Perhaps Nietzsche’s most famous essay is “On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense.” In this essay he mocks the human effort to arrive at truth by erecting huge and complex conceptual frameworks and structures of scientific knowledge that in a fundamental sense rests on illusions and self-deception about the nature of reality. According to Nietzsche, humans have a need for lies in order to conquer this reality, this “truth,” that is, in order to live. That lies are necessary in order to live is itself part of the terrifying and questionable character of existence. “Metaphysics, morality, religion, science . . . these things merit consideration only as various forms of lies; with their help one can have faith in life” (Nietzsche, 1968, p. 451). According to Nietzsche, human beings need science, religion, and metaphysics in order to deal (dull ourselves) with the uncertainties and ultimate horror of the realization of the truth that there is no truth. And so, humans create interpretations, generalizations, and principles but then forget that these truths are nothing but their own inventions that have turned into fetish.
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms— in short, a sum of human relations that have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, translated, and embellished, and that after long use strike a people as fixed, canonical, and binding: truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors that have become worn-out and deprived of their sensuous force, coins that have lost their imprint and are now no longer seen as coins but as metal (Nietzsche, 2010, pp. 29, 30). Nietzsche points out, over and over again, that all words derive from metaphors, but that these metaphors are already illusory.
Selected Readings:
Nietzsche, F. (1954). “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense.” In W. Kaufmann (ed.), Nietzsche. New York: Viking Press.
Nietzsche, F. (1968). The Will to Power. (W. Kaufmann, transl.) New York: Viking Press.
Nietzsche, F. (1981). On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company.
Nietzsche, F. (1986). Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Nietzsche, F. (2010). On Truth and Untruth. New York: HarperCollins.