On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense - Essay Example

Here he discusses the implication of language to our acquisition of knowledge. The second part deals with the dual nature of man, i.e. the rational and the intuitive. He establishes that neither rational nor intuitive man is ever successful in their pursuit of knowledge due to our illusion of truth. Therefore, Nietzsche concludes that all we can claim to know are interpretations of truth and not truth itself. Analysis In the first part of his work, Nietzsche asserts that: “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” (Nietzsche 451-452).

Here, it seems that Nietzsche is trying to reject any empirical sense of gaining knowledge. For example, I know that I am sitting on a wooden chair because I can see the chair, feel the texture of the wood, touch it, and even smell the aroma of it. But Nietzsche argues that we only perceive the surface of things, and our “senses nowhere lead to the truth" (Nietzsche 452). This is what Nietzsche meant by using the analogy of our senses being like a “blinding fog over the eyes” and thus deceiving us on our knowledge about things.

But how do we know what is true from what is false? What is truth as opposed to lies? Here, Nietzsche introduces the concept of man as a social being who creates peace among society and forms a general consensus in the process of doing so. He once more establishes his point by saying that “this peace treaty brings in its wake something which appears to be the first step toward acquiring that puzzling truth drive” (Nietzsche 452). Furthermore, he argues that “a uniformly valid and binding designation is invented for things, and this legislation of language likewise establishes the first laws of truth.

For the contrast between truth and lie arises here for the first time” (Nietzsche 452-453). In other words, Nietzsche establishes his foundation of truth as opposed to lies. Since the development of language, all its representations are, according to Nietzsche, lies. Language is a form of self-deception, which humans have created to convince themselves that the unreal is real. Indeed, Nietzsche asks, “Is language the adequate expression of all realities?” (Nietzsche 453). The emphasis here is the one to one correspondence of an object to that of its spoken word.

For example, when I a rainbow, the first thing that I associate with it is color. Almost anyone would understand me if associate the word “color” to the object “rainbow”. However, consider the following scenario: what if you were never exposed to color? Since you were born into this world, you were kept inside a house that had only shades of gray. In short, what if the world you consider as real is all in black and white? Now consider that this person saw a “rainbow” outside his window for the first time, would he associate the term “color” with it?

Would he even know what “color” means? This is the point that Nietzsche wants us to understand regarding language. I quote, “It is this way with all of us concerning language: we believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things - metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities” (Nietzsche 454). Thus, Nietzsche concludes that “the genesis of language does not proceed logically in any case, and all the material within and with