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Nietzsche, metaphor, and truth.
 

offline CS2x from London (United Kingdom) on 2007-12-03 16:59 [#02150384]
Points: 5079 Status: Lurker



“What is truth?: A mobile army of metaphors, metonymics,
anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which
became poetically and rhetorically intensified,
metamorphosed, adorned, and after long usage, seem to a
nation fixed, canonic and binding; truths are illusions of
which one has forgotten that they are illusions."

Is Nietzsche saying here that truths aren't actually truths;
what we call truth is in fact just a series over-used
descriptive metaphors? I keep thinking I'm missing
something, or that I've got it the wrong way round....

Sorry. I feel very stupid. It's from his essay "On Truth and
Lying in an Extra-moral sense".



 

offline epic chod on 2007-12-03 17:03 [#02150385]
Points: 70 Status: Lurker



hes attacking a straw man

easy mistake


 

offline SlipDrinkMats from Thanks (Bhutan) on 2007-12-03 17:06 [#02150386]
Points: 1744 Status: Regular



He sounds like wMw, horrible, really. It gives you some idea
that Nietzsche was the wMw of his age; unloved, unheard, a
prick, and wrong.


 

offline Spikee Dragon from Newcastle (United Kingdom) on 2007-12-03 18:12 [#02150410]
Points: 4176 Status: Regular | Followup to CS2x: #02150384



He's deconstructing truth in a very bold way, much to his
style. It's a warning against being objective and to be
critical of anything that is proclaimed ultimately true.


 

offline CS2x from London (United Kingdom) on 2007-12-03 18:25 [#02150412]
Points: 5079 Status: Lurker | Followup to Spikee Dragon: #02150410



"a warning against being objective and to be
critical of anything that is proclaimed ultimately true"

I agree with that, and I do get the overall sense of what he
is doing in the essay. But that particular quote and what it
is saying about metaphor (and how it is over-used),
language, and truth is what I'm finding hard to pinpoint. I
know that his general point involves a rejection of the idea
of universal constants and the idea that “truth” is an
invented human convention, but I think there's something to
that particular statement I'm not getting.

Well, it's easier than Derrida, at least.


 

offline epic chod on 2007-12-03 18:26 [#02150413]
Points: 70 Status: Lurker | Followup to Spikee Dragon: #02150410



including his claim


 

offline Spikee Dragon from Newcastle (United Kingdom) on 2007-12-03 18:52 [#02150421]
Points: 4176 Status: Regular | Followup to CS2x: #02150412



Hmm, well metaphors are subject to rhetorical shifts; they
can loose their original meaning. Ways of reading the stars
have become anthropomorphised over the ages and taken as
literal mythical interpretations in religion. I would have
just read it as him being scathing though.

I think I saw a Derrida DVD for sale once...

I dunno. I need alcohol in my brain fast.


 

offline staz on 2007-12-03 19:01 [#02150422]
Points: 9844 Status: Regular



animes

will forever be true~


 

offline w M w from London (United Kingdom) on 2007-12-03 19:26 [#02150424]
Points: 21443 Status: Regular



Anything human related is perhaps too high level to be
considered the truth. Wolfram's ideas in 'a new kind of
science' are perhaps closest. I know you were just having
trouble juggling multiple 3 syllable words rather than
deliberately being hostile to me, dog blech. We are all very
understanding and supportive of your condition.

You don't have to be handicapped to be different.
Everyone is different!


 

offline DeadEight from vancouver (Canada) on 2007-12-04 01:08 [#02150459]
Points: 5437 Status: Regular



metonymy, anthropomorphism, and metaphor are all forms of
abstraction, particularly pertinent to language. It's been a
while since i read that one, but the general crux seemed to
be that very fundamental concepts to our understanding of
things (becoming, growth, identity, etc.) are in fact
metaphorical and thus baseless (in the very literal sense).
You seem to get that part just fine. maybe you could also
say, following his language here, that there is a tendency
to efface that which is present and concrete, in favour of
moving into a more transcendant realm where one can, for
example simplify or mythologize...




 

offline BoxBob-K23 from Finland on 2007-12-04 15:10 [#02150675]
Points: 2440 Status: Regular



OK, here's another take on it.

He's saying that the concept of truth is itself born out of
language games, and that all truth is HISTORICAL, i.e.
Tradition. Most "truths" are accepted as such because they
are results of social myth-making, of "nation" (a word he
used) telling itself a good story. The very fact that we
forget the origin of where we get our ideas, ironically
enough, serves the purpose of making these "truths" seem all
the more eternal and valid. After all, we must accept them
as GIVEN if we don't know their origins.

In a word, Nietzsche is saying that all Thought has History
- which leads into his genealogies of the West and so on...


 

offline marlowe from Antarctica on 2007-12-04 16:27 [#02150698]
Points: 24586 Status: Regular | Followup to w M w: #02150424



ouch


 


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