Abstract

This chapter offers Nietzsche’s early, unpublished essay ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’ as a template of his subsequent rhetorical style. A close examination of the text’s use of similes, epithets, repetition, wordplay, assonance, and hyperbole will disclose, on the one hand, the rhetorical strategies by means of which Nietzsche polemically transposes the Kantian transcendental aesthetic into a moral harangue on truth and lies, arrogance and ignorance, and on the other hand, how this heightened transposition mirrors the formation of language as expounded by Nietzsche in the essay. According to the latter exposition, language is merely the end product of a series of metaphorical transpositions from sensation to image to sound; it thus lacks the authority to deliver logical, philosophical, or scientific truths. Such ‘truths,’ therefore, are false, but which Nietzsche rhetorically and moralistically magnifies into ‘lies’ begotten by human pride, arrogance, and deception. As the chapter points out, Nietzsche’s use of such morally freighted terms in his re-staging of Kant’s epistemological Copernican revolution incongruously belies the ‘nonmoral sense’ of truth and lies adverted to in the essay’s title, thereby furnishing an early example of the kind of titular-textual misalignment also found in Twilight (see Chap. 5).