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Nietzsche: Philosopher of the Perilous Perhaps

I have just read a rather ridiculous article on Yahoo to do with words that make the speaker sound stupid. For the most part it was a predictable list with few surprises; we can all agree, for example, that only a moron uses the word awesome.

However, I was intrigued to see the list included the word maybe on the grounds that it showed the speaker to be unsure of his own views or unable to make up her own mind (i.e. to lack intellectual confidence and decision making ability).

For maybe is perhaps one of my favourite words; just as perhaps functions as the most privileged of all qualifiers in my philosophical lexicon. For the term perhaps doesn't express my uncertainty, so much as create unease in the listener via a suggestion of ambiguity when there was an everyday expectation of clarity and coherence.

It thus subverts and, more radically, deconstructs an entire system of metaphysics based upon a fundamental belief in the opposition of values and an eternal game of either/or (Either you love me or you don't, goddammit!)

For those who believe in the truth - and who believe, what's more, that they know the truth when they hear it - everyone is expected to speak truthfully (i.e. with sincerity, conviction, and logical coherence). Only liars, cheats, swindlers, women, poets, and Continental philosophers refuse to call a spade a spade and like to beat about the bush.

Philosophers such as Nietzsche, for example, who eagerly anticipated the arrival of a new style of thinker; one who has a very different taste and inclination to the adherents of the Truth as a categorical imperative. He calls such thinkers to come philosophers of the dangerous Perhaps.       


See: Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1990). Part I, Section 2.