Of those philosophers who seek to define life in some way, mostly positively, there are a set of provoking souls who seek to uproot any optimistic perspective such as Friedrich Nietzsche. He sees life as a bleak, ephemeral, meaningless, and deceptive time from birth until death as he explains in the essay “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense.” One of the subjects he especially focuses on is the topic of metaphors in language and naming empirical objects that surround us. When a human hears a word and brings about an image, that image is not universal amongst all humans; thus, the attempt to create a single sound to represent a varying subject should be considered unfeasible and a form of lying. Nietzsche puts forward the idea that because
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This repetition gives it authority to become a well-known truth. Nietzsche attempts to counter this statement by comparing it to “an eternally repeated dream [that] would certainly be felt and judged to be reality” (Nietzsche 7). Logically speaking, one could see that Nietzsche has a point. However, sane humans have enough intellect to be able to distinguish dreams from reality. To say that people would likely believe their dreams to be true if repeated enough is almost an insult. Perhaps after thousands of similar dreams, a person may begin to lose sanity and then believe the dream to be true. Still, intellect does not fail that easily. To compare that process to one which gives a sound meaning is not a viable comparison. When a sound is first emitted and is said to represent something, repetitions of use will modify what that sound defines. A definition of a word today does not mean exactly the same thing as it did a thousand years ago as evolution requires the constant change of something to make it closer to perfection. Evolution allows a word to live throughout the years. So, the object represented by a word (or metaphor), is not exactly “hardening and congealing” (Nietzsche 7) since metaphors are always and will always be malleable. They are never set in stone as Nietzsche suggests. If anything, metaphors harden and congeal as metals do, but when needed, metaphors may be melted down slightly or significantly to modify their use as needed by humans. Metaphors will thus constantly come closer to the true meaning of an object, but the metaphor will never reach the unattainable concept that is truth- sort of like infinite limits in calculus. Therefore, man needs these metaphors and they can be justified through their ever-changing
This repetition gives it authority to become a well-known truth. Nietzsche attempts to counter this statement by comparing it to “an eternally repeated dream [that] would certainly be felt and judged to be reality” (Nietzsche 7). Logically speaking, one could see that Nietzsche has a point. However, sane humans have enough intellect to be able to distinguish dreams from reality. To say that people would likely believe their dreams to be true if repeated enough is almost an insult. Perhaps after thousands of similar dreams, a person may begin to lose sanity and then believe the dream to be true. Still, intellect does not fail that easily. To compare that process to one which gives a sound meaning is not a viable comparison. When a sound is first emitted and is said to represent something, repetitions of use will modify what that sound defines. A definition of a word today does not mean exactly the same thing as it did a thousand years ago as evolution requires the constant change of something to make it closer to perfection. Evolution allows a word to live throughout the years. So, the object represented by a word (or metaphor), is not exactly “hardening and congealing” (Nietzsche 7) since metaphors are always and will always be malleable. They are never set in stone as Nietzsche suggests. If anything, metaphors harden and congeal as metals do, but when needed, metaphors may be melted down slightly or significantly to modify their use as needed by humans. Metaphors will thus constantly come closer to the true meaning of an object, but the metaphor will never reach the unattainable concept that is truth- sort of like infinite limits in calculus. Therefore, man needs these metaphors and they can be justified through their ever-changing