Question about reading Nietzche and philology

A former student of mine asked me to help him understand a quotation by
Nietzche. The quotation itself is at the end of my response to him,
which is copied and pasted below. Since there are several people here
that could probably offer some insight, I'd appreciate any responses.

Jim

*******

No sweat about when you pick up the _Maus_ books. Just don't want you
to forget them, that's all. Next time you're around campus is fine,
even if that's not 'till February.

The quotation from Nietzche would probably be easier to understand if
you juxtapose it against other ideas about language.
  

If you start with the idea that language was created by God, for
example, and therefore directly and accurately describe realities as
they present themselves to the human mind, then I think you can see how
Nietzche's ideas are very different.

Nietzche's background was philology, the study of language as it exists
across time and culture. It's kind of like an anthropology of
language. So rather than seeing language as this thing that came down
from heaven entire, he saw it as something that developed over time from
non-verbal cultures to cultures that have sophisticated languages with
millions of words.

Let me give you a fictional example. Imagine we were to trace the
history of the word "justice." Suppose that we went all the way back,
and found that the earliest use of the word justice (in its earliest
form in some other language) simply meant "scales" -- that it was a noun
referring to a balancing device of some sort. Then suppose it came to
be used metaphorically. People serving judicial functions in this early
society may have been seen as "balancing" the competing interests of
different people in the tribe. So justice started out as a simple noun
referring to a thing, and developed a more abstract meaning related to
judicial functions. From there the word "justice" could evolve to mean
fairness or equality or "human rights."

Now, to the person who believes language was handed down by God, the
word "justice" would have no such history, or they would believe the
real history of the word is lost in history (except for sacred texts
that describe the origin of language). To this group, all the ideas
about fairness and equality and human rights existed from the beginning
-- they are therefore "real things" out there in the cosmos and in the
human world.

  
To Nietzche, though, as he looks at what he thinks is the history of the
word, it seems obvious that it was never anything more than a metaphor
that we made up to begin with, a "sum of human relations." We've
forgotten the real history and now mistake these metaphors describing
human relations for eternal truths. He extends this type of judgment to
all of the "big words" and, by extension, to the morality and beliefs
that are formed by them.

Here's the original quotation so you can read it over again and see if
what I described fits. Remember, I just made up this "history" of the
word justice. It's just an illustration.

> "What is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms -- in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power, coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins"

Harsh stuff, eh? :). I think the truth of the matter is that we don't
really know where language came from, since all we can do is follow the
evolution of -written- language. We can never be sure, exactly, how
written language related to spoken language in the distant past, nor of
the developments in language prior to its existence in written form.
Language may have suffered a "fall" and what we witness in the history
of written texts is a recovery. Hard to say just on the basis of the
evidence at hand.

Jim
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Received on Sun Dec 14 10:26:24 2003