The Birth Of Tragedy Rhetorical Analysis

What follows is a detailed exegesis on a passage from Friedrich Nietzsche’s writing, “The Birth of Tragedy”. The main purpose of this passage is to challenge the idea of truth through a series of metaphors and vivid interpretations of such. Nietzsche’s goal in this excerpt is to expound on a specific issue using reasoning in a metaphoric way to justify his argument. To help the reader further understand this higher thinking passage, I will be tearing apart and reconstructing it line by line. Nietzsche begins this section with an analogy to illustrate what he feels is essentially flawed in our form of communication. He starts by saying, “one can conceive of a profoundly deaf human being who has never experienced sound or music; just as such

This helps to expand on the analogy Nietzsche used previously of the deaf person believing he has understanding in terms of sound itself, but has only subjective understanding, which are inadequate at the very least, regarding sound. The metaphors that Nietzsche mentions in this line are the words that we use on a daily basis. He describes them as metaphors because of the way we form conceptions; we systematically do so with these objects and it is only through experience. Therefore, the metaphors of objects that man use are founded on experiencing the objects and not on the original entities, of which are unknown. For a concept to be grounded on original entities one would have to assume objects have true forms; Nietzsche would disagree with this thought. Nietzsche argues that there is no such thing as pure absolute truth; this is because we can only relate to objects in ways that they relate to us. Therefore, we can only identify objects in ways that directly relate to our own state of mind. Nietzsche states. “as creatures of reason, human beings now make their actions subject to the rules of abstractions; they no longer tolerate being swept away by sudden impressions and sensuous perceptions; they now generalize all these impressions first, turning them into cooler, less colourful concepts in order to harness the vehicle of their lives and actions to them” (Nietzsche 146). Here Nietzsche contends that it is part of human nature to get by with metaphors; it is in fact a way of communication. But he claims that that is the easy route, the way that is more comfortable to man. But in its simplicity and comfortability, the presence of greatness from nature is no longer residing, but is slowly fading away.