Three Great Liars 1: Nietzsche

Portrait photo of Nietzsche 
by Friedrich Hartmann (c.1872)

Nietzsche's essay of 1873 - Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne [1] - is not quite as sexy as it sounds, even when you say it in the original German. It is, in fact, quite a sober work dealing with epistemological questions to do with the nature of truth, language and the formation of concepts, rather than simply an affirmation of the right to lie. 

For Nietzsche, inasmuch as concepts are metaphors, then they do not correspond directly with reality and so can never be strictly true; they are, in fact, a form of convenient fiction, or a type of vital lie that makes human life possible by facilitating communication and enabling us to make sense of the world.    

In a famous passage - much loved by postmodern theorists - Nietzsche writes that truth should thus be considered as:

"A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms - in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins."

Man is the clever animal who invented knowing; which is to say, he discovered a convincing method of falsification and self-deception. And it's this - mistakenly named the truth - upon which we pride ourselves. And, mistakenly named or not, this art of lying is something we should be proud of; for it helps preserve us as a species.

For whilst the great beasts have sharp teeth and horns with which to defend themselves, we possess the power of dissimulation. It's not the will to truth that has so far saved our skin, but the fact that we know how to deceive, flatter, lie, delude, talk behind backs, put up false fronts, wear masks, play roles, live in borrowed splendour and hide behind ideas, etc. Man employs his intelligence mainly in devising these strategies of survival.

Indeed, we are so deeply immersed in illusions and dream-images, says Nietzsche, that we hardly even stop to consider the real world that exists independently of us. Our senses glide over the surface of things as things and the mind remains aloof even from the body in its materiality.

Ultimately, however, man wants more than to merely survive in his own individual dreamworld; "from boredom and necessity, man wishes to exist socially". He needs, therefore, to find common ground with others and come to some agreement as to how the world is; needs, in other words, a shared conception of the truth; i.e., a "uniformly valid and binding designation" for things.

Thus, whilst lies sustain the individual; truth allows for the development of society. And a society founded upon this will to truth will have little time for the liar who misuses these designations in order to confuse a newly agreed upon reality: "If he does this in a selfish and moreover harmful manner, society will cease to trust him and will thereby exclude him."

For social man now wants the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth - so long as it brings him pleasant advantages; that is to say, so long as the truth is also tied to the Good and the Beautiful. He doesn't want ugly, evil truths and if faced with these he'll happily fall back on orthodox illusions, such as the lies of priests, for example.      
   

So, to reiterate: to be truthful means to employ socially agreed metaphors. Or, to express this in moral terms, there is a duty to lie "according to a fixed convention [...] and in a manner binding upon everyone". Over time, however, man forgets that the game he is playing is a game and lying in a socially approved manner becomes for him a second nature.

Thus, it is from out of forgetfulness that man's sense of truth is born. To paraphrase George Costanza, it's not a lie ... if you believe it - and cease to recall its origin in falsehood.  

Man, concludes Nietzsche, is a genius of construction who builds up an entire world from conceptual material manufactured from within himself. Lying is a brilliant means of anthropomorphising reality; of making the world correspond with his own fantasies and ideals. He should be admired for this. But we shouldn't praise him as an honest animal. For it's the "drive toward the formation of metaphors" which is the fundamental human trait, not the will to truth.

And perhaps that's for the best: for the latter, if pushed to its extreme, becomes a fatal form of nihilism that makes human life dispensable, if not impossible [2].

Notes

[1] Nietzsche, 'On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense'. This essay can be found in Philosophy and Truth, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale, (Humanities Press International, 1993), as well as in various versions online. 

[2] It could be, of course, that Ray Brassier is right in maintaining that philosophy should do more than simply further human conceit and deceitfulness. That its duty - and, indeed, its destiny - is to become the organon of extinction and acknowledge that thinking ultimately has interests that do not coincide with those of mankind or, indeed, life. See Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).  

To read the second post in this series - on Mark Twain - click here.  

To read the third, on Oscar Wilde, click here.