HOW MUCH TRUTH CAN WE HANDLE?

(For the record, the movie quoted in this entry and alluded to in its title is A Few Good Men.)

As a preamble to this entry, we might compare truth in existence to poison in medicine. The word poison is weighted with some pretty scary connotations, for as we well know poisons do kill people. But on the other hand, the more educated among us also know that poisons are the essence of medical cure, and quite often the only way to save a patient (educated or uneducated makes no difference here) from an imminent death is to administer poison to him, provided that it is done professionally by someone (namely, the physician) who knows what he is doing. Bearing this in mind, let us now proceed with the bulk of our entry.

Paraphrasing Nietzsche in a previously quoted passage, “one man’s nourishment is another man’s poison.” Spoiling the aphoristic brevity of this sentence, for the sake of clarity, the exceptional man’s nourishment is the ordinary man’s poison. This is very much in the same vein as the point made in the next passage which has become the centerpiece of this whole entry, about that nourishment and poison being the truth. (But this passage is also remarkable because of its immediate association with the memorable Jack Nicholson movie line: “Because you cannot handle the truth!!!” I wonder if the writer of this line had any knowledge of the passage in Nietzsche, which we are about to discuss, or was inspired by something else, maybe even by his own wisdom?!) So here is our promised passage from Nietzsche’s Jenseits 39:

Nobody is very likely to consider a doctrine true merely because it makes people happy or virtuous, except, perhaps, the lovely “idealists,” who become effusive about the good, the true, and the beautiful, and allow all kinds of motley, clumsy, and benevolent desiderata to swim around in utter confusion in their pond… Happiness and virtue are no arguments. But people like to forget, even the sober spirits, that what makes unhappy and evil are no counterarguments. Something may be true, while also harmful and dangerous in the highest degree. Indeed, this might be a basic characteristic of existence that those who would know it completely would perish, in which case the strength of the spirit should be measured by how much of the truth one could endure, or to what degree one would require it to be thinned down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, falsified. (Jenseits 39.)

There is a good reason why this passage is so unusual, or rather, so perfectly usual for Nietzsche that it just leaps out at you. If truth is ‘good’ (by our Christian logic of “From God is good and God is truth it follows that truth is good,” or, in formal terms, a=b & a=c®b=c), then ù(happiness=good), from which, however, it does not follow that happiness=evil. Should this contradiction become psychologically unbearable to us, it can be overcome by admitting that we have stepped into the perplexing territory of the Twilight Zone, or, to use Nietzsche’s famous original terminology, Jenseits von Gut und Böse.

And finally, returning to the question of how much truth we can handle, the obvious answer is not much, if it does not arrive at our doorstep in the same glossy and red-ribboned package, with the niceties mentioned above. Without being wrapped in this obligatory package we cannot handle truth at all. In a clear-cut sense, truth for us is always secondary to the package it comes in, and thus even the cheapest lie, being richer than our poverty-stricken truth, all nice and fancy packages have been sold out by the time the unpackaged truth makes herself ready to become available to us.