Nietzsche attacks science on the very grounds that many atheistic scholars would
attack religion: it relies too heavily on faith in unjustified fundamental
beliefs. While the religious never question their faith in God, scholars never
question their faith in truth. For Nietzsche, the sign of a strong intellectual
conscience is that one is not afraid to doubt everything, that one never falls
back on faith. A sufficiently strong intellectual conscience will not even have
faith in truth, but will demand that the scholarly pursuit of truth be called
into question and justified.
Nietzsche's perspectivism effectively does precisely this. Nietzsche does not
demand that we see a matter in one particular way, as would the ascetic priest,
and he does not claim that he sees a matter in completely objective and neutral
terms, as would the scholar. Instead, he urges both himself and us to look at
any matter from as many different perspectives as possible. In that way, we get
the roundest picture of the truth, one not dominated by any one particular
interpretation. Nietzsche's perspectivism doggedly attacks the idea that there
is any such thing as an absolute truth or a "correct" perspective from which to
view a matter. Absolute truth, to Nietzsche, means only that a certain
interpretation has become suspiciously compelling.
This perspectivism, as was mentioned earlier, has been profoundly influential on
postmodern thought. Derrida has criticized the entire Western intellectual
tradition, claiming that it is based on a "metaphysics of presence." That is,
our intellectual tradition is steeped in claims that assert an absolute
authority by appeal to some absolute ground, be it God, truth, certainty, or
whatever else. We are so obsessed with the notions of certainty and
absoluteness that we fail to question the value of these absolutes. Clearly,
Derrida and his contemporaries owe a great debt to Nietzsche.
