For Nietzsche, contradictions are implicitly essential to life – while paradoxically – the downfall of every contemporary ideology. At moments throughout his work, it seems as if Nietzsche were trying to escape the necessary truth of perspectivism – as he delightedly employs reason to subvert reason and the pre-conceived notions of virtue to undermine prevailing and static moralities. The methodical, sometimes even Cartesian, discourse Nietzsche pursues to arrive at this celebrated insight into truth is a recurring theme in passages such as Origin of knowledge (The Gay Science) and How the 'Real World' at last Became a Myth (Twilight of the Idols).
Essentially, humankind's natural desires and perceptions of the world (to Nietzsche: man's passions and senses) are what, up until the Socratic era, constituted our very being – "The Real World". At this point, Nietzsche applies a Darwinian model to the evolution of our reason in that a belief, whether "true" or erroneous, will persevere among the species only to the extent that it is life-preserving. A belief in "free will" and that 'reason' overcomes the folly of the senses would eventually culminate in the works of Descartes and Kant, where all bodily passions and sense perceptions are subverted.
Nietzsche's age is one presented with the limits of this truth. Recognition of this history – that our reason is as much built on the values we bring to it and our pre-conceived notions of certainty – would destabilise its very foundations and allow a shift towards the age of the overman, where a "plurality of truths" are embraced.
Life and art, saturated necessarily with contradictions, are destroyed and sterilised by reason, morality and ideology. These systems, where human reality is denied, are what Nietzsche hopes to undermine.
