Nietzsche on Truth, Again: on "Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense"

I wrote this about 15 years ago, in another life, as part of a rare philosophical discussion with an intelligent, philosophically engaged student (Stefan G.), who as a musician was really into Nietzsche.

 

        Now I can't write a book about Nietzsche's many views of truth, but overall I sense one basic fault line that runs through his writings: as a philosopher the striving to go beyond surfaces, to question public opinion and traditional convictions, and in the end gain a deeper (or higher) perspective on life.  In this mode, truth is connected to depth and authenticity; the opposite to it is laziness, conformism, false comfort, cowardice, superficiality.  The tension arises when in his desire for depth (or heights) Nietzsche also strives to satisfy the whole of his being, “to affirm life.”  The idea is that an unsentimental, pure striving for truth does reach its object – life, the world, as they really are.  And the problem for Nietzsche is his conclusion that they are utterly horrible. At the bottom of his thinking I always sense the “wisdom of Silineus,” quoted in his early work The Birth of Tragedy: the best for man he cannot have, for it is never to have been born.  Given this “truth,” all means are allowed to escape it; nothing else matters but to overcome it.

      The Greeks in Nietzsche's view lived life to its fullest, empowered by a largely amoral make-believe world and the good sense not to question to deeply into the nature of things “as they are in themselves.” Thus we can't have both: truth/depth and life at its fullest.  Throughout his productive life, Nietzsche attacks the value of truthfulness for the sake of “affirming life” at the only level he believes it can be affirmed – an amoral “aesthetic phenomenon.”  And yet, at other times, qua skeptical philosopher, he belies this willingness to be satisfied with illusions, constantly telling his readers what he believes the deepest truths are and trying to give us the courage to face them as they are.  One of my theses: Nietzsche has set up a false dichotomy. And he is inconsistent, at times praising the courageous who can face truth, and times claiming truth is less important than “life.”

Nietzsche's many passages on truth consider not a univocal concept, but different aspects of the word.  Often he uses truth and means scientific truth.  His attitude towards science is complex and contradictory; yet his adherence to a scientific worldview as the true one, regardless of those passages in which he considers science one perspective among others, drives his thinking in “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense.”   It is also significant that he thinks truth, morality, and aesthetics to be logically separate categories, just like scientific attitudes today; he divides what Socrates/Plato thought of as belonging together: truthfulness and  goodness (and in the Symposium, beauty).  Of course, Nietzsche agrees with Socrates that scientific views are fundamentally indifferent to man's life; one can have all the truth one wants by counting and measuring things, but whatever utility such truths may have for us, they don't touch fundamental questions of meaning.  And, of course, the scientific perspective is indifferent to questions of meaning; a logical difference becomes a metaphysical gap when the indifferent reality revealed by science is taken to be metaphysical reality as such. 

 Sometimes he is obviously not attacking the kind of truth-seeking he believes himself to be doing, but a conventional, shallow “truth” which does not go much beyond wishful thinking.  Philistinism.  Those who pretend to love the truth but use philosophy as a stage to display their ego.  Or the pedant who does not realize that truth pursuing at the deepest levels is not the pedantic enterprise of normal science or conventional wisdom, but dynamite. 

Another of my theses: Nietzsche's view of truth is informed by science; it is reductive; it is wrongly cut off from moral and aesthetic reality (from goodness and beauty); and thus Socrates/Plato was right and Nietzsche wrong.  A well-known question from Jenseits von Gut und Böse could serve as a further preface for Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne and for my response to it:

 

“Granted, we want truth; why not rather Falsity? And Ignorance?  – The problem of the value of truth confronts us here, a – or were we the one who is confronting that problem”

 

[„Gesetzt, wir wollen Wahrheit: warum nicht lieber Unwahrheit? Und Unwissenheit?  –  Das Problem vom Wert der Wahrheit trat vor uns hin, –  oder waren wir's, die vor das Problem hin traten?“ ]

 

From what context, from what application does this question draw its force, for it does have some signifying power; it is not a meaningless question.  My answer: of course, in superficial sense of “truth” (in quotation marks), it does have force.  In fact, in this sense, it is not truthfulness, but a form of self-deception. In this sense, to question to value of “truth” is to question the value of self-deception, philistinism, pedantry.  Ironically, much of Nietzsche's attack on truth is a veiled attack on a superficial attitude towards truth, an attack on self-deception.  It also draws force when applied to certain practices of science and scientifically-minded philosophers: one can certainly question the value of devoting one's life to counting and measuring and calculating things which don't touch the surface of authentic life – as Socrates brought philosophy from the study of the heavens to man.  And one can question the value of a naive optimism that the truth will always be pleasant and comforting, and all other such conventional certitudes. For such contexts, Nietzsche's question is “dynamite.”  It helps clean the air in one's thinking about truth, and attack ad hominem against certain lazy and fallacious forms of thinking. At this level, we are not yet doing genuine philosophy, but defining the space in which serious thinking should take place by getting rid of the corrupt forms.

What the question cannot mean without both absurdity and mendacity is to call the genuine forms truthfulness into question.  Here, the tension between depth and being able to be glad one was born comes into play to make things difficult for Nietzsche and confusing for his readers.  In the end, there are no arguments to be made, for we have to do with things which are absolute, sui generis. To choose to live a lie, to deceive oneself, to remain ignorant about matters essential to life, to deceive others, to prefer myths to truths because they make life seem more pleasant or less horrible – this can't be what Nietzsche is about. If it is, in fact, what he is about, I cannot come up with an argument to show he is wrong; but I would only pity him. I certainly couldn't take his writings seriously; I couldn't respect him as a philosopher, whose vocation is precisely to seek truth, wherever it will lead.  He would receive a failing grade in my writing class for all his rhetorical brilliance.  We would simply have to part ways.

 

And now to "Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense"

 

I.  Nietzsche opens the piece, frames it so to speak, by one of his standard appeals – again, rhetorically brilliant – to the meaningless, indifferent universe, and the insignificance of man and his reason within it.  But this colorful opening does critical philosophical work for Nietzsche, and shouldn't be quickly passed over without at least briefly analyzing what work it does. It signifies, of course, to his readers because none of us can escape the power of this picture of the world, which draws its force not only from the success of particular scientific theories of nature (Darwinian evolution, relativity Theory, thermodynamics, etc.), but from the scientific “value-free” way of thinking, and the demythologizing (Weber's Entzauberung der Welt; disenchantment of the world) tendencies introduced into the culture through science.  It forms the horizon – the unquestioned assumption – of Nietzsche's project; the force of so much of what Nietzsche has to say depends on this horizon. 

I suppose he thinks it true; I suppose he believes what he writes, that nature is utterly indifferent to human longings.  If he believed, as he sometimes does write, that it is only one human perspective among others, then one could without loss of depth find another perspective which would make other life possibilities possible.

His horror at existence unredeemed by the aesthetic is closely dependent on the meaningless universe + Darwinian nature (with all minor differences Nietzsche has with Darwin, he is fundamentally in agreement with his reductive naturalism), and the demythologizing of nature as a source of meaning. It is the truths of science which – for Nietzsche – leave no conceptual space for God, and thus are responsible for “the death of God."

Nietzsche's article draws it force for us due to the power of the scientific worldview.  In a universe where only atoms, molecules, waves, forces, etc. obeying causal laws (or acting at random in the quantum dimension), the spirit has no conceptual space to exist. To call this worldview „scientific“ is a misnomer, however: true science does not make metaphysical statements about Being such as statements affirming or denying the reality of our inner life, or whether Reality is nothing but what is revealed by scientific practice (of which science is, of course, a part).  This metaphysical move is what is behind the so-called scientific worldview, which most of us accept as a matter or faith, and which make reductions of the inner life to causes which in principle can be investigated by science (and thus “real” according to this metaphysic) seem so plausible, despite being so improbable that to believe them would almost imply that our inner lives have no more reality than those depicted in the popular movie as existing in the Matrix.  Nietzsche sometimes speaks of scientific truth as a perspective; sometimes he assumes it as unquestioningly true.

Next Nietzsche performs a reduction of truth – truth in the service of the instincts. Though in Nietzsche (at least in later works), life is not so much oriented to survival as a “will-to-power” (and this has been understood in many different ways), the framework is basically reductive: it seems to us that a person may love truth, that philosophers may pursue truth, that honesty is a virtue, etc. In fact, although we are not conscious of it, what “true” really is amounts to a mean to an end programmed into our organisms by “animal physiology.” 

Nietzsche reduces the value to truth as a spiritual category to fundamentally different biological/psychological categories.  This amounts to the claim that our experience of truth as a virtue, etc., is an illusion masking instincts, non-rational, non-individual processes that determine our being without our being able or willing to acknowledge them.  In a similar way, Freud reduced much of conscious life to a mask of the ID, which was his interpretation of what Nietzsche was trying to get at with his „will-to-power.“ 

Have I understood Nietzsche correctly?  Partly.  He goes back and forth from this reductive concept to criticizing shallow view of honesty and truthfulness. But to criticize certain attitudes as embodying shallowness with respect to truth and honesty, is at the same time to presuppose there are deeper attitudes – his own, for example; and these deeper attitudes cannot be accounted for reductively, as really only serving instincts or social conventions.

Aside from reducing truth to a function of the instincts, Nietzsche offers a sort of anthropological picture of society, in which in order to co-exist (and with his picture of the instincts it can be no more than coexistence), some minimal consensus of the meaning of words and conventional behavior is needed by Nietzsche's (to me, as much as I share Nietzsche's dislike of conformism, rather revolting) picture of people as herd-people.  Truth is never valued for its own sake, but as a means to the end of protection of the weak.  As long as people are not physically harmed, no one has anything against deception, which is more or less the natural thing for us to do. 

The point to emphasize here is that people have a tactical relation to truth – not truth, but those things their instincts program them to desire drive behavior; truth is good or bad only to the extent it allows them to achieve these pre-given desires.  Truth is “good” only when deception prevents them from getting what their instincts program them to want.  Thus pure truth, if it existed, is irrelevant, “not worth striving for,” as Nietzsche puts it.

This sociological picture (fantasy?) of truth is also reductive.  We think honesty is a virtue, but what is really always is amounts to little more than a social convention which can be more or less effectively manipulated to achieve those ends to which our instincts program us to strive for. That many people treat it as though it were this can be interpreted reductively; but in light of Nietzsche's own truthfulness and his implicit criticism of this philistinism, it can also be interpreted as merely a shallow attitude towards truthfulness.  Again, Nietzsche moves back and forth between his reductive hypothetical constructions and his belief in a higher and lower form of truthfulness.

I can't go too far into the meaningless universe hypothesis.  But it is not obviously true; I'm not even sure I – we – know exactly what it means. It is certainly not  a scientific fact, theory, or hypothesis, though the reason people believe in it is not unconnected with the cultural-epistemological power of science. But there is no experiment one could conduct to prove whether nature is meaningless; no amount of data could verify or falsify the hypothesis; the question is no part of the disciplines of physics, chemistry, geology, etc.   Perhaps it is just another way of proclaiming one's atheism, or one's nihilism?  But neither atheism nor nihilism are scientific or mathematical matters. My thesis: the meaningless universe hypothesis is an expression of ... meaning, not science. And as such, should be no more assumed as obviously true than the (distorted) religious attitudes Nietzsche criticizes.

With respect to the reduction-to-instincts interpretation, one has to distinguish between evolutionary changes over time and the mechanisms behind these changes – unquestionably matters of science – and the reduction of our inner life to biological processes (the mind-body problem) which is philosophical, not scientific. The relationship between physiology and the inner life remains highly contentious within philosophy. Suffice it to say Nietzsche does not seem to be aware of the issues involves; he gives no arguments supporting his reductive thesis; in other words, he begs the major questions involved, because it seems he confuses the scientific aspects of the Darwinian framework with the philosophical aspects.  A course in the philosophy of science would have helped him sort these kinds of issues out.

The final part of Nietzsche's article claims that language by its very nature is not an adequate means to expressing truth. Although this raises issues I can't deal with here involving the philosophy of language, I will at least indicate my position at the end of these comments.

Reading Nietzsche, though almost always a pleasure, is philosophically frustrating. This is because he blinds us with his powerful rhetoric from his typically dubious philosophical moves and assumptions. In this article, he moves back and forth between his reductive assumptions (never argued) to his polemic against philistinism and conformism (responsible for much of the force of his writings) to his attack on moralities based on notions of common humanity, equal worth, or human dignity.  One can deal with the reductive assumptions with philosophical argument; against the moralistic polemic against philistinism and conformism I have nothing to object to, only when put in the context of his rejection of the moral worth of each individual human life – his “extra-moral sense” – he draws conclusions diametrically opposed to those I would draw.

 

II.

What underlying conception of truth lies behind the “extra-moral” framework assumed by Nietzsche?  For here, at least, is something he considers true.

Interesting is the conceptual dependence of substantive matters of meaning and his conception of truth – in particular, the relation of truth to meaning, emotional response, our deepest longings.  Thinking about what Nietzsche believes to be true and the interpretation of the concept “truth” that these beliefs he regards as true presuppose shows that the concept of “truth” cannot be conceived logically independently from substantive beliefs about meaning of self, others, world.  Independently of any substantive moral beliefs, in the inclusive sense that Nietzsche's rejection of morality is a moral belief (i.e. a belief involving the meaning of our dealings with self, others, world), one cannot say what truth or reason is. Thus no independent, morally neutral rationality can then adjudicate between conflicting claims. 

Nietzsche's unquestioned belief in an indifferent universe, in man's utter insignificance, and in a reductionist pseudo-Darwinian interpretation of the human soul co-determine a conception of “truth” as value-free, scientific, “objective” in the sense that who one is is irrelevant to the truth. The question is: is this conception the only one, or even the better one, in the context of philosophy?

In general, the concept truth is applied when our judgments of the way things are accurately reflect the way things really are – which in itself doesn't say very much, applying to everything from counting chairs to complex questions of the sciences  or the humanities or politics, or the deeper questions of meaning we must face in our lives.  It always implies the possibility of error as well as the possibility that the truth may not turn out to be what we wish it to be.  But depending on context in which the concept is applied and the kinds of questions asked, truth has different grammars.  Consider the following examples:

 

Example One

     It is an (admittedly vastly complex) scientific question whether the human-caused increase of green-house gases into the atmosphere is causing significant climate changes.  Groups and individuals have strongly conflicting political, economic, and personal interests in the outcome of this scientific question.  Of course, to the extent that a scientist investigating the question is led to not see the relationship the way it is through such external, emotional commitments – say he hates capitalism and believes for moral and political reasons in a radical political and economic change – to that extent his attitude and emotional responses blind him to the truth of the matter, which is quite independent of, and indifferent to, his hopes.  The personal attitudes and emotional responses are logically external to the reality of climate change.  And this reality can in principle be investigated whatever one's fundamental beliefs, which should ideally be “bracketed out” during the investigation.  Truth for scientific questions is not logically tied to emotional response; even if one's political passion aided rather than hindered the search for truth, the relationship is purely contingent.

A real scientist, upon looking at the data of his politically passionate colleague, could meaningfully say: “I don't care about his politics; the question is whether his data holds up.” Further assume the data are skewed to support the politically passionate scientist's political agenda.  Then his emotional response could rightly be cited as a cause which hindered his pursuit of truth, or blinded him to reality.  In this the passion would be similar to tiredness or drunkenness – an external cause for not getting things right, for distorting thought. Such a conception of truth – entirely proper within many practices – gives rise to an idealized picture of objectivity and the perfectly rational thinker, which assumed in Nietzsche's time a cultural power transcending the practices (science and engineering) where it was at home. It behind a model for truth and rationality itself, characterized famously by Thomas Nagel as “the view from nowhere” by an intelligence which occupies the Archimedean point.  Who sees things as God would see them.

When made absolute, such a conception of truth does become “extra-moral.”  The this particular grammar is abstracted from the social practices in which it is at home,  everything (including all meaning and value) becomes just as external to reality as the scientists political passion to the facts of global warming.

Through the optic of this conception of truth, being and meaning are radically divorced; meaning is banished into subjectivity, which itself has no footing in being and thus is subject to reduction. Thus the meaningless and indifferent universe as well as Darwinian psychology is the pre-determined outcome of applying the scientific conception of truth to metaphysics. (Clearly – the indifferent universe and pseudo-Darwinian nature of Nietzsche are metaphysical speculations.) 

 

Example Two

      Now consider a case where emotional response functions differently as a critical concept. Image a happily married man who falls in love with another woman.  He is accused of being shallow and romantically sentimental in both his loves and what they mean. (I am actually thinking of a character in Iris Murdoch's The Sacred and Profane Love Machine.)  Being a psychiatrist, he justifies his adultery by citing certain empirical claims from psychology.  He might say, for example, that evolution has genetically pre-formed the male of the species such that he seeks to pass his genes along at every opportunity; therefore, not monogamy but polygamy is natural and thus his adultery is justifiable.  But he may not make any such claims. He might simply give romantic-sentimental accounts of being-in-love with two women, lovers being tragically fated for one another, being in the grip of irresistible emotions, wanting to finally live authentically, feeling alive, etc. 

Suppose someone does want to say, and truly: “You, sir, are shallow and sentimental.”  Could someone who is unsure, or the lover himself, say, as did the fellow scientist above: “I don't care whether he is shallow and sentimental.  I just want to know whether his beliefs are true?”

Although this makes perfect sense in scientific example above, and might also make sense if the question were the truth of his psychological (scientific) claims, the response seems absurd as a reaction to the judgment of shallowness and sentimentality. Here the shallowness and sentimentality – unlike the political passion of the scientist above – is not a contingent cause of faulty thinking, but the very form of the error itself.  The shallowness and sentimentality are the bad thinking (and feeling), not the external cause of it.  In this example, the emotional response functions as a critical concept; to judge someone's relationships as  shallow and sentimental is to criticize them; these concepts indicate a way such relationships can be false, unauthentic, counterfeit, or corrupt – not the cause of such failures.

In the second example, where feeling and thought cannot be logically separated, truth involves one of Nietzsche's uses: to distinguish between the authentic and the unauthentic; in the first example, where feeling may only be logically related to truth as an external cause contingently aiding or hindering thinking, the logical distinction is between the correct and the incorrect. 

The confusion occurs when Nietzsche treats matter belonging to first context in terms of the second:  the problem of the naturalistic reduction of meaning “explaining away” the reality of the inner life in terms of a scientistic, quasi mechanical theory – consciousness gives us the illusion of truthfulness, but really we are driven by unconscious selfish instincts obeying their own programs and social conventions serving such instincts in the weaker specimens.

Thus within the scientistic (actually metaphysical) reduction, the relevant contrast for truth is no longer authentic verses unauthentic expressions of the inner life (truthfulness, honesty) – and the exposure of the inauthentic is what gives Nietzsche's writings force – but correct verses incorrect, with consciousness and the inner life being proclaimed inherently illusionary and mendacious in light of Nietzsche's metaphysical biology.  [I think these two examples also partly clarify the logical differences between the natural sciences and the humanities.]

 

III.

To want to look at cases like example two above – thinking about the inner life where concepts like shallow or sentimental function logically as critical concepts, forms of error or untruth, rather than contingent causes of error like in example one – means to want to see moral problems (or hermeneutic problems in general) as scientific problems as in example one: to want to separate truth from value.  Seeing the lie in terms of one conception of truth or the other – example one or two – cannot be conceptually independent from the objects under consideration: lying and truth. Both examples only make sense on the basis of prior assumptions about the reality involved, which itself cannot be determined by an independently intelligible theory of truth; the reality involved rather makes the theory of truth intelligible. 

The problem of finding out the shortest way to Golm from Bornim is the same for the sinner and the saint, the profound and the superficial; the problem of knowing whether someone's “being in love” is an authentic response to another person or an infantile fantasy is tied to values and persons in a way the road to Golm is not.  Both are questions of truth in the sense that judgments can be made about the way things are, etc.

Nietzsche's extra-moral truth applied to the inner life makes sense only against the background assumption of the indifferent universe and the pseudo-Darwinian [Darwin was not interested in the mind-body problem, to my knowledge, but only the mechanisms of evolutionary change] reduction of the inner life to effects of instinct.  Under this reduction, problems like wanting to know whether being-in-love is a deep emotional response to the wonder of another person or an infantile fantasy simply dissolve – all states we term “being-in-love” are effects (masks) of a primary reality – instinct. 

I suppose Nietzsche would say the illusions are necessary for conscious creatures who would otherwise see how horrible life in the meaningless universe really is and stop reproducing, or stop trying to fulfill its program – the will-to-power, whatever it is that this program orders us to do.  [What or who would recognize this?  How does this recognition fit into the biological program?]   But the reduction is intelligible only by a prior decision to see the reality of the inner life in terms of a conception of truth (example one) which corresponds to objects of scientific investigation or the shortest way to Golm – which at one stroke denies the reality of the inner life and explains away any conception of truth not reducible to “animal physiology.”  A circular argument, since the issue is precisely whether the conception of truth in example one is appropriate for thinking about the inner life.

Meaning for Nietzsche – problems of example two are problems of meaning – is an “aesthetic phenomenon,” an effect of the instincts, an “interpretation” which creates a non-existing wall consisting of fantasies about self, others, and world separating that which uses the personal pronoun “I” from the relentless reality of the blind will-to-power.  Such a view of things is certainly not scientific, not independently verifiable or falsifiable by sinners or saints, profound or superficial people.  We can't set up the Nietzschean picture alongside the Socratic one, for example, and appeal to an independent conception of truth to help us decide which is true. The Good and the True cannot be conceptually disentangled.  Judgments of value (or lack of value) co-determine whether one thinks about a matter in terms of example one or two.  In Nietzsche's case, his denial of the value of truth for life (as he conceives it) influences his decision to see it in an “extra-moral sense.” Notice how the force of Nietzsche’s writings largely depends on his effective polemic against philistinism and unauthentic conventions.  Here he is operating with a conception of truth outlined in example two: distinguishing genuine from counterfeit spiritual states. But then he moves quickly to the reduction involved in seeing the inner life in terms of the conception of truth in example one. 

This going back and forth between debunking the inauthentic and reducing all of the inner life is confusing; the force of his rhetoric is in no small way indebted to this confusion. It is as if the dubious scientistic reduction of the inner life lives parasitically off of the effective debunking of counterfeit forms of the inner life.

 

IV.

The full reality of the inner life cannot be captured in an extra-moral conception of truth. The deceptions, lies, flattery, shallowness, and so on, are critical concepts indicated forms of real spiritual harm.  Plato has his Socrates say that it is better to suffer evil than to do it.  Wittgenstein thinks genuine morality is absolute, sui generis.  Lies almost always harm the liar and the one lied to (perhaps, as Kant thought, they always harm them) because we are not just spin-offs of a master program, but beyond all the fantasies of our fat relentless egos we are real, and radically singular, even if not transparent (which would be boring). I don't need to prove that lying always harms the soul to refute Nietzsche; just one case is needed to refute his reductionism. And I don't have to go to extremes like the “Holocaust lie” – a simple example from academic life will suffice.

Consider the example of two college instructors, evaluating the written work of their classes. 

 

Professor Nitske

       Image a Nietzschean instructor who sees before him every Tuesday morning a group of herd animals hiding behind masks of “the flabby concept of humanity.” But among the class is a very promising specimen with a strong will and intelligent, showing the potential to become a freier Geist or perhaps even an Übermensch. 

Glancing through the work of the class, he finds what he expected to find – flawed, weak arguments, written in flat, democratic prose. Rather than waste his time giving them instruction on how to improve their arguments, their thinking, their prose, he gives them all much better marks than they deserve to flatter them, which not only satisfies his love of irony but insures his popularity which is a condition for his freedom. But he spends much time on the work of the budding Übermensch.

Afterwards, during the semester pause, he begins to feel something like remorse.  Hasn't he betrayed those students in his class?  Hasn't he betrayed his vocation?  Fortunately, he recalls the hard truths he has learned from Nietzsche: remorse is caused by the power of the resentment of the herd gaining power over his will through the illusions of morality, a “moral interpretation” of essentially amoral phenomena. As the remorse is thus the product of illusions, revealing nothing about the reality of the matter, he is safe to laugh about it, affirming life as it really is on his way home from work.  He knows this is the way life really is, because this is a question of extra-moral truth, which leaves no conceptual space for any reality remorse may possibly reveal.

Professor Nitske is (I hope!?) a caricature, but not because I am being unfair to the extra-moral Nietzsche.  Part of my argument against Nietzsche is that we cannot really imagine an extra-moral Nietzschean; of course, we can imagine someone devoted to truthfulness, who hates all the lying hypocrisy one encounters in the world, very frequently among moralists and religious people (but not only); we can be amused at how blind some of the most brilliant thinkers have been to the psychological and cultural background of their thinking; we can be nauseated at the all-too-human resentment which fuels the conscious life of many people. And so on. This is the Nietzsche that still speaks to us with force. 

But the reductive Nietzsche – the Nietzsche of the “extra-moral sense” – creates a picture of the inner life which can only be a parody, cannot really be taken seriously.  [Some might say that the Nazi doctors with their medical experiments might be an accurate picture of a desire for truth without a moral sense?]  At best belongs in those courses of metaphysics which deal with questions of the reality of the external world or the self. But at soon as such speculations, however fascinating, descend from the ivory tower of metaphysical speculation into the world of real people, ... well, I think Wittgenstein gave the definitive refutation of that...

If, however, we pretend that Professor Nitske is not a caricature and take the example seriously, ... well, I want to try to imagine how Socrates would respond.  I think Socrates would say that this instructor was ensnared in a labyrinth of evil, blinded to his own evil by the shadows of his true reality pictured on the wall of the very dark part of the cave he is in – pictures made by the rhetoric of sophists like ... Nietzsche.

According to the “sophist” Nietzsche's extra-moral sense, the instructor would be acting consistently with the view that morality – which is based on the illusion that the class were not creatures with a kind of individuality and inner life we associate with ourselves and conditions our sense that each of us is due justice, respect – is in fact an “effect” of a herd instinct, and that this “effect” has corrupted the practice of teaching over the centuries, causing teachers to waste time treating every member of their classes irrespective of ability as owed their best instruction, and courageously resisting the seductions of this kind of lying morality.  But such a view is corrupt.

In the extra-moral view, seeing Professor Nitske as corrupt would be due to the conventions of the herd-men trying to protect themselves from the strong; seeing his mask hiding his corruption would not be due to an inner sense of shame at his corruption but an ironic sense of superiority; seeing his flattering of those students he sees as herd-people would not be a form of harming them, since such are not capable of being harmed by falsity as such. 

Can philosophical arguments – rather than the ad hominem we seemed to be left with – be made against such an extra-moral view?  Which view of the instructor is true?  How would one go about investigating this question?  There is no neutral ground, no Archimedean point, no extra-moral perspective on which to stand.  However, to see the class as part of a herd and thus remove oneself from the claims they make on the instructor qua students and human beings (justice, respect), does not involve us in a question that can be answered scientifically in terms of example one (climate change).  No data or experiment could prove that their inner life was so attenuated as not to be worthy of serious obligations. To see them in reductive terms already presupposes that one has refused to recognize the possibility of such an inner life.  At most the Nietzschean could claim:

 

“If the totality of reality is such that what is real by definition can only correspond to what can be investigated by science or subject to the conception of truth illustrated by my example one, then the question may be treated as a scientific one, in the extra-moral sense.”

 

But that is a very large metaphysical if. Being in its totality is not a possible object of knowledge or Vorstellung. Our notions of truth are limited by our possible experience, but need not, I think, be considered illusions for that reason, as I will try to show with the next example.  And it would produce the absurdity of not knowing what to do with the investigator. Presumably, his truth and his inner life would be just as unreal, and therefore his results unreal.

 

Professor Lurie [based on Coetzee's character in Disgrace]

      This instructor, in a spiritual state bordering on despair, pursues a student (an immature one, uncertain of herself, and not a particularly good student) sexually, and under odd circumstances (see Disgrace) gets her in bed.  She then seeks to trade on the sexual relationship for favors in the course she has with Professor Lurie.  Lurie's teaching has to a large extent lost his meaning for him under the circumstances of university reform which has been phasing out the humanities because they can't be proven to contribute to the gross national product.  He has a certain contempt for the young people in his courses, who seem only interested in jobs, consumption, prestige, sex, music.  Reluctant at first, he lets things take their course – the student-lover misses an exam; he tries to get her to make it up, but she is not very willing, doesn't see it as important.  [Now I will modify Coetzee's story.]   Assume the student writes a term paper which even under the most generous interpretation should not pass.  Yet he passes her, because he doesn't want to risk losing her as a lover. 

Now imagine this instructor suffers remorse – the pained recognition of guilt. He feels he has betrayed his vocation; he feels he has betrayed his student.  She deserved his best instruction; she deserved the justice of being evaluated fairly; she deserved to be treated seriously as a person – all this, although she was not fully aware (but at some level felt it notwithstanding) of these things herself. 

But her inability to love Lurie was partly conditioned by the fact that he saw her as a person/student not deserving to be treated seriously; nor could she really respect him, as shown by the cynical remarks she made after love-making about his teaching attitude.  One could paint this picture in greater detail.  In any case, Lurie confesses all, asks the student and his colleagues for forgiveness, and resigns his teaching post.

In the view I am attributing (rightly or wrongly) to Socrates, the pain of remorse is the form of the recognition of reality (per example two).  Naturally remorse may be more or less lucid or pure.  It may itself be corrupt. It is thinkable that Lurie was just bowing to morality because he was, in the end, a conformist; or perhaps his remorse was just a show to put his declining ego on stage again – a deceit, a pose, a mask, perhaps even to himself.  Socratically, it should be of the utmost importance to determine whether the remorse was genuine or counterfeit (truth per example two). 

But when Nietzsche writes there are no moral phenomena, only moral interpretations of phenomena [true, he didn't write his in the article I am considering; but it is compatible with the thought in this article], he seems to be denying that in this case the remorse could possibly be a form the  recognition of reality takes; he seems to be denying to framework of authentic/corrupt remorse altogether with his reductions, on the view that remorse as expressing a moral phenomenon in this case is the illusion produced by a physiological program in which the herd (following its instincts) protects itself from the stronger specimens; a program in which the war of all against all is reduced in scale. 

To believe – Socratically – that remorse may reveal something real about the people and deeds involved in the example would be like believing in God or a fairy tale.  Why? I know of no possible answer other than one I have already mentioned:  the metaphysical assumption that moral phenomena have no place in a “scientific” universe.  Remorse for Nietzsche – operating exclusively with truth per example one – can only be an external cause which in this case prevents Lurie from seeing clearly the (amoral) nature of things.

Again, who are we to believe?  How are we to go about finding out who is right?  No objective solution seems possible. No answer in the sense of the shortest way to Golm.  One cannot say Nietzsche or my Socrates are mistaken, though I suppose both would think the other confused and influenced by irrational motives under the surface of the thought. 

However, an irreducible personal element does seem to exist, which seems to support the Socratic picture. Since the object does not lend itself to scientific investigation, choosing to see it “scientifically” as Nietzsche does cannot be based on logic but on “interpretation.” But when seeing things “scientifically” in an “extra-moral sense” does not correspond to the nature of the object being investigated, and then it must have its source elsewhere – in the mind of the investigator.

While neither the Socratic nor the Nietzschean views are reducible to personal categories, neither is it possible to think these categories away. Nietzsche reveals partly who he is by his extra-moral sense, by seeing most people as herd-people, by seeing truth as a tactic in a survival-social game scenario in which the instincts play themselves out.  While Lurie's remorse may be corrupt, there is no a priori reason grounded in the nature of things that it has to be (the concept “corrupt” would not even be applicable in such a case – in fact, the whole of our evaluative concepts would be rendered meaningless on Nietzsche's reductive thesis, which is one of the reasons a Nietzschean is not imaginable except as a caricature or an embodiment of evil); and whether or not it is corrupt, it reveals something about Lurie that he, in the end, is not able to deal with students as not deserving justice from him as an instructor.

Thus there is an irreducible element of ad hominem in these diverging perspectives which no amount of reasoning can do away with.  What confuses the matter, however,  is the seductiveness of the pseudo-scientific view that there are no moral phenomena, only moral interpretations of phenomena – that real truth is always “extra-moral.”  And thus that truthfulness requires us to recognize that morality – and thus, absurdly, truthfulness – is an illusion.

One can only expose such logical-metaphysical confusions. But even when they have been put away, there is no logical ground which compels Nietzsche on pain of irrationality (like denying that x is the shortest way to Golm would be demonstrably irrational, or getting a sum wrong) to recognize that remorse may be authentic, that there are moral phenomena.  And at this level, logically, only ad hominem and circular type arguments are possible.  Thus one can only partially “refute” Nietzsche.

 

 

 

V.

Evil is sui generis. To ask for reasons why lying, flattering, deceiving are wrong shows that one has not understood the concepts – is ignorant in the Socratic sense.

Nietzsche writes:

“The liar uses the valid designations, the words, to make the unreal appear as real; he says, for example, 'I am rich,' when the word 'poor' would be the correct designation of his situation. He abuses the fixed connotations by arbitrary changes or even by reversal of the senses.”

 

Here, as throughout, the force of the passage draws on its seemingly moral passion, exposing how mendacious we often are prone to be. He sounds a bit like Socrates, though without Socrates' warm, deeply humane irony.  He seems to concede the distinction between lie and truth is real, though only within the context of socio-linguistic conventions to which we by nature can only have a strategic and tactical (i.e. superficial) relationship.  But the “liar” seems hardly a neutral word – to call someone a liar is to judge him negatively, one would think.  But not for Nietzsche in his “extra-moral sense.”  In this sense, the lie is not seen as good or bad, but in terms of something like the rules of a game, much as anthropologist describe the behavior of alien, primitive cultures.  The point of all society is to end the open war of all against all; deception is kept within the limits of what is tolerable to society; truth and lie come into being with socio-linguistic conventions. 

But by nature creatures of instinct prone to deception, our relationship to truth is external; we condemn it only when in the interests of our “will-to-power” to do so. This is our nature and the nature of society for Nietzsche, not a criticism. He is doing something like anthropology here, though I doubt such a thesis would be publishable today. (Perhaps it wouldn't even make for a passing grade in an undergraduate anthropology course, but this is beside the point.)

 

A tension results as we are not clear whether Nietzsche is attacking inauthenticity or doing metaphysical anthropology. 

 

In any case, the attitude towards deception and truth Nietzsche attributes to “man-in-society” is utterly superficial; truth is pragmatically related to instincts, including self-preservation, and the fictions which promote these.  Man-in-society is superficial for Nietzsche. He lacks depth, individuality – all the qualities we associate with true humanity.  Truth and deception alike are portrayed – reductively – as necessarily a means to certain ends which can be characterized independently.  Both have only instrumental value. 

Interesting that this superficial relation to truthfulness seems to be shared by Nietzsche's herd-people as well as his “higher types.”  [See Jenseits von Gut und Böse, erstes Hauptstück, 4.]  Whatever it is that separates Nietzsche's Übermensch from the herd-people, it is not love of truth. People – I suppose most all of us at one time or another – develop a shallow relationship to truth. The issue is not whether we are by nature lovers of truth, but whether, however difficult an achievement, we are all condemned by our nature, by the slavery of consciousness to our instincts (whether these be strong or weak is unimportant in this respect), to a superficial relationship to truthfulness; or whether a deeper relationship to truthfulness is not a fiction but a human potentiality, and one worth striving for. 

To examine this question, one could again look at teaching as a vocation, and consider the case of an instructor who flatters his students.  Suppose a student writes a paper on King Lear.  Imagine that the instructor was due to be considered for tenure, and that student evaluations weighed heavily among the responsible committee.  The instructor, however, resists any temptation as unworthy to flatter the student, and evaluates the work fairly – with a poor grade.  He justifies his criticisms, however, with much care and insight, and the students profits from this.  The student acknowledges the justice of the criticisms – although they have not exactly promoted his career hopes.  He does become a better writer and does understand Lear better due to the experience.

 

I think Nietzsche would admire this instructor.

 

I do not think he could say why within the terms of his article.

 

There is something beautiful in being treated justly, in being treated with a view towards one's real good – which in this case was not the externalities of careers, but good writing and better understanding.  But apart from the pragmatic advantages that resulted from the instructor's truthfulness, advantages that could be explained in terms of Nietzsche's “man-in-society,” but simply being treated as someone worthy of justice and the best instruction cannot be bracketed out. 

To be treated such is also good, sui generis, apart from the positive consequences which are of course a part of the picture.  Many of us have experienced such instruction, and though we may always be mistaken and revise our thinking about certain instructors based on further reflection, there is nothing that prevents such authoritative experiences of truthfulness from being genuine. An anthropology which does not leave conceptual space for such authoritative experience creates a caricature of human relations.  To those of us who have been the beneficiaries of such truthfulness, the strategic attitude towards truth both of Nietzsche's fictive herd-people and equally fictive Übermensch must seem vulgar.

Such instructors' truthfulness is not only a form of respect for students as persons and learners, and not only a form of respect for (love of) their vocation and the subject, but is also conditioned by a sense that to flatter students is a form of harm beyond any practical consequences it may have.  Perhaps flattery would have the consequence of preventing students from attaining excellence in the areas of writing or literature; perhaps they would never come to a deeper understanding and appreciation of Lear, which would be a shame.  But to be flattered or deceived about one's true stand in the practice is to be dealt with as though one were the kind of person – a herd-man – not deserving truth and justice.

For Socrates such harm was qualitatively greater than any worldly consequences.  And the flatterer harms himself most of all.  He betrays his students and his vocation, betrays a deep trust.   His relationship to his subject, his vocation, and his students would be exposed as hopelessly superficial; he would be exposed as nothing but a prisoner of his instincts, which is not an extra-moral anthropological judgment, but a moral corruption.

Such questions as  “is it really bad to flatter” etc. make no sense, are in fact unintelligible outside the area of abstract metaphysical speculations which call the reality of the world and the inner life as such into question. In such circumstances, for an instructor to understand the fact in an “extra-moral sense” that his actions had revealed him to be a shallow flatterer and deceiver would sound like a cheap rationalization.  “I know I'm a shallow flatterer and a deceiver, but so what?  We're all that way by nature!” Nonsense.  Such a move would only reinforce his superficiality.

Notice only as a shallow flatterer would he be wearing a mask in his role as teacher, posing to be what he was not.  Nietzsche seems to be denying with his metaphysical anthropology to possibility of transcending this miserable condition.  With his rejection of equal worth, he seems to deny flattery and deceit are forms of harm for most, if not all, of humanity. 

 

VI.

One can, in the end, only give an alternative to Nietzsche's account of truth.  Each person must then explore the matter in terms of his or her own experience, though if they do this is the sense of truthfulness, they will already have, in a sense, decided the issue.  Why can't I see my students as herd-people, why are their abilities irrelevant to his seeing?  Of course, it is thinkable that my inability means that I am caught in some Hobbesian-Nietzschean slave morality. Perhaps I am too cowardly to face cruel reality.  Perhaps I am in need of false consolation. Etc. ad nauseum.

Part of the vast experiential ground why I find it impossible to see others as herd-people is the birth of my daughter. The wonder of it.  The awesome sense of wonder and responsibility and love involved. Of course, this is personal testimony, and I can only give my word for its authenticity. Those who know me may be better able to judge this. Logically, I might be putting on a show; maybe I just need an example to express my will-to-power in overcoming Nietzsche.   Of course, I should be aware of the possibility of posing or masking underlying motives in using this example. That is one reason why I never use personal examples in my public writing – it already creates a suspicion of wanting to instrumentalize them, indicating after all a shallow relationship to them.

All this aside – many people, I suppose, feel similar things at the birth of their children. This feeling has nothing to do with the prospective abilities of their children. There is not the slightest evidence that my daughter is on her way to being an Übermensch. I suppose Nietzsche would see her – as he sees women generally – as part of the herd, eaten up with resentment at not being a Nietzschean man (one reason for me not to like Nietzsche – in fact, I don't like him for this, but I find it difficult to judge him too harshly for my own reasons).  But such wonder conditions the way I see other people's children.  The experience of grief at the loss of loved ones – again, people who for Nietzsche I suppose would be herd-people.  In grief, the uniqueness, the irreplaceableness of people becomes manifest through the pain of loss in ways no words or philosophy could express. This also conditions the sense that people are radically singular. Also remorse. Etc.

Notice with respect to truth, that there is no independent way to this reality.  Only by experiencing wonder, love, remorse, grief, and so on – by allowing these heavily emotional responses to make a genuine claim on us – is the reality they point to revealed. Exactly this is what informs example two. Exactly this is what Nietzsche distances himself from. It's as if he is saying that to only road to truth is to treat such emotional responses as causes of error per example one; that when we no longer allow them to make their claims on us, we will see reality in its true, amoral form; we will see these responses not as forms revealing reality, but as effects of an underlying biological program. 

And, as I have argued, there is no independent way of knowing which view is right. All philosophy can do is crudely draw the boundary where science ends and philosophy begins, and thus expose the attempt to justify the Nietzschean view as the objective one. The whole objective=true and subjective=illusion view belongs to the conception of truth per example one; precisely the blurring of the boundaries is characteristic of example two.

That I, like most of us, respond to these defining human events as genuine and revealing does not mean that I or we are saints; that are fat relentless egos are not constantly at work hiding this reality from us, constructing images, idols, fantasies of others and the world which console us or make us feel better about ourselves or make us feel superior to others or extra-special is ways for which there is little evidence. But it is precisely because of this that truthfulness is so important.  Precisely for this reason are practices such a writing, chess, foreign languages, philosophy, science, good farming, gardening, etc. important – in such practices, we learn that reality cannot be reduced to what we want it to be or imagine it to be (Murdoch).   Such practices are excellent preparation for the moral life, which is partly defined by the constant effort to penetrate through the fantasies of the fat relentless ego and see others . . . as other. 

Obligations within practices to treat others with justice and respect are deeply moral, and train one to see others as others and not as part of a herd. Only by seeing and treating others as deserving of justice, by preserving the truth of defining experiences – a the wonder of birth, the pain of grief or remorse, love, being treated and treating others justly, fulfilling one's obligations as teacher. . . .  This might not be radical enough for youth!  As Wittgenstein said of his philosophy: it leaves things as they are.

 

VIII.

Nietzsche's thoughts on truth and language. Nietzsche doesn't think words can designate the way things are.  He doesn't think concepts express reality. What can this not mean?  It cannot mean that I cannot give you directions to Bornim and my words will not suffice to get you here.  It cannot mean under pain of absurdity that Nietzsche thinks his words bear no relationship to the way things are.  It cannot mean that our ordinary notions of truth are suddenly invalid.

What can he mean?  Actually Nietzsche makes it clear he is not talking about our ordinary notions of truth, which he takes – wrongly – to be necessarily superficial.  Quite unexpectedly, he dives into Kantian things-in-themselves and Platonic forms, claiming that if there were pure truth, this is what it would be. But since such notions are incoherent or unreachable (which?), and not worth striving for, pure truth is incoherent or unreachable. 

 

Well, I don't know. Perhaps I am missing something, because I know Nietzsche was a great thinker. 

 

It is not perfectly clear to me whether he believes that such truth is contingently unreachable for man, and is chastising those weak mind – as the fashionable post-modernism of the 90's did – who don't recognize this; or whether he believes such a notion of truth is incoherent (as I do, in spite of the interesting roles such concepts play within the thought of Kant and Plato).  In neither case do I see such metaphysical conceptions and their incoherence as providing a ground to debunk our ordinary notions of truth and the importance of truthfulness, which, as I tried to show by the example of teaching, are not always trivial.  These ordinary conceptions (example one and two above) in no way assume things-in-themselves or Platonic forms, and remain unaffected by a metaphysical critique of these. 

The purity of truth or truthfulness does not depend on reaching an unintelligible Archimedean point, a “view from nowhere” in the absence of which “everything goes.”  The purity of truth and truthfulness is revealed by one's inner attitude to it – as revealed by my humble example of the instructor who treated his students justly.  Of course, there are much greater examples of purity – for me, the writings of Primo Levi would be one example. Wittgenstein would be another. In short, I think Nietzsche's linguistic argument simply misses the point.  Non sequitur.

 

p.s. I do not read Nietzsche as a total skeptic, but a philosopher in pursuit of “higher truths,” even if he was only able to understand truth in the sense of my example one. 344 of the Fröhliche Wissenschaft is a key passage for me in this reading.

At deepest level, Nietzsche’s philosophy trying to do what he believes Greek tragedy achieved; looking at the horrible reality, but, without lying about it in art, without giving, for example, false metaphysical consolation, transforming it into something we can live with through his writings, through art.  Actually, true art vs. false art.