To ask whether self-deception is an important criterion for the assessment of a person's religious beliefs is to remind ourselves that what Nietzsche calls "schooling in suspicion" is an essential part of the ethics of belief. Like all of Nietzsche's important insights though, this sharp and incisive view is a sword that cuts both ways. On the one hand, he sometimes suggests that our lives are bearable only because we have the capacity to evade the truth, especially at those times in life when too much truth might undermine and erode those basic commitments which enable us to make sense of the world. In the "Preface" to his Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche addresses this theme when he Offers his own somewhat ambivalent confession to rationalize his youthful enthusiasm for Schopenhauer and Wagner. Not surprisingly, he suggests that if there is any excuse for failing to see the failings of our avatars, it is because there is never any reason to ask for the whole truth when a little truth will suffice: "... what do you know, what could you know, of how much cunning in serf-preservation, how much reason and higher safeguarding, is contained in such deception -or how much falsity I shall require if I am willing to permit myself the luxury of my truthfulness .... Enough, I am still living, and life is, after all, not a product of morality: it wants deception, it lives on deception ...'1
In the world according to Nietzsche then, our lives are livable only because each person has an excuse for their illusions; namely, that a finite and limited perspective is what makes human life possible. And yet Nietzsche offers us a contrasting ideal, what one might call the life of philosophical virtue which is captured by his portrait of the "free spirit," the person who assumes the risks of free inquiry even though it might lead to the erosion of his life-preserving deceptions. Anticipating the meditations * Many thanks to Gordon Marino and Rusty Reno for theft thoughtful insights and comments.