Abstract
Nietzsche’ s remarks about truth are among the most notorious and philosophically problematic in his entire oeuvre. The trouble centers on his repeated claims that there is no truth, or that all our beliefs are false in some sense — for example, that “There exists neither spirit, nor reason, nor thinking, […] nor truth: all are fictions that are of no use” (WP 480), or that “Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live” (WP 493). These claims about truth are self-refuting in the most straightforward way: if they are assumed to be truths, then by the force of their own assertion, they are false (“errors,” “fictions”), and have no cognitive value. Some recent commentators have insisted that Nietzsche’s talk about truth should be evaluated rhetorically, and not semantically.1 Nietzsche’s rejection of truth is rhetorically problematic as well, however, for he is very willing to indulge in the rhetoric of criticizing views by calling them false, or the like, even though this would seem to be no criticism at all, given his view that such falsity is inevitable. To add to the paradox, Nietzsche’s general denial of truth did not stop him from claiming that some particular beliefs are true. Perhaps most famously, he closes the first section of the Genealogy of Morals by expressing the hope that — whatever their other faults — his much maligned “English psychologists” of morality “may be fundamentally brave, proud, and magnanimous animals, who […] have trained themselves to sacrifice all desirability to truth, every truth, even plain, harsh, ugly, repellent, unchristian, immoral truth.— For such truths do exist.—” (GM I: 1). A more unambiguous affirmation of the existence of truths could hardly be asked for.
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Notes
See, e.g., Bernd Magnus, “Nietzsche Today: A View from America,” International Studies in Philosophy 15, no. 2 (1983): 95–104, Alan Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation (New York: Routledge, 1990), chs. 6–7, and, in a somewhat different vein, Ken Gemes, “Nietzsche’s Critique of Truth,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52, no. 1 (March 1992): 47–65. The approaches of Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor,trans. D. Large (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles,trans. B. Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), and Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979) are similar to this move in spirit, but they also go further than this claim in important respects.
For example, “we thus reject the Christian interpretation and condemn its meaning as counterfeit” (GS 357); “We, too, do not deny that faith `makes blessed’: that is precisely why we deny that faith proves anything— a strong faith that makes blessed raises suspicion against that which is believed; it does not establish `truth,’ it establishes a certain probability — of deception” (GM III, 24); “As for materialistic atomism, it is one of the best refuted theories there are, and in Europe perhaps no one in the learned world is now so unscholarly as to attach serious significance to it, except for convenient household use” (BGE 12); and perhaps most dramatically, “In the Christian world of ideas there is nothing that has the least contact with reality — and it is in the instinctive hatred of reality that we have recognized the only motivating force at the root of Christianity. What follows from this? That in psychologicis too, the error here is radical, […] One concept less, one single reality in its place, and the whole of Christianity hurtles down into nothing” (A 39).
This last interpretive tack is most prominently and thoroughly pursued by Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Although the reading of Nietzsche I advocate here bears some similarities to Clark’s informative treatment, I cannot accept her central claim that Nietzsche eventually abandoned his denial of truth. For a fuller treatment, see R. Lanier Anderson, “Overcoming Charity: the Case of Maudemarie Clark’s Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy,” Nietzsche-Studien 25 (1996): 307–41.
“What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins” (TL, 84).
“They [the senses] do not lie at all. What we make of their testimony, that alone introduces lies; for example, the lie of unity, the lie of thinghood, of substance, of permanence. `Reason’ is the cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses” (TI III, 2).
Clark, Nietzsche on Truth, 95.
This claim has been prominently made by Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 52–55, and also by Gemes, “Nietzsche’s Critique,” and Randall Havas, Nietzsche’s Genealogy: Nihilism and the Will to Knowledge (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). Nehamas seems to share my contention that this point by itself does not resolve the truth paradoxes, since he goes on to offer additional considerations to resolve those problems. See Nehamas, Life as Literature, 56–63 and 65–69. By contrast, Gemes and Havas try to get more work out of simply insisting that Nietzsche was not offering any theory of truth, and was indeed “not interested in the notion of truth per se” (Gemes, “Nietzsche’s Critique,” 64).
According to Nietzsche, our perspectives organize our experience, and thereby give things a certain “look” for us. Such perspectives include our most basic logical, metaphysical, and scientific concepts (e.g., “logic” (BGE 3), mathematics, the “self-identical.” and the “synthetic judgments a priori” (BGE 4), “bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content” (GS 121)). We adopt the perspectives we do because they respond to our needs, interests, and values (see BGE 3, 4; GS 110, 112, 121). Nietzsche makes it clear in BGE 4 that he thinks this organization of experience in accord with our concepts and values amounts to a “falsification” (BGE 4), and therefore Nietzsche’s basic epistemology and his account of the relation between our values and the world are deeply bound up with the falsification thesis. I give a fuller interpretation of perspectivism along these lines, and propose a resolution for other self-referential difficulties besides the truth paradox, in R. Lanier Anderson, “Truth and Objectivity in Perspectivism,”Synthese 115 (1998): 1–32.
n addition to the famous passage from GM I: 1, quoted above. see, e.g., “Let us say once more what we have already said a hundred times, for today’ s ears resist such truths-our truths” (BGE 202); and “In late ages that may be proud of their humanity, so much fear remains. so much superstitious fear of the `savage cruel beast’ whose conquest is the very pride of these more humane ages, that even palpable truths remain unspoken for centuries L…]. Perhaps I dare something when I let one of these truths slip out: let others catch it again and give it `milk of the pious ways of thinking’“(BGE 229). On the importance of the pursuit of knowledge within Nietzsche’s conception ofhis task, see GS 110, 324, and 325, GM Preface, and BGE 227–230. Claims to truth naturally arise in connection with such a task.
See, e.g., BGE 229–30, and even more dramatically WP 535. Both passages are discussed in section 2, below.
See Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), eh. 2.
The following discussion is based on my “overcoming Charity: The Case of Maudemarie Clark’s Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy,” Nietzsche-Studien, 1996, 25:307–41.
See Anderson, “Truth and Objectivity in Perspectivism,” and Anderson, “Overcoming Charity.” Others have also noted the broadly Kantian character of Nietzsche’s perspectivism. See esp. Friedrich Kaulbach, Philosophie des Perspektivismus, I Teil: Wahrheit and Perspektive bei Kant, Hegel,and Nietzsche (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1990), and also Clark. Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, esp. eh. 5.
See the lists of concepts at BGE 21 and 34, GS 110, and WP 497, 516, and 574.
See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s 1962) citations to the Critique will be made parenthetically in the text. Kant describes his position as a second Copernican revolution in the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, because it reverses the traditional approach to knowledge: “Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But 1…1 we might have more success in the tasks of metaphysics if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge” (B xvi). Objects “conform to our knowledge” in the sense that possible objects of knowledge appear to us only through the framework we use to conceptualize our experience. All objects of knowledge thus bear the influence of that framework.
I have altered Kaufmann’s translation of this passage.
On the conception of things in themselves as “objects of the pure intellect,” see, e.g. A 254/B 310, and A 264–5/B 320–1. A complete conceptual description of the intellect, capable of determining a thing in itself, would be a description which determined, for every possible predicate, that the object in question had that predicate. or had its opposite. This is the sense in which things in themselves are completely determinate and self-subsistent, in Kant’s way of thinking about them. Such a conception is clearly implicit, for example, in Kant’s discussion of Leibniz at A 281/B 337, and also in his inference to transcendental idealism as the solution for the Antinomies of reason, at A 506–7/B 534–5.
In his so-called “Inaugural Dissertation,” Kant makes much of the distinction between the “real use” of the intellect and its merely “logical use.” See Immanuel Kant, On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World, in Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770,trans. and ed. D. Walford and R. Meerbote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 385, 386, 406 (Ak. pp. 393, 394, 411). By the time of the Critique of Pure Reason, however, (and especially in the second edition) Kant comes to reject the possibility of any such “real use.” See, e.g., B 68, B 71–2, A 51/B 75, B 135, B 138–9, and B 145. Gary Hatfield, The Natural and the Normative: Theories of Spatial Perception from Kant to Helmholtz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1990) has pointed out that this is one of the central insights separating Kant’s mature thought from his “pre-critical” writings, and also that this rejection of any real use of the intellect was of fundamental importance in changing our understanding of the powers of the mind. See esp. pp. 59, 78–9, 81, 93, 127, and 213. For the broad story of how this point influenced conceptions of the mind, see also Gary Hatfield, “The Workings of the Intellect,” in Logic and the Workings of the Mind: the Logic of Ideas and Faculty Psychology in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Patricia Easton, (North American Kant Society. 1997).
There are two other potential ways to justify the posit of something like things in themselves, and thus to underwrite our ability to make sense of the notion. Things in themselves could be understood as the underlying cause of the objects of experience, or they could be posited as what Kant called the transcendental “correlate” (A 250) of the world of experience, i.e., as the ultimate source of the “matter” which our “formal” cognitive resources organize in order to produce experience. Nietzsche follows Schopenhauer’s point that the first way involves an illegitimate application of the concept of causality beyond the realm of possible experience, and he rejects the second way since he denies that our cognitive resources have the transcendental status attributed to them by Kant. I discuss these points more fully in Anderson, “Truth and Objectivity in Perspectivism.”
In this Kantian context, “like us” would cover the very broad class of all finite intellects that have space and time as forms of intuition, a class which comprises (at least) all human beings.
For a fuller discussion of this argument, and how it fits into Nietzsche’s larger defense of his will to power doctrine, see R. Lanier Anderson, “Nietzsche’s Will to Power as a Doctrine of the Unity of Science,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 25, no. 5 (October 1994): 729–50.
Including, for example, his argument for a particular interpretation of punishment at GM II: 12–14, and his arguments against the hypotheses of the “English psychologists” about the origins of morality at GM I: 1–4.
Elsewhere (Anderson, “Truth and Objectivity in Perspectivism”), I have distinguished these two conceptions of truth as “internal” and “external.” Nietzsche’s new sense of truth is “internal” because it depends on notions drawn from within our cognitive practices (epistemic standards), while the traditional conception of truth is “external” because it posits a standard of truth which is outside the circle of our cognitive practices (independent things).
As I noted in section 1, above, Richard Schacht, Nietzsche,eh. 2, has also suggested that Nietzsche operates with more than one sense of “true.”
The cited passage is far from the only such case. See, for example, Nietzsche’s comment that “Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species could not live” (WP 493).
Naturally, the falsification thesis is false, in the traditional sense, just as everything else is. It fails to correspond to the way things are “in themselves” with our cognition, since the very notion of such a way things are is incoherent.
Thanks are due to Bernard Reginster for forcing me to become clearer on the issues connected with this point.
Nietzsche also appeals to the notion of “appearance” in a similar fashion. See BGE 34.
See, e.g., Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy,eh. 5.
Clark, Nietzsche on Truth, 107.
Clark, Nietzsche on Truth, 134.
Clark, Nietzsche on Truth, 107.
Clark, Nietzsche on Truth, 107.
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Anderson, R.L. (1999). Nietzsche’s Views on Truth and the Kantian Background of His Epistemology. In: Babich, B.E. (eds) Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 204. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2428-9_4
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