Nietzsche's truth

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Nietzsches truth()we have grown sick of this bad taste, this will to truth, this truth at any price, this youthful madness in the love of truth (GS preface s4).

This remarkand others like itcould be taken as emblematically Nietzschean. With reference to Truth and Lying and/or later works as

the Gay Science or Twilight of the Idols, explain and explore what Nietzsche is saying when he talks about truth.

by

joshua

brancheau


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Since I grew weary of the searchI taught myself to find instead.

Since cross winds caused my ship to lurch

I sail with all winds straight ahead.1

This poem is emblematically Nietzschean in its witty juxtaposition of what Nietzsche saw

as the flaw in western traditions quest for Truth, and his solution. Throughout his writings,

Nietzsche poetically relates his position in philosophy to the western tradition, making claims

like Truths are an illusion,2 truth is a woman,3truth is a metaphor.4 Read out of context,

these claims can be counter intuitive and easily misinterpreted. Nietzsche does not believe in the

absolute objective eternal Truth, an ideal which he attributes to the works of Plato and Socrates.

This does not mean he believes truth is unrealistic. He finds that the common man has grown

too attached to absolute Truth, and has forgotten the transient nature of the world of experience.

It could be said that Nietzsche considers truth to grow through experience, to be alive within us.

His work exemplifies how truth is a human relationship, and thus fleeting with time. It also

exemplifies that the western tradition has been faithful to dead Truths, and thus in error for a

long time. Throughout this essay I will make a textual distinction between the traditional notions

of unchanging Truth, and the Nietzschean notions of living truth.

The western tradition has long maintained the certainty of universal classifications. Even

though they have often been recognized as hollow concepts, the prevailing doctrine of scientific

certainty reigns from Plato, through Descartes, and even now persists in the contemporary

practices of science. Nietzsche wants to abolish the notion of absolute Truth. He discusses his

problems with the western concept of Truth in the Twilight of the Idols. He criticizes the western

tradition for passing down conceptual mummies; he says of philosophers that, nothing actual

has escaped from their hands alive.5 This analogy of the mummification of ideas illustrates

Nietzsches position very well. Nietzsche saw, like Heraclitus, the continuity of change in the

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real world. In the tradition of Plato and Parmenides, philosophers disregarded the world of sense

perception as deceptive and constructed unchanging ideas that could exist outside of this world.

Instead of investigating the world fortruths, philosophers have tended to investigate their minds

for Truth. This leads to the inevitable oversight of the persistence through change of objects over

time. Nietzsche sees the tradition philosophy far too concerned with an accurate description of a

stagnant what is, and not at all focused on how things persist through their growth and change.

In an essay he wrote early in his career (1873), called Truth and Lying in a Nonmoral

Sense, Nietzsche clearly demonstrates his opposition to the certainty of Truth. The essay aims

at analyzing what truth is and why it cannot be as certain as the western tradition has assumed it

to be. In order to thoroughly analyze what truth is, Nietzsche begins by investigating the origin

of the drive for Truth.6 He denotes that humans possess a tendency towards self-sufficiency, but

they are nevertheless bound to a social existence. This social bond brings rise to the necessity

for communication, and thus what Nietzsche identifies as the root of truth. The need to

accurately communicate, the need to be able to identify specific objects or specific situations,

creates the context in which a need for truth can arise. A uniformly valid and binding

designation is invented for things, and this legislation of language likewise establishes the first

laws oftruth.7 Truth as a standard exists in order to allow common identification, and create a

platform on which people can communally share their experiences in the world. With the rise of

truth comes the formation of a lie. The liar speaks contrary to what is collectively held to be

true. The community attaches a life-preserving value to truth, and a destructive value to lies.

Nietzsche claims that at this early period the communal man is indifferent towards pure

knowledge;8 truth is just a means to maintain communication among a community. Over time

man forgot truth was loosely adapted to the world they experienced, and they started to fabricate

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a power of knowledge over the world. Out of what man had made truth for communication, man

made Truth for power and control, and imposed certainty onto notions that were mere

approximations of reality.

At this point Nietzsche begins to question the certainty of Truth, and the viability of

language to possess such a potential as Truth. Are designations congruent with things? Is

language the adequate expression of all realities?9 Nietzsche wants to emphasize the complex

causal relationship responsible for the creation of words, and the designation of human sounds as

objects themselves. First, he demonstrates the non-universal nature of language, questioning

how so many different languages could arise if morphology were the universal route to ascertain

Truths. Then, he illustrates the causal relationship of an experience with the verbal expression of

that experience in order to draw out his opinion that language only provides a metaphoric

understanding of an experience, not an absolute account of what underlies reality. He accounts

the transference of experiences into words, as two distinct metaphors; one that is made in the

process of creating a mental image of an experience, and one that is made in order to express this

mental stimulus in a verbal exchange.10 If man ever knew that what we call Truths are really

metaphors, then at some point we forgot that they are mere representations, and started to cling

to them as if their life preserving value was for certain. Here Nietzsche identifies the drive for

Truth as the societal impulse to use the typical metaphors, to lie according to a fixed

convention.11 The metaphoric nature of language eliminates the potential for Truth in words.

Language is the embedded code of our understanding. Nietzsche argues that since

humans created systems like mathematics, it is a lie to say that we discovered that two plus two

equals four. We invented two plus two equals four. When someone hides something behind a

bush, and looks for it in the same place and finds itthere is not much praise in such seeking

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and finding.12 Mans language created the Truths of mans world. Our perspective is a unique

human perspective. The truth that we create is a unique human truth. Nietzsche elaborates on

how non-human animals perceive the world in a different way, and how insects too would

perceive the world in another different way. In the end, claiming that there is no correct

perception.13 In this Nietzsche means that if red is red to us, and green to the birds, and smells

funny to the bees, then there is no correct and True red. What we experience as red is arbitrary

apart from what actually exists beyond our perception of it. When we say that it is true the apple

is red, we are discussing a relationship between ourselves and the apple. If we allow the apple to

rot, it is quite likely that it will no longer be considered red. We coexist with truth; it lives

through us, while we live through it. Mans truth does not exist without man. When it is all

over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened. For his intellect has no additional

mission which would lead it beyond human life.14 Nietzsche holds truths to exist as

perspectives in individuals, not as universal concepts that can persist beyond this world.

In the preface to the second edition of The Gay Science, written in 1886, Nietzsche

provides a merciless and scathing critique of the history of philosophy and the predominant

notions of Truth reigning throughout the western tradition. He conveys his position distinctly by

describing it as one rising out the depths of illness. He claims to be rejuvenated, with new signs

of hope, foreseeing the end of what he considers to be a backward tradition and a long

maintained error. Nietzsche compares the traditional drive towards an objective Truth with an

irritably bad taste in his mouth. We have grown sick of this bad taste, this will to truth, this

truth at any price, this youthful madness in the love of truth.15 Nietzsche wants to revitalize

truth. He wants to raise awareness against the culturally ingrained conceptions of Truth.

Through his state of sickness, Nietzsche has come to understand the misunderstanding of an

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entire tradition. By clinging to ideas that were certain humans were able to falsely assume that

certainty was valuable. By holding Truth to be absolute beyond our perception of it, man has

overstepped his boundaries. We interpret the truth through our experiences with the surrounding

world. Truth is not something to search for that lives beyond us, but rather it lives with us in all

of our experiences.

I find the poem that I started this paper with called My Happiness from the prelude to the

second edition of The Gay Science to be a very good analogy for Nietzsches experience with

western thought. The four lines present two shifts Nietzsche highlights in his interpretation of

truth. The first shift is juxtaposed in the first two lines, Since I grew wary of the search, I

taught myself to find instead. Since Nietzsche found the rationalization of absolute Truth to be

too limiting in its scope, weeding out non-truths in search of rational certainty, he taught himself

to accept the truth in every experience. Then in the last two lines, Since cross winds caused my

ship to lurch, I sail with all winds straight ahead. If the ship were to be taken as analogous to

Nietzsches subjective experience, and the various winds as analogous to individual experiences,

then out of what the western tradition treats as conflicting experiences, Nietzsche compiles a

living truth, which grows linearly through experience rather than shifting sporadically from the

influence of the changing winds. His goal is to get away from this tradition of contradictory

confusion, and to live life, to philosophize life.

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1 Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Josefine Nauckhoff. Cambridge University Press: NewYork, USA. 2001all references to this text are to this edition and henceforth cited as endnotes-GS pg# sec#

Poem from the Prelude to the Gay Science: poem 2, page 11

2 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense. translated by Simon Sparks. In Simon Sparks 1st ed.Boulder, CO; Giclee Publishers Unlimited. 2004 all references to this text are to this edition and henceforth cited

as endnotes-TL pg4 p4

3 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Judith Norman. Cambridge University Press: NewYork, USA. 2002all references to this text are to this edition and henceforth cited as endnotes-BGE pg# sec#

preface

4 TL pg4 p4

5 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Penguin Group, NewYork, NY. 2003

pg45 sec1

6 TL pg2 p2

7 TL pg2 p38

TL pg2 p49

TL pg3 p110

TL pg3 p311

TL pg5 p112

TL pg6 p113

TL pg7 p214

TL pg1 p115

GS preface s4

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Nietzsche's truth