Nietzsche's Argument Analysis

Nietzsche argues that we can never know reality because our intellect is only a tool for survival. Intellect, he says, is “given only as an aid to the most unfortunate, most delicate, most evanescent beings in order to hold them for a minute in existence” (Reader, 1). The main use of intellect is to create stimulations of reality, which we are “acting a role before others and before oneself” (Reader 2). With respect to understanding our world, Nietzsche acknowledges the role that senses play in forming concepts. Sensory informations leads to words that in turn organize and describe a concept. He introduces the origin of a concept as we “equate what is unequal”(Reader 5). Information from different experiences are all categorized into one “arbitrary
Each individual has a different perspective on reality which agrees with Nietzsche argument. To him, truth is used to create a “peace pact “ (Reader 3) with other humans and is a “sum of human relations”(Reader 5). I acknowledge that he is correct in saying that truth is a sum of human relations, in a sense, that truth is a group of experiences. What needs to be included in the truth equation is the power of the intellect. A person alone cannot know the whole of reality but that does not mean what they know is wrong. How they view reality is out of their control, people do not have disabilities because they choose to. A blind person can never have a clear cut mental image of a tree without the experience of seeing it. Differing views does not make everything and everyone wrong. Knowledge and Truth are multifaceted. We have five different senses for a reason, so we may experience as much as the world as possible. Our intellect connects these experiences together so to achieve a deeper knowledge. To gain truth, it is necessary to have a culmination of other perspectives to create a clearer image of the world. Those lacking certain senses are not wrong or defective and should not be considered out of the equation. They just interpret the world differently, and in most cases, have stronger use of other senses. We take the experiences of others, even if we do not agree with them, and use that to understand another dimension of reality. The word truth is just a verbal designation of what we all feel naturally, a desire to understand. Therefore, reality is a single gem with many faces of truth. The gem needs to be turned in different light to see its many faces just like truth requires more than one