ABSTRACT
Nietzsche is the first Western philosopher to define the human as a meta-
phorical being. I could rephrase the point by saying that, for Nietzsche, we
are in metaphor or we are metaphor: our being is not derived from a Pla-
tonic, eternal essence or from a Cartesian thinking substance but (in as
much as there is a way of being we can call ours) is emergent from tensional
interactions between competing drives or perspectives. This claim may be a
familiar one as far as truth and human perception are concerned, since
Nietzsche argues the point explicitly in ‘On Truth and Lie in an ExtraMoral Sense’ (2000), but may be less familiar with regard to defining
human being. Taking truth first, we customarily hold it to be a relation of
correspondence between knowledge and reality but, Nietzsche declares, it
is in fact ‘a movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthro-
pomorphisms’ due to the fundamentally metaphorical nature of concept-
formation, a series of creative leaps from nerve stimulus to retinal image
(first metaphor) to sound as signifier (second metaphor) (2000: 55). Our
categories, and the judgments we form with them, can never correspond to things in themselves because they are formed through a series of transfor-
mations which ensures that ‘there is no causality, no correctness, and no
expression’ connecting the first stage (the stimulus) with the last (the con-
cept) (2000: 58).
