Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 33, No. 1, 2001 The Perils of Rationality: Nietzsche, Peirce and education MAUGHN GREGORY Department of Educational Foundations, Montclair State University, Canada Introduction I begin this paper with a brief description of Nietzsche's epistemology, according to which rational knowledge is constructed from intuitive experience, and intuition must be cultivated as a means of deconstructing archaic habits of rationality. I then show how Peirce's epistemology compliments Nietzsche's, because it employs semiotic theory to explain how rational thought is developed from intuition. Both philosophers present rationality as instrumental, hypothetical and fallible; and the general aim of education that follows from this pragmatic epistemology is to prepare students to participate in the creative renewal of dominant conventions of thought, feeling and action. I conclude the paper with sketches of three broad pedagogical strategies for achieving that aim. Nietzsche 1 Early in his philosophical career, Nietzsche provided the groundwork and many details of a bipartite epistemology, according to which rational knowledge is an overlay on a more immediate, intuitive and existential knowledge. The latter Nietzeche hoped could be cultivated and constantly pitted against conceptual knowledge, so that it could be continually de-constructed and re-constructed. Nietzsche speculated that when the mind begins to cognize nerve stimuli it has only one means at its disposal: a trick he called 'imaginative transference'. 2 The most important aspect of this transference is its aesthetic or metaphorical nature: Between subject and object ... there is at most an aesthetic relation: I mean a suggestive transference, a stammering translation into a completely foreign tongue-for which there is required, in any case, a freely inventive intermediate sphere and mediating force. 3 It isn't merely that we know objects through the effects they produces in us, but also that our notions of objects are imaginative, artistic interpretations of those effects. Imagination is a physiological function that mediates between what effects the object causes and what perceptions result to the subject. The fault of perception that most troubled Nietzsche was the abstraction involved in it. Since the perceptual metaphor is not strictly caused by the object in the world, ISSN 0013-1857 print; ISSN 1469-5812 online/01/010023-12 © 2001 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia DOI: 10.1080/00131850020019000