Nietzsche's Critique of Metaphysics: Embracing Sensory Experience

Empirical Standpoint: The Superiority of Sensory Experience

At an epistemological level, Nietzsche adopts an empirical standpoint, establishing the superiority of sensory experience over reason. The senses show us the real world; they are sharp observation instruments that reveal minor differences. In contrast, reason falsifies the testimony of the senses, creating an apparent world and misleading us.

Anthropological Level: A Vital Perspective Against Dualism

At an anthropological level, from a vital perspective, Nietzsche criticizes the dualism of the ailing Western metaphysical tradition. He claims the health of the body as a vital force to impose its reality. Platonic dualism is rejected for sentencing the soul to the prison of the body. Similarly, Judeo-Christian dualism is criticized for placing the principle of evil and corruption in the flesh. The denial and contempt of the body are symptoms of resentment and the need for final solutions. He also criticizes Cartesian dualism for reducing the body to a measurable mass.

Nietzsche understands the body and life experience as something that makes itself felt from the inside, like racing. The body is a unified plurality of different "consciousnesses" while the self, or consciousness itself, is outside the internal dynamics of this diversity.

The Senses and the Body in Nietzsche's Philosophy

For Nietzsche, one of the characteristics of philosophers is the worship of the world of being and hatred of the world of becoming. Thus, Nietzsche radically attacks Platonic metaphysics: "What becomes is not; what becomes is not...". This means that Nietzsche sees the history of metaphysics as dominated from the outset by the attempt to drive the future of being, to deny being the future and, conversely, to free being from all forms of becoming. Another feature of philosophers is to consider reason and despise the senses. Metaphysics distrusts the senses because they show the transitory; it sees in them the enemy of thought. Thus, metaphysics opposes the senses, falsifies their testimony, and invents a supersensible world.

Ultimately considered as organs of knowledge, philosophers denigrate the senses and the body, considering them a source of error because they deceive us about the real world. Nietzsche disqualifies philosophers of the Western tradition for being decadent, that is, pessimistic and nihilistic. This is a result of extreme rationalism; taking refuge in reason, they find comfort in the difference between a real world and another apparent one. Reason "kills life," turning multiplicity and change into unity and permanence. To fully appreciate the importance of Nietzsche's thinking, one must take into account that the philosophical tradition has considered reason as the capacity to know and the work of the human being. Therefore, Nietzsche criticizes the concept of reason at different levels: