Published in

Kriterion: Revista de Filosofia, 132(56), p. 521-540

DOI: 10.1590/0100-512x2015n13211ll

Links

Tools

Export citation

Search in Google Scholar

AU COMMENCEMENT ÉTAIT LA MÉTAPHORE: UNE INTUITION PRÉCOCE DE NIETZSCHE SUR LA PRIMAUTÉ DE LA MÉTAPHORE COMME MATRICE COGNITIVE

Journal article published in 2015 by Laurent Lamy
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

Full text: Download

Question mark in circle
Preprint: policy unknown
Question mark in circle
Postprint: policy unknown
Question mark in circle
Published version: policy unknown

Abstract

This paper highlights the precedent, managed by the precocious insights of the young Nietzsche who advocated the structuring force of the metaphor as the matrix of cognitive powers. We first provide a short sketch of the postulates and gains of cognitive grammars. We examine the guidelines of the works on cognitive research led by great Eleanor Rosch, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, as well as the concept of embodied mind developed by Francesco Varela. This summary survey is a crash introduction to a series of angular readings from a large array of perspectives on Nietzsche's early contributions to the field of cognition. The works prospected are contemporary of the publication of Nietzsche first great work, "The Birth of the Tragedy" (1872), including his notes for the lecture course on rhetoric taught at the University of Basel during the winter semester, in 1872-73, then his "Theoretische Studien", written during summer 1873, with a consideration of later developments in his "Gay Science" (1882). The overall thesis advocated by Nietzsche in these works could be summarized as follows: all the elements of the categorical apparatus and the conceptual framework by which we assess reality, a fortiori the notion of truth which vouches for it, are the "precipitate" or the residue of a cluster of metaphors which constitute the structuring force of cognitive powers. The instinct of conservation and a subtle form of dissimulation lead to the elision of the tropic dynamics of language to the benefit of a literalism bound to a structuring amnesia. If for Kant we get access only to phenomena and not to noumenon, for Nietzsche we always deal with perspectives or points of view, whilst reality is traded to us by mean of truths which are mere fictions or worn out metaphors. So we come to acknowledge that the endogenous tropism displayed by language uses constitutes a major force in the implementation of conceptuality, that last one being eager to absorb its own prehistory into oblivion and to endow itself a status which is in close to timelessly imploded by the ebb of creative imagination fuelled by sheer metaphoric force, a spontaneous impulsion that Nietzsche ties to an "artistic force" (Kunstkraft) which tends to multiply the perspectives whose genealogy is driven by an exponential factor.