The metaphoric truth

I believe that the metaphor is the “prince” of human resources. It’s not only a matter of language, but of essence: all the human expressions are metaphoric.

About metaphor, there is a brief text written by Friedrich Nietzsche which I would like to talk about: On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense. Already in the incipit, we immediately enter in nietzschean atmospheare:

Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die.

The man feels his intellect as the center of the world but, Nietzsche says, “if we could communicate with the gnat, we would learn that he likewise flies through the air with the same solemnity, that he feels the flying center of the universe within himself”. From this example of the deep relativity of human knowledge, the author analyzes the genesis of this last and discloses its deep lack of truth:

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.

There’s not any truth in human language, because the truth isn’t only a series of sounds that we call words, but it’s above all a matter of meaning. Before being sound, a word is a nervous stimulus and a mental representation. We understand, therefore, that the language’s aboutness (which meaning the ability that the words have to refer to world’s things) is very least. I think that our “truth” could be compared to what, for Plato, sensitive reality was in comparison to the realm of ideas: an imitation. But the Nietzsche’s platonism (yes, I know it sounds “strange”) is more radical, in the sense that it goes to the terrestrial roots, so he proposes the language as a metaphoric imitation of this reality.

But if this is the characteristic proper of language (of all the languages) and, therefore, of truth that is express through the language, what’s the difference among a “scientific” discourse and “poetry”? There’s a difference, but it’s oddly contrary to what we usually think: the poetry is more scientific than science.

If truth is “a movable host of metaphors”, the real scientist is he who knows how to use the metaphor. He who has the full power of it, he who metaphorically represents the reality that surrounds him. In this ability, the philosophers (I think to Nietzsche and Heidegger) are masters: they know how to express the content (the world) in a form that knows how to represent it. For this reason, Nietzsche and Heidegger are the more criticized philosophers for how they use the language. Often I hear the people say that what Heidegger expresses in difficult metaphors, formulas and turns of phrases, is “so banal” that could be said in a more simply way.

But reflect: if Nietzsche is right, and I believe that he is, to remove the metaphor from heideggerian texts (and from nietzschean texts) means to falsify that texts and that reality (our reality) that they represent.

Then, the philosophy and the poetry are the most rigorous forms of science. If we bring this reasoning to the extreme consequences, we have to conclud that poetry and philosophy should not so clearly be separated (the poetry as “art”, the philosophy as rational thought), but that they should give life (together with science) to a more conscious language, to a humbler thought, to a more human man.