The two types of humanity and the meaning of “truth” within Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense”
In Nietzsche’s essay “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” he highlights and describes the categorical and profound differences between two types of humanity that he identifies to be crucial to understanding human thinking and emotions. The first type that he identifies would be the man of reason or the “intelligent man,” who is characterized by the notion of capacity for abstract thought, logic, and reason, and who seeks to understand the world through the use of language and concepts. Personally, I would say that Nietzsche’s “intelligent man” description would be describing most peoples’ disposition in understanding the things in the universe that corresponds with facts and logic and in essence to explain the inner workings of the world humans live and thrive. The second type is the “intuitive man,” who is characterized by their direct, embodied experience of the world and their reliance on instinct and feeling rather than dwelling in the realm of abstract thought and reason. The “intuitive man” therefore has a place in society where it is important to embrace the primal feelings of humans in order to grow and develop whether it would be based off of growing a business that appeals to a target audience or a personal goal set aside to be completed in a fair amount of time. By the end of Nietzsche’s essay he suggests that these two types of humanity represent different ways of understanding and engaging with reality based on the interpretation of human’s logic and reason or feeling and emotion which each has its own strengths and limitations. I believe the strength of being the “intelligent man”is to see the world based on a human’s reasoning to what is real but a limitation would be that there would be a tough endeavor to correlate the reasoning in a practical setting. The “intuitive man” has a strength with understanding the world in an emotional sense which helps build humanity’s goals but a limitation would be that it lacks the presence of rules. Nietzsche also suggests that the balance between these two types of humanity is important for a human’s overall well-being and growth which I believe to be his reasoning in bringing the reader’s attention to these two distinct humanities by the end of his essay. Within his essay, on page 756, he brings forth meaning into the construction of what “truth” entails for humans. In his own words he says the following of what “truth” entails: “A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, 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.” Thus, Nietzsche’s answer to the formation of truth is that it is essentially built as a human construct, a set of linguistic symbols and conventions that have been developed and embellished over time, and which are taken as fixed, objective, and authoritative by a given community. He argues that these concepts do not accurately reflect the complex and fluid nature of reality, but rather are human-made representations of reality. With this information provided through Nietzsche’s essay, there is a reasoning that “truth” and the description of the two humanities have a purpose in explaining the building of a human’s language and personal reality based off a balance between the man of reason or “intelligent man” and the “intuitive man.”


