There’s No Truth and I’m Scared: Nietzsche Notes On Truth and Lies

Nietzsche claims and argues on a variety of levels on the idea that deception lies within language. Pure truth is incapable of being found in our language because words we recite, read, and write are merely metaphors. A metaphor serves as a comparison or analogy that captures the essence of a thing by using another comparison to describe it. They have “no way to the original entities” rendering them only as copies of copies that rely on other essences to define them, further distorting truth. Words within our language act as images of the real thing proving that the words we choose to express ourselves are random and subjective. What we know about the “laws of nature is what we ourselves bring into them-time and space, and therefore the relationship of succession and number”.  He instills the notion that the idea of truth and language are social constructs. He ironically uses more analogies such as a bee working in it’s hive or a man in a house. It is human nature to label anthropomorphize. The consequences to this is that it strips nature of it’s mysticism/surrealism and “lead us to distrust idealism”. I’m pretty sure this means our knowledge is based in anthropomorphism or else we wouldn’t be humans without this defining feature. Though it is ruled to be destructive in it’s own right because human’s are known to label their whole world around them with metaphors which act as a jail. N questions if this human nature only limits us as a race. As an artist it makes me wonder if art is another victim of metaphor and anthropomorphism from a viewer’s perspective. N touches base on art stating that art serves no purpose to seduce our trust or beliefs. Is this liberating then?

It isn’t the duty of language to precisely frame the environment. N pokes at this idea claiming “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 at least not derived from the essence of things”. We look to records of mathematicians, historians, artists, and masters of their craft which have molded and shaped our world. If their teachings are false due to the deception within language being subjective and random, then is there more depth and truth in lies? I find it quite amusing yet very intriguing that (from what I understand) N is making us stop and rethink about the validation of the greatest minds of our history.
What N makes apparent is that every “concept” consists of what he calls unequal parts. Qualities such as deception and forgetfulness allow concepts to form. The progression of time allows one to forget the origin of truth within metaphors because they’re copies of analogies. Metaphors frequently used soon become devoid of meaning and lose their luster only to become the husk of a cliché. N claims this to be problematic when “the same image has been generate millions of times and has been handed down for many generations and finally appears on the same occasion every time for all man kind…the hardening and the congealing of a metaphor guarantees absolutely nothing concerning it’s necessity and exclusive justification”. We forget the words we use are copies of a copies, which in a way if you really think about it is a lazy way to assume the world and our environment.
N lastly compares the concepts of a liberated mindset of an intuitive man in relation to a rational person guided by concepts. The rational man is regarded as inartistic, less adventurous, guided by concepts, and aims to be free from pain. The intuitive man is opposing in many ways to his peer. He is considered irrational, confusing, believes illusion and beauty is fashioned deeply into life, relies on the culture and art to shape him. N concludes that both men suffer misfortunes but the Intuitive man suffers harsher conditions since he is incapable of foresight and learning from his mistakes. He is incapable of quelling himself emotionally from the inevitability of misfortune. Is this N’s way of showing no matter which man we are, deception is inevitable so the least we can do is learn to cope with it?