Nietzsche

Nietzsche claims that the truth we claim to have as human beings is really a sea of metaphors and accepted deceptions. In Nietzsche mind, there is such a thing as Truth itself, but it could never be fully grasped, or even adequately approached. In his essay “On Truth and Lies in a non-moral sense” Nietzsche points out how  “The ‘”thing in itself”‘ (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for.” In other words, not only is it impossible to capture the pure reality of an object through language, the truth itself of an object isn’t even worth trying to describe.

For Nietzsche, seeking Truth itself, or even obtaining some part of the Truth, is not necessary to live an enriching and fulfilling life. For this reason, Nietzsche sees it as pointless to seek the Truth. In his mind, the intellect should be used to project meaning, or a reality, that is empowering to our own lives. We should see ourselves as an “artistically creating subject” that paints the reality of the world with metaphors rather than arrogantly cling to our perception of what we believe to be the truth. He claims that “the drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive” and is a drive that “continually manifests an ardent desire to refashion the world which presents itself to waking man, so that it will be as colorful, irregular, lacking in results and coherence, charming, and eternally new as the world of dreams.”

Nietzsche is nihilistic by representing humans as nothing more than “clever beasts” that “invented knowing” and that later die in an indifferent universe. Taking the universe as a whole, he sees no purpose in the intellect. The intellect only has importance to us, but has no real importance to the outside world. If there is no God, as Nietzsche claimed, than this is the cold and harsh reality of life. He is, however, anti-nihilistic by urging us to not to despair of this fact. Even though we don’t fully capture the truth, we can still have a beautiful life without it. We ourselves can create our own purpose and come up with a view a world of that helps us to live happy lives, so long as it doesn’t harm others.

Contrary to Nietzsche, I do believe that capturing a true view of the world around us is important to living a happy life. Finding the truth about our own purpose as human beings, and trying to see the world around us as it really is, is a natural instinct in us. We want to be in the right and uncover universal truths.I do agree that there are limitation to how much our language can capture of reality, but, nevertheless, with our limitations we are still able to capture enough of the Truth to lead meaningful and fruitful lives.

This desire to know the truth is something that even Nietzsche recognizes, but he struggles to understand how this desire came about in human beings. People deceive, lie, and present distorted images of themselves so frequently, for their own advantage, that Nietzsche finds nothing “less incomprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them.” and later asks “where in the world could the drive for truth have come from?” given this tendency for us to distort reality in a negative way. The only reasonable answer that I have found for this question is that we were born with this desire. It’s not a desire we ourselves developed, but a desire that we were created with. This desire was most likely dormant early on in human history, where we were just trying to survive and reproduce. But as we evolved, and as we started to live in more sophisticated societies, where all our basic needs where met, this desire began to awaken in us, leading us to seek truths beyond those necessary for survival. We began to ask questions, out of this desire, such as: What is the meaning of life? What is our purpose as human beings? What is there after death? How did we as human being come about? and many other questions that didn’t have to do anything with our own survival. This was the birth of philosophy, I believe, as we sought to find answers to these existential questions through our own reason.

I believe we don’t physically perceive the objects around us as they really are, but we can come to understand their purpose and the reason for their existence. In this way we can seize part of the truth, which is beneficial for our own lives.

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