Nietzsche: Antithesis cannot produce thesis

 In this essay I will examine the assertion “Antithesis cannot produce thesis”. To better understand what Nietzsche is proposing, and to understand his position as an 'anti-philosopher', I will look to contrast his viewpoint with the Philosophy he is rejecting.     Socrates, claiming ignorance, was driven by the search for an adequate answer to questions such as “what is Justice?” and “What is courage?”. He began from the position of ignorance -which is of significance in itself insofar as to have made his own assertion might have left him vulnerable to his own method- and encouraged his opponent to make an assertion with the question “What is x” where x represents the topic of choice. The Opponent would then respond with “x is y” where y represents the opponents assertion of what x is.
    Socrates would then secure the agreement of his counterpart to a series of assertions until it became clear that his opponents original assertion “x is y” is found to be false. We can understand this dialogue as a simple method employed to eliminate false statements. The process involves the assertion of a thesis such as “Being happy is good” and a response to this in the form of it’s opposite -the anti-thesis- in this instance we might propose “Being happy is not good”. The goal is to resolve the conflict between the two assertions thereby identifying one statement as false and its negation as true. This is the dialectic in it's earliest form (prior to Hegelian Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis refinement).
    Having identified Socrates’s method we should now examine what he intends to find, namely truth. This is no small task as Truth remains a widely debated subject in philosophy and has been the source of considerable speculation for thousands of years. Despite this challenge, we may observe that by his choice of method it would appear that Socrates understands truth to be some thing in the world that can be found by means of inquiry. Truth for Socrates is a definite thing (true or not), and part of the world in which we live. Not all thinkers have adopted this stance with respect to the nature of truth, and Nietzsche is one such opponent of this position who’s objection I will attempt to exemplify.
    If I consider what I have done when I resolve (in my opinion) the conflict between two assertions thesis and anti-thesis; asserting that x is false and therefore that y is true, I can see I have made a decision. It does not necessarily follow that what I have decided is  true or false at all just because I claim that it is. Instead my decision describes how I perceive the situation; that x is false and y is true. The point Nietzsche highlights for us at this point, is that we assume that what we have found is truth or conversely untruth.

“If everyone saw the world through green glasses, they would be forced to judge that everything they saw was green, and could never be sure whether their eyes saw things as they really are, or did not add something of their own to what they saw. And so it is with our intellect. We can never be certain that what we call Truth is really Truth, or whether it does not merely appear so to us.” (Kleist, 1982).

    Nietzsche's point in eroding truth is not to promote a kind of nihilism, but to encourage us re-evaluate our understanding of the world. The question to be asked should not be "Is this true?" or "Is this false?" but instead "Is this life-affirming or species furthering?" and "Does this promote life?". Nietzsche thereby 'transcends' (places himself beyond) good and evil and relates to the world in another way.
    Nietzsche examines how “meta-physicians” such as Socrates attempt to decide if a statement is true or false. He has observed that for such philosophers there is a commonly held assumption that all statements of truth must have an origin of their own, because they are so distinct from the world in which we live. He proposes that metaphysical inquiry can be recognized by it’s approach to discerning what is true and what is not; that is it can be identified by its use of dialectic.
    Returning to the original text Nietzsche makes the exclamation “how could anything originate out of it’s opposite?”. He is acknowledging that both the source and origin of any truth statement at which the philosopher arrives, by means of a dialectic, is flawed. Nietzsche notes that in attempting to develop a dialectic of value, the philosopher assumes that the value he or others confer to a statement is correct. Nietzsche calls into question the existence of antithesis which may simply be how we perceive false statements through the lenses of our prejudice.
    To conclude, Any judgement for Nietzsche becomes worthwhile at the point it promotes life. Nietzsche thereby places himself beyond good and evil; and beyond all conventional truth statements. If Nietzsche is correct, and a statement of truth holds no intrinsic value, and should only be considered on the basis of how it affirms life, it would be very difficult to ascertain how I could ever conclude the product of my dialectical inquiry was a thesis.
    In this way Nietzsche denies that antithesis can produce thesis. I will be lead precisely where I already intend to go; if I begin believing a statement is false my conclusion will affirm my belief. Consequently the assertion that some statement is true (or false) is more likely to offer a clearer indication of where my prejudices lie than indicate if something is actually true or not. Some may argue that such concerns do not necessarily cast doubt on the existence of truth (which may or may not exist) but rather on my ability to access it by means of rational inquiry. However such a point would render the search for truth moot if we accept as Nietzsche does that man is sole means by which things are valuated and we reject 'superearthly' claims.