Nietzsche's Will to Power: Truth, Error, and Metaphorical Language

Nietzsche's Will to Power: Truth, Error, and Epistemology

The bottom line is no longer whether a judgment is true or false, but whether or not it is conducive to life, if it preserves life, if it makes life bigger. Human logic serves to equalize, stabilize, and take an overall view. To be determined by its appearance is only useful to assert and settle within constant change.

The truth is just an appearance that strengthens our perspective, imposed by custom, but it would still be a mistake.

This is the essential meaning of the radical nature of Nietzsche's thought, which he calls the Will to Power. This justifies error as a necessary condition for the affirmation of life. The Will to Power is, therefore, the will to appearance, even illusion, especially in relation to the knowledge that humanity may have about the world. But this will is deeper, more metaphysical, than the 'will to truth' which prevailed under the reign of the supersensible world, because it knows the true reality of being-becoming, and knows that human reason can never cover, totalize, or simplify it within its categories.

The New Idea of Language and Metaphor

If categories and concepts do not serve to bring us closer to the reality of becoming, which is multiple and changing, then what does?

Against the suffering of petrification—of becoming fixed in a category—the metaphorical imagination is exalted. The metaphor is open to the world. What separates the traditional approach from the Nietzschean one is the model or way of approaching the world:

• The first model, based on the concept, simplifies and hinders the becoming of being.
• The second model is based on the metaphor, embracing uniqueness and plurality.

This theoretical and practical exaltation of metaphor exists because there is no logical causal link between the world of object and subject. The only possible relationship is Art. This is not a 'formalization' of art, but the exaltation of the aspect of humanity's Will to Power: its creativity.

The significance of the Nietzschean Will to Power is best appreciated in his early work, The Birth of Tragedy. Through the metaphors of Apollo and Dionysus, Nietzsche states that human beings need to create a framework against the incessant reality of becoming.