Beyond Falseness & Truthfulness: To Recognize Untruth as a Condition of Life

“What was at stake in all philosophizing hitherto was not at all “truth” but something else — let us say, health, future, growth, power, life.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Gay Science

In every corner of our life we have always in a desire for truth and certainty that all humans are long to know. This isn’t surprising since the science itself is to get us into understand and knowing how the universe itself work. We always long to learn throughout our life and the knowledge that we have from our experiences we use sometimes to get us to live.

But is it really the case? does our knowledge of the world is always about the truth? Do we learn to live or live to learn? What can possibly makes our life meaningful if not the ‘truth’?

One Single Truth

That is the question that has been studied for a long time since the greeks philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle about the question ‘Truth’. Plato proposes that a Philosophers (the Lover of Wisdom) must have desires and love for attaining the Truth. He wrote:

“He who has been earnest in the love of knowledge and of true wisdom, and has exercised his intellect more than any other part of him, must have thoughts immortal and divine, if he attain truth, and in so far as human nature is capable of sharing in immortality, he must altogether be immortal.” – Plato, Timaeus

In another dialogue with Parmenides he also proposes about the one single ‘Truth’ as the essence of the Truth itself as oppose to appearances. Quote:

“Then let that be said — and also the following, namely that, as it seems, if ‘one is’ or if ‘[one] is not’, [then] it and the others both are and are not, and both appear and do not appear to be all things in all ways, both in relation to themselves and in relation to each other.” – Plato, Parmenides, 166C

Throughout the ages since the greeks, medieval, and modern Philosophy, Philosophers have always been attempted to pursuing the Truth, I.e the one single Truth that can make sense of life and how the universe itself work. Whether they using Metaphysical question of Truth, about something beyond the physical sense, or Epistemological question of truth, where they began to questioning and investigate about whether such pursuit of attaining the Truth is possible or not.

Nietzsche as Proto-Postmodernist on Truth

However, one Philosopher (among others that question the possibility of Truth) namely Friedrich Nietzsche has a unique approach that is also smashing the mind about the question of ‘Truth’ itself. He proclaims that what happens in ‘Truth’ is always about something else, something behind the truth, or what’s will the Truth. He wrote:

“No, this bad taste, this will to truth, to “truth at any price,” this youthful madness in the love of truth, have lost their charm for us: for that we are too experienced, too serious, too merry, too burned, too profound. We no longer believe that truth remains truth when the veils are withdrawn; we have lived too much to believe this.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Gay Science, Preface for the second edition

All quest for the Truth now for Nietzsche unlike the Philosophers of the past are not about one unconditional Truth detached from life and experience or the synthetic a priori judgment of the Truth which he criticize against epistemology of Kant. The quest of Truth is hypocritical i.e it itself an irony that when we searching for Truth is also delusional as our quest for Truth is a quest for Life.

Truth are now not about the Truth in-itself or about finding the True one for us humans to live. But about the activity and condition of our existence, that the True is not merely the only thing that can be valuable to live i.e the only thing that is worthwhile approaching rather something beyond or behind the Truth.

So what is the meaning in all of this? If life isn’t about searching for what is true or that the true itself is not as valuable as it seems then what’s the point?

“The falseness of a judgment is for us not necessarily an objection to a judgment; in this respect our new language may sound strangest The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life-preserving, species-presering, perhaps even species-cultivating. And we are fundamentally inclined to claim that the falsest Judgments (which include 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 a constant falsification of the world by means of numbers, man could not live-that renouncing false judgments would mean renouncing life and a denial of life. 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.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil sec 4 (Translated: Walter Kaufmann)

To Answer this question we need to go beyond our presupposition about life itself, that life is the Truth. When we perceive the dichotomy between what is True-False we can see the richness of life itself. That life can have many aspects from so many prespective that we can experience something that is much different from the foolproof system of knowledge.

One famous Postmodern Philosopher has a great notion about what can be the meaning of the Truth that can preserve our life, Michel Foucault wrotes:

“The task of testing oneself, examining oneself, monitoring oneself in a series of clearly defined exercises, makes the question of truth — the truth concerning what one is, what one does, and what one is capable of doing.” – Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self

The question Truth becomes the principle of ascetic practices. That the true is not just one single aspect that is detached from life but something like an ongoing process or a story that can be foretold in us until we die.

“Philosophy does not consist in knowing and is not inspired by truth. Rather, it is categories like Interesting, Remarkable, or Important that determine success or failure.”

Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?