Preface

The preface opens with one of the most arresting opening sentences in modern philosophy: "Supposing that truth is a woman — what then?" The point is not about gender but about method. Dogmatic philosophers have approached truth with "terrible seriousness and clumsy importunity," like a poor suitor. Truth, Nietzsche says, has never allowed herself to be won by such methods. The metaphor does its work in two sentences: all dogmatizing in philosophy may have been a category error.

He pushes further. All dogma, however imposing, however logically dressed — Plato's, Spinoza's, Kant's — may have been resting on "some popular superstition of immemorial time," some "play upon words," some "audacious generalization of very restricted, very personal, very human — all-too-human — facts." The grand edifices of systematic philosophy, Nietzsche suggests, stand on the same epistemological footing as astrology: elaborate, internally consistent, and built on a need rather than evidence.

The preface closes by locating the book in time. It was written in 1885 at Sils Maria in the Upper Engadine. It is offered not as a refutation but as a prelude — the title says it: a prelude to a philosophy of the future. Whatever comes after will have learned from the failure of the old. The book is signed with a date and a place rather than with an argument. Nietzsche is telling the reader that even this text belongs to a perspective, to a moment, to a man — which is precisely the point he is about to spend nine parts making.