Deception and Truth

It is difficult to look at oneself and find the false things that are inside and admit and accept those truths. It is natural for man to highly rate themselves on morality and honesty based on some good deeds, like giving change to the poor or building a new school in an underdeveloped community. One can put more weight on such actions than on the negative ones he has done. He may describe himself as great, successful, the best, pure, most natural, most powerful, and having authority to make things the "truth" just because he is human and has a certain title or earned a higher degree that were both designed by humans themselves. Nietzsche, the author of "On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense", describes in this excerpt how mankind creates "truth" through perception and deception. He compares man to nature as he claims man guilty of deception and nature as innocent and the truth. He explains how humans are easily blinded and deceived by their eyesight. Nietzsche describes the human mind and activity as naturally gullible by perceptions, concepts and metaphors that falsely claim to be real knowledge and the truth. After reading the excerpt I deem that the author claims that the truth lies within nature alone because only she knows how, why and where it originated from. Knowing the negative tendencies of human nature, he asks how man can be bold and arrogant enough to seek and make things true when their nature involves actions and beliefs of deception and selfishness. Man deceives one another in order to rise in society and tries to get that power to make things "true". "This art of dissimilation reaches its peak in man; here, deception, flattery, lying and cheating, slander, false pretenses, living on borrowed glory, masquerading, conventions of concealment, playacting before others and before oneself, in sum, the constant fluttering about the flame of vanity, is so much the rule and the law that almost nothing is more incomprehensible than how an honest and pure desire for truth could arise among men" (247). It is difficult to understand how man, who is capable of deception, can have the desire to know and make truth.