Abstract

Philosophers from Nietzsche and James to Marx and Dewey agree that the most elementary consideration of human beings, born helpless, with drives and finite resources, makes it unlikely that anything is intrinsically, non-instrumentally or finally good, and certainly not truth. Yet this agreement is entirely negative: The value of truth, the good of it, does not derive from the adequation of intellect and being. What James and Nietzsche make of this observation is very different indeed. Schematically, where James reserves the predicate "is true" for the proper good of belief, which he then analyses in pragmatic terms, that is, in terms of efficacy in rules or habits of action, Nietzsche reverses truth's value "experimentally," as part of a projected revaluation of the highest values.