One of the authors that my listeners and subscribers have been asking for consistently to be included in my Sadler's Lectures podcast is Friedrich Nietzsche. In fact, he is a consistent favorite when I create polls about who I ought to produce content on next.
One of his short essays that I shot a series of core concept videos about several years back is his "Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense," in which Nietzsche argues, among other things that truth itself is something invented:
A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.
He says a good bit more about truth and its presumed opposite, falsehood or lying, as well as about the workings and functions of our intellects, and the inescapability of metaphor.
These seven podcast lectures run to about an hour-and-a-half - so you can download and listen your way through all of them in a workout or commute or two. Here they are:
- Dissimulation and the Human Intellect
- The Invention of Truth and Lying
- What Is Truth?
- Metaphor, Language, and Concepts
- Rationality, Abstraction, and Anthropomorphism
- Idealism, Natural Law, and Science
- Myth, Art, Metaphor, and Intuition
I hope that you enjoy them and find them thought-provoking!
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