In response to Nietzsche - Essay Example

Nietzsche further asserts that truth is a social construct that completely depends on human language for its existence. Since language comprises of the signifiers to objects and experiences in human beings’ life, truth cannot exist as a separate entity outside human experience. Necessarily a truth is colored by a man’s experiences and perceptions of the truth itself. When truth dwells in a metaphysical level, its perception is embodied trough human-induced language constructs like metaphors or metonymies, as Nietzsche says in this regard: “What is truth then?

A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations that are elevated, transmitted, beautified in a poetic or rhetoric manner, and that appear to the people after a long usage as fixed, canonical and binding” (Nietzsche 45) Indeed perspectivism is a crucial term in understanding the validity of Nietzsche’s concept of truth. Nietzsche claims that “truths are illusions of which one has forgotten they are illusions, metaphors that are worn out and literally became powerless” (Nietzsche 45).

But the problem that arises here is whether Nietzsche is true. While “there is no truth” according to Nietzsche, the question is how the truthfulness of Nietzsche’s claim can be validated. Obviously Nietzsche himself is aware of the conundrum that his concept of truth may develop. In response to this question, Nietzsche assumes that truths are socially established collective perspectives about something which are collaborative with other human experiences. Subsequently there may be another truth claimed by a philosopher.

But according to this different truth about something is the said philosopher’s own perspective which has been induced and modulated by different context and experience with which he or she happens to be familiar with. Therefore when a philosopher claims any idea or anything as true, he or she is prejudiced and ignorant of different contexts which might lead him to a different conclusion. In his book, “Beyond Good and Evil” Nietzsche discusses this very postulation of perspectivism and its relation with the philosophers’ prejudices about truth.

In the beginning chapter called “On the Prejudices of Philosophers”, he comments that though a traditional philosopher may claim any of his idea as the product of pure reasons and, therefore, as something true, there can be a different truth, about the same thing, which is the product of different reasoning. Indeed reasons and reasoning can be different from individual to individual, since reasons themselves, in some ways or others, are the products of individual experiences and perspectives.

Therefore, a cluster of experiences which is same for a group of people may give birth to a cluster of perspectives which itself may lead to a conclusion assumed as a truth. In the same manner, a different cluster of experiences about the same may lead to a different truth. The problem of traditional philosophers is that they attempt to prove their perspectives (according to Nietzsche, their prejudices) as the universal truth. Referring to this problem, Nietzsche comments: “They pose as having discovered and attained their real opinions through the self-evolution of a cold, pure, divinely unperturbed dialectic: while what happens at bottom is that a prejudice, a notion, an ‘inspiration,’ generally a desire of the heart sifted and made abstract, is defended by them with reasons sought after the event”