Lacan's Mirror, Letter

Through his synthesis of Saussurian linguistics and Freudian psychology, Lacan attempts to give us a more complete and nuanced picture of both systems of thought as well as of the nature of our own existence.

I think it is important to note, from the outset, that by applying (and to a great extent, also extending) the Saussurian model of language into the core of the human psyche (as it relates to our subconscious), Lacan necessarily pushes any theory of existence into a realm of uncertainty and relativity. In his essay, "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious," (excerpted in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd ed.), Lacan quickly does away with the possibility of discussing reality at all when he states that

“...this primordial distinction [between signifier (S) and signified (s)] goes well beyond...the bi-univocal correspondence between the word and the thing....[N]o signification can be sustained other than by reference to another signification..." (1171).

The reason for this impossibility, Lacan posits, is the fact that there necessarily remains within us sections of ourselves that are untranslatable in any language. This quality of the incompleteness of language Lacan develops into a complete explanation of human existence as it manifests itself in human psychology.

In "The Mirror Stage as Formative..." (also excerpted in the Norton), Lacan sets about explaining what he conceives to be the moment of an initial separation of self from self-image. He locates this moment at the time that a baby first identifies itself in a mirror. (Thus, "Mirror Stage"). Before this moment, Lacan suggests, the baby is a bundle of "turbulent movements" that he can feel animating him (1165). We might find an analogy for this state in Nietzsche's Dionysiac, associated as it is with immediate sensory experience and fleeting sensation. Lacan's pre-Mirror baby has no sense of itself beyond the fragmented pieces of sensory data that it compiles from the world around it. It does not conceive of itself as a unified being. During this time, it might be inclined to consider its mother's breast as much a part of its existence as the feeling of hunger which the milk helps to subside. The sensation of warmth provided by blankets likewise is not conceived as separate from the self.

All of this changes, Lacan says, when the baby makes the "primary identification" of its self in the mirror (1164). In this identification, the baby conceives of itself as a unified whole for the first time. This has the effect of drawing forth the child's ego, as he conceives of a certain power and agency associated with a unified self. Lacan says that the idea of a unified self is primarily an aesthetic realization, based as it is on the form of unity presented in the mirror. However, the "agency of the ego," in order to establish it's self-image, must necessarily subject that pre-Mirror sensory data to a degree of repression, and so, Lacan says, the ego in this way is from the beginning situated "in a fictional direction" (1165). The mirror image, Lacan continues, "symbolizes the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination" (1165). This alienation occurs because at the same time that the child conceives of himself as a unified being, he must also recognize all of those things which are evidently not a part of that self, including (not least of all) his mother's breast.

We can see Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic at play in the interaction which Lacan conceives of between the child and his mirror image. Here, the child understands the image in the mirror to be Other than himself. It is not actually part of himself, but the child incorporates this "specular I" as Other into himself when he begins to interact with others. Thus Lacan's concept of "paranoiac alienation" occurs as the true self (the inner, inexpressible, and fragmented self that the child first knew) is subdued, enslaved and repressed by this "specular I" in its first attempts to interact socially.

From a scientific standpoint (one to which I, despite [because of?] my deep-seated romanticism, am ever inclined to resort), the question arises whether the mirror in this stage must be a literal mirror (in the sense that the identification taking place must be an actual literal reflection of the child), or if it might as easily be seen as a figurative mirror, in which the child’s individual mirror image comes together finally in his mind as he unifies the sensed anatomy of his own body and the perceived unity of other humans. It seems that if we are to consider the mirror to be literal (there is some suggestion that we are), Lacan’s theory has implications for our understanding of pre-industrial societies. For thousands of years the only mirrors available might have been the calm surfaces of bodies of water. Prehistoric babies would not likely encounter such a reflection until well into their lives. How much earlier today’s young children are surely exposed to any literal reflection of themselves. (The little musical swing that we bought for my son Will when he was born had a little mirror positioned just above his newborn head, for easy viewing.) Does this earlier exposure suggest that the mirror stage might be reached earlier in life for modern man? If, in order to avoid such a difficulty, we consider the latter to be true, and the mirror to be figurative, we are put in the position of asking what the immediate stimulus might be for the child to unify his self-image. Truthfully, this same issue arises in the literal-mirror model, since I think we can safely assume that Will did not unify his self-image the first time we laid him in the musical swing. In this sense, Lacan's theory lacks clarity as so many other developmental models seem to (my wife, in this connection, suggests Piaget's cognitive development model). Lacan goes farther than Freud in explaining the roots of the consciousness we experience, but he shirks the question of why it should be this moment, this stimulus, rather than any other which causes the necessary fracture.

In "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious," Lacan attempts to trace out the implications of the fracture of self-consciousness which occurs in the Mirror Stage. He begins by positioning the individual, from the very start, in the context of society and culture through our relationship with language, to which he attributes the structure of the unconscious. Lacan observes:

“...language and its structure exist prior to the moment at which each subject at a certain point in his mental development makes his entry into it....[T]he ethnographic duality of nature and culture is giving way to a ternary conception of the human condition--nature, society, and culture--the last term of which would well be reduced to language...” (1169-70)

He perceptively downplays the traditional dichotomy between individual and society, between nature and nurture. Lacan sees these two elements as so intimately interwoven as to be ultimately indivisible. However, the real revolution is Lacan's assertion that the unconscious itself contains "the whole structure of language" (1169). Saussure was astute in his recognition that language is something complete which we enter into as we learn it. We do not have to create language anew because it already exists in the world separate us. Lacan goes a step further by stating that language is the structure by which our subconscious is organized. Language, in other words, at least in its structure is an inborn trait. By identifying himself with an image, the child has already undergone a shift in his consciousness from the 'real' (that state of immediate sensual interaction with the world) to the 'imaginary' (literally, associated with his image, his fractured ego self). When the child enters into language, he undergoes a second transition, into the realm of the 'symbolic.' Interactions at the level of society and culture, undergone through our employment of language, are therefore removed from reality by two degrees.

In explaining the structure of this Language itself, Lacan reproduces the formula put forward by Saussure, translating it in Lacanian fashion into an algorithm: S/s, where S represents the signifier and s the signified. Lacan here places a great deal of stress on the bar separating the two, a barrier which he says "initially...resist[s] signification" (1171). This bar takes on greater significance later, as he explore the signification of the phallus. For now, it is enough to say that this bar is largely uncrossable, and that any suggestion of a direct relationship between S and s is misleading. To demostrate this, Lacan reproduces the diagram employed by Saussure to explain the relationship between signifier and concept:

And couples it with his own, corrected and refined image:

It should be noted that, in reproducing Saussure's image, Lacan has flipped it, in order to make it match with his formulation S/s. (in Saussure's original, the concept is on top, the sound-image on bottom, which accords with his view that the sound-image flows from an attempt to represent, to signify, the concept). This change also has the effect of placing the primacy on the signifier, rather than the signified, which is key to Lacan's understanding of the final inaccessibility of the signified in any attempt at signification.

The difference between these two images lies in Lacan's conception of language as a power in identity formation. The second image presents two signifiers with seemingly identical signifieds. The speaker then is left with a choice which requires that he enter into one or the other, and in so doing, fit himself (or herself) to a notion of identity which is defined by language (as a system external to the self). While Lacan's example ostensibly deals with sexual identity (which he seems to consider as primary in identity formation), the same diagram might well serve in any number of cases, as far as it relates to Saussure's pardigmatic axis of signification. The choices we make with regards to language, what word we choose as signifier for any given signified, help to define our identity in relation to society.

Lacan here introduces what he terms "the signifying chain," which is the chain of signification by which we attempt communication, and which he characterizes as "rings of a necklace that is a ring in another necklace made of rings" (1174). The image is appropriately abstruse, and suggests in language the quality of a fractal, ever diverting from any specific connection to reality. The signifying chain is indicative in grammar of "the level of the unit immediately superior to the sentence," and in verbal utterance, "the level of the verbal locution" (1174). In other words, the signifying chain is active at the moment that a complete meaning is attempted in language. Lacan allows that this meaning is developed either by recourse to metonymy (the substitution of words based on partial signification) or by metaphor (the substitution of signifiers which cross the barrier of signification).

Mytonymy is basically a repetitive act, and does not require any creation, as it simply substitutes signifier for signifier based on similarity or relationship in meaning. This seems similar to Saussure's paradigmatic axis, which finds attached to any signifier other signifiers which have a related meaning. Indeed, Lacan echoes Saussure when he states that "[t]here is in effect no signifying chain that does not have, as if attached to the punctuation of each of its units, a whole articulation of relevant contexts suspended 'vertically', as it were, from that point" (1175). This suggests that any utterance implies a substitution, some other chain which would work equally well to perform the intended meaning. It also suggests that any utterance might well imply its opposite, and that the implication of opposing meaning is equally as important in our attempts to understand the meanings of opposite. (This seems again to suggest language as a system of negative relations: we define any single concept not so much by what it is as by what it isn't).

Metaphor is more complicated, and I'm not quite sure what to make of it. Lacan allows that metaphoric construction is "creative or poetic" in that it represents a "crossing of the bar" of signification which allows for the "passage of the signifier into the signified" (1179). This formulation is confusing, considering Lacan's insistence up until now (and later, in his discussion of the Phallus) of the inviolability of the bar, the essential inaccessibility of the signified in any attempt at signification. Perhaps we must understand this simply as stating that metaphor is creative in that it sets up new linguistic relationships between signifiers, new arrows pointing to new signifieds (which perhaps still remain essentially out of reach). If at one time 'love' and 'rose' were metonymically isolated, metaphor has since crossed the bar, so that the two words now are bound by associative meaning.

Lacan finishes his essay on "The Agency of the Letter" with a deconstruction of Descartes assertion that "I think, therefore I am." Lacan identifies the error in this assertion as the assumption that human thought represents the epitome of existence. Thought, Lacan has shown, is a determinate of language, which is necessarily symbolic and repressive of reality. To hold to Descartes' formula is to "deny oneself access to what might be called the Freudian universe," all that part of existence which eludes consciousness (1180). The reformulation of human consciousness around linguistic construction means that, henceforth, it is no longer "a question of knowing whether I speak of myself in a way that conforms to what I am, but rather of knowing whether I am the same as that of which I speak" (1180). Because the true inner self, the 'real', is eternally cut off by our recourse to language, we must forever wonder whether what we are 'really' bares any relation to how we are represented in our speech. Lacan thus reformulates the saying, first as, "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think," and finally as, "I am not wherever I am the playing of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think" (1180). While these reformulations can be seen partially as a humorous Lacanian subversion, they suggest what is really at the core of his philosophy: that human 'reality' must necessarily lie forever beyond the scope of explanation.

Oscar Wilde and "The Critic as Artist"

Oscar Wilde's The Critic as Artist (Excerpted in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition) represents an interesting synthesis of many of the ideas I have heretofore been exploring.

In a strict sense, he seems to be interested in extending and refining the role of the critic put forward by Matthew Arnold in his essay "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" (also, conveniently anthologized in my Norton). Arnold holds that it is the function of criticism "to see the object as in itself it really is" (695), a notion with which Wilde assertively disagrees. As the title of the work suggests, he holds the critic in high regards as an artist in his own right, who uses the works of artists as they in turn have used the material world: as a point from which to jump in the creation of something wholly new. He seems to anticipate reader response criticism when he states that the artwork is not "expressive," but "impressive," and that Criticism is "in its essence purely subjective, and seeks to reveal its own secret and not the secret of another" (800). Criticism, for Wilde, has no interest in discovering the true intentions of the artist; that is a shallow endeavor. Rather, Criticism must use the artwork as a pallet upon which to read "the record of one's own soul" (799).

Arnold maintain that criticism lays the philosophical groundwork upon which art is built. Wilde suggests, "There have been critical ages that have not been creative, in the ordinary sense of the world, ages in which the spirit of man has sought to set in order the treasures of his treasure-house" (796). It is, in fact, to this effect that Arnold sets about writing his essay to begin with. He sees a certain deficiency in the age from which he writes, a deficiency which he believes makes the creation of any true art impossible; the absence in Arnold's England of the "national glow of life and thought" which makes epochs of great art possible, leaves contemporary art wanting "materials and a basis" which might allow it "a thorough interpretation of the world" (698). It is the function of Arnold's proposed turn to criticism to create such an era of inquiry. Wilde agrees, stating that "there has never been a creative age that has not also been a critical age" (796).

Arnold still holds the "free creative activity" found in great art to be the "highest function of man," and so seems to position criticism as a somewhat lesser, albeit equally necessary, pursuit (696). Wilde sees no such distinction. Indeed, the very title of his work suggests as much: the critic does not stand in relation to the artist, but rather becomes an artist himself as he experiences and interprets the art of others. For Wilde, Criticism in its highest form is "more creative than [artistic] creation" because it relates not to the world, but to one's soul; in this sense, Criticism becomes a more pure realization of Hegel's self-consciousness, which Wilde holds to be essential to the creation of true art (799). Wilde even goes so far, at times, as to (somewhat humorously) denigrate the artistic function. Of authors, for example, he says, "Anybody can write a three-volumed novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature" (797), and he attributes to the Mona Lisa the possibility that da Vinci was "merely the slave of an archaic smile" (800).

Wilde's concept of Beauty echoes and revises that of Kant. Kant asserts that "the beautiful is a symbol of the morally good" ("From Critique of the Power of Judgment," excerpted in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition, p. 449). Wilde parallels the sentence of Kant's when he claims that "Beauty is the symbol of symbols" ("The Critic As Artist," p. 802). For Kant, establishing the subjective universality of Beauty was essential, and he went to great lengths to eliminate all interest from the aesthetic judgment of an artwork. In Kant's aesthetic, beauty must have no purpose, and all judgment of beauty lies within the person who is judging. Wilde takes in these concepts and states that "because it expresses nothing," Beauty offers the opportunity to the Critic to "put into it whatever one wishes" (802). Beauty, according to Wilde, "has as many meanings as man has moods," and Criticism of artwork offers the opportunity to bring to fuller light "a form which the artist may have left void, or not understood, or understood incompletely" (802). That the artwork is somehow incomplete for the artist is an idea first raised by Shelley, who saw in the works of Dante and Milton the possibility of interpretations that the artists themselves could not have anticipated. Wilde echoes this concept when assigns to his Critic the role of "always showing us the work of art in some new relation to our age" (806).

There are aspects of Wilde's work which call to mind Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lying" as well; foremost perhaps is Wilde's insistence that it is the primary aim of the writer to lie willfully. What Nietzsche asserts gravely, however--that we are blind to our reality because of our immersion in a lie--Wilde approaches playfully; he seems to register Nietzsche's concerns even as he acknowledges them as the components of the great play-thing that is human existence. In his exploration of the critic, in fact, Wilde builds an argument that echoes Nietzsche's at each step, while at each turn reversing the "tone of grim intensity" that pervades Nietzsche in favor of a certain frivolity (Editor's note, p. 78). Wilde first acknowledges indirectly Nietzsche's skepticism of language when he asserts that language "is the parent, and not the child, of thought" (797). Wilde maintains a certain level of pride in the human animal, who through language can "rise above" "lower" lifeforms (797). Where Nietzsche criticizes language for its roll in constructing a false sense of reality, Wilde praises this linguistic function in human existence:

...it is the function of Literature to create, from the rough material of actual existence, a new world that will be more marvellous [sic], more enduring, and more true than the world that common eyes look upon, and through which common natures seek to realize their perfection (798).

One can see that Wilde uses the word true just as Nietzsche would, to describe the constructed reality revealed through the employment of language. Language divides us from the crude rule of mere action, which Wilde points out any animal may achieve, calling action "a blind thing, dependent on external influences, and moved by an impulse of whose nature it is unconscious" (797). Wilde's man of action here begins to sound a bit like Nietzsche's intuitive man.

As Wilde describes the way in which the critic interacts with the artist, he does so in a way that hearkens the role that Nietzsche assigns to Science. For Nietzsche, science "works unceasingly" to fit the world of primary concepts, concepts more or less created as metaphors for reality, into a "columbarium," a great framework which imposes metaphors upon metaphors and thus removes humanity ever farther from the primary experience of reality (771). Similarly, Wilde's critic

occupies the same relation to the work of art that he criticises as the artist does to the visible world of form and colour, or the unseen world of passion and of thought (798-99).

As Nietzsche's Science piles metaphor upon metaphor, so Wilde's criticism is "a creation within a creation," and just as Nietzsche condemns Science for this tendency, Wilde praises criticism as "the purest form of personal impression" because "it has least reference to any standard external to itself" (799).

Reading Wilde, I am struck by the way in which he constructs his arguments. As is evident in the above analysis, he is interesting not so much for the originality of his ideas, but for the wild (read, "Wilde") spin he puts on the ideas of others. He uses the dialogue format to highlight the ostensible absurdity of his theses, and then shows them to arise out of a certain point of view taken on past theoretical work. It is, of course, the subjective point of view which arrives as the champion of Wilde's Criticism, and employing just such a point of view serves to demonstrate the very theory he is positing.

Nietzsche's Truth and Lying

In his essay, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” Nietzsche paints a picture of humanity “deeply immersed in illusions and dream-images” (Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition, 765).

He calls into question language’s capacity to relate truths. Nietzsche’s “liar” is only lying insomuch as he is subverting the agreed-upon naming system of society. Nietzsche goes on to deconstruct this naming system, pointing to language’s tendency to generalize experiences and thus disconnect the language of them with the experiences themselves. He goes on the explain the genesis of language in terms of two metaphors.

The first metaphor occurs when “[t]he stimulation of a nerve is first translated into an image” (767). It seems easiest to imagine this metaphor in terms of visual stimuli, where photons of light travel to our visual cortex, and our brain receives and interprets the stimuli as some set of images. We “see” a chair because our brain interprets the set of photon data as a specific image. This could apply equally to other senses, though we perhaps have to modify our understanding of the term “image.” Sound waves activate nerve sensors within our inner ear, and our brain resolves these waves into some semblance of order and intelligibility. This order would be the “image” of sound. Thus also for smell, taste, and touch.

Nietzsche’s second metaphor occurs when “[t]he image is then imitated by a sound” (767). This is the creation of language. The nervous receptors of the original stimuli transfer the image data to our verbal centers, which create a verbal representation of the image.

An interesting aspect of this process of language creation as described by Nietzsche is the necessary break between each step in the process. Translating nervous stimulus into image, and then image into sound, the human brain must encounter some very difficult choices. An analogy might be found in the difficulty translators have in capturing the essence of a passage in another language. Some data will be lost. Some amount of meaning will be distorted. Indeed, many hold that translation even between languages is impossible to accomplish effectively. And this between systems of thought designed to accomplish the same or similar tasks (i.e., the verbal representation of real experiences, of Nietzsche’s “nervous stimulation”). Nietzsche puts the difficulty thus: “...[E]ach time there is a complete leap from one sphere into the heart of another, new sphere” (767). As humans, we tend to gloss over the difficulty that occurs when one type of stimulus is translated into an entirely different sort of data (by way of not one, as Nietzsche points out, but two leaps) so long as this translation is as familiar as that which accompanies language formation. We are more uncomfortable with other forms of the same phenomenon; for example, the experience of tasting colors, which has been attested to by many who have experienced LSD, seems entirely foreign to us. Perhaps a closer examination of such “nonstandard” data translations would help us become aware of just how much of reality is lost in translation.

Nietzsche goes on to discuss “concepts” as the uses of language for individual cases which “must fit countless other, more or less similar cases, i.e. cases which, strictly speaking, are never equivalent, and thus nothing other than non-equivalent cases” (767). He gives the example of “leaf” and “honesty”, which words do not designate a particular entity in reality, but only a generalized concept of reality which is “formed by dropping...individual differences arbitrarily” (767). Nietzsche asserts that, by way of these generalizations, we create for ourselves a concept of something which does not exist in nature, a prototypical leaf from which all other leaves are designed in our minds. It’s interesting to note that this generalization necessarily begins in (and may take place entirely within) the creation of the first metaphor. When our nerves in our eyes are stimulated by some photons, our translation of this data into image must necessarily draw on the image data already stored in our brains. It is a simplification, to be sure, but it seems as though this sense data may be compared with the experiences of past nervous sensation, and when an alignment is found (between this sensation and others which are associated with the image-concept of ‘leaf’) a generalizing concept is applied. Language, then--the second metaphor--has less work to do.

Nietzsche uses this classification of experience in order to call into question humanity's relationship with the concept of “truth,” which he calls

A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation, and decoration, and which, after they have been in use for a long time, strike a people as firmly established, canonical and binding... (768)

He (somewhat humorously) returns to the liar with which he began the discussion, stating that humanity's obligation to “truth” is no more than “the obligation to lie in accordance with firmly established convention, to lie en masse and in a style that is binding for all” (768). This construct of humanity, which he acknowledges as “a mighty architectural genius,” nevertheless has no real connection to the world as it is, to Kant's “thing-in-itself,” and Nietzsche calls on man to again awaken to the knowledge of himself “as an artistically creative subject,” though this awakening necessarily means the loss of such “degree of peace, security, and consistency” as is achieved within the dream-image of constructed reality (770).

Nietzsche explains that humanity's continued employment of specific images to relate to specific neural activity, over many generations, has created in our minds a sense of causality, “as if it were the only necessary image” (770). He likens this experience to a dream from which one never wakes, and so takes the dream itself to be reality. The idea of dream-image is intimately taken up by Benjamin, whose phantasmagoria suggests that we are continually caught up in a false understanding of the continuity of reality. Benjamin, too, points to language's tendency to dissolve the concept of flux which is inherent in any concept of reality which attempts to exclude human consciousness. Things as they are do not have continuity, and only in the employment of language do I become an entity which is independent and unchanging.

By calling into question humanity’s access to universal truth, Nietzsche anticipates Postmodern relativism. It’s funny: it seems like I have, for most of my life, been aware of language’s limitations as Nietzsche outlines them, and I am attracted to his theory as foundational partially because it strikes me as somewhat odd that the concept of language’s constructedness could have ever been “new.” My feeling must necessarily stem from my own embeddedness in a set of cultural assumptions which has begun to internalize Nietzsche’s theory. This brings up a certain double paradox of the theory. First of all (and rather plainly), by making his claim that language does not relate to reality, that it distorts truth, Niezsche automatically undercuts his own argument (by virtue of the fact that it, too, is made using language). It’s the philosophical equivalent to saying “nothing I say is true.” But even more paradoxical to me is the idea that Nietzsche’s theory is embedded in a history of philosophy that makes him the inheritor of a great deal of ground work regarding our capacity for reason. It would seem, in other words, that Nietzsche’s own theory denouncing reason could only be reached through a superior employment of reason. Only through a superior self-consciousness can man become conscious of his own self-consciousness.

Nietzsche distinguishes between the man of concepts, regularity and reason, and the man of pretense, myth and immediacy. Modern, enlightened man, he says, will “no longer tolerate being swept away by sudden impressions and sensuous perceptions,” but must rather “generalize all these impressions first, turning them into cooler, less colorful concepts in order to harness the vehicle” of his life to them (768). Nietzsche blames science, which “works unceasingly at that great columbarium of concepts” for removing humanity into a world of metaphors based on metaphors, and so distancing us even further from any sense of reality. The drive to form metaphors, which Nietzsche acknowledges as a “fundamental human drive,” is not realized in a world structured by science, which hands down its own prepackaged metaphors and gives them the name Truth. This drive, however, might still be realized “in myth and in art generally” (771-72). He turns to pre-Socratic Greek society for an example of man for whom, “thanks to the constantly effective miracle assumed by myth...anything is possible at any time, as it is in a dream, and the whole of nature cavorts around men as if it were just a masquerade of the gods” (772). Modern man rarely considers just how much of his life and society functions based on the assumptions that trees will not talk and things, when dropped, will fall to the ground. By calling to mind a people for whom these assumptions did not hold, for whom at best trees usually didn’t talk, Nietzsche challenges us not to start looking for talking trees, but to recognize our position within the construct so that we might realize our own embeddedness in Nature (and thus, perhaps, gain perspective on ourselves as a species). He doesn’t seem to call so much for a total subversion of reason, but for a re-evaluation of reason in relation to its opposite: intuition.

Nietzsche’s hope for art and intuition as a force for revealing new metaphors, for subverting the normative framework of “reality” presented by science and reason, calls to mind Shelley’s assertion that poetry “lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar” (From A Defence of Poetry, excerpted in my Norton, p. 596). When Nietzsche’s artist, his “man of intuition[,]...wields his weapons more mightily” than the man of reason, “a culture can take shape...and the rule of art over life can become established” bringing humanity “a constant stream of brightness, a lightening of the spirit, redemption, and release” (773). Unlike Schiller or Coleridge, who set the imaginative capacity of man over and against natural phenomenon, Nietzsche suggests that our imaginative capacity, our metaphor-drive, is most active when we are closest to nature. When we allow ourselves to abandon the distinction that reason creates between “man” and “nature”, we are most attuned to the magical possibilities that the mysteries of nature present.

Nietzsche is interested in reembedding man in the great family tree of the animal kingdom. He seems to say to humanity, “Get over yourself. You are just a big dumb animal who has distinguished yourself from all other animals only because you happen to be a little less dumb.” He sets his task at the beginning of the essay, when he claims that what is needed is

...a satisfactory illustration of just how pitiful, how insubstantial and transitory, how purposeless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature; where were eternities during which it did not exist; and when it has disappeared again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that might extend beyond the bounds of human life. (764)

Nietzsche characterizes human intellect as nothing more than a Darwinian evolutionary tactic for “dissimulation”--for trickery, deceit, and cleverness--made necessary by our lack of “horns or the sharp fangs of a beast of prey with which to wage the struggle for existence” (765). From a scientific standpoint, this is probably a relatively accurate (if vastly oversimplified) portrayal. Again, Nietzsche himself must have seen the irony of the situation: His own theories about man’s over-reliance on Science are made possible and given “teeth” (so to speak) only through the advancement of Science. Darwin’s evolutionary theory, which deems to delineate all of life into an historical organizing apparatus, must represent for him a supreme example of Science’s propensity for the columbarium, and yet it is only Darwin’s theory which finally, and irrevocably, repositions mankind as nothing more than one possible outcome of a complicated natural phenomenon.

In describing man’s propensity for constructing metaphorical relationships, Nietzsche finds analogies in some of the more complex constructions found in nature (e.g., cobwebs, honeycombs). These analogies give rise to the question, how much of humanity’s “web” of metaphors results from our embeddedness in nature? Nietzsche would have us believe that our metaphorical tendencies, piling metaphor upon metaphor and building an “infinitely complicated cathedral of concepts on moving foundations...on flowing water” are in many ways subverting our natural tendency, dividing us from intuition and mystery (769). However, as he himself admits, “if we could communicate with a midge we would hear that it too floats through the air with the...feeling that it too contains within itself the flying centre of this world” (764). This seems to suggest that the tendency to center the universe around oneself is a natural tendency, which implies that a rejection of the constructed concept--a rejection in large part called for by Nietzsche--would represent more of a domination of man’s reason over nature than the original construction itself. Though it is our nature that we construct metaphors to dominate nature, Nietzsche seems to say, now we must begin the process of dominating (by abandoning) our natural tendencies to do so.

I am supremely interested in the limitations of language put forward by Nietzsche. I have been intrigued by the futility of the phrase, “do you know what I mean?” for some time, and I am excited to see where his theories lead. However, it seems essential to recognize Nietzsche’s suspicion of human intellect as an essentially intellectual suspicion, as well as to remember that, when all’s said and done, we are still left with language and action as our only recourse as unifying and organizing social forces.