Nietzsche, perspectivism, and capital T truth.

Friedrich Nietzsche the famous German existentialist, famously wrote that "there are no facts, only interpretations." Nietzsche meant that our epistemic awareness of the world, comes through a filter of the subjective understanding of our religious, political, familial, linguistic, and general cultural milieu. This doesn't mean that facts don't exist but our understanding of facts is mediated through our own subjective understanding of the world. People tend to like certainty. The world is a messy, gray, and morally ambiguous place. Often in our broken two party political system, there is no good choice, but we have to choose between the lesser of two evils. Philosophical moral dilemma's like the "trolley problem"show how morally messy our world can be and how there is no objective right answer. Political philosophers like Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin, don't often fit neatly into any left or right political paradigm, and thus shatter the political certainty of our tribal thinking. Philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Paul Tillich don't fit neatly into the theist/atheist debate and show how complicated our understandings of Being and God are.

Another German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, had the theory of the phenomena and noumena in his famous book The Critique of Pure Reason. The phenomena is the world as it appears to us as through the senses. Objects are filtered through the innate structures of our minds. The noumena is reality that exists in itself, completely free from our empirical understanding of the world. The ultimate nature of the noumena is unknowable to us and thus we are limited in bias free, and objective understanding of the world. Sometimes people who are religious fundamentalists and atheists like Pat Robertson and Richard Dawkins, while hating each other, end up mirroring each in their dogmatic like certainty in either religion or science. All our experiences are filtered through us, as living subjective human beings, whose lives are often a contradictory mess. First person consciousness is the starting point of all knowledge, because the world comes through me.

Nietzsche had a perspectivism approach to epistemology. There is no God's eye understanding of the world for Nietzsche. This doesn't mean though that all answers are the same. Some answers that are very thoughtful, and are clearly better than others, but the God's eye perspective is beyond our reach. Derrida wrote that "there is no outside the text." This doesn't mean that we only understand things through books, but that all our understanding is linguistic and in a cultural context. I think Nietzsche, Derrida, and continental philosophy, are in agreement on this point. I believe that the world is often a dark place, but do I think I have a capital T understanding that the world is a dark place? No. Nietzsche, the anti Christ figure, and scathing critic of religion in general was also critical of scientific positivism. Nietzsche thought the world was in constant flux and didn't follow the principle of non contradiction. Philosophers search for truth, but we humbly walk in uncertainty. Thank you.