THE TRUTH OF LIFE-PROMOTING LIES

Within the large philosophical context of the ethics of truth, by far the most dramatic query into the question of What is “good” and what is “bad”? has been made by Nietzsche, by virtue of his coinage of the inspired Latin dictum “Fiat veritas, pereat vita!” Which has prompted me to reverse the terms of that proposition, as “Fiat vita, pereat veritas!” It is with this understanding in mind that we must be approaching the following passage 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 is no sense for me to argue about Nietzsche’s terminology, because I am the one who has introduced the change that I should be arguing about. It is much better, and fairer to Nietzsche, to express my greatest admiration for his keen sense that puts him essentially on the same track that has brought me to my theory of truth in fiction. But let us first present the evidence that we are talking about that same thing. Nietzsche uses the terms falseness, falsification, untruth talking about fiction and invention, and his splendid point is that these unsavory elements ‘are the most indispensable to us,’ being “life-promoting, species-preserving and even species-cultivating.” So why are they unsavory? Just because they are false and untrue! And here is where my theory comes into the picture. No, I say, fiction and invention are not false and untrue, they are perfectly true, as long as they stay within the world, in which they have been created. Therefore, there is no need to apologize for the falseness of a judgment because the judgment here is apparently true. And there is no need either, to recognize untruth as a condition of life, because what we call “untruth” here is not untruth, but truth, which is all a matter of definitions. Once the definitions are set right, we have morality restored to our conundrum, and, lo and behold!--- there is no more conundrum, but the solid moral ground of good life, making it unnecessary for us to travel Jenseits von Gut und Böse for this particular purpose. (And as an added bonus in this case, we may rejoice in finding the famous Kantian synthetic aprioris, which were considered either “unfindable” or, even worse, non-existent, until Nietzsche planted their mention in the above passage for us to find and identify them as those selfsame particles of mental matter which have come to us in vague vaporous shapes, as represented to us by Kant, but, on second look, are nothing more elusive and mysterious than any “normal” specimens of created fiction.