Abstract
Nietzsche’s position on truth is a subject of controversy within Nietzsche scholarship. Conflicting interpretations in the literature reflect the existence of ostensibly conflicting statements within the text. Nietzsche’s attack on the moral and intellectual culture of his time involves the claim that our beliefs instantiate errors and falsification (TI The Four Great Errors). Notions of error, illusion and deception, however, are not unambiguously negative motifs in Nietzsche’s thought (BT 25, HH I: 33, GM III: 19).
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Notes
Thomas H Brobjer chronicles Nietzsche’s positive relationship with both Kant and Schopenhauer (Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 28–40).
Nietzsche writes in an incomplete essay of 1868: “we are compelled to protest against the predicates Schopenhauer assigns to his will, which sound much too determinate for something ‘unthinkable as such’, and are obtained simply by opposition to the world of representation”. (“On Schopenhauer”, trans. Christopher Janaway, in Willing and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s Educator, ed. Christopher Janaway (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1998) 258–265).
I am interested in how Kantian themes influenced the direction of Nietzsche’s thoughts on truth, and in bringing to light the shape that these thoughts began to take. I am not concerned here with whether Nietzsche correctly understood and critiqued the notion of the thing-in-itself as it appears in Kant, nor do I directly address the question of how Kantian Nietzsche’s ultimate position is. For an interesting discussion of the extent to which Nietzsche’s position bears an affinity to Kant, see Tsarina Doyle, “Nietzsche’s Appropriation of Kant”, Nietzsche Studien 33 (2004): 180–204.
Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt Als Wille und Vorstellung (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1844).
Friedrich Albert Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart (Leipzig: Iserlohn, 1866)
George J. Stack, Lange andNietzsche (Berlin; New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1983).
Nietzsche may have gained the insight that physiological explanations of our contribution to experience presuppose the physical world, and thus cannot lead to subjective idealism, from African Spir, whose book Denken und Wirklichkeit, he took out of the Basel library in March 1873 (“Chronik zu Nietzsche’s Leben”, KSA 15: 47), and referenced and quoted in the Nachlaß (for example KSA 1: 856, 7:571, 510, 11:537, 633). For a debate on the implications of Spir’s influence, see Nadeem J. Z. Hussain, “Nietzsche’s Positivism” and Maudemarie Clark, and David Dudrick. “Nietzsche’s Post Positivism”, European Journal of Philosophy 12(3) (2004): 326–68
Keith Ansell-Pearson, “The Eternal Return of the Overhuman: The Weightiest Knowledge and the Abyss of Light”, Journal of Nietzsche Studies 30 (2005): 1–21
The importance of this question is emphasised in The Nietzsche Reader, eds, Keith Ansell-Pearson and Duncan Large (Maiden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 258.
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© 2013 Katrina Mitcheson
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Mitcheson, K. (2013). The Problem of Truth. In: Nietzsche, Truth and Transformation. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137357069_2
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