Nietzsche, Friedrich

A concern with lies and deception is central to the oeuvre of German philosopher, philologist, and cultural critic Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). In his 1873 essay “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense,” Nietzsche argues that language operates on the basis of a social contract that obligates everyone to lie according to fixed linguistic convention. He claims that language has no interest in the objective truth of what he calls, following Immanuel Kant, the “things in themselves.” Instead, language only designates the subjective relations between humans and the world around them through metaphors that correspond in no way to the essence of external objects. For the purpose of security and consistency, society obligates individuals to use a fixed set of metaphors, and by the force of habit, individuals forget that the words and concepts that they consider truthful are nothing but metaphorical functions of their conventional morality.

Significantly, Nietzsche's argument itself relies heavily on metaphors, many of which revolve around the opposition between life and death. For instance, he compares language to a Roman columbarium and calls it a graveyard of perceptions, suggesting that the lies that society obligates individuals to use to designate things kill their colorful and vivid first impressions and intuitions. Nietzsche's own heavy use of metaphors seems necessary because he believes that a criterion for “correct perception” is not available: between the human subject and the perceptual object there can only be an aesthetic relation at best.

Therefore, Nietzsche concludes the essay by distinguishing between “rational” and “intuitive” people, who use metaphors in different ways. Whereas rational people cling to an immense “framework and planking of concepts” and live regular and prudent lives in scientific disenchantment, intuitive people, such as the ancient Greeks, dare to choose beauty over need and embrace the “immediacy of deception,” which can lead to the establishment of art and culture. Like various other 18th- and 19th-century German critics of modernity, Nietzsche, who was a professor of classical philology in Basel, Switzerland, from 1869 to 1879, often presented an idolized view of ancient Greek culture in order to critique what he saw as the lifeless and artless utilitarianism of modernity.

Critics have argued that what Nietzsche discovers in “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense” is not that language as such is a lie but the inadequacy of so-called correspondence theories of truth, which hold that a linguistic utterance is true only if it corresponds to a fact in the world. According to this objection, Nietzsche's discovery of language's failure to correspond to “things in themselves” should simply lead him to adopt either a coherence theory of truth, which holds that the truth of linguistic utterances is determined by their coherence with other utterances; or a pragmatic theory of truth, which views those linguistic utterances as true that successfully organize individuals' experience of the world for practical purposes. However, this objection fails to engage with Nietzsche's philosophical project as it develops in his mature work, which might be summarized as a radical critique of lies and deception in the present, composing a “prelude to a philosophy of the future” (this is also the subtitle of his 1886 book Beyond Good and Evil).

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