Nietzsche - “In Favor of Criticism”
A detailed analysis of aphorism 307, “In favor of criticism”, reflects an aggregate approach that intertwines scientific thinking, artistic energy, and practical wisdom. The aphorism relates to the themes of of science, truth, art, morality, and intellectual conscious as they are found in “The Gay Science”. The aphorism is in favor of criticism, and merits the method of critique as a manifestation of a vital energy in us that wants to “live and affirm”.
“Now something that you formally loved as a truth or probability strikes you as an error; you shed it and fancy that this represents a victory for your reason.”
First of all, we notice the tone that Nietzsche is using – he is speaking informally and directly, perhaps to open us to our own experience, an instance where we ourselves employed reason to critique and overcome a particular outdated truth, to incite us to receptivity of what is next to come. We are immediately in concord, but should be weary since it is obviously only an opening to an issue of greater importance. Nietzsche is not concerned with overcoming a particular outdated error, but to have us recognize that all knowledge is an error, and all previous virtues and morals are products of errors, conflated into systems of morality that work to preserve the species.
Nietzsche expounds on his opening by claiming that truths (provided by science) and probabilities (provided by faiths) are not eternal as they are often portrayed – in fact, when considering our own experience, as Nietzsche has forced us to do with his opening sentence, we can find evidence that indeed there have been times we have employed truths that we now consider an error. As such, the qualitative judgment is less important than the use we derived from its employment. In this sense, truths seem to be contingent, not eternal, and, as such, can be easily given up, as long as they are perceived in a certain manner. While the recognition of a truth as error could be celebrated as a victory for reason, Nietzsche is quick to point out that perhaps a celebration is not warranted. There is little to celebrate if one is only trading one error for another.
“Perhaps this error was as necessary for you then, when you were still a different person – you are always a different person – as are all your present “truths,” being a skin… that concealed and covered a great deal that you were not yet permitted to see.”
This sentence explicitly mentions the necessity of errors: those scientific achievements and habits which preserve the species in the face of a mendacious and sufferable existence, and the lies of art, the “good will to appearance” that not only provides the aesthetic that allows one to adopt the error, but to make it something desirable. Further, Nietzsche ties the contingency of the truth to the being of an individual. Truths are reciprocated as such by an individual – but what provides for the reciprocation? It must be a fulfilling of function, or a meeting of criteria.
This idea adds a new dimension to error. Not only is it necessary for secure and bearable existence, it also contain a qualitative aspect that can be assessed by an individual. In this sense the subject is the interpreter of existence, and is engaged with his environment. Actions are made to meet changing needs. The subject, through error and art, “buys in” to useful truths. These particular truths become errors when they no longer serve their purpose, or when other desirable truths arise, creating a conflict between conservative morals (preservative errors) and new ideas, which are “always evil” according to the prevailing morality.
Nietzsche presents the notion of truth as a skin, and this brings to mind many different ideas: something that contains us, that protects us, but also conceals. The inability to see certain realities is a theme that Nietzsche makes throughout the Gay Science. The honesty of reality would be nauseating, and claims we are not yet strong enough, hence the necessity of art. But it is curious that Nietzsche uses the phrase “not yet permitted to see”, for who grants us permission? I think that Nietzsche is referring to morality: an embedded instinctual preservation for the species that forces individuals to keep harmful things out of sight, to conceal them with errors and lies. The possibility of “pure” still seems that it is something under human sovereignty, but an ability we’ve perhaps or forgotten lost due to a long history of relegation to the domain that preserves the herd. Lastly, biologically, skin is something that is shed once it dies, and that is replaced with new skin. It is a biological function that affirms life; a function that existed prior to the crowning of reason.
“It collapses and unreason crawls out of it into the light like a worm”.
Once truths are expelled as errors and a new myth is adopted, the illogic of old myths rises to the surface. Extrapolating on the origin of knowledge, Nietzsche claimed: “Logic came into existence… out of illogic”. While truths are put forth as eternal, each one contains a worm hiding in the darkness, shrouded. I think Nietzsche is using the image a worm to make the point that unreason is something that we shrink back from, something alien to those who value reason above all.
“When we criticize something, this is no arbitrary and impersonal event; it is, at least, very often, evidence of vital energies in us that are growing and shedding a skin. We negate and must negate because something in us wants to live and affirm – something that we perhaps do not know or see as yet.”
With these sentences, Nietzsche is asserting a human nature much different than the Aristotelian notion of ‘disclosure’. Life is a “consistently shedding something that wants to die”; it is valuing the vital energies in us that seek to affirm life, and acting accordingly. Useless truths are shed, and new ones are created. The process is one of experimentation and action, whereby success depends upon the intensification of life.
For Nietzsche, an intertwining of science and art and practical wisdom is necessary for the creation of life-affirming values. As Nietzsche proclaimed “Pardon me, my friends, I have ventured to paint my happiness on the wall”(56).
1. In the aphorism “The teachers of the purpose of existence”, Nietzsche asserts that men only do what is good for the preservation of the species. But a tradition of that denies life has resulted in men who have become dependent on “purposes”, and cannot flourish without periods of faith in reason in life. Both systems of religion and morality provide for these periods.
107. “The ultimate gratitude to art”: If we had not welcomed the arts and invested this kind of cult of the untrue, then the realization of general untruth and mendaciousness that now comes to us through science…would be utterly unbearable”
4. In the aphorism “What preserves the species” Nietzsche makes the claim that we exist in a tradition of good and evil, whereby the prevalent morality deems anything untried or daring “evil”, “inexpedient”, and “harmful”. Nietzsche asserts that this is a false claim: the dichotomy of good and evil is useful only to the greater power in its domination of subjects. In truth, both instincts are expedient, merely with different functions.
8. The aphorism “Unconscious virtues” describes unknown concealed virtues, for which we have no instrument for measurement. This virtue is left unspecified, but I think Nietzsche is referring to will – the vital energy in us, denied by a weak morality, and denied for so long that many are perhaps unfamiliar with it, or threatened by the truth of it.
111. “Origin of the logical”.
76. “The greatest danger… is the eruption of madness”, “Not truth and certainty are the opposite of the world of the madman, but the universality and the universal binding force of a faith; in sum, the non-arbitrary character of judgments”.
26. “What is life?”
319. “A thinker is now that being in whom the impulse for truth and those life-preserving errors clash for the first fight”, “We who thirst after reason [wish ourselves] to be our experiments”,
110. “To what extent can truth endure incorporation? That is the experiment”.
