On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

The essay he left unpublished in 1873, in which Nietzsche called truth "a mobile army of metaphors" and our firmest concepts dead figures we have forgotten were ever figures.

by Friedrich Nietzsche38 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne
First published: 1873(aged 29)
Original language: German

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Overview

In 1873, a year after The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche dictated a short essay and left it in manuscript. Its question is where our confidence in truth comes from, and its answer dismantles that confidence. The human intellect, he argues, is not an organ for grasping reality but a tool for survival, and language does not copy the world: a nerve-stimulus becomes a sound, the sound a word, the word a concept — and a concept is made only by throwing away everything that distinguishes one thing from another, calling many unequal things "leaf." What we honour as a truth is therefore a metaphor whose figurative birth we have forgotten, a mobile army of metaphors and figures that long use has made binding. To be truthful is only to lie according to a settled convention. The piece sat unread; his sister released it in 1896, after his collapse, and for decades it counted as a curiosity beside the famous books. Then the late twentieth century found it, and this discarded essay became one of the most cited things he wrote — a founding text for deconstruction and for every account of knowledge that treats it as rhetoric — a full century after Nietzsche set it aside.

Key concepts

What does a mobile army of metaphors mean?

It is Nietzsche's definition of truth in this essay: truths are a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms and anthropomorphisms — figures of speech whose origin as figures we have forgotten, worn smooth by long use until they feel literal and binding. A truth, on this view, is not a match between word and world but a metaphor a community has agreed to stop hearing as one.

How does Nietzsche say a concept is formed?

A concept is formed by discarding differences. A single leaf is unlike every other, yet we make the concept leaf by dropping everything that distinguishes real leaves and keeping only what they roughly share. Every word does this: it equates unequal things. So language never copies reality — from the first syllable it abstracts and flattens the unique into the general.

What does the title phrase in an extra-moral sense mean?

It signals that Nietzsche is not asking the usual moral question of whether lying is wrong. He is asking a prior, colder question: what truth and lie are in the first place, given that the intellect evolved to preserve a weak animal, not to know reality. Placed outside morality, the honest person's truth turns out to be lying by an agreed convention.

What is the nerve-stimulus to word chain he describes?

It is the sequence by which Nietzsche shows language losing contact with the world. A nerve is stimulated; that stimulus is translated into an image, the image into a sound, the sound into a word. At each leap something incommensurable is carried over as if it were equivalent. So even basic naming is metaphor piled on metaphor, never a copy of the thing itself.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Truth as a Mobile Army of Metaphors

Where does our confidence in truth come from, and does it survive inspection? The intellect is a survival tool, not an organ for reality, and a concept is made only by discarding all that makes one thing differ from another.

Dictated in 1873 and left in manuscript, the essay dismantles the very trust it examines. Language, Nietzsche argues, copies nothing: a nerve-stimulus becomes a sound, the sound a word, the word a concept that equates unequal things by calling many leaves leaf. What a culture honours as a truth is thus a metaphor whose figurative birth has been forgotten, and to be truthful is only to lie according to a settled convention. Unread until his sister released it in 1896, the piece became, a century later, a founding text for deconstruction and for every account of knowledge as rhetoric.

truth
language
metaphor
epistemology
perception
illusion
concepts
deception
abstraction
intellect

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 38
distinct concepts: 74
by passages held, corpus-wide: #243

What this book thinks together

Every arc around the wheel is one concept in this book. A ribbon joins two the text reaches for together, and its width is how many of its passages hold both. Strongest: epistemology with metaphor.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 9 pairings. 20 shared passages in all. 9 weaker pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
epistemology	metaphor	3
epistemology	perception	3
deception	intellect	2
deception	survival	2
epistemology	language	2
illusion	perception	2
intellect	survival	2
language	metaphor	2
metaphor	perception	2

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1873 Aufsätze und Vorreden aus dem Nachlaß
Not a book he wrote but a volume his editors gathered from his early papers — prefaces to books he never actually wrote among them.
DE
1873 On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne) you are here DE
1881 The Dawn of Day (Morgenröte)
The book Nietzsche later marked as the start of his campaign against morality — the least read of the mature works, and the seed of the Genealogy.
DE
1882 The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza)
Aphorism 125 gives us the madman and "God is dead"; aphorism 341, the eternal return — the most personal of the mature books.
DEEN
1883 Thus Spake Zarathustra (Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen)
His one work of fiction and his most famous, written across 1883–85; the fourth part he withheld from the public entirely.
DEEN
1889 Twilight of the Idols (Götzendämmerung)
A short, savage précis of his whole philosophy, written in a week in 1888 as his last lucid year ran out.
DE
Beyond Good and Evil (Jenseits Von Gut Und Böse)
The 1886 prelude to his late assault on morality, arguing in the open what Zarathustra had delivered in parable.
DE
Ecce Homo (Ecce Homo: Wie Man Wird Was Man Ist)
His last book, a self-portrait written weeks before the collapse and kept from print by his sister until 1908.
DE
Homer and Classical Philology (Homer Und Die Klassische Philologie)
His inaugural lecture at Basel, given at twenty-four — the philologist's public debut, and already the argument that would raise art above scholarship.
DE
Human, All Too Human (Menschliches Allzumenschliches Ein Buch Fuer Freie Geister)
The turn from Wagnerian metaphysics to the cool aphorist — the book in which the "free spirit" first speaks in his own voice.
DE
Nietzsche contra Wagner (Nietzsche Kontra Wagner)
A montage of passages taken from his own earlier books, put together at the very end to show he had judged Wagner rightly all along.
DE
The Antichrist (Der Antichrist)
Intended as the first book of the "revaluation of all values" he did not live to finish — his fiercest word on Christianity, held back until 1895.
DE
The Birth of Tragedy or Hellenism and Pessimism (Die Geburt Der Tragödie)
His first book, and the one that cost him his standing among classicists; its discursive prophecy he would spend the next decade outgrowing.
DEEN
The Case of Wagner (Der Fall Wagner)
His settling of accounts with the composer he had idolised, written in the same 1888 burst as Twilight of the Idols.
DE
The Genealogy of Morals (Zur Genealogie Der Moral)
Three treatises, written quickly in 1887 as a "supplement" to Beyond Good and Evil — his most sustained argument and his most studied book.
DEEN
The Will to Power (Der Wille Zur Macht)
The most notorious book under his name, and one he never assembled: his sister and Peter Gast made it from his notebooks after his collapse.
DE
We Philologists (Wir Philologen)
The scholar's turn against his own discipline: notes for an "untimely meditation" on philology that he abandoned around 1875.
DE

— or open another of their works