Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy

"I think the one to go for would be the Clark – Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy . The first half of the book is primarily about truth and knowledge, matters of metaphysics and epistemology. The book appeared in 1990 and it was a very significant work. It was very unusual because, first of all, it treated Nietzsche as a philosopher. I know that sounds a funny thing to say, but an awful lot of books on Nietzsche are full of quotations and paraphrase – they don’t really engage dialectically and argumentatively with what Nietzsche has to say. What Clark did, through systematic examination of Nietzsche’s views about truth and knowledge from the early essays through to his final works, was to try to show that Nietzsche’s view of truth and knowledge evolved over time, that it changed in significant ways. That is Clark’s target in this book – the idea that Nietzsche is the guy who thinks there’s no such thing as truth and that there’s no such thing as knowledge, that every view is as good as every other view. She suggests that there may have been an aspect of the postmodernist view of truth in Nietzsche’s early work, but that he gradually came to abandon that view once he came to abandon the intelligibility of the old Kantian distinction between the way things appear to us versus the way things really are in themselves . There are a lot of difficult philosophical issues here, but that’s the crux of the story she’s trying to tell in the first part of the book. In the second part of the book Clark does take up many of the famous themes from Nietzsche: The will to power, eternal recurrence, the ascetic ideal, and so on. And she has very interesting expository chapters on each of these. Her account of the will to power makes a very good contrast to Richardson’s (in my next book choice). She argues that we should understand the will to power as a kind of psychological hypothesis about human motivation, rather than, as Heidegger took it, a metaphysical doctrine about the essence of reality."