While Derrida makes the statement in Of Grammatology that “there is nothing outside of the text,” Nietzsche does not go so far as to say there is nothing. He seems to closely follow the work Kant and Schopenhauer—though Bizzell and Herzberg point out that Nietzsche also rigorously criticizes Schopenhauer (1173)—in that he asserts there is a reality behind the veil of human perception, what he calls “nature.” Nietzsche begins by posing this question: “What does man actually know about himself?” (1172). The answer is certainly very little. If man knows so little about himself, then where does his scrupulous conception of truth come from? It is the distinction between true and lie that Nietzsche must confront because this is the basis for all knowledge. He wishes to establish a discourse for discussing truth, and in order to get to the root of truth, he must begin with how truth is described—through language.
It is in Nietzsche’s discussion of language that we can see the framework for semiotics begins to take shape. Nietzsche is interested in the relationship between “language and thought, rhetoric and knowledge” (Emden 1); he wants to examine the possibility for contingence between these and at what point they connect if ever. He points out first and foremost that the establishment of truth can be seen as a sort of “peace treaty” (1172); its meaning is a social contract. He writes: “[A] uniformly valid and binding designation is invented for things, and this legislation of language likewise establishes the first laws of truth” (1172). Thus, man despises and punishes the liar because the liar does not adhere to these laws; however, Nietzsche also points out that “what [he] hate[s] is basically not deception itself, but rather the unpleasant, hated consequences of certain sorts of deception” (1173). In other words, it is not that the essence of the lie, the lie-in-itself, that man hates; rather, it is merely the consequences based upon the contract which was fashioned by man in the first place. Here, the opposition between truth and lie is essentially deconstructed. The consequences or rewards for lies and truths, respectively, have nothing to do with what those words are, as things-in-themselves. But if we cannot decide the difference between truth and lie at the level of our understanding, then how can we claim anything as truth? It is this question that Nietzsche answers next.
Nietzsche provides three steps for utterance-formation. He writes that a word is “the copy in sound of a nerve stimulus; between the stimulus and the sound is the image” (1173). Nietzsche also points out, however, that there are certain abstract concepts which we pretend to be familiar with outside of the context of their use. He writes: “The ‘thing in itself’ (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for” (1173). Discovering the nature of an object, being able to pull back the veil of perception, is what Nietzsche is referring to. What he draws from this is the idea that language is not “logical” because it is arbitrary. Words are not “derived from the essence of things” (1174). If we understand Nietzsche’s essay in terms suggested by Christian Emden, as a discussion of the relationship between “language and thought, rhetoric and knowledge” (1), Nietzsche’s project becomes clearer as a discursive practice. There is a rupture between language and thought because language cannot be contained by thought nor can it describe outside of the limits of what our minds can conceive. This is best exemplified in Nietzsche’s discussion of the concept and the differences between concrete and abstract concepts. The concrete is formed “by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences [between individual concrete objects—Nietzsche’s example is ‘leaf’] and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects” (1174). This concrete concept formation illuminates the inability of language to shed its own artifice in order to describe the essence of an object. Even more perplexing is the formation of the abstract concept. Nietzsche provides the following example:
We call a person ‘honest,’ and then we ask ‘why has he behaved so honestly today?’ Our usual answer is, ‘on account of his honesty.’ Honesty! [. . .] We know nothing whatsoever about an essential quality called ‘honesty’; but we know of countless individualized and consequently unequal actions which we equate by omitting the aspects in which they are unequal and which now designate as ‘honest’ actions. (1174)
Ultimately, Nietzsche is describing our account of reality as a system of metaphors. Nothing we describe in language is actually completely accounted for through language; it is only alluded to. Language exists on the fringes of nature, never able to get beyond itself to nature.
However, Nietzsche repairs this rupture between language and thought. This is not how we account for reality, that is day to day, one does not consciously recognize all language as metaphor. Rather, the metaphor has gone through a process of “petrification and coagulation” to become rigid and fixed—seemingly unmovable (1176). In the middle of his essay, Nietzsche finally answers the question that he set forth at the beginning. He writes:
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. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force [. . .]. (1174)
Again, the opposition between truth and lie is deconstructed because truth is described in terms of falsity. Truth is not the same as what we believe its essence to be. This must be the case because truth embodies the very nature of all reality. If all concepts and their individual objects, both concrete and abstract, are metaphors—are not true essence—then truth itself, not truth-in-itself, must be described in the same way—as nothing more than a metaphor for the essence of truth, whatever that may be. Nietzsche writes, “The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself” (1177). It is not then a rupture between language and thought, but a disconnection of thought and language from nature. Language and thought are inextricably linked in order to turn metaphor into truth. Through this conception of truth—the fixed, canonical, and binding, Nietzsche sees
the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, and clearly marked boundaries—a new world, one which now confronts that other vivid world of first impressions as more solid, more universal, better known, and more human than the immediately perceived world, and thus as the regulative and imperative world. (1175)
He describes here the ordering and structuring of oppositions which begin, for Nietzsche, with true/false. These oppositions arise out of the coagulation of metaphor—of the vivid world of first impressions. As Nietzsche says, it is a way to make reality “more human.” But this pyramidal structure is exactly that—a structure, man-made and impermanent.
Lee Hardy writes that “ ‘knowledge,’ for Nietzsche, is a kind of error, and what passes for truth among us is but a fiction, devised for vital purposes” (31). The relationship between rhetoric and knowledge is very important. If all knowledge is erroneous, but rhetoric attempts to disseminate knowledge, then the discursive practices of the past certainly need to be re-evaluated—Nietzsche’s own discursive practice should be as well. However, Nietzsche fails to acknowledge this point. Hardy poses this very important question to ask of Nietzsche: “Is the claim that all of our ‘truths’ are little ‘t’ truths—good for us to believe, perhaps, but ultimately false—itself a big ‘T’ truth, one that gets it just right, one that tells us how the world is set up such that our truths must always be spelled with a little ‘t’; or is the claim that all of our truths are little ‘t’ truths itself a little ‘t’ truth, that is, nothing more than a useful fiction?” (31). It seems very clear, in this essay at least, that Nietzsche would like to claim his explanation to be an absolute truth but he cannot. At the same time, however, he does not acknowledge the totalization his discourse demands. There is no room for other possibilities because all possibilities are contingent on empty metaphor. But this becomes self-legitimizing, which sets the stage for a displacement of this discursive practice with another.
Derrida creates points of contingence and rupture in one vital place within Nietzsche’s discourse. I use the terms contingence and rupture together as one in the same because this is the way in which Derrida describes his displacement of not only Nietzsche, but Freud and Heidegger as well. Oppositions such as contingence and rupture are both necessary tools in his discursive practice. First, Derrida recognizes the sign, to use Saussure’s terminology, as arbitrary and made of two parts, the signifier and signified, which function as two sides of a piece of paper. They are inextricably linked. These terms are essentially the same as language and thought in Nietzsche’s text. Language, the signifier, arouses thought, the signified. However, unlike Nietzsche, Derrida does not necessarily see any “nature” behind language. Derrida’s project is to discover the “nothing” that is outside of the text. He begins this in his essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” with a discussion of the “center” of structure. Derrida writes:
[I]t has always been thought that the center which is by definition unique, constituted that very thing within a structure which while governing the structure, escapes structurality. This is why classical though concerning the structure could say that the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. The center is at the center of totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere. (279)
In other words, “the center,” in Western metaphysics, must transcend the structure that it supports. This conception of center is based on the metaphysics of presence. Centers such as “essence, existence, [. . .] transcendentality, consciousness, God, man” all demand presence (280). Derrida points out, however, that a signified that demands presence limits the play of the signifier, that is if there is the possibility of an absolute the play of the signifier is finite.
However, Derrida is not interested in the destruction of Western metaphysics, which is what he claims Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger do. Derrida acknowledges that these discursive practices seek to establish a conception of truth that defies Western metaphysics and attempts to solve its central problems, questions of being, truth, and knowledge, by destroying its foundations. Derrida points out that “all of these destructive discourses and all their analogues are trapped in a kind of circle. This circle is unique. It describes the form of the relation between the history of metaphysics and the destruction of the history of metaphysics. There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to shake metaphysics” (280). For Derrida, it is impossible to critique metaphysics by attempting to dismiss its terminology because we “have no language—no syntax and no lexicon—which is foreign to this history; we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest” (280-1). It is impossible to escape the use of a discursive practice if one seeks to critique that same practice. One must use the same language.
Because of this, one cannot escape the inevitability of what would seem like contradiction in Nietzsche’s discursive practice. Derrida uses the example of Claude Lévi-Strauss and his discussion of incest prohibition to illustrate this phenomenon. Lévi-Strauss is concerned with the distinction between nature and culture—a distinction that goes at least as far back as the Phaedrus in the discussion between Calicles and Socrates. Incest prohibition seems to exist as part of both nature and culture because it is universal across all cultures, but it also belongs to a system of norms because it is a prohibition. Derrida writes “By commencing his work with the factum of the incest prohibition, Lévi-Strauss thus places himself at the point at which this difference, which has always been assumed to be self-evident, finds itself erased or questioned” (283). This is what deconstruction does. It destabilizes oppositions that were for so long though to be self-evident. It rearranges them, reorders them. In this way, Derrida’s discursive practice displaces Nietzsche’s because Nietzsche’s practice would have been concerned with exposing this pyramidal structure as metaphor, non-truth, not truth-in-itself. Derrida, however, wants to move beyond this and not merely tear down and destroy the opposition, but see how it can be rethought.
Lastly, Derrida confronts the notion of totalization. Nietzsche, as Derrida points out, defines totalization as “useless, and sometimes as impossible. This is no doubt due to the fact that there are two ways of conceiving the limit of totalization” (289). In Nietzsche’s view, totalization is impossible because he sees it as an attempt to master the unmasterable. It is the use of finite language to try and contain the infinite. Derrida, however, writes, “[N]ontotalization can also be determined in another way: no longer from the standpoint of a concept of finitude as relegation to the empirical, but from the standpoint of the concept of play” (289). Rather than seeing language as a finite field which cannot cover the infinite, Derrida sees that the “nature of the field” itself “excludes totalization” (289). That is, it is not that the field is too large; rather there is “something missing from it” (289). The field of language is missing a center. The sign replaces the center, thus “One cannot determine the center and exhaust totalization because the sign which replaces the center [. . .] occurs as a surplus, as a supplement” (289). Language, for Derrida, does not function merely as a finite system of metaphors but as a system where the “center,” the transcendent, presence, is always missing.
Works Cited
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
—. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. 278-93.
Emden, Christian J. Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness and the Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Hardy, Lee. “Postmodernism as a Kind of Modernism: Nietzsche’s Critique of Knowledge.” Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought. Ed. Merold Westphal. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. 28-43.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” The Rhetorical Tradition. Ed.
Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001. 1171-9.
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