strictly scientific methods of thinking have the whole pathos of mankind against them.[1] And so far does he go in sympathy with "mankind" that he is ready to say that if a choice has to be made between truth and the requirements of life, the requirements of life should come first. Why may not illusions be allowed to stand, he virtually asks,—on what ground do we say that truth has the greater right to be? He is the first thinker, to my knowledge, to turn truth itself into a problem.[2] He criticises truth for truth's sake as much as art for art's sake or the good for the good's sake,[3] saying that those who, instead of valuing these things from the standpoint of life, make them supreme over life, are only logical as they postulate another world than this one, since here truth, science at any cost, may be inconsistent with life and an absolute will to truth may be a hidden will to death.[4] Knowledge (in the strict sense) may actually not be desirable for most, j the world as we picture and conceive it under the stress of life's needs may be better than the world as it really is[5]—our ignorance, even a will to ignorance, may be expedient for us.[6] k
So keenly does Nietzsche feel all this, that for a moment he is willing to revise his idea of truth. Wishing to keep the word in its customary honorific sense, he says, let us agree to designate as truth what furthers life and elevates the type of man.[7] As he once puts it paradoxically (mingling the two meanings of truth in the same sentence), truth is the kind of error without which a definite type of human being could not live.[8] l He tries valiantly to keep to this new definition.[9] And yet the settled uses of languages prove too much for him and we find
- ↑ Will to Power, § 469.
- ↑ Genealogy of Morals, III, § 24. The very reverence for truth is partly the result of illusion, i.e., of thinking that the values which we put into existence are there independently of us.
- ↑ Will to Power, § 298.
- ↑ Joyful Science, § 344; of. Will to Power, § 608.
- ↑ Joyful Science (preface of 1886); cf. §§ 54, 299, 301, 344; Genealogy etc., III, § 24; Will to Power, §§ 583, 598 ("the truth is ugly"); Joyful Science, § 107 ("our final gratitude to art").
- ↑ Will to Power, § 609.
- ↑ Ibid., § 51; cf. Werke, XII, 209, § 442.
- ↑ Will to Power, § 493; cf. Werke (pocket ed.), VII, xviii ("knowledge is error that becomes organic and organizes").
- ↑ In accordance with it he even speaks at times of "creating" truth (cf. Will to Power, § 552).
