On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

January 10, 2026 | 1,520 words | 8min read

Paper Title: On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

Link to Paper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Truth_and_Lies_in_a_Nonmoral_Sense

Date: 1896

Paper Type: Philosophy of Language, Truth

Short Abstract:

1. The Origin of Truth and Lies . Or what is truth?

Nietzsche opens with a cosmic fable: in a tiny corner of the universe, intelligent animals (humans) briefly invented “knowledge,” and then died, showing how trivial human intellect is on a cosmic scale. Intellect appears accidental, fragile, and purposeless in nature. Humans overestimate its significance, believing the universe centers on their consciousness, but Nietzsche compares this to a mosquito’s self-importance: every creature experiences itself as the center.

Intellect evolved not for truth, but for survival and deception. Humans, being weak animals, rely on simulation, flattering, lying, role-playing, and vanity. In this world of illusions, it is remarkable that the desire for “truth” ever emerged at all.

Humanity eventually forms societies (“herd-fashion”) and establishes conventions to prevent mutual harm. Language emerges as a social contract defining what counts as “truth.” The liar is condemned not because deception is inherently bad, but because it harms the social pact.

Thus, truth begins as a tool for social utility, not as a metaphysical or objective value. Humans suppress damaging truths and desire only life-preserving truths.

Nietzsche attacks the assumption that language corresponds to reality. Words represent:

1. Nerve stimulus → image (1st metaphor)
2. Image → sound (word) (2nd metaphor)

This double translation already shows the distance from any “thing in itself.” Different languages reveal arbitrariness: there is no single true representation. Language names relations and anthropomorphic projections, not essences.

The concept arises by equating unequal experiences. Example: the concept “leaf” ignores infinite differences among actual leaves. Concepts are abstractions achieved by forgetting individuality. Truth becomes a set of conventional metaphors hardened by usage.

Nietzsche famously defines truth 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

Humans turn perceptual metaphors into abstract concepts and then build logical systems, creating a rigid, organized world. This conceptual world is more solid, predictable, and useful than the chaotic world of sensory impressions.

The scientist/thinker mistakes these abstractions as universal truths, but they are merely human projections.

Humans measure the world against themselves (anthropomorphism). The scientist seeks to transform the world into something equivalent to human categories, not to know the world “in itself.”

Ultimately, humans forget the metaphorical origins of their concepts, and this forgetting allows them to live securely.

Nietzsche argues there is no correct perception; subject and object are too different for causal representation. At best, perception is an aesthetic translation. Repeated metaphors become hardened into shared reality (just as a recurring dream would come to seem real).

He rejects naive realism: laws of nature are human constructs based on forms (time, space, number) we impose on experience. The apparent harmony of scientific facts is simply the harmony of our imposed categories.

2. The Power of Metaphors

Language originally constructs the conceptual architecture; science later continues this work, fillign the concepts. The man of action uses concepts to navigate life; the scientist lives beside the conceptual tower to extend it.

Yet the drive to create metaphors remains primal in humans and cannot be abolished. When blocked by rational conceptual structures, it re-emerges in myth, art, poetry, and imagination.

Nietzsche notes that we distinguish waking from dreaming only through conceptual regularity. He cites Pascal: if dreams repeated with consistency, they would matter as much as waking experience. Similarly, mythic cultures like early Greece lived in a world where gods could appear in disguise, trees could be nymphs, and nature felt enchanted, making reality flexible like a dream.

Humans possess a strong desire to be pleasantly deceived. Epic poetry, theater, and artistic illusions delight us. The intellect, usually bound to necessity and survival, becomes free during art. It plays with metaphors, mixes categories, and pairs unrelated things In this liberated state, the intellect operates through intuition rather than concepts. Intuitive insight cannot easily be expressed in words or abstractions; people resort to daring metaphors or fall into silence when confronting it.

Another Interpretations

Source: Quidfacis_

Nietzsche’s project in this essay, in the most reductive and general sense, is to attack language. To do that, he first needs to establish that humans do not actually value truth for its own sake. What we avoid when we exclude the liar, he says, isn’t deception itself but the harmful consequences of deception. We don’t hate lies because they’re false; we hate the pain they can cause.

So for Nietzsche, humans don’t prefer truth because it’s true, nor honesty because it’s honest. We prefer pleasure and we avoid pain. Statements like “I dislike liars” really mean “I dislike the harmful effects of lying.” Nietzsche needs this point to undermine language: if humans cared chiefly about truth, then language would be oriented toward truth. But if humans care chiefly about avoiding pain and maximizing pleasure, then language becomes something else: a tool for comfort, advantage, and survival rather than a mirror of reality.

A simple example: on a date, you don’t use language to scientifically model reality. You use language to charm, impress, to get laid. For Nietzsche, all language works like that: not as a truth-machine but as a pragmatic tool aimed at comfort, pleasure, and benefit.

Nietzsche then pushes further: even when we think we’re describing the world accurately. When we talk about “trees,” “snow,” “flowers,” or “colors”: we’re not touching reality itself, only employing metaphors that vaguely gesture at it. Imagine you have a pet bird named Beatrice. The word “Beatrice,” and the words you use to describe her, never fully capture what she is: her colors, her movements, her quirks, your history with her. The total experience of Beatrice exceeds the language that tries to point to it. Every word does this: it approximates rather than reveals.

The same goes for concepts like “honesty” or “love.” When you say you love your bird Beatrice and your friend says they love their dog Hank, you both use “love,” but the sentiments involved i.e. the attachments, memories, emotional textures, are wildly different. Yet the same word covers them both. Nietzsche finds this bizarre: distinct inner realities get collapsed into identical linguistic tokens.

Now return to the opening point. If we actually cared about truth, then you and your friend would require different words for your different experiential bundles. Language would differentiate endlessly. Reality would demand precision. But practically, we adopt a coarser, more functional system. One that “works well enough” for social coordination instead of truth.

Over time, we forget that this system is metaphorical. Words like “love” or “marriage” start to feel fixed, canonical, binding. But they only feel that way because we’ve forgotten their metaphorical origins, forgotten that they once covered wildly different experiences. Nietzsche’s example of truth as a “host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms” expresses exactly this point.

Consider relationships: two people say “I want to get married,” and believe they mean the same thing. But a month later, Tom assumes marriage involves shared bank accounts, while Sue assumes it involves separate bank accounts and weekly cake. The conflict surprises them because they assume sameness of meaning from sameness of word. But the word “marriage” never actually contained that sameness; it only concealed difference.

If we were truly interested in truth, language would look more like atomic engineering: “marriage-jointbankaccounts-two-kids-bird-pet” vs. “marriage-separatebankaccounts-cakes-Thursdays.” Distinct expressions for distinct realities. But that ideal, scientific language is impossible for Nietzsche. No concept can ever fully capture the flux of lived experience. The “correct perception”, the perfect expression of object in subject, is a contradiction.

And yet we continue to use language as if it were precise. We continue to delight in its fictions. We prefer the comfort of deception to the terror of reality’s ungraspable complexity. We forget the metaphorical world beneath our words, because remembering it would make life unstable. It’s easier and far more pleasant to assume that “marriage” means the same for everyone than to confront the abyss of linguistic subjectivity. We’d rather blame Tom or Sue than blame the architecture of language itself.

Some Thoughts

The problem with language is, as this article points out, that we often mean different things when we use the same terms.

On top of that, sometimes we ourselves don’t even fully know what we mean. This was highlighted in the paper Many, but Almost One, where even apparently simple terms like house are underspecified, is the garage included? The lawn? A shed? It’s not obvious, even to the speaker.

Further complicating matters, everyday language isn’t only about conveying meanings. We also try to get others to accept our meaning, as pointed out in Disagreement and the Semantics of Normative and Evaluative Terms. Conversation becomes partly a negotiation over definitions.

reply via email