Beyond Epistemology: Nietzsche and the Need for Epistemic Criteria

In a recent paper, "Nietzsche's Sting And The Possibility of Good Philology/1 Kenneth Wcstphal presents a case for interpreting as strongly cognitivist a number of Nietzsche's remarks concerning truth, language and the world. The cognitivism Wcstphal attributes to Nietzsche is at bottom a correspondence theory of truth: that there arc truths about the world that can be known and expressed, truth being a product of a correspondence between one's beliefs and the world.2 Wcstphal argued in an earlier paper3 that it is crucial to Nietzsche's enterprise that he maintain such a position, for unless he docs he cannot claim to know the facts upon which he bases his stinging criticisms of the Western intellectual tradition. For example, if Nietzsche cannot claim that Christians exist or have existed, and that they possess certain intelligible psychological features, and that it is possible to know what these features arc and to criticize them, then Nietzsche's own depiction of Christians as world-weary intellectually dishonest decadents is groundless. As Wcstphal puts it, "not interpreting him as a cognitivist-at least for a certain range of critical claims-converts the roaring lion into a noisy crank with no grasp of what's going on around him."4 Wcstphal believes that in order to salvage the integrity of Nietzsche's critical project by providing that project an epistemic ground attributable to Nietzsche, a formidable obstacle must be overcome, namclv Nietzsche's own skeptical remarks. As Wcstphal asks, "How can Nietzsche be a cognitivist given his skeptical declamations, his criticisms of language, and his pcrspectivism?"5 According to Wcstphal, a convincing case for Nietzschcan cognitivism must not only provide evidence for establishing an epistcmology that is cognitivist, it must also reconcile Nietzsche's skeptical remarks to this epistcmology. A position that simultaneously implied the impossibility of truth and yet advocated the