The Power-Truth Enigma.

Nietzsche’s saying was a philosophical reformulation of what is roughly known as ‘might is right’, a doctrine whose advocates invoke history as evidence with ample apparent justification.

 Nietzsche famously declared that power is truth. Considering the over-all thrust of his philosophical thought, he might have easily added the qualifier, ‘alone’, to say that ‘power’ alone is ‘truth’.

Nietzsche’s saying was a philosophical reformulation of what is roughly known as ‘might is right’, a doctrine whose advocates invoke history as evidence with ample apparent justification.

The question, however, always remains that whatever is established de facto cannot be valid de jure and can by no means be morally upright. There are so many glaring injustices which exist but whose mere existence cannot be their justification.

Nietzsche’s crisp formulation of an age-old thinking (whose prominent earlier representatives include Chanakya and Machiavelli) has, however, determined a whole complex process of historical hermeneutics. Thinkers like Michel Foucault and New Historicists, among others, have shown how complex power-relations subtly decide the thinking, the interpretation and the directions of human thought and action.

All this is clearly traceable to the underlying conviction, no longer merely unconscious, that man is an animal and that the governing principle of the human world is ‘survival of the fittest’.

Thus the borderline between the animal world and the human world is practically obliterated and Darwin seems to be the undisputed presiding genius of modern thought in most of its departments. In political economy Karl Marx and his school argue that the sole determining factor in human affairs is economy and what matters, in the ultimate analysis, is the belly.

In psychology Freud believes that man and all his activities are governed by instincts over which he has no control and which rule him as inexorable fate from within. Even aesthetics and fine arts are explained in terms of their utility of relaxing the nerves and restoring the lost or disturbed balance. Literary critics, like I. A. Richards, explain literary value in terms of stimulus to and response from a complex nervous system. This signals a complete reversal of a position when man was seen in angelic terms, the repository of a ‘soul’ which connected him with God and opened to him vistas of boundless spiritual evolution. This may serve as illustration, just one among many, of the multi-layered Quranic statement:

Certainly We created man in the most exquisite of conformations (ahsan-taqweem) and then also granted him the potential of sinking to the lowest of the low (asfala safileen). [95:4-5]