On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense
Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn (in English: "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense") is an (initially) unpublished work of Friedrich Nietzsche, written in 1873. It deals largely with epistemological questions of truth; in particular, Nietzsche criticizes the formation of concepts from individual unique experiences:
Every word immediately becomes a concept, inasmuch as it is not intended to serve as a reminder of the unique and wholly individualized original experience to which it owes its birth, but must at the same time fit innumerable, more or less similar cases—which means, strictly speaking, never equal—in other words, a lot of unequal cases. Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal.
Overview
Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, appeared to a mixed, if not often hostile reception in 1872. Among other things, contemporary critics accused him of a ‘lack of love of truth’[1]--which, depending on the critic’s definition, might have been right--but it was Nietzsche to himself, fourteen years later, who articulated the book’s tenor and faults best in his own 'Attempt at a Self-Criticism':
Listen yourself, my dear pessimist and art-deifier, but with open ears, to a single passage chosen from your book ... Isn’t this the typical creed of the romantic of 1830, masked by the pessimism of 1850?[2]
‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’, was written, if not published, in the next year; and so it sits comfortably with The Birth of Tragedy as an important expression of his youthful romanticism, a romanticism that Nietzsche would later call by name and reject, but would also condition his views on ‘truth’ and prepare him for so many of his mature projects: ‘the problem of science itself, science considered for the first time as problematic, as questionable... to look at science in the perspective of the artist, but at art in that of life’ [3].
It appears that this early Nietzsche is often rewriting Kant’s description of perception and experience to emphasize the aesthetic over the conceptual: nodding at the concepts of time and space, Nietzsche notes that ‘the artistic process of metaphor formation with which every sensation begins in us already presupposes these forms and thus occurs within them’. And elsewhere the Kantian concept or notion is somewhat retained, but made subordinate:[4]
The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself. 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. [5]
Though the ‘rational man’ is no more dismissed than the ‘intuitive man’--‘the latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic’--it is clear which life Nietzsche would prefer: ‘the man who is guided by concepts and abstractions only succeeds by such means in warding off misfortune, without ever gaining any happiness for himself from these abstractions.'
Nietzsche’s argument is nuanced but immature, and does not seem so much interested in refuting, or even deeply arguing with Kant on Kant’s terms. As he later admitted, his early writings struggled to use Kantian, or even Hegelian, modes of expression in a spirit quite against Kant and Hegel: "I tried laboriously to express by means of Schopenhauerian and Kantian formulas strange and new variations which were basically at odds with Kant's and Schopenhauer's spirit and taste!"[6] The gap between himself and these philosophers was, of course, far too wide: they were ultimately writers of a Christian transcendence, and Nietzsche was an anti-theist in a rather deep way.
This is perhaps why he turns away from this early romanticism, with its deification of art and nature as another variation on the Christian ‘metaphysical comfort’; Beyond Good and Evil, published sixteen years later, has, as critics like Richard Rorty might argue, much more in common with the American pragmatist tradition than Nietzsche’s own predecessors--even if the similarity grounds itself in their mutual rejection of a rationalist tradition, and not in mutual influence.[7] (After all, his rejection there of Kant is even more indirect than in the earlier essay; but, just like the earlier one, compares the actual lives led by the ‘rational’ or ‘intuitive’ man and comes in favor of the intuitive (or ‘romantic’ or ‘Dionysian’--it is hard to say). Here is the later passage:
....it is high time to replace the Kantian question ‘how are synthetic judgements a priori possible?’ with another question: ‘why is belief in such judgements necessary?’ -- that is to say, it is time to grasp that, for the purpose of preserving beings such as ourselves, such judgements must be believed to be true; although they might of course still be false judgements! [8]
Notes
- ^ qtd. in Walter Kaufmann's intro. to The Birth of Tragedy. Basic Writings of Nietzsche. (1967) p. 5
- ^ 'Attempt at a Self-Criticism,'The Birth of Tragedy, 1886 ed. Basic Writings of Nietzsche (1967) Walter Kaufmann, trans. p. 25
- ^ ibid. p. 18
- ^ For Nietzsche's relationship to rationalism of the Kantian sort, see: Stanford Internet Encyclopedia: Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche's 'Self-Criticism,' and such recent criticism as Richard Rorty's work.
- ^ 'Truth and Lies'
- ^ "'Attempt at a Self-Criticism," p.24
- ^ See, for instance, one of Rorty's position statements, and his essay, 'Nietzsche, Socrates and pragmatism.'
- ^ Beyond Good and Evil, Hollingdale, trans. (1973) p. 24
External links
- On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense at the Nietzsche Channel
- Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn at the German Wikisource.
