The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics

by Kenan Malik

The problem of truth for Nietzsche was not, in any case, simply that of perspective. It was also that the very search for truth often obscured the values by which humans had to live their lives. Meaning does not exist in the world, to be discovered as one might discover scientific facts, but must be invented by humans. ‘A “scientific” interpretation of the world’, Nietzsche suggests, might ‘be one of the most stupid of all possible interpretations of the world, meaning that it would be one of the poorest in meaning.’ A world in which all we knew was scientific truth would be ‘an essentially meaningless world’. In antiquity, ‘the striving for virtue’ came before the search for facts; knowledge was seen as ‘the best means to virtue’. With modernity ‘knowledge wants to be more than a mere means’.10 The problem with the modern world was that truth had become not a means to an end, but an end in itself.