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Sense/Nonsense: Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense”

Sense

It made sense to me that truths and lies are subjective. For instance, language is constructed by nerve stimuli transferred into an image (first metaphor), then into a sound (second metaphor). Certain relations are designated as truth while others that don’t fit into those concepts are dismissed as lies. As Nietzsche states, “We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things – metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.” He argues that our perception of both are illogical and cannot be derived from the essence of things.

Nonsense

It’s puzzling to me how concepts are grouped into categories for it to be a truth. Like Nietzsche’s example, “Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept ‘leaf’ is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects.” By simply “forgetting the distinguishing aspects,” one can disregard the individual’s unique characteristics.

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