Abided Knowing

Nietzsche’s epistemology of signs seems to be a derivative of his larger project. As what we call “I” is the governor of the commonwealth that is our body, what he calls the “sign” is a token for a much deeper and richer reality. He goes on to say that we have made signs for whole classes of signs. This makes our epistemology narrower. He notes that error is purely a problem for the organic world.

Later in the Notebooks, he writes about the internalization of all movement so that movement itself may just be a sign in our epistemic structure, an abbreviated reaction to pressure or force. But, Nietzsche himself is concerned with what, exactly, is the nature of an error. Clearly, he does not believe that error is a problem with our sensory (body). In defense of Descartes, he says, “This God left aside, the question is permitted whether being deceived is not one of the conditions of life.” Maybe becoming is hidden from us because of our own nature, and we wrongly ascribe that hiddenness and elusiveness to be a form of error on our part, the deception of our bodies. How incredibly perspicacious is this?

With equal clarity, Nietzsche opposes the graspability of reality. He derides those who think they can signify the world around them. We grasp with signs, and signs of signs, in order to avoid error. However, error is a necessary condition of life. Error is not objective falsity; it sits among a hierarchy of errors. So our signs are our errors may be the same thing. Our ego is a ‘becoming collection’, so too is our epistemology, a becoming collection of abbreviations, errors and signs.

This post refers to Nietzsche’s private notebooks recently published through Cambridge Press (Nietzsche: Writings from the late notebooks, especially p. 56).