"Pure Perspectives" in Nietzsche's Perspectivism

In this entry I want to share a problem I have with Brian Leiter's reading of Nietzsche's perspectivism. The article of his I cite is almost 15 years old now so it might be a bit dated, but I just want to get it out there. It will start with a summary of some of the main points of the article before I get to the criticism, but I'll keep it short. This may be interesting to anyone who is frustrated with the intellectual laziness encouraged by the prevalence of the "there's no truth, it's all how you look at it" way of thinking. Or anyone who has heard a bunch of hype about Nietzsche's perspectivism and wants to find out more about what he actually wrote.

In “Perspectivism in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals,” Brian Leiter criticizes a reading of perspectivism that he believes “has attained the status of near-orthodoxy among commentators,” (334). He characterizes this "Received View" (RV) as follows:

(i) the world has no determinate nature or character;
(ii) our concepts and theories do not “describe” or “correspond” to this world because it has no determinate character;
(iii) our concepts and theories are “mere” interpretations or “mere” perspectives (reflecting our pragmatic needs, at least on some accounts);
(iv) no perspective can enjoy an epistemic privilege over any other, because there is no epistemically privileged mode of access to this characterless world.

Leiter sez: “the Received View cannot be sustained by a close reading of the central text in the work Nietzsche published in which he actually discusses perspectivism: section 12 of the Third Essay of On the Genealogy of Morals,” (335). Before he starts this close reading, Leiter puts up two basic problems with the RV. First, a big part of Nietzsche's philosophy is arguing that other views are mistaken, like when he says something has no basis in experience or that religious and moral interpretations appeal to “imaginary causes." This clashes with his supposed avowal that no perspective can be any more true than any other. Second, in insisting that no perspective can give an account of the world as it ‘really is’, the RV reinstates the distinction between appearance and reality that Nietzsche famously rejects.

Now let's go to the "central text," GM III:12, which provides evidence against the RV. Leiter notes that instead of presenting truth as something impossible to attain, Nietzsche begins the passage “with an attack on any metaphysics that posits the truth as essentially unknowable, with Kant’s thing-in-itself as a paradigmatic case in point,” (343). And instead of giving up objectivity for relativism, Nietzsche presents a different understanding of objectivity. He writes that “objectivity” should be:

...understood not as “contemplation without interest” (which is a nonsensical absurdity), but as the ability to control one’s Pro and Con and to dispose of them, so that one knows how to employ a variety of perspectives and affective interpretations in the service of knowledge.
Henceforth, my dear philosophers, let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject”; let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as “pure reason,” “absolute spirituality,” “knowledge in itself”: these always demand that we should think of something that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking; these always demand of the eye an absurdity and nonsense. There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective “knowing”; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity” be. But to eliminate the will altogether, to suspend each and every affect, supposing we were capable of this—what would that mean but to castrate the intellect?— (GM III:12)

The passage proposes an analogy between “knowing” and literal, visual seeing: as seeing is dependent on visual perspectives, so “knowing” is dependent on interests or affects. Leiter spells out the analogy as follows:

In the visual case:
Necessarily, we see an object from a particular perspective: for example, from a certain angle, from a certain distance, under certain conditions (perspectivism claim).
The more perspectives we enjoy—for example, the more angles we see the object from—the better our conception of what the object is actually like will be (plurality claim).
We will never exhaust all possible perspectives on the object of vision (infinity claim).
There exists a catalogue of identifiable factors that would distort our perspective on the object: for instance, we are too far away or the background conditions are poor (purity claim).

In the “knowing” case:
Necessarily, we know an object from a particular perspective: that is, from the standpoint of particular interests and needs (perspectivism claim).
The more perspectives we enjoy—for example, the more interests we employ in knowing the object—the better our conception of what the object is like will be (plurality claim).
We will never exhaust all possible perspectives on the object of knowledge (there are an infinity of interpretive interests that could be brought to bear) (infinity claim).
There exists a catalogue of identifiable factors that would distort our knowledge of the object: that is, certain interpretive interests and needs will distort the nature of objects (purity claim).

The problem I have with Leiter is with the epistemic purity claim, which Leiter admits is “the most contentious.” He writes, "If we are to have the epistemic purity claim then we must be able to make out something like the following thought: certain interpretive needs and interests distort the nature of objects. We require, then, some criterion for distinguishing nondistorting and distorting needs and interests," (346). What I don't get is how needs and interests could be nondistorting. As I understand it, needs and interests cause us to focus on certain aspects of an experience or situation at the cost of others and to automatically process everything in relation to a certain idea, framework, or agenda, so the perspectives they produce are necessarily partial and unfair. The idea of non-distorting interests is mysterious, and Leiter's speculation as to what the criterion to identify them could be does not clear things up (I'll return to this below).

Moreover, if some perspectives are distorting and others are not, it seems like old Friedrich should tell us to avoid the bad ones and collect the good ones. Indeed, this is how Leiter goes on to qualify the plurality claim: we “can always benefit from additional *nondistorting* perspectives," (Leiter 346). But he does no such thing; in GM III:12 the plurality claim is indiscriminate: “the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity” be.” Moreover, he makes it clear that one can learn from perspectives that one considers to be distorting and false. After all, immediately after beginning GM III:12 with “an attack on any metaphysics that posits truth as essentially unknowable,” using something he clearly disagrees with, Kant’s metaphysics, as an example, he writes that we should be grateful to this kind of metaphysical view for increasing our capacity for “objectivity” and thereby aiding us in our search for knowledge. This suggests that we can learn from all perspectives, not just some of them. There seems to be nothing in the passage to support the introduction of this fishy "pure perspectives" idea.

So what led Leiter to introduce it? The worry seems to have been that if all perspectives are misleading and distorting, that would leave no true or reliable perspectives from which we can learn. But I think N's point is precisely that such 'reliable sources' are empty fictions that have no role in a true search for knowledge; this is why he attacks such concepts as pure reasons, contemplation without interest, and knowledge in itself as absurd. I think he might add Leiter's pure perspective to the bunch, and that at any rate we can do without it.

I think we can read this passage as making a simple point: even if each point of view we take up is a partial, simplified, and distorted version of the truth, we can learn from each point of view if we understand *how* it is partial, simplified, and distorted. The more we recognize such interest-driven partiality in the beliefs and practices of ourselves and others, the better we understand those beliefs, the interests that shape them, the people who have them, and the world. Recognizing the partiality will drive us away from our comfortable beliefs to understand and learn from a variety of perspectives, which we can do despite the fact that none of them will give us a pure, nondistorted view into the true nature of the world. This does the opposite of encouraging laziness with beliefs because "it's all just perspective, anyway," by encouraging strenuous effort in understanding and criticizing many points of view, without retracting its attack on the old objectivity's claim to interest-free authority. Though this doesn't necessarily mean it is now understood better, I think that attack on metaphysical objectivity was radical at the time it was written but is seen as pretty commonplace today.


(As a footnote: I said I'd return to Leiter's criterion for telling distorting interests from non-distorting interests, so here we go. After observing that it must be those rare strong individuals who are capable of facing the terrible truth who have those nondistorting interests, he writes that "The mark or criterion of a nondistorting interest, for Nietzsche, is that it is adequate to the “terrible truth” about the world. But that “terrible truth” must be established on other grounds," (347). This would mean we can't know which interests are distorting and which aren't unless we know the truth already and can judge what we epistemically "see" from certain perspectives by comparing it to what we already know. So as you can see, this doesn't help explain how those strong interests could avoid shaping the world in a certain partial way.
Instead of explaining the strong's ability to know the truth by supposing that their strength is constituted by the passive possession of ‘strong, truth-adequate perspectives,’ I think it makes more sense to see their strength as an active ability “to control one’s Pro and Con and to dispose of them, so that one knows how to employ a variety of perspectives in the service of knowledge.” On this reading, strong people can approach the truth not because of the particular interests or perspectives they happen to have, but because they are able move between and learn from a variety of perspectives.)