Thus, a faith in truth which never questions the value of truth suggests, to Nietzsche, that the value of truth cannot be demonstrated and is probably false. If all he were concerned about was to argue that truth did not exist he could have left it at that, but he didn’t. Instead he moves on to argue that at times, untruth can indeed be a necessary condition of life. The fact that a belief is false is not and has not in the past been a reason for people to abandon it; rather, beliefs are abandoned based upon whether they serve the the goals of preserving and enhancing human life:
- “The falseness of a judgement is not necessarily an objection to a judgment: it is here that our new language perhaps sounds strangest. The question is to what extent it is life-advancing, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-breeding; and our fundamental tendency is to assert that the falsest judgements (to which synthetic judgments a priori belong ) are the most indispensable to us, that without granting as true the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a continual falsification of the world by means of numbers, mankind could not live — that to renounce false judgements would be to renounce life, would be to deny life. To recognize untruth as a condition of life: that, to be sure, means to resist customary value-sentiments in a dangerous fashion; and a philosophy which ventures to do so places itself , by that act alone, beyond good and evil.” (Beyond Good and Evil, 333)
So if Nietzsche’s approach to philosophical questions is based not upon distinguishing what is true from what is false, but rather what is life-enhancing from what is life-destroying, doesn’t that mean that he is a relativist when it comes to truth? He did seem to argue that what people in society usually call “truth” has more to do with social conventions than reality:
What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins. (“On Truth and Lies in an Extramoral Sense” 84)
That does not, however, mean that he was a complete relativist who denied the existence of any truths outside of social conventions. Arguing that untruth is sometimes a condition of life implies that truth is also sometimes a condition of life. It is undeniable that knowing the “truth” of where a cliff begins and ends can be very life-enhancing!
Nietzsche accepted the existence of things that are “true” and appears to have adopted some form of the Correspondence Theory of truth, thus placing him well outside the camp of relativists. Where he differs from many other philosophers, however, is that he abandoned any blind faith in the value and need for truth at all times and in all occasions. He did not deny the existence or value of truth, but he did deny that truth must always be valuable or that it is easy to obtain.
Sometimes it is better to be ignorant of the brutal truth, and sometimes it is easier to live with a falsehood. Whatever the case may be, it always come down to a value judgment: preferring to have truth over untruth or vice-versa in any particular instance is a statement about what you value, and that always makes it very personal — not cold and objective, as some try to portray it.
