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Summary Of On Truth And Lying In A Non Moral Sense By Nietzsche

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Nietzsche’s essay, “On Truth and Lying In A Non-Moral Sense”, challenges the overall concept of human intelligence and the conventional meanings of truth. Nietzsche begins his essay by explaining how human kind, as a whole, places itself at a higher status in comparison to any other living creature. We believe that without the existence of humans, the universe could not continue. Humorously, Nietzsche compares this idea to a midge, in which if seen from their own point of view would believe in its own importance to be as significant as humans do (172). Nietzsche then goes on to explain how little humans truly know. This led to his arguments on the overall ideas, concepts, and meanings of “truth”. Nietzsche explains that truth is something we …show more content…

His main argument lies within the universal ideas of language. Language itself is an arbitrary invention made by humans, and if humans can’t fully understand and reach the level of truth that they often believe they do, what truth is there in the words we speak? The thing about language, as discussed by Nietzsche, is that it is incredibly vague and overused. This is the whole reason as to why certain words or phrases are considered to be hackneyed and repetitive. A word can mean a single concept within a language, yet take a unique physical form in reality. Specifically, Nietzche discusses the idea of a leaf. The word “leaf” describes the general idea of a plant connected to a tree. However, if no two leaves can ever be identical, how can they then classify something to fall under the idea of what a “leaf” really is. Going back to the fact that language is merely created by humans, each human has their own perspective of reality that can only be viewed by themself. This makes the overall definition of a word obsolete. Given the example that there are two individuals, A and B, looking at a bench by which both individuals agree that the bench is painted

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