There are very few things which Plato and Nietzsche could
form a congenial agreement upon. The truth is definitely one of them. The
disagreement here does not lie simply in the question of what the truth is, but
rather if the truth even exists.
Plato would argue that there is a truth, and that all wise
people chase it. Through the Theory of Forms, it may even be possible to
conclude that Plato though objects had a sort of “truth,” that being a perfect
counterpart.
Nietzsche, on the other hand, was not a proponent of the
idea of truth. To quote his essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense”:
“What then is truth? 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 binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are
illusions- they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained
of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered
as metal and no longer as coins.”
Here,
Nietzsche explains his position on truth, which is, in essence, that everything
has been so influenced by outside forces that anything that may have once been
considered a truth is now something different. Therefore, according to Nietzsche, no single truths
exist, but only widely accepted interpretations.
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