Textual Reflection on Nietzsche

Nietzsche’s On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense discusses the relation between concepts and the external world. He presents a circular thought pattern due to the crossings between dissimulation and perception. One of the first claims he makes is about language. Humans need dialect in order to communicate in the world. The first laws of truth are established from the introduction of language because “the contrast between truth and lie arises here for the first time” (66). However, it is because of language that people cannot find the truth since language is a man made mode of operation created in order to relate. A person who tries to use words “in order to make something which is unreal appear to be real” (66) is a liar. By trusting language and relying on it to help understand, we are depending on biases. Nietzsche seems to view language as a tool, which we use to help us feel like we understand concepts that we do not know. However, language carries limitations because it is confined within the human perspective. Through our quest for truth, are we in fact getting farther away from the truth by delving into the false assistance language provides? Nietzsche states, “it is only by means of forgetfulness that man can ever reach the point of fancying himself to possess a ‘truth’” (66). While we think that language leads us to knowing things, we really only possess metaphors for the things. This isn’t useful because metaphors “correspond in no way to the original entities” (67) that we are attempting to understand. These metaphors aren’t derived based on the essence of the thing in question nor does logic play a role in forming the metaphor, so there is no substantial relation between the metaphor which we wrongly equate with language and the actual thing. Language is formed of words, which become concepts. Concepts have to fit multiple cases that are not equal which means that “every concept arises from the equation of unequal things” (67). The method by which concepts are formed ignore the particulars and only concern themselves with the general. Consequently, “truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions” (67). The concept has been conceptualized so many times by language that we mistake the end product for a truth when really it is the most distant from the truth. The quest for metaphors is the “fundamental human drive” (70) and the drive further blurs the conceptual categories by introducing new information and further complicates the issue of trying to equate unequal things. Since Nietzsche believes that knowledge “is no longer understood as a binary relation between representation and object…perception and understanding are akin to the creation and appreciation of art” (64). Between a subject and object there is an aesthetic relation only. Consequently, art is not limited by nature the way language is but art transcends nature. Art does not carry the burden that the limitations of language impose. Human intellect is “aimless and arbitrary” (65) within nature because “this intellect has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life” (65). Art need not concern itself with entities related to intellect like language because art itself is a stimulus and a purpose in itself.