Nietzsche, Truth and Transformation

K. Mitcheson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137357052
• eBook ISBN: 9781137357069
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy

Providing a novel interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophical method, Nietzsche, Truth and Transformation addresses the philosophical problem of on what basis, if knowledge is always from a perspective, one can criticise modern humanity and culture, and how such critique can be actively responded to.

1

The Problem of Truth

Introduction

Nietzsche’s position on truth is a subject of controversy within Nietzsche scholarship. Conflicting interpretations in the literature reflect the existence of ostensibly conflicting statements within the text. Nietzsche’s attack on the moral and intellectual culture of his time involves the claim that our beliefs instantiate errors and falsification (TI The Four Great Errors). Notions of error, illusion and deception, however, are not unambiguously negative motifs in Nietzsche’s thought (BT 25, HH I: 33, GM III: 19).

Nietzsche’s understanding of truth cannot be captured by privileging either criticisms or praise of it, which are both to be found in his writing. Interpretations that represent Nietzsche as dismissing truth fail to account for his ultimate commitment to its value. Praise for truth can be found in his early work: “love of truth is something fearsome and mighty” (UT III: 8), “knowledge of even the ugliest reality is itself beautiful” (D 550), “for this goal no sacrifice is too great” (D 45), and at the end of his productive life: “How much truth can a spirit bear, how much truth can a spirit dare? That became for me more and more the real measure of value [ ... ] every step forward in knowledge is the result of courage” (EH Foreword: 3). It is clear from such statements that Nietzsche both values truth and believes that some form of knowledge is possible. We should not dismiss, however, the challenge that Nietzsche brings against existing understandings of truth and the seriousness of his questioning the unconditional value of truth: “we have grown sick of this bad taste, this will to truth, to ‘truth at any price’” (GS Preface: 4). Nietzsche takes seriously the question: “Granted we will truth: why not untruth instead?” (BGE 1) We need, therefore, to take account of Nietzsche’s critique of truth without representing him as rejecting truth entirely.

Nietzsche’s conflicting statements regarding truth cannot be explained away by fitting them into distinct time periods encapsulating a change in his position. Seeming contradictions in Nietzsche’s valuation of truth span his writings. To divide Nietzsche’s writings into rigid periods would be to exaggerate the rupture between the texts and overlook the continuity of themes. While his conceptual development involves a self-proclaimed break from his early embrace of Schopenhauer, the development of his understanding of truth can be understood as a gradual evolution growing out of persistent concerns.¹ Truth, the question of its value and the form it must take in a post-Kantian world present a set of problems that Nietzsche continually returns to interrogate.

The aim of this chapter is to delineate the problematic of truth as it emerged for Nietzsche. By highlighting the presence of key themes that shaped his approach to truth, we are better placed to understand Nietzsche’s mature attitude to truth and its value. To this end, I provide an overview of Nietzsche’s early discussions of truth and some of the influences that shaped his approach to the topic. I make reference to all of Nietzsche’s early work, but, as it provides the most immediate context for the emergence of his mature philosophy, and as some boundaries must be drawn for this task, I focus primarily on the period of 1878 to 1882. To clarify the nature of these formative themes, I consider Nietzsche’s acquaintance with Kantian doctrine and, in particular, with Friedrich Lange’s uptake of the thematic of the subject’s contribution to knowledge. My aim is not to precisely evaluate Nietzsche’s conceptual relationship to Kant or Lange, or to add to the historical scholarship concerning his reading of post-Kantian philosophers. I draw on such scholarship in order to better understand how Nietzsche approached the question of truth and to emphasise the existence of certain themes that provide the framework from which Nietzsche’s own take on truth emerged.

I begin by delineating what I consider to be the key aspects of Nietzsche’s particular approach to truth, which are present from the beginning and continue to inform his mature philosophy, and I highlight that Nietzsche raises the question of truth’s value from the start. It is crucial to bear in mind that Nietzsche is always interested in this question, both to understand the textual references to truth in his work, and to make sense of his own theory of truth, which cannot coherently be extracted from the issue of its value and its cultural existence. After briefly presenting the relevant aspects of Kant’s epistemology, I discuss Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysical truth, which he associates with the Kantian notion of the thing-in-itself. Nietzsche ultimately rejects the possibility of our ever having knowledge of a thing-in-itself with all perspective subtracted, but is primarily concerned with the cultural role and effect of our investment in this concept. In the next section, I turn to an aspect of Kant’s philosophy that has a positive influence on Nietzsche’s thought: the contribution of the subject to experience. Taking account of the neo-Kantian Lange’s influence on Nietzsche serves to emphasise the role of the knower in Nietzsche’s understanding of truth, and the significance of Nietzsche’s interest in self-knowledge. In the period from 1878 to 1882, Nietzsche is already concerned with the role of interpretation in knowledge and the importance of method in taking account of this. I describe how Nietzsche’s position on truth develops towards a point from which his perspectivism will surface. The final section of this chapter shows how Nietzsche sees knowledge as an experimental activity and already considers truth as potentially transformative. These themes will influence Nietzsche’s mature understanding of truth as a practice through which transformation can be effected, and the modern human can be overcome.

Questioning the value of truth

In The Birth of Tragedy, the influence of Schopenhauer on Nietzsche’s thought is at its strongest. Despite already demonstrating an awareness of problems with Schopenhauer’s approach to the thing-in-itself,² Nietzsche has not yet denied the possibility that our practice of truth can coherently aim at describing the thing-in-itself, claiming, “the contrast between this genuine truth of nature and the cultural lie which pretends to be the only reality is like the contrast between the eternal core of things, the thing-in-itself, and the entire world of phenomena” (BT 8). Nietzsche’s position changes dramatically from that of The Birth of Tragedy: he will soon move to insist on the emptiness of such a conception of truth, and in his later work will provide an analysis of its role as an ideal, but his characteristic ambivalence concerning the value of truth is already present. Of Sophocles’ Oedipus, Nietzsche writes: “Wisdom, the myth seems to whisper to us, and Dionysiac wisdom in particular, is an unnatural abomination: whoever plunges nature into the abyss of destruction by what he knows must in turn experience the dissolution of nature in his own person.” (BT 9) The terrible potential of knowledge requires art, “tragic knowledge, which, simply to be endured, needs art for protection and as medicine” (BT 15). The effect of truth, whether we are capable of bearing truth, and not simply epistemological issues concerning its possibility, is thus one of the formative questions in Nietzsche’s philosophy.

Nietzsche’s concern that truth should not be unquestioningly privileged over other values is also evident early in his philosophical career. In the Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche argues that history should ultimately serve life and not truth at the cost of life. He demands: “Let us at least learn better how to employ history for the purpose of life! Then we will gladly acknowledge that the suprahistorical outlook possesses more wisdom than we do, provided we can only be sure that we possess more life” (UM II: 1). Nietzsche ends this meditation with the claim that knowledge must not eclipse life:

Is life to dominate knowledge or is knowledge to dominate life? Which of the two forces is the higher and more decisive? There can be no doubt: life is the higher, the dominating force, for knowledge which annihilated life would have annihilated itself with it. Knowledge presupposes life and thus has in the preservation of life the same interest as any creature has in its own continued existence. (UT II: 10)

This claim that truth and knowledge are valuable in the context of their effect on life, and not in themselves, prefigures Nietzsche’s later call for a revaluation of all values on the basis of life’s flourishing (GM Preface: 3).

From The Birth of Tragedy onwards, Nietzsche recognises the role that illusion plays in life, and questions our capacity to endure the truth. In order “to be able to live”, Apolline illusion is necessary (BT 25). According to Nietzsche, life has used and needed error (HH I: 33). A degree of falsification has been a condition for life in general, and for Nietzsche personally in the development of his philosophy. In his preface for the new edition of Human, All Too Human, written in 1886, he writes: “I had artificially to enforce, falsify and invent a suitable fiction for myself” (HH I: Preface: 1). This process of falsification can be seen not only as a prerequisite of life but also as a positive enhancement of it. In exploring the metaphor of colour blindness, as comparable to our comprehension of the world, Nietzsche considers that the inevitable “approximation and simplification” in our understanding of the world “is not merely a deficiency” but by introducing harmonies “can constitute an enrichment of nature. Perhaps it was only in this way that mankind first learned to take pleasure in the sight of existence” (D 426).

Nietzsche, therefore, recognises the potentially negative effects of truth and advances in knowledge, and the positive role of falsification. In contrast to the philosopher’s traditional assumption that truth is the ultimate aim, he raises the questions of whether, why, and how truth should be valued. “I cannot see why it should be desirable that truth alone should rule and be omnipotent; it is enough for me that it should possess great power. But it must be able to struggle and have opponents, and one must be able to find relief from it from time to time in untruth” (D 507). Nietzsche requires us to consider that truth comes at a price. We should know, therefore, why we are prepared to pay this price. In an aphorism, “Sorrow is knowledge”, which borrows its title from Byron, Nietzsche reminds us of the potential pain of truth: “man may bleed to death from knowledge of truth” (HH I: 109). The progress of truth will remove life’s consolations. This represents a danger, and a cause of suffering. “Will truth not become inimical to life, to the better man?” (HH I: 34)

Nietzsche does, however, declare that “telling the truth” is “that for which it is always time, and which the present has more need of than ever” (UT I: 12), and that each “must organise the chaos within himself by thinking back to his real needs. His honesty, the strength and truthfulness of his character, must at some time or other rebel against a state of things in which he only repeats what he has heard” (UT I: 10). This tension between Nietzsche’s belief in the need for truth and his awareness of a need for illusion continues into Nietzsche’s later work and shapes his mature conception of truth. It is a defining feature of his philosophy that he does not assume truth to have a supreme value. This does not imply that Nietzsche would have us embrace error over truth, but emphasises that we must consider what is involved in truth and what it means to seek to expose illusion and error. Nietzsche asks whether if error has a value for life, this gives us a reason that counts against truth. “How if this effect – the effect of consolation – were precisely what truth were incapable of? – Would this constitute an objection to truths?” (D 424) In place of taking for granted that the aim of philosophy is the pursuit of truth, Nietzsche’s own philosophy pursues the question of how far this pursuit is possible and desirable. Crucially for Nietzsche, the question of possibility is framed not in terms of the limits to epistemological certainty but in terms of our capacity to endure the truth.

The illusions that life has needed have often been taken to be truths. Nietzsche addresses why these approximations and simplifications had to be believed to be true. Just as life has needed error and illusion, it has also needed the concept of truth. It has needed to bestow on illusions the status of truth. Nietzsche raises not only the question of the value of truth, but also that of why we have valued truth. This involves a cultural analysis and critique, which narrates the role that truth has played.

Given our reliance on illusions, the question “where on earth can the drive to truth possibly have come from?” arises. (TL 1) The answer Nietzsche suggests in his early unpublished essay On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense is that in the process of forming societies, “that which is to count as ‘truth’ from this point onwards now becomes fixed, i.e. a way of designating things is invented which has the same validity and force everywhere” (TL 1). To think that “language [is] the full and adequate expression of all realities” requires “forgetfulness” (TL 1). Illusions are established as fixed truths as part of socialisation, and in this process a drive for truth emerges. Here it is a drive to fix things; it can be involved in falsification, but it will also, as a value and goal in its own right, come to challenge these falsifications. Nietzsche will later consider how our drive to truth undermines our belief in what we have fixed as true.

Here we encounter both the notion of a drive for truth, which we will see recur in the concept of the will to truth, and its ambiguous involvement with other drives (a concept that I will expand on in Chapter 2). The drive to truth has always been associated with “a whole host of the most various drives – curiosity, flight from boredom, envy, vanity, the desire for amusement, for example – can be involved in the striving for truth” (UT II: 6). That men “give themselves over to the sciences [Wissenschaften] [ ... ] can hardly originate in any supposed ‘desire for truth’: for how could there exist any desire at all for cold, pure inconsequential knowledge! [ ... ] the man of learning [Dienern der Wissenschaft] consists of a confused network of very various impulses and stimuli, he is an altogether impure metal” (UT III: 6). The concept of a drive to truth, which cannot be understood simply in terms of the pure aim of truth, will reach fruition once Nietzsche has developed his understanding of the will to power. This will allow him to explain the development of the will to truth according to its own need to expand and assert its interpretation and evaluation, and the needs that have used it, and not simply in terms of its willing truth. Thus, the question of its value becomes linked to the (contingent) form it has taken and values which it currently serves. This will enable Nietzsche to resolve a tension between his criticisms of truth and his commitment to it by linking the criticisms to a form of truth which can be overcome.

The destructive and dangerous character of truth in undermining life-sustaining illusions presents not simply grounds to question its value, but also an opportunity for positive change. Truth is compared to a “bitter medicine”, painful and not unambiguously desirable, but potentially curative (UM II: 4). The advance of truth, in undermining our illusory consolations, allows us to place our energy in our immediate reality. An example of this is in the exploration of a thing’s true origin. “The more insight we possess into an origin the less significant does the origin appear: while what is nearest to us, what is around us and in us, gradually begins to display colours and beauties and enigmas of significance of which earlier mankind had not an inkling” (D 44). In exposing stories of origin as myth, we remove the mystical lure of the obscure and are left with the potential of a new engagement with the present. In the experience of a loss of our self-supporting delusions, we are also forced to change. The transformative potential of truth, which Nietzsche will come to understand as an activity and a practice, will play a key role in his mature philosophy of overcoming.

As well as considering the value of truth, Nietzsche engages with the problem of whether we can have true knowledge. He is aware of sceptical concerns regarding our access to truth and the possibility of knowledge. I will explore below how Nietzsche’s rejection of truth, in the form he analyses it to have developed historically, is connected to his belief that in this form, it is inherently unattainable. The alleged asceticism of our concern with truth, asserted by Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morality, is linked to his critique of it as an obsession with what is beyond our reach, which is present in his earlier writings. In addressing the problem of “those strange phenomena of morality usually called asceticism and holiness” Nietzsch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1 The Problem of Truth
• 2 Perspectivism
• 3 The Will to Truth
• 4 The Practice of Truth
• 5 The Will to Power
• 6 Becoming the Free Spirit
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index