Ishaan Jalan

April 26th 2010.

Truth in Philosophy: Change but not Progress

Philosophers have debated about questions regarding life, existence, being, etc. for

centuries. From Plato’s Socratic dialogues to Descartes’ Meditations, philosophers have compiled

accounts of what they believe is the ‘truth’ or meaning behind life, existence, values, mind, etc.,

and what they essentially believed in their opinion, constituted the ‘rational argument’. 1 As

Nietzsche’s account ‘On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense’ suggests, philosophy does not

make progress to reach a universal truth, but rather changes with the time to reflect the views

that philosophers of an era believe to be the truth. I believe change within philosophy represents

the ever-changing radical nature of philosophers over time and not progress within philosophy

or aid to other areas of human endeavor. Philosophical writings reflect the beliefs of the

generation in which they are written and do not represent progress since they essentially

address the same questions as previously written accounts.

Before I delve into the intricacies and depth of Nietzsche’s ‘On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral

Sense’ and Descartes’ meditations, I should make an important distinction between change and

progress with respect to philosophy and philosophy’s aid to progress in human endeavors.

Change within philosophy refers to the new thoughts, ideas, etc. in philosophy that reflect the

notions of the time and how they are different from notions previously held about these ideas.

Progress on the other hand, refers to the movement of a particular subject towards its

conclusion, which is universally true and uncontested. It can be said that progress is made if

philosophy is beneficial in any way to improve human standards or living and knowledge. Let us

1
Anthony Quinton, in T. Honderich (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford University
Press, 1995), p. 666
consider the case of Boethius and how philosophy gave him ‘consolation from reality’; if

philosophy could have led to him changing the very system he lived in at the time, it may have

been considered progress. Only when philosophy has a direct consequence that leads to a lasting

step forward in the society of its time; when society improves or moved towards a particular

point of success due it, can philosophy be considered to aid progress. A fundamental error with

such reasoning is that society can never really make progress neither in philosophy nor with its

aid because society itself does not know where its final destination point lies.

One of the earliest examples we come across in Nietzsche’s account ‘Truth and

Lying in a Non-Moral Sense’, is with regard to the human intellect. Human intellect grows with the

procurement of knowledge and knowledge may be obtained through philosophical teachings.

Nietzsche is skeptical of the human intellect and critiques the notion that progress may be made

by the growth of this intellect. Philosophy, as we know, is a study using logical reasoning and the

growth of the human intellect through philosophy would certainly be considered progress. But

here Nietzsche presents the argument countering this by saying that after an individual’s death

the intellect becomes irrelevant:

Someone could invent a fable like this and yet they would still not have given a satisfactory
illustration of just how pitiful, how insubstantial and transitory, how purposeless and arbitrary
the human intellect looks within nature; there were eternities during which it did not exist; and
when it has disappeared again, nothing will have happened. 2
Here Nietzsche declares that the intellect, which may grow with philosophical questioning,

cannot be considered to progress since it is limited to the lifetime of humans. He further states

that “this intellect has no further mission that might extend beyond the bounds of human life.” 3

2
Nietzsche, Friedrich: The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings: ‘On Truth and Lying in a Non-
Moral Sense’. Page 141. Cambridge University Press 1999.
3
Nietzsche, Friedrich: The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings: ‘On Truth and Lying in a Non-
Moral Sense’. Page 141. Cambridge University Press 1999.
To him the philosophical knowledge present within human intellect is not as great as we regard

it to be and “only its own possessor and progenitor regards it with such pathos, as if it housed

the axis around which the entire world revolved.”4 We can see the underlying idea that

philosophy does not aid human progress and due to the short, periodic nature of the intellect, its

growth does not facilitate progress.

In Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings, Descartes’ meditation on first philosophy

discusses the breakdown of all his knowledge so that may he approach philosophical knowledge

from a fresh and unbiased perspective. In this meditation, Descartes seeks to prove Gods’

existence and make a distinction between the human soul and body. As Descartes says, he

“noticed how many false things [he] had accepted as true [during his] childhood” 5 and how he

built on these foundations. Descartes wished to build a strong foundation ‘firm and durable’ in

the sciences, which why he chose to approach the problem by “clear[ing] [his] mind of all cares

and arranged for [himself] time free from interruption.”6 As we know from later in the text,

Descartes considered this a success and progress in philosophy despite the fact that he was

simply rebuilding the foundations of philosophy in accordance with his beliefs and notions.

When Descartes discusses the existence of God, he is simply trying to improve or add to the

arguments of philosophers before him. Gods’ existence in philosophy has been mentioned by

Boethius; others have used God as a way to counter the famous ‘third man argument’ which

suggests that the infinite regress that cannot be explained without an assumption. Thus,

Descartes does not actually ‘make progress’ simply because we do not know when philosophy

will reach a point when it becomes universally accepted and even then, whether it is universally

4
Nietzsche, Friedrich: The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings: ‘On Truth and Lying in a Non-
Moral Sense’. Page 141. Cambridge University Press 1999.
5
Descartes, Rene: Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings. Page 18. Penguin Classics 2003.
6
Descartes, Rene: Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings. Page 18. Penguin Classics 2003.
applicable. One cannot make progress if one does not know where the point of conclusion is, if it

exists at all. Even Descartes acknowledges that “there may be some people who would prefer to

deny the existence of such a powerful God rather than believe that everything else is uncertain.” 7

By saying so, Descartes himself suggests that his writings may not be universally accepted and as

we know each philosopher has held his or her own theory on the existence of God. This shows us

that there is no progress in philosophy, rather change that brings different perspectives on pre-

conceived theories. Hence, even though Descartes considers this progress, it is not so because it

simply represents his view on the existence of God as compared to other philosophers before

him.

Plato is considered to one of the most eminent philosophers of his day. His Socratic

dialogues have spawned generations of fiercely contested debates. He used his theory of the

Forms to explain his concept of true knowledge. Friedrich Nietzsche however, dismisses this

theory in his account On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense. He writes:

They are deeply immersed in illusions and dream images, their eyes merely glide across the
surface of things and see ‘forms’; nowhere does this perception lead into truth; instead it is
content to receive stimuli and, as it were, to play with its fingers on the back of things. 8
Nietzsche is talking about human recognition and recollection of ‘the forms’ of entities as

explained by Plato, but according to Nietzsche we do not gain the true knowledge of these

entities through these forms. He also writes about how “there is virtually nothing that defies

understanding so much as the fact that an honest and pure drive towards truth should ever have

emerged….”9 Here, he is referring to the ‘deceptive, lying, cheating and cowardly’ nature of

7
Descartes, Rene: Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings. Page 18. Penguin Classics 2003.
8
Nietzsche, Friedrich: The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings: ‘On Truth and Lying in a Non-
Moral Sense’. Page 142. Cambridge University Press 1999.
9
Nietzsche, Friedrich: The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings: ‘On Truth and Lying in a Non-
Moral Sense’. Page 142. Cambridge University Press 1999.
mankind and how mankind uses its knowledge and promotes it to support their own cause.

According to him we cannot get true knowledge from the forms because mankind’s’ drive for

knowledge is not sincere and severely limited. In order to gain the ‘true knowledge’ of the forms,

mankind must want the knowledge of the forms to appreciate its absolute truth and not so as to

pervert it and satisfy mankind’s greed or cause. Nietzsche mistrusts philosophical knowledge

here for this very reason and cannot understand how an honest drive for knowledge could ever

interest human beings. He does not consider the theory of the forms to hold true because no one

has ever seen the perfect ‘form’ of anything and he does not believe in recollection as a way to

gain knowledge previously forgotten.

Nietzsche further suggests that ‘man is not rational’ when he wrote: “There are epochs in

which the man of reason and the man of intuition stand side by side, the one fearful of intuition,

the other filled with scorn for abstraction, the latter as unreasonable as the former unartistic.” 10

Man’s rationality is a key issue to progress, if man is unreasonable as Nietzsche suggests, then

there can be no progress due to the absence of rational reasoning. With Nietzsche we see that

philosophers do not tend to build on others before them, rather they question the concepts and

beliefs of others before them. Thus, we can see philosophy as a sort of science of mutation, where

one philosopher critiques the theories of another, replacing it with his own. While this continues,

neither can there be any progress in philosophy nor can philosophy be an aid to any human

progress. As we know from above, man’s rationality, a genuine quest for knowledge and a

destination point are required for philosophy to aid progress in life, but as we know man is an

irrational animal who uses and perverts knowledge to his or her own cause, and so, philosophy

does not aid progress in human endeavor.

10
Nietzsche, Friedrich: The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings: ‘On Truth and Lying in a Non-
Moral Sense’. Page 152. Cambridge University Press 1999.
 In conclusion, I would like to reiterate that change is not progress. While there has been

extensive sophistication and growth in the knowledge of philosophy, we cannot consider this to

be a sign of progress, simply because we have not reached any definite conclusive point.

Nietzsche further highlights this by suggesting that we, as human beings, often do not search for

the truth at all and are seemingly driven by negative emotions. Descartes’ idea of progress begins

with the breakdown of all his previously held knowledge and as such is not progress, as much as

it is a fresh outlook on existence and being. I believe we can never truly reach a conclusion in

philosophy because we do not know where the end point is. We do not possess the ability to live

forever and expand our knowledge indefinitely and so our quest to reach such a point would be

cut short by our limited existence on this planet. As Nietzsche puts it, “only through forgetfulness

could human beings ever entertain the illusion that they posses truth” and “truth, too, is only

desired by human beings in a … limited sense.”11 That being said, one truth remains in

philosophy: there is change but no progress.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

Word Count: 1769

11
Nietzsche, Friedrich: The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings: ‘On Truth and Lying in a Non-
Moral Sense’. Page 143. Cambridge University Press 1999.