GUIDANCE NOTES FOR LECTURE ON 'NIETZSCHE AND THE QUESTION OF TRUTH' DELIVERED ON MY X ACCOUNT 25/07/25

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Let me begin, as I usually do, with an anecdote

Shroyer / septum-pierced girl encounter

You will all know Shroyer as an InfoWars employee who has been involved in litigation over both the Sandy Hook and the January 6^th issues (for the latter I believe he spent time in jail).

Shroyer is clearly puzzled to find himself mocked by these girls, as “not understanding Nietzsche”, when in his mind he is doing a very “Nietzschean” thing: proclaiming some hard, conservative truths.

This is actually very instructive as to the history of the reception of Nietzsche in the English-speaking world.

Shroyer surely has only a vague and schematic idea of Nietzsche.

He studied Psychology and Media at Missouri University in the 2000s so he will likely have picked up, as part of the former discipline, some basic knowledge of Nietzsche.

Since, however, he was not in a Philosophy department the knowledge of Nietzsche passed on to him was likely somewhat out of date: one dating perhaps from thirty or forty years previously: the age of Kaufmann

Kaufmann’s work – standard for thirty years between the 1950s and the 1980s – is significantly entitled “Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist”.

This standard work of Kaufmann’s is actually very remarkable from our present-day viewpoint in that it confesses openly – in a preface added in the 70s – that

“Nietzsche's ideas about knowledge – i.e. Nietzsche’s ideas about truth – are of great interest (but) I have nevertheless slighted them in this book because he never developed a theory of knowledge that satisfied him”

This really is quite astonishing from the point of view of “Nietzsche studies” in 2025 and goes a large way to explaining why Kaufmann’s once-standard account of Nietzsche is, fifty years on from his heyday, an antique: something like a Rolodex or a Filofax in the age of the iPhone.

Today, an account of Nietzsche that “slighted” his “ideas about knowledge” / “ideas about truth” would be an absurdity – like an account of Marx that left out the economics.

University teaching on Nietzsche today focusses firstly, and almost solely, on the philosopher’s “ideas about knowledge”: centrally on such theses – taken up, of course, and built on by Foucault after his “turn to Nietzsche” in the 70s – as that “will to knowledge” is always a “will to power”, i.e. that what is important to various human groups is not “truth” per se but whatever helps them flourish, which can be truth but can also be falsity.

This is the explanation of the smugness and the condescension of the septum-pierced girl and her friend. They have been taught this Nietzsche in college and this Nietzsche seems to overarch and even render obsolete the Nietzsche who prefigures Shroyer’s stance of “the proclaimer of hard truths”.

It’s likely, I would say, that these two girls were not even AWARE of the existence of the passages in which Nietzsche sounds most like an Israelite prophet “in reverse”:

Passages like the last chapter of Ecce Homo, for example:

“When the truth squares up to the lie of millennia, we will have upheavals, a spasm of earthquakes, a removal of mountain and valley such as have never been dreamed of. The notion of politics will then completely dissolve into a spiritual war, and all configurations of power from the old society will be exploded—they are all based on a lie: there will be wars such as there have never yet been on earth.”

Or indeed even of such “truth-proclamatory” passages as the

“are you going to meet a woman? Do not forget the whip!”

Or the praise of the “blond beast” in the “Genealogy”, which seems to affirm certain warrior values as “truer” than others, even to affirm certain races as living “more in truth” than others.

One of the etymologies of “gut” in the context of the “gut / boese” dichotomy – the “master morality” dichotomy - in the first essay of the “Genealogy” is “THE TRUTHFUL”.

often in those words and roots which designate “good” there still shines through the main nuance of what made the nobility feel they were men of higher rank. It’s true that in most cases they perhaps named themselves simply after their superiority in power (as “the powerful,” “the masters,” “those in command”) or after the most visible sign of their superiority, for example, as “the rich” or “the owners” (that is the meaning of arya [noble], and the corresponding words in Iranian and Slavic). But they also named themselves after a typical characteristic, and that is the case which is our concern here. For instance, they called themselves “the truthful,” above all the Greek nobility, whose mouthpiece is the Megarian poet Theognis.

An interest in Theognis, a “pre-Classical” Greek poet (6^th or 7^th century BC) is in fact one of the threads that runs through the whole of Nietzsche’s career, from his earliest days as a philologist right up to his “great year of harvest” – 1888 – as a philosopher.

The grand “gymnasium”, Schulpforta, which he attended – and at which the higher classes were already doing work that, today, would be expected of a post-graduate scholar in Classics – required a “graduation dissertation” and the nineteen-year-old Nietzsche wrote his on Theognis.

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Before going on to say more about Shroyer and the “philosophy foids” of 2016, something should be said maybe about the larger philosophical background of this Nietzschean position adopted by the septum-pierced girl that there is something “cringe”, or fundamentally stupid and mistaken, about any claim to be “speaking the truth” in a simple and direct, “unprejudiced” way.

The fact is that, even though “philosophy” has been associated throughout its history with “reaching the truth”, it has really always been characterized by this hubristic gesture of insisting that Man has an indispensable role to play in making whatever is true true.

That is to say, what philosophy throughout its history has EXCLUDED is the idea that Man is in the end subservient to some truth which overrides and governs him.

This “outside of philosophy” can be seen, for example, in the “vitalism” that is the other side of Nietzsche’s teaching, besides the “perspectivism” that sees various forms of human practice and “discourse” as deciding everything.

“Listen, my brothers, to the voice of the healthy body: this is a purer voice and a more honest one. Purer and more honest of speech is the healthy body, perfect and square-built: and it speaks of the meaning of the earth”.

Other manifestations of it can be seen, for example, in Heidegger’s talk of “Being”.

Also, of course, in Christian talk of “God” – although the work of Feuerbach, fifty years before Nietzsche, points up how much of what has been called “God” is in fact a projection and glorification of the practices of Man.

In any case, I think the whole mainstream of philosophical culture can be characterized in this way:

As a projection and glorification of the practices of Man.

Philosophy has famously been called “just a series of footnotes to Plato” and Plato, it is true, appears at first to be a strong exception to this:

He seems to offer the model of a philosophy in which Man is forced to subjugate himself to “objective truths” that transcend him.

But if we look at Plato and those who took their cue from him somewhat more closely, we can see that what they practice is indeed a sort of Nietzschean “perspectivism”: a “world-making” by application of certain human notions and inventions.

A very interesting study from the 1950s by the linguist Emile Benveniste points up how far Aristotle’s supposed “fundamental ontology” laid out in his “Categories” is in fact just a grammar of the Greek language: the description of a specifically Greek “way of worldmaking”.

The same could certainly also have been shown of the philosophy of Aristotle’s teacher, Plato. Nearly all of Plato’s arguments turn on Socrates’ forcing his interlocutor to conform to the meaning of certain terms “akribestaton” or “kath’auton” – which really boils down to their meaning in Greek at a certain historical point.

Now, we could examine this tension – this “dialectic”, if you will – between “perspectivism” and “essentialism” – that is to say, the tension between, on the one hand, the projection of human practices and institutions into the sphere of transcendent truth and, on the other, the claim that human beings are logically bound to conform to these transcendent truths – throughout the next two thousand years of philosophy.

Obviously, we don’t have time to do that here.

Let me just restrict myself, then, to events in the hundred years immediately preceding Nietzsche:

This dialectic of perspectivism and essentialism comes to one of its many crisis-points about a hundred years before Nietzsche began writing in the encounter between David Hume and Kant.

Hume is the culmination, at least for the early modern period, of the empiricist current in philosophy that grew up mainly in Britain (Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley etc)

He “bends the stick” farthest in the direction of a recognition that all “objective truth” is merely an arbitrary imposition, by human beings, upon a “blooming, buzzing confusion” that is the real, raw nature of “the world”

(The phrase is William James’s – the Pragmatist philosopher and brother of Henry – who uses it to describe the infant’s initial experience of the world, before it has concepts and categories to master and organize it with.)

The most notorious expression of this “anti-objectivist” stance on Hume’s part is, of course, his argument about “the law of cause and effect”, and about “natural” and “objective” laws in general.

He points out that “water changing from a liquid into a gaseous state at a temperature of 100 degrees centigrade” is not a “law” but only a hitherto regularly observed “constant conjunction”. These things have hitherto always been observed to happen one after the other. But according to the principles of strict empiricism that does not make them a law. The next time someone raises the temperature of the liquid water to 100 degrees, it may not become gaseous.

Now, it has to be said that this is more or less the epitome of a “sophistical” point. (The “revenge of the Sophists” that some people have ascribed to Nietzsche can be said already to begin with Hume).

That is to say, Hume raises an objection here that is indeed logically valid but that no one is actually pragmatically disturbed by in real life.

We have to accept that it is abstractly true that, when we put a pot of water on the hob to boil some pasta, we are arbitrarily wagering on the same thing “happening” to occur as has occurred a thousand million times before.

Concretely, however, no one is really disturbed, or affected in their behaviour, by this arbitrariness. We proceed AS IF the event “assumed” were objectively certain.

But this “undisturbedness”, it has to be said, is also a function of a specific culture or national character.

The reason why Hume could take empiricist, anti-“objectivist” logic to such an extreme was because he was speaking primarily out of, and to, a certain phlegmatic, pragmatic British – in his case, specifically Scottish – mentality and character.

We see it expressed, for example, a few decades later in the English poet John Keats’s interesting notion of “negative capability”:

“I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”

Hume expresses this idea in philosophy about sixty years before Keats expresses it in poetry. The Englishman – or Scotsman – has the aptitude to “be in uncertainties without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”.

That is to say, he can accept that the world around him is a world that he himself has made by arbitrary leaps of assumption or pure invention – leaps which can fail at any moment and tip him back into a “blooming, buzzing confusion” – without becoming agitated or disoriented in his daily practices by this knowledge.

One of the great turns in modern philosophy, and modern culture in general, comes when this “island” sensibility encounters and clashes with the “continental” sensibility of Immanuel Kant, who was born and formed not just “in deepest Europe” but on Europe’s “Asianmost” border, Königsberg, now Kaliningrad in the Russian Federation.

Kant read Hume as a young man, in the 1740s, and reacted to him with a sensibility which was quite alien to Hume’s own but which was, in the end, to spread over even into the British cultural realm from which Hume had emerged.

For Kant, this “British” stance of “living on a volcano” – that is, of living one’s life on assumptions about “truth” and “reality” that one at the same time confessed to oneself were arbitrary inventions, human projections – was something untenably agonizing, and in the last analysis unacceptable.

The human subject, for Kant, can only survive psychologically if the moment that had been predominant in Platonism – the principle of a sure and certain truth by which Man could orient himself – were restored.

He found, however, Hume’s arguments to be entirely convincing. (The neurosis and depression that Hume’s ideas threw him into dictate the whole depressive tenor of Kant’s youth, just as Kant’s own ideas, given systematic expression in his middle age in the 1780s and 90s, are said to have driven many of the Romantic generation – such as Kleist – into mental crisis and suicide).

His only way out, then, was the extremely radical and elaborate one – famously, he worked on it all through the decade of the 1770s, publishing almost nothing and working and re-working alone in his study – of his so-called “Copernican turn”, expressed in the “Critique of Pure Reason” of 1781.

Here, Kant concedes to Hume the whole of static, essential “reality”. He calls this reality “the noumenal” and concedes that we can know nothing of it, so that it may indeed be the “blooming, buzzing confusion” without laws or objectivity that Hume evokes.

What Kant achieves in the same work, however, is a shifting of the philosopher’s attention entirely over onto the “phenomenal” – i.e. the only reality that counts, or can count, for us.

In order for anything to appear to us as “real” it has to conform to the “categories of our understanding” – and in these categories there are stored up and protected all the things that Hume’s empiricism destroyed: the law of cause and effect, the inherence in every object of certain ‘primary qualities’ such as spatiality and temporality etc.

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Now, this turn of the 1780s is a fatally consequential turn in Western philosophical thought. It is really, properly considered, to Kant and the 1780s – and not, as is most often done on the right, to Nietzsche and the 1880s – that we need to trace the defining roots of our present situation of the swamping of our culture by “post-modern” relativism and “perspectivism”.

Nietzsche is in fact, if one examines him in his historical context, most appositely characterized as a “maximally radical Neo-Kantian”.

That is to say, he begins the process – which has become ubiquitous and predominant in our present day – of taking this Kantian principle that

“’objective reality’, in order to be ‘objective reality’, has always to be filtered through the subjectivity of our innate mental ‘categories’”

and stripping it of that universal-anthropological form that it had had in Kant. Nietzsche introduces, for the first time, the idea that the ‘categories’ by which ‘worlds are made’ could be peculiar to each of a possibly infinite range of cultural, or class, or ethnic groups.

It has to be said that we should not ascribe too great a uniqueness and distinction to Nietzsche here. He really needs to be situated within a whole group of “Neo-Kantian” thinkers working throughout the second half of the 19^th century.

Hans Vaihinger, for example, is a Neo-Kantian who was born within a few years of Nietzsche, though he lived much longer and published his definitive philosophical statement – “The Philosophy of ‘As If”” – only in old age, so that he seems to belong to a post-Nietzschean generation.

In fact, however, he was working out a “perspectivist” reading of Kant in those same years of the 1880s as Nietzsche was.

One of the best of the newer Nietzsche scholars – Maurizio Ferraris – proceeds very correctly in his somewhat demeaning and derogatory characterization of Nietzsche as just this: “a particularly radical member of the Neo-Kantian school”.

Certainly, it is striking that almost all the main philosophical sources that Nietzsche drew one were works by “Neo-Kantians”:

He got all his ideas about philosophical materialism from Lange’s “History of Materialism” and Lange was not a materialist but a Neo-Kantian.

When he wanted to inform himself about Spinoza in the early 1880s he did not read Spinoza himself but rather the long account of Spinoza’s thought in the “History of Modern Philosophy” by Kuno Fischer, sometimes seen as a Neo-Kantian (though also sometimes as a Neo-Hegelian).

Maurizio Ferraris stresses this very strongly – and has become something of a bête noire for his countrymen of the “Montinari School” for this reason.

(He has “triggered” them, and earned great merit, in other ways too – for example, by republishing, in Italian, “The Will to Power”, a book anathematic to the Montinarians, and arguing in his introduction that what Nietzsche himself says in this book makes any “fascistic” additions by “the Nazi sister” superfluous).

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But let me finally return, on the basis of this general review of the history of “perspectivism” in Western philosophy, to my original topic of the encounter between Owen Shroyer and the “foid Nietzscheans” in 2016.

Most accounts of “left Nietzscheanism” that you’ll hear on the Right will stress the boost in morale that has been given to the Left by the propagation of the Nietzschean idea that no one really “fights for truth” but only for the expansion of their own power under the guise of “truth”.

Accounts coming from the James Lindsay corner, or Conservative Inc. stress this idea that the Left have become very strong because this Nietzschean idea that

“the effects that beliefs achieve are more important than the truth or falsity of these beliefs”

has freed them up for a pure “power politics”, while the Right is still burdened and held back by the position enunciated by Shroyer: namely, that politics has a core of “truth” that one must adhere and be faithful to.

There is surely some truth to this.

The Left does indeed conduct politics today somewhat in the spirit of this passage from Roland Barthes (written in the early 70s, when the spirit of Nietzsche was just taking over French thought).

Imagine someone who abolishes within himself all barriers, all classes, all exclusions by simple discard of that old specter: logical contradiction; who silently accepts every charge of illogicality, of incongruity; who remains passive in the face of Socratic irony (leading the interlocutor to the supreme disgrace: self-contradiction) and legal terrorism (how much penal evidence is based on a psychology of consistency!). Such a man would be the mockery of our society: court, school, asylum, polite conversation would cast him out: who endures contradiction without shame?

There is something of this in the smugness of the two “Nietzschean” girls. They know that they will win every argument because they hold to a conception of truth that is infinitely malleable, whereby every “fact” brought against them can be interpreted out of existence, since all “facts” have, in order to be “facts”, to be processed by the cognitive structures of one or another human group.

(The philosopher who laid the ground for this re-presentation of “facts” as “facta” – made things – was, of course, Giambattista Vico, who belonged to the generation preceding Hume’s).

But I think it’s also worth looking at the stance taken by the two girls in the light of the arguments brought against the whole political camp that they belong to in the book, well-known in our circles, of Spandrell:

“Biological Leninism”

One historically very early response to Nietzsche that I would strongly recommend to you all is Francois Mauriac’s “Le Baiser au Lepreux”

I’m not sure if the title comes from the Gospels or from Flaubert’s “Saint Julien” – a text I would recommend to you as explaining Christianity.

In any case, Nietzsche appears here in an extreme “Shroyer” form – as someone proclaiming truths before which the individual is helpless, truths that actually DESTROY a certain individual.

The comparison, in the passages that Jean Peloueyre stumbles on, of the thoughts enunciated by Nietzsche with elemental natural forces – a “buffeting October wind”, “the scorching heat that fills a room (in the Camargue in southern France) when the blinds are opened on an afternoon in August)” – completely “blows away” the “perspectivist”, cerebralist element in Nietzsche and foregrounds the “vitalist” moment: the moment focused on “the body square-built and strong of “he who has turned out well” (and correlatively on “the body deformed and weak” of “he who has turned out badly”).

Shroyer’s girls of 2016 would likely be completely baffled by the whole drama of “Le Baiser au Lepreux”.

(Perhaps there is a seed of their view in Mauriac’s own words “a few badly understood pages of Nietzsche”).

For these “new Nietzscheans”, Mauriac’s protagonist should have persevered in reading Nietzsche’s works until he found the passages that would free him to re-interpret his ugliness as beauty, his weakness as strength etc.

This, then, is another important aspect of the Left’s relation to Nietzsche as “no facts” philosopher.

He allows them to interpret away their own bioleninist reality.

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We might also, then, characterize the problem that Mauriac’s “Baiser au Lepreux” represents for the “new Nietzscheans” whom Shroyer encounters as the problem of Mauriac having his wretched, bioleninistically failing protagonist stumble on the wrong passages from Nietzsche.

His satori begins with a passage from “The Antichrist” – a work (see Leiter) set outside of Nietzsche’s corpus by the new Nietzscheanism as a work of madness.

The “new Nietzsche scholarship” is troubled by the recession undergone, in this work and all the works of 1888, by the “there is no truth” theme.

It could be argued that “truth” in the classical sense is simply reinstated in these works of 1888.

The following passage, for example, from “Antichrist” 8, states the problem in quite a different way from the way it is usually stated in Nietzsche

So lange der Priester noch als eine höhere Art Mensch gilt, dieser Verneiner, Verleumder, Vergifter des Lebens von Beruf, giebt es keine Antwort auf die Frage: was ist Wahrheit? Man hat bereits die Wahrheit auf den Kopf gestellt, wenn der bewusste Advokat des Nichts und der Verneinung als Vertreter der „Wahrheit“ gilt…

It is implied here that the old philosopher’s question “what is the truth?” could be returned to once the curse that currently lies on the world is lifted.

We might make a link between this and what might be called a return of the “correspondence theory of truth” in a novel form in another “mad” work of 1888 “Ecce Homo”.

… Mein Genie ist in meinen Nüstern…

Truth is also very much present in “Ecce Homo” – but as something “smelled out”, not “seen”.

A “correspondence theory” of truth remains – but the organ that is its “objective correlative” switches from eye to nose.

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The real problem lies in the second text that Jean Peloueyre looks into: “Beyond Good and Evil”.

This is the real “finest hour” of the “anti-truth” Nietzsche.

The central argument of this book is summed up in its fourth aphorism:

Die Falschheit eines Urtheils ist uns noch kein Einwand gegen ein Urtheil; darin klingt unsre neue Sprache vielleicht am fremdesten. Die Frage ist, wie weit es lebenfördernd, lebenerhaltend, Art-erhaltend, vielleicht gar Art-züchtend ist; und wir sind grundsätzlich geneigt zu behaupten, dass die falschesten Urtheile (zu denen die synthetischen Urtheile a priori gehören) uns die unentbehrlichsten sind, dass ohne ein Geltenlassen der logischen Fiktionen, ohne ein Messen der Wirklichkeit an der rein erfundenen Welt des Unbedingten, Sich-selbst-Gleichen, ohne eine beständige Fälschung der Welt durch die Zahl der Mensch nicht leben könnte, — dass Verzichtleisten auf falsche Urtheile ein Verzichtleisten auf Leben, eine Verneinung des Lebens wäre. Die Unwahrheit als Lebensbedingung zugestehn: das heisst freilich auf eine gefährliche Weise den gewohnten Werthgefühlen Widerstand leisten; und eine Philosophie, die das wagt, stellt sich damit allein schon jenseits von Gut und Böse.

This aphorism in fact represents a “fallacy of composition”

It is through the chink of this fallacy that the Untermensch takes on the role of the Uebermensch.

Nietzsche seems not to have even foreseen the possibility that anyone other than the born “masters” – those who think “beyond good and evil” because they return to thought in terms of “good and bad” – would take up the practice of thinking “beyond true and false” and moulding “truth” to their will.

But we live in a world where this has happened and “beyond true and false” talk belongs principally to the “Missrathenen” the bioleninist “misbirths”

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Must – indeed can – the opponents of these “misbirths” fall back, in this situation, on classical “truth”?

Are we betraying Nietzsche if we do so?

As I have suggested, we can – and we are not.

As I’ve said, there is much evidence that Nietzsche returned to a classical notion of truth in the works of 1888.

One problem here, of course, is that this notion seems to have to be watered down because there is pressure to “reconcile” it with the rejection of “truth” in the great work of just three years before.

The standard periodization places “Beyond Good and Evil” and “Antichrist / Ecce Homo” within the same “late” period, running from 1884 to the end.

But this raises the problem I’ve alluded to: we need perhaps to establish a much more gradated periodization: a Nietzsche of very rapid mental metabolism, becoming a new philosopher every year.

The final philosopher, then, would have rejected the Nietzsche of 1885 and returned to “truth” in a classical sense.

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One exception still needs to be noted.

There is a difference between the “lie” embraced as something ontologically inevitable and the “lie” as moral or anti-moral strategy deployed in full acknowledgment that “truth is a matter of correspondence to reality and this does not correspond”.

This kind of lie becomes central to Nietzsche’s thought in the “doctrine of the eternal return of the same”

This (see Overbeck letter) is a lie consciously deployed to drive the Jean Peloueyres in their millions even deeper into despair than the passages Mauriac has him read.