ENGLISH LITERATURE 3Q03
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE 3Q03
Supplemental Notes on Friedrich Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" [Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne]
Friedrich Nietzsche was born in the fall of 1844 and died in summer of 1900--which is to say on the very threshold of the "modern world" that his work is sometimes said to help usher into existence. Taken as a whole (albeit a whole made up of an array of often strange fragments), Nietzsche's work represents nothing less than a massive critique, a deconstruction, if you will, of the fundamental principles of Western philosophy. In this work we witness an often fiercely articulated critique of Western aesthetics, epistemology, ontology, and morality, and a re-visioning of theories of history, language, and subjectivity going back to Plato. For better or for worse (depending on your perspective), nothing seems to have escaped Nietzsche's always ironic grasp. His career as a thinker would appear to be a complex, and self-complicating experiment not only in thinking, but also in writing: his texts are strange and passionate things, full of competing voices, characters, polemical flourishes, and they possess a self-conscious rhetorical density hitherto unknown in philosophical circles. He was denounced during and after his life as a madman, and, indeed, his last years were spent in the midst of a terrible and agonizing psychosis. Today, his work and his insights live on in many different schools of philosophy and critical theory. He is perhaps most well known for his "genealogical analyses," i.e., his reflections on the ways that a culture naturalizes its morality--makes its moral claims appear to be given, rather than the reflection of those who have the authority to say what is right and what is wrong.
"On Truth and Falsehood in the Nonmoral Sense" was written in the summer of 1873, when Nietzsche was not "much" older than many graduate students (and some undergraduate students!). In this piece, never published during his lifetime, he suggests that the ultimate truth is that we have to live without truth--and without nostalgia for that truth. Nietzsche's great insight is that people go around saying and thinking that they are seeking the truth of things, but that in fact they succeed only in establishing the rules according to which they will be said to be speaking truly or falsely. That is to say, one can only speak truly by virtue of the force of the rules that are imposed in any given cultural situation. So, by "truth" we do not mean what is conventionally understood by the term--i.e., true propositions to be discussed or accepted--, but the set of rules that make it possible to utter and to recognize those propositions that are held as true. "Knowledge" is in this way indistinguishable from power; it is not a weapon of power only, what one can hold over someone else; it is power. In "On Truth and Lie," Nietzsche shows that what we call truth is a special kind of lie, but a lie which ultimately deserves to be freed of moral connotations, liberated from being treated as something that is wrong or bad (and thus compared unfavourably to a certain given standard of rightness or goodness).
The essay itself falls into two sections, one much longer than the other. In the first section, Nietzsche asks and answers the fundamental question of philosophy: "What is truth?" It is also the section were he explores the centrality of metaphor to knowledge, and the way in which a drive towards the production of metaphor is an inescapable part of experience. In the second and concluding section, Nietzsche rapidly--perhaps too rapidly--develops an argument about the split nature of human beings: roughly speaking, the rational human and the intuitive human. Neither way of being in the world is entirely perfect, and both expose human beings to states of suffering.
First Section
Nietzsche beings with a startling little fable; once upon a time, he suggests (as if speaking in the voice of an alien from another planet), there was a place--Earth--where "clever beasts invented knowing." This supposedly important occasion was in fact "the most arrogant and mendacious [lying] minute of world history," he says...but it was only a minute. After all, the little star cooled, and the "clever beasts had to die." Such a fable doesn't come close to illustrating the "miserable...shadowy...transient...aimless" and "arbitrary" ways in which the human intellect looks within nature--but it is a good start. Nietzsche wonders ironically at the "pride" that comes with knowing and with intellect, and the arrogant sense that comes with this intellect--namely that human existence is intrinsically valuable, important. In this pride, human beings flatter themselves that knowing and right-knowing is crucial to our dignity and exemplarity as human beings; for Nietzsche, there is a distinct air of deceitfulness about all of this. He asks: How on earth did "an honest and pure drive for truth" arise in human beings in the first place, especially when so much of their lives seems devoted to deceiving, flattering, lying, deluding, hiding behind conventions, and playing roles? Note that by deceit and lying and playing roles, Nietzsche does not mean ordinary lying; the delusions and illusions about which he speaks are much deeper, more fundamental. Just look at us, he exclaims: What do we know even about ourselves, much less the "truth of things"? Are we ever able to see ourselves, really see and know ourselves, "as if laid out in a lighted display case?" Nature, after all, conceals almost everything from us, yet we continue to swagger through the world as if we "knew" things for what they "really" were. We humans have our "proud, deceptive consciousness," while all along our bodies run on forever outside of our conceptual reach. Imagine the day, Nietzsche challenges his readers, when we might peer out of "the chamber of consciousness" into the world "outside," say, the world of our own bodies: what if we took a quick look "out" and saw that all that keeps us human is ignorance of this world, blindness to a world that is "pitiless, greedy, insatiable, and murderous"? To use Nietzsche's powerful figure: what if we are creatures dreaming our existence on the back of a ferocious tiger? Here, Nietzsche gives us a metaphor for how human beings are always, as it were, displaced persons, always "elsewhere"; in the midst of our consciousness, we are in fact asleep, and travelling somewhere else than we think we are travelling. For Nietzsche, the division of consciousness from our own bodies is a metaphor for a deeper division in the universe, that is, the split between human beings and things in themselves.
If this is indeed our predicament, then where did "the drive for truth come from"? Nietzsche speculates that the origin of the will-to-truth coincides with the birth of society, i.e., the crucial development from a non-society of the animalistic "war of all against all"--i.e., every person for himself or herself--to what he disdainfully calls the "herd" existence. At the moment that we become social creatures, and, indeed, as a condition of us becoming social creatures, there must be minimal agreement on what is true and what is false. Truth is thus not some beacon of light for which we strive, but a set of mutually agreed upon principles that facilitates the smooth functioning of the herd. It is the originating means by which social control is established; once you determine truth from lies, then you get to do all sorts of things to discipline and punish the social body so that it continues telling what has been deemed to be the truth. (Here, you might recall Locke's more optimistic picture of the minimal agreements that form the basis for the forging of social collectivities.)
"We believe that we know something about things themselves when we speak of trees, colours, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things--metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities." With this statement, Nietzsche informs us that what things are in themselves, before we re-process them with our senses and our minds, remains forever out of our reach. At best, these things are at root "the mysterious X of the thing in itself"--but that X never appears to us. What we in fact experience is a series of displacements or transports of that original X, starting with a stimulus of the nerve and ending with a sound or an idea. What we call truth is therefore a kind of hallucination, because it comes of a series of completely arbitrary transferences. In arguing this way, Nietzsche attacks the classical definition of truthfulness, the so-called "adequation" model of truth. According to this model, the answer to the question--What is truth?--is determined by measuring of how close a proposition is to that which it describes. "Truth" happens when the account of a fact approaches the fact itself: "the adequate expression of an object in the subject." This model applies to the simplest of declarative statements, for example, "the stone is hard." But as Nietzsche suggests, we say this as if "hardness" where a quality inhering in the object rather than what it may actually be, a quality that says much more about the knowing subject than about the indifferent object we are claiming to know. Apparent descriptions of objects are in fact the projections or hallucinations of human subject. For example, he notes how German nouns fall into masculine and feminine genders; things are not "naturally" one gender or another, and yet the very language that Germans use makes it seem as if this were the case. For Nietzsche, language is full of these completely arbitrary significations, all of them more or less "bold" metaphors, i.e., metaphorical substitutions and transferred senses of one kind or another. In arguing this way, it is important to remember that Nietzsche doesn't pine nostalgically for the comprehension or apprehension of the "thing in itself"--which would, as he says, constitute a kind of "pure truth." No, he says, this purity remains "quite incomprehensible...and something not in the least worth striving for." In place of striving for this unnameable "thing in itself," Nietzsche suggests, we should turn our attention to the ways in which language and human experience is composed of "relations" or transferences. "Something"--we know not what--stimulates the optic "nerve;" this in turn is translated into an image, what we see; and this in turn is translated into a word. Each of these turns--or "tropes"--is a "metaphor." And, in each case, we move from one discrete world into another, "entirely new and different one." The analogy or metaphor that Nietzsche uses to illustrate this process of metaphorization is a device that translates sound into shapes in sand: "sound" is here transported into "sight," and the patterns we see in the sand are at best metaphors for the originating sound. An oddly disconnected series of connections is what Nietzsche sees as the basis for consciousness and knowledge.
Nietzsche asks us to consider, then, the "the formation of concepts," even as Locke had done two centuries earlier. As he suggests, conceptualization--the making of concepts--is the effect of equating unequal things. He uses the example of a "leaf;" this word works as a concept at the instant that it is forced to name many different experiences of leaves, each of then "unique and entirely individual." These individual experiences are entirely different and un-equal; we encounter each leaf in a fundamentally different way each time we experience a leaf. Yet we rapidly--perhaps instantaneously--come to use the word/concept "leaf" to name these experiences, to join them and to equate them. In other words, in forming concepts we violently and arbitrarily flatten out the stark differences between individual experiences of leaves, "forgetting the distinguishing aspects." For convenience's sake, and, surely, for the sake of keeping our sanity, we equate these unequal things. One of the classical definitions of metaphor is precisely that: the yoking together of different worlds under one image. But then we go on to do something very strange--and Nietzsche wants to recover this strangeness for us--and that is to assume that there must be something called "leaf-ness" that stands above and beyond all these individual leaves; these individual leaves are then considered to be more or less pale imitations of this form of the leaf. Do you see what has happened in this process? The completely unique and different experiences of individual leaves is at "first" the original experience, with the formation of the concept "leaf" coming "after," as a metaphor that subsumes all of these differences; but then a reversal happens, and we start to attribute the originality to the concept, and make the individual leaves a more or less distorted version of that original concept. For Nietzsche, it was Plato who had taught us to reverse our apprehension of the world in this fashion. These sorts of tricks and transferences, these sorts of language operations form the basis for knowledge: I) We transfer things from one sphere to the next, substituting an image for a electro-chemical nerve stimulus; ii) We confuse and substitute the properties of a thing for the thing itself; iii) We confuse and substitute generalizations for individualities.
Nietzsche reminds us again that nature has "no forms and no concepts:" there is only "an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us." So, "What then is truth?" Nietzsche's answer is strange, but has had a tremendous impact upon critical theory since the Second World War:
A moveable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in sort, a sum of human relations which have been poetically intensifies, transferred, and embellished, and which, after along usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which have forgotten themselves to be illusions: they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are not considered as metal and no longer coins (p. 84).
To be "truthful," then, means only "to employ the usual metaphors." To be "moral," which is to say, to fulfil one's duty to be truthful, is only "the duty to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie with the herd and in a manner binding upon everyone." In other words, truth is a matter of consensus and of power or authority. We come to feel obliged to call one thing "red" and another "cold," and out of that obligation arises a "moral impulse in regard to truth." Of course, Nietzsche notes, we quickly forget the arbitrariness of this basis for morality and truth, and instead congratulate ourselves on being "rational" beings who willingly place themselves under the "control of abstractions." Afraid of the strange "truth" of truth, human beings "will no longer tolerate being carried away by sudden impressions, by intuitions." They prefer the cool, dead world of abstractions--like "leaf-ness"--over the violently wrenching world of perceptions, a world that approaches each individual experience or impression of a leaf. So it is that we "universalize these impressions into less colourful, cooler concepts, so that he can entrust the guidance of his life and conduct to them." The world of images and sudden vivid first impressions is dissolved into concepts; the "original perceptual metaphors" are forgotten, and even confused with "things themselves." Out of this great swirl of dissolution comes the construction of a "great edifice of concepts," an edifice that Nietzsche scathingly compares to a huge funeral vault. In the beginning, there was vivid metaphor, an original, individual experience of bold, hot, transference in which we move from nerve stimulus to image; but this original experience quickly gets captured by a kind of conceptualization machine, which brings to this individual experience a less than bold orderliness. How strange, Nietzsche wonders aloud, that this world of certainty is built upon such "an unstable foundation," upon, indeed, nothing but "running water." Under these conditions, he says ironically, the human is to be congratulated, even admired,"but not on account of its drive for truth or for pure knowledge of things." For how can be congratulate human beings for "finding" the truth that they have in fact invented so that it can be found? Instead, congratulations are given to humans for being so tricky, so damned clever: I invent a definition of a "mammal," then go out and see a camel or a cat, and declare, "look, a mammal" So what have I done? For Nietzsche, the only truth that has been brought to light in such a circumstance is that "a thoroughly anthropomorphic truth which contains not a single point which would be `true in itself' or really and universally valid apart from man." The seeker after truth is only, in the end, the seeker after "the metamorphosis of the world into man" (here you might think of Schiller's criticism of those who succumb to the form-drive). The supposedly "passive" discovery or "finding" of the truth is, after all, the aggressive imposition of the human on the world, making "man the measure of all things." The seeker after truth is not the self-evidently positive and dignified activity that it always represents itself as being, especially to funding agencies and university presidents; it is something much more aggressive and appropriative, a grasping and taking of the world, and its forced conversion into something human, into the image of the human: under these conditions, truth and power are fully interimplicated.
We begin in a "primitive world of metaphor," but quickly forget it. Why? Because it is easier: in forgetting, we gain a reassuring sense of safety: "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." Is there ever "an adequate expression of the object in the subject"? No! Nietzsche says, for the two worlds of subject and object share absolutely nothing with each other; that being the case, the most that we can say is that they have an "aesthetic relation," a "suggestive transference, a stammering translation into a completely foreign tongue--for which there is required...a freely inventive intermediate sphere and mediating force." No doubt, what Nietzsche means here is language. We might say "appearance," instead, but Nietzsche clearly wants to avoid this term since it is so intimately tied to the adequation model of truth, suggesting as it does that what appears to us has a necessary relationship to that which causes the appearance. As he points out, we infer, after the fact, that there is something of which the appearance is an appearance...and then say that that thing was "out there" in the first place: and so an effect comes to substitute or stand for a cause, which is a trope called metonymy (one member of the army of metaphors about which he spoke earlier on in the essay). Once an image gets generated enough times, "millions of times," it gets mistaken for the truth: the analogy used here--drawn from the great French philosopher, Pascal--is that "an eternally repeated dream would certainly be felt and judged to be reality." We live in a world that only seems "secure, complete, infinite, regular, without any gaps." We inhabit a universe seems law-governed, but Nietzsche suggests that the judicial nature of the world betrays it is an anthropomorphic and anthropocentric construction. The so-called "laws of nature" are not qualities that inhere in the universe, but are projections upon the universe, metaphors about the universe that have forgotten themselves to be metaphors.
Second Section
By now, Nietzsche speaks not of a drive or will to truth, but of a drive to metaphor, that generates the new worlds of "myth" and "art." This drive to metaphor is never "truly vanquished," although it is more often "imprisoned" in the great conceptual edifices of philosophy and science. Implicitly, the will to metaphor is in part a remembrance, a process of remembering all the metaphors that have been forgotten or that have forgotten themselves. When it is at work, the will to metaphor is disruptive, always "bringing forward new transferences, metaphors, and metonymies." It continually "refashions the world...so that it will be as colourful, irregular, lacking in results and coherence, charming, and eternally new as the world of dreams." Nietzsche thinks of "mythically inspired people," the ancient Greeks, for whom trees could speak, and gods appeared in the shape of a bull; what made some of these people powerful was that they knew that these were illusions. Art and myth and metaphor is "art" that knows itself to be illusion; it is a form of lying or deception that does not seek to deceive, and in this sense it could be described as lying "in a nonmoral sense." Nietzsche imagines for his readers a type of person who does not cling needily to "that immense framework and planking of concepts...in order to preserve himself." Another person would "smash this framework to pieces," throw it "into confusion," and put it "back together in an ironic fashion"--i.e., having a certain distance from it; this person would be the intuitive person, not the rational person. The intuitive person scorns abstractions, whereas the rational person fears intuition. The intuitive person is ir-rational, which may not mean crazy, but other than rational; the rational person, on the other hand, is in-artistic, in Nietzsche's revised sense of what constitutes a "true" artfulness. But both "desire to rule over life," as if Nietzsche were acknowledging that the intuitive person is still captured by the craving after power; here we should recall his account of ancient Greece, where the "intuitive man handles his weapons more authoritatively and victoriously than his opponent." The rational person manages to ward off pain and misfortune through the force of abstraction; but the intuitive person "suffers more intensely, when he suffers." Nietzsche concludes with a sombre description of what he imagines to be another creature again, namely the "stoical man," the creature who wears a "mask with dignified, symmetrical features," and who suffers the world in its utterly unavoidable violence. This is the human being who does not regret the world for what it is, and who simply endures that world.
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Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) on ‘decadent’ or ‘slave’ or ‘Christian’ morality
Taming the noble races (from Genealogy of Morals, first essay)
Here there is one thing we will be the last to deny: . . . the same good men who are kept within strict limits by custom, honour, habit, thankfulness, even more by mutual protection, through jealousy among equals and who . . . demonstrate in relation to each other such resourceful consideration, self-control, refinement, loyalty, pride, and friendship—towards the outside, where the strange world, the world of foreigners, begins, these men are not much better than beasts of prey turned loose. There they enjoy freedom from all social constraints. In the wilderness they make up for the tension which a long fenced-in confinement within the peace of the community brings about. They go back to the innocent consciousness of a wild beast of prey, as joyful monsters, who perhaps walk away from a dreadful sequence of murder, arson, rape, and torture with an exhilaration and spiritual equilibrium, as if they had merely pulled off a student prank, convinced that the poets now once again have something to sing about and praise for a long time to come. At the bottom of all these noble races we cannot fail to recognize the beast of prey . . . splendidly roaming around in its lust for loot and victory. This hidden basis from time to time needs to be discharged: the animal must come out again, must go back into the wilderness,—Roman, Arab, German, Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, Scandinavian Vikings—in this need they are all alike. It is the noble races which left behind the concept of the “barbarian” in all their tracks, wherever they went. . .
What in any event is taken as “the truth” nowadays, [is] that it is the purpose of all culture simply to breed and tame a civilized animal, a domestic pet, out of the beast of prey “man”. . . These people [who want to civilize man] carry instincts of oppression and of a lust for revenge, the descendants of all European and non-European slavery . . . —they represent the regression of mankind! These “instruments of culture” are a disgrace to humanity . . .
The ‘Improvers’ of Mankind (from Twilight of the Idols)
At all times morality has aimed to “improve” men — this aim is above all what was called morality. Under the same word, however, the most divergent tendencies have been concealed. But “improvement” has meant both taming the beast called man, and breeding a particular kind of man. Such zoological concepts are required to express the realities — realities of which the typical “improver,” the priest, admittedly neither knows anything nor wants to know anything.
To call the taming of an animal its “improvement” sounds almost like a joke to our ears. Whoever knows what goes on in kennels doubts that dogs are “improved” there. They are weakened, they are made less harmful, and through the depressive effect of fear, through pain, through wounds, and through hunger, they become sickly beasts. It is no different with the tamed man whom the priest has “improved.” In the early Middle Ages, when the church was indeed, above all, a kennel, the most perfect specimens of the “blond beast” were hunted down everywhere; and the noble Teutons, for example, were “improved.” But how did such an “improved” Teuton look after he had been drawn into a monastery? Like a caricature of man, a miscarriage: he had become a “sinner,” he was stuck in a cage, tormented with all sorts of painful concepts. And there he lay, sick, miserable, hateful to himself, full of evil feelings against the impulses of his own life, full of suspicion against all that was still strong and happy. In short, a “Christian.”
Physiologically speaking: in the struggle with beasts, making them sick may be the only way to make them weak. The church understood this: it sickened and weakened man — and by so doing “improved” him.
The ‘discovery’ of Christian morality (from Ecce Homo, ‘Why I am a Destiny’)
[It is possible] that it is not humanity that is degenerating, but only that parasitic kind of man, the priest, who through morality has lied his way up to being the determiner of humanity’s values—who realized that Christian morality was his means to power… And indeed this is my insight: the teachers, the leaders of humanity, theologians to a man, were also all decadents: hence the revaluation of all values into that which is hostile to life; hence morality…
The discovery of Christian morality is an event without parallel, a real catastrophe. Anyone who raises awareness about it is a force majeure [irresistible force], a destiny—he breaks the history of humanity in two. You live before him or you live after him… The lightning-bolt of truth has struck precisely what stood highest hitherto [until now] . . . Everything called ‘truth’ so far has been recognized as the most harmful, malicious, subterranean form of lie; the holy pretext of ‘improving’ humanity recognized as a ruse to drain dry life and make it anaemic [poor blooded]. Morality as vampirism… Anyone who discovers morality [what it really is] discovers at the same time the valuelessness of all the values that are or have been believed in; in the most revered [respected] types of man, even those pronounced holy, he no longer sees anything venerable [respectable], but sees in them the most disastrous kind of deformity . . . The concept ‘God’ invented as a counter-concept to life—bringing together into one dreadful unity everything harmful, poisonous, slanderous, the whole mortal enmity against life! The concept ‘hereafter’, ‘true world’ invented in order to devalue the only world there is . . . The concepts ‘soul’, ‘spirit’, ultimately even ‘immortal soul’ invented so as to despise the body, to make it sick . . . Instead of health the ‘salvation of the soul’—in other words a folie circulaire [intermittent madness] between penitential cramps and redemption hysteria! The concept ‘sin’ invented along with its accompanying torture instrument, the concept of ‘free will’, so as to confuse the instincts and make mistrust of the instincts into second nature! In the concept of the ‘selfless’, the ‘self-denying’, the true emblem of decadence that turns . . . self-destruction into a badge of value itself, into ‘duty’, ‘holiness’, ‘divinity’ in man! Ultimately—and this is the most terrible thing—in the concept of the good man siding with everything weak, sick, misshapen, suffering from itself, everything that ought to perish—the law of selection crossed, an ideal made out of the contradiction to the proud man who turned out well, to the yes-saying, future-assured, future-confirming man—who is called evil from now on… And all this was believed in as morality!—Ecrasez l’infame! [Crush the infamy!]*— —
The weak and the ill are parasites (from Twilight of the Idols)
The sick man is a parasite of society. In a certain state it is indecent to live longer. To go on vegetating in cowardly dependence on physicians and machinations, after the meaning of life, the right to life, has been lost, that ought to prompt a profound contempt in society. The physicians, in turn, would have to be the mediators of this contempt . . . for all cases in which the highest interest of life, of ascending life, demands the most inconsiderate pushing down and aside of degenerating life — for example, for the right of procreation, for the right to be born, for the right to live. . . Finally, some advice for our dear pessimists and other decadents. It is not in our hands to prevent our birth; but we can correct this mistake — for in some cases it is a mistake. When one does away with oneself, one does the most estimable thing possible: one almost earns the right to live. Society — what am I saying? — life itself derives more advantage from this than from any “life” of renunciation, anemia, and other virtues: one has liberated the others from one’s sight; one has liberated life from an objection.
Especially in this last passage, keep in mind the cultural and historical context in Europe: the social emphasis of the Church (care for the weak and the poor, children’s homes, hospitals, etc.), vs. Hitler’s euthanasia programs at the start of the war. It’s not a coincidence that Nietzsche’s writings were admired by some of the highest-ranking Nazis.
Essay Question: Is Nietzsche right when he says that man is essentially a ‘beast of prey’ (or ‘predator’)? Or that ‘slave’ morality exists in order to weaken the beast, to make him sick? What do you think of his remarks about the weak and the ill in society? Compare with Russell.
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