something sensational in nature, though the sensations are now pictured, thought, rather than immediately felt?—is it more than an attenuated schema of them? Yet if this is so, how do concepts bring us in the slightest degree nearer the objective reality of which we are in search? So far as they are related to it, is it not a poorer, more beggarly relation than the individual sensible experience itself, since they are constituted just by leaving all that made the experience individual and distinct out of account?
What then does our so-called knowing amount to? To speak of literal correctness, as of a picture to its original, is out of the question. "First a nervous stimulus turned into an image [e.g., a color]. Metaphor number one. Then the image transformed into a sound. Metaphor number two. And each time, a complete leaping from one sphere into an entirely different one." "We think that we know something about things, when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers, and in truth we have nothing but metaphors which have no correspondence whatever to the original realities." As for a concept, it is little better than a "residuum" of a metaphor—it is more a skeleton or a ghost, than a real thing; once Nietzsche describes it as the "burial place" of the living experience. Of course, the various concepts in which the varied experiences of men are summed up, may be put in order, and they may make an imposing array, but it is the array of a "Roman columbarium." [One thinks involuntarily, or, shall I say? maliciously, of a Logic like Hegel's.n]
In other words, and speaking perhaps with offensive plainness, our "knowledge" is illusion, falsehood. We stand in an essentially æsthetic relation rather than any other to reality—we are primarily poets, builders, creators. Nietzsche sometimes uses the word "falsehood" (Lüge), sometimes "play" (Spiel)—the thought in both experiences is the same.[1] Our "truth" is a "mobile throng of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a lot of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically heightened, translated, adorned, and
- ↑ R. M. Meyer remarks that Nietzsche's use of the word Lüge recalls one of Herder's "genialsten" writings, "Ueber die dem Menschen angeborene Lüge."
