Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology

In his article “Perspectivism and Psycho-dynamic Psychotherapy,” Ronald Lehrer argues that many contemporary psychoanalysts have adopted a Nietzsche-style perspectivism in their practice, and Lehrer offers both a critical exegesis of Nietzsche’s views and an evaluation of their usefulness in clinical psychology. We think that Lehrer fails to appreciate how radical Nietzsche’s position really is, and that he underestimates its power and defensibility. Moreover, Lehrer does not discuss an aspect of Nietzsche’s perspectivism, namely the bundle theory of the self, which is especially relevant for psychiatry.

There are two sorts of perspectivism implicit in Lehrer’s discussion. Let us call the first modest perspectivism. According to this idea, there is a mind-independent reality with well-defined objects and objective causal relations that obtain among them. However, as cognitively limited creatures, we have access to reality only through a number of different methods, approaches, theories, paradigms, and the like. Each of these cognitive methods is incapable of disclosing the full truth about the world. As Nietzsche wrote in On the Genealogy of Morals (essay III, §12), “the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity’ be.” In other words, it is only through the recognition that no approach, no matter how successful, is completely satisfactory, that we are able to overthrow rigid methodological dogmatism and embrace the perspectivity of knowledge.

Let us call the second variety of perspectivism radical perspectivism. According to radical perspectivism, truth itself is somehow indexed to points of view, or to interpretations. There is no objective body of the facts that exists independently of some specific perspective taken on them. Nor are there well-individuated objects in the world apart from some particular cognizing of them. This is not idealism—the world isn’t just in our minds, and we do not “eat ideas,” nor are we “clothed in ideas,” as Berkeley famously claimed. Rather, in itself the world is chaotic and without an intrinsic structure. What structure we discern is due to our idiosyncratic perceptual mechanisms coupled with what interpretations we find useful (for survival, or for the promotion of power). Causal relations, too, while not invented out of whole cloth, are also not wholly objective facts about the world that we discover. If a forest catches fire, there is no objective way to decide that it was caused by the lightning, instead of being caused by the presence of oxygen, or the abundance of dry wood, or high winds.

Modest perspectivism has the virtue of being exceedingly ecumenical. Outside of a few die-hard [End Page 173] fundamentalists, who really wants to claim that they alone have found the one shining path to the truth? Even radical perspectivists, who reject the thesis that reality is mind-independent, are attracted to the idea that no cognitive method reigns supreme. As Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (book III, §11.2), “‘This is my way; where is yours?’—thus I answered those who asked me ‘the way.’ For the way—that does not exist.” Lehrer does not stop here, however. He also contends that modest perspectivism is the only plausible form of perspectivism, and it is Nietzsche’s view to boot. It is worth acknowledging that with respect to the latter claim, Lehrer is not alone. Respected Nietzsche scholars Richard Schacht (1995, 91–92) and Bernd Magnus (1988, 152–53) offer similar interpretations. Nevertheless, we will argue that Nietzsche’s perspectivism is both more radical and more defensible than Lehrer recognizes.