The Truth and Falsity in an Ultramoral Sense by Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche in his essay, “Truth and Falsity in an Ultramoral Sense" questions the age old belief that language can provide us with truth, and reason always deals with the real knowledge. For him the tendency of language is always towards abstraction and away from the individual and real, and finally in to the threat of rational fixity.

He claims that reason never bends to truth. Most of the time, human intellect is satisfied with illusions. Nietzsche refuses the idea that the world revolves around intellect. He refuses the idea that the world revolves around the intellect and is guided by truth. He sees sensation and cognition as main causes of deception. Man is deeply immersed in falsehood and illusion. His sensation is satisfied with the surface knowledge of things and his cognition forms an idea of things out of this surface knowledge. He tends to thinks that it is the knowledge of the essence of the thing. This is an illusion with human beings and his knowledge is always incapable to lead to the truth. Nietzsche argues that human society us hypocritical, it longs for truth only because of its life preserving consequences. But what is supposed to be a truth is only a deception. Man hates not the deception but the evil consequences of deception. When man feels that the adopted or constructed truth can create an inimical situation, he does not hesitate to avoid it .

Man uses language or words to indicate truth value or essence of the things. In reality, he uses only metaphors that arbitrarily indicate the essence of the thing. We merely designate the relation of that thing to man or it is just an anthropomorphic interpretation. Every time we take the relation of things to man from different perspectives, and with a difference or change in perspectives, we give different metaphors to the same thing .We have the knowledge of these metaphors, not of the real essence of things since metaphors are not capable of bearing the real essence of things. Language itself is a large system of such metaphors thus language cannot convey the truth. Through it seems that all word signifies truths or ideas but there is no such relation between words and ideas. Rather they are conventionally fixed, individual and particularized. They are fitted in the context of the similarity omitting some differences. Thus, ideas are formed equaling unequal. We never know the real. Therefore, only after ignoring the real we are able to form an idea. For Nietzsche “Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms. This is a sum of human relations adorned and intensified poetically and rhetorically and after a long usage seems to be fixed and canonic. But truth is an illusion that emerges with the error of believing in illusion as truth and with the error of forgetting the illusive quality of truth. Truth always moves toward abstractions and man rationally submits to it in order to live socially. The abstraction is a generalization of impressions and schematization of metaphors to make perceptions appear as truth or idea. In the process of abstraction, man using an architectural genius creates a pyramidal order of laws, privileges and suborders. Whatever submits to this order is taken to be real. This constructed truth survival in the realm of reason making reason questionable. Thus, Nietzsche as a real deconstructionist deconstructs the notion that language bears with it reality, truth or idea. Moreover as the domain of reason is not separable from the mechanism of language, it too becomes something that can be questioned.