Nietzsche and Truth Throughout the course Nietzsche’s lifespan his attitude towards truth and religion has shifted various times. He first left his Christian beliefs and changed his major from theology to Philology in order to search for truth. He did not want to have faith without knowing what he was having faith in beforehand. By his thirties Nietzsche started to interpret that people were making up myths and stories in order to keep themselves in denial from the truth of life, thus giving a different meaning. When Nietzsche starts writing “Beyond Good and Evil” Nietzsche again changes his views and describes truth as a woman and philosophers are truth’s unwanted men in her life who are going about her in all the wrong ways, asserting and
“Suppose we want truth but why not rather untruth, uncertainty, or even ignorance”? Why look at truth when there are many other knowledges to look at? After questioning truth he then moves to the topic of dualities and how they are said to opposed to one another. He believes that instead of being jointly limited to each other that they are more jointly interdependent, or complimentary of one another. That what is considered good could be intertwined with what is considered evil and opposed, Nietzsche even goes as far as naming these opposites as one. Examples of these could be truth and deception, selflessness and selfishness, good and
Nietzsche informs the reader various times throughout the book that truth isn’t that important. This creates three different outlooks you can read into the book. The first is that Nietzsche is trying to depict to us what he thinks is true, giving us another outlook on truth and how to perceive it. The second option is that Nietzsche isn’t telling us what he believes and is being untruthful throughout the whole book because he has chosen untruth over truth which he had been asking philosophers why not untruth along. This tactic pressures the reader to make their own opinion and perceptions on the book instead of believing everything the author says. Then Nietzsche turns the tables and says to read the writings of a person as if it was a memoir and that if philosophers are truly influenced by their unconscious instincts then that is how we should read all of philosophy. This would allow the reader to search deeper into Nietzsche’s personal life and views to discover a third interpretation of the book. The truth of Beyond Good and Evil is really in the reader’s
We have grown weary of man. Nietzsche wants something better, to believe in human ability once again. Nietzsche’s weariness is based almost entirely in the culmination of ressentiment, the dissolution of Nietzsche’s concept of morality and the prevailing priestly morality. Nietzsche wants to move beyond simple concepts of good and evil, abandon the assessment of individuals through ressentiment, and restore men to their former wonderful ability.
Friedrich Nietzsche was a brilliant and outspoken man who uses ideas of what he believe in what life is about. He did not believe in what is right and wrong because if who opposed the power. Nietzsche was against Democracy because how they depend on other people to make some different or change, while Nietzsche believe they should of just pick the ones that were gifted and talent to choose what to change. Nietzsche also does not believe in Aristocracy because how they depend on an individual person to create the rules or change those benefits for him. As you see Nietzsche did not like how they depend on one person to decide instead of each person to decide for himself for their own benefits.
The central point of this essay is this “truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions.” (Pg. 146) He also goes on to say that the truth is a metaphor, using the Latin meanings of metaphor, meta (to carry with) and phora (to carry over), we can say that a metaphor is a transference between two completely different spheres. It is all about reasons, concepts, and perceptions. What we consider or believe to be the truth is simply a subject realm of experience, completely different from reality. For example, colors, if we were to believe and go by what Nietzsche is saying, colors are not absolute truths just illusions that we have created in our relative reality. So nothing is actually blue, and to take it a step further blue is not real, both perceptions are illusions that we have made
At first we see “what is in it for us”. After that, we “take this effect as the intention”. At last, we “ascribe the harboring of such intentions as a permanent quality of the person whose behavior we are observing”. Following from these steps is how we can determine whether a person is harmful, beneficial or kind (102). Nietzsche claims that our judgment is always based on how the actions of the other relate to me “What harms me is something evil (harmful in itself); what is useful to me is something good (102).” From here, Nietzsche refuses the idea that we are able to morally judge the other. Nietzsche then questions that if we assess the right actions relatively then “we ourselves must constitute the principle of the good (102).” But how can we constitute the principle of good if we are ignorant about our actions, our ego, and our neighbor. The truth is that we are deceiving ourselves and we are shaping this principle of good in a manner that suits us. From here, our principle of good is conditional, and we don’t constitute the “principle of
In Beyond Good and Evil, one of his attempts to sum up his thoughts—indeed, throughout his philosophical work, as far as I can tell, Nietzsche describes a type of experience and a way of living life that transcends these questions of Ism.... ... middle of paper ... ... However, rather than breaking the hold of logic on the mind, Nietzsche, with his jibing remarks, swashbuckling writing style, self-contradictions, and secrecy, intends to break the hold of socially determined "masks," or Isms, from the perceptions of the new philosopher who will arise the day after tomorrow.
There are two possible understandings of an experience underwritten by God; either that God was constant and static but our capacity to understand him was limited; or that God was dynamic and exhibited agency and so we could never have a static set of criteria to evaluate truth against. It seems most likely that Nietzsche considered God to be the former arguing that “[m...
For him, “life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker, suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation.” That is to say, our desire for power is unavoidable and an inherent part of our nature. On the other hand, the abnegation from “injury, violence, and exploitation and placing one’s will on a par with that of someone else” (instead of propagating one’s own will over others’) is “a will to the denial of life [and] a principle of disintegration and decay.” If one considers life and the act of living itself as the will to power, then master morality’s affinity to honour strength and self-promotion would be the more compelling morality for Nietzsche. This is not precisely the case however, as master morality lacks a certain subtlety as opposed to the act of enslaving oneself, which can be an “indispensable means of spiritual discipline and cultivation.” In any case, Nietzsche’s appreciation of the advantages of master morality is not as intuitive of a sentiment as it is to other modern
Babette E. Babich talks about Nietzsche’s style in her article “Self-Deconstruction: Nietzsche’s Philosophy as Style.” In her article she states that, “Nietzsche’s style grants neither the casual reader nor the diligent commentator an automatic access to the text” (Babich 105). From what Babich says here, she is trying to allow her audience to know that Nietzsche’s work makes a challenge for the reader to digest.
Firstly, Nietzsche stated that life is death in the making and all humans should not be determined by an external force rather, he believed that humans should have the incentive to think for themselves. Nietzsche claimed the future of a man is in his own hands. Simultaneously, humans are phased with struggles in the attempt to self-create themselves. Nietzsche proceeded with his argument affirming
“There are no truths,” states one. “Well, if so, then is your statement true?” asks another. This statement and following question go a long way in demonstrating the crucial problem that any investigator of Nietzsche’s conceptions of perspectivism and truth encounters. How can one who believes that one’s conception of truth depends on the perspective from which one writes (as Nietzsche seems to believe) also posit anything resembling a universal truth (as Nietzsche seems to present the will to power, eternal recurrence, and the Übermensch)? Given this idea that there is no truth outside of a perspective, a transcendent truth, how can a philosopher make any claims at all which are valid outside his personal perspective? This is the question that Maudemarie Clark declares Nietzsche commentators from Heidegger and Kaufmann to Derrida and even herself have been trying to answer. The sheer amount of material that has been written and continues to be written on this conundrum demonstrates that this question will not be satisfactorily resolved here, but I will try to show that a resolution can be found. And this resolution need not sacrifice Nietzsche’s idea of perspectivism for finding some “truth” in his philosophy, or vice versa. One, however, ought to look at Nietzsche’s philosophical “truths” not in a metaphysical manner but as, when taken collectively, the best way to live one’s life in the absence of an absolute truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense represents a deconstruction of the modern epistemological project. Instead of seeking for truth, he suggests that the ultimate truth is that we have to live without such truth, and without a sense of longing for that truth. This revolutionary work of his is divided into two main sections. The first part deals with the question on what is truth? Here he discusses the implication of language to our acquisition of knowledge. The second part deals with the dual nature of man, i.e. the rational and the intuitive. He establishes that neither rational nor intuitive man is ever successful in their pursuit of knowledge due to our illusion of truth. Therefore, Nietzsche concludes that all we can claim to know are interpretations of truth and not truth itself.
But he objects to the values of the New Testament that shouldn't be linked to the Old Testament. They demote power. He sees religion as intensely nihilistic - it's all about denying life and being negative. Nietzsche feels that the New Testament is also like that. We have to go beyond this.
...no way implies that Nietzsche is presenting the ideas of the Genealogy in bad faith; he certainly believes that they have some truth to them-but perhaps not to the extent that they are definitive. Thus, it is possible that Nietzsche, in writing his polemic, has other goals than the mere straightforward elucidation of a philosophical system. If this view is adopted, many of Nietzsche’s radical notions and unsupported assertions become easier to stomach. Of course, such a softening of the impact of Nietzsche’s claims may destroy the fundamental mind-opening project that lies at the heart of the book, since the shock of encountering such views is clearly essential to that project.
Nietzsche believed we create the self through our experiences and our actions, and in order to be a complete self, we must accept everything we have done. I agree with him in this sense. Although it is easy to learn from the mistakes of others, there is no greater lesson than learning from our own mistakes. He also believed there is much more to the self than we know about. This is another example about how we learn about ourselves through our experiences and actions.
Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals can be assessed in regards to the three essays that it is broken up into. Each essay derives the significance of our moral concepts by observing