In Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying…” he questions what ‘truth’ is and who determines its existence. He notes that our perspective of the world is filtered through our own personal interpretations. Therefore, language is subjective: it begins as nervous stimulus, becomes an image, and is then communicated through sound. Nietzsche asserts, “We believe that when we speak of trees, colours, snow, and flowers, we have knowledge of the things themselves, and yet we possess only metaphors of things which in no way correspond to the original entities” (755). In response to this notion, he asks, “What then, is truth?” To which he answers:  “…truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by fre­quent use and have lost all sensuous vigour…” (756). Generations and generations ago, someone determined that a tree should be called a ‘tree,’ so he is insinuating that what we consider ‘truth’ is just an idea that is passed down through the generations and is our way of making sense of the world. He states, “But the fact that a metaphor becomes hard and rigid is absolutely no guarantee of the necessity and exclusive justification of that metaphor” (758). Truth, or what human beings have classified as truth, is not reality simply because it has been repeated. However, if a tree has always been referred to as ‘a tree,’ can’t this be the only truth? What is the original truth or truthful way to ascribe meaning to an object? Years ago, if a tree was given the signifier ‘chair,’ would that be its truth? Is the truth the actual, physical tree as it stands in nature? 

In this search for determining what truth is, Nietzsche says, “If I create the 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…” (757). Humans can be regarded as ‘architectural geniuses’ in that we manufacture and create concepts, forget that they were metaphors to begin with, and then regard them as truth. He notes, “Thus, forgetting that the original metaphors of perception were indeed metaphors, he takes them for the things themselves” (757). We come to regard our metaphors as ‘true’ and forget that they are not in rooted in reality. I find it fascinating that Nietzsche asserts that not even science is truth, since it is still filtered through human perspective and interpretation. His assertions made me think about the way we use the words ‘truth’ and ‘lies,’ if really there is no such thing as truth. Perhaps when I instill in my students the importance of ‘truth’ and ‘telling the truth’ I’m really telling them to do something impossible since truth does not really exist.

In Course in General Linguistics, Saussure introduces what he calls the “linear nature of the signifier” in Principle II: the explanation is comparatively brief, and he qualifies it as obvious enough to have been overlooked in the study of linguistics, i.e. too plain and simple to merit mention. He throws us a bone and explains that because the signifier is auditory, it takes place in a span of time, and that “the span is measurable in a single dimension; it is a line” (829). Evidence of a signifier’s linear relationship to time can be found in writing, where graphic marks on a page are created and perceived in spatial lines. The time we take to read signifiers “in our heads” on a page simulates the time we would take to hear those signifiers spoken aloud, in corresponding order. In the particular language you’re reading this in, you’re processing what I’ve written from left to right, top to bottom, based on our collective understanding of linear time. This principle, which Saussure underlines with enough importance to declare that “the whole mechanism of language depends upon it” (829) provides scaffolding for his notion that words acquire valuable relations because they are chained together in a sequence of speech. Two words can’t be spoken simultaneously, so they fall into a certain order, and the context created by that order is essential to how we process the meaning of those signifiers within what Saussure refers to as “discourse” (838).

Of course, this makes me think about the “line” as we understand it in poetry. “Breaking” a line is perhaps a unique intervention in how a reader experiences the procession of time within a poem, and a way of generating a different type of distinct unit. One reads a sentence in prose that will go as far as the material boundaries (margins) of a page or screen allow, and then on until the writer has halted the sentence and closed it with a period to make it a distinct sequence, which is then a unit within a larger sequence (paragraph), and then a larger one (text): there’s our usual system for wrangling concepts or thought through language. Yet enjambment in verse can alter the natural flow of speech by creating a minute suspension within a sentence, chopping up what would usually be understood as one unit mimicking the linear time span of a sequence conveyed. A line break affects the process of reading words on a page in one’s head (visual/spatial) and ideally the process of reading a poem out loud (auditory). Is it unnatural, as in a willful intervention on the natural logic and flow of speech? Well, one could argue that poets do this (and a lot of other things) because they’re taking into account the potential for spoken language to mimic music: its laws, its measurements, its sensations, which are also commanded by sound taking place in time. Saussure isn’t concerned with that in this snippet, but I wonder if Nietzsche might care in the context of our sober, scientific, mendacious classifications being capable of being broken by willful illusion, intuition, and the drive for artistic pleasure.

Saussure makes clear immediately in Course that the individual “can never create nor modify language by himself; it exists only by virtue of a sort of contract signed by the members of a community”: the signs that make up language are social and collective (824). Yet in On Truth and Lying, Nietzsche suggests that somewhere outside of “hardened” classification exists unique and individual sensuous perception. Can this ever be translated using our preexisting system of language? Towards the conclusion of On Truth and Lying, Nietzsche’s idea of Heroic individualism within artistic creation peeks through. He presents two archetypes in opposition: the Enlightened “needy” man of reason, and the more liberated, free-willed man of intuition.

That vast assembly of beams and boards to which needy man clings, thereby saving himself on his journey through life, is used by the liberated intellect as a mere climbing frame and plaything on which to perform its most reckless tricks; and when it smashes this framework, jumbles it up and ironically re-assembles it, pairing the most unlike things and dividing those things which are closest to one another, it reveals the fact that it does not require those makeshift aids of neediness, and that it is now guided, not by concepts but by intuitions. (761)

Taking hold of the linear nature of language, and using it as a site for play (reckless tricks) through the bizarre breaking and spatial rearranging of sequences, may just be one way humans are capable of altering the agreed-upon logic of language proceeding in “real” time. Of course, it may be worthwhile to investigate music’s role in this–perhaps yet another deceptive man-made and man-measured edifice.

Both Nietzsche and Saussure discuss the inadequacy of language at getting at reality, albeit in slightly dissimilar ways. First I will discuss each theory independently and then go on to Nietzsche’s discussion of art and intuition at the end of “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral sense.”  Firstly, in Culler’s “Saussure’s Theory of Language,” Culler explains that by “the arbitrary nature of the sign” Saussure means “that there is no natural or inevitable link between the signifier and the signified (29).” He goes on to use the example of dog as a signifier, which alone does not mean “dog,” one could substitute any sound sequence to denote “dog.” However, Culler goes on, this is not the only problem that arrises with in linguistics, because if so, each language could just be mapped onto another, replacing each signifier with the signifier in the corresponding language one is looking at. However, this is also clearly not the case, so therefore “Each language articulates or organizes the world differently. Languages do not simply name existing categories; they articulate their own (31).” I think the next step Saussure takes in his Course is where he comes into contact with Nietzsches theory. This is that signifieds “ are arbitrary divisions of a continuum that are not autonomous entities,  each of which is defined by some kind of essence. They are member of a system and are defined by their relations to other members of that system (34).”  To showcase this point Culler uses the example of river and stream in English with fleuve and rivière in French. In English “river” is not a stream based on size; however, to define one, one must know the other. “While in French “fleuve” flows into the sea and “rivière” does not. They represent a different articulation of the conceptual plane (33-34).” Similarly in teaching someone what the color Brown is, one must express its differences from Green, Blue, Red and so on. In this system we need the system as a whole to create a way of communicating.

Nietzsche then asks “Is there a perfect match between things and their designations? Is language the full and adequate expression of all realities (754)?” To Nietzsche the answer is no. Using the example of ‘hard’ in reference to a stone. He calls the concept a “merely entirely subjective stimulus (754).” So language does not get to ‘thing-in-itself,’ or reality.  This is because, according to Nietzsche, humanity only seeks to “designate only the relations of things to human beings (755).”  This point agrees with Saussure’s, that signifieds exist in a system of relations, and then Nietzsche builds on this by claiming that man then uses metaphors to express these relations. The first metaphor is when the signified is translated into an image (not his use of signified) and second when the image becomes a sound, assuming the sound of “tree” or “snake” or any signifier, as, of course, a “snake” is independent of its human designated sound that connotes the image of a “snake”. This then leaves us, in Nietzsche, with a feeling that “we believe that when we speak of tress, colors, snow and flowers, we have knowledge of the things themselves, and yet we possess only metaphors of things which in no way correspond to the original entities (755).”  After this strong exclamation, where then does this leave us? Entirely hopeless beings with no chance of ever getting to reality, the ‘thing-in-itself?’ Stuck in a dreadful cycle of using metaphors to speak of the world, yet never actually being able to do and deciding ourselves? Here, I think, Nietzsche turns to art as a possibility of moving beyond these limitations.

Resting on this notion, Nietzsche explains that truth, then, is “a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms(756).”  This is where I become uncertain, but I think Nietzsche makes the claim in this turn that what would be needed to escape this linguistic limitation, or at least push it to its outermost point, is “an aesthetic way of relating, by which I (Nietzsche) mean an allusive transference, a stammering translation into quite a different language. For which purpose a middle sphere and mediating force is certainly required which can freely invent and freely create poetry (758).”  This then involves the use of another metaphor usage, which is freeing, and different than simply “lying” by only being mistaken and taking reality for its weak substitute in normal (i.e. non poetic) speech. Here Nietzsche seems to hold up myth for the Greeks, as a way of existing in more dream like world, where a god can come to Earth and “a tree may speak like a nymph,” therefore achieving some other way of being.

Then this would be, perhaps, articulated by Picasso’s statement that art is “a lie that makes us realize truth.”  Taking, for example, the Surrealists fascination with the language in Comte de Lautréamont’s Songs of Maldodor as mode of expression that does not attempt to be misguided and deceive the real for a metaphor. Instead Lautréamont composed the famous line “as beautiful as the random encounter between an umbrella and a sewing-machine upon a dissecting-table” which Soupault and Breton came to idealize, using as an example of the potential of Surrealism. This type of art does not attempt to get closer to the ‘thing-in-itself,’ but instead by moving so far from it, reveals a very different truth of the world. Although here Nietzsche might still call this the anthropomorphic world.  But this line of Lautréamont’s could align with what Nietzsche writes of intuition and its ability to break down and reassemble and play with the structure that humanity has created, and in doing so “he will speak only in forbidden metaphors and unheard of combinations of concepts so that, by at least demolishing and deriding old conceptual barriers, he may do creative justice to the impression made on him by the mighty, present intuition (761).”  So artistic creation can create a mode of expression that can reveal new truths, that moves beyond linguistic limits. Similarly when Nietzsche claims that “A painter who has no hands and who wished to express in song the image hovering before him will still reveal more through his substation of one sphere for another than the empirical world betrays of the essence of things (758).”  So there is some hope for communication, for moving beyond simply “lying” with language or fooling ourselves in discourse. I think the poetic expression would create a new set of problems, though, in interpretation of what the disparate imagery creates. What exactly does Lautréamont mean? Or perhaps in the elusiveness of the image is where new truth is revealed?  There does arise more problems with this mode of expression, using the plasticity of language and what it can denote. Saussure references the problem with idioms, which connects with the way a language shapes its world view, and Poetry and art does the same. I think it creates a new language, not one that has solved the problems Nietzsche and Saussure have brought up, but perhaps that provides a way of thinking and seeing that does get perhaps closer to some essential quality or texture of being human, without trying to objectively portray a reality we will never arrive at.   

Nietzsche “On truth and Lying”, devotes an ample amount of energy on how the reader is meant to feel when experiencing a text. The theme of “deception” at the heart of language and cognition is seen throughout the reading. This could be done for a variety of reasons, perhaps, for the reader to feel a sense of how language and words can hold different meanings and emotions. It could also be to describe how reality and the feeling of being deceived can be tied to language and the manner in which people interact with one another. Throughout the reading Nietzsche holds a melancholy tone reflecting also the art of “deception” and how it can impact the manner in which information is received. When he states “Even on this level they do not hate deception but rather the damaging, inimical consequences of certain species of deception.”(754) it lead to reflecting what the reader can consider the highest form of “deception” the answer varying from person to person adds to the complicated nature. A question that arises from this is Nietzsche attempting to demonstrate the untrustworthy perception seen in writing or perhaps the manner in which being deceived is far worse? Would knowing you’re being deceived be worse than the deception itself?

Saussure from Course in General Linguistics speaks on a slightly different topic, with a focus on how words and meaning work together to create better understanding. The problem with thinking of language as a process of giving names to things can cause a misinterpretation of what language is and it’s only attainable through words. An example of this is seen through the images used on page 826 of the “Arbor” followed by an image of a tree, and on the following page “Arbor” is placed underneath the word “tree”. The placement of the image of the tree above “Arbor” also provides a distinction between what is visible versus what is not. While the word “tree” is part of a way to define “arbor” there are varying interpretations of what that image will be to the reader. Saussure does this to focus on how words can also work with creating meaning in order to form a way of understanding outside of typical norms. This led me to wonder if other countries or languages experience this same form of language? How images and words create a larger meaning but can vary between person to person as well as between languages.

In forming a thought, one conjures up a representation of reality, and not the real. Conceptualization is inherently a fabrication, a self-deception. Yet, often we humans forget or fail to acknowledge this. In our own egotistic pursuit of correctness and desire to be perceived as upstanding, trustworthy individuals, we claim truth as our aim, our aura. Nietzsche speaks on this when he writes, “The arrogance inherent in cognition and feeling casts a blinding fog over the eyes and senses of human beings, and because it contains within itself the most flattering evaluation of cognition, it deceives them about the value of existence” (Nietzsche 752-53). Our very presence in space and time is beget in deception and even if we are able to uncover a sliver of its purpose, we play at knowing and living in some sort of authentic otherworld in which we know truth and speak it. Not only do we participate in deception, we enjoy it like a game. We flatter, we pander, we tell-half truths both in self-congratulation and in appeasement or encouragement of others in order to maintain socially constructed group norms and hospitality. 

The Traitors has quickly gained prominence and fanfare amongst reality TV show competitions. This game of deception, trickery, persuasion, dubiously meaningful mini games, and coalition building garners a cult following from the public, I suspect, because it reveals what we all know deep down – we, too, play a game of deception. 

The fact of untruths does not disturb us, but rather is warmly accepted by us and implemented into our everyday way of communicating. Nietzsche correctly asserts that humans do not hate being lied to, nor do they love being told the truth. Rather, they want to minimize harm received. Because we cannot fully conceive or reproduce actuality, we embrace the stand-in, the metaphor, the signal so long as it is not to our detriment. 

Language is constructed around designation and substitutes that altogether are not what is represented. The production of language is a cascade of metaphors: first that of perception of the actual thing-in-itself to a thought image, second, that of the thought image into a sound, and continuing into written and other representations. Truth, in conception and in expression through language, is thus nothing but deception, “a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms…subjected to rhetorical intensification, translation, decoration…which…strike people as established, canonical, and binding” (756). Truth is a construct centered around a mutually enforced perception of reality.

Indeed, in season 2, episode 4 of The Traitors, Housewife and traitor Phaedra Parks remarks at the demise of fellow contestant (by her own edict) Ekin-Su, “Oh, my Lord! Sweet baby Jesus! Not Ekin-Su. Lord, not Ekin-Su!” The remaining cast mates do not suspect Phaedra because their mutual perception of what a housewife, devout Christian woman, and extravagant personality is demonstrated. They have forgotten the illusion, that their conception of her and her words have been agreed upon en masse as truth, though they are not founded in reality but dolled up in custom, finery, and affectation. We enjoy mutual deception of language and cognition – of representations, metaphors, and signs. We love being in on the game, until we are not.

For Nietzche, as for Phaedra, deception is just part of the game. That’s life, baby.

In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” the word “nevermore” serves as a powerful symbol of finality and despair. Repeated by the raven in response to the narrator’s desperate questions, it strips away any hope for change, offering an unyielding, hopeless answer. Each utterance of “nevermore” reinforces the harsh reality that the narrator will not be reunited with his lost love, Lenore, and that his sorrow is endless. There is no possibility for comfort or resolution, as the word acts as a cruel reminder of the permanence of death.

The repetition of “nevermore” also reflects the narrator’s growing madness. According to the “Northern Anthology of Theory Criticism,” it is stated “that in reply to which this word “Nevermore” should involve the utmost conceivable amount of sorrow and despair,” highlighting how this word is used to symbolize the constant-growing darkness Edgar Allen Poe wants to portray to the reader. At the start of the poem, he seeks solace and understanding from the raven, hoping for an answer that might ease his grief. However, with each response, the word becomes a source of torment, slowly chipping away at his rationality. The narrator’s obsession with the raven’s word reveals his inability to accept reality and his spiraling emotional state. What starts as a simple query about his fate turns into an overwhelming fixation that leads him deeper into madness. The repetition of the word highlights how important it is, giving it more meaning as the word stands out as the reader reads the poem.

Moreover, “nevermore” underscores the cyclical nature of grief. The word resonates like an echo of the narrator’s internal suffering, as if the pain of loss is a continuous, inescapable cycle. Every question he asks is met with the same answer, reinforcing the idea that there is no escape from the anguish of mourning. The repetition of the word mirrors the way grief can feel repetitive and unending, trapping the individual in a loop of sorrow.

Ultimately, “nevermore” captures the essence of irreversible sorrow, both in a literal and metaphorical sense. It is a reminder that death is final and that some losses cannot be undone. The raven’s single word becomes a haunting reflection of the narrator’s emotional turmoil, amplifying his sense of hopelessness and despair. In this way, “nevermore” is not just a word but the manifestation of the narrator’s inner torment, a symbol of the universal pain that comes with loss.

In “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” Nietzsche’s project is alternately a negative critical intervention toward German Idealism and Christian morals and an attempt to lay out new terms for understanding the functions of language as a parallel metaphorical construction apart from the material world. In a tone at turns Biblical, polemical, ironic, and pompous, he attacks the notion that language is precisely representative, deploying examples that might strike a contemporary reader as commonplace dorm room musings, “if one of us were to see a stimulus as red, a second person were to see the same stimulus as blue” (758). This effect is in part historical, as thought experiments which went to the heart of epistemology at the turn of the 20th century now strike us as bordering on the banal. The critique of truth as a useful category is the groundwork for a more subtle ideological argument presented at the close of the piece. Although Nietzsche attacks the notion that language can express truth, arguing that language itself is a process of deception, dissimulation and creativity which should not be morally evaluated, it seems evident that he does not feel that all use of language is created equal, favoring some deception outside the causal and utilitarian “fleeing from… the harm from being tricked” he describes (754). 

The historical argument early in the piece sets some of the confused terms which develop into his ideological archetypes of man at the close. Language emerges as a “peace treaty” to leave a Hobbesian state of nature for “herds and society”, which humanity seeks out of “boredom and necessity” (753). Truth in language is a “A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation, and decoration” which calcifies over time into a ‘truth’ which operates as mass deception (756). For Nietzsche, the ordinal difference between types of deception seems to be the ability for a subject to be cognizant and participatory in this project of dissimulation. Implicitly pitying those who meekly accept what society constructs as truth, contrasting “the man of reason and the man of intuition” (761) and valorizing human subjectivity in Greek antiquity as an example of constructive dissimulation, “at no time is [human intellect] richer, more luxuriant, more proud, skilful, and bold (760”). 

Of course, this valorized “unreason” of the intuitive intellect is not coming about in an autarchic state of nature, and is reliant both upon prior dissimulating language as well as the labor of others. Nietzsche seems to hold the archetype of the researcher with some disdain, for the air of certainty, the bent toward the practical, and the uncreative application of the intellect. The intuitive, architectural and creative type (which Nietzsche seems to emulate in his style and argument) is worthy of veneration, perhaps, only to the degree in which his deception is successful in structuring the world around him, not only for himself but for others. 

In focusing on the impossibility of veracity in language, Nietzsche smuggles in a clear awareness of language as an expression of power. His anti-moralism is ultimately secondary to a disdain for society, not on the basis of class consciousness or concern for the oppressed, but rather for the way society conceals and limits the free expression of an ‘intuitive’, almost ecstatic understanding of power through language which Nietzsche himself conceals in his final argument. Throughout the rhetorical turns and elaborated metaphors deployed, there is no mention of human labor, power relations, or the capacity of language to cohere for the purposes of domination and subjugation. Nietzsche is certainly sincere about the universal untruth of language, but occupies his ‘intuitive’ mode of intellect to covertly naturalize what strikes me as an insidious notion of power relations and human inequality.

I feel that human is an “architectural genius” because of the ability possessed by all humans to make meaning out of “nothing”. We derive the most complex stories and associations from mundane objects and actions. When we tell stories our words as Eliza Hamilton from the musical Hamilton puts it “You built me palaces out of paragraphs/You built cathedrals” (Song: Burn). We make entire worlds with some resembling ours and others being illusions we breathe life into. Words are just scratches on paper or squiggles on a screen that require the reader to imagine the concepts the words intend to represent. According to Nietzsche, the human is an “architectural genius” because it “succeeds in erecting the infinitely complicated cathedral of concepts on moving foundations…so delicate that it can be carried off on the waves…” (pg. 757). I think what he means by this is that what we conceive of as truth and it resting on solid ground is that the ground is moving constantly with the truth being built to be strong enough to hold on. The moving ground could be an illusion to the questioning that society often subjects the truth to. Even when the questions appear settled, unanswered questions bubble under the surface threatening to move the foundation further. When he describes how the concepts rest on the foundation of the relationship he draws between being firm and being delicate is probably about how for a truth it needs to be able to move in a way where it reaches everyone yet be sturdy enough to withstand questioning or even opposing truths.

This implies that language has more of a capacity to build new things and less of a capacity to describe. This is not to say that language is incapable of describing. Many of the poems and stories written in the romance genre can pair tangible words with a concept as messy and tangled as love. However when asked to describe love by itself most humans struggle. That highlights the limits of descriptive language exists because “It is not known to us in itself but only in its effects” (pg. 759). As with love we only know the concept from how it affects others and how we are affected as recipients of love however we do not know what the essence of love is. Nietzsche further expands on this when he mentions how “…they are utterly incomprehensible to us in their essential nature” (pg. 759). It is because of this that humanity relies heavily on figurative language to explore or explain the truth within ideas and objects encountered in daily life. On some level we are aware that we will never know the full truth within the world around us yet these language tools help us to get as close to the essential truth as possible.