For all the attention it has received and all the times its most famous (or infamous) lines have been quoted, Nietzsche's brief “On Truth and Lie in the Extramoral Sense” remains something of an enigma – a “riddling X,” as the text itself refers to the inaccessible and undefinable thing-in-itself (das rätselhafte X des Dings an sich). In large measure, the enigmatic status of the text is due to the uncanny way it manages to predict and inscribe within its own borders, in its own terms, any attempt that would gain access to it by solving its riddle and identifying its X. Those who would take the text literally on the level of its argument and its (“philosophical”) logic all too often inscribe themselves in the text as the “rational man” at the end. He may be a stoical man who learns from experience and governs himself by concepts – and he may seek nothing but sincerity, truth, freedom from deception, and protection from ensnaring ambushes – but his reason and rationality are for all that no less a “masterpiece of dissimulation” (Meisterstück der Verstellung), for the rule of his concepts is nevertheless the rule of metaphors: his concepts and their “truth” are never the adequate expression of any reality but only faded, cooled, stiffened metaphors – the edifice of concepts a vast columbarium containing the ashes of once-living, but now dead, metaphors.