on truth and lies in a nonmoral sense by Friedrich Nietzsche
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On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1873)
By Friedrich Nietzsche
Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was
a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of "world history," but
nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to
die. _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. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all
over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human
life. Rather, it is human, and only its possessor and begetter takes it so solemnly-as though the world's axis turned within it. But if we
could communicate with the gnat, we would learn that he likewise flies through the air with the same solemnity, that he feels the flying
center of the universe within himself. There is nothing so reprehensible and unimportant in nature that it would not immediately swell up
like a balloon at the slightest puff of this power of knowing. And just as every porter wants to have an admirer, so even the proudest of
men, the philosopher, supposes that he sees on all sides the eyes of the universe telescopically focused upon his action and thought.
It is remarkable that this was brought about by the intellect, which was certainly allotted to these most unfortunate, delicate, and
ephemeral beings merely as a device for detaining them a minute within existence.For without this addition they would have every
reason to flee this existence as quickly as Lessing's son. The pride connected with knowing and sensing lies like a blinding fog over the
eyes and senses of men, thus deceiving them concerning the value of existence. For this pride contains within itself the most flattering
estimation of the value of knowing. Deception is the most general effect of such pride, but even its most particular effects contain within
themselves something of the same deceitful character.
As a means for the preserving of the individual, the intellect unfolds its principle powers in dissimulation, which is the means by which
weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves-since they have been denied the chance to wage the battle for existence with horns
or with the sharp teeth of beasts of prey, This art of dissimulation reaches its peak in man. 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-in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity-is so much the rule and the law among men that there
is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them. They are
deeply immersed in illusions and in dream images; their eyes merely glide over the surface of things and see "forms." Their senses
nowhere lead to truth; on the contrary, they are content to receive stimuli and, as it were, to engage in a groping game on the backs of
things. Moreover, man permits himself to be deceived in his dreams every night of his life. His moral sentiment does not even make an
attempt to prevent this, whereas there are supposed to be men who have stopped snoring through sheer will power. 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 a proud, deceptive
consciousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream, and the intricate quivering of the fibers! She threw
away the key. 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 indifference of his ignorance by that which is pitiless, greedy,
insatiable, and murderous-as if hanging in dreams on the back of a tiger. Given this situation, where in the world could the drive for truth
have come from?
Insofar as the individual wants to maintain himself against other individuals, he will under natural circumstances employ the intellect
mainly for dissimulation. But at the same time, from boredom and necessity, man wishes to exist socially and with the herd; therefore,
he needs to make peace and strives accordingly to banish from his world at least the most flagrant bellum omni contra omnes . This
peace treaty brings in its wake something which 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. That is to say, a uniformly valid and binding designation is invented for things, and this
legislation of language likewise establishes the first laws of truth. For the contrast between truth and lie arises here for the first time. The
liar is a person who uses the valid designations, the words, in order to make something which is unreal appear to be real. 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. If he does this in a selfish and moreover harmful manner, society will cease to trust him and
will thereby exclude him. What men avoid by excluding the liar is not so much being defrauded as it is being harmed by means of fraud.
Thus, even at this stage, what they hate is basically not deception itself, but rather the unpleasant, hated consequences of certain sorts
of deception. It is in a similarly restricted sense that man now wants nothing but truth: he desires the pleasant, life-preserving
consequences of truth. He is indifferent toward pure knowledge which has no consequences; toward those truths which are possibly
harmful and destructive he is even hostilely inclined. And besides, what about these linguistic conventions themselves? Are they
perhaps products of knowledge, that is, of the sense of truth? Are designations congruent with things? Is language the adequate
expression of all realities?
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. If he will not be satisfied with truth in the form of tautology, that is to say, if he will not be content with empty husks, then he
will always exchange truths for illusions. What is a word? It is the copy in sound of a nerve stimulus. But the further inference from the
nerve stimulus to a cause outside of us is already the result of a false and unjustifiable application of the principle of sufficient reason. If
truth alone had been the deciding factor in the genesis of language, and if the standpoint of certainty had been decisive for designations,
then how could we still dare to say "the stone is hard," as if "hard" were something otherwise familiar to us, and not merely a totally
subjective stimulation! We separate things according to gender, designating the tree as masculine and the plant as feminine. What
arbitrary assignments! How far this oversteps the canons of certainty! We speak of a "snake": this designation touches only upon its
ability to twist itself and could therefore also fit a worm. What arbitrary differentiations! What one-sided preferences, first for this, then for
that property of a thing! The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question
of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages. The "thing in itself" (which is precisely what the pure truth,
apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something
not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays
hold of the boldest metaphors. To begin with, a nerve stimulus is transferred into an image: first metaphor. The image, in turn, is
imitated in a sound: second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of one sphere, right into the middle of an entirely
new and different one. One can imagine a man who is totally deaf and has never had a sensation of sound and music. Perhaps such a
person will gaze with astonishment at Chladni's sound figures; perhaps he will discover their causes in the vibrations of the string and
will now swear that he must know what men mean by "sound." 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. In the same way that the sound appears as a sand figure, so
the mysterious X of the thing in itself first appears as a nerve stimulus, then as an image, and finally as a sound. Thus the genesis of
language does not proceed logically in any case, and all the material within and with which the man of truth, the scientist, and the
philosopher later work and build, if not derived from never-never land, is a least not derived from the essence of things.
In particular, let us further consider the formation of concepts. Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not
supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin; but rather, a word
becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases--which means, purely and simply, cases
which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from 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 by arbitrarily discarding these individual
differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects. This awakens the idea that, in addition to the leaves, there exists in nature the
"leaf": the original model according to which all the leaves were perhaps woven, sketched, measured, colored, curled, and painted--but
by incompetent hands, so that no specimen has turned out to be a correct, trustworthy, and faithful likeness of the original model. We
call a person "honest," and then we ask "why has he behaved so honestly today?" Our usual answer is, "on account of his honesty."
Honesty! This in turn means that the leaf is the cause of the leaves. We know nothing whatsoever about an essential quality called
"honesty"; but we do know of countless individualized and consequently unequal actions which we equate by omitting the aspects in
which they are unequal and which we now designate as "honest" actions. Finally we formulate from them a qualities occulta which has
the name "honesty." We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is
acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable
for us. For even our contrast between individual and species is something anthropomorphic and does not originate in the essence of
things; although we should not presume to claim that this contrast does not correspond o the essence of things: that would of course
be a dogmatic assertion and, as such, would be just as indemonstrable as its opposite.
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, seem to a people to be fixed,
canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions- they are metaphors that have become worn out and
have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.
We still do not yet know where the drive for truth comes from. For so far we have heard only of the duty which society imposes in order
to exist: to be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors. Thus, to express it morally, this is the duty to lie according to a fixed
convention, to lie with the herd and in a manner binding upon everyone. Now man of course forgets that this is the way things stand for
him. Thus he lies in the manner indicated, unconsciously and in accordance with habits which are centuries' old; and precisely by
means of this unconsciousness and forgetfulness he arrives at his sense of truth. From the sense that one is obliged to designate one
thing as "red," another as "cold," and a third as "mute," there arises a moral impulse in regard to truth. The venerability, reliability, and
utility of truth is something which a person demonstrates for himself from the contrast with the liar, whom no one trusts and everyone
excludes. As a "rational"being, he now places his behavior under the control of abstractions. He will no longer tolerate being carried
away by sudden impressions, by intuitions. First he universalizes all these impressions into less colorful, cooler concepts, so that he
can entrust the guidance of his life and conduct to them. Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability
to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept. For something is possible in the realm of
these schemata which could never be achieved with the vivid first impressions: the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes
and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, and clearly marked boundaries-a new world, one which now
confronts that other vivid world of first impressions as more solid, more universal, better known, and more human than the immediately
perceived world, and thus as the regulative and imperative world. Whereas each perceptual metaphor is individual and without equals
and is therefore able to elude all classification, the great edifice of concepts displays the rigid regularity of a Roman columbarium and
exhales in logic that strength and coolness which is characteristic of mathematics. Anyone who has felt this cool breath [of logic] will
hardly believe that even the concept-which is as bony, foursquare, and transposable as a die-is nevertheless merely the residue of a
metapho r, and that the illusion which is involved in the artistic transference of a nerve stimulus into images is, if not the mother, then the
grandmother of every single concept. But in this conceptual crap game "truth" means using every die in the designated manner,
counting its spots accurately, fashioning the right categories, and never violating the order of caste and class rank. Just as the Romans
and Etruscans cut up the heavens with rigid mathematical lines and confined a god within each of the spaces thereby delimited, as
within a templum , so every people has a similarly mathematically divided conceptual heaven above themselves and henceforth thinks
that truth demands that each conceptual god be sought only within his own sphere. Here one may certainly admire man as a mighty
genius of construction, who succeeds in piling an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were,
on running water. Of course, in order to be supported by such a foundation, his construction must be like one constructed of spiders'
webs: delicate enough to be carried along by the waves, strong enough not to be blown apart by every wind. As a genius of construction
man raises himself far above the bee in the following way: whereas the bee builds with wax that he gathers from nature, man builds with
the far more delicate conceptual material which he first has to manufacture from himself. In this he is greatly to be admired, but not on
account of his drive for truth or for pure knowledge of things. When someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the
same place and finds it there as well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding. Yet this is how matters stand regarding
seeking and finding "truth" within the realm of reason. If I make up the definition of a mammal, and then, after inspecting a camel,
declare "look, a mammal' I have indeed brought a truth to light in this way, but it is a truth of limited value. That is to say, it is a
thoroughly anthropomorphic truth which contains not a single point which would be "true in itself" or really and universally valid apart
from man. At bottom, what the investigator of such truths is seeking is only the metamorphosis of the world into man. He strives to
understand the world as something analogous to man, and at best he achieves by his struggles the feeling of assimilation. Similar to
the way in which astrologers considered the stars to be in man 's service and connected with his happiness and sorrow, such an
investigator considers the entire universe in connection with man: the entire universe as the infinitely fractured echo of one original
sound-man; the entire universe as the infinitely multiplied copy of one original picture-man. His method is to treat man as the measure
of all things, but in doing so he again proceeds from the error of believing that he hasthese things [which he intends to measure]
immediately before him as mere objects. He forgets that the original perceptual metaphors are metaphors and takes them to be the
things themselves.
Only by forgetting this primitive world of metaphor can one live with any repose, security, and consistency: 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 in the invincible faith ththis sun, thiswindow, this table is a truth in itself, in short, only by forgetting that he himself is an
artistically creati subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency. If but for an instant he could escape from the
prison walls of this faith, his"self consciousness" would be immediately destroyed. It is even a difficult thing for him to admit to himself
that the insect or the bird perceives an entirely different world from the one that man does, and that the question of which of these
perceptions of the world is the more correct one is quite meaningless, for this would have to have been decided previously in accordance
with the criterion of thecorrect perception, which means, in accordance with a criterion which is not available . But in any case it seems
to me that "the correct perception"-which would mean "the adequate expression of an object in the subject"-is a contradictory
impossibility. For between two absolutely different spheres, as between subject and object, there is no causality, no correctness, and
no expression; there is, at most, an aestheti relation: I mean, a suggestive transference, a stammering translation into a completely
foreign tongue-for which I there is required, in any case, a freely inventive intermediate sphere and mediating force. "Appearance" is a
word that contains many temptations, which is why I avoid it as much as possible. For it is not true that the essence of things
"appears" in the empirical world. A painter without hands who wished to express in song the picture before his mind would, by means of
this substitution of spheres, still reveal more about the essence of things than does the empirical world. Even the relationship of a nerve
stimulus to the generated image is not a necessary one. But when the same image has been generated millions of times and has been
handed down for many generations and finally appears on the same occasion every time for all mankind, then it acquires at last the
same meaning for men it would have if it were the sole necessary image and if the relationship of the original nerve stimulus to the
generated image were a strictly causal one. In the same manner, an eternally repeated dream would certainly be felt and judged to be
reality. But the hardening and congealing of a metaphor guarantees absolutely nothing concerning its necessity and exclusive
justification.
Every person who is familiar with such considerations has no doubt felt a deep mistrust of all idealism of this sort: just as often as he
has quite early convinced himself of the eternal consistency, omnipresence, and fallibility of the laws of nature. He has concluded that
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