Nietzsche’s Analysis of the Problematic Relation of Language to Reality
Questioning the eternal truths of language in a world in flux
Consider the word “chair”. It may bring to your mind an image of a particular chair, perhaps the one you are sat on right now, or perhaps one you’d prefer to be sat in. If you happen to think of a particular chair, then its characteristics are likely to be specific to you: it might be tall or short, it might be cushioned or bare, it might have armrests, it might be made of wood or metal or plastic.
We all know from experience that there are hundreds of different types of chairs, yet when we say the word “chair” we make no specific reference to any of these characteristics.
So to say the word “chair” is to employ a concept — a kind of summary word, one that transcends all individual instances. The German philosopher Nietzsche described the use of concepts as “dropping those individual differences arbitrarily, by forgetting those features that differentiate one thing from another.”
As a modern philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) made significant challenges to the established model of language. Like many philosophers before him, he was concerned with how language affects the way we perceive the world — the relationship between words and the…
