Joshua Andresen

American University of Beirut, El Líbano
Assistant Professor

Joshua Andresen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the American University of Beirut. His research interests and publications center on the anti-foundationalist implications of Nietzsche’s work and deconstruction.

Abstract

Nietzsche, Naturalism, and Falsification

This presentation focuses on one of the greatest challenges still besetting Nietzsche scholarship: making sense of his so-called «falsification thesis». I argue that attempts to understand Nietzsche’s claims about falsification have failed for two central reasons: 1) because they have tried to reduce a variety of forms of falsification to a single form, and 2) because they have not made an adequate connection between Nietzsche’s naturalistic account of the development of human perception and his general perspectival account of perception. The first part of the presentation presents and briefly evaluates three distinct types of «falsification» to which Nietzsche calls our attention. The second part begins by specifying Nietzsche’s naturalism as a heuristic claim against human exceptionalism and for the continuity of the human and animal, organic and inorganic, living and non-living, rather than a commitment to natural or empirical science as is sometimes supposed. I then develop Nietzsche’s naturalistic account of human perception, arguing that Nietzsche’s naturalism and perspectivism preclude the «falsification» of the world by human perception and cognition. In the context of my discussion of Nietzsche’s naturalism and perspectivism, I critically evaluate recent discussions of Nietzsche’s relation to science and conception of falsification by R. Lanier Anderson and R. Kevin Hill. Contrary to Anderson, I argue that falsification cannot be said to take place between cognition and sense perception precisely because the «content» of unconscious sense perceptions is, in principle, unknowable. Rather than cognition fundamentally falsifying sense perception, I argue that Nietzsche can only claim that the unjustified inference from the categories of cognition (e.g. substance, cause) to the objective characteristics of the world is what gives rise to falsification. When we understand Nietzsche’s perspectivism in accordance with his naturalized account of human perception, we see that the tendency to make falsifying inferences arise specifically because of our successful evolutionary development. As Hill has recently argued, Nietzsche responds to the long-standing puzzle of the harmony between human cognition and the world with neither a transcendent or transcendental account, but with a naturalistic evolutionary account. However, contrary to Hill’s further claims, Nietzsche does not invoke «falsification» to qualify ordinary human «phenomenal» perceptions of the world in contrast to supposedly truer «physical» accounts given by our best science. Rather, the combination of Nietzsche’s naturalistic account of the development of human cognition and his perspectival arguments lead us to two important conclusions. First, we see that the reality that buttresses Nietzsche’s falsification claims is not an objective mind-independent reality, but the world as it is experienced by other human and non-human perceivers. Second, Nietzsche’s arguments require us to see science not as contradicting ordinary human cognition, but as extending cognition to extraordinary phenomena (such as high gravity phenomena that have led us to model spacetime as «curved» rather than «flat»). Taken together, these conclusions underscore the value Nietzsche places on a naturalistic conception of life, one that specifies the development of knowledge claims squarely in terms of the evolution of the living, including the human and non-human alike.