Nietzsche, Habermas, and the Question of Objectivity

Abstract

The questions posed by the philosophical Auseinandersetzung between thinkers of Nietzsche’s apocalyptic persuasion and those vitalised by Habermas’s vision of the dialogical are, indeed, enormous. Is the history of thought one of rupture and displacement, of violent ends and beginnings or does it betray emulative repetitions and expanding continuities? Does truth have its origins in a willfulness that “something shall count as true” or is it generated by the dialogical character of linguistic discourse? Is the meaning of truth left without remainder when the concept is reduced to a stratagem of a will to power or can the meaning of the concept transcend the circumstances of its genesis? Is philosophical enlightenment a matter of individual revelation — a “lightening” of the burden of falsehood and error — or does it concern a collective aspiration for the continuous expansion of both the boundaries and citizenship of “the city of reason”? If Nietzsche’s dictum “everything is false: everything is permitted” means that even the regulative fiction of truth should be abandoned, what would making a mistake mean?1 If science expands its cognitive insights by the making and overcoming of mistakes, how could it conceivably continue to function without a regulative notion of truth?