horror and chaos of existence, and yet draw an affirmative conclusion from this confrontation -- and the naively optimistic assumption of Socratic dialectic that reality can be exhaustively grasped in concepts. The Birth of Tragedy is directed against 'the illusion that thought, guided by the thread of causation, might plumb the furthest abysses of being, and even correct it'. ¹² Throughout his work Nietzsche will stress the aversion of the human mind to chaos, its fear of unmediated intuition, and its resultant attempts to simplify the world by reducing diversity to identity. There is, however, an equally strong pragmatic tendency in Nietzsche, which suggests that this process of ordering and simplification takes place not simply because of an 'existential' need for security, but in the interests of sheer survival:

In order for a particular species to maintain itself and increase its power, its conception of reality must comprehend enough of the calculable and constant for it to base a scheme of behaviour on it. The utility of preservation -- not some abstract-theoretical need not to be deceived -stands as the motive behind the development of the organs of knowledge. . . . ¹³

It is on such considerations that Nietzsche bases his many paradoxical pronouncements on the nature of knowledge and truth; his statement, for example, that 'Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life cannot live.' ¹⁴

A number of commentators have attempted to moderate the perplexing and scandalous effect of these formulations by suggesting that Nietzsche draws a distinction, implicitly at least, between two kinds of truth. His attack is directed against correspondence theories of truth, against the failure to consider the extent to which our language and our concepts shape the world, but does not exclude a deeper insight into the nature of reality which would merit the title 'truth'. Such attempts to render Nietzsche's position coherent are not entirely without textual support, but they also have a tendency to underplay the extent to which Nietzsche's paradoxical formulations betray a genuine dilemma. The Kantian element in Nietzsche's thought pushes him towards a thoroughgoing idealist epistemology, since -- like Kant's immediate successors -- he rejects the doctrine of the 'thing-in-itself' as incoherent. Thus, in The Will to Power he writes:

The intellect cannot criticize itself, simply because it cannot be compared with other species of intellect and because its capacity to know would be revealed only in the presence of 'true reality' . . . . This presupposes that, distinct from every perspective kind of outlook or sensual-spiritual appropriation, something exists, an 'in-itself'. But the psychological derivation of the belief in things forbids us to speak of 'things-in-themselves'. ¹⁵

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