Nietzsche Essay #2: "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense"

  * I'm taking a class on Friedrich Nietzsche and we do a 2-page essay on our weekly readings.  This is one of my essays.

·      “What then is truth?  A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred and embellished, and which, after long usage, see to people to be fixed, canonical, and binding.” (p 117) Explain what this means.

 

In his essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" Nietzsche clearly denies that truth is any sort of correspondence between the thoughts of a subject and the objective world.  He calls such a notion “a contradictory impossibility” (119). Furthermore, Nietzsche rejects any conception of universals—“nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts” (117).

Nietzsche holds to a kind of scientific psychology of human language and its relationship to the world.  Nietzsche’s outline looks something like this: 

“The thing in itself” >>nerve stimulus >>image >>sound

The “thing in itself” (a very Kantian phrase!) is “pure truth” but “incomprehensible to the creator of language” (116).  This impinges on our nerve stimulus to create an image. This image Nietzsche calls “first metaphor.”  When the subject translates this image into sound (language) this is called “second metaphor.” It is important to note that for Nietzsche there is no necessary connection between the nerve stimulus and the generated image (119).   Given this picture, Nietzsche is able to forthrightly state:

It is this way with all of us concerning language: we believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things—metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.

 

So for Nietzsche, language does not map onto reality in any truthful sense. Rather, linguistic creation of concepts necessarily falsifies the empirical world.  Thus, all that is left are the self-created metaphors that are twice-removed from reality.  According to Nietzsche, these metaphors take on a “fixed, canonical, and binding” status by sheer repetition.

            Nietzsche will not even allow that “science” gets us at truth.  It is an illusion that science gets at the “infallibility of laws of nature” (120).  It is a vain hope that “Science will be able to dig successfully in this shaft forever, and all the things that are discovered will harmonize with and not contradict each other” (120).  These “laws of nature” are simply what the result of relations to other “laws” we have created.  In a statement seemingly dependent on Kant, Nietzsche writes, “All that we actually know about these laws of nature is what we ourselves bring to them—time and space, and therefore relationships of succession and number” (120).  Thus, Nietzsche is able to conclude that the empirical world is the anthropomorphic world (121). 

            So for Nietzsche there is not access to the “real world”—the “thing in itself.”  All we have are self-generated linguistic conventions that function as metaphors for reality.  With the passing of time these are hardened into “laws” but they are just “anthropomorphisms” since they are generated by the human subject which cannot break out of the prison house of the Kantian categories which the human subject imposes on reality.  Even the vaunted claims of empirical science are rendered anthropomorphic since the alleged natural law “which impresses us so much in the movement of the stars and in chemical processes, coincides at bottom with those properties which we bring to things” (120).  All that is left of “truth” is metaphor and anthropomorphism, according to Nietzsche.