As a youthful disciple of Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was influenced by the older philosopher’s critique of reason and by his suggestion that art, as an expression of genius, afforded a glimpse of being-in-itself. Trained as a classicist, Nietzsche’s encounter with Attic tragedy led him to a reevaluation of Greek culture that would have a momentous impact on modern thought and literature. In a pathbreaking dissertation that was ultimately published in 1872 as The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, Nietzsche claimed that the dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles represented the high point of Greek culture, whereas the philosophy of Plato and Platonism constituted a decline. Nietzsche’s study culminated in a withering critique of Socrates and the Western philosophical tradition engendered by his method of logical analysis and argumentation—elenchos, or dialectic. “Our whole modern world,” Nietzsche laments, “is caught in the net of Alexandrian [Hellenistic] culture and recognizes as its ideal the man of theory, equipped with the highest cognitive powers, working in the service of science, and whose archetype and progenitor is Socrates.”

Nietzsche was disturbed by the Enlightenment’s unswerving allegiance to the concept of scientific truth. In a brilliant early text, “On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense” (1873), he offered a number of insightful observations about the vocation of philosophy that would ultimately find their way into his mature thought of the 1880s. The will to philosophy, with its pretensions to objectivity, should not be taken at face value, suggests Nietzsche, for its veil of impartiality conceals an array of specific biological functions. The intellect is a practical instrument employed by the human species to master a complex and hostile environment. Despite pious insistences to the contrary by philosophers, there is nothing sacrosanct about their vocation. “What is a word?” Nietzsche asks. “It is the copy in sound of a nerve stimulus.” Like other biological phenomena, thought stands in the service of life as a means of self-preservation. “As a means for the preserving of the individual, the intellect unfolds its principle powers in dissimulation, which is the means by which weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves,” Nietzsche observes.

Nietzsche couples these criticisms with a number of astute observations concerning the relationship between philosophy and language. For centuries philosophers have claimed that they possess access to absolute truth. Yet such pretensions belie the extent to which philosophical discourse, like all human communication, is mediated by the rhetorical and representational contingencies of language. With language as an instrument or intermediary apparatus, human conceptual access to the “in-itself,” or real being, of objects is unavoidably mediated, hence never direct or pristine. Without the rhetorical approximations of metaphor, trope, and figuration, the philosophical enterprise would languish and wither. Truth, regarded by the philosophers’ guild as something magical and sacred, is, claims Nietzsche, merely a series of metaphors, or imprecise rhetorical approximations, mobilized to achieve a certain effect or a set of desired ends. It is

a movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and blind. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions.

Ultimately, and contrary to what philosophers have perennially contended, the relationship between concepts and the things they designate, far from being necessary or intrinsic, is merely a matter of convention and habit. Truth does not yield a “view from nowhere.” As Nietzsche insinuates, it inevitably involves an “anthropomorphic” dimension: it is both a reflection of custom and a projection of human need. Nietzsche’s later doctrine of the “will to power”—which characterizes philosophy, like all human undertakings, as a quest for world mastery—systematized many of these early insights concerning the finite and conditioned nature of truth. His emphasis on truth’s inescapable linguistic and rhetorical components would, a century later, profoundly influence post-structuralist theories of truth, such as those of Foucault and Derrida.

Despite his questioning of traditional philosophical concepts such as truth, Nietzsche remained committed to the goals of serious philosophical inquiry. Indeed, his prodigious philosophical musings are informed by two precepts handed down by Socrates: (1) the unexamined life is not worth living; and (2) virtue is a kind of knowledge (that is, being virtuous consists of knowing what virtue is in general and what the virtues are in particular). Although Nietzsche emphatically rejected Plato’s theory of Ideas, according to which all earthly objects are merely imperfect copies of abstract, celestial Forms, he remained convinced that wisdom, and therefore possession of the truth, was the key to human flourishing. Nor did his later “perspectivism”—the idea that all knowledge is situated and partial—amount to a shallow relativism (see ethical relativism). Instead, Nietzsche intended his “transvaluation of all values”—his reversal or inversion of all received conceptions of truth—as a way station on the path to a set of higher, more-robust and affirmative ethical ideals. The same impassioned concern for the welfare of the soul that one finds in Socrates and Plato one also discovers in Nietzsche. Moreover, Nietzsche’s philosophy was motivated at every turn by Aristotle’s distinction between mere life and the “good life”—a life lived in accordance with virtue.

Not only did Nietzsche never relinquish his interest in “first philosophy,” but he approached metaphysical problems in a manner that was remarkably consistent and rigorous. To be sure, his aphoristic and fragmentary style of writing makes it difficult to develop a systematic interpretation of his thought. It is clear, however, that Nietzsche embraced the fundamental questions of metaphysics and sought to provide them with compelling and original answers. After all, were not his doctrines of the will to power and “eternal recurrence”—the idea that life must be lived emphatically, as if one might be condemned in perpetuity to repeat a given action—in essence attempts to come to grips with the essential nature of being and, as such, metaphysics at its purest? What was his theory of the “superman”—of a superior being or nature who transcends the timidity and foibles of the merely human—if not an earnest attempt to redefine virtue or the good life in an era in which cultural philistinism seemed to have gained the upper hand? And what motivated Nietzsche’s perspectivism if not a desire to arrive at a less-limited, more-robust understanding of the nature of truth in all its richness and multiplicity?

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche proclaims that

it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in knowledge rests—that even we knowers today, we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is truth, that truth is divine.

This passage could hardly have been written by someone who was not a “lover of wisdom”—i.e., a philosopher.