Forging Worlds with Words: Nietzsche’s Earliest Linguistic Vision and Its Sources

A Sea of Music and Words. AI art

 

“What takes place, is a somewhat mysterious process by which ‘thought-sound’ evolves divisions, and a language takes shape with its linguistic units in between those two amorphous masses. One might think of it as being like air in contact with water: changes in atmospheric pressure break up the surface of the water into series of divisions, i.e. waves. The correlation between thought and sound, and the union of the two, is like that”. F. de Saussure, CGL.

Introduction

“He forgets that the original perceptual metaphors are metaphors and takes them to be the things themselves” — On Truth and Lies in an Extra‑Moral Sense

“Language, the organ of semblance, can never disclose the pulse of music” —The Birth of Tragedy

Friedrich Nietzsche’s first two publications—the aesthetic treatise The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and the fragment “On Truth and Lies in an Extra‑Moral Sense” (1873)—seem, at first glance, to inhabit separate terrains: art and epistemology. Yet these pages, taken together, forge a single, audacious philosophy of language. In what follows I unfold that philosophy through five interconnected claims, showing how Nietzsche casts speech as a creative mask—an aesthetic stratagem woven from rhythm, feeling, and forgotten tropes that renders chaos livable even while veiling it.

Metaphor, Not Mirror

Nietzsche begins by toppling the correspondence theory—the longstanding view that language mirrors reality. According to this tradition, most famously articulated by Plato and later echoed by empiricists and realists, a true statement is one that accurately reflects an external fact. Nietzsche rejects this mimetic model. A word, he writes, is merely “the image of a nerve stimulus in sounds” (OTL, p. 83). No verbal token transparently transmits an external object; instead, it slides across sensual impressions through figurative leaps. For Nietzsche, metaphor is not an ornamental flourish but the very precondition of knowledge. Ancient Greek rhetoric—where persuasive craft outweighed referential fidelity—supplied the young philologist with a historical model: logos persuades precisely because it reshapes, not reproduces, the world. This dethroning of mimesis prepares the ground for Claim 2: the view that truth itself is a fossilized metaphor.

Truth as Fossilized Trope

From this non‑transparent starting point flows Nietzsche’s second principle: truth crystallizes when repeated metaphors ossify. His notorious maxim—“truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are” (1989/1873, p. 84)—echoes Kant’s warning that knowledge never escapes appearance, yet pushes further by diagnosing a collective amnesia. Concepts are not pristine tools of reason but archaeological remnants—linguistic fossils—that retain the contours of once‑living metaphors while lacking their original imaginative pulse. The Enlightenment quest for certitude thus rests on sedimented poetry, not neutral observation. If truth begins as frozen poetry, what raw material first congeals into that poetry? Nietzsche’s answer is rhythm.

Musical Subsoil of Speech

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche links discourse to rhythm and melody. Section 6 claims that folk song is “the musical mirror of the world, the original melody” from which words later spring (1999/1872, p. 52). Schopenhauer’s thesis that music voices the will without mediation supplies the metaphysical backdrop, while Schiller’s notion of a “musical mood” preceding clear thought (BT §5) offers psychological evidence. Nietzsche inverts the usual order: not logos begetting rhythm, but rhythm inciting logos. Meaning does not don melodic garb; melody summons meaning into being. What rhetorical handbooks call delivery, Nietzsche situates at the genesis of speech itself. Once rhythm invites language, those words quickly acquire social leverage.

Concept, Power, Politics

Concept formation is therefore neither accidental nor benign. When we label diverse leaves with the single signifier leaf, we “equate what is unequal” (1989/1873, p. 85). Freezing a vibrant flux into stable sameness is an epistemic violence—a taming of multiplicity that secures cultural authority by erasing nuance. Here the Romantic celebration of perpetual metamorphosis (Heraclitus’ river, Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants) haunts Nietzsche’s critique, reminding us that nature resists rigid grids. Categorization, he shows, is always already political. This political edge raises a final question: if language both veils and violates, why do we keep speaking at all?

Masking Chaos, Making Life Possible

Nietzsche’s answer avoids nihilistic despair. Both early texts acknowledge the pragmatic necessity of illusion. Only by “forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject,” he writes, can humanity live with “repose, security, and consistency” (1989/1873, p. 88). The Apollonian veil in BT performs the same task: sculpting distinct images atop Dionysian tumult. Kant’s phenomena–noumena split hovers in the margins, but Nietzsche adds a twist: the mask is not merely epistemic limitation; it is an aesthetic achievement. Far from deception, this crafting is affirmation. To mask chaos is to live. Rhetoric, for Nietzsche, is not falsehood but finesse—a sculptural act that turns formlessness into form, contingency into coherence.

In short, we keep speaking not in spite of language’s veiling, but because of it. Veiling, for Nietzsche, is what makes life livable.

Conclusion

From the primacy of metaphor to the musical womb of utterance, Nietzsche’s debut works articulate a unified vision: speech is a crafted screen—born of rhythm, solidified through trope, wielded by power, indispensable for survival. Drawing on Kant’s critical legacy, Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of music, Romantic fluidity, Classical rhetoric, and Schiller’s psychology of inspiration, the young thinker forges an audacious linguistic genealogy. Later writings will refine the vocabulary—perspectivism, will to power, genealogy—yet the scaffolding is already visible in 1872–73. Recognizing this continuity dissolves the boundary between aesthetics and epistemology in Nietzsche’s oeuvre and invites contemporary philosophy to view language less as a window and more as the very mask that renders an unpredictable real endurable.

Notes

1. Page references for Nietzsche follow Kaufmann’s The Birth of Tragedy (Vintage, 1999) and Breazeale’s translation of “On Truth and Lies” (Cambridge, 1989).

References

Kaufmann, W. (Trans.). (1999). The Birth of Tragedy. Vintage. (Original work published 1872)

Nietzsche, F. (1989). On Truth and Lies in a Non‑Moral Sense (D. Breazeale, Trans.). In Early Greek Philosophy and Other Essays (pp. 79–97). Cambridge University Press. (Original essay written 1873)

Schiller, F. (1967). On the Aesthetic Education of Man (E. M. Wilkinson & L. A. Willoughby, Trans.). Clarendon Press. (Original letters 1795)

Schopenhauer, A. (1969). The World as Will and Representation (E. F. J. Payne, Trans.). Dover. (Original work published 1818)