ABSTRACT
On several occasions throughout his writings Friedrich Nietzsche emphasizes that knowledge is ultimately dependent on metaphor. Appealing to Friedrich Lange, Gustav Gerber and other contemporary sources, Nietzsche is able to assert that language is a representation of abstract images produced by perception. Rene Descartes’ cogito appears as an epiphenomenon of language, and in the fifth book of The Gay Science, Nietzsche consequently notes that the evolution of language and the emergence of consciousness within any given individual are inextricably linked. Nietzsche is aware of the confusion which tends to bedevil most philosophical accounts of rhetoric, and he is therefore willing to abandon all rigid designations of the term ‘metaphor’ in order to examine the epistemological implications of this concept. Although Rudolph Hermann Lotze apparently has to assume a direct physiological access to reality, he concludes that such a direct access is impossible, since any act of perception — and of mental activity in general — involves too many complicated neurophysiological transpositions.
