The Nietzsche passage below has
already been commented on, in my entry The Meaning Of Metaphors, in the Sonnets
section. But there, the accent was on the metaphor, whereas here it
is on truth.
Furthermore, in an apparent
violation of my own rule set for the last subsection of the Nietzsche section
to organize my comments along the chronological lines of Nietzsches Werke,
and going through each of them in Nietzsche’s established sequence, I have
introduced a second Nietzsche passage into this entry, which is taken from his
later work Jenseits (296). Well, rules are set to be broken for a
compelling reason, and here is a reason compelling enough to do it: the organic
connection between the two passages, further united in my commentary. So, this
is it!
***
What is truth?… We have
already been there on a number of occasions, but when it comes to talking about
the subject of such paramount importance as truth, no number of
reiterations is too many.
We have tackled this subject
repeatedly in the context of Absolute Truth (God is Truth), and
discussing the multiplicity of the “truths” of individual creations, within the
circles of their jurisdiction. In this particular context we are looking at the
aging process of an exciting discovery, which shoots into the air as a splendid
firework display, but as soon as it is gets universal acceptance, begins its
journey down to earth, becoming a boringly commonplace object increasingly worn
out by usage until, like an utterly worn-out coin, it loses all constructive
value: its once sharp image and uncirculated glow have long been rubbed off it,
to the point of turning it into a faceless disc of dull metal.
This is precisely the way
Nietzsche approaches the subject in the following passage from his unpublished
work Über Warheit Und Lüge Im Außermoralischen Sinn (1873):
What,
then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms,¾
in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and
embellished, poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm,
canonical, and obligatory to people: truths are illusions, about which one has
forgotten that this is what they are, metaphors, which are worn out and without
sensuous power; coins, which have lost their pictures and now matter only as
metal, no longer as coins…
There are two ways of looking at
such truths, if we would like to follow Nietzsche’s insightful lead. One is the
more benign, which follows from this poetic lamentation of his in Jenseits (296):
What
are you, my thoughts? It was not long ago that you were still so colorful,
young and malicious,--and now? You have taken off your novelty, and ready, I
fear, to become truths: so decent, so dull!
In this reading of the fate of
such truths they turn into dull clichés, losing their sting, their challenge,
their excitement, but, apparently, not their veracity, which is in this case
transformed into a truism to be shunned not on the basis of its speciousness,
but in view of its beaten-to-death triteness.
But there is another, less benign
way of looking at such “truths.” A long time ago, the Ptolemaic geocentric
system in astronomy was an exciting discovery, postulating a spherical Earth
and superseding the outdated flat-earth hypothesis. Eventually, however, it was
itself superseded by the Copernican heliocentric system, and at that moment,
even though still held to be the truth, it had become an obstacle to the
progress of truth. Such is the fate of truth in science. There is no set
cliché to represent an immutable scientific truth, as truth in science is a
process of perpetual evolution, and its truth-- always relative, and never
absolute-- lies in the ability of science to outgrow an earlier stage of its
development, in favor of a new stage, that someday will likewise become
outgrown and will in turn have to be discarded like the stiffening chrysalis of
an emerging butterfly.
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