Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Seen Vs. Unseen
Throughout his work “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense,” Nietzsche asserts the uselessness of knowledge, the common lie that the word has come to be, and the distinction between initial impression (truth, satiated with the significance of forgetting) and secondhand experience (of acquired metaphoric value). Particularly, he embellishes these key ideas with an assortment of binary opposition themes, a primary example being the seen versus the unseen. Consequently, the author often refers to human “truths” as illusions- “illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions”- for these individuals have not experienced the original naming process, and they therefore remain in ignorance of origin as well as semantic meaning (250). He effectively symbolizes such a situation with “a person who is completely deaf and has never had a sensation of sound and music... identifying their cause as the trembling of strings, then swearing that he must know what people call 'sound'” (249). While the false realities of “knowledgeable” men constitute the seen, the surface world of language, the underlying curiosity (“acquisition of his mysterious desire for truth”) that produced such meaning in the first place has been locked away, overcome with pride and nature's ability and desire to “keep secrets” and throw away “the key” (247). As Nietzsche establishes this counter-relationship, criticizing the subject/culprit's “delusions”, “their eyes merely [gliding] along the surface of things and [seeing] forms” and the lack of understanding linked to this method of investigation, he simultaneously sets the binaries as analogous to the more general topic of truth (unseen) and lying (seen) (247). Ultimately, the mystery that encounter-stimulating truth has evolved into has gradually diminished in cultural importance over the years, and it is this trait of human nature, difficult to overcome in both intuitive and rational perspectives, yet the feat remains necessary in order to rediscover what language has lost.
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sorry but i can't seem to figure how to post on here so forgive for posting mine in your comments.
ReplyDeleteBinary: Truths and Lies
In Nietzsch On Rhetoric and Language, he uses the binary between truth and lying. In this binary, Nietzsch makes a “distinction” between the two. So Nietzsch states that lying “make the unreal appear real” (p. 248) and truth is merely just the opposite of lying. However, Nietzsch also states that “men flee not so much being deceived as being harmed by deceit. What they hate is really not so much deception as the bad, hostile consequences of certain kinds of deceptions” (p. 248) which means that lying or deception is not only used for selfish reasons but also can be used to protect. “Man also wants truth in a similar, restricted sense” (p. 248). This is where truth and lying connects. Refraining from telling the truth can be used to protect just as lying can be used to protect. These tells us that language, depending on how men use it, can affect one another but then that leads us into the question that Nietzsch posed at the end of his paragraph, “Is language the adequate expression of all realities?” (p. 248)
-Phi Tran