Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher who pushed back against the narratives of progress and the rationalistic ordering of society in nineteenth century Europe, seeing these along with the societal traditions as hypocritical and repressive. In “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense”, Nietzsche strongly critiques the idea of rationality and classification in a world that he sees as dominated by whims and unpredictability, instead arguing for the domination of emotion and intuition through art that brings enjoyment to man. Countering him in “The Nature of the Linguistic Sign”, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand De Saussure expands on the structure of the word, which he calls the linguistic sign, and acknowledges its arbitrary classifications, but sees the sign as natural, rational and unchangeable. Thus, Nietzsche and de Saussure may be seen as opposites.

Nietzsche argues that cognition and rationality’s “most general effect is deception” (Nietzsche 141). The intellect serves as a protection for creatures who do not have things like “horns or the sharp fangs of a beast of prey” to survive (Nietzsche 142). Humans with their intellect are arrogant and see themselves as the center of the world. They are absorbed in dream visions and illusions, moving through the surface of things but never uncovering their truths. The individual, through making peace with others and thus leaving the state of nature, creates the first laws of truth. Yet truth is only wanted in a limited form by humans. They love enjoyable truths but hate bitter, harmful ones. Nietzsche deconstructs words and their structure. He wonders how trees could be classified as masculine and plants as feminine. For him, the identification of snake only refers to the twisting movements of the creature and thus is equally appropriate for a worm. This is how the word is made: First, a nerve’s stimulation is translated into an image, then the image is copied by a sound. Each word is immediately made into a concept, which is created “by making equivalent that which is not equivalent” (Nietzsche 145). For example, no leaf is like any other leaf, yet the concept of “leaf” ignores these differences arbitrarily so as to divide the “leaf” from what is not a leaf in nature. Thus “a concept is produced by overlooking what is individual and real, whereas nature knows neither forms nor concepts and hence no species, but only an ‘X’ which is inaccessible and indefinable by us” (Nietzsche 145). It is anthropomorphic. Thus, truth is “a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms”, bluntly a sum of human connections which has undergone revision and translation and has become conventional after having been in use for a long time (Nietzsche 146). Humanity builds a structure of concepts which is as rigid and regular as the Roman columbarium. The researcher tries to measure all things as they pertain to man, and thus has forgotten that metaphors are merely metaphors, that the objective is merely subjective, and that man is an “artistically creative subject”. He just wants to have some semblance of peace, but that peace is a prison (Nietzsche 148). For Nietzsche, man cannot hide the fact that he is a subjective creature, and that emotion rules him rather than reason. Men are hypocrites to Nietzsche for pretending that they can be objective and know the world, when in reality they are as insignificant as any other creature. If man had a different way of seeing things, with one person seeing a stimulus as red and the other as blue, nature would no longer be seen as being consistent with man’s laws but would instead be accepted as subjective. But as it stands, words serve to conceal ignorance for Nietzsche.

De Saussure uncovers the structure of words, or linguistic signs, and acknowledges that they are arbitrary but supports them unlike Nietzsche. He says that “the linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image” (Saussure 66). The latter, rather than being a purely physical, material object, is the psychological imprint that the sound makes on the senses. It is sensory, while the concept is usually more abstract. The linguistic sign goes both ways: the concept, as the definition of the sound image, also recalls it. Although the sign usually indicates only a sound image or word, De Saussure uses it to signify the combination. He says that “arbor is called a sign only because it carries the concept ‘tree’, with the result that the idea of the sensory part implies the idea of the whole” (Saussure 67). De Saussure replaces concept and sound-image with signified and signifier because to him those terms have the advantage of indicating their separation within the whole of which they make up their parts. This is one difference that De Saussure has from Nietzsche: he recognizes that although the signified and signifier have a separation, together they make up a common linguistic sign. That is why he uses the word-sign unlike Nietzsche, who is against the idea of the word and its rational structure and is deconstructing it. De Saussure acknowledges the arbitrary nature of the sign, noting that for example “the idea of ‘sister’ is not linked by any inner relationship to the succession of sounds s-b-r which serves as its signifier in French; that it could be represented equally by just any other sequence is proved by differences among languages and by the very existence of different languages” (Saussure 67-68). This principle underlies all of the linguistics of language. In reality, all forms of expression in society are based on convention: for example, a Chinese bow to the emperor is based on a fixed rule rather than the inner value of the expression itself. But De Saussure warns against arbitrarily changing symbols, because a symbol maintains a semblance of connection unlike a sign. For instance, the pair of scales symbolizing justice cannot simply be replaced by another symbol like a chariot. The arbitrariness of a signifier also does not mean that choosing it is left entirely to the speaker, as he cannot change a sign once it has become established within the linguistic community. Rather the arbitrariness is unmotivated in that it has no natural connection with the signified. While De Saussure agrees with Nietzsche about the arbitrariness of the word, he supports it and builds it up rather than deconstructing it like Nietzsche.

Nietzsche’s solution is to free the mind in art, but De Saussure insists that language is linear and a communal law. Nietzsche says that the intrinsic human conviction to create metaphors cannot be imprisoned through the fortresses that concepts build. Instead, “the drive seeks out a channel and a new area for its activity and finds it in myth and in art generally” (Nietzsche 151). The prison will inevitably be broken through. This stimulates the world of a people and makes it seem more of a dream than the world of a thinker who has had a mind sobered by science. Art “jumbles up metaphors and shifts the boundary stones of abstraction, describing a river, for example, as a moving road that carries men to destinations to which they normally walk” (Nietzsche 152). When the man of intuition vanquishes his counterpart, art will dominate life, and thus life will be expressed by pretense, the denial of want, the shine of metaphorical visions, and indeed mostly by the closeness of deception. While the man who follows concepts and abstractions merely drives away misfortune but does not find happiness, and only wishes to avoid pain, the man of intuition can reap directly from his feelings not merely protection from harm but also brightness, spirit, redemption and release. The man of intuition can create the world he wants through art, not be afraid to use his own mind to create. He does not have to be bound by abstract, rational concepts like the stoic who has a dull, boring life. Of course, the man of intuition will suffer more severely and more often as he does not learn from experience but continues to fall into the same trap. He is equally as unreasonable while suffering as in his happiness. His counterpart is a stoic who learns from experience. De Saussure continues outlining the sign’s structure with his second principle of the linguistic sign: that the signifier represents a span that is measurable in a line, and these “auditory signifiers have at their command only the dimension of time. Their elements are presented in succession; they form a chain” (Saussure 70). So, when someone speaks, they have to put out their words in a certain succession for them to make sense, otherwise if someone speaks scrambled words and nonsense they cannot be understood. The signifier “is fixed, not free, with respect to the linguistic community that uses it” (Saussure 71). That means that the masses cannot change it, and the signifier can never be replaced. A law followed by a community is not freely chosen by everyone but is rather something that is tolerated. This is because “no society, in fact, knows or has ever known language as a product inherited from preceding generations, and one to be accepted as such” (Saussure 71). There may have been an act that assigned names to objects, but such an act has never been recorded. Only the knowledge of the sign’s arbitrary nature tells one that this could have happened that way. So De Saussure is very much a defender of the rational structure of language. He knows its arbitrary but understands that people did not choose it but simply inherited it from other generations. His essay, which is written in a rational, analytic and emotionless tone, contrasts with Nietzsche’s polemical and emotional style filled with exclamation marks.

Nietzsche strongly criticizes the ideas and structures of rationality and objective classification in a world that to him is subjective and dominated by emotion. He instead argues for the acceptance of the subjective, emotional nature of man and its channeling through art. De Saussure is his opposite, as while he unpacks the linguistic sign and also acknowledges that it is arbitrary, he argues that it is an embedded structure that cannot be changed. Both views have their merits and uses in certain careers: those who do creative, artistic jobs like writers, poets, painters, and musicians would likely resonate with Nietzsche’s view, while non-fiction writers, language teachers, and linguists would find De Saussure to their appeal. Nietzsche reminds us that language and classification are not perfect, but De Saussure tells us that those structures, while they have their problems, are the best we have.

Works Cited

Nietzsche, Friedrich W. “The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings.” Cambridge, U.K: Cambridge University Press, 1999. PDF Document

Saussure, Ferdinand. Courses in general linguistics. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966. PDF Document.