E. Remarks Suggesting that Truth Exists
Nietzsche suggests on a number of occasions that truth does actually exist. For instance,
“That it does not matter whether a thing is true, but only what effect it produces – absolute lack of intellectual integrity” (Will to Power, 172)
Further,
“What is the price of moral improvement? —Unhinging of reason, reduction of all motives to fear and hope (punishment and reward); dependence upon a priestly guardianship, upon pedantic formalities which claim to express a divine will; the implanting of a ‘conscience’ which sets a false knowing in place of testing and experiment” (Will to Power, 14).
And,
“How much truth can a spirit endure, how much truth does a spirit date? —This became for me the real standard of value. Error is cowardice, every achievement of knowledge is a consequence of courage, of severity toward oneself, of cleanliness toward oneself—Such an experimental philosophy as I live anticipate experimentally even the possibilities of the most fundamental nihilism; but this does not mean that it must halt at a negation, a No, a will to negation. It wants rather to cross over the opposite of this—to a Dionysian affirmation of the world as it is, without subtraction, exception, or selection –it wants the eternal circulation:--the same things the same logic and illogic of entanglements. The highest state a philosopher can attain: to stand in a Dionysian relationship to existence—my formula for this is amor fati or love of fate. It is part of this state to perceive not merely the necessity of those sides of existence hitherto denied, but their desirability; and not their desirability merely in relation to the sides hitherto affirmed (perhaps as their complement or precondition), but for their own sake as the more powerful, more fruitful, truer sides of existence, in which its will finds clearer expression.” (Will to Power, 104).
F. Summary
It appears that these remarks indicate that Nietzsche recognized two kinds of truth. ON the one hand there is ordinary truth, which he despises, and on the other hand there is Dionysian truth based upon change, adventure, danger, and the fullness of life.
