Our fifth installment in the “Postmodern Epistemology” series will briefly survey a few features in the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche that have helped shape postmodern thinking.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas (himself a proponent of modernity) refers to Nietzsche’s thought as the “entry into postmodernity.” According to Habermas, Nietzsche refuses to furnish a new definition of reason in his writing and work of philosophy and rather he “bids farewell to the dialectic of enlightenment”¹ altogether, and he consequently introduces a kind of irrationalism instead.

Nietzsche has been labeled a nihilist, an aestheticist and a relativist/perspectivist. In point of fact, his thought probably contains elements of all of these.

(1) Nihilism is, to put it simply, belief in nothing. It means that there is no meaning. ² There is no universal truth nor is there any underlying reality that can serve as a basis for morality or meaning.

(2) Aestheticism views artistic expression (in paintings, music or language) as something that occupies a middle ground or (perhaps better) as something that serves as a functional mediator between the subjective and the objective world.

As such it is the natural heir of Kantian constructivism. Nietzsche says that in aesthetics “the whole opposition between the subjective and the objective…is altogether irrelevant.”³

We shall have much to say much about aestheticism later.

(3) Perspectivism and relativism mean roughly the same thing with respect to Nietzsche’s thought. For Nietzsche, “there is a multiplicity of perspectives. From each of these one may develop a truth from a point of view, but not a truth as such. The latter is an empty notion, as is the idea of the world. Instead of universal and objective rules or rationality, there are simply strategies of insight.”Erickson, Truth, 25.

Nietzsche proposes a view of truth which defines truth as a synthesis of perspectives. In other words, the more perspectives one includes vis-à-vis a particular question (e.g., a question of ethics) the closer one comes to truth.

It goes without saying that, for Nietzsche, this process is not objective or neutral, but neither will it be dominated by any single claim to truth, which inevitably leads to a struggle for power.

We should note that the “truth” that this process of perspectivism yields, Nietzsche alleges, is not absolute. So-called “absolute” truth is nothing but a perspective or interpretation of a particular issue that has become most compelling (either by force or by conviction).

Nietzsche asks,

”What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms - in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors - in moral terms, the obligation to lie according to fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all.”⁴

For Nietzsche then, there are no facts, only interpretations. “It was Nietzsche who denied facts in order to make room for interpretations. Indeed, for him, it is interpretation ‘all the way down’.”⁵

1. Habermas in Erickson, Truth, 85.↩
2. The pun is intentional.↩
3. Nietzsche in Megill, Prophets, 12.↩
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Truth and the Extra-moral Sense”, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1968), 46-47.↩
5. Vanhoozer, Postmodern Theology, 13.↩