Ordets tillblivelse : aspekter av Nietzsches tidiga språkfilosofi

Sammanfattning: The thesis examines the nineteenth century German philosopher and philologist Friedrich Nietzsche’s early notion of how a word is generated in the process of perception. It does so by looking at the “metaphorical transitions” Nietzsche talks about in the essay “Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne” (“On Truth and Lie in an Extra-MoralSense”). According to the relevant passage in “On Truth and Lie…“ an image is first created as a metaphor for a stimulus and a word is then created as a metaphor for the image. Nietzsche also states that the word has two fundamental aspects: metaphor and concept. The essay, and in particular the passage on the metaphorical transitions, has often been interpreted either from a skeptical viewpoint, saying that Nietzsche’s enterprise is to reject philosophical realism and the Aristotelian/Kantian correspondence theory of truth. Or it has been interpreted from a dogmatic viewpoint, saying that Nietzsche holds that there is an insurmountable barrier between “consciousness” and “the world” and that human knowledge is therefore doomed only to consist of private and erroneous representations of a world beyond the reach of the intellect. This thesis suggests a third way of looking at the passage, where the metaphorical transitions are taken to be the very possibility of knowledge, since they constitute the human way of being in the world. Thus Nietzsche’s train of thought in “On Truth and Lie...” is interpreted as a general model for looking at how knowledge arises. By force of this interpretation, it is argued that a consequence of Nietzsche’s position is that the epistemological strength of language, taken as the ability to pose the question what something is, lies in its image creating aspect, the metaphor, rather than in its discursive aspect, the concept.