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man to too many different views of existence. Modern man had been
blinded by a "hypertrophic virtue," the presence of "much too bright,
much too sudden, much too changeable light." As a result, "the lines of
his horizon restlessly shift again and again," rendering him incapable of
"rude willing and desiring." The fictionalist relativism of Shafer or Geha,
in which one would never take one's present self-understanding too
seriously, remaining ever ready to move on to a successive self–
understanding, risks having this kind of corrosive or debilitating effect,
especially for people who already suffer from problems of a schizoid or
narcissistic type.
Schizoid individuals tend to sense that their own perceptions, memo–
ries, and actions are somehow insubstantial. They feel detached, as if sepa–
rated from the world by a sheet of glass, and they often become overly
preoccupied with theories and abstractions, or with internal thought
processes that seem to be idling in neutral. Narcissistic individuals are
generally more engaged with the social world, but the transience and self–
centeredness of their attachments robs them too of a real sense of
groundedness, and, in the end, leaves them also feeling hollow and
discontented. What such people require is hardly a greater appreciation of
the multiplicity of perspectives or of the element of artifice inherent in all
of human existence. This might actually work only to increase the sense
of detachment and dissatisfaction that brings them to psychotherapy in the
first place.
In one of his most powerful attacks on perspectivism Nietzsche wrote
that "the basic condition of all life" is to have a
single
perspective: "And
this is a general law: every living thing can become healthy, strong and
fruitful only within a horizon; if it is incapable of drawing a horizon
around itself or, on the other hand, too selfish to restrict its vision to the
limits of a horizon drawn by another, it will wither away feebly or over–
hastily to its early demise." He criticized those "given over to a restless
cosmopolitan choosing and searching for novelty and ever more novelty,"
the people of an age in which "knowledge, taken in excess without
hunger, even contrary to need, no longer acts as a transforming motive
impelling to action.... " And in a passage that could be read as a critique
of intellectual developments in the contemporary world of postmodernist
literature and poststructuralist theory, he writes of the age of the "Don
Juan of cognition," the person who lacks sufficient love for the things he
knows yet nevertheless pursues knowledge relentlessly until, finally,
"nothing remains to be hunted but the most agonizing effects of know–
ing" itself. This is the brother of his despised "theoretical man," who is
"bent on the extermination of myth" and "finds his highest satisfaction in
the unveiling process itself, which proves to him his own power."
