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

Since I grew weary of the search I 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,3 truth 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

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 for truths, 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 of truth.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

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

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

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.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Josefine Nauckhoff. Cambridge University Press: New York, 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 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 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Judith Norman. Cambridge University Press: New York, USA. 2002all references to this text are to this edition and henceforth cited as endnotes-BGE pg# sec# preface TL pg4 p4 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Penguin Group, NewYork, NY. 2003 pg45 sec1 TL pg2 p2 TL pg2 p3

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