Nietzsche, the Armenian language, and the Search for Meaning.

Edvard Munch - Golgotha (1900)

The word ‘wisdom’ in the Armenian language is ‘imastutyun’ (ee-mas-tu-tyoon) which literally translates as ‘meaningfulness’. For the ancient Armenians, who coined this word millennia ago, to be wise meant to lead a meaningful life.

I'm fascinated by how much clarity and insight we can gain from understanding the origins of words. The word 'wisdom' is often misunderstood as having 'expertise' in a specific field or with being exceptionally well-read or intelligent. However, neither of these definitions is accurate, as a well-read person can lack wisdom, just as someone with deep expertise. The beauty of the Armenian word ‘imastutyun’ is that it unveils to us this familiar concept in a completely different light. It is hard to imagine a wise person leading a meaningless life. It is an oxymoron.

Emperor Charlemagne once said, "To have another language is to possess a second soul," recognising that each language offers a distinct perspective on life. I was once told by a friend of mine that in Mandarin the word ‘Shen’¹ means both ‘focus’ and ‘God’, when one wants to say that they ‘got distracted’ they say ‘zhou shen’ or ‘my spirit drifted away’. As a person whose spirit ‘drifts away’ quite often, I found this explanation of my procrastination and distraction unbelievably insightful.

It's difficult to deny that, over centuries and millennia, many words have lost the original beauty of their meaning. For example, the word ‘discipline’ is associated today with obedience, punishment, and correction of behaviour. The original meaning of the word, however, had little to nothing to do with punishment or obedience. The Latin word ‘disciplina’ meant teaching, learning, or instruction thus the word ‘disciple’, to be a ‘disciple of Christ’ for example, meant to be ‘a student’ or ‘learner’ of teaching of Christ.

‘To discipline someone’ originally would have implied guidance, instruction, or direction of someone so they could adhere to a set of teachings, principles, or practices, instead of punishing for disobedience.

‘A good teacher guides, a bad teacher disciplines’. From my own experience, I have to say that the teachers who guided me at school had a lifelong impact on me, while the strict teachers who attempted to discipline me (in the modern definition of the word) lost all their influence the second I graduated. I always loved learning but never liked being taught.

In my article Aldous Huxley and the Art of Deep Rest, I mentioned another word that lost the beauty of its original meaning over the centuries and that word is ‘comfort’. The original meaning of comfort was rest that prepared you for action, not the meaningless and passive Netflix entertainment we think of today.² The word is derived from the Latin word fortis to ‘get stronger’. For a soldier, "comfort" meant rigorous training that strengthened and prepared him for future battles.

When we look at the words ‘discipline’ or ‘comfort’ from the perspective of their original meanings we find them noble, empowering, and even life-affirming. Suddenly the repulsive word ‘discipline’ starts to mean ‘guidance’ and ‘instruction’ that you could have received from a wise teacher. We get the same feeling with comfort, which ceases to be a passive word meaning ‘a state of physical ease and freedom from pain’ and becomes a life-affirming word that means making yourself better, stronger, and well-prepared for action.

In his seminal work On the Genealogy of Morals, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, wrote that the original word for ‘Good’ in Greek meant the one who was ‘brave’, while the word for ‘Bad’ meant the one who was ‘cowardly’, or one who was not courageous enough to live.

Nietzsche explains the change in the meaning of words by slave morality taking over the master morality (or aristocratic morality). He refers to Theognis, a Greek poet from the 6th century BC, who in his work Elegies described nobility as a skill of being truthful, of being one ‘who is’, of knowing yourself. These noble beings gave noble meanings to words. They used words that praised power, strength, and affirmed life.

The slave morality however turned everything upside down. The acceptance of suffering, the rejection of one's current life in hopes of a better one after death, and the emphasis on pity and compassion for the weak—all of these are forms of slave morality that would have repelled the nobles.

Nietzsche tells us that the best way to change the course of one’s life and even the course of an entire civilisation is by shifting what is moral and what is not.³ By looking at the origins of words, their roots, we can see how this shift in morality occurred over centuries and millennia.

Think of the word ‘vulgar’ that we use today to describe something that lacks sophistication, good taste, or action that we perceive as outrightly crude. When I was researching the history of Dante’s The Divine Comedy I came across the fact that Italian was considered ‘a vulgar’ language at Dante’s time. "Vulgus" originally meant "belonging to the common people," and it was only with the onset of the Renaissance that its meaning evolved into the way we use it today.

If we speculate, we might suggest that Nietzsche would have interpreted the evolution of the word 'vulgar' as reflecting an aristocratic morality, implying that anything associated with the common people is mediocre or unsophisticated, since to be common is to be average.

Whether you agree with Nietzsche or not, it's hard to deny that he offers an intriguing approach to examining our morality through the etymology of words. Once you investigate some words in the language you speak through a magnifying glass you begin to see hidden beauties and hiding beasts behind their etymological evolution.

I guess we all need a bit of ‘imastutyun’ to interpret the origins of the words meaningfully.

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Proofread and edited by Lisa Statler

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1. Although I tried studying Mandarin Chinese I have to admit that apart from some basic words and self-introduction I can’t speak much. If my transliteration is incorrect please feel free to DM and I will correct it.

2. From Auto-Intoxication: Aldous Huxley on the Art of Deep Rest

3. It is worth mentioning that there are hundreds of books written about Nietzsche and his works. One can write an entire book interpreting one passage from his book. So I ask my readers to take into account that one paragraph does not do justice to what Nietzsche conveys in his The Genealogy of Morals.