ABSTRACT
My goal in this chapter is to elucidate Nietzsche’s perspectival epistemology in terms of the nihilistic semiotics which gives rise to it and the doctrine of the will-to-power which grounds it. To this end I will attempt to illustrate Nietzschean epistemology with constant reference to a contradiction, endemic to Nietzschean writing, between affirming certain concepts to be true, as Nietzsche does in relation to his doctrine of the will-to-power and a consistently stressed dismissal of all claims to truth. This focus will allow me to identify the fundamental interrelationship between Nietzsche’s understanding of truth and language, as well as introducing the core notion of the self which grounds it1. As such, I will show that while the contradiction in Nietzsche’s writing cannot be subdued, the conception that this represents an inconsistency in his thought is dependant on a set of presuppositions which are not shared by Nietzsche. To give voice to these presuppositions I will illustrate the attempts of significant interpreters of Nietzschean thought to take out of play, or ‘straighten’, Nietzsche’s self contradiction. This perspective allows me to both explicate Nietzsche’s basic writings on truth and language, and also to show the core divergence between Nietzsche’s semiotics assumptions and those of his interpreters. From focussing upon this core contradiction then, I can, at once, illustrate Nietzsche’s perspectival understanding of truth, show, by virtue of articulating Nietzsche’s semiotics, the relationship between such thought and the semiotics which have clouded interpretation of his work, and, most significantly, begin to illustrate the grounding of Nietzschean epistemology and semiotics within Nietzsche’s understanding of will-to-power.
