Nietzsche on Language: Interpretation as Religious Practice

Abstract

In ‘Maxims and Arrows,’ the first part of the Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche speculated that ‘[i]f we possess our why of life we can put up with almost any how.’1 The possibility of possessing the ‘why’ of life, of believing that human experience has meaning, is an integral part of his reflection on the relationship between the religious imagination and language — between creativity and meaning. In the aftermath of the death of God, meaninglessness is the sign of powerlessness. Not only has humanity lost its will to truth — which of itself is among the causes of meaninglessness — but it has ‘grown one stage poorer, no longer possessing the strength to interpret, to create fictions …’ of which even the will to truth avails itself (WP 585A). The revaluation of values is Nietzsche’s attempt to recover the ‘strength to interpret, to create fictions’ in order to lend meaning to human existence. His rejection of metaphysics, the notion of a transcendent referent and the certainty vested in objective truth, signifies the emergence of a new and dynamic understanding of values.KeywordsObjective TruthEarly WritingInterpretative ProcessCreative PowerCreative EngagementThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.