Ecce Homo as Nietzsche’s Honest Lie

How can we reconcile Nietzsche’s professed commitment to honesty with the fictionalisations we find in his autobiographical Ecco Homo? Nietzsche understands truth as a practice to be actively engaged in. It can operate to purify us from delusions and cultivate new habits. A new practice of truth serves to overcome the old concept of truth. Once we recognise this we can reconcile Nietzsche’s criticisms of truth with his praise of truth, the latter refers to a new truth practice that reveals the dishonesty at the heart of the concept of truth as the ‘real world’ and allows us to go beyond this concept. If we are also to reconcile the importance of truth and of honesty towards oneself, which Nietzsche declares in Ecce Homo, with the fictionalisations this text seems to contain, these fictions must be seen to serve Nietzsche’s practice of truth. I claim that they do and that Ecce Homo, therefore, operates as Nietzsche’s ‘honest lie’, which contrasts to the “lie of the ideal” (EH Foreword 2).