In understanding Nietzsche, the way in which he writes and expresses himself (his style) is just as important as paying attention to what (the content) he says. This fact raises tremendous difficulties of interpretation, especially when taking into account Nietzsche's conception of truth. Here I can only touch on the complex role a notion of truth plays in Nietzsche's writings, indicating how it is bound up with his concern with style.

Nietzsche rejected a correspondence theory of truth – the view that our concepts and judgements give us unalloyed access to ‘reality’ – in favour of Kant's view that we impose categories upon the world in order to make our experience of it intelligible and calculable. Nietzsche was concerned to reject the claims of the school of thought known as ‘positivism’, which holds that we have access to the facts about the world through sensory experience and empirical observation. But, for him categories such as ‘cause’ and ‘effect’, ‘subject’ and ‘object’, and notions such as ‘rule of law’, ‘freedom’, and ‘motive’ are to be understood as ‘conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and communication – not for explanation’ (BGE 21).