Two Truths in Nietzsche's On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense

Adrian B.

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Two Truths in Nietzsche's On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense

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Abstract

A common criticism brought against Nietzsche, especially regarding his essay On Truth
and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense, is that Nietzsche seems to wholly refute the idea of an
objective truth and to simultaneously express his own ideas and opinions with a confidence and
assertion as if to suggest a truth. However, I think (and will argue in the first body paragraph)
that this contradiction is only apparent,in that two ideas share a single name and Nietzsche differentiates between two different “truths:” (1) Collective Truth—truth by definition, based on society's interpretations and conveyed through words; the truth that a group creates as a means of communication and security among its individuals.(2) Individual
Truth—the objective truth only in the sense that it can only be subjective and true, only
for the one. Relayed through a comparison of the two Truths, the point Nietzsche makes is that,
although both truths are based on a type of self-deception (explained in the second body
paragraph), it is the second truth—that of the man of intuition, the individual—that is worth
pursuing, that is the only one for a human being to live in a way that he calls life-affirming (final
body paragraph).

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[...] The second truth Nietzsche mentions is the Individual Truth. This truth is not categorical or ordered on any great scale, as human beings are typically most comfortable with, but rather subjective, i.e. this truth is true only in each single thing “in itself.” Whereas the scientific truth “comes into being by making equivalent that which is nonequivalent” (145), by ordering many individuals and similar things into a single category (into a “truth”), the individual truth “know[s] neither forms nor concepts and hence no species, but only an ‘X' which is inaccessible to us and indefinable to us” (145), i.e., separate if not opposite of societal truth. [...]

[...] Nietzsche's On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense is an examination of what society commonly refers to as “truth,” in this essay generally identified as Collective Truth. He condemns such truths as “illusions of which we have forgotten they are illusions” (146), as stemming from “the obligation to lie in accordance with firmly established convention, to lie en masse and in a style that is binding for all” (146). It is seemingly contradictory, then, when 1 Nietzsche's opinions come across very direct and confident as though he considers them to be truths themselves. [...]

[...] Words (society's 5 “truths” by shared agreement), however, has no function beyond such communication, and can very likely even those other “truths,” those “truths of quite another kind,” which are fundamentals of human life, life of the ever-changing, ever-growing, “ever-new” human soul which words simply cannot even come close to conveying. Bibliography 1. Geuss, Raymond and Ronald Speirs, ed. “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense.” Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. New York, USA: Cambridge U, 1999. [...]

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