What Jordan Peterson gets wrong about Nietzsche
Disputing the popular view of Nietzsche as an irrationalist
“One of Nietzsche’s most famous maxims is that ‘truth serves life’, and that’s a very different idea than the purpose of truth, say, as the accurate representation of the objective world.”
— Jordan Peterson*
When Jordan B. Peterson first appeared on Sam Harris’ Waking Up Podcast (since rebranded as the Making Sense Podcast), the ensuing dialogue was as highly anticipated as it was ultimately disappointing.
Whatever you think of either of these figures, there is no question of their influence. Even after his visibility has waned a bit following his recent disappearance from public life (and stint in rehab), Peterson still has a fanbase of millions. Sam Harris’ popularity rivals Peterson’s, and he’s existed as an intellectual in the public eye for decades. Whether they’re accepted by modern academics is one thing; whether they have a tangible affect on culture and the popular consciousness is quite another.
The two men clashed early in the two hour discussion on the nature of “truth”, and proceeded to argue about this topic for the episode’s entirety. This was not entirely unsurprising, given that Sam Harris is known for his incisive style. Harris will persist in fleshing out the details of his interlocutor’s position to make absolutely certain that no intellectual baggage is being smuggled into the debate. Peterson, meanwhile, is obtuse and speaks in metaphors and personal anecdotes. He makes strong and occasionally interesting claims, but can be vague and long-winded in his explanations.
Peterson’s characterization of “truth”, which so flustered Harris, was, at least in his own words, derived from Friedrich Nietzsche. It may be the typical philosophical claim to hold that life ought to serve truth; Peterson claims that Nietzsche argued, on the contrary, that, “truth should serve life.”
This characterization bothered me, and things only got worse with the example that Harris used to press the issue with Peterson. Even though the effect of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was ultimately bad and horrific, Harris argued, this doesn’t mean that the science behind the atomic bomb was untrue. Peterson, for whatever reason, stuck to his guns. He seemed to hold that Harris’ view of truth was impoverished. That being said, he never gave a satisfactory response as to why we should regard harmful scientific truths as false rather than simply harmful.
Peterson’s take on Nietzsche’s epistemology ultimately collapses into irrationalism. The irony here is that Peterson, the stalwart opponent of postmodernism, has to invoke the irrationalist view of Nietzsche popular with postmodernists to make his case. The construal of Nietzsche’s view of truth as irrationalism is exactly the kind of view premising a Derridian interpretation of Nietzsche.
Peterson ends up resembling the postmodernists he opposes — and I would argue that, to the average bystander, he is probably indistinguishable from them.
This interpretation, whether it comes from Peterson or from Derrida, is a misconstrual. In order to sort out what exactly is wrong with Peterson’s “truth ought to serve life” characterization of Nietzsche, we’ll have to get into the nitty-gritty. And this will not be easy. In fact, one of the most impenetrable aspects of Nietzsche’s thought is his view of truth. Like most things Nietzsche, to really get a handle on it, we’ll have to examine the issue from a couple different perspectives.
Ought Truth Serve Life?
The first and most important clarification to make is that Nietzsche never said, “truth ought to serve life”. That is to say, he never used that exact phrasing, as least not anywhere in any of his writings that I’ve seen. That being said, I wouldn’t go so far as to accuse Peterson of dishonesty, since he doesn’t seem to claim that this is a verbatim quote. Rather, it is Peterson’s overall characterization of Nietzsche’s position.
Is this characterization justified?
To some extent, yes; you can find supporting evidence in Nietzsche’s works to bolster this interpretation. Perhaps the closest thing resembling this sentiment in Nietzsche’s works appears in Beyond Good and Evil, in the first chapter, entitled, “On the Prejudices of Philosophers”, #4:
The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing…
This seems to make things perfectly clear: Nietzsche does not think that the truth is the most important thing in assessing an opinion. To Nietzsche, the important thing is whether it is life-furthering. It is very easy to distill the principle, “truth ought to serve life” out of this passage.
The case for irrationalism gets stronger, still, however. We find, in Nietzsche’s unpublished notes, found in notebooks from Summer 1886 to Fall of 1887 — later published posthumously in the Will to Power collection, #481 — a passage entitled, “Belief in the ‘Ego’: the subject”. Here, Nietzsche writes:
Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying “there are only facts,” I should say: no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations”.
This seems rather damning for anyone like myself arguing against the irrationalist interpretation. But, the devil is, as they say, in the details. We should first examine the context of both of these passages.
Beyond Good and Evil, for example, is Nietzsche’s attempt to rise above the simpleminded bifurcation of every issue into two opposite positions. Antithesis is stitched into the fabric of our thought by our language, which defines the boundaries of our thinking. The concept of an opposite makes perfect sense within the framework of metaphysical or religious thinking, where objects and beings are thought to have an “essence”. In the religious worldview, we therefore have the opposite categories of good and evil, truth and falsehood, virtue and vice, spiritual and material.
Nietzsche, however, approached human thinking as a natural phenomenon. We’re an evolved species. In language, the notion of opposites may hold use to us now as a tool, or a social convention; but the idea of having some opposed essential nature seems unfounded.
Nietzsche therefore questions whether there are any opposites at all, or whether this is simply an illusion of language. He writes in part I of Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism #2:
The fundamental belief of the metaphysicians is the belief in the opposition of values . Even the most careful among them has never had the idea of raising doubts right here on the threshold, where such doubts are surely most essential, even when they promised themselves “de omnibus dubitandum” [one must doubt everything] . For we are entitled to doubt, first, whether such an opposition of values exists at all and, second, whether that popular way of estimating worth and that opposition of values, on which the metaphysicians have imprinted their seal, are perhaps only evaluations made in the foreground, only temporary perspectives, perhaps even a view from a corner, perhaps from underneath, a frog’s viewpoint, as it were, to borrow an expression familiar to painters… It might even be possible that whatever creates the value of those fine and respected things exists in such a way that it is, in some duplicitous way, related to, tied to, intertwined with, perhaps even essentially the same as those undesirable, apparently contrasting things.
Nietzsche’s hypothesis is that where we see opposites, there may actually only be gradations, refinements, or sublimations. He even suspects that our apparently antithetical motivations — such as honesty and deception — may share a common origin, or be two offshoots of the same root.
Truth gives us an advantage in some circumstances, and lying gives us an advantage in others. This would mean that “Truth” is not something mystical and transcendent, but a concept which we have created for the purposes of understanding the world, and engaging with it. Truth is something humans seek after because there is a need for it. Nietzsche wondered if we making a mistake by believing that a Truth can exist outside of our human valuations of it. His contemporaries in philosophy were looking for ‘disinterested truths’ — but perhaps Truth-seeking was always a process motivated by interest. Nietzsche even wondered whether knowledge or facts can exist independently of human conception of them.
In the very first section of “On the Prejudices of Philosophers”, Nietzsche begins by raising the question of the value of truth. Nietzsche suggests that this is a dangerous thing to do. After all, if our inquiry — driven by a “will to truth” — should lead us to the conclusion that untruth is more valuable, that poses problems for philosophy itself.
Now that we have contextualized Nietzsche’s comments in I.4, which one might construe into something like, “truth ought to serve life”, we may notice something: Nietzsche‘s questioning of the value of truth is itself an act of seeking the truth.
Paradoxically, only the truth-seeking philosopher can do such a thing as interrogate the value of “Truth”, because the person within a dogmatic or religious mindset takes it for granted that their truths are the most valuable things in the world.
Furthermore, we may notice that Nietzsche is not devaluing truth in section I.4 — far from it. He is saying, rather, that we may have to acknowledge that untruth is just as valuable as truth, perhaps even more valuable depending on the context. Nietzsche therefore does not discard “truth”, in the sense of rational knowledge — rather, he wants the philosophers of the coming generation to understand that we cannot discard man’s irrational needs either. Mankind is a species of animal. We are passionate, we can be stubborn, we seek after things which have no apparent value except to ourselves and our arbitrary wills and desires.
Nietzsche wants to warn the philosophers away from conceptualizing man as a rational animal; we must acknowledge that most important things in our lives, such as love or art, are totally unreasonable.
When we contextualize Nietzsche’s comments on Truth in Beyond Good and Evil, then, we find that classifying Nietzsche simply as an “irrationalist” is to establish another antithesis: the kind of thing Nietzsche was trying to transcend in this very work.
As for his notes and the infamous utterance, “there are no facts, only interpretations” — which I would argue has been greatly overblown in its importance — we might draw our attention to the fact that this statement is intended as a rebuttal to positivism. Positivism was the attempt to do away with all allegedly speculative philosophy and only make the sorts of hypotheses that can be verified by experiment.
Nietzsche’s bone to pick is with the kind of positivist who claims that only “facts” exist. To Nietzsche, the “fact” is not something separable from the mind that conceives of the fact. The fact cannot be extricated from the epistemological framework for comprehending the fact.
More to the point, we should not let this single sentence color our whole view of his epistemology. While we have examined a strong case for viewing Nietzsche as an opponent of what we might call a correspondence theory of truth — and definitely an opponent of views like positivism or moral realism — this is still not the full story.
Our Truths are Human — All Too Human
Where we find some of the most incendiary remarks on truth is in one of Nietzsche’s early essays — another unpublished gem, known as “On Truth and Lies in the Non-Moral Sense”.
This essay is remarkable for a number of reasons. In it, Nietzsche makes arguments about language and its effect on thought that predate Wittgenstein and the linguistic turn in philosophy. While it went unpublished, it contains the germ of many a future Nietzschean idea. And finally, it shows how the early Nietzsche was struggling to understand truth with the epistemological framework common in Germany at the time, inspired by Immanuel Kant.
In “On Truth and Lies…”, Nietzsche tries to come to an understanding of how humans, an evolved species, ever came to have anything like a drive to find truth. Such a thing seemed counter-intuitive to the young Nietzsche. If man is an evolved species, then truth is not given from on high.
Nietzsche argues in this essay that language is inherently linked to our mental process of concept formation. We form languages as a collective act of an entire society, not as the mental productions of one individual. Concepts — which are shaped by the limits of language — are therefore also formed collectively. Through language, we represent the world to ourselves, but the very act of doing so must falsify the world, to some extent. He writes:
Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases — which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things.
We know that Nietzsche continued to think about these ideas in spite of the early date of the essay. We find, in Beyond Good and Evil, a similar notion: “without constant falsification of the world by means of numbers, man could not live”. Even numbers themselves are a falsification of the world, because, as Nietzsche writes in Human, All Too Human I.19: “The laws of numbers assume there are identical things, but in fact nothing is identical with anything else.”
The reason why nothing is truly identical with anything else for Nietzsche is because the boundaries we draw around a given “thing” are completely arbitrary: or rather, they are contingent on our human needs, and our human level of perception. Numbers, like concepts, are formed by abstracting the general case from the specific phenomena. Where we designate “one tree”, it would be just as correct to designate a trillion particles, or to understand the tree as only one part of the whole forest, the root system, the mycelial network, the ecosystem, etc. We designate the tree as a single phenomenon because it appears to us that way on the human level of resolution: more to the point, it appears to us that way because of our biological needs and preferences.
In Nietzsche’s notebooks from 1885–86, he elaborates on his theory of conscious perception as shaped by evolutionary usefulness. This helps contextualize his views on truth-seeking. He writes, in Will to Power #505:
Our perceptions, as we understand them: i.e., the sum of all those perceptions the becoming-conscious of which was useful and essential to us and to the entire organic process — therefore, not all perceptions in general (e.g., not the electric); this means: we have senses for only a selection of perceptions — those with which we have to concern ourselves in order to preserve ourselves. Consciousness is present only to the extent that consciousness is useful. It cannot be doubted that all sense perceptions are permeated with value judgments (useful and harmful — consequently, pleasant or unpleasant)….
The argument is simply that if we had some advantage to gain by perceiving electric signals, we would have a sense organ for doing so. But we do not. So, the very horizons of our perceptions, which make up the foundation of conscious awareness, are shaped by preference.
The most famous paragraph in “On Truth and Lies in the Nonmoral Sense” is key to contextualizing Nietzsche’s views on truth, but it admittedly poses the danger of pushing the inquiring mind further into an irrationalist view of Nietzsche. Nevertheless, we must disentangle it:
What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and; anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.
To explain this passage, we must consider what Nietzsche means by “truth” in this sense. He’s talking about what is designated as true, or logically valid, by the social conventions expressed in language. This is where Nietzsche thinks that “truth” as a concept originates.
The origin is in language: a sound, a symbol, a marking comes to stand for another meaning. By means of some expression, some vocalization, early humans indicated something. To use the usual designations was advantageous to all involved. If you meant to indicate, “poisonous” but instead indicated “harmless”, this could be very dangerous. Thus, to be truthful is advantageous to the community, and this is why we have always had a high social valuation of truth.
Therefore, Nietzsche argues, the concept of truth originates first from our duty to use the usual metaphors. This lines up nicely with the modern idea that a word’s meaning is determined by common use. Language is not arbitrary and private, but determined by collective agreement.
When Nietzsche says that “truths are illusions we have forgotten are illusions”, he is referring to the expressions of truth in terms of language and human thought-systems. The only way that we can process any information about the world is through our sense organs; this information must then be interpreted through the brain. Nietzsche is not talking about “truth” in the sense of facts that exist independently of the human mind — rather, he is arguing that the very notion of a fact as independent of the human mind is nonsensical. Such a thing would be, by definition, both imperceptible and inexpressible.
This is because Nietzsche thinks all knowledge is contained within the world of phenomena, or the world of mere appearances. This is in contrast with the noumenal world, or the “thing-in-itself”.
To explain these terms, we’ll have to take a brief detour into the epistemology of one of Immanuel Kant. Not only is Kant one of the most influential philosophers of all time, but, as stated above, his philosophical work had reshaped the academic and intellectual landscape of the Germany in which Nietzsche was raised and educated.
In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, he argued that we could not use reason to make claims about the nature of the world as it exists independently of the human mind. This is the world beyond our own sense faculties. Everything we gather through empirical engagement with the world is processed through the five senses. These senses represent the world to us, but this means that world we experience is simply a representation. Logic cannot therefore inform us about the noumenal world, or the world that exists independently of our representations of it.
During this early period of his writing, some have interpreted Nietzsche as a Neo-Kantian. This is not to say that Nietzsche agreed with Kant’s conclusions, but that he was working off of the framework established by Kant’s work. Nietzsche, in fact, had quite a few disagreements with Kant. But Nietzsche, like all German philosophers who came after Kant, had to reckon with the phenomena/noumena split.
Nietzsche seems to follow Kant during this period of his career insofar as he accepts that we cannot really know anything about the thing-in-itself. He was not alone in this. At that time in Germany, there were a number of Neo-Kantian scientists who attempted to verify Kant’s ideas through experiment. The implications of the world we experience a mere representation created by our sense organs raises the question: “Would a being with different sense organs experience a different world?”
Figures such as Hermann von Helmholtz therefore attempted to study the nervous systems of various animals, and try to get some idea of how other creatures construct a representation of the world. We should therefore keep in mind that these claims about knowledge were not post-modern and anti-scientific, but grounded within the spirit of scientific investigation. (Nietzsche, as a philologist, was himself a scientist; philology was considered a wissenschaft in the German university system.)
Von Helmholtz expresses the Neo-Kantian perspective in 1853:
Perhaps the relation between our senses and the external world may be best enunciated as follows: our sensations are for us only symbols of the objects of the external world, and correspond to them only in some such way as written characters or articulate words to the things they denote. They give us, it is true, information respecting the properties of things without us, but no better information than we give a blind man about colour by verbal descriptions.
This is basically the Neo-Kantian perspective on knowledge, in a nutshell: empirical reasoning, in the form of science, can tell us about the phenomenal world, but all this knowledge comes to us through the filter of the senses; Nietzsche further adds that must be expressed through language.
Nietzsche even goes so far as to suggest that the scientific approach to reality may help undermine the type of idealism that posits “Truth with a capital T” as attainable by the human mind. This is because science, as Popper would later frame it, works by falsifying hypotheses, not by verifying truths. Science is always overturning past doctrines, as it further adumbrates the laws of nature, and as Nietzsche writes, “can dig successfully in this shaft forever”. Nietzsche notes that, as science has discovered more and more regularity in the natural world, this has acted as a seal of confirmation — “How little does [this regularity] resemble a product of the imagination,” he writes.
Of course, Nietzsche is never one to give only one side of an issue, and turns about and critiques the faith in science in the same paragraph:
Against this, the following must be said: if each us had a different kind of sense perception — if we could only perceive things now as a bird, now as a worm, now as a plant, or if one of us saw a stimulus as red, another as blue, while a third even heard the same stimulus as a sound-then no one would speak of such a regularity of nature, rather, nature would be grasped only as a creation which is subjective in the highest degree. After all, what is a law of nature as such for us? We are not acquainted with it in itself, but only with its effects…
We may recognize, again, the Neo-Kantian influence on Nietzsche’s thought. There is a boundary between us and “pure reality”, or whatever we might call it. We like to imagine that our truths are truths about this reality: the reality independent of humanity.
Both Nietzsche’s criticism of “Scientism”, and his praise of science where it is due, speak to the same underlying idea: all of our truths are inescapably human. There is no such thing as a disinterested truth, since everything human is colored by human interests. The whole process of concept formation is motivated by human interests. Science is useful insofar as it humbles us and reminds us of our limited human framework for understanding; it is harmful insofar as we forget to put science in its proper context, and think that it can bring us the “Truth with a capital T”.
One of Nietzsche’s strongest arguments in this regard involves language. If our rational-discursive concepts actually corresponded to truths about the world-in-itself, then we ought to be able to gain knowledge about the world through studying language. But this is not the case. “The various languages,” he writes, “placed side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages.”
There is much that is arbitrary and irrational in our languages, such as the gendered names for inanimate objects in German, or in Spanish and Italian. If we tried to reconstruct a picture of the world by working backwards from language, we’d get all sorts of inconsistencies. Objects designated as male by one language would be designated as female in another. If linguistic concept formation was a disinterested process, then the objective truth would be contained in the linguistic representations.
Since this isn’t the case, and there are all sorts of different assumptions, prejudices, and moral judgments baked into all the various world languages — and they differ on this account — we can’t construct the world from a language. We construct language from the world, not the other way around. The filter the world passes through in the process of representing it to ourselves distorts it. Everything that passes through the human filter becomes human knowledge; to speak of non-human knowledge becomes impossible.
Perhaps Nietzsche’s view here is not dissimilar to the perspective put forward by the 20th century philosopher Alan Watts, who argued that designations such as “the external world” were in themselves just philosophical ideas. “That there is an external world is a notion in your nervous system,” Watts said in one of his lectures. “There may or may not be, but it’s a notion in your nervous system.” Likewise, in the first chapter of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche wrote, “we see by means of our human head, and cannot cut it off — though one wonders what would remain if it had been cut off” (Ibid).
Nietzsche’s point then is not to deny the validity of scientific truth on the basis of the fallibility of the senses. On the contrary, Nietzsche thinks that only the world of the senses is of any importance or meaning to us. Science is the method for exploring the immediate, real world that actually exists, the only world that exists for us: the world of the senses. It is not even coherent to make statements about knowledge existent outside of human knowledge. His target is the metaphysical speculation about a world beyond, or the “thing-in-itself”. This is why Nietzsche would later go on to reject the phenomena/noumena split altogether.
In light of this, we might consider the first paragraph of the essay:
Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die.
The significance of this paragraph is not an attempt at being frivolously nihilistic; rather, Nietzsche is contextualizing knowledge as something that emerged in the brains of an evolved species. This is in contrast to the Christian world-picture, in which an all-knowing deity created the world. In the Christian view, “In the beginning was the Word,” — knowledge precedes existence.
In the Nietzschean view, the world began in ignorance. Knowledge emerges out of life; it is a tool of life. The world didn’t come from knowledge, knowledge came from the world.
Intellectual Toughness
With all we have so far considered, perhaps we should spell out the objection to Peterson more clearly: Nietzsche’s view on truth does not include the precept that one should question whether the science behind the atomic bomb is true or not, on account of how harmful it was.
On the contrary, the Nietzschean would accept the scientific knowledge behind the atomic bomb as being more true and more relevant than most truths. The atomic bomb is a matter of life and death. The knowledge of the science leading to its production, of the bomb’s history, of its place in the human experience — these are truths so relevant that they are existential. These are not disinterested truths at all.
I should note that I don’t think that Peterson would necessarily disagree with me here. He even approached this articulation of what we might call a pragmatic view of truth: that we cannot comprehend or engage with truth unless it bears relevance to our experience. But his misunderstanding seems to be that the advantages of disadvantages of believing in a given truth affect its true value.
This is not Nietzsche’s position. He is perfectly capable of acknowledging something unpleasant or disadvantageous as true and something life-promoting as false. Nietzsche never suggests that because something is injurious to life that it isn’t true. He suggests that we might have need of the untrue whenever the truth does become harmful. Nietzsche’s ambivalence towards the pursuit of truth, in fact, depends on this recognition of truth and falsehood as independent of helpfulness or harmfulness.
Nietzsche‘s criticism of the concept of “Truth” is really twofold.
First, he is contextualizing those beliefs of ours — such as our moral beliefs — that we think to have come from “the lap of being” or from God, as actually emerging from evolution. Evolution is not a disinterested process: every cell, every gene, every organism has preference in its every action.
Second, he is relocating our “Truths” not within a metaphysical world, but within the physical world.
He writes, in The Gay Science, #335:
We, however, want to become those we are — human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves. To that end, we must become the best learners and discoverers of everything that is lawful and necessary in the world; we must become physicists in order to be able to be creators in this sense — while hitherto all valuations and ideals have been based on ignorance of physics or were constructed to contradict it. Therefore: long live physics! And even more so that which compels us to turn to physics — our honesty!
“Physics” here, is implicitly contrasted with metaphysics. Nietzsche is likely using the term “physics” in an extended sense, to refer to the study of reality through scientific or empirical means. This is the essence of Nietzsche’s position on Truth-seeking. So far as we contextualize the search for truth as a human activity, which exists within a human world, to serve human interests, then the study of the world is a powerful and life-giving thing.
This is not without dangers. This is where Nietzsche diverges from the Truth-worship of other philosophers, with their sedate characterization of Truth as purely positive, something that can “set you free”. Nietzsche sees the truly intellectual life as difficult and rugged. You become a wanderer, and are set apart from your fellow men and their world of moral and cultural assumptions. He sees Truth-seeking as therefore the life of an adventurer. The thinker is not guaranteed peace of mind, a soothing balm for his suffering, or anything of the sort: quite the opposite in fact.
Nietzsche made this perfectly plain, in an early letter to his sister, where he wrote:
Here the ways of men divide. If you wish to strive for peace of soul and happiness, then believe; if you wish to be a disciple of truth, then inquire.
These are not the words of an irrationalist, or someone who thought it was acceptable to ignore scientific truths. Nietzsche metaphorically described truth as a woman, who “loves only a warrior.” The image of Truth here is one resembling Pallas Athena. The truth is not a sedate, benign, disinterested thing that can be sought by an academic: the truth must be won. Nietzsche thought there was an intellectual toughness required to endure truth, to overcome and swallow tough truths, to be willing to adventure into questions and projects that seem dangerous or immoral. He writes elsewhere, in Beyond Good and Evil (II.39), that the strength of a mind might be measured by “the amount of truth it can endure” without having to have it sugarcoated or distorted.
But perhaps the most informative passage of all in understanding Nietzsche’s position reads almost as a direct refutation of the characterization of Nietzsche put forward by Peterson.
This passage is from The Gay Science, #324, and is entitled, In media vita, or “in the middle of life”:
No, life has not disappointed me. On the contrary, I find it truer, more desirable and mysterious every year — ever since the day when the great liberator came to me: the idea that life could be an experiment of the seeker for knowledge — and not a duty, not a calamity, not a trickery. — And knowledge itself: let it be something else for others; for example, a bed to rest on, or the way to such a bed, or a diversion, or a form of leisure — for me it is a world of dangers and victories in which heroic feelings, too find places to dance and play. “Life as a means to knowledge” — with this principle in one’s heart one can live not only boldly but even gaily, and laugh gaily too. And who knows how to laugh anyway and live well if he does not first know a good deal about war and victory?
Could it be? Not that truth ought to serve life, but that, to Nietzsche, the “good life” was “life as a means to knowledge”? Human knowledge, yes. Knowledge bound by the constraints of human language, true. Knowledge only of our sense perceptions; nothing approaching “Truth with a capital T”, granted. Knowledge not as something existent in a disinterested, objective world, but something that we seek for absolutely motivated reasons. Yes, yes — we grant all of this.
And yet, Nietzsche still calls “life as a means to knowledge” the “great liberator”. After all, he is a philosopher. He is a scientist. His epistemological task was not to relegate the concept of truth to the dustbin, but to remind us that our illusions are just as valuable to us. They can be just as real, because they are forged from the same process of concept formation as our truths are, and for the same reason: to give advantage. Nietzsche didn’t want the overthrow of science in the name of mysticism. His goal was nothing less than the unity of man’s rational and irrational needs.
Whether Peterson or Harris will be of lasting relevance in the broader philosophical picture, who is to say? The two later held a follow-up debate, in which they were able to move past the truth issue, at least to some extent.
What troubles me is Peterson’s motive in invoking Nietzsche’s standard of truth. After all, Peterson’s task is premised on the revivification of our religious traditions in the western world. He shares Nietzsche’s fears over the Death of God: the decline of western Christian belief.
But where Peterson sees the solution in a return to our traditional values, Nietzsche believed that going back to the old God was impossible. He thought we should treat this unprecedented shift in human religious thought as an opportunity — a incredibly dangerous one, to be sure, but still an incredible opportunity. It is the open horizon with seemingly limitless possibilities. Going forward is the only option.
Thus, Peterson appeals to Nietzsche’s view — in the form that he characterizes it, as “truth ought to serve life” — to advocate for the way of life that Peterson believes in. Peterson knows that his western audiences, made up primarily of young people, are largely skeptical at best about the supernatural claims of religion, and about the transcendent morality of Christianity. This is why Peterson makes such an admittedly strong case for the value of Christian traditions and for the utility of conventional moral values. He is trying to make a case for Christian values serving life — the hope being, of course, that with the new epistemology Peterson has gifted them, his audience will no longer be troubled by the objective truth or falsehood of Bible stories, but simply judge whether they find them to be useful or life-promoting. Peterson therefore intends to use the “truth should serve life” model to persuade his audience to turn off their rational minds and embrace beautiful illusions.
The problem with this is quite simple: it is impossible. Belief is not subject to the will. We cannot just decide to believe something that we don’t actually believe. Peterson knows this, I think — he may even have said as much. But this amounts to simply another level of sophistication to his rhetoric: he is revealing to his audience that it is okay if they don’t really believe in the metaphysical or supernatural claims of Christianity, so long as they adopt its values. He hopes that they’ll eventually act their way into the feeling, which is much easier than feeling your way into an act.
Whether or not Peterson has been a force for good in our culture is up for debate. But that is beyond the scope of this article. The simple truth of the matter is that his views have very little to do with Nietzsche, and his goals are, in fact, contradictory to those of Nietzsche.
Peterson argues to his audience that, if they want happiness and peace of the soul, they must believe.
Nietzsche, a disciple of truth, says, “Inquire!”
[*] The quote at the beginning of the essay is not from Peterson’s debate with Harris, but from this video: https://youtu.be/MCOw0eJ84d8 (Peterson expresses the same idea in the debate with Harris, but I liked this phrasing to encapsulate his position).
