1. See, e.g., Bernd Magnus, “Nietzsche Today: A View from America,” International Studies in Philosophy 15, no. 2 (1983): 95–104, Alan Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation (New York: Routledge, 1990), chs. 6–7, and, in a somewhat different vein, Ken Gemes, “Nietzsche’s Critique of Truth,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52, no. 1 (March 1992): 47–65. The approaches of Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor,trans. D. Large (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles,trans. B. Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), and Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979) are similar to this move in spirit, but they also go further than this claim in important respects.
2. For example, “we thus reject the Christian interpretation and condemn its meaning as counterfeit” (GS 357); “We, too, do not deny that faith `makes blessed’: that is precisely why we deny that faith proves anything— a strong faith that makes blessed raises suspicion against that which is believed; it does not establish `truth,’ it establishes a certain probability — of deception” (GM III, 24); “As for materialistic atomism, it is one of the best refuted theories there are, and in Europe perhaps no one in the learned world is now so unscholarly as to attach serious significance to it, except for convenient household use” (BGE 12); and perhaps most dramatically, “In the Christian world of ideas there is nothing that has the least contact with reality — and it is in the instinctive hatred of reality that we have recognized the only motivating force at the root of Christianity. What follows from this? That in psychologicis too, the error here is radical, […] One concept less, one single reality in its place, and the whole of Christianity hurtles down into nothing” (A 39).
3. This last interpretive tack is most prominently and thoroughly pursued by Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Although the reading of Nietzsche I advocate here bears some similarities to Clark’s informative treatment, I cannot accept her central claim that Nietzsche eventually abandoned his denial of truth. For a fuller treatment, see R. Lanier Anderson, “Overcoming Charity: the Case of Maudemarie Clark’s Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy,” Nietzsche-Studien 25 (1996): 307–41.
4. “What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins” (TL, 84).
5. “They [the senses] do not lie at all. What we make of their testimony, that alone introduces lies; for example, the lie of unity, the lie of thinghood, of substance, of permanence. `Reason’ is the cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses” (TI III, 2).