistemology. Nietzsche would see this as inevitable. Nietzsche’s ‘falsification thesis’ and his more ‘metaphysical statements’ seem to be appealing to this independent object, through a metaphysical positing of phenomena and noumena as two separate entities. However I wish to suggest that they are epistemic insights and do not result in two entities, but look to the nature and pretensions of reason.

It appears that Nietzsche’s ‘falsification thesis’ is an argument about phenomena, while his ‘metaphysical statements’ are arguments about noumena. This leads one to consider phenomena as inherently erroneous and leads Nietzsche into a skeptical position about the ‘real’ world. This seems to then contradict his fundamental agreement with Kant (over the definition of the distinction). However, the case is precisely converse. The phenomenal object is not erroneous because it is conditional and thereby subject to our erroneous schematism of it, rather it is erroneous insofar as our schematism posits a noumenal object as the source of experience⁷. Our schematism of objects as noumenal (as referring us to a noumenal object in the weighty sense) is erroneous, not all schematism. Schematism or conditional relation is necessary for experience, which is precisely what Nietzsche’s perspectivism confirms. By calling that schematism that refers one to an unconditioned object (whether this be ‘Self’, ‘thing’ or ground etc) erroneous, Nietzsche is limiting its pretensions by arguing that we cannot know that this refers us to any such object.

We saw that Nietzsche’s distinction did not imply knowledge of a Metaphysical world (Nietzsche does not define two realms of objects; the objects of experience and the objects exempt from epistemic relation). Rather they apply only to an idea of the world, hence Nietzsche asks “are the axioms of logic adequate to reality or are they a means and measure for us to create reality, the concept ‘reality,’ for ourselves?- to affirm the former one would, as already said, have to have a previous knowledge of being – which is certainly not the case. The proposition therefore contains no criterion of truth, but an imperative concerning that which should count as true.”(WP,516) Phenomena and noumena apply to particular considerations of the world. The consideration of noumena is a particular idea which attempts to “make of logic a criterion of true being”, this would cause one to “position as realities all those hypostases: substance, attribute, object, subject, action, etc.; that is, to conceiving a metaphysical world, that is, a ‘real world’ (-this, however, is the apparent world once more-).”(WP,516)

For Nietzsche (as for Kant) positing the noumenal object (in the positive sense) is an illusion of reason. Nietzsche’s falsification thesis, does not reject any object synthesized by the mind because it is synthesized by the mind (he does not reject phenomena), he only rejects any synthesis which posits a noumenal reality. He lists these errors: “substance, attribute, object, subject, action”(WP,516), These errors presuppose a noumenal or unconditioned object as the source of experience. Such a synthesis does not conform to the reality of phenomena; rather it posits an object exempt from epistemic relation by means of this very epistemic relation. The argument is not that the mind synthesizes in a manner foreign to the independent reality it structures. This would leave us with both a phenomenal and noumenal world, which Nietzsche rejects. Rather the argument is simple: Nietzsche is only agreeing with Kant that noumenon is a kind of illusion of the mind, an error that cannot be presumed for it contradicts the phenomenal insight.⁸ Nietzsche’s ‘Metaphysical statements’ are all arguments, not about an independently existing world, but rather are insights into the idea of a phenomenal world.

We have seen that Nietzsche argues that what is posited is not adequate to reality. “Nietzsche believes that Kant is wrong to think that experience actually conforms to these categories of being” (Greeen,81) rather experience is made to conform. For Nietzsche there is no condition for the unification of qualities in an object or the positing of an unconditioned. “The ‘thing’ in which we believe was only invented as a foundation for the various attributes. If the thing ‘effects,’ that means: we conceive all the other properties which are present and momentarily latent, as the cause of the emergence of one single property ‘x’ – as cause of the property ‘x’: which is utterly stupid and mad”(WP,561) We have seen that this single property ‘x’ is the thought of an unconditioned, as a transcendental object = x its function is to unify experience. This does not refer us to an actually existing object, but only to the necessity of this thought. Kant and Nietzsche both accept that the unconditioned could never relate to the conditioned. “A thing, completely isolated, would not exist at all – it would have no relations”(KSA,9:12[17]). “The properties of a thing are effects on other ‘things’: if one removes other ‘things’ then a thing has no properties, i.e., there is no thing without other things, i.e., there is no ‘thing-in-itself’”(WP557). However for both thinkers a thing-in-itself is assumed as a regulative idea of reason (using Kant’s terms) or a regulative article of belief (in Nietzsche’s terms)

Nietzsche’s departure from Kant occurs in this subtle but crucial difference between an idea of reason and a regulative article of belief. While for Kant the thought of the transcendental object is necessary for experience to occur in the way that it does, for Nietzsche this expresses only a belief⁹. “We set up a word at the point at which our ignorance begins, at which we can see no further, e.g., the word ‘I’, the word ‘do’…:- these are perhaps the horizon of our knowledge, but not ‘truths’.”(WP,482) Kant, for Nietzsche, although removing the noumenal object (in a positive sense), retained the function of noumena at this horizon of knowledge (in a negative sense). So that one has to think that sensations are unified into an unconditioned object. Nietzsche will extend Kant’s critique of reason to Kant’s own use of reason, arguing that this is a conciliatory move on the part of Kant. If noumenon is an error of reason, no harm is done to it if it is allowed to retain its function as a regulative article of belief.

For Nietzsche to argue for a relinquishment of this idea of reason, he must give us something other than a transcendental argument. For Kant’s argument is wholly adequate to reality as it is experienced. Nietzsche, in arguing that the transcendental object is erroneous, needs to support this insight. Constitutively he does this through Kant’s own argument that noumena cannot be phenomenal. On the level of regulative reason, Nietzsche does so through his genealogical insight into phenomena – will to power. Rather than allow the noumenal thought to regulate experience, Nietzsche sets up will to power to replace this function. This tells us that will to power is not a theory about a Metaphysical world, but a regulative function of a phenomenal world.

We have seen that, for Nietzsche the transcendental object is only “invented as a foundation for the various attributes”. (WP,561) Will to power replaces the function of this ‘x’ by making the conditional regulative functions themselves. Objects become “understood as unending chains of conditions, without anything unconditioned being met, then it makes sense to say all there is to objects are relations (for example, causal relations, relations of parts to whole, relations of structure to form) without there being any nonrelational relata.”(Green,72) This ‘x’ then becomes only an illusory epiphenomena of relation (will to power).

Recall here that Nietzsche is not describing an independent world (we must constantly remind ourselves of this). “That we nevertheless rebel at such a notion and demand relata for these relations simply shows the antinomial nature of the argument- the fact that to think at all means seeing the world as being. Our dissatisfaction with the conception of a thing as a system of relations is analogous to our feeling that the Leibnizean conception of time and space, under which placement in space or time is exhausted by relationships, leaves it uncertain just where and when we are.”(Green,70) Nietzsche writes; “We are somewhere in the middle- between the vastness of the world and the smallness of the inexhaustible world…. Is the world nothing for us but the collection of relations according to a measuring rod? As soon as this arbitrary measure disappears, our world dissolves into nothing!”(KSA,9:11[36])

However, Nietzsche writes “(t)he calculability of the world, the expressibility of all events in formulas- is this really ‘comprehension’? How much of a piece of music has been understood when that in it which is calculable and can be reduced to formulas has been reckoned up?- And ‘constant causes,’ things, substances, something ‘unconditioned’; invented- what has one achieved?”(WP,624). Nietzsche attempts to make ‘the music the rule’. Here, the sensations, that which exceeds the unconditioned (that which is necessarily conditional) become the formula.

Nietzsche gains this insight from Spir and Boscovitch. For Nietzsche the senses do not lie, but we make them lie “What we make of their testimony, that alone introduces lies; for example the lie of unity, the lie of thinghood, of substance, of permanence... ‘Reason’ is the cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses. Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie…”(TI,’Reason’ in philosophy,2) For Nietzsche, a thing (before it is a thing) is a locus of affect, the world is force and force is always feeling. All reality must be experiential! This view speaks to Nietzsche’s debt to Boscovich, he says “Boscovich has taught us to adjure the belief in the last part of the earth that ‘stood fast’- the belief in ‘substance’, in ‘matter’, in the earth-residuum and particle atom”(BGE,12) Atoms in Nietzsche are “not fundamental particles, but postulates of representation”(Swift,72), or rather sensation. Nietzsche says; “(b)eings will have to be thought of as sensations” (WP,532). This supports Nietzsche’s rejection of a thing-in-itself for the thought of what an object may be apart from our sensing of it is nonsensical as an object is a sense (is experiential).

However, even if Spir and Boscovich are wrong this does not affect Nietzsche’s argument. For Nietzsche is only requesting that we think experience as conditional (this may be harder than it seems). He borrows the hypothesis current to his time in an attempt to formulate another way of regulating experience. However he acknowledges that this is a provisional hypothesis. To say that this was ‘true’ and not an interpretation would be to go against his argument that there can be no knowledge of a world in-itself. These metaphysical statements, however, do not have to be adequate to reality; all they need do is regulate experience in a manner that ceases in referring us to an unconditioned entity. This task is most perfectly filled by perspectivism. Here Nietzsche argues that we cannot assume that we have facts about the world, only that we have interpretations, perspectivism teaches us how to make do with interpretations.

Nietzsche at this point reformulates the distinction between noumena and phenomena as it applies to regulative (not constitutive) reason. “The antithesis of the apparent world and the true world is reduced to the antithesis ‘world’ and ‘nothing’.”(WP,567). The world has no opposite, for it is not a concept or thing. If for Kant the distinction between noumena and phenomena are two different considerations of the same thing. This also holds true for Nietzsche. “If there is no real world apart from this world of appearance, then no criterion is left on the basis of which one could judge this world to be apparent, illusory, or less real. We have just – this world…”(Stambaugh,12).

Will to power does not tell us what type of ‘thing’ the world is, for will to power is not a kind of ‘thing’. “’Thingness’ was first created by us”(WP,569) It is clear from the above that Nietzsche’s ‘Metaphysical statements’ are not metaphysical at all.

This (will to power) allows Nietzsche to argue that the noumenal projection (along with the distinction between inner and outer experience) occurs not via a transcendental argument that is adequate to reality, but as an illusion of the apparent itself. Nietzsche’s first insight is that inner and outer is the reformulation of noumena in a different guise.

Gone is the illusion between inner and outer, subject and independent reality for these all are noumenal illusions for Nietzsche. Nietzsche places the subject back into the flux of a phenomenal existence. Nietzsche argues that he has insight into the phenomenality of inner sense. It is now impossible to talk of a correspondence theory of truth of truth.

I will now revisit the pragmatic, cognitive and neo-Kantian interpretations of Nietzsche’s position before providing my own reinterpretation of Nietzsche’s epistemology.

“But instead of saying that we are left with the merely psychological, we are forced to stop and ponder again the question of what or who man is, man no longer defined as the animal rational nor as the imago dei, but questioned in his very being as the still undetermined animal.”(Stambaugh,12)

We can’t suspect that there is knowledge about the self because interior is phenomenal as well. Inner and outer is not two separate realms.

Thus an attempt to reconcile the paradox in Nietzsche’s writing, without taking into account that this is a paradox of the mind is doomed to failure.

Against positivism, which halts at phenomena- ‘There are only facts’ –I would say: No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations. We cannot establish any fact ‘in itself’: perhaps it is folly to want to do such a thing.

‘Everything is subjective,’ you say; but even this is interpretation. The ‘subject’ is not something given, it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is.- Finally, is it necessary to posit an interpreter behind the interpretation? Even this is invention, hypothesis….

“There would be nothing that could be called knowledge if thought did not first re-form the world in this way into ‘things,’ into what is self-identical. Only because there is thought is there untruth.”(WP,574)

1 Nietzsche uses the terms ‘thing-in-itself’ and ‘appearance’, this can be equated to ‘noumena’ and ‘phenomena’. He also uses the terms ‘True’ and ‘apparent’ world as the Idea’s that the former epistemological distinctions refer too. When he is speaking of a ‘Metaphysical world’, here Nietzsche uses the term to refer us to a Metaphysical entity and not merely a thought or Idea.

2 This distinction is most often assumed in his published works and a definition warrants less attention, however this is the definition that he employs. I will be relying heavily on the third book of Will to Power, however I have only quoted Nietzsche’s unpublished work when it is in keeping with his ideas throughout his published work.

3 Also; “Our new "infinite."— How far the perspective character of existence extends or indeed whether existence has any other character than this; whether existence without interpretation, without "sense," does not become "nonsense," whether, on the other hand, all existence is not essentially actively engaged in interpretation—that cannot be decided even by the most industrious and most scrupulously conscientious analysis and self-examination of the intellect: for in the course of this analysis the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself in its own perspectives, and only in these. We cannot look around our own corner: it is a hopeless curiosity that wants to know what other kinds of intellects and perspectives there might be; for example, whether some beings might be able to experience time backward, or alternately forward and backward (which would involve another direction of life and another concept of cause and effect). But I should think that today we are at least far from the ridiculous immodesty that would be involved in decreeing from our corner that perspectives are permitted only from this corner. Rather has the world become "infinite" for us all over again: inasmuch as we cannot reject the possibility that it may include infinite interpretations. Once more we are seized by a great shudder—but who would feel inclined immediately to deify again after the old manner this monster of an unknown world? And to worship the unknown henceforth as "the Unknown One"? Alas, too many ungodly possibilities of interpretation are included in the unknown, too much devilry, stupidity, and foolishness of interpretation—even our own human, all too human folly itself, which we know..”(GS,374)

4 This has radical implications for the Kantian position. Implications that Nietzsche will find himself forced to confront. The most important of these implications for this thesis is that the origins of our necessary schematism of experience is contingent on empirical factors, therefore what in Kant is absolutely necessary and analytic, becomes synthetic. Not transcendental these factors are an attribute of the phenomenal world. For Kant without the necessary separation of transcendental from empirical conditions one falls into empirical idealism, taking the attributes of the mind to be attributes of experience, which leads to transcendental realism. This then is quite at odds with Kant’s arguments.

9 For Kant this is simply a description of phenomena. The transcendental object is posited by the mind and not given in experience. Phenomena cannot be noumenal. But the positing of the transcendental object is necessary for experience to occur in the way that it does. It gives the distinction between inner and outer sense, it makes for a unified experience. It is still a feature of experience (an idea of reason) used to regulate experience. Thus Kant uses a transcendental argument to maintain that the transcendental object is necessary for experience. Nietzsche, in rejecting ‘transcendental argument’, can say that transcendental object is not a constitutive but a regulative use of reason and thereby not necessary to experience. It does not conform to phenomena, but places on phenomena a demand that is foreign and erroneous.