Bewitchment of language in Beyond Good and Evil

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche accuses philosophers of being 'bewitched' by language.  This is a serious allegation and there are a number of ways in which this is discussed in the text. One early example [found in the first few aphorisms] involves the tendency for everyone [not just philosophers, but philosophers should know better...] to structure their thinking in terms of opposed linguistic terms. Nietzsche calls this 'thinking in opposites' and seems to think it has important consequences when we try to grasp the nature of reality. As he puts it in Aphorism 2: 'The metaphysician's fundamental belief is the belief in the opposition of values'. He argues that philosophers build metaphysical systems around what are essentially linguistic oppositions, such as true/false, good/evil, altruism/egoism, appearance/reality and that these dichotomous terms inform or underpin certain types of value judgements. Given how careful most philosophers are to only make claims that can be supported or justified, it seems a very extreme claim to make. So what support does Nietzsche offer?

As ia often the case in the text, what is missing from the accusation is any real detail about how and why this occurs. We could onviously turn away at this point and draw the conclusion that Nietzsche is simply making an unsubstantiated assertion. But given the importance of the claim in the text, we need to be a little more patient and try to reconstruct what an argument in support of the claim might look like [while also recognising that Nietzsche chooses not to present such an argument himself, for reasons that we need not go into here].

I think such an argument could look like this:

Imagine if, in trying to understand the nature of reality, a philosopher [let's call her Emmanuelle Platocartes] experiences the world as sometimes hot and sometimes cold, but constantly changing; it is therefore difficult to say what it is really like. Analysing the logic of this experience, Platocartes notices that she uses the same terms 'hot' and 'cold' to name different experiences of different degrees of warmth or coldness. 'Hot' means 'warmer than cold', for example. But what are the different experiences, experiences of? The relative terms [hot/cold] only make sense if they are grasped logically as relative to something absolute [isn't that what 'relative to' means?]. Absolute or pure hot/cold must therefore exist for our experiences of things as relatively hot/cold things to make sense.

Armed with this insight, Platocartes is now able to apply the analytical framework to make evaluative judgements about the nature of reality in terms of the extent to which the world approaches or fails to approach some perfect or pure state. The world as we experience it ['world as it is for us'] becomes a mere appearance of some deeper reality ['world as it is in itself']. Anything that merely feels hot is judged to be not really hot, it is but a poor reflection of absolute or perfect hotness. Our experience becomes a kind of illusion. And anyone who tries to identify 'hotness in itself' with relative hotness is looked on as misrepresenting the true essence of hotness or is understood to be mistaking an imperfect, pale reflection of hotness for the real thing. So thinking in opposites has led the philosopher a long way from the world as it is actually experienced to a judgement that the world should be rejected and our experience should be mistrusted because they never measure up to perfection.

Nietzsche suggests Plato's theory of Forms is derived in this way. Christianity, he argues, also opposes body [bad] to soul [good] in this way, while Descartes distinguishes mind/reason [good] from senses/experience [bad]. Kant opposes heteronomy [bad] to autonomy [good]. Once you notice it, you can see it everywhere...

This is a problem because it leads us - disastrously - to denigrate the confused and messy world in which we actually live in the name of some perfect ideal state. It also leads us to judge ourselves in purely negative terms, a symptom of a deep nihilism that sees human beings as never able to measure up to the kind of absolute knowledge that always seems to be out of reach. In other words, thinking in opposites is life-denying.