(Here’s my second installment of “Learn Nietzsche with me!” Though some people associate Nietzsche with the political right, his attacks on traditional beliefs about truth became a “rallying point for the epistemological left,” according to Maudemarie Clark, in chapter 1 of Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy. In his earlier writings, Nietzsche questioned whether what we call truths are really just illusions or metaphors. Nietzsche would argue, for example, that what we call a leaf is just a metaphor that doesn’t really capture all the variations of leaves, so it’s not necessarily a true concept. So what is Nietzsche’s view on truth? Here’s a summary. For those wondering why I’m writing these, I am currently enrolled at the Talbot School of Theology, Biola University getting my master’s in Christian Apologetics.)
“What then is truth?” Nietzsche asks in his 1873 essay, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” He answers: Truth is 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 who, after long usage, seems to people to be fixed, canonical and binding.” (p. 117, The Nietzsche Reader)
Nietzsche believes truth is a social construction made by man to live in community with others. “From boredom and necessity, man wishes to exist socially and with the herd… This peace treaty appears to be the first step toward acquiring that puzzling truth drive: to wit, that which shall count as “truth” from now on is established.” (p. 115) In other words, man will construct a reality. He will designate names to objects, like leaves, or even acts, like honesty. But just because there is a naming convention, doesn’t mean man has discovered or even knows or cares what truth ultimately is.
Nietzsche also calls truth metaphorical. A metaphor is stating one thing is another. “When we speak of trees, colors, snow and flowers,” we “possess nothing but metaphors.” (p. 116) As he explains it, man experiences a nerve stimulus, converts it into an image, say of a leaf, and then converts that image into a word –”leaf.”
Each transfer represents one thing as something else, which is why Nietzsche calls all words metaphors. It’s not that there isn’t an underlying truth to something existing, it’s just that our designation of it is just a metaphor. Anthropomorphism is to give human traits to non-human things. Nietzsche says that truth is anthropomorphic because when man describes what he sees or feels, like a stone that feels hard, he is being subjective and describing something in relation to human perception. The “creator only designates the relations of things to men.” (p. 116)
This world of metaphors that man believes is truth is so expansive and rigid, Nietzsche likens it to a Roman columbarium, which he calls a “great edifice of concepts.” This comparison illustrates how man takes different perceptions and abstracts them into categories that wipe out their individuality. The columbarium is also a fixed, binding, orderly structure. When man forgets that he created metaphors, he begins treating them like fixed, canonical, binding truths, which is something Nietzsche is warning against.
Importantly, Nietzsche points out that “dissimulation reaches its peak in man.” Dissimulation is to conceal something by creating a different appearance. Man is so predisposed to “deception, flattering, lying, deluding” that Nietzsche wonders how “an honest and pure drive could have arisen among them.” (p. 115) Therefore men are not opposed to lies. “What they hate is basically not deception itself but rather the unpleasant, hate consequences of certain sorts of deception.” (p. 116) They hate the harmful consequences of a lie. But if a lie were to actually produce good consequences, then man may find it acceptable.
Nietzsche therefore sees man’s relationship to truth as pragmatic: man doesn’t desire truth for its own sake, but for its life-preserving consequences. The challenge is that truth is an “illusion” that man forgets he created. (p. 117) One implication from Nietzche’s warning is that once man forgets that what he sees and has constructed is just metaphor of his own making, no less, he may be building a moral life upon shaky foundation.
(Image source: Brittanica)