A question from a couple of weeks ago:

Nietzsche asks: “Supposing truth is a woman–what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? that the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman’s heart?”

At which point we must ask: What does it look like when one has won the heart of truth? What does it look like when truth rejects one’s advances? What kind of truth is it that can return love?

One answer: when we approach truth with our ideas, and our ideas are absorbed by truth and seem intrinsic to truth — when our conceptions develop into perceptions — that is when the thinker’s love is requited.

When we insist on imposing our conceptions on truth, and we disregard how we perceive reality and prefer our explanations to our primary experience, truth does not love us.

In other words, authentic metanoia* is the requited love of truth.

Dogmatic faith of the kind that is held despite contrary evidence of perception (isn’t this the popular definition of “faith”?), as much as it pretends to be love of truth, is in fact nothing more than love of one’s own preferred image of truth. And as anyone who exalts this type of “faith” will tell you, truth does not change, and continues to defy and betray us at every opportunity. The truth we experience — the “truth of this world” — is contrasted with the reality of the “world to come” which will not betray us and cannot betray us.

*

Metanoia is a Greek word commonly translated as “repentance”. It literally means “after knowing”. It is a re-knowing of truth that changes one’s relationship to life as a whole, theoretically, practically, morally and aesthetically.