Keith Ansell-Pearson Quotes

Nietzsche envisaged a cultural revolution in which our appreciation of language and our conceptions of truth and knowledge would undergo a fundamental transformation. This emphasis on the crucial importance of language does not mean that Nietzsche is guilty of idealism. For him language is a material phenomenon which is rooted in our animal bodily human needs and which has historically evolved. In one of the opening sections of "Human, All Too Human", for example, he attacks philosophers for lacking a historical sense which results in their inability to grasp the fact that the human animal is a creature which is not an 'aeterna veritas' but is one which has 'become'; the same applies to the human faculty of cognition. 'Everything' Nietzsche insists, 'has become. There are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths'. Consequently, he argues, 'what is needed from now on is historical philosophizing, and with it the virtue of modesty.

Nietzsche does not seek a completely politicized existence in which a private realm of existence is abolished. On the contrary, he wishes to preserve a private/public distinction. His quarrel with modern liberal society is that, although its ideology of the privatization of politics allows individuals a tremendous degree of private freedom, it does so at the cost of undermining notions of culture and citizenship.