When we left off with “On Friedrich and Britney, part II”, we asked a question about the connection between Nietzsche’s statement, “Without art we would be nothing but foreground,” and Shelley’s, “poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration”.
The answer is in how named things are connected and how we derive the definitions of named things from connections between them. Nietzsche also says, in “On Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense”, “The creator of language … only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors.”
Patterns, metaphors, and patterns of metaphors.
Named things are connected to each other in epistemologically convenient patterns. We create connections between things in ways that jive well with whatever existing connections we have. We define things by their connections, those connections are relations, and those relations are, by definition, relative; they are “comparative”.
Syllogism of the moment: We define things by connections that are comparative.
They are synonymous, antonymous, or somewhere in between along the spectrum of similarity. The relation is, according to “On Truth and Lies…”, a metaphor — a definition by comparison. “Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things.” And the spectrum of relativity is an emergent patttern of metaphors. This pattern of metaphors is the limit of our capacity for comparison, thus definition, at any one time. But as things appear which do not fit the conventional (read: accepted) definitions for their names, the names (read: metaphors) shift.
Consider Nietzsche’s leaf:
“Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept ‘leaf’ is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects.”
And when a leaf appears, the comparative connections to which are different from those, generally, of other leaves, but we know it should be a leaf, we alter the metaphor “leaf” to accommodate. Eventually the patterns themselves — the connections between metaphors that instantiate and perpetuate those metaphors — shift. The undulations of the metaphor patterns are Shelley’s always unfurling futurity casting shadows upon the present, reflected as the unapprehended inspiration of which poets are hierophants. How does this bring us back to the original issue of art and texture vs. pop-culture and foreground?
In Part IV, I will compare Nietzsche’s and Shelley’s perspectives upon the value of metaphor vis-a-vis truth, and we will perhaps see where the potential lies for for understanding… Is it in “art” or in the “vulgar”, or is it perhaps in the beholder of either?
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