If you wanna learn the truth or, to put it in a better way, live a life free of delusion,
you have to be willing to challenge your own beliefs.
As Nietzsche said, “one must never have spared oneself, /harshness/ must be among
one’s habits, if one is to be happy and cheerful among nothing but hard truths.”
Don’t spare yourself.
Be critical of your own beliefs.
And what does it mean to spare yourself?
To not test a belief.
Or even worse: to protect a belief.
There’s a latin phrase I really like, a phrase that I think carries great wisdom:
veritas numquam perit.
Or in English: truth never perishes.
If you really challenge yourself, if you destroy all of the parts of you that can be destroyed,
all that you’ll be left with is the truest parts.
To be harsh towards yourself in this way is a great virtue.
And what does it mean to be harsh towards yourself?
To go a step further than not protecting your beliefs: to outright attack your beliefs.
To destroy them, and disprove them, if you can.
To only believe what you can’t help but believe, because you haven’t been able to
disprove it yet.
It means becoming an enemy to yourself, but in the best possible sense.
You become an enemy towards what’s false in you, and as a result, you become the friend
of what’s true.
To be able to be, and to have, enemies was very important to Nietzsche.
He said, “to be able to be an enemy, to be an enemy — that perhaps presupposes a
strong nature, it is in any event a condition of every strong nature.
It needs resistances, consequently it seeks resistances…every growth reveals itself
in the seeking out of a powerful opponent - or problem: for a philosopher who is warlike
also challenges problems to a duel.”
To become true, to become strong, you need resistance.
You need an enemy.
An enemy that is capable and willing to challenge what is potentially false in you, even if
that enemy is yourself.
But this destruction is grounded in love.
As Nietzsche wrote, “equality in face of the enemy - first presupposition of an honest
duel.
Where one despises one cannot wage war…to attack is with me a proof of good will…”
You must be capable of being an enemy to the people you love most, if they’re strong
enough to bear it.
And if you’re not capable of having enemies yourself, people who can criticize, test,
and doubt you, people who can potentially destroy what’s false in you, then you’ll
become weak.
So remember: veritas numquam perit.
Truth never perishes.
If you challenge yourself, become an enemy to yourself, and allow yourself to have enemies,
people who can test you, criticize you, and doubt you—but always in the spirit of love—you
can eliminate what’s false in you.
And as you eliminate more of what’s false in you, you’ll be left with more of what’s
true.
And if truth never perishes, the more truth you contain, the more imperishable you yourself
become.
That concludes my exploration of Nietzsche’s teaching.
As always, this is just my opinion and understanding of Nietzsche, not advice.
If you’re looking for another video to watch after this one, I recommend watching my video
“Nietzsche - How to Become Who You Are.”
I’ll put a link to it in the description below and in the top right of the screen right
now.