"In so far as the senses show becoming, passing away, change, they do not lie. . . . [N's ellipses] But Heraclitus will always be right in this, that being is an empty fiction. The 'apparent' world is the only one: the 'real' world has been lyingly added. . ."
And in discussing the myth of the unitary ego, he notes that Man "always discovered in things only that which he had put into them! --The thing itself, to say it again, the concept 'thing' is merely a reflection of the belief in the ego as cause. . . . And even your atom, messieurs mchanists and physicists, how much error, how much rudimentary psychology, still remains in your atom! --To say nothing of the 'thing in itself', that horrendum pudendum of the metaphysicians!"
When I read passages like the above in Nietzsche, in which he emphasizes how we impose order on the world and then claim the resulting object is a manifestation of the "thing in itself", I have a hard time understanding how anybody would call Nietzsche a realist. Sure, he claims the senses don't lie, but what does he mean? He does not mean that if I see an orange on the table, there really is an orange on the table [a Kantian thing in itself]: rather, he claims that senses provide fleeting information that we deceptively simplify in order to perceive a recognizable object such as an orange.
I like this view of human perception: humans are creative meaning makers, they're not just dutiful scribes dully transcribing the text of Nature. And if this Nietzschean view is considered realism today, hey, count me in!
Miles "wandering far afield instead of grading summer final papers" Jackson cqmv at odin.cc.pdx.edu