7/26/2019 0 Comments Brain Pickings Rhetorical AnalysisThough it serves primarily to distinguish reality from falsehoods, language inherently conceals the truth, distorting reality, embellishing lies, and promoting fallacious rhetoric. In Maria Popova’s, “Nietzsche on Truth, Lies, the Power and Peril of Metaphor, and How We Use Language to Reveal and Conceal Reality,” she juxtaposes frequent philosophical quotes with whimsical imagery to highlight the anthropomorphic nature of language and to emphasize the validity of her claims.
Through including frequent philosophical quotes in her post, Popova demonstrates that experts support her musings, enhancing her credibility with the reader and giving her analysis more validity. She begins her post with two provocative quotes on the nature of language from Hannah Arendt and Karl Popper, allowing her to reveal that her post’s analysis is rooted in scientific thought and foreshadowing her later discussion of language’s distortion of truth. By immediately beginning her post with quotes, Popova not only enhances the validity of her claims but also piques the readers interest, encouraging them to continue reading her post; through not immediately delineating her own thoughts on the issue, Popova indicates to the reader that they will only receive her insight on the issue if they read the entire post. Throughout her post, Popova also includes frequent quotes from Nietzche, allowing her to illustrate and analyze his thoughts on the abstraction of language. For example, she includes quotes from Nietzche about mammals, mathematics, and science to determine whether language is an anthropomorphic creation or a fundamental truth. Popova also employs whimsical imagery to allude to languages ability to conceal the truth. For example, she includes images from “Pinocchio: The Origin Story,” to subtly indicate that Pinnochios use of language to embellish the truth quintessentially demonstrates the illusory and distortive power of language. Additionally, she includes a drawing of a snake to allude to the snake in Adam and Eve, who uses language as a means of deception and trickery. Finally, she includes a series of ominous, surrealist paintings by Dali and Michelangelo to reveal that language’s distortion of truth is synonymous to surrealist’s distortion of reality. Throughout her post, Popova cleverly includes imagery to illustrate Nietzsche’s writings on language and truth. In Popova’s, “Nietzsche on Truth, Lies, the Power and Peril of Metaphor, and How We Use Language to Reveal and Conceal Reality,” she cleverly emphasizes language’s distortion of truth through philosophical quotes and imagery. She uses imagery, such as paintings by Dali and Michelangelo and drawings from “Pinocchio: The Origin Story,” to subtly support Nietzche’s ideas, and she employs excerpts from Nietzsche’s writing to more explicitly express his thoughts. This juxtaposition allows her to effectively communicate to the reader that language is an anthropomorphic creation used to distort, embellish, and conceal the truth.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
April 2020
Categories |