Nietzsche’s Views on Truth and the Kantian Background of His Epistemology

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.