Nietzsche: Truth, Metaphor, and the Artist’s Vision
In this text, Nietzsche seeks to differentiate between truth and the world’s concept of truth as metaphor. The metaphor is the product of human creation in a world of continuous change, where everything is possible. However, the metaphor, man’s natural impulse to understand the world as variable, is soon forgotten by the man of science.
The term ‘metaphor’ is consistent with the authentic product of man who is not seeking access to ‘truth,’ which respects the variable nature of the world. By contrast, the term ‘truth’ alludes to the claim of Western man, from Plato, to understand reality as a quality that only reason can find. And once found, it is fixed as a concept, an invariable law. It constructs a reality, the product of reason, and takes this as the essence, the truth of the changing world. This has eliminated all we have: a living reality, variable, elusive.
Nietzsche’s text tries to explain how he dreams his fiction, and both dream it, making it real. In the dream world combined, according to Nietzsche, the order of things that science has taught us to accept as normal, for this reason we created new metaphors, such as a craftsman is a king, or vice versa. Therefore, we can also relate to art, since they are two ways that man has used to ‘rip’ the concepts traditionally used in language and science.
Nietzsche’s Life and Work
Nietzsche was born in 1844 and first studied classical philology at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig, where he became acquainted with the philosophy of Schopenhauer, which decisively influenced the formation of his ideas.
In 1873, Nietzsche wrote the play ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.’ It assesses the role that the intellect develops in the whole world and is considered a lie and truth outside the moral. Art and science are considered totally conflicting concepts. They represent two different models of interpreting the world: the creative artist and the rational man who has forged his life and has taken real fiction. This feature provides a holistic model to Western culture, from language, metaphors falsifying reality by transforming metaphors into concepts, and real belief that they represent.
Genealogy and the Rejection of Platonic Ideals
Therefore, Nietzsche wants us to discover, from the genealogical method, the origin completely different now that we know things by withdrawing to the myths of the Greek era, before Plato, in which the Apollonian, the reason was in harmony with the feelings, the Dionysian. But with Socrates and Plato, begins the great error of mankind. Plato divides the world into the rational, the eternal, and the physical, deceptive, the senses, while possessing the truth only the world of reason. Apollo and Dionysus wins counterfeiting begins: The rest of the fiction is just an extension of this initial fiction as well as religion. Science becomes their metaphor for a truth.
The Invention of Securities and the Rise of Nihilism
The man, unable to bear the reality that every day is different and we do not always worth the same metaphors, invents a world of securities, in which refuge from the chaos of everyday life. He invented the universal laws of reality that only respond to our needs mentally. Science is the greatest creator of concepts, providing the man his life. Hence we can conclude that all the values on which Western culture rests are nothing but fiction. Since then the man turns into nihilism, starting to behave like an artist and not as a scientist. Thus, the model of artist, is that Nietzsche accepts. The art to create an awareness of what is being created and allows us to perform a new destroy creation. The creation of new values after the death of God.