ABSTRACT
My aim in this essay is to state as clearly as I can Nietzsche’s theory of truth, and, in doing so, to point to some connections between Nietzsche and other philosophers, both earlier and later. I am not interested in the question of influence, of who had read what, who admired whom. The connections I want to trace are connections of meaning, similarities of thought; they are more logical than causal or historical. For Nietzsche has to some extent suffered, in England, from being thought a highly outlandish and non-serious thinker, and to point to some such connections may help us to understand his thought. Again, I want to avoid historical discussion of the development of Nietzsche’s thought itself, though this may seem an even more dubious aim. For it is difficult to write about Nietzsche without becoming at least partly biographical. Nevertheless it seems to me that this way of approaching him tends to obscure the philosophical interest of his work. It is seldom that other philosophers, with the possible exception of Wittgenstein, are treated firstly as men with biographies and only secondly as philosophers. On the whole, for good or ill, their philosophical works are taken as given, as if they had descended like tablets from heaven, timelessly there to be criticized, analysed and appraised. It is in this unhistorical spirit that I want to discuss Nietzsche’s theory of truth. But it must be admitted at the outset that to speak of his theory of truth is probably misleading. For, as will become evident, he is not consistent; and this inconsistency springs not so much from the gradual development of a view in which the earlier stages are contradicted or overtaken by the later, but from a tension in his attitude towards truth. And his attitudes find expression in his theory. Moreover, as we shall see, there is an ambiguity in the very subject-matter under discussion. We shall not find a way to reconcile these tensions and ambiguities; but it is by considering their nature that I hope to be able to clarify Nietzsche’s own thought, and incidentally to bring out what he has in common with certain other, very different, philosophers.
