Introduction

That the world does not form a unity either as a sensorium or as ‘spirit’ – that alone is the great liberation.

(Nietzsche 2005: 182)

Nietzsche believed that the outcome of nihilism – the death of God – is itself the opportunity for what he terms ‘the great liberation’. Not the inexistence of God but his death. For Nietzsche, ‘God’ is shorthand for the entire metaphysical tradition and its true world, a timeless, unchanging, supersensible world in contrast to the world as it appears to our senses, which is rather a world of time and becoming. Given that the true world is manifestly not our world, the true world also gives rise to two worlds – paradigmatically to the heaven–earth distinction – and so the problem of the true world and of the two worlds is really the same problem. Indeed, as Giles Deleuze comments (1983: 147), the idea of another, supersensible, world is not for Nietzsche one error among others, but the source of all error. That this true world died upon the realization ‘that the world does not form a unity either as a sensorium or as “spirit” – that alone is the great liberation’, writes Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols, shortly before losing his mind (2005: 182).

What we have to be equal to here is the thought not that God never existed – mere atheism – but that his death is where the possibility of liberation lies.¹ Although Nietzsche detests Christianity, he seems to be telling us that we should be grateful for a God who died, which is obviously not so much at odds with the Christian story as a different version of it.² To be sure, Nietzsche is looking for a new faith – Zarathustra criticizes his shadow for celebrating the ‘Ass Festival’ in the old pious ways – but he does acknowledge the need for new festivals, which should be celebrated ‘for your own sake’ (Nietzsche 2006: 257). To have no festivals is to risk being recaptured by the old faith. But the festivals of the new faith celebrate nothing other than the freedom enabled by the demise of the old faith, which is why Zarathustra, the first of the godless, adds that these new festivals should be celebrated also ‘in remembrance of me!’ (Nietzsche 2006: 255).

As well as being an opportunity, nihilism is first and foremost a problem – the problem – in Nietzsche’s estimation. To restate Deleuze’s crucial point: for Nietzsche, nihilism is the problem, first and always, of the true world. This book pursues the implications of this insight. It asks what the problem of the true world is, which is inseparable from the question of where the true world came from. These questions are the subject of the present chapter and of Chapter 1. But the real intent of the book is to build on this understanding in order to consider how the problem of the true world has been confronted. Are there ways of thinking of the world other than as a true world and are there ways of thinking of truth other than as the truth of the world? And, since thinking and being are the same, are there other ways of being in the world than those given by the true world?

Arising from these guiding questions are chapters devoted to the image of the world in the thinking of the ancient Cynics, St. Paul, Nietzsche and Heidegger respectively. These thinkers (and Cynicism as a tradition of thought) have been chosen ahead of many others with good claims to our attention for the reason that the true world has long been a vision of the world as a totality – or kosmos (κόσμος), to use its ancient name. And Diogenes the Cynic, Paul, Nietzsche and Heidegger are all exemplary figures when it comes to arguing that what it is to be in the world, as also to be in truth, is otherwise than to know one’s place in the cosmos.

If Paul, Nietzsche and Heidegger are all to some extent anti-philosophers, then the final chapter on parrhēsia (παρρησία),³ the ancient courage of truth, will show that philosophy has also known (even if it has largely forgotten) another truth to that of the true world. Indeed, its concern with parrhēsia distinguishes the Socratic event itself. Given that the free-spokenness of parrhēsia is founded in confidence in self and others and what we can do together, it serves as a concept of truth as worldly – a truth in the world rather than of the world. And since parrhēsia is also a provocation to live truth – that is, to change – it envisions world as possibility rather than the unchanging identity of the true world.

Truth and world

Michel Foucault’s last lectures on parrhēsia seize on something significant. In these lectures, and in his discussion of ancient Cynicism in particular, Foucault identifies a form of the will to truth that aims not at capturing the world in a re-presentation, which presupposes a world that does not alter, but rather at an interventionist truth – truth as a test of oneself, and as a provocation and a challenge to others – which understands that the world can become other than it is. Foucault, like his master Nietzsche, believes that the notion that everything stands still ‘is a real winter doctrine, a good thing for sterile times, a good comforter for hibernators and stove huggers’ (Nietzsche 2006: 161).

Yet in silent conversation with Nietzsche, Foucault seeks to overcome Nietzsche’s assumption that truth can only lie because, beings always a ‘winter doctrine’, its tenets freeze in place what is really a broiling world of change: ‘Sometimes I believed I was lying and behold – that’s where I first hit – the truth’ (Nietzsche 2006: 222).⁴ Foucault does not dispute Nietzsche’s insight (2001: 201) that this wintery form of the will to truth ‘could be a hidden will to death’, but he does question whether the will to truth must only will the timeless truth of the world, must only be a ‘winter doctrine’. Foucault’s other will to truth – parrhēsia – is rather living, in the world, and, being a thaw wind to all winter doctrines, can even change the world.

As we will see, Nietzsche seeks to overcome the nihilism of the true world by way of world-affirmation. Affirmation is the superhuman element, the mark of the Overman which even the higher man remains incapable of (Deleuze 1983: 170).⁵ But Nietzsche has less to say about how to confront the crisis of truth that the true world engenders. For all Nietzsche’s efforts to overcome the true world, does his sense of truth get suitably transformed in the process? There are certainly glimpses of another truth in Nietzsche. For example, Zarathustra (Nietzsche 2006: 80) identifies the truthful one as he who has not the will to truth but rather ‘the will of the truthful’. Here truth is a way of being rather than a claim about the way of the world. For the most part, however, Nietzsche thinks that the death of the true world (the death of God) kills off truth too – makes truth something that is not true. The problem here is that the notion that the true world is a lie continues, of course, to presuppose a truth of the world. The lie cannot be a lie unless it is other than truth. Nietzsche is thereby forced to counter the lie of the true world with a deeper truth of the world. But a truer truth of the world must assume a true world.

The question of nihilism, of the nothing (nihil), is always a question of truth. Only when truth is taken as the measure of the world is a crisis of truth also an experience of worldlessness. How, then, did truth become this measure? Nietzsche’s answer to this question is: philosophy. Philosophy as the will to truth is ‘the faith millennia old, the Christian faith, which was also Plato’s, that God is truth, that truth is divine’ (Nietzsche 2001: 201). Indeed, this will to truth and its nihilistic implications are already present in the pre-Platonic philosopher, Parmenides. Nietzsche (1962: 81) recalls Parmenides’s prayer:

Grant me, ye gods, but one certainty [. . .] if it be but a log’s breadth on which to lie, on which to ride upon the sea of uncertainty. Take away everything that comes-to-be, everything lush, colourful, blossoming, illusory, everything that charms and is alive. Take away all these for yourselves and grant me but the one and only, poor certainty.

The philosophical will to truth opens the door to nihilism since it makes truth (understood as what is timeless) the utmost thing and by the same token besmirches a world of time and becoming. This tension between truth as unchanging and world as change is also why the will to truth continually calls truth into question. As soon as something is held to be true (and here our language betrays its metaphysical element), the very holding turns it into a lie. For Nietzsche, his awareness of this dilemma in both its ‘most terrible’ and ‘most hopeful’ aspects is the decisive feature, not only of his thought but also of his life: ‘what meaning would our entire being have if not this, that in us the will to truth came to consciousness of itself as a problem?’ (Nietzsche 2014: 348).

For all his insight into the will to truth as a problem, it is worth being more historically specific about the will to truth than Nietzsche was. Although he wrote a genealogy of morals, Nietzsche did not write a genealogy of truth. Nietzsche sees the will to truth as leading inexorably to nihilism – and not only Nietzsche, since plenty after him have agreed that the will to truth is so self-defeating that, in Deleuze’s words (1983: 99), we need a truth ‘which presupposes a completely different will’, a truth that does not seek truth. Deleuze, like Nietzsche, has in mind a creative will rather than a will to truth, but this risks repeating Nietzsche’s mistake of thinking that the will to truth has aimed only at giving an account of what does not change. Nietzsche is right that this truth ends in nihilism, but the question is whether the will to truth has indeed been concerned only with the truth of the world?

This is not to deny that the true world has been the main road that the will to truth has taken. In the metaphysical tradition, eternity is identified with truth and time with error. Even in Presocratic natural philosophy it is the case, as Nietzsche (1962: 66) says, of letting ‘the wheel of time roll where it will, it can never escape truth’. In Parmenides, if being is one then the appearance of change must be an illusion. This tendency to identify change with error is retained in post-Socratic philosophy by way of Plato. In Plato’s Republic we read that when the mind ‘is fixed on the twilight world of change and decay, it can only form opinions, its vision is confused and its opinions shifting, and it seems to lack intelligence’ (Plato 1974: VI: 508d).

Plato’s account of the creation of the world in Timaeus is exemplary here. Timaeus recounts (3.29), to Socrates’s approval, that the maker and father of the universe must have worked from a pattern based on some unchanging principle since the alternative ‘is a blasphemy even to mention’. The world is the fairest of all things created, so undoubtedly the demiurge ‘had his eye on the eternal’ when giving form to it. And indeed, the demiurge’s model was an eternal living being such that, although it was not possible to bestow eternity fully on the created universe, ‘he determined to make a moving image of eternity, and so when he ordered the heavens he made in that which we call time an eternal moving image of the eternity which remains for ever at one’ (7.37). Eternity is the model for a time that always falls short of eternity’s timelessness.

For Plato, given that the true world is changeless, a description of it will itself be changeless – will be ‘as irrefutable and incontrovertible as a description in words can be’ (3.29). For the same reason, however, the truth of our material world of change, a world which is only a likeness of the true world, will itself ‘be merely likely; for being has to becoming the same relation as truth to belief’ (ibid.). The true world, being timeless, is the very model of truth, whereas the world of becoming can have no certain relation to truth at all.

Modernity can no longer bring itself to believe in the true world. But this does not make the true world go away. If Descartes inaugurates modern philosophy as the philosophy of the solipsistic subject, then this is in no small part because radical doubt quickly brings the true world into question, leaving only the ‘I think’ in place: ‘But it will be said that these phenomena [of the senses] are false and that I am dreaming. Let it be so; still it is at least quite certain that ... I see light, that I hear noise, that I feel heat’ (Descartes 1911: 10, emphasis added). The true world can be false; I remain true! It is the true world that brings about the crisis of truth in Descartes, a world that only gains a firmer grip when the solution to it is the cogito alone.

However, if it is insufficient merely to stop believing in the true world, neither is it enough to redescribe the true world as what becomes rather than what always is; and this, fairly or not, is Heidegger’s fundamental objection to Nietzsche’s world, as we shall see shortly. The truth of the world redescribed as becoming rather than being is still a true world. The other of that which is eternal is not what is always changing (note the metaphysical ‘always’ that is still in operation here) but that which is mortal. Mortal truth belongs to a transformed sense of world, understood now as time rather than timelessness, and as possibility rather than eternity. For Heidegger (1991), Nietzsche does not question whether there can be another truth than that of the world, it is just that, being more honest than the metaphysicians, he finds this one truth unsightly: ‘The belief that truth does not exist, the nihilists’ belief, is a great stretching of the limbs for someone who, as a warrior of knowledge, is constantly at struggle with so many ugly truths. For the truth is ugly’. (Nietzsche 2003: 220).

Rather than another account of the world, for Heidegger the experience of nihilism that the true world leads to can be answered only with another truth: a truth not of the world but a truth in the world, in fact a truth that is identical with world as what world gives to be known, as what it lets be. We will now turn to Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche, since in it the stakes of the problem of the true world become clearer.

Truth and wisdom

You famous wise men – how could you go with me! –

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

(Nietzsche 2006: 81)

Does the term philosophy mislead? Philosophia is the love of wisdom; but would this be the same thing as the love of truth, as is assumed? Does the love of truth have anything to do with wisdom? For wisdom, as the truth of the world, has a problem. The problem is whether, in knowing how the world is, we are party to untruth. If the world is nothing except for that which it was not before, becoming other at every moment, then the test of truth is change, not what remains the same. The same world, the true world, would be untrue. Perhaps the only way of reconciling a finite world of blind becoming with a final truth of the world – namely its being – is to posit the eternal return of the same, as Nietzsche believed. If the world is limited in its quantum of force (‘we forbid ourselves the notion of an infinite force as incompatible with the very concept “force”’ [Nietzsche 2003: 24]), then its becoming is not infinite, and, given infinite time, everything will return – just exactly as it was before. ‘Even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’ (Nietzsche 2001: 194). In his Late Notebooks, Nietzsche makes it clear that the thought of the eternal return is necessary to overcoming the residual theological thinking which, even though it no longer thinks the world as divine, continues to indulge itself in conceptions of the world as ‘possessing divine powers of creation’. The world is ‘still supposed to possess not only the intention but the means of avoiding repetition’ (Nietzsche 2003: 24). The circle of eternal recurrence is Nietzsche’s attempt to conceive of the movement of the world while keeping its Godless, and therefore goalless, state in mind.

That truth is movement, that propositions about the world cannot have an unlimited and universal value, was already central to German Idealism. But here the teleology, and with it the theology, remained. For Hegel, although there are no absolutely true statements about the world taken in isolation, the movement through which these claims emerge and are in turn overcome can be grasped: ‘Appearance is the arising and passing away that does not itself arise and pass away, but is in itself and constitutes the actuality and the movement of the life of truth’, as Hegel (1977: 27) writes in the Phenomenology of Spirit. This self-grasping of world-movement is itself the telos of that movement, a progression towards the true as the self-knowledge of the world-subject.⁶ The world for Hegel thereby remains that which can be known, can know itself, as providential process. In the Philosophy of History (Hegel 1980: 26–7), we read that the ‘truth, then, that there is a divine providence presiding over the events of the world, corresponds to the stated principle: for divine providence is wisdom with infinite power, realizing its own ends, i.e., the absolute, rational end-goal of the world’. As the very progression of providence itself, everything turns, for Hegel, on grasping the True as subject – self-knowing movement – and not only as substance, as he famously argues in the Phenomenology (1977: 10).

Once removed from any total and teleological schema, however, the implications of becoming are much more destabilizing. After the death of God, and along with him his providence, is the true world any longer thinkable? Working to undermine even his highest thought of the eternal return, this is also a nagging question for the late Nietzsche. Indeed, it gives him a fundamental problem that perhaps, hints Heidegger, was the very thing that drove him mad. For the eternal return, while it might overcome metaphysical providence or teleology, is still a vision of eternity; in short, it remains a timelessly true world, only differently described. The illusory world as defined by metaphysics – the world of change – becomes the true world. Since Platonism ‘amounted to the very inversion of truth’, then the opposite of Platonism must itself be the true world, Nietzsche (2014: 2) supposes. But the true world as eternal becoming rather than eternal being is still a true world. Being and becoming have merely traded places in the metaphysical two-worlds schema, a schema that remains unquestioned.

Just how decisive for Nietzsche in his last year of sanity was the insight that, absent the true world of Platonism, the illusory world of change disappears along with it (i.e. can no more be the true world than can the ideal true world of Platonism) can be gleaned from Twilight of the Idols (2005: 171): ‘The true world is gone: which world is left? The illusory one, perhaps? ... But no! we got rid of the illusory world along with the true one! (Noon; moment of shortest shadow; end of longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.).’

For Heidegger (1991, I: 200–10), Nietzsche realizes only very late, indeed just before his descent into madness, that the passing of the true world as the world beyond (the ‘death of God’) means the loss of any truth of the world at all – even that deepest, most terrible truth of the eternal return, the facing up to which Nietzsche had made the ultimate test of the overcoming of nihilism. The world as eternal becoming ends up being the true world just as much as any motionless metaphysical world. In Heidegger’s reading, up until this point of no return for any truth of the world whatever, Nietzsche’s attempts to escape metaphysical wisdom, the timeless truth of the world, remained ensnared in it since the timeless truth of the world was now that there is no timeless truth. The world in Nietzsche is becoming.

In Beyond Good and Evil, for example, Nietzsche (2014: 16) intimates that if both idealist and natural philosophy fail in their search for the truth of the world, then he, Nietzsche, will succeed: ‘It is dawning now on perhaps five or six minds that physics too is only a world interpretation and arrangement (by us! if I may say so!) and not a world explanation.’ And, just as Heidegger claimed, even at the end, namely in his late notebooks from late 1887/early 1888 (Nietzsche 2003: 219), we find that the true world still provides the sense of truth for Nietzsche, which is why ‘truth’ must be discarded:

nor [may] the concept of ‘truth’ be used to interpret the total character of existence [which] is not ‘true’, is false ..., one simply no longer has any reason to talk oneself into there being a true world [. . .]

Once we have devalued [truth], demonstrating that [it] can’t be applied to the universe, ceases to be a reason to devalue the universe.

That the true world is not true holds only because the true world is still Nietzsche’s model of truth.

As Heidegger saw it (1998c: 179), Nietzsche thereby remained trapped by metaphysical truth: by truth as truth of the world, which is truth as correspondence between the representations of a subject and the world given as an object. This truth is what must be overcome. For the truth understood as something objective fails to account for that which might be universally binding, for example most prejudices, and yet still not true. ‘Conversely, something can indeed be true which is not binding for everyone but only for a single individual’ (Heidegger 2003: 17). This does not mean that truth is subjective, but, for Heidegger, rather that it is historical. There can be no timeless truth of the world not because the world is movement but because time is constitutive of human existence, which therefore cannot be understood without it. In his debate on Kant with Cassirer at Davos (1929), Heidegger makes this point directly. Having argued that human transcendence (i.e. being open to Being) is entirely dependent on finitude, Heidegger goes on to say that ‘truth itself’ is unified with this transcendence, and calls this ‘Being-in-truth’ (1990: 176). Being-in-truth excludes ‘universally valid eternal truths’ in the sense that, absent Dasein – the being-there of mortal existence – there can be no truth. This does not mean that truth is relative to what individuals think, but is rather to be understood ontologically: truth could not be without Dasein.⁷ The ‘trans-subjectivity of truth’, that truth is not individually subjective, depends upon truth being ‘relative’ to Dasein (ibid.). If the idea of eternal truth is that, against ‘the flow of experience, there is a permanence’, then Heidegger’s counter-question, a question to which ‘every page’ in Being and Time (1996) was devoted, is: ‘What, then, does the eternal actually mean here? From where, then, do we know of this eternity? Is this eternity not just permanence in the sense of the ἀεὶ of time? Is this eternality not just that which is possible on the grounds of an inner transcendence of time itself?’ (Heidegger 1990: 176; see also 1988: 75). Eternity is only an idea of time, and time is mortal time.

Heidegger was not the first in the tradition to question truth as correspondence of thought with an eternally given external world. Kierkegaard, a significant influence on Heidegger (see, e.g. Heidegger 1988: 13), had already pointed to the irreducibility of a truth that is true for the subject rather than indifferently given as objective. Objective truth, the truth of the world, makes individual existence vanish from view. And, in turn, objective truth is a matter of indifference from the perspective, the only one that can really matter for the individual, of existence (Kierkegaard 2009: 162–3). In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard puts it like this: ‘Conventional wisdom [Hegelianism] aims presumptuously to introduce into the world of the spirit that same law of indifference under which the outside world groans. It believes it is enough to have knowledge of large truths. No other work is necessary. But then it does not get its bread, it starves to death while everything is transformed into gold’ (1985: 57–8).⁸

Schelling, although in his case from a metaphysical rather than an existential starting point, had also argued against truth as correspondence. For Schelling, the truth of the world as adequate idea of an object for a subject is thinkable only if subject and object are different, since agreement presupposes separation. But as soon as we think subject and world as difference in order to think their agreement in knowledge (as correspondence), we find that we can no longer explain this agreement. The world cannot be accurately reflected in the representations of the subject unless the subject already knows what the world is. Otherwise, how would the subject recognize the world that it re-presents to itself as the world in the first place? Once this deeper identity of world and human knowledge is admitted, then the Cartesian cogito is revealed as a fundamental error: ‘thinking is no longer my thinking and being is not my being’ (cited in Laughland 2007: 54). Indeed, absent this deeper identity of human knowledge and world, the partial and shifting character of knowledge could not be thought of as concerning the same world. Long before Heidegger, Schelling suggested that that within which beings appear, the world as totality, though it cannot appear as such, is the condition for their appearing at all. As later for Heidegger, for Schelling, time ‘is’ that negation which is ‘the totality appearing in opposition to the particular life of things’ (cited in Bowie 1993: 73). The absolute, World, is finitude, and thereby cannot be known in the manner of a thing. This is why Nietzsche’s attempt to overcome static metaphysical truth with a deeper truth of the world as becoming remains, in Heidegger’s view, metaphysical. It is what enables Heidegger to characterize Nietzsche as the last of the metaphysicians.

Socratic truth

For all that the philosophical tradition has prioritized the metaphysical question of the truth of the world (and, by the same token, forgotten truth as being always in the world), it was never the case that the will to truth of philosophy took only the metaphysical road. Indeed, for Foucault (2011), whose work on ancient philosophy reinforced this point, philosophy emerged precisely in the attempt at establishing its difference from wisdom (the truth of the world), a distinction that is not yet clear in Presocratic natural philosophy. The Presocratic thinker Heraclitus, for example, sat in the kitchen of some common people, warming himself by the oven and announcing, to much astonishment, ‘but the gods are here also’. His point? For Foucault (2011: 246), that ‘philosophy is fulfilled in the thought of the world itself, and in the form of the common life’. Natural philosophy, like all wisdom, establishes the oneness of things, not the rupture that is the true life, a life that has no common measure with customary existence. The moment of differentiation of philosophy from wisdom is the Socratic event (Foucault 2011: 82). According to Foucault, we need to grasp the singularity of Socrates.⁹

If for Foucault the singularity of Socrates is essentially the difference of Socratic truth from wisdom, then Nietzsche thought the opposite. In Twilight of the Idols(2005: 162), opening the section ‘The Problem of Socrates’, Nietzsche identifies Socrates with the tradition of wisdom that Nietzsche finds to be nihilistic:

About life, the wisest men of all ages have come to the same conclusion: it is no good. Always and everywhere one has heard the same sound from their mouths – a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness of life, full of resistance to life. Even Socrates said, as he died: ‘To live – that means to be sick a long time: I owe Asclepius the Saviour a rooster.’ Even Socrates was tired of life. [. . .] These wisest men of all ages – they should first be scrutinized closely. Were they all perhaps shaky on their legs? tottery? decadent? late? Could it be that wisdom appears on earth as a raven, attracted by a little whiff of carrion?

Foucault (2011: 81–92) sees Socrates as entirely foreign to this picture of the doddery, decadent wise men, drawing out instead the distinction between Socratic truth-telling and wisdom. First, Socrates explicitly rejects the use of wisdom in the political sphere, arguing in the Apology that his daemon has forbidden him from entering into political life. Socrates will not be Solon; he will not seek to be the wise lawgiver. Second, Socrates makes a quite atypical response to the Delphic Oracle’s pronouncement that he is the wisest man in Athens. Rather than seek either to interpret this prophecy or to await or avoid the fate it unveils, Socrates rather tries to test it. If not exactly sceptical and impious, Socrates is certainly questioning.¹⁰ A critical attitude surfaces in Socrates and with it the corrosive rise of reason, as Nietzsche often bemoaned.¹¹ Socrates effectively sets out to disprove the oracle by going from the highest to the lowest of Athenian society seeking the wisdom that may be found there. Third, if the sage is the one who shares his wisdom seldom or not at all, somebody who in the case of Heraclitus is even proudly misanthropic, then Socrates rather defines himself as a soldier who must not leave his post in the city until the day he dies (even Nietzsche [2001: 194] cannot help but admire this man who ‘lived cheerfully and like a soldier in plain view of everyone’). This is why Socrates chooses death over exile and is also, no doubt, an inspiration for Plato’s allegory of the cave: the true philosopher must not, as does the sage, remain outside the cave, basking in the light of the Good. He must rather return to the darkness to tell of what he has seen. If the wise man needs nothing and need do nothing, then Socrates rather has a mission. This is also why Socrates, who does not fear death, nonetheless avoids the citizens’ Assembly less he be killed for telling the truth. His mission gives him much to do, work he cannot accomplish from beyond the grave. Finally, if wisdom is founded in a truth that is timeless, leading thereby to the essential indifference of the sage, then Socrates’s mission is rather a mission of care (epimeleia). The Pythian Apollo was concerned for Socrates, and, by announcing that he was the wisest, also concerned, by way of Socrates (who would seek to get them to care for themselves, too), for all men. Socrates therefore pursues the truth from out of a founding divine care (Foucault 2011: 88, 100, 113).

The distinction between the truth that Socrates pursues and the truth retold by wisdom is clearly revealed by Socrates himself in his apology. Defending himself before the popular jury on charges of impiety, Socrates points out that, contrary to the accusations made against him, he has never spoken of the being of the world, something which might indeed suggest doubting the existence of the gods:

there’s [supposedly] a Socrates around who’s an expert – one who dabbles in theories about the heavenly bodies, who’s already searched out everything beneath the earth [. . .]

I ask those of you who’ve ever heard me in conversation (and there are plenty of you who have) to tell the others, if any one of you has ever yet heard me making the smallest mention of such things. (Plato, Apology, 18b and 19d)

Socrates does not deal in the truth of the world; he ‘shows that what he is striving for is not at all the being of things and the order of the world, which is in fact the object, the domain of the discourse of wisdom’. Socrates rather ‘speaks of the test of the soul’ (Foucault 2011: 89).

The importance of the test of the soul can of course lead to the metaphysical question of what the soul is in its truth, as for example in the Alcibiades, where the soul is identified as the immortal element, as the ontological reality of the self considered in distinction from the body. But in reconstructing the life of Socrates, it is clear that this is Plato’s inflection. For Socrates, the test of the soul is the test of life. The Socratic quest is not a matter of the being of man but rather of his existence (Foucault 2011: 125–8, 160–2). The question ‘who are you?’ is reducible entirely to the question: ‘how do you live?’. In this way, Socrates is the point at which the already long-standing concern of the Greeks with care of self (epimeleia heautou) is delinked from its traditional aim of a beautiful and memorable existence and becomes indexed rather to the question of truth, to truth as courageous truth-telling: parrhēsia (Foucault 2011: 163). As Plato makes Socrates say at the end of the Gorgias:

Renouncing the honours at which the world aims, I desire only to know the truth, and to live as well as I can, and, when I die, to die as well as I can. And, to the utmost of my power, I exhort all other men to do the same. And, in return for your exhortation of me, I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly conflict.

As indicated by this reappraisal of Socrates, Foucault (2011: 114) came to see ancient philosophy as a form of life characterized – if not exclusively then certainly in its point of differentiation from other modes of truth-telling – by parrhēsia, the courage of truth. This truth is not the truth of the world, but truth as a courageous intervention in the singularity of souls and situations. It is truth-telling understood not in the register of epistemology – does the truth-teller’s statement conform with the world? – but in the register of ontology – what is the way of being of the one who tells the truth (Foucault 2010: 309)? For Foucault, parrhēsia thereby does just what truth should do but which wisdom does not: it is truth indexed to change, rather than what stays the same, and it finds its principle of identity (that which does not change) not, metaphysically, in a frozen world picture but in this very courage itself, something which is always and necessarily in the world. It is the subject of truth (the true life), not the veracity of truth (the true statement), which is at stake in parrhēsia. As a logos proper to philosophy and quite unlike the logos of wisdom, parrhēsia does not claim to know the truth in advance, only to place itself in relation to truth. As the Cynic Diogenes of Sinope said, being but a pretender to wisdom is philosophy (Diogenes Laertius 1991: 66–7).

The purity of the subject of metaphysical truth is constituted in a cathartic break from the sensory world as the world of error. This subject identifies with the eternity of truth as that true world which is beyond this world. The subject of parrhēsia, by contrast, is a very this-worldly and engaged subject of sacrifice, battle, resolution and endurance for the truth (Foucault 2011: 125). The metaphysical subject washes his hands of the world; the truth that changes him is given to him from elsewhere. The parrhesiast struggles to change the world; the truth that changes him is his acceptance of the test of the true life, here. The last lines of Foucault’s parrhēsia lecture notes summarize the significance, indeed the urgency, of this difference for the dying Foucault: ‘But what I would like to stress in conclusion is this: there is no establishment of the truth without an essential position of otherness; the truth is never the same; there can be truth only in the form of the other world and the other life’ (2011: 340; see also 247).

The Nietzschean provenance of this understanding of truth is clear, and was also influential on Foucault’s friend, Deleuze. In his book on Nietzsche, Deleuze too is keen to draw a distinction between wisdom and philosophy. As Deleuze notes (1983: 5–6), philosopher does not mean ‘wise man’ but ‘friend of wisdom’. But this friendship is not what it first appears to be. The friend, says Zarathustra, is actually a third person in between ‘I’ and ‘me’ who pushes me to overcome myself and to be overcome. The philosopher, then, makes use of wisdom for ends that are hardly wise at all. The philosopher is in no way a sage since he destroys the old concepts, creating new ones in their place that are ‘neither eternal nor historical, only untimely and not of the present’ (Deleuze 1983: 92 and 107). For this reason, the philosopher, unlike the wise man, will avoid the metaphysical mistake of asking ‘What is it?’, preferring rather: ‘Which one?’ (Deleuze 1983: 76–7). Applied to parrhēsia in Foucault’s treatment of it – a treatment that attempts a genealogy of the courage of truth rather than an account of truth ‘itself’ – we can see that when it comes to the content of truth, parrhēsia is a question of the appearance of truth rather than its being. Its concern is not what truth is, but which one has the courage of it (Foucault 2010: 306). Parrhēsia wants to make distinctions and is concerned with singularities; it always wants to affirm its difference, as Deleuze would say.

Truth and time

The true world, as a timeless world, puts truth and time at odds. Given that human being is not immortal, our temporal existence itself ceases to have any relation to truth. Time is in every case only my time or our time: Either there is still time, or it is the time, or there is no more time (Heidegger 2002b: 90–1). Because the essence of time is singularizing rather than universalizing, because there is no generic time, the true world is out of time.¹²

The true world is out of time not only in the sense of being removed from time but also in the sense of having run out of time. As accomplished being, the true world is a world that stands judged; since it can be nothing else than it is already, since it is at a standstill, a final judgement of the true world can be given. As Aquinas says in the Summa Theologiae (cited in Agamben 2015: 58) of the Last Judgement, ‘Judgement belongs to the term, wherein [things] are brought to their end’. Heidegger, in a lecture on time from 1924, writes of human Da-sein: ‘How is this entity to be apprehended in its Being before it has reached its end? After all, I am still underway with my Dasein. It is still something that is not yet at an end. When it has reached the end it precisely no longer is’ (1992a: 10). The world as mortal time and possibility is a world in which a final judgement becomes impossible, a world in which the day of salvation is always at hand. If salvation is the possibility of a new beginning, of Paul’s ‘new man’, then the world as mortal time is a world that can be saved. Only after the world can the world be judged. In the world, no last judgement comes. There is salvation because there is still time.

The true world is first fundamentally challenged by Paul, for whom timeless cosmos, as the world order of empire, gives way to this world, a world that, no longer eternal, instead draws to an end: ‘Do not be conformed to this world [αἰῶνι τούτῳ] but be transformed by the renewal of your mind’ (Rom. 12.2). For Nietzsche, this only means that Paul takes metaphysics to a new level by preferring the next world to this one, but Heidegger demurs. On the way to his rethinking of human being in Being and Time (1927), Heidegger argues that Paul inaugurated a new experience of time and the world in which temporality is not the eternity of a timeless cosmos in which all is already accomplished, but essentially open, because mortal, human being-in-the-world. In short, Paul is crucial to putting Heidegger onto finitude as the groundless ground of human being.¹³

In his early lectures on ‘The Phenomenology of Religious Life’ from 1920–21 (2004: 48), Heidegger notes of Galatians 1:5 that Paul’s sense of world (aeon) is that ‘The present time has already reached its end and a new [aeon] has begun since the death of Christ. The present world is opposed to the world of eternity’. If eternity is the metaphysical sense of time and the world, then Paul’s world is now: ‘Galatians 2:2: ‘“Running.” Paul is hurried, because the end of time has already come’ (2004: 49). Differently from the stasis of cosmos, Paul encounters himself and his congregations not as given but as becoming other. ‘Paul experiences the Thessalonians in two determinations: 1. He experiences their having-become ... He experiences, that they have a knowledge of their having-become ... That means their having-become is also Paul’s having-become. And Paul is co-affected by their having-become’ (2004: 65).

For Paul and his followers, no fixed sense whatever can be given to their being: ‘their Being [Sein] now is their having-become [Gewordensein]. Their having-become is their Being now’ (2004: 66). God’s being-present leads to a transformation of life (peripatein, living), not to its remaining the same (2004: 67). This is why Greek-inflected theology, with its understanding of God as an object of speculation (theo-logy as the logos of God), cannot grasp Paul’s good news primordially as an active turning towards God rather than his passive contemplation. It also means that life, for Paul, ‘is not a mere flow of events; it is only insofar as he has it. His life hangs between God and his vocation’ (2004: 70). The parousia (presence, coming) of Christ is therefore not something the Christian awaits as for a future event. Christian hope is not in an objective time to come – Paul does not tell the Thessalonians when Christ will return but rather announces ‘you know exactly’ (1 Thess. 5.2). Paul refers the Thessalonians back to their own life; how they live is decisive, not the precise hour of Christ’s return. He thereby distinguishes between two ways of living rather than between two given orders of time: 1 Thess. 5.4: ‘But you ...’ (2004: 71–2). For Heidegger, it is not possible to encounter this Christian temporality in an objective concept of time: ‘The when is in no way objectively graspable’ (2004: 73). Metaphysical ideas such as the eternity of God thus reflect the penetration of Greek philosophy into Christianity and are not found in original Christian experience itself.¹⁴

These reflections on world and time in Paul anticipate, and no doubt stimulated, core themes of Being and Time. In this work time is to be thought neither as dead eternity nor as a simple succession of nows but as ‘the moment’ (Augenblick), or finitude. Time is not something other than mortal existence but rather Dasein, as time, ‘temporalizes its Being’ (1996: 319). This understanding of time, contrary to the time-image of a series of nows, establishes the essential unity of past, present and future: ‘The future is not later than having been, and having-been is not earlier than the present. Temporality temporalizes itself as a future which makes present in a process of having been’ (1996: 401; see also 1990: 143). The future of projection is what makes present – the present is made from out of the sense of future possibility that every tradition, every ‘having-been’ is.¹⁵ Indeed, given that projection onto death as a possibility discloses Dasein’s constitutive finitude, the ‘primary phenomenon of primordial and authentic temporality is the future’ (1996: 378).¹⁶ Inauthentic temporality, by contrast (the time of Das Man, ‘the they’), prioritizes the present.¹⁷

Time as successive nows, the ‘vulgar interpretation’ of time, therefore lacks ‘datability and significance’ (1996: 387); it fails to think ‘the moment’ not as a mere now but as that which ‘lets us encounter for the first time what can be “in a time”’, its possibility (1996: 311).¹⁸ It is the moment that brings existence to a situation by disclosing the ‘there’ of significance (1996: 319). The now, by contrast with the moment, is a dead time image because it is always already either no longer (past) or not yet (future). The now is a timeless time because it is endless in both directions without giving us any time (1996: 38).¹⁹

In his Introduction to Metaphysics (2000: 47–8), Heidegger thus calls the moment ‘history’ while ‘what is merely contemporary’, to the contrary, ‘never happens, but always just “passess”, makes its entrance and goes by’. Indeed, when we look away from the moment and experience time merely as the nows that we never have, then we lose ‘temporality itself’ (2000: 389). Time is ours only as finitude, only when we no longer look away from our own mortality. Time is mortal time. This is why our everyday talk is not of how time comes to be but of how it passes away: ‘Dasein knows fleeting time from the “fleeting” knowledge of its death’ (2000: 390). This is why the moment, as opposed to the now, temporalizes itself from the future. It also means that the future is not the not-yet of the now but the very condition for the present itself to arise (2000: 391). In the moment, the future comes ‘first’ just as, for Paul, tomorrow’s parousia transfigures today’s subjective possibilities: ‘History as happening is determined from the future, takes over what has been, and acts and endures its way through the present. It is precisely the present that vanishes in the happening’ (2000: 48). But if the present vanishes in the moment, then the past is also transformed. The past is no longer simply what is past, or gone, but that which is recapitulated from out of the future (elsewhere Heidegger [1990: 159] calls this ‘remembering again’²⁰). If the past operates in the present – in a sense is the present in terms of giving to it its horizon of possibility (1998c: 181; 1988: 32)²¹ – then the redetermination of the past from out of the future is a transfiguration of the present into the moment (Augenblick).²²

Metaphysical eternity, then, is really only the failure to think time. Heidegger (2000: 89) makes this point bluntly: ‘There is no time in which there were no human beings, not because there are human beings from all eternity and for all eternity, but because time is not eternity, and time always temporalizes itself only at one time, as human, historical Dasein.’ Heidegger’s Paul does not negate the world in some nihilistic beyond. Rather, ‘primordial Christian facticity gains no exceptionality, absolutely no special quality at all. In all its absoluteness of reorganizing the enactment, everything remains the same in respect to the worldly facticity’ (2004: 83). The Christian does not leave this world behind but, remaining in his worldly station (I Cor. 7.20), finds only ‘a new fundamental comportment’ to the world (2004: 84). The world of the Christian is taken up into becoming not because another world arrives but because this world is determined ‘out of the original enactment’ (2004: 85). Christian enactment remakes the world through resignification. That the slave is free in Christ and the Christian a slave to God means that, far from stepping out of the world, the Christian now receives his worldly determination (as free man or slave) as something temporal rather than eternal. The slave in Christ ‘is’ no longer a slave while the freeman in Christ ‘is’ no longer free. These worldly determinations are overcome not through their replacement by some other equally fixed determination but through their ‘having-been’, their becoming other.

This becoming is not just the flow of time, which, in its own way, is equally lifeless, but is rather a ‘complex of becoming’ (2004: 80)²³ which is beyond the alternatives of static-dynamic altogether: ‘The time of factical life is to be gained from the complex of enactment of factical life itself, and from there the static or dynamic character of the situation is to be determined’ (2004: 64, emphasis added). Enactment itself decides what endures and what passes. Christian life is therefore lived temporality as opposed to both deathly eternity and the indifferent flux of time: ‘Compressed temporality is constitutive for Christian religiosity’ (2004: 85).²⁴ Paul’s hos me, the famous ‘as if not’ of 1 Cor. 7 (which signifies how the believer should relate to his worldly vocations such as husband or as one who weeps), should thereby not be translated ‘as if’ since this suggests an ‘away from here’ with regard to the world. The ‘as’ adds a new, positive, sense to worldly determinations rather than introducing otherworldliness (2004: 86), as is affirmed later in Being and Time’s discussion of authenticity, where the ‘proper’ is, existentially, ‘only a modified way in which the [improper] is seized upon’ (Heidegger 1996: 224).

Heidegger provides us with a sense of the importance of Paul to any challenge to metaphysical timelessness, his own included. But if the condemnation of mortal time by the vision of eternity is what is decisive, then we need to understand more of how this two-worlds structure – the very heart of the metaphysical operation – came to be. For if Nietzsche (2006: 257) is right, the true world is the source of all error:

‘To be sure, unless you become as little children, you shall not enter that kingdom of heaven. (And Zarathustra gestured upward with his hands.)

But we do not want to enter the kingdom of heaven at all: we have become men – and so we want the kingdom of the earth.’

¹Deleuze (1983: 152) makes a similar point in his book on Nietzsche: ‘God is dead’ says both that God existed and that he is dead. This is not a speculative but a dramatic proposition, ‘the dramatic proposition par excellence’. ‘ Existence or non-existence cease to be absolute determinations which derive from the idea of God, but rather life and death become relative determinations which correspond to the forces entering into synthesis with or in the idea of God’.

²Deleuze (1983: 172) again: ‘The transmutation which defeats nihilism is itself only the completed and finished form of nihilism. Nihilism is defeated, by itself. For it is the role and foundation of nihilism to reveal the will to power’ since ‘nihilism, the will to nothingness, is not only a will to power, a quantity of the will to power, but the ratio cognoscendi of the will to power in general.’

³From πᾶν ‘all’ and ῥῆσις ‘speech’, meaning to speak everything, namely to speak freely or boldly.

⁴See also Zarathustra: ‘powerlessness to lie is by no means love for the truth. Beware! Freedom from fever is by no means knowledge! I do not believe spirits that have cooled down. Whoever cannot lie does not know what truth is’ (Nietzsche 2006: 235).

⁵This is why, for Nietzsche, the transvaluation of values is not so much a change of values as a change in the standpoint from which the value of values derives, a shift from a negative to an affirmative standpoint. For affirmation is the ground of the will to power in general; new values emerge only from this ground (Deleuze 1983: 171–3).

⁶‘the thought of the Whole is the effectuation of the Whole itself’, as Badiou (2009a: 142) summarizes it nicely.

⁷Thus if Kant’s emphasis is, negatively, on the limits of human knowledge of the world, then, for Heidegger (2002b: 163), the ‘limit’ of human finitude is the positive condition of world-disclosure: ‘This finitude must be exhibited, not in order to ascertain its boundaries or limits, but in order to awaken the inner resolve and composure within which everything essential begins and abides.’

⁸See also this from Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript (2009: 211): ‘Only the truth that edifies is truth for you. This is an essential predicate relating to truth as inwardness, whereby its decisive feature as edifying “for you”, i.e., for the subject, is that in which it differs essentially from all objective knowledge, in that the subjectivity itself becomes the mark of the truth.’

⁹In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche (1999: 74) had already called Socrates ‘the vortex and turning-point of so-called world history’. Nietzsche intends this judgement negatively in this early work, but his opinion of Socrates undergoes many modifications in following works (see especially his late judgement ‘The Problem of Socrates’ in Twilight of the Idols).

¹⁰Questioning is actually a zone of indistinction between wisdom and parrhēsia. Inasmuch as it avoids pronouncements, questioning maintains the silence of the sage; yet the question also remains true to the parrhesiastic injunction not to be silent (Foucault 2011: 26).

¹¹‘With Socrates, Greek taste suddenly changed in favour of dialectics: what really happened here? Above all, a noble taste was defeated [. . .] Honourable things, like honourable people, do not go around with their reason in their hand. It is indecent to show all five fingers. Nothing with real value needs to be proved first. Wherever authority is still part of the social fabric, wherever people give commands rather than reasons, the dialectician is a type of clown.’ (Nietzsche 2005: 164)

¹²Compare, for example, Immanuel Kant on this point in his Critique of Pure Reason: ‘For there is only one time, in which all different times must not be placed simultaneously but only one after another’ (Kant 1998: 303). The flow of time, for Kant, is precisely what is constant, what abides in becoming. For Heidegger (2002b: 118–19), it is this very conception of the permanence of time that ultimately defeats Kant’s critical project, which, though it starts out from human finitude (Kant’s distinction between appearance and unknowable thing-in-itself, by which he limits pure reason, is basically that between finite and infinite knowledge), fails to think it all the way down. Kant’s model for time remains the causal time of nature (Heidegger 2002b: 138–9; 165–8). Elsewhere (1988: 144) Heidegger levels this same accusation at Hegel. Time and space for Hegel are principally understood as problems of the philosophy of nature: ‘Conversely, the problematic of time is not developed in terms of history. . .’.

¹³But, as mentioned, also Kierkegaard, for whom the philosopher has no answer to the question: ‘“What am I supposed to do?” ... See, here you are at one with the philosophers. What unites you is that life comes to a halt. For the philosopher, world history is ended, and he mediates ... He is outside; he is not a participant’ (Kierkegaard 1987: 171–2).

¹⁴While Heidegger might agree with Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy (1999: 64) that metaphysical Christianity has stolen away our mortal time (‘of all the hours of man’s life [it] holds the last to be the most important’), he would profoundly disagree that Paul is ultimately responsible for this.

¹⁵On this account of tradition as a ‘thinking forward’, which is not a planning, see also Heidegger (1996: 41): ‘“Being” ever and always speaks as destiny, and thus permeated by tradition’ (see also 1996: 51).

¹⁶Heidegger repeats this point in his book on Kant (1990: 128 and 177): ‘when exactly does the most original essence of time, i.e. that it is developed primarily from the future, come to the fore?’; ‘the analysis of death [in Being and Time] has the function of bringing out the radical futurity of Dasein, not of producing a ... metaphysical thesis concerning the essence of death’.

¹⁷‘Does not all war over Being, then, move in advance within the horizon of time?’ (Heidegger 1990: 164)

¹⁸Again, this point is repeated in his study of Kant (1990: 120): ‘Th[e]‌ sequence of nows ... is in no way time in its originality. On the contrary, the transcendental power of imagination allows time as sequence of nows to spring forth, and as this letting-spring-forth it is therefore original time’. (See also 1990: 132 and 137.)

¹⁹Aristotle, the first for Heidegger to really think time, shapes the tradition here, conceiving of ‘the “Being” of time from the “now”’ (1990: 165).

²⁰See also Heidegger 2002b: ‘the historical past is not defined through its position in bygone, but through its future’ (147). This is very different from temporality in Hegel, where although the past is ‘the decisive character of time’, nonetheless it is always ‘fading away, something transitory and always bygone’. For Heidegger (1988: 82), it is decisive that Hegel ‘speaks about having been, but never about the future’. That the past constitutes the essence of time for Hegel is unsurprising since a genuine (self-conscious) being is that which has returned to itself. Being is therefore what has always already occurred, that for ‘which nothing can be earlier’ (1988: 146). Following Heidegger, Deleuze (1994: 84–5) takes up the importance of reminiscence to recovering the past, a past that we otherwise reduce ‘to the former present that it was, or to the present present in relation to which it is past’. Only in reminiscence can we save the past for ourselves. Thus does the future subordinate the present and the past to itself, ‘making use of the repetition of habit [past] and that of memory [present]’ as stages that it leaves in its wake. This is how repetition (which for Deleuze means difference) passes from a thing in itself to a thing for itself (1994: 94, emphasis added).

²¹See also Henri Bergson as cited in Deleuze (1991: 51): ‘the following moment always contains, over and above the preceding one, the memory the latter has left it’. As Deleuze (1991: 63) says of ‘the Bergsonian revolution’: ‘We do not move from the present to the past, from perception to recollection, but from the past to the present, from recollection to perception.’ Also: ‘we must recognize that the present itself is only the most contracted level of the past’ (1991: 74; see also Deleuze 1994: 85).

²²Badiou, who rejects all talk of finitude, rather sees the possibility of the recapitulation of the past in the present as a possibility opened up by the event, not by the future (2009: 507). To live is then to be incorporated into the present as a subject of truth, an incorporation which ‘reconstitutes a different past’. In this reading, the past is ‘the amplitude of the present’ such that, for the subject, ‘History does not exist. There are only disparate presents whose radiance is measured by their power to unfold a past worthy of them’. Indeed, to the extent that the subject of an event creates the present according to a universal truth, this present is nothing less than the ‘being-there of eternity’ (2009: 509–10).

²³Deleuze (1991: 32–3) reads Bergson’s philosophy as making a similar point: ‘Intuition is not duration itself. Intuition is rather the movement by which we emerge from our own duration, by which we make use of our own duration to affirm and immediately to recognize the existence of other durations . . . ’

²⁴Badiou (2009 : 384–5) concurs that the event – which for him opens up the possibility of a truth – is in immanent exception to becoming: ‘The event is neither past nor future. It presents us with the present.’