I became pretty interested in Nietzsche’s ideas about truth. He says that humans create metaphors based on what they observe as connected in the universe. After we create these metaphors, we often assign words to the concepts or things that we are referring to. He also says that these metaphors, and the words that are assigned to them are often incomplete or incorrect.
I was reminded of Susan Langer’s idea of logical form when I read this. She talks about shopping for a lamp. There are many aspects to a lamp that can be changed while the lamp still remains a lamp. Who else has seen the major award in A Christmas Story? The fact that we can change a lamp while the lamp remains a lamp points to a degree of incompleteness in regard to language. Plato had similar ideas too. The aspects of imitation in language allow for quite a bit of confusion and misunderstanding. Each object and concept has its own form. Variations of that form share the same word, and that’s the idea behind Nietzsche’s piece.
No comments:
Post a Comment