Nietzsche's View on Perceptions

Humans see things differently than birds, insects - and one another. As a consequence of these different perceptions, how is it possible for one human to communicate to a second human with any assurance that what he says - and she hears - mean the same thing? How is it possible for a human, only one species of existence in the universe out of a trillion trillion, to know that human perception has any meaning at all within that overall context of being? Philosopher-philologist Friedrich Nietzsche would answer that it is impossible to know in both cases and that the conventions of language, which make such an assumption of certainty, are therefore inherently false. It is an answer that stands up well under the scrutiny of rhetorical analysis.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) produced a veritable library of works supporting his basic conclusion that "language ... conveys not sensations but 'copies of sensations,' not things but images of our perception of things" (Bizzell and Herzberg 886). How he arrives at that conclusion - and where that conclusion leads in terms of implications built upon it - was conveyed via a series of published lectures and writings recounting observations on the nature of language as rhetoric. Nietzsche believes that language is rhetoric because it conveys only an opinion, not knowledge (Bizzell and Herzberg 886). Since he has chosen rhetoric as his starting point, it would do well to perform a rhetorical analysis of one of Nietzsche writings o

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are integral to existence, he observes, noting that myth and art compete with language in this effort: "The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself" (Nietzsche 894). At the level of intuitive man creating myth and art, however, Nietzsche finds more recognition of the metaphor, of the approximation. It is science which creates an "anthropomorphic world" (Nietzsche 894) and is therefore more to blame by the inherent lie of language: Whereas the man of action binds his life to reason and its concepts so that he will not be swept away and lost, the scientific investigator builds his hut right next to the tower of science so that he will be able to work on it and find shelter for himself beneath those bulwarks which presently exist (Nietzsche 894). That is, the language of metaphor and concept must be created in order to survive - Nietzsche accepts that necessity - but science recognizes that language is an illusion yet still constructs its rationalizations and insists that they are "truths." This is the lie that Nietzsche finds distasteful. Distasteful and at the same time inevitable

Category: Philosophy - N