Here we see again how this, er, spirited young man still believes in a good to pursue and a self to pursue it. On the other hand, he’s very much a modern and, as such, a liberal, or more precisely a pseudo-liberal (and thereby a pseudo-modern). If he weren’t, if he were fully illiberal, he wouldn’t be talking in terms of individuals (liberalism is about the freedom of the individual from the collective):
“In any human or bestial herd, the main concern of herd members always is to get or to preserve what is good for themselves. The ‘themselves’ here are not experienced as isolated, nihilist individuals who are nothing more than a chaos of arbitrary sentiments or experiences. The herd member’s self-knowledge is political. It is of himself as a father and citizen, a member of his herd. Thus obtaining or preserving what is good for himself is interpreted in terms of communal or political, not private, goods. No real privacy is available to, or desired by, herd members; everything crucial in their lives is political.” (Harry Neumann, Liberalism, “Politics or Nothing!”)
HumAnIze is, to some extent, a philosopher in Neumann’s sense:
“[T]he philosopher’s main theoretical and practical care is the concern dominating him in his common-sense, illiberal world: To get what is good—really good—for himself. In this appendix, that illiberalism is also called man’s ‘natural’ orientation.
Unlike non-philosophers, the philosopher is permeated by the sting of the awareness of lacking adequate knowledge of what is good for him, of his true self-interest. Consequently for him, his main theoretical and practical job is philosophy, the striving to secure that adequate knowledge. Since philosophers interpret this striving as man’s most natural drive, no method is necessary to discipline the mind into being philosophic; non-philosophers (ordinary, unquestioning herd-members) need only become alive to their need to know what they by nature most want to know.” (op.cit., “The Nihilist (Liberal) Discipline of Scientific Method”.)
This, then, is the reason why the question ‘Why do you seek the truth?’ seems completely absurd to him:
A true illiberal, however, has no need to seek the truth:
“[T]he worth of one’s gods appeared self-evident, subject to doubt only by madmen or fools. To its devotees, this piety had nothing to do with faith or belief. It informed a way of life in which the main concern—the piety which unified the nation—was experienced as self-evident truth. This political piety left no room for serious philosophic or scientific questions which became possible only by its discrediting […]. All moralities or religions informed by this liberal disestablishment naturally are experienced as faith in something questionable, something open to philosophic-scientific inquiry.
Once the pious certainties of the old tribal or civic piety are lost, politics can no longer escape ‘the police supervision of doubt’, however much desperate partisans may cling to the self-evidence of some pious truth. Most men dread the rootless, aimless lives forced upon them by the liberal discrediting of tribal-civic piety.” (op.cit., page 180.)
It’s actually precisely the question “What is the value of truth?” that may turn the philosopher from an illiberal or a pseudo-liberal into a true liberal:
“The will to truth which will still tempt us to many a venture, that famous truthfulness of which all philosophers so far have spoken with respect—what questions has this will to truth not laid before us! What strange, wicked, questionable questions! That is a long story even now—and yet it seems as if it had scarcely begun. Is it any wonder that we should finally become suspicious, lose patience, and turn away impatiently? That we should finally learn from this Sphinx to ask questions, too? Who is it really that puts questions to us here? What in us really wants ‘truth’?—Indeed, we came to a long halt at the question about the cause of this will—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?—The problem of the value of truth came before us—or was it we who came before the problem? Who of us is Oedipus here? Who the Sphinx? It is a rendezvous, it seems, of questions and question marks.—And though it scarcely seems credible, it finally almost seems to us as if the problem had never even been put so far—as if we were the first to see it, fix it with our eyes, and risk it. For it does involve a risk, and perhaps there is none that is greater.” (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 1 whole, translation Zimmern.)
This is what it means for the “natural” love of truth to make way for the “moral” will to intellectual probity:
“By annihilating any non-arbitrary good or god, science (liberalism) rejects the common-sense, moral-political universe in which a man’s chief care is acquisition of what truly is good for him. Until its farce is scientifically exposed, illiberalism assumes the existence of that real, non-arbitrary good. Science is the insight that the world hospitable to politics, and therefore to philosophy, does not exist. Unlike philosophy which gives full rein to the mind’s ‘natural’ bent, science tyrannically imposes its methodology to discipline that bent into submission to science’s ‘unnatural’ orientation.
That tyranny is the basic meaning of scientific conquest of nature. Nietzsche rightly observes that modernity’s hallmark is not the victory of science, but the victory of scientific method over science. Here ‘science’ means inquiry deluded by faith in an illiberal universe whose core is the swindle responsible for politics and, therefore, philosophy. Despising that faith, Nietzsche insists that truth is scientific method: insofar as truth is more than liberal (nihilist) insight, it is the tyrannic will to suppress illiberalism in thought and in action. This suppression’s main weapon is scientific methodology. To subvert illiberalism (politics and philosophy), Descartes and his liberal allies invented liberal science, mathematical physics, grounded in a symbolic mathematics not reflecting, as illiberal mathematics had, the common-sense (moral-political) universe. The mathematical assumptions and consequences of Cartesian liberalism are well described by J. Klein. That liberalism despised illiberal mathematics which ‘had no notion of the Zero’.” (Neumann, Liberalism, “The Nihilist (Liberal) Discipline of Scientific Method”.)
“[We] shall conquer and come to power even without truth. The spell that fights on our behalf, the eye of Venus that charms and blinds even our opponents, is the magic of the extreme, the seduction that everything extreme exercises: we immoralists—we are the most extreme.” (Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 749 end, translation Kaufmann.)
