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Essay on The Philosophy of Nietzsche
Nietzsche was not a systematic philosopher but rather a moralist who passionately rejected Western bourgeois civilization. He regarded Christian civilization as decadent, and in place of its "slave morality" he looked to the superman, the creator of a new heroic morality that would consciously affirm life and the life values. That superman would represent the highest passion and creativity and would live at a level of experience beyond the conventional standards of good and evil. His creative "will to power" would set him off from "the herd" of inferior humanity. Nietzsche's epistemology of embodied perception encourages us to look into discourses of truth as symptoms of hidden operations of power in social systems. His epistemology also encourages us to be suspicious of systems that are hostile to the body and lived experience.
"Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species could not live" (Nietzsche 1968a, 272). What could Nietzsche mean by such an obviously self-contradictory statement? If Nietzsche is really denying the possibility of truth, how can he call anything an error? This paradoxical way of approaching the question of truth is present throughout Nietzsche's work. (Clark, 1990). It is possible to use this paradoxical statement to reject the very possibility of any epistemology or to reject Nietzsche's view by arguing that it is incoherent. A third way of reading the aphorism may prove more fruitful. Nietzsche is asking us to look at discourses of truth in a new way. He wants to show that the discourses do not have the metaphysical validity that traditionally have been granted to them. Discourses of truth are, however, necessary to life, and therefore, not to be totally rejected (Stegmaier 1985, 69-95). For Nietzsche, the question of truth centers on the social function of truth and how we can change the way we use discourses of truth to better serve human needs..............
