Nietzsche, Metaphor, and Truth

Abstract

ions are indeed metonymies, but this not end of story, for at least in some instances i.e., in cases in which we come to believe in reality of our own tropes we give them a causal efficacy which they originally did not possess. Indeed, Nietzsche suggests that this what sets us apart from animals: we are able to place our behavior under the mastery of abstractions . . . to volatilize perceptual metaphors into a schema.3' This not only allows a much greater degree of organization of our perceptual metaphors than would otherwise have been possible, but also promotes eventual development of a world of concepts juxtaposed to immediately given sensations. It a firmer, more general, better known, more human world and thus seen as regulative and imperative, even though it only composed of concepts which are residues of metaphors.32 Thus we forget 28 111/4, 194(04), p. 69. 29 R, p. 319; cf.111/4, 19(415), p. 74 and 19(236), pp. 8i-8z. 30 UWL, III/z, p. 374 = PN, p. 46. 3' Ibid., p. 375. 32 Ibid., pp. 375-76. I90 LAWRENCE M. HINMAN This content downloaded from 157.55.39.181 on Thu, 29 Sep 2016 06:01:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms metaphorical origins of our own concepts, imbue them with an independence and causal efficacy which they did not originally possess, order them in accordance with schemata which are themselves of metaphorical origins, and then place ourselves under domination of that world which was originally of our own construction. Our metaphors thereby acquire an independence and power insofar as they are no longer taken as metaphors but rather as measure of reality itself; in becoming dead metaphors, they come to rule us. A language, as one recent writer on metaphor has suggested, is nothing but a necropolis for dead metaphors.33 Thus we see full scope of Nietzsche's claim that language fundamentally metaphorical and that truth but a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms. If we think of metaphor as a from one sphere to another, we see metaphor permeating process of knowing. Starting from immediate data of sensation (the nerve stimulus, according to Nietzsche), there a in two directions. On one hand, a metonymical carrying over from those data to an imagined external cause of them, a thing-in-itself which imputed cause of our sensations of it; on other hand, a metaphorical carrying over of those nerve stimuli into images. The process continues in both directions. As we then make another metaphorical transition from images to words, so we organize external world into particular kinds of objects which are put into pigeonholes fashioned by our own vocabulary. Finally, as we move from words to concepts, we see these individual external objects as manifestations of a world of essences. In treating each of these transitions as metaphorical, Nietzsche wants to underscore fact that these involve movements between radically different spheres of reality and that it meaningless to talk about a literal translation from one level to another. Yet there a second sense in which this entire process involves a over. Insofar as we carry over some aspects of an experience (and omit others) and thereby come to treat similar experiences as though they were equal, we order our experiences metaphorically; in other words, categories and concepts in terms of which we order experience have no more epistemic justification than other metaphors, except for fact that we have forgotten their metaphorical origins and let them harden into normative measures of reality itself. 33 'As,' or The Limits of Metaphor, New Literary History, VI, i (Autumn, 1974), p.