Thinking the Event. François Raffoul
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concepts, truth itself are here referred back to language, conceived of as a sort of symbolic activity performed for the sake of life’s needs. The name “truth” is the designation of such conventional agreement deposited in language. “That which shall count as ‘truth’ from now on is established. That is to say, a uniformly valid and binding designation is invented for things, and the legislation of language likewise established the first laws of truth.”4 The link between language and a corresponding objective reality finds itself severed, as it immediately appears in Nietzsche’s questions: “And besides, what about these linguistic conventions themselves? Are they perhaps products of knowledge, that is, of the sense of truth? Are designations congruent with things? Is language the adequate expression of all realities?” (OTL, 81). Clearly, for Nietzsche, they are not, and it is not.
Conceptuality proves to be a linguistic phenomenon. In fact, for Nietzsche reason is nothing but a metaphysics of language, a “crude fetishism” with respect to language. “In its origin, language belongs to the time of the most rudimentary type of psychology: We encounter a crude set of fetishes when we become conscious of the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language—or, to put it plainly, reason” (TI, 20). Language finds itself severed from any ideal meaning that would anchor it: it is but a material, physiological production: “What is a word? It is the copy in sound of a nerve stimulus” (OTL, 81). The origin of language is not an ideal sphere of intelligibility, but a material production, a radically subjective phenomenon. In one statement, Nietzsche has posited both the material basis of language (nerve stimulus) and the metaphoricity of sense (copy or image). Further, this metaphoricity of sense is as it were unhinged, for it is not anchored in any proper, literal, ideal meaning. The referentiality or transference inherent in metaphor (a word for another) is not about connecting a word with a reality, but rather heterogeneous and always subjective realms. “To begin with, a nerve stimulus is transferred into an image: first metaphor. The image, in turn, is imitated in a sound: second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of one sphere, right into the middle of an entirely new and different one” (OTL, 82). Between these spheres, there is no relation of causality, but rather of translation and invention: “For between two absolutely different spheres, as between subject and object, there is no causality, no correctness, and no expression; there is, at most, an aesthetic relation: I mean, a suggestive transference, a stammering translation into a completely foreign tongue—for which there is required, in any case, a freely inventive intermediate sphere and mediating force” (OTL, 86). One notes in this transference the radical absence of any necessity (whether natural or otherwise): “even the relationship of a nerve stimulus to the generated image is not a necessary one” (OTL, 87). Both the material basis of language and the metaphoricity of sense collapse the possibility of an objective causality. This is why Nietzsche is able to state that to infer from the nerve stimulus a cause outside of us is a prejudice of reason, of the principle of sufficient reason: “the further inference from the nerve stimulus to a cause outside us is already the result of a false and unjustifiable application of the principle of sufficient reason” (OTL, 81). No natural connection whatsoever with sense is here allowed. Arbitrary designations are mistakenly taken to be the exact descriptions of the things themselves. However, when one returns to the material genesis of language and sense, one can no longer invoke such thing in itself. “The ‘thing in itself’ (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for,” concludes Nietzsche (OTL, 82). One can see how, ironically, it is the activity of the mind that invented such fictions as “objectivity,” “essences,” and “causes,” precisely on the basis of a forgotten metaphorical activity. A metaphor is mistakenly taken for a nonmetaphor, and that oblivion is what is called a concept! Man “forgets that the original perceptual metaphors are metaphors and takes them to be the things themselves” (OTL, 86). Hence Nietzsche’s celebrated passage on truth, where truth is declared nothing but a fluid complex of metaphors: “What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins” (OTL, 84).
We may believe that through our linguistic designations, through our concepts, we know things as they truly are, as if we could know “something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers”; in fact, “we possess nothing but metaphors for things—metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities” (OTL, 83). A concept is the result, the trace, or the residue of a metaphor, and the formation of concepts is an artistic creation. “Anyone who has felt this cool breath [of logic] will hardly believe that even the concept—which is as bony, foursquare, and transposable as a die—is nevertheless merely the residue of a metaphor, and that the illusion which is involved in the artistic transference of a nerve stimulus into images is, if not the mother, then the grandmother of every single concept” (OTL, 85). Indeed, a concept must erase the individual experience from which it was formed. As a general representation, it necessarily negates “the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin” so that “we obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual” (OTL, 85). This negation of life through concepts takes place precisely as the concept also embraces and includes within it “countless more or less similar cases—which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal” (OTL, 83). Each concept “arises from the equation of unequal things” (OTL, 83), abstracting from the differential uniqueness of experience. In fact, as Nietzsche emphasizes, “one leaf is never totally the same as another,” which is another way of saying that the concept “leaf,” as any concept, does not exist and only has an imaginary existence. The greatest paradox, of course, is that such a nonexistent notion is then taken to be what is most real! Nietzsche points to this paradox when he notes that “the concept ‘leaf’ is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects. This awakens the idea that, in addition to the leaves, there exist in nature the ‘leaf’: the original model according to which all the leaves were perhaps woven, sketched, measured, colored, curled, and painted—but by incompetent hands, so that no specimen turned out to be a correct, trustworthy, and faithful likeness of the original model” (OTL, 83). A concept kills and mummifies metaphorical life, and it has been philosophers’ “idiosyncrasy” to essentialize, dehistoricize, and eternalize metaphorical life. These abstractions—concepts—are ways for humans to secure a stable “conventional” construct of reality on the basis of a forgetting of the primal unstable and creative metaphoricity of life; they are like the hardening, petrification, or congealing of life. “Only by forgetting this primitive world of metaphor can one live with any repose, security, and consistency: only by means of the petrification and coagulation of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid, only in the invincible faith that this sun, this table is a truth in itself, in short, only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency” (OTL, 86).
Any concept is a construct, an invention, a fiction, what Nietzsche calls an “error.” By “error,” of course, Nietzsche does not mean a falsehood or untruth that could be corrected: rather, it points to the fictitious nature of any concept whatsoever. Nietzsche’s critique does not consist in denouncing the falsity of a concept or a judgment: rather, it is to expose the lie as lie. In Ecce Homo, he writes: “I was the first to discover the truth by being the first to experience lies as lies—smelling them out.”5 Conceptuality, along with the “fictions of logic,” rest for Nietzsche on assumptions “with which nothing in the real world corresponds” (HH, 16), as, for instance, the assumption of the equality of things, the identity of the thing, causality or the I-cause, free will, agency, intention and accountability, and so on. These categories, which have become idols of worship and belief in the Western tradition