Notes on Nietzsche 05: On Old Truths and New

By Sadhika on

 Book IV, The Joyful Wisdom

“Something now appears to thee as an error which thou formerly lovedst as a truth, or as a probability: thou pushest it from thee and imaginest that thy reason has there gained a victory.”

It happens so often that we look back on our past selves and laugh on our follies and frivolities, as if we are any different now! It is true we are different in one sense: what once appeared sacred truth to us is now a fool’s mumblings, but it is also untrue in another that our wit and reason continues to reassert itself like it did back then. We like to win, be it battles or arguments, against a country or ourselves. We know not what we stand for, but the list of things we stand against is on the tips of our tongues.

We love to renounce: faith like the Atheists, materialistic pursuits like the Ascetics, emotional expression like the Stoics, objectivity like the Romantics, property like the Marxists, meaning like the Nihilists, meaninglessness like the Utilitarians, free will like the Fatalists, the list goes on. We also like to renounce ourselves from time to time, for it is this snakelike shedding of our skin that allows a new us to emerge forth. It is the things we give up that define us better than the things we bear. And who dares be undefined?

“But perhaps that error was then, when thou wast still another person—thou art always another person,—just as necessary to thee as all thy present "truths," like a skin, as it were, which concealed and veiled from thee much which thou still mayst not see. Thy new life, and not thy reason, has slain that opinion for thee: thou dost not require it any longer, and now it breaks down of its own accord, and the irrationality crawls out of it as a worm into the light.”

We content ourselves with delusions about how our present state of being is the one. The truths of today seem more real and convincing, because we lack the capacity to argue them out of existence like we did the truths of yesterday. When we focus our vision on an object, the surroundings become blurred, much like the peripheral truths that lie in the background of the truth we see today. In a sense, they are less true than the truths of today so their shapes appear more distorted in our newfound vision.

“When we make use of criticism it is not something arbitrary and impersonal,—it is, at least very often, a proof that there are lively, active forces in us, which cast a skin. We deny, and must deny, because something in us wants to live and affirm itself, something which we perhaps do not as yet know, do not as yet see!—So much in favour of criticism.”

Let us not count it among our victories that these truths lie dismembered before our eyes. The new truths of today dislodged them from our favour, for these truths have us in their grip, and not we them. They live out their lives through us, and it is the apparent consensus of all truths, old and new, to let us be their figureheads, to let us feel triumphant against ourselves that we defeated the old truths and replaced them with new ones! We jeered at our past selves for so long, that we hear the smug laughter in our heads still. But perhaps, this is not the echo of our mockery after all. Perhaps it is the truths themselves that are laughing at us and say, “Behold the fool who thinks he birthed us!”

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