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Truthfulness as Nietzsche’s Highest Virtue

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Notes

  1. I have employed parenthetical citations of Nietzsche’s works using the following abbreviations. In those cases where I depart from the translations in these editions, I either note this explicitly or supply the German from Colli and Montinari’s Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA).

    KSA :

    Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,, 1980)

    BT :

    The Birth of Tragedy, ed. R. Geuss., trans. R. Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

    HL :

    “The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life”, in Untimely Meditations, ed. D. Breazeale, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

    HH :

    Human, All Too Human, Ed. R. Schacht, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

    GS :

    The Gay Science, ed. B. Williams, trans. J. Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

    Z :

    Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. W. Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin Books, 1976).

    BGE :

    Beyond Good and Evil, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989).

    GM :

    On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989).

    TI :

    Twilight of the Idols, trans. W. Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin Books, 1976).

    A :

    The Antichrist, trans. W. Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin Books, 1976).

    NCW :

    Nietzsche Contra Wagner, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, ed. A. Ridley and J. Norman, trans. J. Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

    EH :

    Ecce Homo, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989).

  2. See my article “Nietzsche’s Questions Concerning the Will to Truth,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 50, No. 2 (April 2012).

  3. See my article “What Does Nietzsche Owe Thucydides?” Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 42 (2011), pp. 42–45.

  4. For an account of Nietzsche’s notion of conviction, see Bernard Reginster, “What is a Free Spirit? Nietzsche on Fanaticism,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, Vol. 85, No. 1 (2003).

  5. See Lester Hunt, Nietzsche and the Origin of Virtue (London: Routledge, 1991), chap. 7.

  6. For a useful taxonomy of the notions of life in Nietzsche, see John Richardson, “Nietzsche on Life’s Ends,” in Ken Gemes and John Richardson, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

  7. For a discussion of the various aspects of Nietzsche’s relativism concerning the value of truth and truthfulness, see Simon May, Nietzsche’s Ethics and his War on ‘Morality’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), chap. 10.

  8. See section 2.1 of “Nietzsche’s Questions Concerning the Will to Truth.”

  9. Here I assume that Nietzsche’s remarks about judgments apply to beliefs as well. For discussion of this point, see Bernard Reginster, “Honesty and Curiosity in Nietzsche’s Free Spirits,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 51, No. 3 (July 2013).

  10. For a discussion of this point, see chapter 8 of Charles Larmore, The Autonomy of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Reginster discusses Larmore’s position in note 12 of “Honesty and Curiosity in Nietzsche’s Free Spirits.”

  11. See “Honesty and Curiosity in Nietzsche’s Free Spirits”, especially pp. 456–461.

  12. ibid., p. 457.

  13. This is Reginster’s reading of the passage. See “Honesty and Curiosity in Nietzsche’s Free Spirits”, p. 458, p. 462.

  14. Though he does not discuss GS 345, Robert Pippin provides an insightful account of the themes of love and truthfulness in his “Nietzsche, Eros, and Clumsy Lovers,” in Idealism as Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

  15. It should be noted that the curiosity that Reginster identifies as Nietzsche’s preferred variety of truthfulness is not an amour-plaisir but a striving for the overcoming of resistance that Reginster identifies as the essence of will to power. See “Honesty and Curiosity in Nietzsche’s Free Spirits,” p. 459. The account of truthfulness that I will provide focuses on different aspects of will to power, namely change and self-overcoming.

  16. For a useful discussion of the shortcomings of the typical philosopher, see section III of Pippin’s “Nietzsche, Eros, and Clumsy Lovers.”

  17. Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick present this dependence of truthfulness on passion as a relation between a will to truth and a will to value. See chapter 5 of their The Soul of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

  18. For an insightful discussion of Nietzsche as skeptic, see Jessica Berry, Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

  19. Lester Hunt also makes this point. See Nietzsche and the Origin of Virtue, p. 92.

  20. I wish to thank the other speakers and the audience at the conference “Nietzsche and Virtue” (University of Guelph, October 2013) for their questions in response to an early version of this paper. Special thanks to John Hacker-Wright for his insightful comments and organizational expertise.

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Jenkins, S. Truthfulness as Nietzsche’s Highest Virtue. J Value Inquiry 50, 1–19 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-015-9496-7

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