The peace treaty and the birth of lies
Metaphors and what they make of us
No, this is not a piece on the forthcoming American presidential elections, nor on the continuing running sore of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Even though it can sometimes seem, in the words of the wonderful King James Version of the Bible, that a ‘darkness which may be felt’1 stretches over the lands, that is not where we will be going here. Rather, I’d like now to take a moment to consider not so much how we use language, but rather how language uses us.
The title of this piece is taken from an essay by Friedrich Nietzsche.2 The essay starts with a brilliant and arresting fable:
“Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of ‘world history,’ but, nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die.”
For Nietzsche, humanity and human existence are nothing to write home about - and he is particularly abrasive, I think one can say, about what he sees as our inbuilt propensity to dupe ourselves and others. According to what he says in this essay, it all started with our need to get along with each other:
“Man wishes to exist socially and with the herd; therefore he needs to make peace and strives accordingly to banish from his world at least the most flagrant bellum omnium contra omnes. This peace treaty brings in its wake something which appears to be the first step towards acquiring that puzzling truth drive: to wit, that which shall count as ‘truth’ from now is established. That is to say, a uniformly valid and binding designation is invented for things, and this legislation of language establishes the first laws of truth. For the contrast between truth and lie arises here for the first time. The liar is a person who uses the valid designations, the words, in order to make something unreal appear real.”
So as to function as social beings, we agree together that a word denotes a thing. From word to concept is a tiny step, and from concept to belief an even smaller slip of the mind - and then all hell breaks loose:
“Every word becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases - which means, purely and simply, which are never equal and thus altogether unequal.”
So, in the end, ‘truths are illusions which have forgotten they are illusions’, and we are ankle-deep in dead metaphors and flaccid metonymies with every phrase we speak. Not just that, but this unquestioned carapace of concepts determines what we see and how we experience.
In their lovely little book Metaphors We Live By,3 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson make plain just how pervasively metaphors shape our thinking. Take for instance the phrase ‘time is money’ and the way in which this bizarre equation has grown out of a Western culture “in which work is typically associated with the time it takes and time is precisely quantified”. “These practices”, they go on to say, “are relatively new in the history of the human race, and by no means do they exist in all cultures. They have arisen in modern industrialised societies, and structure our basic everyday activities in a very profound way. Corresponding to the fact that we act as if time is a valuable commodity… we conceive of time that way. Thus we understand and experience time as the kind of thing that can be spent, wasted, budgeted, invested wisely or poorly, saved, or squandered.”
Our experience, our vision, is shaped and constrained by the metaphors our cultures have coined - how we might wriggle out of that straitjacket is something I look forward to exploring next week.
Exodus, 10:21
‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’ (1873), in The Nietzsche Reader, Blackwell Publishing, 2006
Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, The University of Chicago Press, 2003