In the essay On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense, Friedrich Nietzsche discusses about the idea of truth and language. He argues in his essay that it is deviated from the thoughts of a man and metaphors are the closest thing we can get to the truth. A passage that I found to be interesting was when he explains about the process of language being created. According to Nietzsche, we first translate the nervous stimulus into an image and then to a sound to represent the image. When we first see an object with our eyes, it becomes the first metaphor and the sound becomes the second. As we go from the first to second metaphor, we become more distant with the truth because we are using sound to represent the image. An example that he uses to help understand his point was the deaf man. A deaf man never had an experience with sound and music. However when he feels the vibrations of the musical instrument, he would then believe that this is “sound.” This becomes problematic because it shows that people are creating their own ideas of “truth” when in fact this truth derived from the thoughts of a man and becomes subjective. Nietzsche adds on explaining that this was like “all of us concerning language.” People believe that we know something about other objects such as trees, colors, but these are only metaphors. These metaphors “correspond in no way to the original entities.” What I believe he is trying to say is that we only associate these objects to metaphors because of their physical components instead of fully grasping the whole object. He concludes this passage stating that the creation of language is not truthful at all. Humans developed their own truths as well as lies through language.

Nietzsche seems to argue that language itself is lacking the truth because words are imperfect. From reading this, a question I had was how can people express the truth when language was rigid and powerless? According to Nietzsche, one has to be unconscious and forgetful to “arrive at his sense of truth.” Another aspect that becomes important for knowing the truth is the peace pact where people set rules and those who follow them are truthful while those who don’t are liars.

In Nietzsche’s essay, he explains that the human brain forms concepts when people first encounter something. They are then categorized into other similar objects despite the object’s unique characteristics. He uses the example of when one encounters a leaf. This person comes across this leaf they have never seen before but concludes that this is a leaf because of its similar characteristics to a previous leaf they have seen. What Nietzsche argues is that we should group objects according to their unique characteristics alone. Throughout his essay, it seems that he believed that our ideas of truth and our language does not truly exist in nature because of the fact that these were created by people themselves.