Nietzsche on Art as the Good Will to Appearance

Abstract ‘Truth is ugly’, Nietzsche tells us in his notebooks: ‘We possess art lest we perish of the truth’; and he makes similar-seeming noises elsewhere. The obvious way to read these remarks is as claiming that art and truth are antithetical, that it is the business of art to falsify aspects of the world that would otherwise prove unbearable. But this reading is not sustainable. Here the author explains why that is and suggests an alternative interpretation on which we can (a) read him as defending a plausible account of the relation between art and truth, rather than an unsustainable one, (b) recast the passages from the notebooks and elsewhere so that they lend support to that reading, and (c) show how the resultant account squares with, and indeed reinforces, Nietzsche’s perspectivism.