On The Thing In Itself - · PDF fileAsgeir Theodor Johannesson Course: Ethics (Kant) Taught by...

Asgeir Theodor Johannesson

Course: Ethics (Kant)

Taught by Alice Pinheiro Walla

January 2014

ON THE THING IN ITSELFIN DEFENCE OF KANT AGAINST NIETZSCHE

1. Introduction

As an introduction to the topic I am going to begin with a short biographical note that

illuminates the subject. The magnum opus of Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as

Will and Representation, brought me to philosophy. In that regard I am not unique

in the history of the field because the same is true of at least two giants in modern

philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Both Nietzsche and

Wittgenstein came to philosophy through Schopenhauer and were heavily influenced

by his views. Both of them also overcame their early Schopenhauerian views,

although one can spot that they were once under his spell, even in their later works

where their rejection of his outlook reaches its peak. I also overcame the philosophy

of Schopenhauer and developed intellectually in a very similar way as both Nietzsche

and Wittgenstein (who are philosophically nearer to each other than many scholars

seem to realise).

Schopenhauer is a transcendental idealist, who considered Immanuel Kant as

his predecessor. Schopenhauer’s whole philosophy was to a large extent based on an

interpretation of Kant’s philosophy and what he considered to be corrections of it. In

order to accept Schopenhauer’s framework one has to accept Kant’s basic premises,

so Kant becomes a central figure for anyone who is interested in Schopenhauer.

Asgeir Theodor Johannesson! 1! On The Thing In Itself

It is out of the scope of this essay to account for the agreements and

disagreements of Kant and Schopenhauer, but the purpose of pointing this out is to

explain why an acceptance and a rejection of Schopenhauer’s scheme of things

creates an acceptance and rejection of Kant’s scheme of things. Such change of

outlook is of no minor importance for the individual in question because it affects

how she views the world and the life within it. For this reason the acceptance and the

rejection are deeply emotional in the same or similar manner as changes in religious

views are emotional. A central focus of the rejection in question has to do with Kant’s

idea of the thing-in-itself and its distinction from the thing as it appears to us. Kant

was not the originator of the idea, but he developed the idea in a certain way and was

its most esteemed and influential spokesman.

Nietzsche’s intellectual battle with Kant’s philosophy was not just through

Schopenhauer, but more direct as well. Nietzsche developed his own philosophical

views in an era marked by Kantian revival. It is not known how thoroughly he read

Kant’s writings, but it is for example known that one of the books he read more than

once was History of Materialism by Friedrich Albert Lange, where the problem of

teleology after Kant was discussed. A direct or indirect reference to the Kantian

distinction between thing-in-itself and appearance is frequent in Nietzsche’s writings.

The importance of this aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophy is well expressed by Dr.

Mattia Riccardi in his paper, “Nietzsche’s Critique of Kant’s Thing In Itself”, where he

says the following:

In particular, Nietzsche has often been presented as the philosopher who, after having endorsed this Kantian distinction in his previous work, eventually ends by rejecting the very notion of thing in itself and thus overcomes the metaphysical dualism which dominates most of the previous philosophical tradition. However, the question of whether he succeeds in substantiating his refusal of Kant’s position is anything but clear.1

Riccardi defends Nietzsche’s position in his paper, but in this essay I am going to do

the opposite: Defend Kant’s position against Nietzsche’s criticism. First I will account

for the idea of thing-in-itself. Then I will explain its relevance for Kant’s practical

philosophy. Next, I am going to discuss both Nietzsche’s early endorsement of Kant’s

framework and his later rejection of it. Finally, before I reach my conclusion, I will


1 ! Mattia Riccardi (2010), “Nietzscheʼs Critique of Kantʼs Thing In Itself” (Nietzsche Studien 39, pp. 333-351), p. 333.

criticise Nietzsche’s arguments and put forward my defence of Kant. The before-

mentioned Wittgenstein will reappear near the end of the essay.

2. Kant’s idea of the thing in itself

How human beings experience the world is dependent of our five senses: Touch,

sight, hearing, smell and taste. We have no reason to think that our senses are perfect

and that they perceive the world in a perfect way. On the contrary, our senses have

developed through messy evolutionary process and we have every reason to think

that they provide us with an imperfect perception of the world. When one has

realised this fact about our condition the question is raised: How is the world on its

own, independent of how we experience it, i.e. how are things in themselves?

Kant is responding to such ruminations when he makes the distinction between

a thing-in-itself and a thing as it appears to us. A thing-in-itself, according to Kant, is

a thing as it is independent of how it is perceived by the perceiver or conceptualised

by a rational being. Things-in-themselves are postulated by practical reason, but their

attributes are in principle not subject to experience and therefore unknowable. The

identification of things-in-themselves and the subsequent distinction between them

and appearances, emerges from rational beings’ faculty of understanding, which is

dependent on a linguistic form of life.

Kant explains the idea in the third section of Groundwork of the Metaphysics of

Morals:

[A]ll representation that come to us without our choosing (like those of the senses) enable us to cognise objects only as they affect us, while what they may be in themselves remains unknown to us; and hence that, as far as representation of this kind is concerned, even with the most strenuous attentiveness and distinctness that the understanding may ever add, we can achieve only cognition of appearances, never of things in themselves. Once this difference has been noticed […], it follows of itself that one must concede and assume behind the appearances something else that is not appearance, namely the things in themselves; even if – since they can never become known to us, but only ever how they affect us – we of ourselves rest content with being unable to get any closer to them or ever to know what they are in themselves.2


2 ! Immanuel Kant (Gr), Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 60 (4:452).

In the same paragraph he says that this view “must yield a distinction, however

rough, of a world of sense from the world of understanding.”3 The former world “can

be very dissimilar according to the dissimilar sensibility of many kinds of observers of

the world,” whereas the latter, which is the foundation of the world of sense, “always

remains the same.” 4

Kant’s distinction is roughly equivalent to his distinction between noumena and

phenomena, where noumena correspond to things-in-themselves but phenomena to

appearances. Still, although we can assume them to equivalent for our purposes,

“both Kant and Kantian scholars draw important distinctions between them in some

contexts.” 5 The noumena and the things-in-themselves are beyond the world of the

senses in the meaning that they transcend that world. The transcendental realm is

unknown to us but the understanding of its existence plays a key role for our view of

the world, as I will later discuss.

There has for a long time been much debate whether the thing-in-itself and the

thing as it appears are two objects or two aspects of the same object. In my view, the

second interpretation is more convincing and sensible. Although it is possible to find

textual evidence for both interpretations in Critique of Pure Reason and other books

by Kant, the ambiguity seems to be reduced by Kant’s private correspondence, as

Roger Scruton points out:

Kant often describes transcendental idealism as the doctrine that we have a priori knowledge only of ‘appearances’ and not of ‘things as they are in themselves’ (or ‘ things-in-themselves’). His followers and critics disputed heatedly over the ‘thing-in-itself’. Moses Mendelssohn thought of it as a distinct entity, so that an appearance is one thing, the thing-in-itself another. Other, under the influence of Kant’s pupil J. S. Beck, took the phrase ‘thing-in-itself’ to refer to a way of describing the very same object which we also know as an appearance. Kant lends support to this second interpretation in his correspondence with Beck, in many passages of the Critique of Practical Reason, and in a letter to one of its principal advocates: ‘All objects that can be given to us can be conceptualised in two ways: on the one hand, as appearances; on the other hand, as things in themselves’ (C 103n.).


3 ! Ibid.

4 ! Ibid.

5 ! James R. OʼShea (2012), Kantʼs Critique of Pure Reason (Durham: Acumen), p. 26.

But there is no doubt that his mind was not made up about the matter, and this led to a crucial ambiguity in the critical philosophy. 6

So the thing-in-itself is the aspect of the object which is independent from our experience while the phenomenal aspect refers to the very same object as it is experienced by us. Some commentators prefer to describe the difference in another way, for example Rae Langton who focuses on relational properties. In her account the phenomenal aspect is considered strictly relational, as it is defined through its relations to other things, while the noumenal aspect is considered strictly non-relational or purely intrinsic.7

But whether or not two objects or two aspects are distinguished, the distinction has arguably consequences, which some find disturbing but others pleasing, namely that although the phenomenal part of the world is the “arena” of our meaningful existence – whether it is our sense of beauty, our knowledge of the universe, our constructive work, or something else – there is another aspect which is in some deep sense “truer” or “more real”, the transcendental realm.

The transcendental aspect of the world applies of course also to “the thing” that a human being is. This means that human beings are themselves both things-in-themselves and beings that belong to the world of sense. So, the view of many mystical traditions that people have “truer self” receives certain philosophical credibility through Kantʼs account of the world. Still the epistemological problem remains, according to him, as is stated in the following revealing passage:

A human being cannot even – according to the acquaintance he has with himself by inner sensation – presume to cognise how he himself is in himself. For since he does not as it were create himself, and gets his concept not a priori but empirically, it is natural that about himself too he can gather intelligence only through the inner sense, and consequently only through the appearance of his nature, and the way in which his consciousness is affected; whereas beyond these characteristics of his own subject that are composed of nothing but sundry appearances he must necessarily assume something else lying at its foundation, namely his I, such as it may be in itself; and with respect to mere perception and receptivity to sensations he must thus count himself as belonging to the world of sense, but with regard to what there may be of pure activity in him (what reaches consciousness


6 ! Roger Scruton (1982), Kant (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press), p. 42.

7 ! Riccardi (2010), p. 342; cf. Rae Langton (1998), Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press).

not by affection of the senses, but immediately) as belonging to the intellectual world, with which he is yet no further acquainted.8

So, what Kant calls “pure activity” (the terminology should be understood in the way Baruch Spinoza used it) belongs to the „intellectual world“. Now the focus has turned to freedom of rational beings and one can glimpse how Kantʼs idea of thing-in-itself affects his practical philosophy, a subject we will now turn to.

3. The practical relevance of the thing-in-itself

According to Kant every change which occurs in the world has a cause, without

exception. So, every natural event is a link in a chain of necessity, one thing leads to

another. Such mechanical view of the natural world had become a common view

among intellectuals at the time of Kant in the 18th century and it is still a common

view, although pure necessity has been replaced by certain degree of randomness and

probability.

But if every event in nature is necessary (or even sometimes random), does this

not also apply to human beings and their actions? If the mechanism in question

applies fully to human beings there is no room left for genuine agency of a person –

and therefore no freedom. People, although rational beings, would so to speak be

slaves to the natural order of things. Without freedom to choose between options one

can neither blame rational beings for wrongdoings nor praise them for rightful

actions; the blame and the praise could only be directed towards the whole fabric of

the world and its possible source or creator (if the creator is not free either, even she

cannot be blamed or praised).

If this would be a commonly accepted description of the human condition,

morality would loose its meaning; it would become senseless. Still, people would

consider some behaviour socially constructive and other behaviour socially

destructive, etc. So people would continue to judge the necessary actions of others

but the vocabulary for such expression would change to reflect the condition of

rational beings without genuine agency. The new vocabulary would purely refer to


8 ! Kant (Gr), pp. 60-61 (4:451). – Arthur Schopenhauer takes another route than Kant in this regard. For Schopenhauer, the fact that we ourselves are part of the noumena gives us an epistemological access to the noumena, although not through reason but feelings. This was the basis for his sentimentalist moral views.

fate; a morally wrong action would become an unfortunate action and a morally right

action would be a fortunate one.

This is the reason why there is, according to Kant, no morality without freedom.

Morality requires freedom. Consequently, the starting point of Kant’s ethics is the

concept of freedom.

Rational beings conceive of themselves as free, as the spontaneous originators

of their actions without any fundamental constraints woven into their own nature

and the causal connection of the world. If rational beings are free they are not

determined by causes outside of themselves but are able to be the first cause of a new

chain of events. Without them able to be a first cause there is a contradiction between

the natural order and human freedom.

In order to solve the puzzle it is tempting to say that the phenomenon of reason,

which developed in human beings, is a faculty which establishes freedom, in other

words that the use of reason creates the possibility of a “first cause”. The problem

with such account, however, is that there is now answer to the question why reason

itself is not one other link in the natural chain and that rational precesses are

determined in the same way as everything else. One could say there is a problem of

infinite regress in the solution of invoking reason alone. It is not sufficient to

establish genuine moral agency.

So, is our sense of freedom only self-deception and our morality a fiction? Kant

did not want to go down that route, rather he sought to establish human freedom and

morality by solving the paradox without circular reasoning. Kant’s solution was to

invoke the ontological argument for the distinction between a thing-in-itself and the

same thing as belonging to the world of the senses. The noumenal realm of things-in-

themselves is the transcendent “intelligence” which grounds the rules of the

phenomenal order, the world as we experience it. This feature of our nature, along

with our rational faculty, is the source of our agency, what enables us to be a “first

cause” on our own. One’s rational faculty and consequent consciousness thus

unleashes a corresponding intelligent source in one’s own being; this source is an

aspect of a person, a person as a thing-in-itself. This is Kant’s key to people’s

autonomy and activity, as opposed to being passive to the causal chain of nature, or


“the determining causes of the world of sense,” as he calls it.9 Frederick Rauscher

explains the situation as follows in a Critical Guide to the Groundwork edited by

Jens Timmermann:

As members of the intelligible world, human beings are active and rational, able to initiate action independent of causal determination in the sensible world, that is, as things in themselves they possess a free will understood as an ability to choose. As free in themselves humans then recognise that they are both obligated and able to conform to rational constraints on their actions.10

Sometimes Kant seems content with the psychological belief that we consider ourselves free rather than an ontological demonstration of it. Thus, he concludes the sub-chapter in the Groundwork in following manner:

For now we see that when we think of ourselves as free we transfer ourselves into the world of understanding as members of it and cognise autonomy of the will along with its consequence, morality; but if we think of ourselves as put under obligation we regard ourselves as belonging to the world of sense and yet at the same time to the world of understanding.11

It is also noteworthy to consider Kantʼs view regarding the mark human freedom leaves on the phenomenal world. Jens Timmermann puts it well when he says the following in his Commentary on the Groundwork:

There is no trace of the supernatural provenance of human action in the phenomenal world. Rather, actions appear to be determined by other appearances – desires and inclinations – in accordance with the causal laws of nature. The causality of freedom lies beyond the realm of knowledge. Even so, the assumption of our dual membership remains.12

Thus, the prerequisite of morality, freedom, has not an empirical grounding,

according to Kant, but a transcendental one. The ontology and the psychology of

freedom, along with Kant’s whole practical philosophy, is established on the bases of


9 ! Kant (Gr.), p. 62 (4:453).

10 !Frederick Rauscher (2009), “Freedom and Reason in Groundwork III” (pp. 203-223) in Timmermann, Jens (ed.) Kantʼs Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 203. – Rauscher adds: “The argument is said to fail, and Kant is said to have realised this failure before writing the Critique of Practical Reason, in which he abandoned any hope of deduction of morality in favour of a very different approach, an assertion of the validity of the moral law as a ʻfact of reasonʼ which requires, and is susceptible to, no deduction. (ibid.)

11 !Kant (Gr.), p. 62 (4:453).

12 !Jens Timmermann (2007), Kantʼs Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: A Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 140.

a simple idea, the idea of a thing-in-itself. That idea has been controversial and I will

now turn my attention to one of its antagonists.

4. Nietzsche’s Early Endorsement

Kant’s distinction between noumenon and the phenomenon, the thing-in-itself and

thing thing as it appeares, was of major importance for Nietzsche since he was in his

early twenties. He endorsed the distinction; for him it was the fundamental premise

of philosophical enquiry. Following Schopenhauer, Nietzsche’s theory of perception

was representationalist, which committed him to the Kantian framework of

metaphysics and its cognitive limitation.

The Kantian-Schopenhauerian metaphysical picture of the world played a

crucial role in Nietzsche’s first books, not least the well known The Birth of Tragedy.

It is not until Human, All Too Human, which was first published in 1878, when

Nietzsche was 34 years old, that one can notice scepticism about the idea of things-in-

themselves. This scepticism goes hand in hand with a major shift in Nietzsche’s

philosophy: He abandons his early Dionysian-Apollonian metaphysics, although he

continues to use the terms with different meanings, and adopts a non-metaphysical

standpoint where the ultimate reality of the world of our senses is not questioned. He

develops his philosophy of “free-spirits” on the rejection of metaphysics.

But even in Human, All Too Human his rejection of Kantian metaphysics of

things-in-themselves is not an ontological rejection, as is evident from the following

passage:

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.13

Rather it is an epistemological and psychological rejection, as Mattia Riccardi points

out: “[Nietzsche’s] criticism does not directly challenge the ontological distinction between the thing in itself and its appearance, but rather dismisses it as a mere theoretical question which is ultimately meaningless in terms of our actions in life.”14


13 !Friedrich Nietzsche (HH1), Human All Too Human. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), § 9.

14 !Riccardi (2010), p. 338.

So the metaphysical world might exist, but it has, according to Nietzsche at that stage, no relevance to life. One could claim that even Kant is “agnostic” about things-in-themselves, in a way that for example Schopenhauer was not, but for Kant the metaphysical distinction had a deep meaning and consequences, not only for theoretical philosophy but also for practical philosophy, for our life. The distinguished Nietzsche scholar Maudemarie Clark uses the word “agnosticism” to describe Nietzscheʼs position regarding the thing-in-itself in Human, All Too Human, but as I have explained it is a type of agnosticism which is psychologically equivalent to a rejection of the metaphysical framework in question.15

It is valuable to understand how Nietzscheʼs views regarding the thing-in-itself develop, but now I will turn to the destination of the development, a fully-fledged ontological rejection of the idea.

5. Nietzsche’s ontological rejection

The Daybreak, published in 1881, marks a new period in Nietzscheʼs thought. In the subsequent books he puts forward a more radical criticism of the idea of thing-in-itself than he had done before. The passages in Nietzscheʼs writings which have been the subject of most discussion among scholars with regard to criticism of thing-in-itself appear in Beyond Good and Evil and The Gay Science. In the former book, Nietzsche dismisses the argument for a thing-in-itself because he claims it contains contradictio in adjecto, that is to say, a contradiction between parts of the argument:

There are still harmless self-observers who believe in the existence of “immediate certainties”, such as “I think”, or the “I will” that was Schopenhauer’s superstition: just as if knowledge had been given an object here to seize, stark naked, as a “thing in itself”, and no falsification took place from either the side of the subject or the side of the object. But I will say this a hundred times: “immediate certainty”, like “absolute knowledge” and the “thing in itself” contains a contradictio in adjecto.16


15 !Maudemarie Clark (1990), Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 90.

16 !Friedrich Nietzsche (BGE), Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), § 16.

There is not a scholarly consensus why Nietzsche considers the argument to be self-contradictory, but the following passage from Gay Science could provide a hint:

What is “appearance” to me now! Certainly not the opposite of some essence – what could I say about any essence except name the predicates of its appearance! Certainly not a dead mask that one could put on an unknown x and probably also take off x!17

Nietzsche is arguing that our world is the world as it appears to us, the world of our senses, and that it makes no sense to make a distinction between that world and something we have no way of cognising or even no way of properly conceiving.18 Nietzscheʼs ontological rejection of thing-in-itself does not take the form “there is no x”, rather it takes the form that to claim there is such an x is not sensical. During his “agnostic” period, mentioned earlier, he maintained that it is impossible to know the answer of the question posed, but his ontological rejection consists in saying that the question itself makes no sense. In this regard, section 354 in Gay Science is of interest and could cast further light on the matter:

[I]t is not the opposition between subject and object which concerns me here; I leave that distinction to those epistemologists who have got tangled up in the snares of grammar (of folk metaphysics). Even less am I concerned with the opposition between ‘thing in itself’ and appearance: for we ‘know far too little to even be entitled to make that distinction. We simply have no organ for knowing, for ‘truth’: we ‘know’ (or believe or imagine) exactly as much as is useful to the human herd, to the species: and even what is here called ‘usefulness’ is finally also just a belief, a fiction, and perhaps just that supremely fatal stupidity of which we some day will perish.19

So, Nietzsche advocates more epistemological modesty and he does not allow his ontology to exceed his epistemology. He also talks about “the snares of grammar” regarding the opposition between subject and object, a phrase that is very much in the spirit of later Wittgenstein.


17 !Friedrich Nietzsche (GS), The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books 1974), § 54.

18 !Maudemarie Clark argues that the thing-in-itself is inconceivable, according to Nietzsche, while Mattia Riccardi interpretation text as making a weaker claim, that the thing-in-itself cannot be cognised.

19 !Nietzsche (GS), § 354. Here I use the translation of Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Nietzsche does neither want to postulate that things have aspects which belong to an unknown realm nor to postulate that they have an unknown source or true essence. On the contrary, we can only speculate on the deep nature of things by analysing and investigating things as objects of our senses. In another passage in Gay Science Nietzsche says that what starts “as appearance in the end nearly always becomes essence and effectively acts as its essence.”20 Here, he could be interpreted as saying that the only essence of a thing that we can understand is what springs from the thingʼs representative nature.

But what has all this to do with Nietzscheʼs claim that Kantʼs argument for thing-in-itself contains a contradiction? The answer is between the lines in Nietzscheʼs writings and his argument is a common argument against Kantʼs idea, an argument which is eloquently summarised by Roger Scruton:

[A]ppearances possess all the characteristics of physical objects. To say that an appearance is also an appearance of something is surely incoherent. For, by Kant’s own theory, the ‘something’ which supposedly underlies appearance could only be a ‘noumenon’, and about noumena nothing significant can be said.21

If things-in-themselves cannot be known we cannot make any claims about them.

Lanier Anderson, who is both a scholar of Kant and Nietzsche, reaches the following

conclusion on the subject after a thorough reflection:

The unknowability of things in themselves is part of their very conception: it arises not from some contingent deficiency or incompleteness in our experience or theorising to date, but from general and inevitable limitations on our cognitive resources, most importantly the lack of intellectual intuitions capable of representing such objects. This means that in attempting to conceive of things in themselves, we outstrip the legitimate realm of our concepts, and therefore stop making sense altogether.22

Although it is controversial how reliable Nietzscheʼs unpublished writings are as evidence for his views (he deliberately decided not to publish them), they should at least up to some extent be useful as a tool of interpretation of his published books.


20 !Nietzsche (GS), § 58.

21 !Scruton (1982), p. 43.

22 !R. Lanier Anderson (1999), “Nietzscheʼs Views on Truth and the Kantian Background of His Epistemology, in Babette Babich and Robert S. Cohen (eds.), Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche and the Sciences II (Boston: Springer), pp. 50-51.

He mentions the thing-in-itself frequently in his notebooks, for example in the following note from 1886:

Kant was no longer entitled to his distinction between “appearance” and “thing in itself” – he had denied himself the right to continue to distinguish in this old, traditional way having rejected as invalid the inference from the appearance to a cause of the appearance – in accordance with his understanding of the concept of causality and of its purely intra-phenomenal validity[.]23

In 1987 he also calls the thing-in-itself “absurd” for the following reason: “If I remove all relations, all “properties”[,] all “activities” of a thing, then no thing remains left.”24 In a similar vein, Paul Guyer argues in Kant and the Claims of Knowledge that Kantʼs idea of things-in-themselves seems to follow from his “prejudice against the ultimate reality of relations.”25

However, what Nietzsche holds against the idea of a thing-in-itself is not merely that he considers it contradictory and nonsensical. He maintains the distinction is also unfruitful for human life, because a mystical realm is established which draws the attention from our actual world as we experience it, here and now, the only “stage” where we live our lives, the material for our creativity and the object of our aesthetic sentiments. Kantʼs idea is therefore unethical, according to Nietzsche, in the sense that it may distract people from the ideal earthly life and may direct their attention to the unknown or the mystical, which would not be likely to contribute to human advancement. This can be called a consequentalist argument against the idea.

In a chapter called “How the 'Real World' at last Became a Myth – History of an Error” in one of his last books, Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche expresses how he views the idea of the thing-in-itself in the context of intellectual history. In the chapter, the consequentalist argument against the thing-in-itself is poetically interwoven with his ontological argument:


23 !Friedrich Nietzsche (WP) The Will to Power. (A posthumous publication of Nietzscheʼs notebooks). 2nd edn. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), Nachlass 1886, 5[4], KSA 12, pp. 186–187.

24 !Nietzsche (WP), Nachlass 1887, 10 [202], KSA 12, p. 580.

25 !Paul Guyer (1987), Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 350).

1. The real world, attainable to the wise, the pious, the virtuous man – he dwells in it, he is it. (Oldest form of the idea, relatively sensible, simple, convincing. Transcription of the proposition 'I, Plato, am the truth.').26

2. The real world, unattainable for the moment, but promised to the wise, the pious, the virtuous man ('to the sinner who repents'). (Progress of the idea: it grows more refined, more inticing, more incomprehensible […])

3. The real world, unattainable, undemonstrable, cannot be promised, but even when merely thought of a consolation, a duty, an imperative. (Fundamentally the same old sun, but shining through mist and scepticism; the idea grown sublime, pale, northerly, Königsbergian.)27

4. The real world – unattainable? Unattained, at any rate. And if unattained also unknown. Consequently also no consolation, no redemption, no duty: how could we have a duty towards something unknown? (The grey of dawn. First yawnings of reason. Cock-crow of positivism.)28

5. The 'real world' – and idea no longer of any use, not even a duty any longer – an idea grown useless, superfluous, consequently a refuted idea: let us abolish it! (Broad daylight; return of cheerfulness and bons sens; Plato blushes for shame; all free spirits run riot.)

6. We have abolished the real world: what world is left? The apparent world perhaps? … But no! With the real world we have also abolished the apparent world! (Mid-day; moment of the shortest shadow; end of the longest error; zenith of mankind; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA).29

The last words, “Incipit Zarathustra”, mean “Zarathustra begins” and refer to the

main character in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s aesthetic and ethical ideal,

whose time is ripe when the idea of thing-in-itself has been abandoned.

Nietzsche’s criticism is seductive, but I think it is misguided, as I will now

account for.


26 !Translatorʼs footnote: “The truth = Wahrheit, corresponding to wahre Welt = real world.”

27 ! Translatorʼs footnote: “i.e. Kantian, from the northerly German city in which Kant was born and in which he lived and died.”

28 !Translatorʼs footnote: “Here meaning empiricism, philosophy founded on observation and experiment.”

29! Friedrich Nietzsche (TI), Twilight of the Idols. In Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ. 2nd edn. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1990), pp. 50-51.

6. A defence of Kant against Nietzsche

Nietzsche’s criticism of Kant’s idea of the thing-in-itself has been very influential in

the 20th century. Nietzsche has frequently been celebrated for overcoming so-called

Kantian dualism. Here, however, I will defend Kant against Nietzsche’s criticism and

I will argue against both his ontological argument and his consequentalist argument.

I will first react to the latter argument and I will begin by discussing how the

rejection of the thing-in-itself affected Nietzsche’s own ideas and psychology. In my

view, the most revealing evidence is a letter he wrote to his friend Franz Overbeck in

1881, the same year as The Daybreak was published. In it he expresses his

intellectual affinity with Baruch Spinoza, the 17th century philosopher:

Not only is his whole tendency like my own – to make knowledge the most powerful passion – but also in five main points of his doctrine I find myself; this most abnormal and lonely thinker is closest to me in these points precisely: he denies free will, purposes, the moral world order, the nonegoistical, evil; of course the differences are enormous, but they are differences more of period, culture, field of knowledge.30

Spinoza was an inspiring thinker. Kant read him also and was influenced by him. Still, Kant found many of his views problematic. Spinoza was a philosopher of radical immanence; he rejected the transcendent. Kant was partly responding to Spinozaʼs views with his own transcendentalism. So, it is not surprising that Nietzsche was drawn to Spinozaʼs immanent account of the world at the time when he was distancing himself from Kantian-Schopenhauerian metaphysics. The rejection of the transcendent realm causes both Spinoza and Nietzsche to deny “free will”, the “nonegoistical” and the “moral world order”, as is stated in the letter. These are exactly the things Kant established by his transcendental account, the idea of thing-in-itself.

Spinozaʼs denial of the moral world order on the one hand and the nonegoistical on the other, was closely related: his ethics was deeply egoistical. The same can be said about Nietzscheʼs ethics. Spinoza was a determinist, if not a pure necessitarian, and Nietzsche followed in his footsteps and adopted fatalistic views regarding both nature and human behaviour. The rejection of transcendent views turned Spinoza


30! Friedrich Nietzsche (SL), Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche. Edited and translated by Christopher Middleton (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1969), Letter 89 (to Franz Overbeck; Sils Maria, July 30, 1881), p. 177.

into a pantheist while Nietzsche became an atheist, but the difference between those two standpoint was not great. Some scholars have identified Spinoza as an atheist, while others have noticed the religious urge in Nietzscheʼs thought. Spinozaʼs slogan Amor Dei, love of God, has a very similar meaning as Nietzscheʼs slogan Amor Fati, love of fate. They both had an intense psychological need for love in their worldview, but had a hard time finding it in their immanent account of our existence. Fatalism goes against the natural instinct of rational beings, who consider themselves to be free, at least to some extent. Fatalism is a difficult position psychologically and most likely not a fruitful mentality for many people. One can also question the fruitfulness of denying the nonegoistical and a moral world order. One could argue that the attitude in question did not have a good effect on neither Spinoza nor Nietzsche, that it isolated them, made them depressed and even made their life shorter than it otherwise would have been. At least it would not be far-fetched to make such a claim in the case of Nietzsche. One could also argue that the philosophy of fatalistic, egoistic, non-moralistic immanence did not have positive affect of many of Nietzscheʼs followers in the 20th century. In short, there is a reason to suspect that the rejection of thing-in-itself and the transcendent realm does not advance human life, but quite the opposite.

Now we shall turn to the ontological argument. To begin with, one can question how ontological Kantʼs metaphysical framework in fact is. Jens Timmermann argues for example that “Kantʼs invocation of the intelligible world is not intended to be merely theoretical, and certainly not an ontological, claim”:

Rather, he is identifying a practical self-conception of human beings as rational agents. Our experience of the ideas and principles of reason, in particular of the categorical imperative, cannot be readily explained using the sensible world alone. We invoke a distinct order of reason, yet cannot explain how this order of reason can be the cause of any effects in the world.31

Kantʼs idea of thing-in-itself is ontological in the sense that he is in some way describing state of affairs in the world, but his metaphysical account serves to establish the world as we experience it, but it does not lead to conclusions which are foreign to our conception. People conceive themselves as being free, at least to a certain degree, and they have a moral sense. People are also conscious about the


31 !Timmermann (2009), p. 223.

imperfection of their sensual apparatus and that things may not necessarily be as they seem to us. In a deep sense, Kantʼs ontology leaves everything as it is, and then he goes on to explore the rules of reason and to ground a rationalistic morality.

Kantʼs metaphysical account, including his idea of thing-in-itself, is in line with Wittgensteinʼs advice that a philosopher should leave everything as it is. Behind the advice is the view that philosophy does not contribute to human knowledge, but only to human understanding. This is a modest view of philosophy but still does not trivialise the discipline, because the understanding in question is not trivial but illuminating and important.

Nietzsche, however, has de facto an ontological picture of the world that deeply affects his psychology. His philosophical views made him an anti-moral fatalist. It is ironic that Nietzsche let philosophical pseudo-knowledge affect his life, while Kant devised philosophical views which helped people to escape such pseudo-knowledge. At the end of the day, it was Nietzsche who got “tangled up in the snares of grammar,” while Kant snared grammar to tangle what he sought in the world. It is Nietzsche who fails the test of epistemological modesty, but Kant who passes it. This observation is in line with Henry Allisonʼs remark in Kantʼs Transcendental Idealism:

The thing in itself should be understood non-metaphysically: In Wittgensteinian terms, Kant was not trying to say what is unsayable, but merely to define the boundaries of what can be said or asked. In order to do so, however, he had to introduce the “metalanguage” of transcendental philosophy. Thus such expressions as “things as they are in themselves,” noumena,” the transcendental object,” and their correlates are to be understood as technical terms within this metalanguage rather than as terms referring to transcendentally real entities.32

In the criticism of Kant, Nietzsche lacks interpretative sophistication; he understands Kant too literally and attacks a straw-man. Roger Scruton reaches a similar conclusion as Allison with regard to interpretation of Kantʼs views, as is evident from the following insightful and beautiful passage:

[Kant] dismissed as insubstantial any pretence to an absolute form of knowledge, which seeks to soar above the resistant medium of experience. The notion of a transcendental object is misunderstood when considered as referring to a real thing. The idea is posited only as a ‘point of view’ (A 681, B 710), in order to make clear that ‘the principles of pure understanding can


32 !Henry E. Allison (2004), Kantʼs Transcendental Idealism (New Haven & London: Yale University Press), p. 73.

apply only to objects of the senses … never to things in general without regard to the mode in which we are able to apprehend them’ (A 246, B 303). There is no description of the world that can free itself from the reference to experience. Although the world that we know is not our creation, nor merely a synopsis of our perspective, it cannot be known except from the point of view which is ours. All attempts to break through the limits imposed by experience end in self-contradiction, and although we may have intimations of a ‘transcendental’ knowledge, that knowledge can never be ours. These intimations are confined to moral life and aesthetic experience, and while they tell us, in a sense, what we really are, they can be translated into words only to speak unintelligibly. Philosophy, which describes the limits of knowledge, is always tempted to transcend them. But Kant’s final advice to it is that given in the last sentence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosohpicus: That whereof we cannot speak, we must consign to silence.33

If Kantʼs metaphysical framework, along with the idea of thing-in-itself, is understood in the way Allison and Scruton interpret it, the framework withstands Nietzscheʼs criticism. The ideal of perspectiveless knowledge is unrealisable, but a philosophical outlook is incomplete without concepts for such an ideal. The thing-in-itself is such a concept. We cannot cognise the ideal it refers to but we can conceive it, although vaguely and obscurely. Surely, there seems to be a paradox in Kantʼs account of human freedom and morality, how one is subject of freedom as a thing-in-itself, but at the same time bound within a causal chain from a phenomenal point of view. But Kant accepts the apparent paradox and responds to it in the wisest manner, that although we may not comprehend these things, “we do comprehend its incomprehensibility, and this is all that can reasonably be required of a philosophy that in its principles strives up to the boundary of human reason.”34

Human action, choice and morality are all pervading features of human life and they certainly do not strike us as mysterious while we are acting, choosing and behaving morally, but these things become mysterious when we begin to reflect on them. Then it becomes evident that a “man sees well enough what he has, but not what he is,” as Wittgenstein famously put it.35


33 !Scruton (1982), p. 94.

34 !Kant (Gr), p. 72 (4:463).

35 !Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value. (revised second edition), G. H. Wright. (ed.) (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1998), p. 56.

7. Conclusion

I began this essay by accounting for Kant’s idea of the thing-in-itself. Then I

explained its relevance for Kant’s practical philosophy. Next, I discussed Nietzsche’s

early endorsement of it and the arguments for his eventual rejection, which were both

of an ontological and a consequentalist kind. Finally, I defended Kant against

Nietzsche’s criticism. Firstly, I refuted the fruitfulness of rejecting the transcendent;

secondly I gave a meta-philosophical reason for preferring Kant’s framework rather

than Nietzsche’s; thirdly, I maintained that Nietzsche interpreted Kant’s idea too

literally and therefore he attacked a straw-man.

_________________________________

Asgeir Theodor Johannesson


Works Cited

Allison, Henry E. (2004) Kantʼs Transcendental Idealism. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.

Clark, Maudemarie. (1990) Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Guyer, Paul. (1987) Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kant, Immanuel. (Gr) Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Revised Edition. Edited by Mary Gregor and Jens Timmermann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Kant, Immanuel. (PP) Practical Philosophy. Translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Kant, Immanuel. (A/B) Critique of Pure Reason. Translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009 (first published 1998).

Kant, Immanuel. (BR) Basic Writings of Kant. Edited by Allen W. Wood. New York: The Modern Library, 2001.

Langton, Rae. (1998) Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. (BGE) Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. (BT) The Birth of Tragedy in Kaufmann, Walter (ed.) Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: The Modern Library, 2000.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. (D) Daybreak. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. (GM) On the Genealogy of Morality. Translated by Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1998.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. (GS) The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. (GS) The Gay Science. Translated by Josefine Nauckhoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. (HH1; HH2a; HH2b) Human All Too Human. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.


Nietzsche, Friedrich. (SL) Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche. Edited and translated by Christopher Middleton. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1969.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. (TI) Twilight of the Idols. In Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ. 2nd edn. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin Books, 1990.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. (UM) Untimely Meditations. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. (WLN) Writings from the Late Notebooks. Translated by Kate Sturge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. (WP) The Will to Power. (A posthumous publication of Nietzscheʼs notebooks). 2nd edn. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1968.

OʼShea, James R. (2012) Kantʼs Critique of Pure Reason. Durham: Acumen.

Riccardi, Mattia. (2010) “Nietzscheʼs Critique of Kantʼs Thing In Itself” in Nietzsche-Studien 39, pp. 333-351.

Scruton, Roger. (1982) Kant. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.

Timmermann, Jens. (2007) Kantʼs Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: A Commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Timmermann, Jens (ed.) (2009) Kantʼs Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: A Critical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Ed. G. H. Wright. Culture and Value. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1998 (revised second edition).

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2001 (third edition).


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