Nietzsche on Language

Saparate ways. AI image Introduction Nietzsche’s mature philosophy cannot be understood without reckoning with his decisive rupture from Arthur Schopenhauer. This break marks more than a personal or intellectual disagreement; it signals a fundamental reorientation of how value, art, and philosophy itself are conceived. Where Schopenhauer sought redemption through negation and withdrawal from the world, Nietzsche came to affirm creation, interpretation, and form. The emergence of value-creation in Nietzsche’s later work coincides directly with this departure and finds its clearest expression in his radical revaluation of art. Schopenhauer’s Ethics of Negation Schopenhauer’s influence on the young Nietzsche was profound. Nietzsche himself later recalled that upon encountering Schopenhauer for the first time, he felt an immediate and decisive recognition: he counted himself among those readers who, “after having read the first page, know for certain that they will read every page an...

Dostoyevski and Nietzsche in the style of Chagall. AI image Note: This text was originally written in Spanish and is presented here in English translation. Introduction The crisis of nineteenth-century Europe was not merely political or scientific; it was, above all, spiritual. The erosion of Christian faith, the transformation of moral values, and the emergence of a radically historical consciousness confronted modern thought with an unsettling question: how is one to live when God no longer guarantees meaning? Within this horizon emerge two central figures, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche, often read side by side and frequently linked through the notion of a supposed direct influence. Yet what binds them is not a relation of dependence but a deeper affinity: a shared confrontation with nihilism and with the responsibility that arises once life must be lived without transcendent foundations. The decisive difference between them lies in how they respond to this condition....

Introduction In a previous discussion of Nietzsche’s On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1873) and Twilight of the Idols (1888), we observed a shift in scale: from the mechanisms of individual cognition to the historical life of ideas. What begins as an inquiry into perception and language later becomes a genealogy of metaphysical beliefs. This movement invites comparison with a well-known methodological gesture in Plato’s Republic , where Socrates proposes examining justice first in the city rather than in the individual soul, because it can be read “in larger letters.” Nietzsche’s trajectory, however, does not simply echo this Platonic strategy. It inverts it. Where Plato enlarges the soul into the polis to clarify justice, Nietzsche enlarges cognition into history to reveal the illusory foundations of truth. The City Written Large: Plato’s Methodological Analogy In Republic II, Socrates suggests that justice may be difficult to discern at the level of the individual psyc...

Introduction Nietzsche’s reflections on truth trace an intellectual trajectory in which later developments extend rather than negate earlier insights. In On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1873), he examines truth as a product of human cognition, perception, and language. Fifteen years later, in Twilight of the Idols (1888), he turns to the historical and genealogical dimensions, tracing the fate of the “true world” from Plato to positivism. Across this evolution, Nietzsche consistently challenges the assumption of an independent, intrinsic reality behind human concepts, but he shifts from analyzing the mental mechanics of truth to critiquing its moral and cultural history. This article explores that trajectory, showing how truth moves from a metaphorical construction rooted in perception to a historical fable whose necessity gradually dissolves. Truth as Metaphor and Cognitive Construction (1873) In On Truth and Lies , Nietzsche presents a radical picture of human knowledg...