Language since the beginning has been about communication, communicating and sharing our thoughts, our ideas, our feelings. But through it come deception, dishonesty and lying? This is what Friedrich Nietzsche says in his work “On Truth and Lying”. Nietzsche points out that with language we form deception. That truth is “…a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification…” Nietzsche also points out that because language is so much in use after a while it loses its value, comparing it to a coin.

Nietzsche has a really good point. We use language on a daily basis without even thinking. Many times we speak without thinking, many times we don’t realize how heavy our words are, how much of an impact they have. Lying is very common, and it’s even more common to do without intention, without realizing it. With language comes perception, and through that comes honesty or dishonesty. Nietzsche questions the one thing that many people wouldn’t ask. language is a very powerful tool and it allows human to create so much more.

In his essay, Nietzsche describes how “deception” greatly relates to language and cognition. Nietzsche writes how humans, “are deeply immersed in illusions and dream-images; their eyes merely glide across the surface of things and see ‘forms’; nowhere does their perception lead to truth; instead it is content to receive stimuli and, as it were, to play with its fingers on the back of things,” (765). The argument here is essentially that human beings are exceptionally lazy, and only see or identify things to fit their own specific worldview. Given how people lie, cheat, and manipulate facts, “truth” becomes muddled. People see and hear only what makes them comfortable, in turn also distorting what other people witness for their own personal gain.

This is especially true with the way language is formed to deceive, “the liar uses the valid tokens of designation — words — to make the unreal appear to be real; he says, for example, ‘I am rich’, whereas the correct designation for his condition would be, precisely, ‘poor,'” (Nietzsche 766). Such deception through language exemplifies how ideas can be twisted and morphed. The irony here is that language is a social construction devised to build and communicate new ideas and concepts, to inform people the truth —  yet language has also been provided as an outlet for lies and deceit. This analysis on language by Nietzsche is especially relevant today in our media-savvy society, where you can find out a wide range of news with a five-second Google search. Yet with all of this saturation of news and language, it is very easy for one to be swayed by a certain article that has clear bias — that uses language to construct its own fake “truth” to service an agenda. The same can be said for wartime propaganda (eg. Nazi films), using language to distort the truth in order to rally support for a country, or hatred against one.

The beginning of “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” (“there was once a planet…”) reads like the first lines of a fable, and appropriately so: Nietzsche is telling us a story in which he questions the possibility and value of telling the truth (764). He points out the absurdity of humans valuing their intellect above all else when our existence registers but a blip on the timeline of the universe. N denounces human intellect as “pitiful,” “insubstantial,” “transitory,” “purposeless and arbitrary” (764). The arrogance of human intellect deceives even philosophers and scientists into thinking they are pursuing an objective truth when our actual condition is one of permanent deception. That is, “the intellect shows its greatest strengths in dissimulation”: Our idea of cognition is merely an illusion that we construct for the purpose of self-preservation and social cohesion. After all, what do human beings really know about themselves? Nature doesn’t tell us; “nature knows neither forms nor concepts…but only an ‘X’ which is inaccessible to us and indefinable by us” (767).

After degrading the significance of our intellect, N asks about the origin of our truth drive. He concludes that truth isn’t as important as the belief that we possess the truth, which is a mind-blowing revelation (for me, at least). Not only is objective truth impossible for us to grasp, but we don’t even want it if it isn’t pleasant and life-preserving. Sadly, I have to agree.

I also agree with Nietzsche’s critique of language, its futility in capturing and conveying an objective truth/reality. Our inherently subjective, linguistic mode of representation makes me skeptical about the value we place on truth, a “mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms…illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions” (768). What’s “meta” about this essay is that N consciously fulfills what he calls “the obligation to lie in accordance with firmly established convention” in order to illustrate his ideas. In this way, for the purpose of communication, illusion may be beneficial. On the other hand, each reader might extract from this essay a completely different understanding of what N’s trying to communicate due to the shaky foundation of metaphors.

At the end, N contrasts the life of a rational intellectual with the life of a liberated artist who is guided “not by concepts but by intuitions” (773). Unlike metaphor, art is honest about being an illusion. N suggests that art allows humans to detach themselves from their rigid views of truth and alter their constructed world for the better.

According to Nietzsche, at the heart of language and cognition is deception. To completely understand why he believes that to be so we would have to understand how he defines truth. Nietzsche defines truth as being a set of metaphors, similes, poetics, rhetorical  intensification and translations which have been in use for a long time, so much so that we have forgotten they are not firmly established (768). He believes that the truths that we now hold dear are forgotten illusions. We have come to a point when people have forgotten that we are the ones who have defined what something is or is not. We are the ones that have decide that a rock is hard while feathers are soft. In Genesis 1:18 of the KJV of the bible it is says, “And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.” This was the first example that came to my mind after reading Nietzsche’s writing, because even though this is a religious text and he is not religious, it exemplifies what he is trying to convey. We as people do not truly understand the thing we can only define it as we see fit. Thus making the fundamentals of our language and truths to be lies. Our language, as the professor said, does not mirror an object. I find instead that it simply just illustrates what we believe it to be. Describing and labeling a thing is as if you drew an object. No matter how much you may recreate the image the image will not truly reflect the object. It will in the end only help us understand what we think that object is or should be. It is through repetition and forced habits that we have developed the fundamentals of our language and cognition. And because of this repetition we have forgotten that it is also we who has created and defined what we call the truth.