Abstract
In ‘Maxims and Arrows,’ the first part of the Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche speculated that ‘[i]f we possess our why of life we can put up with almost any how.’1 The possibility of possessing the ‘why’ of life, of believing that human experience has meaning, is an integral part of his reflection on the relationship between the religious imagination and language — between creativity and meaning. In the aftermath of the death of God, meaninglessness is the sign of powerlessness. Not only has humanity lost its will to truth — which of itself is among the causes of meaninglessness — but it has ‘grown one stage poorer, no longer possessing the strength to interpret, to create fictions …’ of which even the will to truth avails itself (WP 585A). The revaluation of values is Nietzsche’s attempt to recover the ‘strength to interpret, to create fictions’ in order to lend meaning to human existence. His rejection of metaphysics, the notion of a transcendent referent and the certainty vested in objective truth, signifies the emergence of a new and dynamic understanding of values.
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Notes
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (1968; revised ed., Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 23. Hereafter cited parenthetically as TI with numbers referring to pages.
Herbert Schnadelbach, Philosophy in Germany 1831–1933, trans. Eric Mathews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 161–7.
See, Makarushka, ‘Nietzsche’s Critique of Modernity,’ 199ff. Also, Ernest L. Fortin, ‘Nietzsche and Nihilism,’ in Leroy Rouner, ed. Meaning, Truth and God (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1982), p. 206.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), §230. Hereafter cited parenthetically as BGE with numbers referring to sections.
Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, trans. Robert Czerny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), pp. 284ff.
Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘The Philosopher: Reflections on the Struggle between Art and Knowledge,’ in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979), pp. 3–61. Hereafter cited parenthetically as P with numbers referring to sections.
Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,’ Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979), pp. 79–100. Hereafter cited parenthetically as TLNS with numbers referring to pages.
Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Status of Vorstellung in Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion,’ in Leroy S. Rouner, ed., Meaning, Truth, and God (Notre Dame, Ind. and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), pp. 70–90. He pointed out that absolute knowledge defined as ‘the thoughtfulness of picture-thinking’ allows for ‘the possibility of reinterpreting the hermeneutics of religious thinking as an endless process thanks to which representative and speculative thought keep generating one another.’ There is an inner dynamism that directs ‘figurative thought toward speculative thought without ever abolishing the narrative and symbolic features of the figurative mode’ (p. 86). Nietzsche did not hold with the notion of absolute knowledge or truth, however, he did note in several instances the role of image or picture thinking in the creation of concepts (P 115–16).
Hayden White, Metahistory, (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), p. 374.
Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Description of Ancient Rhetoric,’ in Sander Gilman, Carole Blair, David J. Parent, eds and trans., Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 25. For an incisive commentary on these early lectures on language and rhetoric, see: Sander Gilman, Carole Blair, David J. Parent, ‘Introduction,’ in Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. ix–xxi.
David B. Allison, ‘Introduction,’ in David B. Allison, ed., The New Nietzsche (New York: Dell Publishing, 1977), p. xv. Allison’s introduction offered not only a clear assessment of Nietzsche’s understanding of language and metaphor, but also an analysis of metaphor as an analogue for the will to power. His intention is to suggest that by coming to understand Nietzsche’s general semiotics, some of the problems that Nietzsche’s aphoristic style presents for the reader can be elucidated.
Jacques Derrida, ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,’ trans. F. C. T. Moore, in New Literary Review, 6, no. 1 (Autumn 1974), p. 15. For an opposing view to Derrida’s ‘white mythology’ see: Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, pp. 284ff. His insistence on living metaphor is consonant with Nietzsche’s view of metaphor as a redescription of reality inaccessible to conceptual explanation. For an exploration of the relationship between metaphor and metamorphosis with regard to Nietzsche’s philosophical method, see: Allison, ‘Introduction’ in The New Nietzsche, p. xvi–xix.
Ophelia Schutte, Beyond Nihilism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 35–6.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Marianne Cowan (Chicago, Ill.: Regnery, 1962). Hereafter cited as parenthetically as PTAG with numbers referring to pages.
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955). For Heraclitus play is at the root of the notion that contradictory forces give rise to cosmic order (116–17). He remarked that Nietzsche had been blamed ‘for having re-adopted the old agnostic attitude of philosophy. If indeed he did so, then he has led philosophy back to its antique origins’ (p. 152). On Nietzsche and the Heraclitean notion of play, see also: Breazeale, ‘Introduction; p. xlii n. 36; and Nietzsche, ‘On the Pathos of Truth,’ in Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth, p. 64. The notion of play figures in the development of the concept of the creative imagination and to the romantic understanding of the cult of genius. See: James Engell, The Creative Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981). He pointed out that Schiller described the creative imagination as ‘Spieltriebe,’ play-instinct (pp. 231–6).
Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Homer’s Contest,’ in Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays, vol. 2 of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Oscar Levy, ed., trans. Maximillian A. Mugge, 18 vols., (1909–11, reprinted New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), p. 51.
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, Vintage Books, 1969), pt III: 24. Hereafter cited parenthetically as GM with numbers referring to parts and sections.
J. Hillis Miller, ‘The Disarticulation of the Self in Nietzsche,’ The Monist 64, no. 2 (April 1981): 247–61. He offered a deconstructionist interpretation of Nietzsche’s understanding of interpretation and maintained that Nietzsche is fundamentally a deconstructionist.
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books: 1969), § 2:1. Hereafter cited parenthetically as GM with numbers referring to book and essay.
Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936). He traced the idea of metaphysical theology from Plato through its demise in the nineteenth century.
Joan Stambaugh, Nietzsche’s Thoughts on the Eternal Recurrence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), p. 1.
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© 1994 Irena S. M. Makarushka
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Makarushka, I.S.M. (1994). Nietzsche on Language: Interpretation as Religious Practice. In: Religious Imagination and Language in Emerson and Nietzsche. Studies in Literature and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230375307_4
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