Living in Expression [Nietzsche]
The purpose of this paper is to disclose the relation between language and thought as present in On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral sense. I believe this to be an important aspect of Nietzsche’s work; despite his condemnation of the arrogant way language is used to speak authoritatively about the world, Nietzsche himself, as a philosopher, was essentially tied to the medium of his expression.
On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral sense came after Birth of Tragedy, in which Nietzsche outlined a distinction between “tragic knowledge” and “Socratic knowledge.” Notable is the differing style in which each type of knowledge is expressed: for the former, knowledge is expressed poetically, and for the latter, scientifically. But what enables this stylistic division of language? Where do they originate, and where do they reconvene? At what point did the metaphor - in which unlike objects are juxtaposed - become a function of knowledge?
It is in the unpublished writings of young Nietzsche that we discover metaphor as the origin of knowledge. Present in every thought, Nietzsche claims the “fundamental human drive” is metaphor-formation - an idea that yields an unique understanding of language that applies equally to both Dionysian expression of ancient Greece and scientific expression of modernity.1
On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense begins with a nihilistic streak, poking fun at those who claim to know. At odds with the contemporary tropes of knowledge and truth, young Nietzsche goes on to criticize the pathology of scientism, reject the anthropomorphism of nature as true knowledge, and claim that being human is no less than having an active imagination. By following this interesting work we are rewarded with a unique epistemological justification for pragmatic conceptions of truth, knowledge, and language.
Nietzsche posits that knowledge is a semantic truth derived from a relation to an environment. Nietzsche characterizes the relation as a metaphor, which is an analogical inference. Knowledge-formation is a process in which our senses are stimulated, and an image is inferred from the stimuli. Images can be projected as sound, another inference. At the hight of knowledge, a concept is formed in word; a reference to the image.
At the physiological level, pre-cognitive level, and cognitive level, it is by the analogical inference that our perception of the world is formed. When considered seriously, this seems to suggest that Nietzsche is looking to reconcile mind/body duality from a phenomenological approach. Further, it means we make metaphors at the most basic level, and each inference is inherently susceptible to fallibility. What does this mean for language and science, both dependent on rigorous convention? What does this mean to thought, expressed in consciousness and in speech as language? Is thought limited to language? Does the language limit thought?
My thesis: according to young Nietzsche, language limits thought only when universal judgments are made according to instrumental truths. To be clear, I do not interpret Nietzsche to be saying “language conditions intuition,” or, “experience conforms to language.” This paper is structured in four sections: The Origin of Language, Language as Metaphorical Convention, Thought as Metaphorical Expression, and a conclusion.
THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE
Upon first read, Nietzsche seems to present contradictory empirical claims: there are no truths, but there are certain truths. Nietzsche is famous for his polemical claims2, but in this case a second reading yields clarification: we can’t know the truth of things-in-themselves3 (metaphysical truths), but we can know the meaning of things in relation to us (instrumental truths). With this, Nietzsche takes a skeptical stance towards metaphysics, and orients us towards the sphere in which he is concerned – the cultural sphere.
Nietzsche states that man “by preference and necessity, wishes to exist socially and with the herd.”4 By resolving to the basic preference for a “peace treaty” in regard to the “war of each against all,” men agree to basic (unwritten) social rules. The first of these rules is the “binding designation for things,” which enables individuals to share reference of objects in language. With the binding designation of things in language, the “first laws of truth” are set.5 The “truth” of language is socially upheld for its consequence: the ability to communicate in speech. Language, in the directed, conventional form of linguistic expression, is an instrumental truth.
Instrumental truths are semantic truths; we adhere to them because they carry a pragmatic meaning in regard to our safety and future. The semantics of instrumental truth is reducible to one: life-preservation. The whole of culture can therefore be expressed as an emergence of life-preserving truths, and language, as an integral part of culture, is no different. The anthropomorphic nature of language enables us to speak nature in how it relates to us - to carve a simpler, safer human world out of a complex natural world. For example, when we say “The rock is hard,” we are not describing the rock, but expressing our sensation of grasping a rock. But this brings about a problem for language: since no one thing can be defined by itself, or by its essence, it must therefore be defined in terms of another; by way of metaphor.6 In this way “we believe we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things—metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.”7 Indeed, there is no “real” expression for knowing apart from metaphor8.
LANGUAGE AS METAPHORICAL CONVENTION
“And besides, what about these linguistic conventions themselves? Are they products of knowledge, that is, of the sense of truth? Are designations congruent with things? Is language the adequate expression of all realities?”9
Nietzsche makes extensive use of the concept of a metaphor in his epistemological formulations. Every formulation of knowledge happens by way of analogical inference. From stimuli to image to sound to word to concept, each transference is inferred by a different medium. Just as we anthropomorphize nature, every level of inference privatizes knowledge according to its medium, and in the process of privation, something, in the very least, is distorted.
In “The Philosopher,” Nietzsche makes a distinction between two types of inference: conscious and unconscious.10 Unconscious inferences are “a process of passing from image to image” which occurs prior to concepts, “in perceptions and according to intuition.” 11 It is at the pre-cognitive level of perceptions that the first two metaphorical inference happens, from stimuli to image, and then from image to sound. Conscious inference happens in the realm of linguistic language and therefore conforms to the social/instrumental truth of language. In language, words invite us to the generic conception, as it is the generic metaphorical conventions from which language arose, and we respond automatically. As words refer to a knowledge known by metaphor, to speak a “linguistic truth” is to speak according to socially prevalent metaphor.
While originally it was language that birthed concepts from words, Nietzsche claims that this labor was “taken over in later ages by science.”12 He elaborates with the metaphor “Just as the bee simultaneously constructs cells and fills them with honey, so science works unceasingly on this great columbarium of concepts, the graveyard of perceptions.”13
Referring to our “Alexandrian period,” it is the Socratic knowledge drive which continually seeks a privation of knowledge: when “man is the measure of all things” the “impulse to be true, transferred onto nature, gives rise to the belief that nature must be true towards us. The knowledge drive depends upon this transference14. But as we’ve already stated, transference is privatizing and distorting; it says nothing but meaning in relation to the medium. Therefore science cannot pass judgment on ideal truth, for it only knows instrumental, descriptive truths at the expense of creative, synthetic, emergent truths.
THOUGHT AS METAPHORICAL EXPRESSION
For the context of this paper I’d like to refer to two modes of thought: directed thought, and linguistic thought. Upon introspection, thought is usually accompanied by language. But thought is also accompanied with other phenomena: desire, mental states, moods, ect. When we act according to direct thought, we act not according to introspection, but according to intention. In the mode of directed thought we are driven by the meaning of our action, not by the linguistic content. Similarly, a baby does not require words in order to feed, and Cezanne did not require words in order to paint his experiences, yet both require certain knowledge, and both see a transfer of their intention to the world.
The word “leaf” itself says relatively nothing about a particular leaf, but it acts as a reference for the meanings I attribute to leafness: I know that some leaves are edible, and most are found on trees. But should I forget the word, I would not forget the meaning I attribute towards a leaf. Without the word I would still retain the unconscious analogical inference (instrumental truth) but I would not retain the conscious analogical inference (descriptive, scientific truth). Thought is an expression of the semantic inferences we have made intuitively.
It is my interpretation that since the knowledge drive is oriented towards a descriptive, scientific, objective knowledge of nature, it makes sense that those who pursue the knowledge drive would also seek objective reason over their own intuition, belief, and action. This brings up images of Socrates, who would engage men in argument and lead them to unfamiliar territory, not suited for their language, leaving them in a state of aporia, to which Socrates would impose his own “rational” brand of truth.15 The “language of objectivity” that one imposes on his own thought is nothing but the forcing of one’s intuition, beliefs, and action to conform to so-called “rational knowledge.”
The rational sciences were built from linguistic metaphorical inferences, and the continued development of the rational sciences depends on the continued convention of language. Firm conceptual foundations are necessary for a sustained belief in the validity of concepts originating from the “knowledge drive.” But valid as “instrumental truth” is much different than valid as “universal truth.” Nietzsche was convinced that when we take “instrumental truths” as “universal truths,” we are condemned to suffer a limited and inherently distorted inference of the world. In this sense, the totalizing force of Socratism limits the creativity of our thought, for it forces us to think according to the worn, expressionless maxims of Socratic knowledge.
CONCLUSION
Nietzsche makes the strong claim that it is by unconscious inference that both the contemplative artist and philosopher work.16 The kind of “picture thinking” from which unconscious inference begins is not strictly logical, but adequate as the philosopher tries to replace his picture thinking with conceptual thinking. For the philosopher to evade the “net of language”17 he must work opposite to the objective sciences: whereas the sciences force thought to conform to its language, the philosopher must create or form language to his thought.
Interestingly, a mature Nietzsche chides his younger self in “Attempt at Self Criticism” (added to the 1886 edition of The Birth of Tragedy) for exactly missing that point. He laments: “How I regret now that in those days I still lacked the courage (or immodesty?) to permit myself in every way an individual language of my own for such individual views and hazards…”18
To uncritically accept conceptual convention is to indeed subject thought to the “husk” of Socratic knowledge. The fundamental character of language is far more clearly revealed by the artist’s creative use, or for that matter, the sophists: language is rhetoric. It is a “mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms,” constantly performing conversions and never a neutral medium.
According to Breazeale, Nietzsche “wished to expose the unsuspected role which language has played in forming our thought and our conception of reality in order to try to escape its transcendental distortions.”19 This I believe to be true, but I am equally convinced that young Nietzsche sought to reclaim the origin of language as creative metaphor-formation and to alert others to do the same.
In concepts and words men construct their “second nature,” and it will be either according to the imposing “knowledge drive” of Socratism or the fundamental creative drive of “metaphor-formation.” Nietzsche is clear that he wishes for a vibrant, artfully constructed world that can stand in testimony to the fundamental human power of creative metaphor-formation; as he propounds: “our salvation lies not in knowing, but in creating.”20
FOOTNOTES
1. Dionysian refers to the “tragic culture” of Greece in the sixth and fifth centuries BC; the “scientific world” is referencing the “disciplined, theoretically grounded inquiry into the true nature of things.” Breazeale. Philosophy and Truth XXV, XXVI
2. “God is dead” is arguably his most famous.
3. “Things-in-themselves” are “incomprehensible to the creator of language” and “not in the least worth striving for.” “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” Philosophy and Truth 82
4. “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” Philosophy and Truth 81
5. Ibid. 80
6. According to Breazeale, Nietzsche concluded that “bridging the gap between subject and object bears a closer resemblance to the process of metaphor formation than to any kind of “picturing” or “mirroring.” Philosophy and Truth xxix
7. “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” Philosophy and Truth 83
8. “The Philosopher” Philosophy and Truth 50
9. “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” Philosophy and Truth 81
10. “The Philosopher” Philosophy and Truth 41
11. Ibid. 41
12. Ibid. 41
13. “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” Philosophy and Truth 88
14. Breazeale. Philosophy and Truth 58
15. While Nietzsche is quick to pounce on Socrates for the privileging of reason over intuition, Socrates made extensive use of sophisticated metaphors in order to propound his metaphysical and epistemological arguments and beckon the intuition of others. I’m unsure how Nietzsche responds to that side of Socrates. It might be worth some research.
16. “The Philosopher” Philosophy and Truth 41
17. The “net of language” refers to the limitations and trite quality inherent in conventional language.
18. “Attempt at Self-Criticism” Birth of Tragedy 24
19. Breazeale. Philosophy and Truth xxxi n26
20. “The Philosopher” Philosophy and Truth 33
