ABSTRACT
This passage from Nietzsche’s early manuscripts both draws upon and ironically denigrates our capacities for scientifi c understanding. The tension underlying Nietzsche’s fable and commentary has been taken up in a different way in an infl uential essay by Wilfrid Sellars (2007). Sellars framed one of the central issues in 20th-century philosophy as the relation between two infl uential “images” or conceptions of ourselves and our place in the universe. The “manifest image” understands us as persons, rational, sentient agents accountable to norms: “to think is to be able to measure one’s thoughts by standards of correctness, of relevance, of evidence” (Sellars 2007, p. 374). The “scientifi c image” is the composite formed from the explanatory theoretical postulations of the sciences: a systematic, scientifi c representation of nature that explains its manifold appearances. For philosophical naturalists, the scientifi c image takes priority: as Sellars put it, “in the dimension of describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not” (1997, p. 83). Critics of naturalism respond that scientifi c claims are only authoritative for us because they answer to rational norms of understanding and justifi cation. Sellars sought to do justice to the comprehensiveness and apparent autonomy of both images, combining them in what he called a “stereoscopically unifi ed” vision of ourselves in the world.
