Nietzsche’s Symptomatology of Skepticism

Abstract

Nietzsche’s epistemological position seems to be ambiguous. On the one hand he argues skeptically against the claims of the “dogmatic philosophers”1 and, more or less in continuity with contemporary Kantian and naturalistic theories, he develops a skeptical theory of knowledge and truth. On the other hand, however, Nietzsche himself seems to assert the truth of many of his own interpretations of human nature and its “human all too human” products. In addition to this epistemological ambiguity in his philosophical practice, there seems to be a tension between the obvious skepticism of his critique of the epistemic claims of the philosophers and his attack on skepticism as he finds it not only in some philosophical positions from the past, but especially in the general philosophical and scientific climate of his time. In this article, I will briefly point out some of these ambiguities and then suggest that the apparent contradiction in Nietzsche’s critique may — not perhaps be solved but — at least be understood more fully by approaching it differently. That is, we should approach this apparent contradiction from his symptomatology of skepticism which distinguishes between variant types of skepticism not from an epistemological perspective (e.g. the distinction between universal and partial, or between absolute and relative skepticism)2, but from a “morally” evaluative diagnosis of the type of life which expresses itself in these types of skepticism.