Experience at a Distance

     Aristotle argues that metaphor is the most important form of diction because it implies the underlying ability to make connections between “what is like.” Jakobson, Nietzsche and Lakoff go further by arguing in various ways that metaphor is not an ability, but rather that it is fundamental to the structure of consciousness itself.
The most interesting vision for me is Nietzsche’s criticism of objective truth. He argues that experience is doubly metaphorical. First our sensual experience is related by relation to our consciousness, i.e. an individual leaf grouped with all other leaves we have experienced. Then we create a concept in sound and language to represent that first metaphor. A sign of a sign of an experience. The representation in  language though is not only in communication to others, but in reference to the object in our own thought.  He states, “Everything which distinguishes human beings from animals depends on this ability to sublimate sensuous metaphors into a schema, in other words to dissolve an image into a concept.” (Nietzsche –878)  He argues that we must process all things in terms of this double metaphor to neatly categorize the world around us.
Because we are always at this double remove from authentic sensual experience, we cannot approach anything resembling objective truth. We represent the world by creating a double sign that is by its nature doubly subjective. We perceive the round hard grey thing, lump it first with every other round hard grey thing, then create a representation of the grouping and call it “rock.” This has no connection to the object on the ground. The experience has, in the process of bringing it to concept been subjectively analyzed first for likeness and then for appropriate language.  For Nietzsche the truth of that “rock” is in the un-categorizable instant in when we become sensually aware of it. It is necessarily pre language even pre consciousness. If truth is pre conscious, it is also impossible to grasp.
The sensing animal that Nietzsche venerates at the end of the selection calls into question so many fundamental principles of a society based on logic. Does he really mean to suggest that learning from experience is in some way a fall from authentic experience;  that we should make the same mistake repeatedly in the similar situations because this now is inherently different from that then?