Is Nietzsche's 'On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense'
a Work of Fiction or a Work of Philosophy?
Paper given at the Ivory Tower Society, Pembroke College, Cambridge
Lent Term 2012
ABSTRACT: Initially unpublished, Nietzsche’s ‘On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense’ (Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn) (1) is an essay of arresting evaluative and literary power. Therein, Nietzsche argues that “Truths are illusions we have forgotten are illusions”, his doleful contention that Man creates fantasies to substitute unpalatable aspects of his existence, consciously obscuring his true circumstances beneath a veil of false desires and precarious ideals. This article, discussing the stylistic and generic nuances of Nietzsche’s discourse, examines whether it is ultimately a work of fiction or of philosophy. In considering that interdisciplinary question, I focus upon a range of Classical and Early Modern texts – philosophical, poetic, dramatic, political, and psychoanalytical - to annotate Nietzsche’s exposé of humanity’s propensity for myth-making in the name of a romanticised rather than objective empiricism.
~
This above all: to thine own self be true…
- Polonius, Hamlet (1.3.78) (1905:875)
Introduction: Locating ‘On Truth and Lies’ Chronologically and Ideologically
Hume, like Nietzsche, published his first major work, A Treatise of Human Nature, at the age of twenty-eight, and, just as Hume followed his seminal debut with the Essays Moral and Political, Nietzsche devoted his energies immediately after The Birth of Tragedy to a series of discourses, the Untimely Meditations. Outside of their scope, though, fell a work initially unpublished, ‘On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense’ (1873), sometimes called ‘On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense’. At the heart of that work is Nietzsche’s declaration that “Truths are illusions we have forgotten are illusions”, whereby humanity wilfully contorts or subdues the unpalatable tenets of existence with deftly-engineered falsehoods. Angrily mimicking, if necessarily so, at the beginning of his parable, Man’s view of himself as the measure of all things, it is precisely within this projected intellectual pride that Nietzsche situates the nub of his polemic – to illuminate not only the epistemic vanity that convinces Man there is nothing beyond the remit of his mind and comprehension, but the arrogance that abounds in his ‘selection’ of what he tolerates or rejects. Not merely does Man hold all things to be within the scope of his imagination or understanding, he also presumes to evade what he views as threatening or repugnant, if and when it does not conform to his neat ideal of what is, or of how circumstances should preferably unfold. For Nietzsche, Man’s cardinal hypocrisy is not his veneration of perception, but to qualitatively arbitrate those intuitions – the attractive confidently and inevitably pursued, the ‘vulgar’ scorned and flatly dismissed.
Far, though, from constituting some isolated, “stand alone” piece, ‘OTALIAN-MS’ presages certain strands of Nietzsche’s later thinking, as we will see in extracts from Human, All Too Human, The Gay Science and Beyond Good and Evil. I use the term ‘strands’ here advisedly, then, inasmuch as Nietzsche’s oeuvre seemingly promotes no explicit, defined system, with his essay circumstantially enamouring itself to passages in his mature writings rather than consciously setting the agenda of that later scholarship. It is precisely the absence within his philosophy of a steadfast doctrine, though, that permits, here, an interdisciplinary study of Nietzsche’s critique of Man’s wilful recourse to illusion, revealing both that cynicism in the developed Nietzsche, and how, with ‘OTALIAN-MS’ as our textual basis, other authors have expressed similarly critical and cautionary sentiments. Thus, it is the objective of this paper to examine how questions of perennial interest to philosophers – particularly truth, knowledge and reality - are treated in a compelling example of Nietzsche’s juvenilia, how it may best be classified, and how it annotates or anticipates certain of his and others’ perspectives on dogmatic humanism. It is hoped that the following evaluation will offer a fresh angle on a notable, yet arguably underappreciated, piece by a young Nietzsche.
‘Non-Moral’ Truths and Lies: Quasi Truths, Genuine Falsehoods
What is at once distinctive about Nietzsche’s essay is the markedly paradoxical quality of its title. Imagining truth as ‘non-moral’ illustrates human tendencies to create ‘truths’, and the way in which we ‘design’ them, so as to satisfy a certain motive, need or desire. A ‘non-moral’ account of truth suggests our capacity to sacrilegiously caricature ‘purer’, ‘universally acceptable’ definitions of truth in a bid to fulfil a specific purpose. Perhaps, here, Nietzsche claims that our versions or interpretations of truth are solely ‘divisions’ or ‘types’ of “genuine truths”, those concepts we mentally construct and subsequently urge ourselves to value as “actual truths”.
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies
(1994:274)
remarked Nietzsche in HH (1878) – reinforcing his argument presented in ‘OTALIAN-MS’, Nietzsche demonstrates the way in which humans can, if they will themselves to, come to emphatically believe in the validity of their self-made ‘classifications’ of truth.
Additional to this, then, while Nietzsche seems to suggest that (in our own minds) lies cannot always be seen as entirely immoral, perhaps the same can be said for truth – if we have ulterior motives for permitting lies to masquerade as truths, are there situations or instances – irrespective of whether they are of our own making, or to what end – in which the absolute morality of truth can itself be disputed?
Nietzsche, in his title, seems to place these concepts – “Truth and Lies…” (my emphasis) – into the same ‘category’, isolating them from “…In a Non-Moral Sense”. Perhaps Nietzsche is here suggesting something of what his own style will be – one that may be controversial, not entirely moral, and therefore (possibly) in defiance of ‘conventional’ or ‘traditional’ writing tones. His title is enigmatic, and indicates little to the reader in terms of what his themes and arguments will be, and how they will be expressed and structured.
A Nietzschian Fairy Tale: Fantasies Benign and Crude
The indication that Nietzsche’s essay may be a work of fiction is something of which the reader is immediately conscious. “Once upon a time” is a phrase with which we are all familiar. A typical opening to a fairy tale, our acknowledgement of these words is intuitive, through our recognition of its literary and cultural associations. It is a ‘term’ that has now transcended a ‘tone’ or ‘feeling’, and instead presents itself as linguistically indicative of a specific genre.
Nietzsche follows his opening with a reflection on the Creation. Like so much of the opening section to this piece, there is a patently fantastical feel to his words -
…in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed
into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which
the clever beasts invented knowing.
The lyrical description of the universe and its beginnings emphasises the ‘fictional’ quality of this piece – ‘beasts’ are the ‘characters’ of fairy tales, and the way in which he describes the cosmos reflects the conventions characteristic of creative fiction.
He calls the point at which
…the clever beasts invented knowing…the most arrogant and
mendacious minute of world history.
Here, Nietzsche amplifies the absurdity of such an idea – as if ‘knowing’ can be invented, or spoken about in terms of something which can be seen or touched. Nietzsche comments on the necessarily logical progress of time – (a) the world, at this point, has barely aged enough to be thought of as having had a substantial ‘history’ (that is, of possessing a consequential past), and (b) Nietzsche again indicates how premature, how excessive, the beasts are in their belief that they have already significantly influenced the ‘evolution of time’.
Nietzsche describes how
…the clever beasts had to die.
From a fictional – in this instance, literary – point of view, perhaps the foremost illustration of this principle (the governance of one’s destiny) is present in Oedipus Rex. Though Oedipus has, as the Chorus acknowledges at the climax of the tragedy
…solved the…riddle [of the sphinx] with his brilliance,
(1984:251, l.1679)
their words very much symbolize the attitude, and subsequent end, of Nietzsche’s beasts. The beasts, certain of supremacy and a kind of ‘eternal iconography’ or ‘ongoing renown’, must themselves submit to the reality of finite power. Freud, writing in The Interpretation of Dreams, dubbed the Sophoclean drama
…a tragedy of destiny.
(1991:363)
Perhaps the same can be said for the beasts – they are, through extreme complacency, responsible for their own undoing, Freud’s definition embodying their inevitable demise. Elsewhere in fiction, we see this theme – relentless, overwhelming self-confidence in our abilities and freedom to dictate the future, faith in our knowledge, and the consequences of such thoughts – at work in, for instance, King Lear, Washington Square, and, from a more scientific standpoint, Frankenstein.
Nietzsche employs the ‘beasts’ metaphor at other points in his work. In “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life”, in UM, Nietzsche echoes the language and ideas we have discussed –
Then he says, ‘I remember…’ and envies the beast that forgets
at once and sees every moment really die, sink into night and mist,
extinguished forever. The beast lives unhistorically: for it “goes
into” the present, like a number, without leaving any curious
remainder.
(1997: 106)
Here, then, Nietzsche develops his ideas presented in ‘OTALIAN-MS’ – whatever it may be that the beasts have achieved, or created, it will only be remembered for a time. Recalling Creon’s pronouncement on the King of Thebes,
None of [their] power will follow [them] through life
(1984:250, l.1677)
and there will be no evidence of their having existed. Aristotle holds in The Politics (12.53a) that
He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because
he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.
(1962:60)
Aristotle’s beasts, thinking of themselves as “gods”, believe they have no role or purpose in this society, which will consequently be reluctant to accommodate anything or anyone which or whom considers it or themselves superior to, or irrationally feels threatened by, other beings in that environment.
Nietzsche continues –
One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have
adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient,
how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature.
Here, Nietzsche, speaking in characteristically pessimistic language, comments on how unremarkable, how insignificant, the mind seems in comparison to the incalculable enormity of nature. His reference to his examination of the beasts as a kind of ‘fable’ seems reminiscent of his claim at the opening of BGE (1886) that he has
…gradually come to understand what every great philosophy until now
has been: the confession of its author and a kind of involuntary, unconscious
memoir.
(1973:37)
Nietzsche tempers and rationalises his doctrine, representing his thoughts as subordinate to a broader, impersonal system of values.
He has made, then, a stylistic admission about what he has said in ‘OTALIAN-MS’ – it is a ‘fable’, a fiction he has created as a device to promote a certain argument, which nevertheless speaks to us in the form of a ‘story’. He concedes the “inadequacy” of fables as a tool for voicing his claims regarding the intellect – in any bid to illustrate the shallowness of the mind, this breed of literature is insufficient and inappropriate, as it tends towards the creative, whereas philosophy provides the evaluative apparatus that facilitates analysis rather than mere description.
For Nietzsche, it seems humans are comparable to the beasts – gaining all knowledge, or living in pursuit of all knowledge, is not in our best interests. Ever knowing all that we may want to about Nature is an insurmountable feat, and it is surely best – or rather, inevitable – that the intellect should remain uncertain about some things, if some questions cannot be answered and all problems solved.
Thus, the tragedy of the beasts is not death but the mortality of the intellect – all that desires, articulates and perceives must submit to eventual fate. The capacities and virtues of “humanism” are finite, the cessation of the mind according with that of the body. In contemplating the end of the beasts, Nietzsche laments their unfulfilled aim, and, more significantly, the pathos of their endeavours – a futile commitment to acquiring all knowledge, efforts that prologue nothing.
…when it is all over with the intellect…,
says Nietzsche,
…nothing will have happened.
Void “envelopes” and displaces the intellect, leaving no firm, indelible testament to all that it has accomplished. It was not, by ‘design’, intended to serve any purpose after humanity.
As he progresses, Nietzsche again indicates something of his themes and beliefs in this piece-
…the proudest of men, the philosopher, supposes that on all sides
the eyes of the universe telescopically focused upon his action and
thought.
Nature Contra Man: Cartesian and Nietzschian Perspectives
Nietzsche returns to an issue raised previously, and one he will continue to revisit – the belief of individual humans that the attention and concerns of all others may be focused directly, and exclusively, on their thoughts and ideas, fears and hopes. Nietzsche calls the philosopher
…the proudest of men…,
suggesting the way a thinker may view himself, and his role – a ‘master of thought’, who cannot see through his perception of himself as a being who was made to find answers to all things. He is ‘proud’, in awe of his belief that he holds a key to all unsolved questions and problems, and is convinced that others have absolute faith in his god-like ability or power to do this.
By extension, then, the philosopher, through Nietzsche, is represented as a figure who does not fully understand the purpose of Philosophy itself – not a subject, or movement, motivated towards finding definitive answers, but a discipline content to entertain differing theories, ideas and viewpoints, in the hope of shedding new light on critical questions.
Nietzsche continues his commentary on the ‘role’ of the intellect. He claims it is ‘remarkable’ that all he has said was the product, or result, of the intellect. He claims that the principal purpose of the intellect was to allow the beasts a ‘minute’ of existence – instead, it is the intellect, or rather, the beasts’ belief in their intellect, that has governed their destiny. Presenting a human comparison, Nietzsche claims that the intellect operated in the same way – that is, making existence possible – for ‘Lessing’s Son’. (2)
It is from here that Nietzsche lays the foundations for the argumentative core of his essay, a form of ‘accusation’ he ‘brings against humanity’ -
Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting
up a false front, living in borrowed splendour, wearing a mask, hiding
behind convention.
Nietzsche, as he has implied, sees individual persons as continually living behind a façade and it is not until they pause and reflect on their attitudes and behaviour that they realise – or remember – that all of this is essentially a falsehood, an image that does not accurately mirror our true circumstances.
Indeed, pervasive within ‘OTALIAN-MS’ is a sense in which issues of literary style and ethical argument merge – far from functioning as some entertainment or happy diversion, the most avant-garde moments in the essay’s fiction are themselves the most urgent moments in its philosophy. From the outset, Nietzsche’s talk of peripheral regions in an alternative reality emphasises the “arrogance” and transience of a false intellect (“the clever beasts had to die”). The most leftfield segments in his treatise construct a provocative morality tale designed to unsettle through the events it describes, to instruct against popular illusion and the deceptive, naïve attractions of selective memory and individualised truth. Nietzsche’s intimation of Divine Murder, in GS (1882), features just such an exhortation – the morbid recruited to convey the fundamental. “God is dead”, announces Nietzsche - He has “bled to death”, Nietzsche then asking “Who will wipe the blood off us?”. An “agent” typically thought of as omnipotent and inviolable has, in the most graphically-depicted manner, been disposed of. There can be no denial of its horror, no question as to whom is responsible. Nietzsche gravitates towards the hypnotic, the grotesque, to an objective absurdity. It is not the mystical his barbed and peculiar tone expresses, but facts and absolutes, stripped of any ambiguity, laid savagely but necessarily bare. None may resort to the tempting comforts of conscious denial and organised delusion exposed in ‘OTALIAN-MS’. Therein, Nietzsche purely rehearses his criticisms, enabling Man still to wallow in illusion, but nonetheless forewarning him of the consequences of untruth freely sustained. Man, in ‘OTALIAN-MS’, was still veiled in self-deception, able to step from, then back beneath, that false garb, as he pleased, ensconced in his ill-advised volition. Now, with the death of God, it is Nietzsche who must direct the drama of Man, and, in the agora, the Madman renders humanity its own audience – the divine corpse is there for all to see, and, to identify the guilty, we have only to look to ourselves. The blood of the divine is a stark and appalling image – no idealised metaphysics can be an adequate substitute, not even the most innocuous verisimilitude enough to stem the tide of social unrest.
Truth, as a conceptual entity, has, as in fiction, been subject to persistent philosophical debate, and it seems no firm compromise can be reached in terms of an accepted definition. Anselm of Canterbury, writing in De Veritate (On Truth), was neutral in his interpretation, stating that we must judge solely in accordance with our own opinions-
Unless I am mistaken therefore, we can define ‘truth’ as ‘rightness
perceptible by the mind alone’
(1998:166)
Anselm’s flexibility effectively embodies Nietzsche’s central criticism of human beings – they manufacture types, or degrees, of truth, to justify what in their eyes is valid behaviour. Much later, Hannah Arendt seemed to move a step further, emphasising the practical necessity of lies. She writes in “Lying in Politics” (1971) that
In order to make room for one’s own action, something that there was
before must be removed or destroyed, and things as they were before
are changed. Such a change would be impossible if we could not
mentally remove ourselves from where we physically are located and
imagine that things might as well be different from what they actually
are.
(1994:98)
Arendt seems to speak in defence of such attitudes, suggesting later that it is the imagination that is chiefly responsible for changes such as these – without the imagination, therefore, the pleasure derived from daily living may be vastly reduced.
So fluent is the mind in the language of false truths that Nietzsche feels it remarkable that an
…honest and pure drive for truth…
could ever have been a target at which humanity objectively aimed. He tells us that we persistently view objects purely on a misleading, superficial level, so they remain ‘forms’, as opposed to what they truly are (perhaps a reference to the Platonic εἶδος [universals/unchanging concepts complete in and of themselves/absolute truth]). He claims that, the longer this continues, the
…senses will nowhere lead to truth
- sight, feeling, and other sources of perception will present us only with a blurred version of reality, seemingly at our own will. There is further evidence of this in Nietzsche’s theory of dreams, in which he suggests that we are willing to be ‘deceived’ each night of our lives. Nietzsche’s claim that we allow ourselves to be misled even in our dreams illustrates our blind acceptance that our sentiment governs or neglects what know to be ‘true’ or ‘right’ – if we consciously permit this to happen, then our subconscious ignorance of morality will be engrained in us deeper still.
By definition, then, morality, or a degree of necessary morality, does not seem a fundamental issue for us, whether awake or sleeping. Descartes, in his first Meditation (“Of the Things of Which We May Doubt”), while acknowledging that all of us have, at some stage, been in such a state of mind, alerts us nonetheless to the fact that this in itself indicates a reduction, or profound imbalance, in our most basic reasoning-
However, I must here consider that I am a man, and consequently that
I am in the habit of sleeping and of representing to myself in my dreams
those same things, or sometimes even less likely things, which insane
people do when they are awake.
(1968:96)
he says, making a clear distinction between the rational and irrational – though we all have such thoughts, Descartes believes only the mad never fully recognise that their dream state is a world to which they have indefinitely confined themselves.
Marcus Aurelius, writing in his Meditations, took a similar approach to the conflict between seeing and imagining, suggesting (in 4.3) that our minds alone explain and control this divide, and we must accept that nothing is immune to alteration –
Among the truths you will do well to contemplate most frequently are
these two: first, that things can never touch the soul, but stand inert
outside it, so that disquiet can arise only from fancies within; and
secondly, that all visible objects change in a moment, and will be no
more.
(1964:64)
The purpose of Nietzsche’s renewed focus on nature seems two-fold –
What does man actually know about himself? Is he, indeed, ever able
to perceive himself completely, as if laid out in a lighted display case?
Does nature not conceal most things from him – even concerning his
own body – in order to confine and lock him within s proud, deceptive,
consciousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow of
the blood stream, and the intricate quivering of the fibres! She threw
away the key.
On the one hand, we are aware already of the dangers of trying to find answers to all questions concerning Nature. Additionally, Nietzsche now seems to portray Nature as ‘fighting back’, as if in an effort to stop man gaining all knowledge –
She threw away the key,
says Nietzsche – Nature has denied humanity the method, the device, for unlocking Nature’s door and looking into that ‘place’ where all answers about nature and ourselves as people are held. If this is Nature’s course, then she essentially performs two roles – ‘protecting’ humanity from a potentially harmful intimacy with all knowledge; and manipulating Man’s ignorance in his certainty that he can or does know all, by denying us an identity with ourselves as individuals. Man’s ‘truth’ that he can accomplish his ultimate goal must now be judged by Man for what it really is – an illusion which, only now, we remember is an illusion.
Nietzsche elaborates on such an idea with a violent lyricism, lending his words a deepened, almost tangible potency-
And woe to that fatal curiosity which might one day have the power
to peer out and down through a crack in the chamber of consciousness
and then suspect that man is sustained in the difference of his ignorance
by that which is pitiless, greedy, insatiable, and murderous…Given this
situation, where in the world could the drive for truth have come from?
Here, he seems to present his argument with an anger we have not witnessed before now, his frustration at Man’s attitudes reaching a peak and injecting itself into what he says. He sees human consciousness as being comparable to a chamber – something necessarily restricted in size, and certainly insufficient to hold within it absolute knowledge and truth. What fuels Nietzsche’s resentment here is that (a) Man is now so determined to hold all knowledge that he has set himself no boundaries, and is striving to realise his aim with a
…greedy…” and “…murderous…
savagery, a cruelly aggressive resolution that makes no concessions to morality; and (b) so bound is humanity by this pre-occupation that perhaps Nature herself is feeding humanity with its anger – Nature has been able
…to peer out and down through a crack in the chamber of consciousness…
and now plays humanity ‘at its own game’ – she has identified the origins and causes of Man’s barbarity, and punishes him by
…[throwing] away the key
offering no more clues, no more answers. Humanity, though, can barely see how Nature is reacting – provoking it, infecting it further with the feelings of bitterness it already carries. So confused and blinded is Man by such feelings that he cannot see that it is Nature – that mystery the answers about which it ceaselessly pursues – is (now) itself the cause of the destruction towards which Man seems to head.
Nietzsche is visibly vexed by (and) pities humanity – it has, for so long, sought to achieve its aim that it does not realise it is Nature, the object of its all-consuming passion and fascination, that has betrayed it, and which partly has been its undoing. Nature has both condemned and been responsible for humanity’s ‘fatal curiosity’, a tragedy Man began, and which Nature has ended. Perhaps, though, humanity does, in a sense, recognise its own error – it knows it sins as one injures and corrupts another, yet it cannot fight, or speak out against Nature, now its unseen enemy – only itself. The people hate and fear one another, disillusioned that their dream – their truth – was purely an illusion.
Nietzsche asks –
…where in the world could the drive for truth have come from?
Our immorality has eclipsed any remaining hope of a sober and objective estimation of the scale and implications of our crime – any pretensions to belated atonement meet only with Nature’s indifference. Nietzsche’s representation of a people’s absurd exhibition of repentance, through their impulsive and shameless pursuit of truth, echoes Lear’s eulogistic lament for the dead Cordelia. For the King, the rejected individual, a daughter, becomes his chief desire; for us, truth the central intellectual concern. A person and a concept are now objects of compassion and fascination. Our remorse, though, is cocooned in hypocrisy – we seek to veil selfishness in integrity, as if what has hitherto been an object of disdain had always commanded our consideration and respect.
Here, the events of literature and the observations of philosophy merge, forging a distinct and comparable form of tragedy – namely, that what is lost cannot be resurrected. We mourn not the passing of Cordelia, but that she can never again live and express; we regret not the death of truth but its former value, and, in that vein, the decline of both ‘the Self’ and of reality. The neglect of truth is tantamount to neglect of the empirical realm. Thus, without unswerving adherence to truth, we must accept and adapt to the confines of a ‘substitute cosmos’, effectively the ‘new real’. To that end, the limitations of metaphysics are the boundaries of the noumenal.
Mankind has conformed to, and lived according to, its self-made façade, with Nietzsche left questioning where man’s search for truth – be this his own or a more sanitized definition thereof – could have begun, now that society has disintegrated into such appalling unrest.
Issues of Language and Truth
Recalling Plato’s vision of an Ideal State, Nietzsche describes the way in which Man excludes those whose values reject the policies and intentions of their community-
…man wishes to exist socially and with the herd; therefore, he needs to
make peace and strives accordingly to banish from this world at least the
most flagrant bellum omni contra omnes [‘War of each against all’].
For Nietzsche, doing so will ensure progress towards “real truth” is made. The Republic is an examination of the “Good Life”, accomplished through a combination of reason and justice. A prominent theme in the dialogue (outlined in Book Three and revisited in Book Ten) is the banishment of the artists from the State, especially, though not exclusively, the poets. Within Greek Society, the Ancient Quarrel denoted the long-running conflict between poets and philosophers. Poets were seen as the teachers of Greece, and saw themselves as better equipped with the knowledge and wisdom that would be of value in educating the young Guardians. Philosophers, though, did not fully support this claim. As Plato’s mouthpiece, Socrates, in dispute with Homer, argues that
…the philosopher will have the quality of gentleness
(3.410e) (1955:109)
With stories of the gods playing a key role in so many aspects of Greek life, Plato viewed such tales as a distraction from the setting of positive examples. Hume’s reparation to the poet figure in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) that though they are
…liars by profession, always endeavour to give an air of truth to their
fictions
(1985:170)
falls short of Plato’s utopianism. Instead, it is decided that, unless the poet composes only stories
conforming to the principles we originally established as lawful
(3.398b) (1955:93)
they must be removed – their expulsion punishes their misrepresentation of the truth, appealing to the base parts of the soul at the expense of the higher.
Nietzsche sees such action as a kind of “peace treaty”, a “political correctness” that has hitherto been absent from human attitudes, and, under the criteria of this “treaty”, a clear distinction between truth and lies can now be made. Nevertheless, he speaks about how a
“…binding designation…” is “…invented for all things…”
further suggesting, then, that truth does not emerge naturally – there remains a kind of “creation” clouding human approaches to the term. With this in mind, Nietzsche again reflects how we manipulate the truth to such an extent that it resembles a kind of madness in us (at least, a form of desperation) – referring to “the liar”, Nietzsche comments
He says, for example, ‘I am rich’, when the proper designation for his
condition would be ‘poor’. He misuses fixed conventions by means of
arbitrary substitutions or even reversals of names.
Descartes echoes the possible relationship between this fantasy (e.g. the conflict between rich and poor) and a form of deep insecurity, in his opening Meditation-
And how could I deny that these hands and this body belong to me,
unless perhaps I were to assimilate myself to those insane persons
whose minds are troubled…that they constantly assert that they are
kings, when they are very poor; that they are wearing gold and purple,
when they are quite naked.
(1968:96)
As he suggested earlier, Nietzsche believes that such behaviour or thought could compromise not only the future of the individual but that of society – nothing but a rigid adherence to absolute truth will be enough to ensure human contentment.
Nietzsche now portrays mankind in a more positive light, saying that its main hope is the
…life-preserving consequences of truth.
What forms do these ‘linguistic conventions’ (as Nietzsche dubs them) – knowledge and truth – take?
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world
(5.6) (1961:68)
wrote Wittgenstein in the Tractatus (1922) – man’s feeling and reason is impaired without this essential tool. Moreover, what he now seeks is a language in which he can instil trust – if he has no faith in language, can he, asks Nietzsche, be certain that language is the
…adequate expression of all realities?
Here, we identify one of the paramount themes in Nietzsche’s essay- if we do now want
an honest and pure
sense of truth, can we be certain that the language of this truth, of our personal philosophies, is not, recalling Wittgenstein’s phrasiology in Philosophical Investigations (1953), purely a
…bewitchment of our intelligence?
(1.9) (2001:40)
Now, Nietzsche claims that it
It is only by means of forgetfulness that man can ever reach the
point of fancying himself to possess a ‘truth’ of the grade just indicated.
We considered earlier the way in which, when faced with “genuine truths”, humans remember that their truths are mere illusion, defining that which we have forgotten. He illustrates the way in which truth cannot be ‘measured’ in the form of a ‘grade’ – it must be characterised by an unfaltering standard, and spoken about on its own terms, not something answerable to a certain “class” or “grouping”.
He resumes his concern with the deceptive attributes of language. Defining a word as a…copy in sound of a nerve stimulus,
he feels that anything suggested beyond, or as a result of, the word being spoken, is out of our control. Calling this
…the result of a false and unjustifiable application of the principle of
sufficient reason,
Nietzsche here takes issue with Schopenhauer, of whose thought he was seldom entirely uncritical (in Schopenhauer, the Doctrine of Sufficient Reason signifies the necessary, transcendental form of all appearances, namely, space, time and causality). Writing in Appendix One (‘Of Vision’) of The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (1813), his doctoral dissertation, Schopenhauer observes that -
It must not be urged that knowledge cannot furnish us with any
characteristic feature because, finding ourselves outside the being
to be judged, we cannot say whether or not it knows. This we certainly
can do, for we can judge whether the thing on which its movements
ensue acted on it as stimulus or motive.
(1974: 112)
Had truth been the dictator of the evolution of language, says Nietzsche, there would be no need to say
“the stone is hard”,
as if it were something vulnerable to ambiguity. Nietzsche is critical of our tendencies to isolate and give specific names or descriptions to different people or things, primitive labels which grossly undervalue the beauty or complexity of those individual objects.
We speak of a ‘snake’; this designation touches only upon its ability
to twist itself and could therefore also fit a worm.
(such a theme depends on the etymological relationship between the German Schlange [snake] and schlingen [to wind or twist], both of which are linked to the old High German slango). Our terms and definitions for different things, then, are insufficient – one definition may concern more than one example, perhaps a multitude of similar examples, e.g., in behaviour, size or colour. Were our names for different properties legitimate, Nietzsche says, it would not be possible for so broad a variety of languages to make an impact. Nietzsche here rejects Socrates’ view in Cratylus that there is a kind of “naturally appropriate” association between certain words (or sounds) and things. Addressing Hermogenes in the dialogue (387c), Socrates asks
Will not the successful speaker rather be he who speaks as he pleases?
Will not the successful speaker rather be he who speaks in the natural
way of speaking, and as things ought to be spoken, and with the natural
instrument? Any other mode of speaking will result in error and failure.
(1998:97)
From the point of view of language, Nietzsche sees the truth, which he calls “the thing-in- itself, as something unusual or obscure in the eyes of the creator of language, and thus something not worthy of closer scrutiny.
This creator only designates the relations of things to men, and for
expressing these relations he lays holds of the boldest metaphors.
Again, it seems that Nature is only allowing Man an insight into something of the truth. She only permits him to see parts or connections of something which is more substantial – her “boldest metaphors” may be vivid suggestions to him of the truth, but he is unable to see things for what they really are.
The idea that we “never see things as they are” is echoed in Nietzsche’s explanation of the action that creates this false impression. A nerve stimulus is rendered into the form of an image, with the sound resembling it following, continuously overlapping into a new and different one, repeating the process. Nietzsche uses the example of a deaf man who will ‘gaze’ in awe at “Chladni’s sound figures.” (3)
Nietzsche reinforces his conviction that our habitual grouping or naming of objects can only culminate in fallacy –
…we believe that we know something about the 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.
Elaborating on this theme, Nietzsche expounds (our) flawed theory of “knowledge”. We only judge what names to give to different things – we do not qualify that decision by defining those things in a way that validates or mirrors, in tone or implication, these labels. Speaking in Berkeley’s second Dialogue (1713), Philonous remarks that -
Few men think; yet all will have opinions. Hence man’s opinions are
superficial and confused.
(1988:162)
For Nietzsche, much the same can be said for our ideas – they are too often only opinion, substantiated by minimal thought and legitimate reasoning. If words are rendered meaningless, descriptions are barren epithets.
Nietzsche’s emphasis on metaphor in ‘OTALIAN-MS’, in many ways, reflects what is characteristic of his other writings – his is a chiefly literary philosophy, a worldview not dependent on systematised concepts for its expression. Thus, this stylistic tendency seems especially pertinent to ‘OTALIAN-MS’, the associated debate centring on its philosophical and literary content, and Nietzsche’s pronouncements on how we ought to conduct our lives.
Nietzsche’s sceptical view of metaphor culminates in his denouncement of it, both in his statement that metaphors cannot be likened to the primary object, and the distinctive manner in which he outlines his views - formality largely independent of philosophical terminology, prose that is original yet not superficial. ‘OTALIAN-MS’ speaks as its author urges us to speak - to promote creative yet valid arguments that make no appeal to romanticism, descriptions that recruit no ideological or linguistic aesthetic, and which studiously prohibit what does not resolutely assert the actuality of our perceptions. Nietzsche represents metaphor as a flawed device that generates a redundant intellectualism - one that purports to manufacture symbolism, but which, in doing so, isolates a description from its subject, the agenda of a debate ever more estranged from its principal theme. Views founded on illusion can foster only an incoherent epistemology, a deficient metaphysics masquerading as objectivity that consciously obstructs any commitment to establishing truth.
The critique of metaphor expounded in ‘OTALIAN-MS’ is a synthesis of uncompromising philosophical scrutiny and remarkable linguistic inventiveness. Neither supplants the other - instead, they combine assured, soundly-balanced analysis with imaginative yet constructive literary diagnosis that diligently excludes sentiment and idealism. As such, philosophy and fiction are united to stimulate a more rounded evaluation.
Nietzsche extends his thoughts with a discussion of concept formation, an idea based on the equation of unequal things –
Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another,
so it is certain that the concept ‘leaf’ is formed arbitrarily, discarding
these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects.
Nietzsche implies, then, that the concept is the product of repeated experience for which similar words have been used. There is no original model – rather, the “original” or “form” is derived. The original is a copy. Similarly, Nietzsche equates the idea of the leaf with human qualities, recalling Leibniz’s ‘Indiscernibles’ doctrine (4). Suggesting that we know “nothing whatsoever” about honesty, our view of such a quality in others is of little consequence, as the meaning of the term remains ill-defined. In instances such as this, claims Nietzsche, we are guilty of
…overlooking what is individual and actual… .
Nietzsche, considering the nature of truth, effectively views it as a ‘mobile army’ of metaphors whose proverbial status itself has been forgotten. His dictum “truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions” forms the crux of so much he has said. Much of what we have come to value in our lives are solely those metaphors which have become drained of their sensuous force, their symbolic meaning lost, for example, smooth coins that have lost their embossing and are now treated as mere pieces of metal.
He now adopts a moral tone. To tell the truth means to
…lie according to fixed convention… .
As both a moral and rational animal, the human being comes to rank the universal over the particular, the logical over the intuitive, the orderly over the chaotic. The impulse to classify re-asserts itself, and everything serves an anthropocentric bias.
Man now shows a heightened awareness of how to think practically, and a determination not to be led astray by those falsehoods that previously beguiled him –
He will no longer tolerate being carried away by sudden impressions,
by intuitions.
Such attitudes will, believes Nietzsche, enable Man to start afresh, and work in accordance with “castes” and “degrees” within a
…new world of laws… .
In an almost literal sense, Man is now seen to re-structure society in a way Nietzsche feels is almost mathematical in form and logic.
Of this, Nietzsche is complimentary, but finds little to praise in Man’s methods of striving for the truth. He is frustrated by Man’s simplistic, self-centred view of the world –
He strives to understand the world as something analogous to man… .
Man lives according to the belief that everything bears some resemblance to his own situation, entirely rejecting the possibility that events may be occurring around him, whether he is able to perceive them or not, that are of greater importance or consequence than his concerns, and which are not designed for him to influence or to dictate -
His method is to treat man as the measure of all things…,
claims Nietzsche – if, previously, Man adapted to an almost mathematically-precise set of values in an effort to live and think more conventionally, then he does the opposite here. To ‘measure’ may be a mathematical practice, but it is Man’s belief that he is the “…measure of all things…”, that he can inhabit and ‘master’ the world in such an exacting manner, that Nietzsche acutely resents. The world cannot be ‘measured’ or ‘totalled’ - it is surely infinite in size and complexity - and Nietzsche urges us to accept and respect this. Only by liberating ourselves from a
…primitive world of metaphor…
can truth and reason take their places in our lives.
In his concluding statements, Nietzsche summarises both arguments -
They both desire to rule over life; the former, by knowing how to
meet his principle needs by means of foresight, prudence,
and regularity; the latter, by disregarding these needs and,
as an “overjoyed hero”, counting as real only that life which has
been disguised as illusion and beauty.
Insistently, he illustrates the virtue of the practical over the impractical. As attractive as a life of illusion, uncertainty and chance may be, this is not real life, purely a fantasy. Scarcely can Nietzsche resist a mocking cynicism in applying a social aesthetic to his critique of fantasy – his detection of “beauty” in illusion expressly denotes the false attraction to which Man has enamoured himself. Man is enchanted by empty hopes, but Nietzsche sees, with Macbeth’s piercing clarity, how
Two truths are told....
My thought....yet is but fantastical,...
Is smother'd in surmise, and nothing is
But what is not.
(1.4.127-142) (1905:848)
Proust, writing in Albertine disparue (1925), observes that -
Lies are essential to humanity….They play perhaps as great a
role as the pursuit of pleasure and are indeed controlled by
this pursuit.
(2000:187)
Proust aphoristically sums up Man’s psychology as it is portrayed by Nietzsche. Lies, far from being some random social phenomena, are at the heart of human interaction. They are both fundamental and instinctual, playing an endemic role in pleasure-seeking, to which activity they are ultimately answerable. Proust aligns hedonism and the telling of lies, yet it is precisely over Man’s recourse to fantasy for its misguided protection that Nietzsche casts a wary eye. For Nietzsche, those whose lives are founded on illusion are figures of pathos who revel in baseless idealism and empty aspiration:
And while he aims for the greatest possible freedom from pain, the
intuitive man, standing in the midst of a culture, already reaps from his
intuition a harvest of continually inflowing illumination, cheer and
redemption – in addition to obtaining a defence against misfortune.
Nietzsche laments those who fend off happiness with a subconscious emotional resource which has itself been ‘built’ within them as a resistance to dissatisfaction - a feeling only deepened when the fallibility, the potential of that façade to disappoint, reveals itself. Hope is innate and true. Hedonism is manufactured, a fragile and tragic optimism we construe as social and intellectual security.
Conclusion: A Generic Marriage
From the point of view of philosophy and fiction, there seems to be an active element of both within his essay. Specifically, it seems to read as a piece of philosophy in a way that echoes fiction. His vision of a profoundly insecure society manifests itself with an uncomfortable, thought–provoking lucidity. Parts are written in a language rich with creativity whose arguments are enhanced by their almost involuntary references to other examples of both philosophy and fiction. That it is written in a very literary manner makes it more unsettling – it describes reality in an almost graphic way, leaving us in no doubt of how society may decline. It features few characters to speak of – and yet we recognise ourselves and our attitudes throughout. That those attitudes may ultimately consign society to Orwellian oblivion if we do not embrace real life is constantly hinted at in the unmistakably dystopian atmosphere that emanates through the text.
For Paul F. Glenn, Nietzsche is proposing that “concepts are metaphors which do not correspond to reality”. Though an apt critique of Nietzsche’s position, one wonders if even that reading, cultivating and strengthening though it does Nietzsche’s accusation against Man, goes far enough. On the one hand, it seems, in Nietzsche’s portrayal, that Man takes his idealised vision of existence beyond purely the metaphorical, and into the sphere of a “new reality”, effectively a surrogate Phenomenal; and, on the other, Nietzsche’s talk of “numberless twinkling solar systems”, far from reflecting some opportune foray into the surreal, is part and parcel of his anger at humanity’s “arrogance” and “mendaciousness”. Rather than employing his rhetoric as a fabulistic perversion of ‘ordinary’ or traditionally-conceived spatio-temporal structures, Nietzsche’s literary metaphysics contributes to a social indictment of human fantasy, but of its most crude, self-serving rather than benign manifestation. As such, we observe a powerful interplay of the poetic and the philosophical – the feeding of philosophy by fiction that yields a strikingly creative discourse, the descriptive evaluation of social breakdown and declining values. Yet that “feeding”, that facilitating, that compulsion, on the part of the fictional, is no generic servitude, no mere borrowing from literature to stress some heightened, coldly rational intellectualism – instead, it evocatively demonstrates how, here, fiction is an equal partner in setting down analysis of the most fluent yet sobering hue.
Notes
1. The translation of the work principally addressed by this article, ‘On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense’, is to be found in: Breazeale, D. (ed.) Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1990). Thereafter, translations of works by Nietzsche cited in the article are as follows: Breazeale, D. Friedrich Nietzsche: Untimely Meditations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Faber, M. & Lehman, S. Friedrich Nietzsche: Human, All Too Human (London: Penguin, 1994); Hollingdale, R.J. Friedrich Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil – Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (London: Penguin, 1973) and Friedrich Nietzsche: Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ (London: Penguin, 1968); Nauckhoff, J. & Del Caro, A. Nietzsche: The Gay Science – With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Whiteside, S. Friedrich Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy – Out of the Spirit of Music (London: Penguin, 1993).
2. Nietzsche refers here to the offspring of Gotthold Lessing (1729-81), a seminal name in German Literature, and his wife of two years, Eva Konig, the widow of a Hamburg merchant. The child died on the day of his birth.
3. The interaction between individual tones and vibrating metal plates, studied by German physicist and musician Ernst Florens Chladni (1756-1827).
4. The Identity, or ‘Law’, of Indiscernibles, is a principle of analytic ontology first explicitly formulated by Leibniz in his Discourse on Metaphysics, Section 9 (Loemker 1969:308). It states that no two distinct things exactly resemble each other, such that no two objects have exactly the same properties. The Law raises questions about the factors which individuate qualitatively identical objects.
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