Friedrich Nietzsche's On Truth And Lie In An Extra-Moral Sense

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“On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense”
What is a metaphor? The Greek etymology of metaphor is ‘to carry over.’ Authors such as Friedrich Nietzsche carry over words to compare and equalize ideas. In “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873),” Nietzsche uses a metaphor to define truth saying, “What is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, decorated and . . . illusions, metaphors that have become worn” (257). This quote shows that Nietzsche equates truth and metaphors as the same idea, which in itself is a metaphor. In other words, Nietzsche’s entire essay depends on one word: metaphors. The usage of metaphors is crucial to explain his own definitions. Moreover, Nietzsche demonstrates through the language of metaphors that the intellect can be deceiving, which causes humans to be more like the intuitive man-- one …show more content…

One must not forget that the intellect is the source of deception; moreover, the metaphor used to exhibit this idea is mythology, no longer the animal metaphor. Mythology is metaphorical and tells stories about morals or philosophical questions such as what happens after death. By answering abstract concepts, mythology parallels with metaphors that create these concepts. Mythology for Nietzsche allows him to point to famous philosophers such as Sophocles and Plato. By pinpointing these men, he challenges the history of philosophy by undercutting what philosophy is built on which is language. Language is made of words; words are made of metaphors; thus, the philosophers have fooled themselves and allowed the intellect to deceive