Nonmoral Sense vs.

The Gay Science

Brice Jackson

Though it’s somewhat ironic to place a label on a philosopher who spoke so often of the

human race’s ability to generalize, one could say that Friedrich Nietzsche spent a great deal of

his life battling with the concept of truth. Truth and the history of such is especially prevalent in

two early works, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense and The Gay Science. Though these

works were written almost a decade apart, there are surprising consistencies in Nietzsche’s

representation of truth, as well as a clear evolution of concept regarding the nature of truth and

human intellect.

In On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, Nietzsche begins with what he deems a fable

which tells of a tiny star, twinkling in a far off solar system, on which knowledge was invented

by arrogant and clever animals. Nietzsche then goes on to say of his fable-“ One could invent a

fable like this and still not have illustrated sufficiently how miserable, how shadowy and fleeting,

how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect appears in nature.”1 Here Nietzsche is saying that

our ability to decisively observe the world is nothing but a manifestation of our necessity to do as

such. It is not something that is derived from a higher power, nor something that is intrinsic, but

rather something that has been curated. This belief in the fact that our intelligence is streamlined

from some higher power is what Nietzsche believes is partly blinding us from the truth. Shortly

after in his dialectic, he states, “The intellect, as a means of preserving the individual, develops

its principal strengths in dissimulation.”2 Our ability as humans to pretend to be more “real” than

we are, or to put on masks in certain social situations is how those who cannot deal with the

1 Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Taylor Carman. On Truth and Untruth: Selected Writings. New York,
NY. HarperCollins Publishing, 2010, pg 18.
2 Nietzsche, pg 20.
harshness of reality survive in a society. Since we embody these fake characters, we never see

the truth in reality and live in what Nietzsche calls a dream world in which we only see “forms”.3

This could be interpreted as a critique of humankind represented in the image of the Greek

Tragedy. Since the characters in the plays wore masks to represent a single, drastic emotion, this

separation from reality or suspension of disbelief would help Nietzsche prove his point that the

human intellect or, in a way, the human agenda is to deceive and suspend disbelief. This is why

Greek philosophy often took form in the ultimate disillusioned reality, theatre. Over time these

masks, which were once literal, transformed into a more of a “lie” and took the form of words

which can be utilized as direct forms of deceit. But at this point in the dialectic, moral and

societal codes have been further developed and dictated, which create consequences for those

who lie, which leads beings to fear not the lie itself, since they still more often than not deceive

by applying masks with words, but the ramifications of the deceit. To Nietzsche, this creates a

certain type of social dogma that makes humans react positively to certain fabricated truths that

are deemed safe and absolute and react poorly or viciously to truths deemed harmful or

destructive. These destructive truths are the truths that Nietzsche believes to be reality, which

thanks to the intellect, have been masked. Nietzsche then arrives at the idea of a word as a

metaphor. In his rational, our language can only be seen as a representation of the actual essence

that we’re perceiving, or what he calls its impression. This idea is represented in the following

quote: “If truth alone had been decisive in the genesis of language, and the standpoint of

certainty in the genesis of the designations of things, how would we be entitled to say, ‘The stone

3 Nietzsche, pg 21.
is hard,’ as if ‘hard’ were something otherwise known to us and not a wholly subjective

impression.”4

This idea of impression leads us to the next work, The Gay Science. In section fifty-four,

Consciousness of Appearance, Nietzsche develops his concept of being and impression from On

Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense. Here, as opposed to saying that we can only speak of an

object or being as its impression, Nietzsche now says that a being or essence is no more than its

impression or in this case, its seeming. “What is ‘seeming’ (Schein) to me now! Certainly not the

opposite of some kind of being (Wesen)—what could I possibly say of any such being, other

than the predicates of its seeming! Certainly not a dead mask that one could put on some

unknown X, and indeed take off!”5 As expressed in the following quote, someone of something’s

being cannot be expressed with a generalized universal such as a word. Being is beyond a

fabricated universal, it is something that cannot be dictated. Instead, it is the seeming that is what

we are dictating or describing, which falls similarly in line to what Nietzsche expressed in the

previous selection. Us applying a term such as “tree” to an object is our way of describing the

commonalities between objects that we observe has being similar. X, Y, and Z are all seemingly

similar, so we apply the abstract distinction of “tree”, which in the previous selection Nietzsche

claims is an “metaphor that recalls an image” but said image is nothing more than its seeming.

We can never explain an objects essence or being, we can only describe its seeming. Nietzsche

claims that this concept is the only means of “sustaining the universality of dreaming and the

understanding all these dreamers have among themselves.”6 In the section Origin of Knowledge,

Nietzsche is yet again creating a phenomenological account of intellect throughout human

4 Nietzsche, pg 25.
5 Nietzsche, pg 54.
6 Nietzsche, pg 55.
history. In his mind, the development of the falsehoods in knowledge arose out of necessity.

Through trial and error, humankind has developed a set of norms or “universal truths” that have

been tried and tested throughout time. These truths, in Nietzsche’s mind, only serve to preserve

life. This applies for “truth” as well. He claims that humans throughout time have thought

knowledge to be the “principle of life”7 and that these moral truths are concepts that come from

within the mind, universal truths that have to be discovered and unlocked within the

consciousness. As a critique of the early German philosophers, specifically Kant, Nietzsche

believes that these concepts are not universal but in fact constructs of our society, and that

because we believe that they are universals, we debate and fight over the validity of these

falsehoods and never reach a conclusion.

In the final selection from The Gay Science, Cause and Effect, Nietzsche returns to the

description versus reality concept. To Nietzsche, scientists have never been able to do more than

describe the phenomena that occurs in our natural world, which directly correlates to the idea of

only being able to talk of something’s seeming. In Nietzsche’s argument, our progression in

science is not one of more concrete knowledge or universal truths, but one of a larger capability

to describe the seeming of phenomena. In his defense, he states, “In every chemical process, for

example, quality appears to be a ‘miracle,’ just like all locomotion; no one has ever ‘explained’

an impulse. How could we possibly explain! We work only with things that don’t exist, with

lines, planes, bodies, atoms, units of time, units of space.” Something such as a chemical process,

otherwise known as an emotion, is a subjective quality. It’s seeming can be observed chemically

yet there is no means of objectively describing the feeling of the result of said chemical process

7 Nietzsche, pg 57.
since they’re subjective, thus without description. Any attempt at description would be a

generalization.

As one can see, Nietzsche was in a constant battle to perceive the truth in reality,

whatever that may be, if it even is at all. At least through his early career, documented briefly in

the material written above, Nietzsche was gradually tweaking his ideas and refining the concepts

of falsehoods and truths through instigation. This instigation is meant not to dismiss, but to

provoke the reader. It opens the mind to perception and makes aware of the falsehoods in our

societal conventions. Nietzsche is not against the progression of human existence or knowledge,

since it has done great things for the human race, but he skeptical of how it has developed to its

then current state and whether or not we can believe this to be one hundred percent true. Though

he developed and matured into a philosopher all his own, it’s difficult to dismiss the idea that

search for truth and reality pervades throughout his entire body of work.
 Works Cited

Nietzsche, Friedrich ed. Taylor Carman. On Truth and Untruth: Selected Writings. New

York, NY. HarperCollins Publishing, 2010.