Will to Knowledge, Will to Ignorance and Will to Power in Beyond Good and Evil

Abstract

The question that opens and insistently runs through Beyond Good and Evil is, posed for us by what Nietzsche calls “the will to truth,” the drive, need, tendency and desire to know the world for what it is and not be deceived about it.¹ Forced by the will to truth to ask questions endlessly, we even question this will itself. “Indeed,” Nietzsche writes,

we came to a long halt at the question about the cause of this will—until we finally came to a complete stop before a still more basic question. We asked about the value of this will. Suppose we want truth: why not rather untruth? and uncertainty? even ignorance? (5:15, BGE 1)

To put the value of the will to truth into question is still an effort to determine the truth about this matter. As such, in the paradoxical manner characteristic of Nietzsche’s later writing, the question is itself prompted by the will to truth, which, in the very process of casting suspicion upon itself, secures its own perpetuation.

Error…is more intimately connected with animal existence and the soul continues longer in the state of error than in that of truth.

Aristotle, De Anima III 3 427b 1–2