Upholding Truth and Democracy: "From Friedrich Nietzsche to Elon Musk," Essay on Freedom of Thought and Speech

Presentation and translation by Christiane Wagner

This essay reflects the meaning of language as one way of representing reality, truth, and, in a certain way, in its opposite sense: illusion and the lack of truth. To this end, the author takes up Nietzsche’s paradoxical reflections on language and communication. On the one hand, conditioning language is limited by the word and limited forms of expression of truth. On the other hand, the truth would be accessed through the arts in their aesthetic experience without depending on the limits of the word. Thus, through a retrospective based on the values of language from a Nietzschean perspective, the author takes us to the roots of Western knowledge, reviewing the influence of Greek mythology, the meaning of language and of the word in search of constructions of knowledge about the world and philosophical truth. Moreover, through discussing the importance of language, we are led to the origins of our understanding of the world and its dichotomies by discussing the paradoxes in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy(1872), by the conceptual contradictions of language in Greek tragedy, and in the antagonistic relationship between Apollo and Dionysus. The truth would be therefore, without depending on the limits of the word, through the arts in their aesthetic experience of the interaction between the Apollonian and the Dionysian vision. Jimenez leads us to a near future, conditioning us to see the consequences of the impoverishment of the use of language as a threat to the democratic ideal intrinsic to the dynamics of the public space, which results from the technological development of artificial intelligence and the forms of increasing control over individuals exercised by algorithms and the use of words designed to meet the common and superficial understanding of immediate communication for the efficiency of a pragmatic society. In Jimenez’s essay “From Friedrich Nietzsche to Elon Musk,” the reader will be transported to a near future without return.