Thus Nietzsche asks “What really is it in us that wants ‘the truth’?” and carries the erotic resonance of the question to the issue of questioning as such, reminding us, fully cognizant of the invocation of the sphinx, of Oedipus who himself searched himself, taking counsel from no one and after winning his fortune, finally found his own fatal answer to the question, “Who really is it here who questions us?”
In an examination of conscience drawn from Kant’s moral philosophy and thence conveyed to Freud via Nietzsche himself as the locus of the unconscious in us, we can never know if it is “the question concerning the problem of the value of truth” that steps before us, or if we ourselves all-too-unknowingly have “stepped before this problem? Which of us is Oedipus here? Which of us Sphinx?” (BGE §1)
Supposing, what if, truth were a woman?
Nietzsche's supposition is provocative and a great deal of winking and no small amount of feminist preening has been expended in reaction. As such, however, Nietzsche’s question reveals less about the femininity of truth than the masculinity of its seekers.
Thus with Nietzsche’s contention that truth be regarded as a woman one has no choice but to bring a case against the suitors of or aspirants to truth and that is the point we need to make, and yet and always forget to make — and as soon as this lecture is over, for some of us already and even now, we are back to thinking as we usually do, which means that we are back to taking the standard reader’s view, the standard thinker’s view, which is of course thoroughly sexed as Nietzsche reminds us: “all philosophers, when they have been dogmatists” prove themselves both male and incompetent.
Philosophers to a man, all of truth's suitors, have been way too, all too clumsy.
Nietzsche’s philosopher, this does not surprise us, is supposed to be a man, just as Bataille’s reader is supposed to be a man.
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