Nietzsche: The Will to Truth

Undergraduate / Graduate

The will to truth - Nietzsche first uses the phrase in a notebook entry written in late 1882: "Will to truth!" Let us stop speaking so simplistically and bombastically!" From then on, the critique of this will would preoccupy him for the rest of his career. In this seminar we will study this critique as it develops in Nietzsche's middle and later writings. We will read closely his published works as well as recently translated notebook entries. What exactly is the will to truth? Why critique it? Can philosophy and/or thinking resist it or somehow do without it? What is the status of the discourse that contests it? In asking these questions, we will examine a still underappreciated aspect of Nietzsche's post-Zarathustra writings: the gap separating his polemic against metaphysics qua Platonism from his polemic against the so-called Judeo-Christian, i.e. the inheritance of the Biblical tradition.