Looking away
On the axis: The value of truth · a truth already known
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?
Justification
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.
We have art so that we do not perish of the truth.Posthumous fragments, spring 1888, 16 [40]
Beyond Good and Evil, §1 (1886) · On the Genealogy of Morality, III (1887)
Justification
The knowledge of nature has a therapeutic office: to dissolve the terrors of the gods, of death and of the heavens; without these fears, he says, we would have no need of natural science. Truth is worth what it cures, neither a cult of knowledge nor a consoling illusion: the gods exist but do not concern themselves with us, and it is that very truth which brings peace.
Principal Doctrines, XI-XII
leads to: Attention and diversion