The Value Of Truth For Life
Beyond Good & Evil
Introduction to this series.
The following excerpt comes from section 35 in the book Beyond Good & Evil:
There is something about ‘truth’, about the search for truth; and when a human being is too human about it -He seeks the truth only to do the good (Voltaire)- I bet he finds nothing.
Nietzsche famously said:
Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live. The value for life is ultimately decisive.
Hence the apostrophes around the word ‘truth’. There is no truth, there are rather degrees and sublimations of ‘truth’ which vary according to the age in which we live. If you take the truths of mankind during our longest period, the hunter-gatherer period, we would laugh and be appalled by them at the same time. Let me give you some examples:
“You must not scrape the snow in your shoe with a knife” (the heck?), or take the Mae Enga people where funerals were held for men and pigs but not for women or children, and if a husband died the widow was strangled within 24 hours. In both cases, the two people in question were following a custom that consisted of truth to them.
We can then fast-forward to the first empire in the world, the Akkadian empire. Its fourth ruler, Naram-Sin declared himself God for the first time in history. To the subjects of his empire, this was their ‘truth’.
Obviously, today we can easily dismiss all the three above stories as totally wrong and as far from ‘truth’ as it can get. But lo and behold all three of them were useful for the people living in those times. In the second case, the Mae Enga people lived in an overpopulated territory, and this was bad for the day-to-day survival, hence custom devised means of trying to keep the population under control. In contrast, for example, the Fore people who had a very high death rate and with underpopulated territories venerated women and children. They mourned them exactly like men, premarital sex was highly encouraged and widows were immediately courted for remarriage by men.
In the third case, as was the case with the Mesopotamian city-states and later kingdoms at that time, a very powerful and centralized authority was needed in order to keep this ever-larger clump of people together. Otherwise, without a very powerful figure what happened was that coup d’état, which was the rule back then, and the state of Bellum omnium contra omnes that would follow. A consolidated state was the most important thing. By declaring himself a god, Naram-Sin was greatly increasing his power because what really mattered was not what one really was but what one was thought of as being. Thus the empire could remain into existence, thrive, and prosper.
Therefore, ‘truth’ is something that is variable and on which we are continuously building. That is today basically the case in every single domain of human endeavor. We know Newton, for example, to be wrong (in the strictest possible sense) in his law of universal gravitation and this is because Einstein showed that Newton's laws are but a special case of a much deeper property of the universe. And today we know that Einstein’s laws cannot be correct and that it is possible to go deeper. Hence, partly the hunt behind the theory of everything which would reconcile quantum mechanics with relativity.
On a different level, Jordan Peterson has demonstrated the relevance of the Abrahamic stories’ ‘truths’ for the time in which they were articulated and that even today, some of them remain relevant, although most have become entirely obsolete. But yet again I believe that today we have sufficiently outgrown those truths so that we could look and derive even those insights that might still be standing on other sources.
A new kind of attitude
If truth is something variable and if we are continuously build-up, enhancing, and going deeper then the right attitude towards knowledge should be:
Assume that you are solidly wrong and then your aim is to be less wrong.
This is basically the way how we do science in the 21st century.
The sublimation of the value of Truth for Life
The value of the truth for life is ultimately decisive.
I believe that we have already started to outgrow this ‘truth’. With the enormous development of science in the 21st century, and what shall be possible in the future, I believe that the time will come for a very clear truth for its own sake drive. At a time when the enthusiasm for knowledge is a thousandfold as powerful as today.
Foul-smelling Truths
The second thing that Nietzsche points out is that ‘truth’ and ‘good’ are two different things and not necessarily correlated. He points out in his work over and over again that something might be true while being harmful and dangerous to the highest degree.
Take for instance the program that we have build-in about genocide. This was the main cause of the Holocaust for example. What happens at every genocide is that certain people give orders but then these orders are carried out by ordinary people. Himmler and Heydrich were not the concentration camp guards, members of the Einsatzgruppen, or the Wehrmacht going about massacring people. No, ordinary Germans did that. Again, while it is true that the more extreme elements of the normal distribution (if we are to consider human types and psychologies as following a normal distribution) were part of the Einsatzgruppen still the fact remains that ordinary Germans had their part in perpetrating those crimes.
I believe that Jordan Peterson is right when he points out that it would be possible for you and me to perpetrate the same crimes had we been in Nazi Germany at that time. This is not to say that every person will commit those atrocities given the circumstances, many, perhaps even most people will not but the point is that there is a built-in program in us, coming from our time as hunter-gatherers and beyond when cruelty gave an immense feeling of power and hence pleasure, and it will commit the foulest deeds and can be extremely sadistic (á la Ted Bundy style).
At the time that Nietzsche articulated this thought, no one could begin to grasp it even remotely. Today we know it for a fact but still, many uninformed people will strongly oppose this view and keep a child-like worldview of humans and their psychology. The fact of the matter is that if we understand something, we are in a position to possibly prevent it from ever happening again. That is the main reason why it is so important to have a discourse on everything.
Now, the cause of genocides was a more extreme case and you can find many other instances of ‘foul truths’ but the plain fact is that if you think ‘truth’ and ‘good’ must necessarily go together, you are severely mistaken.
As always, any constructive comments or suggestions are highly appreciated. Thanks for reading.
