Nietzsche’s Critique of Pure Subject

Kant, with his project of “the critique of pure reason,” aimed at 1) deciding where metaphysics has legitimate claims, and 2) showing where metaphysics has groundless pretensions and setting necessary limits to pure reason thereupon. In his moral philosophy, Kant claimed that —albeit as a condition of possibility— there must be moral a priori knowledge in our reason. On the other hand, Nietzsche, performing a different critical philosophy, 1) made contingent the formal structure which Kant had universalized by showing that subject —and its reason— is constructed on an empirical ground, and 2) claimed that, subject, who is a living being, has an intellect which is capable of producing knowledge potentially beneficial for itself or the human species. This article aims to show how Nietzsche took Kant’s critique a step forward via his perspectivist process episteme-ontology and his genealogical method; and how he transformed the critique into “the critique of pure subject.