Metaphors vs. Concepts

Nietzsche distinguishes between the metaphors associated with their concepts, which he sarcastically denounces as the "origin." In his analysis of language, he poses the question "What is a word?" and thus proceeds to look in depth at how the formation of a word as a concept comes down, simply, to the individual, subjective experience, just like how a rock is "hard" and serpent that is described by its "winding." More importantly, he discovers that words have created a single concept that is formed from the the summation of "countless, more or less similar cases." In other words, from having some sort of perfect, idealized structure is a concept formed. Furthermore, that concept stems out into the many metaphors--the dissimilarities of the "perfect"--that all contribute in some way to that ideal concept, like Platoism. Nietzsche illustrates this with his example of the leaf and how "besides leaves, there is...an original form...from which all leaves are [made]."

The implication of such a binary opposition is concerned with other oppositions, like man vs. nature, where man puts himself at the "center of the universe" and never considers nature. The formulation of language is Nieztsche's central argument, and the idea of "metaphors vs. concepts" is key to understanding humanity.