Nietzsche, Post-Truth, and the Value of Truthfulness
Matt Bennett
3. Nov. 2020
E
arly in 2020 the WHO declared not just a coronavirus pandemic, but also a global ‘infodemic’: a fast and damaging spread of fake news and misinformation about coronavirus, undermining public health strategies across the world. While the pandemic has come as a shock to most of us, perhaps the infodemic warning did not. After all, the WHO’s worries about misinformation are continuous with worries that many have had for some years now about the ease with which falsehoods spread through society. Thanks to a dangerous mixture of unregulated digital media, and high-profile politicians discrediting traditional news sources, our current public discourse is riddled with anxiety about widespread hostility towards experts, and confusion about what is fact and what is fake.
How long have we been living in this “post-truth” society? Discussion of the problem tends to favour one of two very different stories about the history of the current state of truth. One of those stories emphasises the novelty of our situation, presenting something of a fall-myth: at some point in our not-too-distant past we fell from stability into the chaos of present-day politics, thanks to the rise of populist demagogues and their efforts to undermine traditional sources of facts and information.
The other story cites a much longer history of what is sometimes called “post-modernism”, a notoriously loose term, but that often takes us back to various intellectual trends in the 20th century. This story usually cites, for example, French philosophers including Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, and sometimes goes back further into the 19th century to critics of the Enlightenment. Nietzsche in particular is often seen as a founding father of our post-truth age. Those who tell this longer historical story will suggest that Nietzsche’s supposed attack on the very possibility of truth laid the foundations for the situation we currently find ourselves in.
Both these histories of “post-truth” are at best only partially true. Yet much can be learned from what is false in these stories. In particular we should take a closer look at Nietzsche, the alleged founder of our post-truth age.
Frederich Nietzsche
Portrait by Edward Munch, 1906.
Truth was causing a lot of problems when Nietzsche began to write about it. In the decades leading up to Nietzsche’s productive period – around 20 years spanning the 1860s, 70s, and 80s – a series of intense debates had raged among German philosophers and scientists about the repercussions of the rise of the natural sciences. Facts revealed by evolutionary biology, anthropology, and psychology were threatening traditional religious and moral authorities, and the success of modern science seemed to bring with it a dangerous nihilism. Nietzsche is famous for having declared that “God is dead”, but he was by no means the first to have recognised that these newly discovered truths could have devastating cultural consequences.
Contrary to the received wisdom that Nietzsche denied the very idea of truth, Nietzsche thought that truth was often all too real. Much of Nietzsche’s philosophy struggles not against truth, but with the question of how we can live with the truth. Nietzsche’s radical version of this question struck at the very foundations of many concepts and values that we still hold dear.
The lesson that Nietzsche wanted us to take from modern science was that an unsentimental, honest acceptance of the world as it is, without fantasies about how we want it to be, reveals potentially unbearable truths about a cold, indifferent world. For Nietzsche this meant that everything important to us – not only religious faith, but all of our other values - is up for grabs: free will, morality, personal identity, democracy, even the very idea of progress and improvement. Our highest ideals, on Nietzsche’s analysis, turn out to reflect a range of human, all too human instincts driving our culture, including resentment, cruelty, and a lust for power. Insisting on an unsentimental realism, Nietzsche’s picture of our social world is red in tooth and claw, and his reality bleak, grim, and unaccommodating.
According to Nietzsche, we have truthfulness to thank for this unappealing picture. But Nietzsche also recognised that truth and truthfulness themselves are just as vulnerable to his grim realism. This hard-edged view of reality is achieved, Nietzsche thought, by stripping away the biases of optimism, hope, and wishful thinking. But the truthful perspective that results from this process is just that: a perspective – one particular way of seeing the world among others. And this way of seeing the world is itself no less a legitimate object of scrutiny and suspicion than the less truthful perspectives of traditional religion and morality. Religious doctrines, moral principles, and social norms are created, Nietzsche thinks, because they satisfy the worldview of those who create them. Such things are valuable depending on whether we share that worldview. And truth? The value of truth too, according to Nietzsche, depends on whether we want truthfulness above all else.
In this respect Nietzsche’s radical approach, so often misreported as a simple denial of truth, is rather to ask why we consider the pursuit of truth valuable, and whether its value might not sometimes be overridden by the value of beauty, creativity, or – less sentimentally – power. As Nietzsche himself puts it: “we do not consider the falsity of a judgment as itself an objection a judgement; this is perhaps where our new language will sound most foreign.”
Nietzsche was particularly fond of speculating about why people believe the things they believe. Philosophers, scientists, artists, priests, and politicians all make claims, argue for them, defend them, and do so for reasons and motivations that can and should be scrutinised. But if truth and truthfulness are valuable from one perspective among others, then we can also ask questions about what motivates commitments to these values.
Nietzsche’s counsel is straightforward enough: if someone tells us that truthfulness must be defended at all costs, then ask why truthfulness is important, and in particular why it is important to the person who is defending truthfulness. The properly Nietzschean position in today’s age of fake news and infodemics would not be to deny the possibility of truth, but to ask what motivates all parties to the debate.
In the politics of those attacking and defending established epistemic standards, Nietzsche’s counsel of suspicion cuts both ways. Right wing populists the world over have benefited significantly from their efforts to destabilise public confidence in expert authorities, traditional news media, and the political establishment. A culture in which few of us care whether what politicians tell us is true is a culture in which Donald Trump can rise to power while his opponents repeat impotent complaints about his poor grasp of the facts. The devaluation of truthfulness is a political tactic which has proved remarkably successful, partly through replacing commitments to truth with alternative and extremely dangerous perspectives on what is most important.
But Nietzsche’s counsel of suspicion also raises the question of whether defenders of truth and fact also may also have a horse in this race. Nietzsche asks: who is truth important to, and why is it important to them? The answers that Nietzsche himself gave to this question are unlikely to be very convincing as an analysis of contemporary defenders of truthfulness, but the question itself still applies. For as much as Trump and others have benefitted from throwing truth into chaos, traditional epistemic authorities also have a vested interest in rebuilding old confidence in their authority. Print and TV media corporations, technocrats disguising political decisions behind claims to be “following the science”, and politicians who perform a sensible, mature, and realistic grasp of solutions to what ails our society, all stand to lose considerable power and influence if their monopoly on the truth is no longer considered important.
The point is not to do away with the very distinction between truth and falsehood, but to ask why this distinction is important, and who does and does not benefit from a culture that recognises it. With Nietzsche, we should recognise that the creation of a “post-truth” culture is driven by a lust for power among those who gain from the destruction of old sources of truth. But Nietzsche also gives us reason to be suspicious of those who claim simply to be led by the facts, especially in politics, where "there is no alternative" is too often used to hide political choices. Nietzsche is not an enemy of truth, but he is suspicious of those who claim to defer to it. Perhaps it is neither ignorant nor irrational for us to be similarly suspicious.
Matt Bennett is Senior Research Officer on the Leverhulme-funded project Competition and Competitiveness at the University of Essex.
