The Will to truth as The Will to Certainty

From Beyond Good and Evil 1.1:

What in us really wants “truth”?

Indeed we came to a long halt about the cause of this will [to truth] — until we finally came to a complete stop before a still more basic question. We asked about the value of this will. Suppose we want truth: why not rather untruth? and uncertainty? even ignorance?

And in the next aphorism (1.2) he writes:

The fundamental faith of the metaphysicians is the faith in opposite values. It has not even occurred to the most cautious among them that one might have a doubt right here at the threshold where it was surely most necessary — even if they vowed to themselves, “de omnibus dubitandum” [all is to be doubted].

Nietzsche’s target in the second passage is Descartes. He, along with Kant, stand as pivotal figures of the two fundamental legacies of philosophy “so far” — a recurring phrase in BGE. What is this legacy, and why is Nietzsche so insistent on the designation of “so far” when talking about philosophy? Walter Kaufmann points out in his first note on the text that “Bisher (so far) is a word that recurs constantly throughout BGE. It helps to color the word ‘beyond’ in the title.” Why Bisher? And why is it linked to “beyond”? Clearly Nietzsche sees the combination of the will to truth and the faith in opposite values as two articles of faith that have driven philosophy “so far.” The designation of “so far” is to claim the possibility that philosophy can move beyond these knee-jerk assumptions.

This “so far” signals the possibility of an end as much as a beginning. Why? Because Nietzsche does not want to give into a knee-jerk faith that humanity has an automatic desire to seek truth at all costs — that this will is somehow natural, eternal and unavoidable. Nor is it automatically noble. Nor does he want to give into an equally knee-jerk faith in binary oppositions as the way to truth. As always, Nietzsche wants to raise the question of value: what is the value of this will to truth? What is the value of this faith in opposite values? The history of philosophy can and should be read no longer as the continuous engagement with eternal questions — questions that themselves should not be questioned. A Philosophy of the Future (BGE’s subtitle) must become the “revaluation of all values” which is the proper task of the philosopher. Philosophy must engage in its own history not to affirm the eternal nature of the values — nor to tell the story as the long history of elite white men of the North Atlantic trying to answer the same set of questions over and over again — but to ask honestly, and perhaps dangerously, about the current value of these values: “But who has the will to concern himself with such dangerous maybes?” (1.2).

Why is this undertaking dangerous? Because we’ve lived with these assumptions for so long and reactivated them for so many hundreds of years, that we risk falling into a dangerous nihilism without them. In the late nineteenth century, Nietzsche clearly believed that we simply didn’t have the conceptual apparatus to handle a philosophy beyond good and evil where “good and evil” is the ur-binary opposition that defines the moral philosophy we’ve lived for many hundreds of years — at least since the advent of Pauline Christianity. I’m not sure we have that apparatus now, but many are trying to create it, which requires faith in Nietzsche’s belief that a new philosophy is possible that will get us beyond good and evil.

To put it all on the table, when Nietzsche says in 1.1 above, “why not rather untruth? and uncertainty? even ignorance?” he is not advocating for a moral relativism. “Alternative facts” would have been anathema to Nietzsche as the apotheosis of nihilism as the will to nothingness (GM 3.28). He is advocating for a Philosophy of the Future that restores wonder, spirituality and a genuine reaching for possibility that is unavailable in a philosophy that obsessively collapses the will to truth into a will to certainty. This will to truth creates alliances with ways of thinking that seek to annihiliate our elan vital even as it purports to unleash it. If we seek a philosophy of the future that values untruth, uncertainty, even ignorance, we can paradoxically imagine a place for philosophy that restores its relevance to how we live our lives within our current crisis of meaning and affirmation.

I believe that this is exactly how Plato put his character of Socrates to use, particularly in the early dialogs. Plato’s Socrates values the will to truth not as the will to certainty, but as a way to transform how his fellow Athenians could speak with each other on important matters. This is why the dialog form is essential to Plato. It is not a mere literary convention to make the text more readable. These dialogs model a will to truth that turns the interlocutor’s attention on his (always “his”) own beliefs. In the process, he finds himself undone (the aporia) because he is no longer certain of what he knows. Thus Socrates’ will to truth starts out to undo certainty, or what is often translated as “false beliefs” (see especially Meno and Protagoras). Very rarely, if ever, do we see certainties that are affirmed in the early dialogs.

Plato’s early Socratic dialogs model what we might call, in modern terms, curiosity and, to use John Verveake’s phrase, not bullshitting ourselves. I believe it could be very defensibly argued that Plato’s use of the Forms — perhaps his most famous philosophical doctrine — only ever arises in an ethical context and not an exclusively epistemological one. (Parmenides might be the exception here, but the Forms come in for some pretty rough treatment in that later dialog.) In other words, the Forms are designed to draw out the interlocutor by making him turn his attention on his beliefs and speak them clearly and consistently. As such, they are less about epistemology (how can we know what we know) and more about ethics (how do we align our actions with our beliefs, and how do we defend our beliefs when our actions are questioned).

The Forms, as a technique of conversation, provoke curiosity and introspection that undoes prior certainties. Many of Socrates’ important interlocutors rarely, if ever, start with “I don’t know.” They always start from certainty, which always turns out to be self-bullshitting, whether the interlocutor admits it or not. Laches is certain he knows what courage is, “but I can’t just now pin it down in words.” Hippocrates wakes Socrates up in the middle of the night because he is certain that he wants to be taught by Protagoras, but he has no idea what Protagoras’ expertise is. Euthyphro is certain he knows what piety is, but that proves to be bullshit. To be clear, these interlocutors are not lying to themselves. They are not intentionally adopting beliefs that they know are wrong. They believe sincerely in what they speak about, but they are exposed as holding beliefs that they haven’t thoroughly examined. These Athenian false beliefs are the target of the early dialogs. Thus we learn, through the example of Socrates, the value of aligning curiosity with ignorance so that we don’t bullshit ourselves on important matters.

The problems occur when the will to truth gets used as a hammer to bludgeon others who don’t agree with us. This happens when the will to truth collapses into the will to certainty. Philosophy becomes a dogmatic rooting out of error and heresies “as soon as any philosophy begins to believe in itself”:

It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise. Philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power, to the “creation of the world,” to the cause prima. (BGE 1.9)

Embracing uncertainty with an open curiosity and belief in possibility is Nietzsche’s answer:

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. (BGE 1.4)

In this way, I am inspired by Nietzsche’s interpreters, like Charles Taylor and Keith Ansall-Pearson, who see in him the power of affirming “the whole of reality, to see it as good, to say ‘yes’ to it all” (Taylor), and of embracing the “rare dedication to philosophy’s original vocation: the discovery of the possibilities of life” (Ansall-Pearson):

The task is not to become gloomy or despondent, but to learn how to love life differently and to discover ‘a new happiness’ (GS Preface 3). For Nietzsche this requires a highly spiritualized or refined mode of thinking and of being in the world, in which we are attracted to things problematic and are able to take ‘delight in x’ (GS Preface 3). (Ansall-Pearson, Nietzsche’s Search for Philosophy, 5)

Taylor says something quite similar and affirming about Nietzsche (and Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky), “viz., the idea of a changed stance towards self and world, which doesn’t simply recognize a hitherto occluded good, but that helps to bring it about.”

The new stance enables me to overcome dread and despair; or to stand in the stream of love; or to accede to the full unity of total self-affirmation of the superman. In the case of Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, the change involves something like the recognition of reality as good, but this at the same time helps to bring about this goodness. (Sources of the Self, 454)

Indeed this does not require moral relativism as if all truths are equal. It does require a critical eye on our legacy that looks at “philosophy so far” to understand how its hallowed truths and bedrock assumptions may be holding us back from this original vocation. The deliberately “changed stance,” as Taylor calls it, is not trying to find a stable certainty as its pedestal. This cannot happen, but this doesn’t mean that we give up or that we act nihilistically. It means that we muddle through untruth as life’s condition, but now with the affirmation that untruth is more common than truth — that our actions are almost always based on provisional assessments of truth, gut instincts, experience and sometimes just blind faith.

Yet we should not be so glum about it: we make friends anyhow, we fall in love anyhow, we exercise restraint and charity anyhow, we recognize beauty and goodness and just behavior anyhow — all of this without any philosophically certain definitions of what these virtues are. We are playing the game on instinct, and if the definitions ever come, it is always after we’ve been on the field for a while and already have learned how to play, however imperfectly.