Relation to truth· Belief and knowledge
Vital illusions
Axis: The value of truth — Should we want the truth at any cost, or do some illusions help us live?
Nothing proves that truth is worth more than illusion: a belief is judged by what it does for life, by the strength it gives or takes away. Art, ideals, the fictions we live by may be illusions, but they are vital ones; the will to truth at any cost is itself a belief that must be questioned.
Movements 1
Show inferred positions (1)
Romanticisminferable
Against the analysis that dissects and disenchants, Romanticism holds imagination, myth and feeling to be organs of life deeper than demonstrative reason. What the understanding sometimes reduces to illusion, poetry, symbol, night, becomes there an access to the real that clarity misses: the disenchantment of the world is not a progress but a loss.
Novalis, Fragments · Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795)
Philosophers 1
Nietzscheexplicit
He is the first to turn the question around: whence our willing the true rather than illusion, and what if this will to truth were itself an inherited faith, the last avatar of the ascetic ideal? Life requires perspectives, fictions, art; not that Nietzsche preaches the comfortable lie: his probity is pitiless, but it is exercised in the service of life, which remains the evaluating instance.
Beyond Good and Evil, §1 (1886) · On the Genealogy of Morality, III (1887)
- PrescriptiveExistential SituationThe right not to know
When a truth can neither guide nor change anything, is refusing to know it wisdom, or giving up on facing reality?
knowledge about oneself - PrescriptiveExistentialThe happy fool
Is a lucid life better, even if troubled by what it discovers, than a happy life in ignorance? Is truth a component of living well, or an instrument worth only what it brings?
a life - PrescriptiveVitalLooking away
To stop dwelling on a truth that gives no purchase is not to deny it; but where does the line run between this wisdom of attention and denial, if discomfort gets to decide what we look at?
a truth already known - DescriptiveLying to oneself
Choosing one's illusions would require believing at will; but can we really believe what we know to be false, or only arrange things so as not to look?
one's own beliefs - PrescriptiveVitalLiving on fictions
An ideal, a work of art, an "as if" we know to be fictions deceive no one: do such avowed fictions do the vital work we credit illusions with, without the price of falsehood, or are they just an illusion unaware of itself?
a fiction known to be false - PrescriptivePolitical & legalThe city and the lie
Many common orders rest on unverifiable narratives, from founding myth to official fiction: does a society owe its members the truth, or can it live on shared myths?
the common order