About Truthfulness

What does Nietzsche mean by Truthfulness? This surely is a term open to endless debate and disagreement. Thus, I shall attempt to say, not what it is, but what it is not in the naïve hope that this would be more fruitful.

There is Truth.

This seems fairly clear. In ‘intellectual conscience’ in 2:GS, he holds contempt for those who do not desire for certainty and calls them lower human beings. Bernard Williams also says that Nietzsche ‘holds on tenaciously to "an ideal of truthfulness that would not allow us to falsify or forget the horrors of the world", for "their existence has been necessary to everything that we value”’ and offers several judicious quotes in support of his claim (WH’s post).

I take it here that ‘desire for certainty’ is not certainty in a myth, mask or noble lie, but certainty in the truth. For example, In section 1 of GS where he says that "man must from time to time believe he knows why he exists", it seems fairly clear (to me) that what a man believes in is not necessarily the truth, and thus not the truth that Nietzsche speaks of.

I also take it that the “ideal of truthfulness” is the same as “Truth”. That there is a will to, value of and ideal of truth implies that there is a truth.

Also, as the intro to the Kauffman edition says, Nietzsche does not seem to be a deconstructive sceptic that holds that there is no such thing as truth, or that truth simply what people think it is, or that truth is just a boring, useless, invented category. Rather, Nietzsche’s main question seems to be how to make truth bearable, and not that truth is malleable or dispensable.

Truth is not Scientific Truth

Scientific truth is only pure knowledge and not Truth, as evidenced in S.as.E (137) in which he lambastes scientists and university philosophers. We also see this is section 344 of GS: ‘In what way we, too, are pious’, where he says “"No doubt, that those who are truthful in that audacious and ultimate sense that is presupposed by the faith in science thus affirm another world than the world of life, nature, and history; and insofar as they affirm this "other world" - look, must they not by the same token negate its counterpart, this world, our world?".

But wait. Doesn’t section 344 also say that “it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rest… that God is truth; that truth is divine…”? Maybe what Nietzsche means then is that science is bad only on the fact that its metaphysical foundations are wrong; truth then can be found in another kind of science - maybe a science that is subjective (Tee How) and not dogmatic (Wenghong).