Nietzsche

This essay was compiled using Nietzsche’s ideas of the history of truth and lies in conjunction with the human mind. In the midst of his crazy word choices and overfilled sentences, his message is quite clear: nothing can be deemed true or false just as it is. We, as a human race, accept things for what they are due to what our ancestors knew and passed down. “… when the same image has been generated millions of times and has been handed down for many generations and finally appears on the same occasion every time for all mankind, then it acquires at last the same meaning for men it would have if it were the sole necessary image and if the relationship of the original nerve stimulus to the generated image were a strictly causal one” (Nietzsche 6). He also states that everything, no matter what it is (a feeling, a tangible item, or even a scientific law), has a different aesthetic meaning to every person. So, essentially, every person defines his or her own universe. The beginning of this work focuses primarily on the details of truths and lies in the human race. He defines truth as “a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding” (Nietzsche 4). He states very honestly that mankind focuses on the material aspect of life instead of promoting happiness for him or herself. Therefore, many people twist the truth into a fabricated “un-truth” to persevere further into the life they feel they are supposed to live, instead of the life they want to live. He then goes into a rant, so to say, about how reality is actually an illusion or a metaphor of what is “true.” To put it in the simplest terms, things are only true because we say they are. He gives the example of the camel and the mammal. It is true to say that camels are mammals, but we only know they are mammals because we gave the definition of both “mammal” and “camel,” therefore making it a limited truth. He spends a good amount of time on explaining what we, as a human race, mean to the rest of the world. He talks about the laws of nature stating that we are not actually in tune with these laws; that we just deal with the effects of it. He seems to have a crazy train of thought, as he jumps from point to point pretty frequently. As to the rest of this class, I was instantly reminded of the idea of structuralism. Within structuralism, there is the idea of meaning being placed upon things, and that those meanings do not make any sense unless they are “attributed” to something. Within this essay by Nietzsche, he covers many of the same points stating that these “truths” that we so widely accept are meaningless to the rest of the world, but we do not question them: we just accept them for what they are. Nietzsche’s essay was a very good read. He leaves the reader with endless questions about the universe around them because he brings up points that the average person would never think of. His mentalities on the fact that every human being has a different outlook on life and the universe around him or her were extraordinary. “… it seems to me that ‘the correct perception’ – which would mean ‘the adequate expression of an object in the subject’ – is a contradictory impossibility” (Nietzsche 6).