Nietzsche on Truth

Once again, I'd like to start my post off with an excerpt from an Alan Watts lecture. I hope some of you are finding his insights as powerful as I have.

It has been an interesting experience for me delving into Nietzsche. While I had read a little of Nietzsche previous to taking this class, my exposure to him was rather limited. I purchased a book over the summer that was about his basic philosophical ideas, but haven’t gotten around to reading it.

What I find most interesting about Nietzsche is that his conclusions are essentially a mirror of Taoist or Zen philosophy about life: especially Nietzsche’s conclusions that the world is just there (and life as well) and that it doesn’t make any sense to moralize and try to create an image of it that fits your desires. It is best to just leave it as it is and enjoy it. I think this is important because even though we may be free to move about and make decisions in the world, our power over it is fairly limited from the perspective of an individual, which we imagine ourselves to be. We have control over many of our urges and desires, and very little else. To spend all of our time trying to make the world into something it is not, simply to appease a notion we have about some transcendent experience that life is moving towards, is a complete waste of time. As Nietzsche points out, there is no such thing as absolute spirituality or pure reason, so it makes little sense to make your life a pursuit of it. Lao-Tzu put it as so:

“When the great Tao is abandoned, 

charity and righteousness appear. 

When intellectualism arises, 

hypocrisy is close behind.”

By attempting to make any way superior to another, you automatically have to deal with its opposite. Taoists have understood this concept for a millennia, and it wasn’t until the end of the 19th century, that Westerners really started to understand what this really means. You cannot understand the world through reason, because reason is ultimately self-referential. It cannot conceive a reality outside of the one it perceives. However in order to understand a transcendent reality (where reason ultimately originates), conceiving of this transcendent reality is exactly what one must do. And this is no different than what our culture has decided is important in pursuing something like capital accumulation. We are told from a young age that in order to be happy and find our place in the world, we must go out and make our mark upon it. We must work very hard, go to college and make lots of money. We must compete with our fellow man because our competing with each other is going to bring happiness to everyone. Of course this has been a dreadful hoax, because it's all wretch and no vomit, it never gets there. Happiness is always a relative and transitory experience and there is no great ladder that one must climb to reach the “highest point” of happiness. It isn’t like a game of pingpong, where we are to rack up the highest score. Life just is. Adding anything else to life is simply moralizing, creating something imaginary. You are creating a myth. 

Now of course there is nothing inherently wrong in myth creation, as long as one is honest about what is actually occurring. If you are going around making up all kinds of myths about the world, but have convinced yourself that it is truth, and perhaps are attempting to convert everyone to your truth, and that it is the real and only truth, then we have a problem. I think that is one of the bigger issues in the metaphysical debate today; all sides seem to know that they are true. And as Nietzsche said, convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies. 

So let us not be so serious in our convictions, and bask in our collective ignorance about the nature of the world. Each of us shares this and if we would but accept it, I truly believe the world would change overnight; wars, famines and oppression would virtually disappear. Wouldn’t that be a nice experience.