One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute. 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. Half a century before Bertrand Russell admonished that, in a universe unconcerned with human interests, the equally naïve notions of optimism and pessimism “spring from self-importance, and are best corrected by a little astronomy,” Nietzsche paints the backdrop for the drama of truth: Haussmann and included in the indispensable Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche ( public library). That is what Friedrich Nietzsche (October 15, 1844–August 25, 1900) examined a century before Arendt and Popper in his 1873 essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” later translated by W.A.
“It is not the search for certainty.”īut in an uncertain world, what is the measure of truth and where does the complex, conflicted human impulse for knowledge originate in the first place?
“Knowledge consists in the search for truth,” Karl Popper cautioned in considering truth and the dangers of relativism. “The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her incisive meditation on the vital difference between thinking and knowing.
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