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This article argues that Nietzsche uses a rhetorically modern appeal to enact the self-overcoming of modernity and the aim of enlightenment. It demonstrates how Nietzsche aims to move his readers from a prejudice in favor of truthfulness, by appearing to radicalize that aim, to a new measure of nobility. In contrast to some who present Nietzsche's styles as the means to convey a dispersion of meanings, this article argues that, designs his writing to move his age. He adopts the prejudices of his time in Beyond Good and Evil, his mature "critique of modernity" in order to demonstrate the self-overcoming of those prejudices. Beyond merely questioning the value of truth, Nietzsche evaluates by the measure of psychological strength, and describes the character of nobility beyond good and evil and beyond truth and falsity.
Nietzsche is a writer of the rarest order; the explosive power of his writing is matched only by its subtlety. Even as he makes shockingly dramatic statements, he employs a familiar modern perspective in Beyond Good and Evil, presenting it in a grand style, as a prelude to exploding that perspective. In the voice of the free spirit, he writes as one who prefers the unvarnished truth to all other things even as he explicitly calls into question the value of truth. He appears to follow an enlightenment procedure of dispelling prejudices, but the chief prejudice he calls into question is that the truth is good. Simply rejecting this view would be a contradiction or it would undermine itself. Rather than viewing this paradox as a performative contradiction in Nietzsche's writing or the means to expose the instability of all meanings, I will argue that Nietzsche constructs his books in an orderly manner, designed strategically, rather than systematically, with a view to their rhetorical effect. Nietzsche's demonstration of the self-overcoming of honesty and freedom as ideals is political in its attention to what the age values and his effort to move his readers and the age. His critique of objectivity not only raises questions about the possibility or desirability of truthfulness and demonstrates the self-contradiction of the enlightenment: it calls for a new responsibility for the effects of offering interpretations.
Nietzsche sought to dispel the very concept of objective truth, yet...