Truth and Interest: On Habermas’s Postscript to Nietzsche’s Theory of Knowledge

Abstract

For anyone familiar with Jürgen Habermas’s views on Nietzsche only through the scathing, global critique of Nietzsche’s irrationalism and its consequences in the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity,¹ the reading of Nietzsche on offer in Habermas’s earlier “Postscript”² to Nietzsche’s theory of knowledge will come as a surprise. While certainly no less critical of Nietzsche’s rejection of epistemology in favor of perspectivalism, Habermas’s reading of the second Untimely Meditation and the essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” exhibits an intense interest in, and indeed a proximity to his subject that is virtually absent in the later work: in 1968, Habermas clearly recognizes something important at stake in one moment of the inner development of Nietzsche’s post-epistemological thinking, rather than merely the philosophical-political consequences of Nietzsche’ s thought taken as a totality.