I wrote this for my 19th Century Philosophy course. It’s about Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lies in the Nonmoral Sense.” Fill in the blanks status.
By and large, the near-total disconnect between the architectonic schema of Kant and the free-flow anti-schema of Nietzsche is well established and easily seen. The two thinkers were nearly diametric opposites in epistemological concerns, and the essay by Nietzsche “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” demonstrates the divide in a clear and simple manner.
As the title alludes, the essay does not deal with the moral status of lying, rather dealing with the epistemological worth of such a kind of statement. However, beyond the fairly cut and dry distinction between the two Germans in their moral approach to lying lies a much richer and deeper discussion of the underpinnings of objective knowledge. In the work, Nietzsche seems to be addressing Kant directly, pointing out the arrogance in the so-called “Copernican Revolution” of Kantian thought, putting the subject at the center of universal concerns. Stating that “just as every porter wants to have an admirer, so even the proudest of men, the philosopher, supposes that he sees on all sides the eyes of the universe telescopically focused upon his action and thought” (Truth and Lies). Beyond the backhanded swipe at Kant, it is fair to say, perhaps, that “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” attempts to kick out the buttresses of the contained, infallible architectonic of Kant’s epistemology.
In the “Categorical Imperative,” Kant makes clear his view on lying. Under no circumstances whatsoever is the act of lying to be viewed in anything other than a moral sense. In the viewpoint of this moral sense, lying is never acceptable; there is no nuance or deviation beyond the rule. This seems strangely stringent—even for a Kantian schema—but the reasoning behind the necessity of this imperative is fairly self-evident. For Kant’s system, the allowance of lying within the moral realm of categorical imperatives necessarily universalizes their impact. The universalized impact of one lie is that the integrity of language in providing truth is abrogated, leaving language useless in conveying truth. Plainly, within Kant’s moral world, this would be a high crime, as lying, in a universal realm of action, would make truth impossible—an epistemological harm that spills in to becoming a moral hazard.
For Nietzsche, on the other hand, lies and lying were not inherently actions with moral value. In fact, he took a more naturalistic approach to analysis of lying, instead looking at their social and evolutionary function. “Insofar as the individual wants to maintain himself against other individuals, he will under natural circumstances employ the intellect mainly for dissimulation” (Truth and Lies). This necessity of maintenance, he believed, was carried out through dissimulation: “As a means for the preserving of the individual, the intellect unfolds its principle powers in dissimulation, which is the means by which weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves-since they have been denied the chance to wage the battle for existence with horns or with the sharp teeth of beasts of prey” (Truth and Lies). This dissimulation, Nietzsche believed, was so endemic in human nature as to force him to wonder: “Deception, flattering, lying, deluding…in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity-is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them” (Truth and Lies). Clearly, for Nietzsche, lying was a mere accident of the natural diffidence in humans—one human attempting to level an unequal evolutionary playing field with an intellectual iteration of evolutionary examples like the chameleon’s color-change ability or the spines of an echidna.
Though the divide in the moral or functional status of lies is interesting, it is not the whole component of what Nietzsche is attacking in the essay. Beyond Kant’s too-restrictive imperative in regard to lying, Nietzsche’s divergence is also felt in Kant’s larger epistemology. Nietzsche’s discussion of lying actually leads in to the meat of the critique present in the paper—a critique that lays low objective, universal knowledge.
If one desires to breach the hull of universal knowledge, one must theoretically attack a base assumption that props it up; it is not enough to nitpick at anomaly and hope that the system falls. In this respect, Nietzsche makes a bold move, moving on to the next portion of Kantian thought to be attacked: synthetic a priori judgments.
Kant’s position in regard to the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments is—much like the judgments themselves—irreducibly important. Before tackling the concept of the synthetic a priori, Kant’s personal definition for “judgment” must be ascertained. “Judgment” for Kant represented a function of unity—judgment united differing datum and concepts in to the overall schema of Kant’s epistemology, allowing for intelligibility and continuity between relations of ideas. Judgment, then, can be viewed as a cognitive capacity that acts as a vehicle to an intelligible worldview. Kant, realizing that an intelligible worldview requires base truths, then turns to try and defend “knowledge from no-where,” in a way.
This “knowledge from no-where” is represented by the synthetic a priori judgment. Kant provided the first modern justification for their existence in his seminal work “The Critique of Pure Reason.” Through it, Kant attempts to prove the infallibility—or at least the veracity—of pure mathematics. For Kant, the simplest mathematical formulation (2+3=5, for example) necessarily carries multiple a priori concepts (2, 3, 5, and the additive properties that relate them). Because the basic language of scientific description is necessarily beholden to the so-called synthetic a priori judgments of mathematics, it can be reasonably asserted that a Kantian worldview would require the extant possibility of these judgments.
For Nietzsche on the other hand, the base idea of the synthetic a priori judgment would be impossible. The usage of the faculty of judgment is in creating causal or otherwise intelligible relations for causality. If this is the basic use, then Nietzsche objects: “For between two absolutely different spheres, as between subject and object, there is no causality, no correctness, and no expression; there is, at most, an aesthetic relation: I mean, a suggestive transference, a stammering translation into a completely foreign tongue-for which I there is required, in any case, a freely inventive intermediate sphere and mediating force” (Truth and Lies). To Nietzsche, the very judgments themselves were contingent on language, and it is this dependence on language that, as shall be easily seen, Nietzsche uses to knock down language’s role in shaping our beliefs.
Before delving in to the portion of Nietzsche’s argument that dismisses objective knowledge due to the presence of language, Kant’s view on language must be demonstrated. Unlike Nietzsche, Kant had no interest in the further investigation of language, beyond it’s utile nature for argument. Because of this, there is not much to be said from the Kantian schema that is surprising, regarding the shaping of beliefs. Language is the heuristic upon which we build all of our judgments, beliefs, imperatives, etc etc. Language is merely a human tool to attempt to produce better and better descriptions of the noumenal “thing-in-itself.”
Nietzsche is almost the exact opposite. Nietzsche believed that truth, and therefore the possibility of intelligible, transmittable language, was impossible. After describing metaphors through the biological function of nerve endings being activated in the service of providing a word for an experience, Nietzsche believes that we stop our rigorous examination of reality and attempt to stretch this metaphor over all alike portions of existence. As stated “Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions- they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins” (Truth and Lies). Concepts, things totally necessary in conveying belief or abstract datum, are believed to be cut from the same flawed cloth that all things of language are.
“…the great edifice of concepts displays the rigid regularity of a Roman columbarium and exhales in logic that strength and coolness which is characteristic of mathematics. Anyone who has felt this cool breath [of logic] will hardly believe that even the concept-which is as bony, foursquare, and transposable as a die-is nevertheless merely the residue of a metaphor, and that the illusion which is involved in the artistic transference of a nerve stimulus into images is, if not the mother, then the grandmother of every single concept.” (Truth and Lies)
Being that concepts are embedded metaphor, and that metaphor is an ossified version of what Nietzsche wants to be a constant flux, it can be reasonably concluded that he believed that language, while constant shaping belief, leads to a functional reality of lies. To wit, returning back to the original topic of lying and morality, “We still do not yet know where the drive for truth comes from. For so far we have heard only of the duty which society imposes in order to exist: to be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors. Thus, to express it morally, this is the duty to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie with the herd and in a manner binding upon everyone” (Truth and Lies).