Topic for #61: Nietzsche on Truth

July 15, 2012 by Mark Linsenmayer 14 Comments

Ah… Nietzsche on Facebook. Life's good.

Facebook seems to be the space to agree and disagree, though. There's very little tolerance for
contemplation here.

Judging Nietzsche’s genius by a quote or aphorism out of the context of his works is… Lol a
bold thing to do.

Übermensch (Além-Homem, ver: Novo Homem) e eterno retorno. Sua filosofia central é a ideia
de "afirmação da vida", que envolve questionamento de qualquer doutrina que drene uma
expansiva de energias, não importando o quão socialmente predominantes essas ideias
poderiam ser.[2] Seu questionamento radical do valor e da objetividade da verdade tem sido o
foco de extenso comentário e sua influência continua a ser substancial, especialmente na
tradição filosófica continental compreendendo existencialismo, pós-modernismo e
pós-estruturalismo. Suas ideias de superação individual e transcendência além da estrutura e
contexto tiveram um impacto profundo sobre pensadores do final do século XIX e início do
século XX, que usaram estes conceitos como pontos de partida para o desenvolvimento de
suas filosofias.[3][4] Mais recentemente, as reflexões de Nietzsche foram recebidas em várias
abordagens filosóficas que se movem além do humanismo, por exemplo, o transumanismo.

Listen to the episode.

We discussed Nietzsche's conception of truth as presented in his essay "On Truth and Lies in a
Nonmoral Sense," written in 1873 but unpublished until after his death with guest Jessica Berry
of Georgia State University, who published Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Traditionjust
last year.

This Nietzsche essay has been extremely influential for postmodernists, and argues that truth is:

A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human

relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically,
and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions
about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and
without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no
longer as coins.
More radical on the face of it that the pragmatist conception of truth, by which "the true" is in
some way defined as what is useful for human endeavor, it sounds like Nietzsche is denying
that truth exists at all. But why should we take Nietzsche's claim seriously if it's not itself true?

Jessica had pretty much no tolerance for this whole line of interpreting Nietzsche. Based on
close reading of the text and familiarity with Nietzsche's other work, it's far more reasonable to
see him as a believer in truth but a skeptic about the dogmatic claims of metaphysicians. His
concern is not to give a theory of truth at all, but to analyze where this "will to truth" that
philosophers value so highly might come from. In keeping with his later analysis of this will to
truth in the Genealogy of Morals, he sees the philosopher's monomainia regarding truth as a
form of asceticism, of life-hating self-denial. First off, illusions are not always bad for us, and
may in fact be necessary for the continued well-functioning of society. More importantly, the
urge towards truth when taken to extremes (or maybe even to just its natural end point given the
way we normally use the term) becomes a will towards acquiring something that due to our
knowledge capabilities simply impossible: we want pure facts, unmediated by our own faculties.
In this, Nietzsche's epistemology is the same as Schopenhauer's and Kant's: there's a
distinction between the thing-in-itself and the world of appearance, and the latter, which is all we
can know, inevitably bears the traces of our own psychology, our own interests. (For more
discussion of the pragmatic conception of truth, listen to our episodes on William James: part 1
and part 2.)

As an optional source to help sort through the various scholarly interpretations of Nietzsche, you
might want to look at Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy by Maudemarie Clark, which has a
whole chapter on it (chapter 3) devoted to this essay; I see someone has posted it here).