On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1873) by Friedrich Nietzsche
I’d like to propose some alternative titles that I think Nietzsche could have used for this essay::
- “Deceive Without Harm” – Your Guide to a Free Intellect
- “Rationality”, It’s Definitely Overrated
- Telling the Truth, aka Lying with the Herd
- Human Intellect, It’s Built on Spider Webs
- “Hide and Seek Truth”, The Game of Reason (and Five Year Olds)
- We Could Be Living in Inception, And That’s Probably Okay
Friedrich Nietzsche begins his essay, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” by disputing the superlative character of human intellect. As though the world’s axis revolved around their very existence, humans move through the world with the same arrogance as the narcissistic gnat, whose world would collapse without his own existence (1). Once upon a time man created the “power of knowing” and with it the pride from which he derives the value of his own existence.
Rather than admiring human intellect (as many philosophers have), Nietzsche casts doubt on its purpose and finds that humans as the “most unfortunate, delicate, and ephemeral beings” (1) possess intellect to hold them in existence (having been denied the opportunity of their animal counterparts to “wage the battle for existence with horns or with the sharp teeth of beasts of prey” (1)). Throughout the essay Nietzsche contrasts human existence with that of animals, locating the dichotomy in man’s ability to conceptualize the world, that is, his formation of truth (4). This intellect unfolds itself principally in dissimulation, where man engages in,
Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself (1).
Immersed in illusions and dream images, man is easily “sustained in the indifference of his own ignorance” (2). Nietzsche thus does not ask the question, “what is truth?” but instead “where does our drive for truth come from?”.
As social beings, humans maintain a balance between self-preservation (achieved through dissimulation) and the desire to exist socially (“with the herd”). Through this social commitment of peace the necessary distinction of “truth” is established. Language institutes the first laws of truth and the dichotomy of truth and lie (2). Existing in society thus becomes the duty of upholding “truth” and in return receiving the “pleasant, life-preserving consequences of truth” (2). Man, therefore, is indifferent toward “pure knowledge” (which has no consequences) and does not hate deception itself, but rather the negative consequences that arise out of certain forms of deception (2). Human drive, then, is not guided by the concept of “pure truth, but by a truth that is,
a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding (4)
When we know something in this sense, we possess only a metaphor for that thing. Language does not mirror reality, rather, it constructs reality through metaphors. Language, a product of man, is inherently anthropomorphic, and thus truths voiced in language will always be “anthropomorphic truths” (5).
Source::
Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1873) http://imrl.usu.edu/6890/OnTruthandLies.pdf
Monographic 