On Truths and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense - Friedrich Nietzsche

Once upon a time, [...] there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of "world history", but nevertheless, it was only a minute.

How miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature.

It is human, and only its possessor and begetter take it so solemnly.

The pride connected with knowing and sensing lies like a blinding fog over the eyes and senses of men, thus deceiving them concerning the value of existence.

The intellect unfolds its principle powers in dissimulation, [...] since they have been denied the chance to wage the battle for existence with horns or with sharp teeth of beasts of prey.

Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself [...] is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them.

Eyes merely glide over the surface of things and see "forms".

Man permits himself to be deceived in his dreams every night of his life.

What does man actually know about himself ? [...] Does nature not conceal most things from him (even concerning his own body) in order to confine and lock him within a proud, deceptive consciousness ?

The individual wants to maintain himself against other individuals. [...] But at the same time, from boredom and necessity, man wishes to exist socially, and with the herd.

What men avoid by excluding the liar is not so much being defrauded as it is being harmed by means of fraud. [...] What they hate is basically not deception itself, but rather the unpleasant, hated consequences of certain sorts of deception.

Toward those truths which are possibly harmful and destructive he is even hostilely inclined.

Is language the adequate expression of all realities ?

It is only by means of forgetfulness that man can ever reach the point of fancying himself to posses a "truth".

If he will not be satisfied with truth, [...] he will always exchange truths for illusions.

If truth alone had been the deciding factor in the genesis of language, [...] there would not be so many languages.

We separate things according to gender, designating the tree as masculine and the plant as feminine. What arbitrary assignments ! How far this oversteps the canons of certainty !

We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow and flowers; and yet we posses nothing but metaphors for things - metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.

Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases.

Just as it certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept "leaf" is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects. This awakens the idea that, in addition to the leaves, there exists in nature the "leaf": the original model according to which all the leaves were perhaps woven, sketched, measured, colored, curled and painted - but by incompetent hands, so that no specimen has turned out to be a correct, trustworthy, and faithful likeness of the original model.

We obtain the concept, as we do the for, by overlooking what is individual and actual.

What then is truth ? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies and antropomorphisms. [...] Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions - they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.

To be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors, [...] the duty to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie with the herd and in a manner binding upon everyone. [...] Thus man lies in the manner indicated, unconsciously and in accordance with habits which are centuries' old.

The venerability, reliability, and utility of truth is something which a person demonstrates for himself from the contrast with the liar.

Man builds with the far more delicate conceptual material which he first has to manufacture from himself.

When someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding. Yet this is how matters stand regarding seeking and finding "truth" within the realm of reason.

He strives to understand the world as something analogous to man, and at best he achieves by his struggles the feeling of assimilation. [...] He forgets that the original perceptual metaphors are metaphors and takes them to be the things themselves.

Only by means of the petrification and coagulation of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid, [...] only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security and consistency.

If but for an instant he could escape from the prison walls of this faith, his "self consciousness" would be immediately be destroyed.

It is even a difficult thing for him to admit to himself that the insect or the bird perceives an entirely different world from the on man does.

But in any case it seems to me that "the correct perception" - which would mean "the adequate expression of an object in subject" - is a contradictory impossibility.

"Appearance" is a word that contains many temptations, [...] for it is not true that the essence of things "appears" in the empirical world.

A painter without hands who wished to express in song the picture before his mind would, still reveal more about the essence of things than does the empirical world.

But when the same image has been generated millions of times and has been handed down for many generations and finally appears on the same occasion every time for all mankind, then it acquires at last the same meaning for men it would have if it were the sole necessary image.

An eternally repeated dream would certainly be felt and judged to be reality.

Science will be able to dig successfully in this shaft forever, and the things that are discovered will harmonize with and not contradict each other. How little does this resemble a product of imagination, for it were such, there should be some place where the illusion and reality can be divined.

All that we actually know about these laws of nature is what we ourselves bring to them - time and space, and therefore relationships of succession and number. [...] But we produce these representations in and from ourselves. [...] If we are forced to comprehend all things only under these forms, then it ceases to be amazing that in all things we actually comprehend nothing but these forms.. For they must all bear within themselves the laws of number, and it is precisely number which is most astonishing in things. [...] Thus it is we who impress ourselves in this way.

The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive. [...] This drive is not truly vanquished and scarcely subdued by the fact that a regular and rigid new world is constructed as its prison from its own ephemeral products, the concepts. It seeks a new realm and another channel for its activity, and it finds this in myth and in art generally. This drive continually confuses the conceptual categories and cells by bringing forward new transferences, metaphors, and metonymies. It continually manifests an ardent desire to refashion the world which presents itself to walking man, so that it will be as colorful, irregular, lacking in results and coherence, charming and eternally new as the world of dreams. Indeed, it is only by means of he rigid and regular web of concepts that the walking man clearly sees that he is awake: and it is precisely because of this that he sometimes thinks that he must be dreaming when this web of concepts is torn apart by art.

If the same dream came to us every night we would be just as occupied with it as we are with the things that we see every day.

If a workman were sure to dream for twelve straight hours every night that he was king, I believe that he would be just as happy as a king who dreamt for twelve hours every night that he was a workman.

But man has an invincible inclination to allow himself to be deceived. [...] So long as it is able to deceive without injuring, that master of deception, the intellect, is free.