Within the large philosophical context of the ethics of truth, one of the most incisive queries into the great question of “What is ‘good,’ and what is ‘bad’?” has been made by Nietzsche, on account of his coinage of the Latin dictum “Fiat veritas, pereat vita!” (Which would instantly prompt me to reverse the terms of this proposition to “Fiat vita, pereat veritas!” thereby creating the other, opposing member of a complementary distribution.)
Forget all the accomplishments, both dubious and real, of every natural school of philosophy that holds the principle of “in vita veritas” close to its heart. Once again, Nietzsche appears to hasten to the side of those Christian zealots who have condemned the life in this world (let us call it ‘vita,’ as in vita brevis), in favor of eternity in the next. (This is a joke on my part of course, as Nietzsche’s intention was nothing of the kind, although both these antipodal super-fighters arrive at essentially the same conclusion of denying the truth to my title question “In vita veritas?”
But let us leave those life-denying Church Fathers aside, as they have been, perhaps, sufficiently repudiated by their more reasonable peers, and return to the more comforting understanding that our precious life in this God-created world, being, after all, God-inspired, and somehow distinguished from the “Original Sin,” with its hair-raising consequences, must be essentially good.
And it is here, as expected, that Nietzsche’s original aphorism immediately encounters a whole avalanche of seemingly insurmountable philosophical challenges. If life is (apparently) incompatible with truth, and truth, being from God, is also good, doesn’t it follow that life is incompatible with God and goodness?
By now, we seem to have entangled ourselves in a linguistic jungle, enough to make our case hopeless, unless we make a feisty effort to disentangle ourselves from it. Let us start with the theological context.
When we say, “God is Truth” and also “God is Good,” it does not immediately follow that “Truth is Good,” or that “Truth is God,” or does it? There is no doubt that in an absolute sense, there exists an absolute Truth as an attribute of God, which can be equated to “God as perceived through one or more of His attributes,” or something like that. I need to remind the reader that even in such a case, the resulting equation ought to be treated with the greatest reservation.
The reason for such a reservation being the philosophically incomprehensible nature of God, which makes the terms “truth” and “good” equally incomprehensible, as God’s attributes, not to mention their attempted connection within the confines of a logical syllogism.
Which leads us now to conclude that either both these important terms have been rendered meaningless to us by their association with the incomprehensible, or else that we are not just allowed, but also required, to engage ourselves in a bold philosophical inquiry into the substance of these concepts, having received full immunity from the charge of impiety on our part.
Our first step must therefore consist in de-theologizing the context in which “life” meets “truth.” It is with such an understanding in mind that we need to approach the following quote from Nietzsche’s Jenseits (4):
“The falseness of a judgment is for us not necessarily an objection to a judgment. The question is, to what extent is it life-promoting, species-preserving, perhaps, even species-cultivating. (!) And we are inclined to claim that the falsest judgments (like the synthetic judgments ‘a priori’) are the most indispensable for us; that without accepting the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without constant falsification of the world by means of numbers, man could not live. To recognize untruth as a condition of life---that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.”
There are several loose strings here so far, requiring to be untangled and tied up into a neat thing, starting with, say, the semantic differences between falseness, untruth, and an outright lie.
To be continued…
Forget all the accomplishments, both dubious and real, of every natural school of philosophy that holds the principle of “in vita veritas” close to its heart. Once again, Nietzsche appears to hasten to the side of those Christian zealots who have condemned the life in this world (let us call it ‘vita,’ as in vita brevis), in favor of eternity in the next. (This is a joke on my part of course, as Nietzsche’s intention was nothing of the kind, although both these antipodal super-fighters arrive at essentially the same conclusion of denying the truth to my title question “In vita veritas?”
But let us leave those life-denying Church Fathers aside, as they have been, perhaps, sufficiently repudiated by their more reasonable peers, and return to the more comforting understanding that our precious life in this God-created world, being, after all, God-inspired, and somehow distinguished from the “Original Sin,” with its hair-raising consequences, must be essentially good.
And it is here, as expected, that Nietzsche’s original aphorism immediately encounters a whole avalanche of seemingly insurmountable philosophical challenges. If life is (apparently) incompatible with truth, and truth, being from God, is also good, doesn’t it follow that life is incompatible with God and goodness?
By now, we seem to have entangled ourselves in a linguistic jungle, enough to make our case hopeless, unless we make a feisty effort to disentangle ourselves from it. Let us start with the theological context.
When we say, “God is Truth” and also “God is Good,” it does not immediately follow that “Truth is Good,” or that “Truth is God,” or does it? There is no doubt that in an absolute sense, there exists an absolute Truth as an attribute of God, which can be equated to “God as perceived through one or more of His attributes,” or something like that. I need to remind the reader that even in such a case, the resulting equation ought to be treated with the greatest reservation.
The reason for such a reservation being the philosophically incomprehensible nature of God, which makes the terms “truth” and “good” equally incomprehensible, as God’s attributes, not to mention their attempted connection within the confines of a logical syllogism.
Which leads us now to conclude that either both these important terms have been rendered meaningless to us by their association with the incomprehensible, or else that we are not just allowed, but also required, to engage ourselves in a bold philosophical inquiry into the substance of these concepts, having received full immunity from the charge of impiety on our part.
Our first step must therefore consist in de-theologizing the context in which “life” meets “truth.” It is with such an understanding in mind that we need to approach the following quote from Nietzsche’s Jenseits (4):
“The falseness of a judgment is for us not necessarily an objection to a judgment. The question is, to what extent is it life-promoting, species-preserving, perhaps, even species-cultivating. (!) And we are inclined to claim that the falsest judgments (like the synthetic judgments ‘a priori’) are the most indispensable for us; that without accepting the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without constant falsification of the world by means of numbers, man could not live. To recognize untruth as a condition of life---that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.”
There are several loose strings here so far, requiring to be untangled and tied up into a neat thing, starting with, say, the semantic differences between falseness, untruth, and an outright lie.
To be continued…
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