On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense: Nietzsche, Perspectivism and the Ethics Meme

Last updated: October 21, 2026

“On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” is a short essay Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in 1873, while he was a young professor of classical philology in Basel, and never published himself; it survives in his Nachlass, the papers he left behind (German text, “1873, aus dem Nachlaß”). Its claim is that human truth grows out of language, and language out of metaphor. Asked what truth is, Nietzsche answers, in Walter Kaufmann’s translation: “A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms”. Kaufmann titles it “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense”; the German außermoralisch means “outside morality”, and the title promises to look at truth and lying before anyone has praised the one or condemned the other.

The ethics meme above this post makes a smaller version of the same move. A hand reaches in from the top right and pets a tan-and-white dog, drawn in the flat style of an online how-to guide, with its mouth open, tongue out and a tag on its collar. The caption on the left tells him that whether he is “a good boy depends on what system of ethics I choose to apply”, and a faded green logo peeks out in the bottom right corner. The dog looks delighted while his verdict waits on a theory he will never read.

Is He a Good Boy? Three Ethical Theories, Three Verdicts

The meme works because normative ethics has three main families, and each would ask a different question before patting the dog.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls virtue ethics “one of three major approaches in normative ethics”, the one that looks at character, next to deontology (duties and rules) and consequentialism (outcomes). A virtue ethicist asks whether the dog is loyal, brave and gentle by habit. A deontologist, in the tradition in which the SEP calls Kant the central figure, holds that “some choices cannot be justified by their effects”, so a dog who stole the sausage did wrong even if the family enjoyed the chase. A consequentialist holds that “normative properties depend only on consequences”, and utilitarianism, the classic version of Bentham, Mill and Sidgwick, is its paradigm case and only one variant of it. Our post on Kant’s categorical imperative works through the best-known deontological test.

Two labels need fixing in the popular summaries. “Teleological ethics” is often used as a synonym for utilitarianism, but Aristotle’s virtue ethics is goal-directed too: the Nicomachean Ethics opens with the claim that every action and pursuit “is thought to aim at some good” (W. D. Ross’s translation). And the German Gesinnungsethik, sometimes rendered as “ethics of attitude”, judges an act by the agent’s inner attitude; the Spektrum Lexikon der Philosophie notes that on Kant’s account of moral responsibility only the Gesinnung, the moral consciousness, is fundamental. Max Weber made the term famous in his 1919 lecture “Politics as a Vocation” as the “ethic of conviction”, set against the “ethic of responsibility”. According to the SEP entry on Weber, he called the two “not absolute opposites” and wanted them combined.

A Clever Animal Invents Knowing

Nietzsche’s essay opens with a fable that shrinks human knowledge to a brief episode on a star in a remote corner of the universe.

Once upon a time, the fable goes, there was a star on which “clever animals invented knowledge”. It was “the highest and most mendacious minute of ‘world history’” in Kaufmann’s version, and then, after nature had drawn a few breaths, the star froze and the clever animals had to die (in the German, “erstarrte das Gestirn”). In Nietzsche’s telling, the intellect is a means of preserving the individual, and it unfolds its main powers in dissimulation. Truth enters only later, through a peace treaty: people who want to live together agree on a uniformly valid and binding designation of things, and from then on “truth” means using the agreed names correctly.

Then comes the linguistic argument. “What is a word? The image of a nerve stimulus in sounds.” A nerve stimulus is turned into an image (Nietzsche’s first metaphor), the image into a sound (the second), and each step jumps into a completely different sphere. Concepts arise when we forget the jumps and stretch one word over countless different cases. “Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal”, he writes, and “No leaf ever wholly equals another”, yet we speak of “the leaf” as if nature had a master copy. The same flattening happens when one “good” has to cover a fetched stick and a guarded house.

Truths Are Coins That Lost Their Picture

The famous sentence defines truth as metaphor that has been used so long that nobody notices it is metaphor anymore.

In German the passage begins “Was ist also Wahrheit? Ein bewegliches Heer von Metaphern, Metonymien, Anthropomorphismen”. A “mobile army” is an image of force and discipline: metaphors that once were poetic get drilled and marched into service, until they seem fixed and binding. Truths, Nietzsche continues, are illusions whose illusory character has been forgotten, metaphors worn out by use, “coins which have lost their pictures” and now count only as metal.

This is where the title earns its odd word. If truth is a convention, then the duty to be truthful is, in Kaufmann’s rendering, “the obligation to lie according to a fixed convention”, “to lie herdlike in a style obligatory for all”. The moral prestige of truth, in other words, comes after the fact, as society’s reward for using the common coinage. The essay ends with two figures: an intuitive man who lives by fresh metaphors, art and illusion, and a rational man ruled by concepts. In misfortune the rational one keeps his face composed like a Stoic, and in the German text’s last sentence he wraps himself in his cloak and walks off slowly under the storm cloud.

“No Facts, Only Interpretations” Comes From a Notebook

The slogan “there are no facts, only interpretations” is a private note from about 1886 to 1887, numbered 7[60] in the critical edition, and it opens as an attack on positivism.

The Nietzsche scholar Neil Sinhababu cites the note as KSA 12:7[60] and dates it 1886 to 1887 (Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 2022). English readers often know it as section 481 of The Will to Power, the compilation Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth made from his notebooks after his collapse; the SEP warns that her arrangement does not follow Nietzsche’s own plans for the book. In the standard English edition of The Will to Power, as quoted by Dave Maier, the note starts “Against positivism, which halts at phenomena”, which says “there are only facts”. Nietzsche replies that “facts are precisely what there is not, only interpretations”.

The slogan leaves out the rest. Nietzsche immediately blocks the easy exit: “‘Everything is subjective,’ you say; but even this is interpretation.” He then adds that “Insofar as the word ‘knowledge’ has any meaning, the world is knowable”, only that it can be interpreted in many ways and has countless meanings, and he names the view: “Perspectivism”. The last line points to the source of the interpreting: “It is our needs that interpret the world”, our drives and their likes and dislikes.

Perspectivism Means More Eyes, Not Any Eyes

Perspectivism holds that all knowing happens from some standpoint, and Nietzsche uses it to demand more viewpoints on a question; he did not treat every view as equally good.

The clearest statement is in the Genealogy of Morality, Third Essay, section 12, which the SEP quotes as “There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing’”. The passage goes on: the more affects we let speak about a matter, “the more eyes, different eyes, we know how to bring to bear”, the more complete our “objectivity” becomes. In Beyond Good and Evil 22 (Helen Zimmern’s translation, Project Gutenberg), he calls the physicists’ “conformity to law” a “naively humanitarian adjustment and perversion of meaning”, then turns the charge on himself: “Granted that this also is only interpretation”, “well, so much the better.”

Maudemarie Clark argues in Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy that his later works “overcome TL’s denial of truth”, TL being the 1873 essay, and that the thesis that knowledge falsifies reality is absent from his last six books. Her developmental reading is influential but not shared by everyone; other readers think the later Nietzsche never fully dropped the idea that our concepts falsify. Brian Leiter, in the SEP entry on Nietzsche’s moral and political philosophy, reads him as an anti-realist about value, someone who denies objective moral facts, and keeps that apart from a global anti-realism about all facts. On Leiter’s reading, whether the dog is good depends on a perspective; whether he ate the sausage does not. Our post on Nietzsche on morals follows where he took that suspicion of moral values.

Moral perspectivism in this sense still differs from “anything goes” relativism. Perspectives can be compared and tested; what perspectivism denies is a view from nowhere that settles every dispute at once. Whether morality has objective facts at all is a separate fight, and our post on whether everything is permitted without objective morality lays out the realists’ and anti-realists’ best arguments.

Post-Truth Borrowed the Slogan and Left the Argument Behind

Nietzsche is often named as a forerunner of post-truth; scholars who test the charge against his texts tend to reject it, with one caveat.

Oxford Dictionaries made “post-truth” its word of the year for 2016, defining it as circumstances in which “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion” than appeals to emotion and personal belief; CNBC reported a rise in use of “some 2,000 percent” that year. The philosopher Lee McIntyre’s Post-Truth (MIT Press, 2018) argues that postmodern ideas about truth were picked up by right-wing pundits to undermine trust in science, and, as the PopMatters review quotes him, “This is the cost of playing with ideas as if they had no consequences.” Bruno Latour had sounded the alarm in 2004: in Critical Inquiry he worried that “dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction” to destroy hard-won evidence, citing a political strategist’s advice to keep making “the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue” in the climate debate.

Helmut Heit’s 2018 paper “Nietzsche as Predecessor of Post-Truth?” notes that a passage from the late notes is “notoriously quoted” to cast Nietzsche as a figurehead of relativism, and argues that Nietzsche did not treat all perspectives as equally valid; he worked with standards that are not absolute yet still let us judge knowledge claims. Kathleen Higgins of the University of Texas reached a similar verdict in 2026: “Nietzsche is far from defending a radical relativism” that would accept alternative facts against the evidence. Bernard Williams, in Truth and Truthfulness (2002), went further and recruited Nietzsche’s genealogical method to defend what his publisher’s summary calls two “basic virtues of truth, Accuracy and Sincerity” against the people Williams called “deniers”.

Nietzsche did put truth itself on trial. The first aphorism of Beyond Good and Evil begins with the will to truth, then raises “the problem of the value of truth” and asks: “Granted that we want the truth: WHY NOT RATHER untruth?” In section 4 he adds that “The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it”. Out of context, those lines read like a licence. In context they serve an inquiry he kept returning to: the SEP describes him treating the will to truth as indispensable and dangerous at once, and answering with an experimental critique of truthfulness instead of giving it up. Doubting the value of truth was, for him, one more job for truthfulness.

For another nineteenth-century German who thought our big words were haunting us, read our post on Max Stirner on spooks, truth and sanity.