Mark Rothko: Untitled, 1963*
I heard a story about Friedrich Nietzsche, today. A friend told me that, for the last years of his life, Nietzsche refused to speak, or even to write. The reason, he said, was that Nietzsche had detected in language an order that might suggest the existence of God. Mortified at the possibility that he might assert the existence of the divine, Nietzsche stopped talking.
The story, of course, is purely apocryphal. If Nietzsche stopped talking in the final years of his life, it was probably because of tertiary syphilis. Aside from this, though, Nietzsche's understanding of language and the way it is used to construct our understanding of truth, is of paramount importance in his essay "On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense." Nietzsche argues that what we understand to be truth is merely a construction of language, a set of metaphors that we use to give order to our experience and structure ourselves into communities. Good art, for Nietzsche, plays with those metaphors, recombining their constituent parts to form new means of expression, but different forms of "truth" are often at odds with one another. Art may be lead to conflict with art.
Nietzsche takes objection to the view of truth as a correspondence between subject and object, saying that the description of objects depends on the arbitrary distinctions designated by words. Language "only designates the relations of things to men." (67). It does not show us "things-in-themselves," but gives us a system by which we can designate, organize, and communicate our perceptions. The words themselves, which we use to distinguish one thing from another, are an arbitrary series of sounds and rules; nothing in the object to which one refers suggests that it be called "snake" or "stone" (66). What we call "truth" is instead:
A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coin. (67-8)To Nietzsche, what we call truth is a system of artful language that has faded, over the passage of time, into cliche. We barely recognize it (if we recognize it at all) as metaphor. What such truths do, however, is organize us into "a pyramidal order according to castes and degrees" and create "a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, and clearly marked boundaries" (68). In short, language systems allow us to organize ourselves into communities and hierarchies.
Nietzsche notes that we are constantly adding to these systems. Even within an overarching language (say, English), there are thousands of smaller communities that use different combinations of terms to refer to different things. One such community is that of science. Nietzsche, with dramatic flourish in creating his own metaphors, describes the language of science in terms of a tower, with its scientist-architects "always building new, higher stories and shoring up, cleaning, and renovating old cells" (70). He goes on to state that the scientist must "find shelter for himself beneath those bulwarks... for there are frightful powers which continuously break in upon him, powers which oppose scientific 'truth' with completely different kinds of 'truths' which bear on their shields the most varied sorts of emblems" (70). Nietzsche is quite deliberately calling attention to the use of metaphors in creating his own 'truth,' but the metaphor seems particularly apt. Science (or, the language of science) has frequently come under assault from other visions of the world.
One such assault might come in the form of art. Nietzsche says that human beings have a "drive towards the formation of metaphors" (70). In a certain sense, we want to be deceived, we want "to refashion the world which presents itself to waking man, so that it will be as colorful, irregular, lacking in results and coherence, charming, and eternally new as the world of dreams" (70). Art offers us the means to do this, by mixing, confusing, destroying the old metaphors and recombining them into new and vivid perceptions (71). Art, for Nietzsche, casts off the chains of old, stale "truth" that is unaware of its own history, and creates new illusions, new combinations of language which become a new kind of truth. In doing so, art explicitly sets itself up as a competitor against science.
But art itself is not immune to the assault of art. There is no reason why the truth of art should not become just as "stale" as that of science, with the passage of time. When that happens, the urge for something new, for something more colorful, again animates the artists to fashion more illusions. Art turns against itself. We may see this historically, with the rejection, again and again, of prior artistic traditions and the movement towards different means of expression. Nietzsche's war of truths is an eternal one. In order to satisfy the human desire to rework the world, we will time and time again reject and respond to the art that has been fashioned before us, creating new forms that will, themselves, be reconfigured by subsequent generations.
I told my friend that his story about Nietzsche was not true, but by turning Nietzsche's life into narrative, by refashioning his experience into myth, we engage in that very same "truth"-forming process that he describes. In a certain light, Nietzsche might have appreciated the tale.
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* Image from: http://cct300-f08.wikispaces.com/Abstract+Expressionism
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