Nietzsche, Foucault, and Hermeneutics by way of “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense.”

Word Count: 1421

Nietzsche, Foucault, and Hermeneutics by way of “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense.”

Friedrich Nietzsche played a major role in the establishment of what we might call modern hermeneutics – that is, hermeneutics since the nineteenth century. When examining the “history of the techniques of interpretation,” language can be understood to evoke two separate, but related, suspicions: First is the suspicion that “language does not mean exactly what is says;” Second is the suspicion that some things in this world speak but not through language. Though these two suspicions truly came to the fore in the nineteenth century, they persist today and have given us new possibilities for interpretation, opening the possibility of a hermeneutic. For Foucault, an important theme, in regards to interpretation, is the idea that Nietzsche situated interpretation as an infinite task. A key component for understanding interpretation in this way is the refusal of a beginning.

That is, “the farther one goes in interpretation, the closer one comes at the same time to an absolutely dangerous region where interpretation not only will find its point of return but there it will disappear as interpretation, perhaps involving the disappearance of the interpreter himself.”

In what follows I discuss an assumption fundamentally tied to the incompleteness of interpretation, an assumption that constitutes one of Foucault’s “postulates of modern hermeneutics.”

Using Nietzsche’s essay “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” as a guide, I address the notion that “if interpretation can never be completed, this is quite simply because there is nothing to interpret.” That is, “there is nothing absolutely primary to interpret, for after all everything is already interpretation.” In order to assess this claim, it is necessary to trace out some of Nietzsche’s ideas about society, human intellect, language, truth and science.

Though many people value human intellect, perhaps above all other endowments, Nietzsche takes a rather different position. For him, the intellect operates quite significantly as the proprietor of deception; its greatest strengths can be found in dissimulation, deception, and illusion. Importantly, this dissimulation penetrates so deeply that humans are essentially unable to perceive truth. Instead, they allow themselves to be lied to, as long as the lies either allow for increased happiness or are, in a more general sense, not harm-causing. Though intellect prevents humans from grasping truth, it also allows for society.

Nietzsche writes that “necessity and boredom…lead men to want to live in societies and herds.” In order to do this effectively he supposes that they need a peace treaty. This peace treaty is actually what drives men toward truth, a truth that becomes fixed, a truth understood as valid in all places, a truth that appears objective but is in fact invented. That is, a truth that appears to those in society as Truth. For it seems that men care not for what Nietzsche calls ‘pure knowledge’ when it has no positive consequences for them, but instead “desire the pleasant, life-preserving consequences of truth.”

It is here that language plays a key role, as it is necessary for differentiating between truth and lies. But, Nietzsche asks, “is language the full and adequate expression of all realities?” To this we must answer in the negative. To come to this answer we are required to understand how Nietzsche interprets words. Part of Nietzsche’s project in this essay to elucidate the role of words in the creation of truth for man. To this end, he is forced to define what a word is.

In a deceivingly simple sentence, Nietzsche writes that a word is a “copy of a nervous stimulation in sounds.” However, this is not the full story. If each person were to create a sound (word) for each nervous stimulation then we would have almost no consensus on general ideas. What one man considers a hard-to-the-touch substance may differ quite significantly from what another does, however there is a general consensus on what hard-to-the-touch means. To Nietzsche it appears that men have drawn, rather arbitrarily, borders with regards to words and ideas like this. However, the above example serves as evidence that “what matters is never truth, never the full and adequate expression.” Instead, man wants to understand the world in relation to himself and to do this he creates metaphors.

By metaphors Nietzsche means that men do not actually name a thing itself, but rather the concept of that thing. In other words, when speaking of a tree we believe that we have knowledge of the thing itself – the tree – however we “possess only metaphors of [the thing] which in no way correspond to the original [entity].” Further, when a word is created it immediately becomes a concept because it is forced to fit similar cases which are never equivalent. To continue the tree example, it is estimated that there are 61 trees per person on the planet today – or roughly 434 billion trees on Earth – how, then, could a language possibly accommodate an individual word for each unique tree? Obviously it cannot. Therefore, when a word is formed it becomes a concept, a generalization, which makes equivalent those things that are non-equivalent. A word has the ability to extinguish unique features and create something that does not actually exist in nature – in this case the generic “tree.” By overlooking what is individual and real, men define the world anthropomorphically in a way that “does not stem from the essence of things.”
If men understand the world through words, how then can they hope to arrive at objective truth? As suggested above, they cannot. Nietzsche believed that truth for man is made up of metaphors which strike people as concrete and established in objective reality; he believed that “truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions.” These illusions (the ability to dissolve images into concepts), however, are what distinguish man from animal. Even the realm of science, which touts itself as supremely objective, must fall prey to this. While science believes in truth it fails to understand that it creates those truths, thus they are not necessarily objective or exterior.

Nietzsche explains the idea that although something may be true to man it does not necessarily mean it is natural:

“If I create a definition of a mammal and then, having inspected a camel, declare, ‘Behold, a mammal,” then a truth has certainly been brought to light, but it is of limited value, by which I mean that it is anthropomorphic through and through and contains not a single point which could be said to be ‘true in itself,’ really and in a generally valid sense, regardless of mankind.”

These laws of nature appear differently to Nietzsche than they do to science. Nietzsche points out that laws of nature are not known to us directly, but instead through their effects. Therefore we see that “relations refer only to one another, and they are utterly incomprehensible to use in their essential nature; the only things we really know about them are things which we bring to bear on them.” This means that man knows no truth that he has not directly influenced, either through drawing the arbitrary boundaries for what that truth must contain, through the creation of metaphor, or the like. Thus man falsely perceives a subjective truth as an objective truth. In this way the intellect once again works to deceive man into believing that metaphors are truth.

Is there, then, anything absolutely primary to interpret? Foucault believes there is not, and it seems Nietzsche would agree. If we believe what Nietzsche says about the inability of man to create words that are neither metaphor nor concept, it follows that there is no possibility for the interpretation of something primary. At best there is interpretation of a concept or metaphor but there is no ability to interpret the direct nervous simulation of which Nietzsche writes. This inability could be understood as deriving from: man’s lack of desire for pure knowledge – man does not care to pursue interpretation of the primary; the shortcomings of language, which lacks the capacity to express without metaphor, preventing expression and interpretation of the primary; the intellect, which works to deceive man into believing that we already interpret the primary; or the fact that what man perceives as truth only makes sense in relation to other truths, making it impossible to interpret without bringing to bare other truths obtained through metaphor, concept, or interpretation of the non-primary.

Sources:

Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense”

Foucault’s “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx”