Did Nietzsche believe that “Truth ought to serve life”? In fact, in Nietzsche’s works, we find a very different and more nuanced view, in which Nietzsche argues that truth in and of itself is usually harmful to life, and that lies may be needed to support life instead. What public intellectuals such as Dr. Jordan Peterson get right about Nietzsche is often his understanding of the truth as a value contingent on human flourishing, and as referring only to a world of phenomena. But the fatal error in the formulation that “truth ought to serve life” is that the health or lifegiving nature of a claim doesn’t actually make it “truer”. In fact, for Nietzsche, the truth value and the lifegiving value of a statement must be assessed separately. Oftentimes we find that the truth is harmful to life, and what is lifegiving is a lie.

In spite of this, Nietzsche writes that we must search for a life “as a means to knowledge”, and that the Great Liberator for himself was the idea of a life as an experiment and an adventure in truthseeking. “Here the ways of men divide: if you wish to strive for happiness and peace of the soul then believe. If you wish to be a disciple of truth, then inquire.”

Learn about all this and more in this episode (episode eight) of the Nietzsche podcast. We cover Nietzsche’s thoughts contained in the essay On Truth and Lies in an ExtraMoral Sense, Human, All Too Human, The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, and some of his unpublished notes found in Will to Power. We also briefly discuss Von Helmholtz and the NeoKantian movement in the German sciences.

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