Being honest with yourself is the most frustrating thing. I still remember the first time I learned something new that put what I thought before to shame.  Maybe you have had that too; you were so sure about a fact of life, an important life choice, or your self-image that it got turned around to the point that you don’t understand you could have ever thought differently, let alone the way you felt before, the day before. I have had these moments in my life, and though I have gotten new beliefs instead of the old ones, the new ones stand on shakier ground. What if these new beliefs are also wrong? I didn’t doubt myself before, so the absence of doubt now is not a guarantee anymore. 

If you are honest with yourself, you know that your opinions are not worth much. This strong opinion that I have about this subject is caught in some kind of contradiction. I have to doubt my opinion, which you have to doubt. 

I have always known that life is just a play, and we all play a role. Most people probably don’t know that they play a role and that the script is handed to them when they are born. When I was around 16, my favorite teeshirt was one with Freddy Mercury on it with big letters saying “The Great Pretender.” Back then, I already knew that something fishy was going on, that I was just playing my role, one that people seemed to expect, or at least I thought they did. But it took another 10 years before I knew that what we think is true is just that, we think it is true, and the role I play is just that. 

My interest in Nietzsche comes after I discovered in more depth what doubt, truth, and certainty mean to me. I started reading philosophy because It starts with the idea of an honest search for what we can know. Nietzsche was one of those philosophers who got mentioned by other philosophers to whom I gravitated, and how he thinks and sees the world felt familiar to me. Nietzsche is not a philosopher like many others who try to understand the world and put their output in some sort of scientific mold. Nietzsche is more like the birdwatchers of his time who painstakingly describe a bird’s behavior and postulates several reasons for why without clear preferences of a preference. Nietzsche asks of you to be honest and acknowledge the mechanisms that run (through) you.

53 Supposed stages of truth. – One of the commonest false conclusions is this: because someone is true and honest towards us, he speaks the truth. Thus a child believes in the judgements of its parents, the Christian in the assertions of the founder of the Church. There is likewise a disinclination to admit that all that which men have defended in earlier centuries with sacrifice of happiness and life were nothing but errors: perhaps one says they were stages of truth. But what one thinks at bottom is that, if someone has honestly believed in something and has fought and died for his belief, it would be altogether too unfair if what had inspired him had actually been no more than an error. Such an event seems to go against eternal justice; which is why the heart of sensitive people again and again contradicts their head, and decrees: there absolutely must exist a necessary connection between moral action and intellectual insight. Unhappily it is otherwise; for there is no such thing as eternal justice. 

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All Too Human, Om the History of the Moral Sensations.

I always thought that Fredies version was the best but I am not so sure anymore…