Nietzsche from the Wolf's perspective

Why truth?

Because, way back on the playground, there was a kid who was bigger, stronger, smarter and better looking than the rest of the kids. He wasn't a bully but he had superior advantage and he used it and adults didn't rein him in much because he was smarter and better looking in addition to being bigger and stronger.

And we wanted to be treated "fairly". The problem is that all the things we didn't like about what this kid did with his superior advantage we would have done too had we had that advantage. Every reasonable doubt we might raise about him in our desperate insistence that superior advantage was not the same thing as superior tout court could be raised against our own perception. So we need a neutral concept that is separate from anyone's particular perception. Objective truth, that's the ticket.

And you can still go with that if you're so inclined, Check back with us when you have worked out the problems that go with "objective truth". I hope you don't mind if we get on with our lives in the meantime.

And we might also note, while you're working at it, that all attempts to arrive at some sort of objective truth until now have failed. So Truth, is really an illusion and a willingly held illusion is a kind of lie.

Okay, so what's wrong with this? Perhaps nothing.

Except language. To make all this work, Nietzsche has to imagine a bunch of atomistic human beings arriving at language so that we could use it as a tool to cooperate. And that's backwards.

Human beings tend naturally to cooperate. We also tend naturally to stab one another in the back but that sort of treachery is only possible against an assumption that cooperation is the normal state of affairs. Language isn't a tool to make cooperation possible. Rather, language is possible because human beings are beings that share activities. It's not something that we do; it's something that we are. Humans are beings that share activities with other human beings (and some other animals) the way fish are animals that swim in water.

The truth that goes with this is not the sort that rationalistic philosophers hanker after but it's real enough and it's more than some sort of meaning created by a supreme act by some sort of super man.

And it isn't art either.

It's the kind of agreement that is necessary to share a form of life.