Bernard Williams on Friedrich Nietzsche

“I don't see Nietzsche as the sort of philosopher whose views you just adopt: there are all sorts of problems with his positive views about the future, about politics, and so on. I see him in the same way that Foucault saw him, as a sort of resource. Foucault said that there isn't any one Nietzsche: everybody gets out of him what they find most helpful. I'm also convinced, from my own experience, that you get most out of him when you've got part of the way there on some path of your own. I think it's arriving at some thoughts of my own which turned out to be not dissimilar to things that Nietzsche had developed in greater depth that has greatly increased my interest in him. I do think that his genealogies are very remarkable constructions, and deserve our attention and respect. But of course they go beyond the metaphysical psychology of Kantian moralism. They also extend much more generally to the sources of our moral conceptions and their associated metaphysical models.”

“Although Nietzsche was keenly alive to what concerns the deniers, he was an opponent of them. The indifference to truthfulness which they encourage would be for him merely an aspect of nihilism. When he discovered that the values of truth and truthfulness, such as the resistance to self-deception and to comforting mythologies, were not self-justifying and not given simply with the concept of truth—unless the concept of truth is itself inflated into providing some metaphysical teleology of human existence, of the kind that he rejected in Platonism—he did not settle for a demure civic conversation in the style of Richard Rorty's ironist, or saunter off with the smug nod that registers a deconstructive job neatly done. He was aware that his own criticisms and exposures owed both their motivation and their effect to the spirit of truthfulness. His aim was to see how far the values of truth could be revalued, how they might be understood in a perspective quite different from the Platonic and Christian metaphysics which had provided their principal source in the West up to now.”