Masks, Music and Metaphor: Nietzsche’s Early Philosophy of Language

Greek lyre and language. AI art

  

“Language, as the organ and symbol of phenomena, cannot at all disclose the innermost essence of music.” — The Birth of Tragedy, § 6

“Truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are.” — “On Truth and Lies”

Introduction

Between 1870 and 1873 Friedrich Nietzsche drafted two texts that, read together, outline a single, audacious theory of language. The Birth of Tragedy (BT) stages the drama mythically—music swells Dionysian chaos; Apollo chisels it into form—while “On Truth and Lies in an Extra‑Moral Sense” (OTL) [1] anatomises the same process in epistemological prose. Both insist that speech is neither transparent medium nor faithful mirror; it is an imaginative veneer that tames primordial tumult and invents a world in which “truth” can be staged.

Mythic Aesthetic Genealogy (The Birth of Tragedy)

BT roots lyric poetry in pre‑linguistic affect. Citing Schiller’s letter about a musical mood that precedes poetic ideas, Nietzsche locates artistic genesis in a “vague, tonal sensation” that mirrors Dionysian self‑dissolution. [2]  He calls this ground the Ur‑Eine (Primordial Unity). Music is its first articulation—not through semantic content but through pulse, resonance, rhythm.

Section 6 deepens the point with the folk‑song, “the musical mirror of the world, the original melody,” from which words later crystallise. “Melody generates the poem out of itself by an ever‑recurring process,” he writes; language trails music, supplying a “parallel dream‑phenomenon” after the fact. [3] Hence the hierarchy: speech imitates sound the way a shadow imitates flame—cool, flattened, belated. When Nietzsche concludes that “language … cannot at all disclose the innermost essence of music,” [4] he is naming the structural deficit that will re‑appear, shorn of myth, in OTL.

Critical Genealogy (“On Truth and Lies”)

OTL restates the argument in surgical terms. A word is “the image of a nerve stimulus in sounds”; the stimulus becomes a picture—first metaphor—then a vocal sign—second metaphor. Concepts arise only when we forget each image’s singular origin and begin “equating what is unequal.” In Nietzsche’s favourite example, no leaf wholly equals another, yet we abstract a concept “leaf” by overlooking the differences. [5] Truth, therefore, is “a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms” ossified by custom. [6]

The epistemic cost of this ossification is masked by a psychological benefit: “Only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject does man live with any repose, security, and consistency.”[7] Abstraction’s “cool breath” secures communal life but severs language from the roiling ground that gave it birth.

Convergence—One Vision, Two Registers

  

Both texts track the same arc:

1. Pre‑conceptual affect (musical mood / nerve stimulus).
2. Metaphorical discharge (melody scatters “picture sparks” / image stage).
3. Conceptual ossification (Apollonian form / habitual abstraction).

The mythic idiom dramatises the process; the critical idiom strips the paint to expose its rhetorical scaffolding. Either way, language is revealed as a necessary fiction: an elegant façade enabling social life while veiling the abyss beneath perception.

Conclusion & Caveat

Nietzsche’s earliest works already house the architecture later elaborated in The Gay Science and Beyond Good and Evil: language invents order; it does not unveil it. BT shows music’s generative primacy and Apollo’s sculptural restraint; OTL diagrams the ladder from nerve stimulus to worn‑out coin. Critics might object that the aesthetic and epistemological registers remain too far apart. Yet the structural homology—rhythm precedes concept, metaphor precedes “truth,” form masks flux—suggests a unified vision. Humanity dwells behind a mask, Nietzsche teaches, not because we are deceitful but because only a mask lets chaos be approached, shaped, and—momentarily—endured.

Notes

1. OTL was written in 1873 but remained unpublished during Nietzsche’s lifetime; it first appeared posthumously in 1896.
2. BT §5 cites Schiller’s 1795 letter: “Perception with me is at first without a clear and definite object … A certain musical mood precedes …”
3. BT §6: “the musical mirror of the world … Melody generates the poem out of itself …”
4. BT §6: “language … cannot at all disclose the innermost essence of music.”
5. OTL: “Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal. No leaf ever wholly equals another …”
6. OTL: “What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors …”
7. OTL: “Only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject does man live with any repose …”

References

Kaufmann, W. (Trans.). (1999). The Birth of Tragedy. Vintage. (Original ed. 1872)
Breazeale, D. (Trans.). (1989). “On Truth and Lies in a Non‑Moral Sense.” In Early Greek Philosophy and Other Essays (pp. 79–97). Cambridge University Press. (Written 1873)
Schiller, F. (1795/1967). On the Aesthetic Education of Man (E. M. Wilkinson & L. A. Willoughby, Trans.). Clarendon Press.