ENGLISH LITERATURE 3Q03
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 3Q03
Supplemental Notes on Friedrich Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" [Über Wahrheit und
Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne]
Friedrich Nietzsche was born in the fall of 1844 and died in summer of 1900--which is to say on the very
threshold of the "modern world" that his work is sometimes said to help usher into existence. Taken as a whole
(albeit a whole made up of an array of often strange fragments), Nietzsche's work represents nothing less than a
massive critique, a deconstruction, if you will, of the fundamental principles of Western philosophy. In this work we
witness an often fiercely articulated critique of Western aesthetics, epistemology, ontology, and morality, and a revisioning of theories of history, language, and subjectivity going back to Plato. For better or for worse (depending
on your perspective), nothing seems to have escaped Nietzsche's always ironic grasp. His career as a thinker would
appear to be a complex, and self-complicating experiment not only in thinking, but also in writing: his texts are
strange and passionate things, full of competing voices, characters, polemical flourishes, and they possess a selfconscious rhetorical density hitherto unknown in philosophical circles. He was denounced during and after his life
as a madman, and, indeed, his last years were spent in the midst of a terrible and agonizing psychosis. Today, his
work and his insights live on in many different schools of philosophy and critical theory. He is perhaps most well
known for his "genealogical analyses," i.e., his reflections on the ways that a culture naturalizes its morality--makes
its moral claims appear to be given, rather than the reflection of those who have the authority to say what is right and
what is wrong.
"On Truth and Falsehood in the Nonmoral Sense" was written in the summer of 1873, when Nietzsche was
not "much" older than many graduate students (and some undergraduate students!). In this piece, never published
during his lifetime, he suggests that the ultimate truth is that we have to live without truth--and without nostalgia for
that truth. Nietzsche's great insight is that people go around saying and thinking that they are seeking the truth of
things, but that in fact they succeed only in establishing the rules according to which they will be said to be speaking
truly or falsely. That is to say, one can only speak truly by virtue of the force of the rules that are imposed in any
given cultural situation. So, by "truth" we do not mean what is conventionally understood by the term--i.e., true
propositions to be discussed or accepted--, but the set of rules that make it possible to utter and to recognize those
propositions that are held as true. "Knowledge" is in this way indistinguishable from power; it is not a weapon of
power only, what one can hold over someone else; it is power. In "On Truth and Lie," Nietzsche shows that what we
call truth is a special kind of lie, but a lie which ultimately deserves to be freed of moral connotations, liberated from
being treated as something that is wrong or bad (and thus compared unfavourably to a certain given standard of
rightness or goodness).
The essay itself falls into two sections, one much longer than the other. In the first section, Nietzsche asks
and answers the fundamental question of philosophy: "What is truth?" It is also the section were he explores the
centrality of metaphor to knowledge, and the way in which a drive towards the production of metaphor is an
inescapable part of experience. In the second and concluding section, Nietzsche rapidly--perhaps too rapidly-develops an argument about the split nature of human beings: roughly speaking, the rational human and the intuitive
human. Neither way of being in the world is entirely perfect, and both expose human beings to states of suffering.
First Section
Nietzsche beings with a startling little fable; once upon a time, he suggests (as if speaking in the voice of an
alien from another planet), there was a place--Earth--where "clever beasts invented knowing." This supposedly
important occasion was in fact "the most arrogant and mendacious [lying] minute of world history," he says...but it
was only a minute. After all, the little star cooled, and the "clever beasts had to die." Such a fable doesn't come
close to illustrating the "miserable...shadowy...transient...aimless" and "arbitrary" ways in which the human intellect
looks within nature--but it is a good start. Nietzsche wonders ironically at the "pride" that comes with knowing and
with intellect, and the arrogant sense that comes with this intellect--namely that human existence is intrinsically
valuable, important. In this pride, human beings flatter themselves that knowing and right-knowing is crucial to our
dignity and exemplarity as human beings; for Nietzsche, there is a distinct air of deceitfulness about all of this. He
asks: How on earth did "an honest and pure drive for truth" arise in human beings in the first place, especially when
so much of their lives seems devoted to deceiving, flattering, lying, deluding, hiding behind conventions, and playing
roles? Note that by deceit and lying and playing roles, Nietzsche does not mean ordinary lying; the delusions and
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illusions about which he speaks are much deeper, more fundamental. Just look at us, he exclaims: What do we
know even about ourselves, much less the "truth of things"? Are we ever able to see ourselves, really see and know
ourselves, "as if laid out in a lighted display case?" Nature, after all, conceals almost everything from us, yet we
continue to swagger through the world as if we "knew" things for what they "really" were. We humans have our
"proud, deceptive consciousness," while all along our bodies run on forever outside of our conceptual reach.
Imagine the day, Nietzsche challenges his readers, when we might peer out of "the chamber of consciousness" into
the world "outside," say, the world of our own bodies: what if we took a quick look "out" and saw that all that keeps
us human is ignorance of this world, blindness to a world that is "pitiless, greedy, insatiable, and murderous"? To
use Nietzsche's powerful figure: what if we are creatures dreaming our existence on the back of a ferocious tiger?
Here, Nietzsche gives us a metaphor for how human beings are always, as it were, displaced persons, always
"elsewhere"; in the midst of our consciousness, we are in fact asleep, and travelling somewhere else than we think we
are travelling. For Nietzsche, the division of consciousness from our own bodies is a metaphor for a deeper division
in the universe, that is, the split between human beings and things in themselves.
If this is indeed our predicament, then where did "the drive for truth come from"? Nietzsche speculates that
the origin of the will-to-truth coincides with the birth of society, i.e., the crucial development from a non-society of
the animalistic "war of all against all"--i.e., every person for himself or herself--to what he disdainfully calls the
"herd" existence. At the moment that we become social creatures, and, indeed, as a condition of us becoming social
creatures, there must be minimal agreement on what is true and what is false. Truth is thus not some beacon of light
for which we strive, but a set of mutually agreed upon principles that facilitates the smooth functioning of the herd.
It is the originating means by which social control is established; once you determine truth from lies, then you get to
do all sorts of things to discipline and punish the social body so that it continues telling what has been deemed to be
the truth. (Here, you might recall Locke's more optimistic picture of the minimal agreements that form the basis for
the forging of social collectivities.)
"We believe that we know something about things themselves when we speak of trees, colours, snow, and
flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things--metaphors which correspond in no way to the original
entities." With this statement, Nietzsche informs us that what things are in themselves, before we re-process them
with our senses and our minds, remains forever out of our reach. At best, these things are at root "the mysterious X
of the thing in itself"--but that X never appears to us. What we in fact experience is a series of displacements or
transports of that original X, starting with a stimulus of the nerve and ending with a sound or an idea. What we call
truth is therefore a kind of hallucination, because it comes of a series of completely arbitrary transferences. In
arguing this way, Nietzsche attacks the classical definition of truthfulness, the so-called "adequation" model of truth.
According to this model, the answer to the question--What is truth?--is determined by measuring of how close a
proposition is to that which it describes. "Truth" happens when the account of a fact approaches the fact itself: "the
adequate expression of an object in the subject." This model applies to the simplest of declarative statements, for
example, "the stone is hard." But as Nietzsche suggests, we say this as if "hardness" where a quality inhering in the
object rather than what it may actually be, a quality that says much more about the knowing subject than about the
indifferent object we are claiming to know. Apparent descriptions of objects are in fact the projections or
hallucinations of human subject. For example, he notes how German nouns fall into masculine and feminine
genders; things are not "naturally" one gender or another, and yet the very language that Germans use makes it seem
as if this were the case. For Nietzsche, language is full of these completely arbitrary significations, all of them more
or less "bold" metaphors, i.e., metaphorical substitutions and transferred senses of one kind or another. In arguing
this way, it is important to remember that Nietzsche doesn't pine nostalgically for the comprehension or apprehension
of the "thing in itself"--which would, as he says, constitute a kind of "pure truth." No, he says, this purity remains
"quite incomprehensible...and something not in the least worth striving for." In place of striving for this unnameable
"thing in itself," Nietzsche suggests, we should turn our attention to the ways in which language and human
experience is composed of "relations" or transferences. "Something"--we know not what--stimulates the optic
"nerve;" this in turn is translated into an image, what we see; and this in turn is translated into a word. Each of
these turns--or "tropes"--is a "metaphor." And, in each case, we move from one discrete world into another, "entirely
new and different one." The analogy or metaphor that Nietzsche uses to illustrate this process of metaphorization is
a device that translates sound into shapes in sand: "sound" is here transported into "sight," and the patterns we see in
the sand are at best metaphors for the originating sound. An oddly disconnected series of connections is what
Nietzsche sees as the basis for consciousness and knowledge.
Nietzsche asks us to consider, then, the "the formation of concepts," even as Locke had done two centuries
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earlier. As he suggests, conceptualization--the making of concepts--is the effect of equating unequal things. He uses
the example of a "leaf;" this word works as a concept at the instant that it is forced to name many different
experiences of leaves, each of then "unique and entirely individual." These individual experiences are entirely
different and un-equal; we encounter each leaf in a fundamentally different way each time we experience a leaf. Yet
we rapidly--perhaps instantaneously--come to use the word/concept "leaf" to name these experiences, to join them
and to equate them. In other words, in forming concepts we violently and arbitrarily flatten out the stark differences
between individual experiences of leaves, "forgetting the distinguishing aspects." For convenience's sake, and,
surely, for the sake of keeping our sanity, we equate these unequal things. One of the classical definitions of
metaphor is precisely that: the yoking together of different worlds under one image. But then we go on to do
something very strange--and Nietzsche wants to recover this strangeness for us--and that is to assume that there must
be something called "leaf-ness" that stands above and beyond all these individual leaves; these individual leaves are
then considered to be more or less pale imitations of this form of the leaf. Do you see what has happened in this
process? The completely unique and different experiences of individual leaves is at "first" the original experience,
with the formation of the concept "leaf" coming "after," as a metaphor that subsumes all of these differences; but
then a reversal happens, and we start to attribute the originality to the concept, and make the individual leaves a more
or less distorted version of that original concept. For Nietzsche, it was Plato who had taught us to reverse our
apprehension of the world in this fashion. These sorts of tricks and transferences, these sorts of language operations
form the basis for knowledge: I) We transfer things from one sphere to the next, substituting an image for a electrochemical nerve stimulus; ii) We confuse and substitute the properties of a thing for the thing itself; iii) We confuse
and substitute generalizations for individualities.
Nietzsche reminds us again that nature has "no forms and no concepts:" there is only "an X which remains
inaccessible and undefinable for us." So, "What then is truth?" Nietzsche's answer is strange, but has had a
tremendous impact upon critical theory since the Second World War:
A moveable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in sort, a sum of human
relations which have been poetically intensifies, transferred, and embellished, and which, after
along usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which have
forgotten themselves to be illusions: they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been
drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are not considered as metal
and no longer coins (p. 84).
To be "truthful," then, means only "to employ the usual metaphors." To be "moral," which is to say, to
fulfil one's duty to be truthful, is only "the duty to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie with the herd and in a
manner binding upon everyone." In other words, truth is a matter of consensus and of power or authority. We come
to feel obliged to call one thing "red" and another "cold," and out of that obligation arises a "moral impulse in regard
to truth." Of course, Nietzsche notes, we quickly forget the arbitrariness of this basis for morality and truth, and
instead congratulate ourselves on being "rational" beings who willingly place themselves under the "control of
abstractions." Afraid of the strange "truth" of truth, human beings "will no longer tolerate being carried away by
sudden impressions, by intuitions." They prefer the cool, dead world of abstractions--like "leaf-ness"--over the
violently wrenching world of perceptions, a world that approaches each individual experience or impression of a
leaf. So it is that we "universalize these impressions into less colourful, cooler concepts, so that he can entrust the
guidance of his life and conduct to them." The world of images and sudden vivid first impressions is dissolved into
concepts; the "original perceptual metaphors" are forgotten, and even confused with "things themselves." Out of
this great swirl of dissolution comes the construction of a "great edifice of concepts," an edifice that Nietzsche
scathingly compares to a huge funeral vault. In the beginning, there was vivid metaphor, an original, individual
experience of bold, hot, transference in which we move from nerve stimulus to image; but this original experience
quickly gets captured by a kind of conceptualization machine, which brings to this individual experience a less than
bold orderliness. How strange, Nietzsche wonders aloud, that this world of certainty is built upon such "an unstable
foundation," upon, indeed, nothing but "running water." Under these conditions, he says ironically, the human is to
be congratulated, even admired,"but not on account of its drive for truth or for pure knowledge of things." For how
can be congratulate human beings for "finding" the truth that they have in fact invented so that it can be found?
Instead, congratulations are given to humans for being so tricky, so damned clever: I invent a definition of a
"mammal," then go out and see a camel or a cat, and declare, "look, a mammal" So what have I done? For
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Nietzsche, the only truth that has been brought to light in such a circumstance is that "a thoroughly anthropomorphic
truth which contains not a single point which would be `true in itself' or really and universally valid apart from man."
The seeker after truth is only, in the end, the seeker after "the metamorphosis of the world into man" (here you might
think of Schiller's criticism of those who succumb to the form-drive). The supposedly "passive" discovery or
"finding" of the truth is, after all, the aggressive imposition of the human on the world, making "man the measure of
all things." The seeker after truth is not the self-evidently positive and dignified activity that it always represents
itself as being, especially to funding agencies and university presidents; it is something much more aggressive and
appropriative, a grasping and taking of the world, and its forced conversion into something human, into the image of
the human: under these conditions, truth and power are fully interimplicated.
We begin in a "primitive world of metaphor," but quickly forget it. Why? Because it is easier: in
forgetting, we gain a reassuring sense of safety: "Only by means of the petrification and coagulation of a mass of
images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid...only by
forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject does man live with any repose, security, and
consistency." Is there ever "an adequate expression of the object in the subject"? No! Nietzsche says, for the two
worlds of subject and object share absolutely nothing with each other; that being the case, the most that we can say
is that they have an "aesthetic relation," a "suggestive transference, a stammering translation into a completely
foreign tongue--for which there is required...a freely inventive intermediate sphere and mediating force." No doubt,
what Nietzsche means here is language. We might say "appearance," instead, but Nietzsche clearly wants to avoid
this term since it is so intimately tied to the adequation model of truth, suggesting as it does that what appears to us
has a necessary relationship to that which causes the appearance. As he points out, we infer, after the fact, that there
is something of which the appearance is an appearance...and then say that that thing was "out there" in the first place:
and so an effect comes to substitute or stand for a cause, which is a trope called metonymy (one member of the army
of metaphors about which he spoke earlier on in the essay). Once an image gets generated enough times, "millions
of times," it gets mistaken for the truth: the analogy used here--drawn from the great French philosopher, Pascal--is
that "an eternally repeated dream would certainly be felt and judged to be reality." We live in a world that only
seems "secure, complete, infinite, regular, without any gaps." We inhabit a universe seems law-governed, but
Nietzsche suggests that the judicial nature of the world betrays it is an anthropomorphic and anthropocentric
construction. The so-called "laws of nature" are not qualities that inhere in the universe, but are projections upon the
universe, metaphors about the universe that have forgotten themselves to be metaphors.
Second Section
By now, Nietzsche speaks not of a drive or will to truth, but of a drive to metaphor, that generates the new
worlds of "myth" and "art." This drive to metaphor is never "truly vanquished," although it is more often
"imprisoned" in the great conceptual edifices of philosophy and science. Implicitly, the will to metaphor is in part a
remembrance, a process of remembering all the metaphors that have been forgotten or that have forgotten
themselves. When it is at work, the will to metaphor is disruptive, always "bringing forward new transferences,
metaphors, and metonymies." It continually "refashions the world...so that it will be as colourful, irregular, lacking
in results and coherence, charming, and eternally new as the world of dreams." Nietzsche thinks of "mythically
inspired people," the ancient Greeks, for whom trees could speak, and gods appeared in the shape of a bull; what
made some of these people powerful was that they knew that these were illusions. Art and myth and metaphor is
"art" that knows itself to be illusion; it is a form of lying or deception that does not seek to deceive, and in this sense
it could be described as lying "in a nonmoral sense." Nietzsche imagines for his readers a type of person who does
not cling needily to "that immense framework and planking of concepts...in order to preserve himself." Another
person would "smash this framework to pieces," throw it "into confusion," and put it "back together in an ironic
fashion"--i.e., having a certain distance from it; this person would be the intuitive person, not the rational person.
The intuitive person scorns abstractions, whereas the rational person fears intuition. The intuitive person is irrational, which may not mean crazy, but other than rational; the rational person, on the other hand, is in-artistic, in
Nietzsche's revised sense of what constitutes a "true" artfulness. But both "desire to rule over life," as if Nietzsche
were acknowledging that the intuitive person is still captured by the craving after power; here we should recall his
account of ancient Greece, where the "intuitive man handles his weapons more authoritatively and victoriously than
his opponent." The rational person manages to ward off pain and misfortune through the force of abstraction; but the
intuitive person "suffers more intensely, when he suffers." Nietzsche concludes with a sombre description of what he
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imagines to be another creature again, namely the "stoical man," the creature who wears a "mask with dignified,
symmetrical features," and who suffers the world in its utterly unavoidable violence. This is the human being who
does not regret the world for what it is, and who simply endures that world.