Friedrich Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” unpacks the nature behind a lie, among other interesting and important things. One little lie can make one come off as a completely different person. Why is this? Nietzsche gives an adequate example and explanation, “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” (Nietzsche 766). When someone is caught in pretty major lie like the one described, they were pretending to be something that they are not. In this case, this person is pretending to be the total opposite of what they actually are. Of course, the person on the receiving end of the lie will feel betrayed since people tend to want to believe what they are told, but at the end of the day, this person was just deceived. Maybe if this lie was more of a white lie, then the reaction would be less dramatic. Possibly, the person being deceived may just brush it off, because everyone tells a white lie every now and then. Perhaps, they might still take great offense to it, but the bottom line is that when it comes to major lies like the one Nietzsche mentions, it is hard to recover on both ends. It is hard for the receiver to find trust in that person again and it is hard for the liar to deal with the consequences of their own actions. On this note, the liar might feel outcasted after the truth is unveiled. With this example, if someone is caught lying about their social status, they will not only be shunned by society, but they also might face legal repercussions if they tried to lie to an authoritative figure. This piece by Nietzsche makes the reader grapple with the art of lying, so much so that the reader may never tell another lie…ever.

Nietzche pointed out many things that stood out but one things that stood out the most to me was “two classes” where it was discussed that there were property owners or property less workers. In my opinion property brought along a major issue where people were mistreated such as people who worked extremely hard and yet didn’t own property. There was no evolvement, working and owning property is to benefit and help the economy grow. Workers were losing reality, people worked a lot and yet saw no profit and yet the production increased in power and range. Nietzche pointed out that when you work so hard your life isn’t your life anymore. That job you are doing then starts to own your life and control how you live. To create, work and live, it is dependent on something else. For example, some people can’t live unless their working and some people can’t create things unless they have an idea. “Labour means life” & “become a slave of his object” (pg 766) in a sort of sense that means that you have to work and if you are working you are making your whole life revolve around it. The man is putting more effort into the object along with more time and value and your giving yourself less of that and degrading those categories on you as a person. To me so far nietzche is trying to explain that you’ll come to realization that when putting your all into work and labour you start to lose yourself. The only thing you’ll actually want to do is work on that specific something or object. It’s becomes mentally and physically draining and you realize and think to yourself “is this benefiting me?”. You work and work and you aren’t growing but the economy will start too and you are left there without property. Workers work in conditions that disturb their life. Going on to page 770, I understood that society happens to follow various orders. What automatically popped in my head was “monkey see monkey do” something my parents always said to me. Don’t follow what others do, be yourself. Along with “social rank”, I believe that’s why workers were slaved to do more then they should and property owners didn’t do much. Over time the economy started to grow way more. There were Chinese markets and trade, development started. Markets grew rapidly and there was never enough, always space for more and more. There was commerce, people bought things and sold it back for profit, something we still do now. These few pages spoke a lot on how truth and lying was occurring in economy and affected the growth. Within time I’d believe the truth came out and people started to make change to better themselves and their society.

Modern Family Season 6, Episode 07

Nietzsche, questioning and admiring himself throughout “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense”, is trying to speak in the fourth dimension, criticizing the people of the age, to explain how it is the norm to be deceive oneself realizing the truth. This concept is similar to translations within languages; when certain words cannot be transcribed to represent the original word as a whole. Nietzsche (765) describes people being fake to oneself and to one another, in an effort to

“preserve himself in relation to another, in the state of nature he mostly used his intellect for conceal-ment and dissimulation; however, because necessity and boredom also lead men to want to live in societies and herds, they need a peace treaty…”

In order to have a moment of peace, people let go of what they believe in to assimilate into society, burying deep inside them their true self. It gets confusing to what is the “truth” (766-771), in sum, truth is an illusion depicted through metaphors (768) but these truths are unique,

“the only things we really know about them[, the relations between things,] are things which we bring to bear on them”.

Nietzsche states that things are things because we make them “things”. The way one person sees something can differ from what another seed it as, but as a society we have to adjust this thing with a name.

For example, what is a mental picture of rock to you? A bland gray colored rock perhaps, I pictured sand first and caves. Nietzsche would say that we do not have a precise concept of what it is supposed to look like but depends on what we have been taught and what is in the area around us. For the word “rock”, it could’ve been a pebble or even testicles, according to Google, as part of vulgar slang.

First picture of rock, grayish and rectangular shape, in Google Images as of 9AM on 02/04/2022.

Now, following on in Google, for me the first thing that appears is this picture from a Wikipedia page.  All of these things have a similar ideal in common, a “rock” is roundish-shape, bland in color, in an empty area, perhaps surrounded by other rocks.

In Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense”, He explores the genesis of Truth, Lies, the differences between the two and how they intersect in more ways than we believe. Nietzsche begins the piece with a jarring truth about humanity, The universe existed before us and it will continue after us. He proposes human intellect is “purposeless and arbitrary” within nature and only serves and exists within the bounds of humanity. (752)  He argues our intellect is merely a tool for survival as the horns or teeth would be on another animal and its main function being “concealment and dissimulation” making “deception” more natural than truth. (753) In fact, he proposes ideas of shared “truths” created language which was birthed from “necessity and boredom” that left humans wanting to build societies.

Nietzsche believes language, which is constructed on a collective social “peace treaty” and is the foundation of the first laws of truth, as well as cognition is heavily reliant on deception. (753) Humans perceive the world in forms, and that informs our limited ability to categorize and create “metaphors” for there existence. Nietzsche explores the flaws in languages ability to accurately describe nature. According to Nietzsche, each word becomes a concept and concepts are created by “dropping individual differences arbitrarily,” (755) So “concepts” like “leaf” “tree” “flower” are born, but Nietzsche clarifies “nature knows neither forms nor concepts and hence no species, but only an ‘X’ which is inaccessible to us and indefinable by us.” (755) further arguing that truth isn’t something natural rather a human invention. There is no link between language and reality so it is all deception and metaphors accepted as truths. It is through language that deception is possible because language dictates what is “true” and “not true”. Language imposes meaning on nature, and since we shape language to fit our needs for survival, truth is not fixed. Nietzsche talks of how truths can contradict each other and often do and how what was once deception or metaphors can become truth overtime.

Self dissimulation is human nature, it saves us from misery and is a survival tool. Nietzsche says,

That drive to form metaphors, that fundamental human drive which can- not be left out of consideration for even a second without also leaving out human beings themselves, is in truth not defeated, indeed hardly even tamed (759)

Nietzsche observes dissimulation and deception as something humans often welcome and seek out as long as it is not harmful. He says “…human beings themselves have an unconquerable urge to let them- selves be deceived,” (760) and cites the fascination of one listening to a fairytale or epic poem. We know it is not true, but are drawn to it nonetheless.

Nietzsche believes that deception is at the heart of language and cognition because people use language to conceal and mask the truth in an attempt to help amplify the basic human instinct of belonging. When it comes to the relationship between a mental picture of an object, the word, and the actual object, Nietzsche believes that the “thing in itself (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be)” is simply something that cannot be understood to the creator of language and is only made in relation to the things humans know. We can only compare these objects to thing that we know of. On page 768, Nietzsche asks himself, “What, then, is truth?” He later answers this by saying that truth is a combination of human interaction that has been changed altered, defined, moved which over time has been heavily intwined into how humans interact. The truth is an illusion of metaphors and other rhetorical devices that has lost meaning and effectiveness over time. Nietzsche later states that humans are “architectural geniuses.” This is due to the fact that humans can conceptualize the things they do not know wether it be a rock or a leaf or another object or idea into something that is easier to understand. This is due in part to the human minds ability to associate language and words that are understood to said object and formulate an idea based off of other concepts and ideas that give us a better understanding. This is despite (as Nietzsche stated earlier in his work) Nietzsches view that language is only a mask and that language is created to “give meaning” to object but in fact it only further entangles them. This implies that language does not build anything particularly new or true but rather it takes an object, connects it to a word or sound and categorizes it into something that humans grow to understand as that object and masks the true meaning of the object they see. Two types of humanities that Nietzsche got onto describe later in the essay is the intuitive mind and the logical mind. The intuitive mind and the logical mind are both tools for building  reality with “minimal dissimilation and maximal truthfulness.” However, something that’s “truth” is only what people agree on the truth to be. Nietzsche style questions the readers thought process and requires his readers to critically examine the way they view language as a construct that allows for true meaning to be lost in deception the of truth. He manages to describe interesting ideas that are broad and expansive yet focuses his thoughts in a manner that makes more sense the more the reader analyzes Nietzsche’s meaning.