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So, I’ve been thinking a lot about Nietzsche lately, and I am attracted to the idea that truth is not as valuable as we have made it out to be, that something like philosophical health could be a higher value than truth. In terms of belief, that one should believe what it is healthy to believe, rather than what is, or what one thinks is, or what is generally considered as, true. Healthy in the sense of yes-saying, life affirming, conducive to flourishing, etc.
So for example, if it is philosophically healthy to believe that there is no God, one should adopt this belief, regardless of its truth value (this is just an example, I am not making the claim that this belief is or is not philosophically healthy).
Does this resonate with anyone? Or maybe you just like Nietzsche? Or you just want to say hello? : )
Hello
The problem I see is that this is telling someone not to think of the word elephant and to not think of elephants at all.
It is very very hard to change what we know and believe. Trying to force yourself to change these would quite likely cause mental health issues.
Well… “hello!” first of all - and welcome.
Your position has problems and others have hinted to that. One cannot decree what truth is and actually not even Nietzsche meant to do that.
This is a very difficult aspect of interpreting Nietzsche, and yet it may be said that truth is what Nietzsche’ s philosophy is about. It would be quite long and difficult to present the various elements concurrent to shape a doctrine of truth in Nietzsche, this would definitely entail a discussion on perspectivism at least, but possibly a lot more.
Anyways, I guess that the view of a utilitarian Nietzsche that you seemingly present cannot be seriously maintained after examining texts, and I refer mostly to GS book V and BGE book VI (just as a bare minimum, there may be other references like TI, not to mention earlier works such as On the Use and Abuse of History for Life). One important aspect is that truths, like men, are not all alike. There are higher truths that can be handled only by higher men.
To cut a long story short, I would say that Nietzsche is not saying that one should believe true what is healthy (which, btw, leaves the open question of what “healthy” means - you seeemingly imply “beneficial”, functional to well-being, while I do not think Nietzsche maintains that), but that “health” is truth.
I do take your point. It’s very hard to just change beliefs, especially if they are core beliefs.
It’s good that you brought up mental illness actually. I was thinking about this in those terms to some extent. The whole point of CBT therapy, for instance, is to try and change thoughts / beliefs. And it’s a very difficult process, though not impossible. But in this case, the goal is to go from a state of unhealth to a state of health. So to change a belief like “I’m a loser” to a belief like “I’m not a loser” or “I’m a good person” for example.
It would take a lot of philosophical work to change beliefs in a similar way. i.e. going from believing in God to not believing in God, not because you think once belief is truer than the other, but because you think one belief is healthier than the other. Although perhaps it is easier if you first lose faith in the idea of truth such that you no longer have a strong belief about whether or not God exists is actually true or not.
Yes, beliefs represent standards of value, of health – the psychological subject, the self and it’s organic necessity tend to be that frame on which beliefs rise or fall. Nietzsche’s point was basically that you can measure the “health”, the quality and quantity of consciousness, of a person in part by the ways in which they relate to their ideas, to the reality of their experience.
Things like naive belief in certain standards of truth more reflect psychological types than reality or “truth itself”. Life is philosophy, or rather philosophy is just whatever is called “life”.
One would have to choose what they think is healthy much in the same way one must choose what is good or right.
Nietzsche would be fine with and even encourage that. Everyone can have their own conception of health. So that’s a bullet I will be happy to bite.
This is true, but also true for truth. So I’m not sure there’s any advantage to be had in sticking with truth over health with regards to the time factor.
For Nietzsche, it wouldn’t be a matter of knowing what is truly healthy, but rather of choosing what you think is healthy for you. It is more like artistic choice. There’s no way Shakespeare MUST write Hamlet, but he must decide how his Hamlet will be if he is going to right it. But there is no truth to Hamlet other than the truth that Hamlet is the Hamlet that Shakespeare actually did right. Similarly, what is healthy for me is whatever chose as the constituents of my health.
I am not denying truth altogether, as Nietzsche does at least sometimes. I think some things count as truly healthy (eating vegetables in moderation) and some things count as truly unhealthy (smoke cigarettes in any quantity). But what I am arguing is that for belief acceptance, health might be a better or higher criteria than truth.
Taking the God example again, there is certainly a truth about God’s existence - either He does or He doesn’t. And you can choose to believe that there is a God because you think it’s true. But perhaps you could also choose to reject God, even if you think it’s true that he exists, because you think that not believing in God promotes better health or flourishing during the course of your life (let’s be agnostic on the possibility of an eternal afterlife for now). You might be wrong in your claim to the falsity of God’s existence, but still have a reason to reject God’s existence because denying God can lead to a happier life (we suppose).
Well… would you say that for Nietzsche, health is truth, but that truth is not correspondence to reality? It seems pretty clear that at least the early Nietzsche of On Truth and Lies (TL) all truths are fictions in at least the correspondence sense.
I do think Nietzsche holds a kind of pragmatic doctrine where truth is what is life-affirming, or beneficial in the sense of being life-affirming and bringing about flourishing. I definitely think that Nietzsche rejects truth as correspondence to reality, even in the later works, against scholars like Clark and Leiter who think that later Heidegger maintains a traditional, correspondence notion of truth such that we can make claims that science gives us truth about reality as it is in itself. I do not think later Nietzsche is saying that.
It may not even be a question of health or illness. Rather, the ambiguity points toward another direction, as his anti Christ is not an attack on personality, but of the system , the institution. Christ is, an idiot, but not born that way. He is an idiot, literally reduced to an almost Buddhist insulation against the vagrancies of life, not an immaturely sustained childish course of attaining peace, but a recapturing of the natural contexts within which an ethical life may be lived. This leads to health, it’s opposite to societal conflict. He may be pursuing a kind of elan, which flows naturally, out of a re-affirmation of early humanistic optimism in the goodness of man.
“Do what you want to be done to yourself” - the essence of morals. This idiot (child) is welcome in Zarathustra’s cave among the Higher Men. The same Idiot of Dostoevsky. I liked the series…
No, there’s no correspondence to reality. Man can’t tell what reality is - but for the hypothesis of will-to-power, the only reality of “the world which is of any concern to us” to be possibly known, or, rather, interpreted. I wholly agree that Nietzsche rejects the notion of truth as correspondence (because such a correspondence is impossible). He states that the living necessarily brings about “error”, it needs to bend perception, to subject perception to its sustainment. Yet this is very different from assering anything like pragmatism. The “error” is structural, necessary - yet not deliberate (it wouldn’t be necessary if it were deliberate).
What is “pragmatism” after all? Whether it is a kind of utilitarianism, I do not see that as being possibly tangent to Nietzsche («even what is here called ‘utility’ is ultimately also a mere belief, something imaginary, and perhaps precisely that most calamitous stupidity of which we shall perish some day» - GS 354). As I interpret Nietzsche, pragmatism is intellectually dishonest, it is a short-sighted presumption of effects having no further reach than one’s petty existence, not the great, expanding and profligate life - nothing that a complementary man (BGE, 207) would ever embrace.
Nietzsche holds to a different hierarchy of concepts. To say that health is truth may seem like you’re praising health, but you’re actually degrading it to the level of truth.
Maybe you are right… Still you don’ t give me much to chew but your dissent.
If you feel like expanding a little more, maybe I can better understand both the different hierarchy of concepts and the degradation to the level of truth.
(Frankly, I suspect that it is going to turn out as a matter of mere “semantics”…)
It is the difference between knowing a thing and conceding to it. To know is easy; to make use of, to value, to challenge, to risk, to overcome, and yes even to deny truth – this is much harder given that knowledge.
What do you do with truth? What is your intention before reality? Before yourself?
Because how you stand before those issues will not only shape the answers, it will also shape your ability to know truth itself, even and especially “objectively” speaking beyond the ranges of those very questions, which, if you grasp what I’m saying, appears highly paradoxical. This is something that cannot be understood until it is experienced as a necessity, which is to say, as a suffering and a salvation.
Nietzsche understood this, in the core of himself. However I think that, unfortunately, he never realized it fully enough in his reason, too. The self is a series of contradictions, oppositions and antitheses which in attempting to reconcile we produce “I”, the lived self. The hierarchy of concepts is all about this. So one also needs an intellectual, conceptual grasp of that overarching process and subtle architecture, if one is to raise the self to its “ultimate level” philosophically speaking.
Nietzsche laid the groundwork for that (building off what came before him); he was unable to finish that project. It has since been finished, however.
IOW let’s say what leads to Health varies, then it might be good if beliefs vary, even about extremely fundamental things. Or, you could Think of it as, It might be inevitable.