Nietzsche Binary: Human and Animal

Human and Animal is a very interesting binary in this piece specifically because it does not start as a binary.  In the first paragraph,  Nietzche calls humans "clever animals". (246)  Later he makes them a presents them as separate, saying "everything that sets man off from the animal depends on this capacity to dilute the concrete metaphors into a schema."(250)  One implication of the binary is what metaphors are.  Most obviously, we see metaphors are what humans uses to set themselves apart from animals.  It the same time, it shows how unreal metaphors are, because humans are actually just clever animals.  The binary is again attacked when humans building concepts are compared to bees building hives (251).  In this way, it is a false binary, the concepts are no different fundamentally than creations of animals.  This commonly accepted binary is addressed and then refuted along with the overarching idea of truth throughout the essay.

--Ben Eisenpress