Questioning moral certainty › The limits of philosophical suspicion

The first difficulty is the apparent circularity of perspectivism. If Nietzsche's own account is an interpretation, why should it correct other interpretations? There is no contradiction merely in admitting that a claim comes from a perspective. A judgment can have conditions of production and still offer reasons that others can assess. The harder task is identifying standards of assessment that do not quietly restore the absolute standpoint under criticism.

Section 22 supplies one resource: acknowledge the interpretive status of the proposal instead of presenting it as an uninterpreted text of nature. But acknowledgment alone cannot settle a dispute. An interpretation still has to account for what it discusses and withstand rival explanations. This is a demand a reader can put to Nietzsche, rather than a complete solution that he explicitly supplies there.

A second difficulty concerns the inference from origins to validity. Suppose a philosophical argument does express its author's temperament. That may explain why the author found the argument attractive. It does not yet show which premise is mistaken. The diagnosis becomes philosophically stronger when it locates a specific distortion; otherwise it risks replacing argument with an assessment of character.

A third difficulty concerns Nietzsche's standards of life and excellence. When he criticizes a value as hostile to life, which life is being evaluated, and which costs are allowed to disappear from the assessment? An arrangement might support remarkable accomplishments while inflicting severe harms on those who support it. Recognizing the accomplishments would leave the justification of those harms unresolved.

Finally, criticizing an unconditional will to truth creates a risk for the criticism itself. If preserving a valued form of life justifies some false beliefs, the reader may ask whether Nietzsche's preferred valuations also depend on comforting or flattering distortions. His suspicion is most demanding when it remains available against the person exercising it.