In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche opens by accusing philosophy thus far of mistaking prejudice for truth - accusing philosophers of dressing up their innate prejudices, drives and desires as that most pure and selfless quest - the quest for eternal, universal truth. Nietzsche, reasonably, attributes this dogmatism to Plato (and, as Whitehead said, all of Western philosophy is but footnotes to Plato), whose tales of Socrates and his dialectic undressing of his interlocutors (the intellectual equivalent of tying together the shoelaces of your enemy before they start running after you) has given philosophers ever since much comfort and joy.
So how well have philosophers fared in their selfless quest? According to Nietzsche, about as well as someone vying for the attention of a woman out of their league… Rather than being free of the philosopher, philosophy is inevitably intimately tied up with its author:
It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of—namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious auto-biography1
In other words there is no philosophy that is “clean” of the human being that originated it. No truth slippery enough that it can be wrested from the hand that wrote it. An appropriate concession to make as I open this philosophy blog? I will lay no claim to truth here (not even Socrates was this Socratic!). But isn’t that itself a truth-claim? A question for the future…
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good And Evil ↩︎