Remarks on science, truths, and lies

In "On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense," Nietzsche insists that we recognize that our claims of truth cannot extend beyond the sphere of metaphor. The truths of science are conditioned by human subjective perception, but this is forgotten by the 'rational' person. Two things struck me while reading this.

First, I'm curious about truth claims expressed by scientific fields like biology. He writes, "If I make up the definition of a mammal, and then, after inspecting a camel, declare 'look, a mammal,' I have indeed brought a truth to light in this way, but it is a truth of limited value" (p. 68). It appears then that the biologist's project of taxonomizing the various life forms into hierarchical structures is, in an important sense, a fiction. It is true that the numerous genus-species relations do tell us what properties are inherited by individual classifications of life, but what do we learn from this? The activity appears to be a mere subsuming of perceived nature into these fabricated categories in order to make this nature more digestible to the human. But we shouldn't expect to find a hierarchical structure 'in nature'; things simply are as they are while our human conceptualization merely formalizes what is present to us. A project like this one appears to not be a position to claim 'truth', since nothing is really learned from nature.

Second, I am also intrigued as to the extramoral value of truths and lies. This is typical of Nietzsche, especially in works like On the Genealogy of Morals. He takes what appears to have absolute value -- for lack of a better term -- like morals, truths, and lies, and whereas other philosophers take their value as for granted, Nietzsche investigates the values themselves from a sort of historical, naturalistic perspective. Nietzsche writes, "What men avoid by excluding the liar is not so much being defrauded as it is being harmed by means of fraud. Thus, even at this stage, what they hate is basically not deception itself, but rather the unpleasant, hated consequences of certain sorts of deception. It is in a similarly restricted sense that man now wants nothing but truth: he desires the pleasant, life-preserving consequences of truth" (p. 66). This is a very interesting remark on the possible origins of the value of truths and lies, and I believe that is is quite plausible but too often overlooked. At the origin, the object of the hatred or pleasure is not the instance of "lie" or "truth" in itself, but rather the very material, tangible results associated with the act of lying or truth. It is the invention of the human that abstracts away from these particular instances to the forms of "lying" and "truth-telling", and somehow the object of scorn or pleasure gets focused on these concepts themselves -- as if they were absolutes -- rather than their material consequences.