Emden Nietzsche On Language Consciousness

I N T E R -
N A T I O N A L
N I E T Z S C H E
S T U D I E S
Nietzsche
on Language,
Consciousness,
and the Body
Christian J. Emden
International Nietzsche Studies
Richard Schacht, series editor
Editorial Board
Rüdiger Bittner (Bielefeld)
Eric Blondel (Paris–Sorbonne)
Maudemarie Clark (Colgate)
David Cooper (Durham)
Arthur Danto (Columbia)
Kathleen Higgins (Texas–Austin)
Bernd Magnus (California–Riverside)
Alexander Nehamas (Princeton)
Martha Nussbaum (Chicago)
Gary Shapiro (Richmond)
Robert Solomon (Texas–Austin)
Tracy Strong (California–San Diego)
Yirmiyahu Yovel (Jerusalem)
A list of books in the series appears at the back of this book.

Nietzsche has emerged as a thinker of extraordinary importance, not only in the

history of philosophy but in many fields of contemporary inquiry. Nietzsche
studies are maturing and flourishing in many parts of the world. This interna-
tionalization of inquiry with respect to Nietzsche’s thought and significance may
be expected to continue.
International Nietzsche Studies is conceived as a series of monographs and
essay collections that will reflect and contribute to these developments. The
series will present studies in which responsible scholarship is joined to the analy-
sis, interpretation, and assessment of the many aspects of Nietzsche’s thought
that bear significantly upon matters of moment today. In many respects Nietz-
sche is our contemporary, with whom we do well to reckon, even when we find
ourselves at odds with him. The series is intended to promote this reckoning,
embracing diverse interpretive perspectives, philosophical orientations, and
critical assessments.
The series is also intended to contribute to the ongoing reconsideration of the
character, agenda, and prospects of philosophy itself. Nietzsche was much con-
cerned with philosophy’s past, present, and future. He sought to affect not only
its understanding but also its practice. The future of philosophy is an open ques-
tion today, thanks at least in part to Nietzsche’s challenge to the philosophical
traditions of which he was so critical. It remains to be seen—and determined—
whether philosophy’s future will turn out to resemble the “philosophy of the
future” to which he proffered a prelude and of which he provided a preview, by
both precept and practice. But this is a possibility we do well to take seriously.
International Nietzsche Studies will attempt to do so, while contributing to the
understanding of Nietzsche’s philosophical thinking and its bearing upon con-
temporary inquiry.
—Richard Schacht
Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness,
and the Body
Nietzsche on
Language, Consciousness,
and the Body
Christian J. Emden
University of Illinois Press

Urbana and Chicago
© 2005 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.
c 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Emden, Christian.
Nietzsche on language, consciousness, and the body /
Christian J. Emden.
p. cm. — (International Nietzsche studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-252-02970-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900. 2. Language
and languages—Philosophy—History—19th century.
3. Consciousness. 4. Body, Human (Philosophy)
I. Title. II. Series.
b3318.l25e45 2005
2004020466
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations and Translations xi
Introduction 1
1. The Irreducibility of Language: The History of Rhetoric in the Age
of Typewriters 9
2. The Failures of Empiricism: Language, Science, and the Philosophical
Tradition 32
3. What Is a Trope? The Discourse of Metaphor and the Language of
the Body 61
4. The Nervous Systems of Modern Consciousness: Metaphor, Physiology,
and the Self 88
5. Interpretation and Life: Outlines of an Anthropology of Knowledge 124
Notes 163
Selected Bibliography 203
Index 217
Acknowledgments
Although this book started out as a vague idea on the shores of Germany’s Lake
Constance—not too far from Basel, where Nietzsche spent ten years as a classi-
cal philologist, and not too far from Sils-Maria, in the Engadin, one of his fa-
vorite haunts—most of it was written at some geographical and intellectual
distance from the sites of Nietzsche’s life and writings, on the long and tranquil
afternoons that seem possible only in a college room in Cambridge, where time
occasionally becomes imperceptible. The final version was completed, with in-
creasing distance from Nietzsche’s world, during an all too humid summer in
Houston.
Work on this project would not have been possible without continuing insti-
tutional support. At a time when research grants have become increasingly scarce
within the humanities, I was fortunate to have received assistance from the
Humanities Research Board of the British Academy; the Tiarks Fund; the Jebb
Fund; the Allen, Meek, and Reed Fund; and the Committee on Grants at the
University of Cambridge. Assistance for extended visits to Germany and the
United States was provided by the Department of German at the University of
Cambridge and by Cambridge’s Sidney Sussex College.
Ulrich Gaier witnessed the tentative beginnings of this project at the Univer-
sity of Konstanz, where he introduced me to the problems of rhetorical thought
and sharpened my understanding of German intellectual history. At Cambridge,
where much of the manuscript was written and revised, Barry Nisbet offered
unfailing advice, patient readings of premature drafts, and unrivaled help with
many aspects of this project, and I thank him for having contributed perhaps
more than he might realize. Duncan Large and David Midgley read several
chapters of a previous version; their critical remarks and questions led to many
changes that have made the argument more lucid. Richard Schacht and my
x Acknowledgments
editors at University of Illinois Press, Bill Regier, Dick Martin, and Bruce Bethell,
have contributed enormously to the completion of this book. Without their
patience, diligence, and careful attention to detail, it might not have seen the
light of day. Also, an anonymous reader with an uncomfortably critical eye has
forced me to clarify several issues that I otherwise would not have noticed.
Portions of chapter 4 have been presented at conferences at the universities of
Cambridge and Konstanz and at Yale University, and the overall argument has
profited greatly from the critical comments made by friends and colleagues,
especially Aleida Assmann, Thomas Brobjer, Friedrich Kittler, Greg Moore, and
Stefan Rieger, sometimes without their knowing that the occasional passing
remark led to substantial changes. A condensed German version of this chapter
has been published as “Metapher, Wahrnehmung, Bewußtsein: Nietzsches Ver-
schränkung von Rhetorik und Neurophysiologie,” in Text und Wissen: Technolo-
gische und anthropologische Aspekte, ed. Renate Lachmann and Stefan Rieger,
127–51 (Tübingen: Narr, 2003). An English version of that article has appeared
as “Metaphor, Perception, and Consciousness: Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Neu-
rophysiology,” in Nietzsche and the Sciences, ed. Gregory Moore and Thomas
Brobjer, 91–110 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). I am grateful for the editors’ and
publishers’ permission to reshape this material. Furthermore, I wish to thank the
Goethe-und-Schiller Archiv in Weimar, Germany—especially Wolfgang Ritschl
and Erdmann von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff—for permission to quote from
Nietzsche’s unpublished lecture notes written in Bonn and Leipzig during the
late 1860s.
For their willingness to extract even the most obscure sources from their shelves,
and to find them in the first place, I finally have to express my gratitude to the
staffs at the university libraries in Cambridge and Konstanz, the Goethe-und-
Schiller Archiv in Weimar, the Widener and Houghton Libraries at Harvard
University, and the Fondren Library at Rice University.
Over the last years the Master and the Fellows of Sidney Sussex College,
Cambridge, and my new colleagues at Rice University have provided the ideal
environment for the completion of the manuscript. Of course, this book is for
Carla, who had to live with it far too long, and for my parents.
Abbreviations and Translations
Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings and notes are quoted according to the following
editions and abbreviations:
A The Anti-Christ, in “Twilight of the Idols” and “The Anti-Christ,” trans.
R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 113–87. Cited by
section number.
BGE Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Judith Norman, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann
and Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Cited by section number.
BT The Birth of Tragedy, in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, trans.
Ronald Speirs, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Spiers (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1–116. Cited by page number.
D Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. Holling-
dale, intro. Michael Tanner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1982). Cited by section number.
GM On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe, ed. Keith Ansell-
Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Cited by essay
and section numbers.
GS The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974).
Cited by section number.
GSA Unpublished notes in the Goethe-und-Schiller Archiv, Weimar, Ger-
many.
HA Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, intro. Richard Schacht
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Cited by volume, part
(when applicable), and section numbers.
xii Abbreviations
KGB Briefwechsel: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino

Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1975–). Cited by volume and
page numbers.
KGW Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, founded by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino
Montinari, ed. Wolfgang Müller-Lauter and Karl Pestalozzi (Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter, 1967–). The Philologica is cited by volume, part, and
page numbers. The Nachlaß is cited by volume, part, notebook section,
and fragment numbers.
S Schreibmaschinentexte: Vollständige Edition, Faksimiles und kritischer
Kommentar, ed. Stephan Gunzel and Rüdiger Schmidt-Grépály (Wei-
mar: Verlag der Bauhaus-Universität, 2002). Cited by page number.
TI Twilight of the Idols, in “Twilight of the Idols” and “The Anti-Christ,”
trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 19–112.
Cited by part and section numbers.
TL “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” in The Birth of Tragedy
and Other Writings, trans. Ronald Speirs, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ron-
ald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 139–53.
Cited by page number.
UM Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Daniel Breazeale
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Cited by part and
section numbers.
All translations from Nietzsche’s Philologica and Nachlaß are my own, although
other translations have been consulted whenever possible. Translations from
Greek and Latin are quoted from the Loeb Classical Library. All other transla-
tions, unless indicated, are my own.
Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness,
and the Body
Introduction
In this book I discuss Nietzsche’s reflections on language, consciousness, and the

body—three themes that are central to his writings throughout his intellectual
career and that influenced many of the approaches regarded as the cornerstones
of his philosophical enterprise. On the one hand, I seek to trace the historical
development of his ideas; on the other, I seek to reconstruct how these ideas,
which Nietzsche developed from the early 1870s to the late 1880s, culminated in
something I will call his “anthropology of knowledge.” As such, this book is an
exercise in intellectual history; it relies not only on Nietzsche’s own writings but
also on his sources, his reading habits, and the trends that shaped the intellec-
tual environment within which his ideas emerged. Having said this, I must be
cautious with regard to the scope of my argument. First of all, I do not attempt
to evaluate Nietzsche’s ideas about the multifaceted relationship between language
and thought, rhetoric and knowledge, as right or wrong. As interesting and
necessary as such an approach might be from a philosophical point of view, it
would shed little light on the timeliness of Nietzsche’s ideas or on the intellec-
tual and historical framework within which they emerged and developed. This
leads me to a second point, for philosophical ideas and arguments do not de-
velop in a historically indeterminate space of pure thought. The making of
philosophy is typically subject to conflicting forces and unforeseen intellectual
convergences among different fields of knowledge that shape the interests of
particular philosophers, their reading habits, and the directions of their thought.
This is perhaps especially true of a philosopher such as Nietzsche, whose
thought—to put it diplomatically—is largely considered to be idiosyncratic,
fragmented, and “difficult.” There are good reasons, then, to approach his writ-
ings from a more historical perspective. Some of these reasons are simply prag-
matic. Studying philosophical ideas as though they have no history may lead us
2 Introduction
to miscalculate our own present position and leave us unable to realize what
Peter Carruthers termed “the proper avenues of escape.”1 Seen from this perspec-
tive, the history of philosophy, much like the history of knowledge in general,
not only appreciates and preserves the successes, crises, and disasters of past
intellectual endeavors but also forces us to rethink our own situation and prevents
us from succumbing to the suggestive “founding myths” of modernity more
thoroughly than does a mere deconstruction of such myths.2 Perhaps a more
historically oriented approach to Nietzsche and his controversial claims might
be able to avoid the errors of both his most dazzling enthusiasts and his harshest
critics.
Historicizing Nietzsche?
In his published works, notebooks, and lectures Nietzsche often mirrors late
nineteenth-century intellectual, aesthetic, and scientific preoccupations, perhaps
more so than do many of his contemporaries, making it necessary to consider
these historical configurations in more detail. To understand the timeliness and
the lasting importance of many of his philosophical reflections on the interrela-
tions among language, consciousness, and the body, we must situate them with-
in the complex intellectual fields of their respective historical contexts. Having
done so, we may realize that his discussion of language and thought reflects not
just a specific understanding of the philosophy of language (or a specific concep-
tion of rhetoric and truth, for that matter) but also his ardent interests in the
theory of knowledge, philological scholarship, contemporary physiology, and
the life sciences at large. Indeed, to disregard the disparate nature of many of his
arguments, and to ignore the eclectic sources from which Nietzsche drew as
much information as inspiration, would be to underestimate the relevance of his
philosophical enterprise.
In many ways Nietzsche’s integration of different and apparently incompatible
fields of knowledge was not an uncommon phenomenon within the intellec-
tual culture of nineteenth-century Europe. In Britain, for instance, figures such
as William Whewell, Francis Galton, Herbert Spencer, and John Stuart Mill
focused their attention on a striking array of scientific and philosophical subjects,
from evolutionary theory, meteorology, and geography to education, psychol-
ogy, anthropology, neuroanatomy, the social sciences, and logic. The situation
in France was not much different, and the German-speaking countries provided
“philosophers” and “scientists” such as Rudolph Hermann Lotze, Hermann von
Helmholtz, Emil DuBois-Reymond, Gustav Teichmüller, Wilhelm Wundt, and
Introduction 3
Friedrich Albert Lange, who were interested in the same constellation of ideas
and attempted to come to terms with the exponential multiplication of “scien-
tific” knowledge following the Enlightenment and idealism. The nineteenth
century was marked by decisive epistemic shifts and unexpected convergences
that are now often overlooked but that reverberate to a considerable extent in
our own equally heterogeneous time. Nietzsche’s discussion of language, con-
sciousness, and the body, his “anthropology of knowledge,” should be situated
within this diverse environment, and doing so will shed new light on the nature
of his philosophical enterprise as a whole.
Nevertheless, although much recent scholarship has devoted itself to the way
Nietzsche incorporated such sources in his own philosophical enterprise, his
reputation remains that of one who radically broke with the commonplaces of
the philosophical tradition from Descartes to Kant, Hegel, and beyond. At stake
in Nietzsche’s philosophical enterprise, it seems, is a fundamental criticism of
something often termed “metaphysics,” and Nietzsche himself continues to be
presented as a subversive thinker who sought to reject what many professional
philosophers hold dear, namely “truth,” “knowledge,” “morality,” and so forth.
Easily shifting between detailed analytical observation, scathing polemical criti-
cism, and highly metaphorical imagery, his own style seems to support the gen-
eral assumption that his ideas, as well as his way of thinking, must be understood
as an “exception” within the philosophical tradition. If we wish to believe his
enthusiasts, he is a trailblazing revolutionary thinker; if we wish to believe his
critics, he is a bizarre footnote to the history of modern philosophy. The question,
however, is whether we should take Nietzsche literally and whether it makes sense
to embrace or reject his ideas fully. With respect to his much-quoted criticism
of metaphysics, for instance, he seems to be more a child of his time than gener-
ally assumed, for German idealism and Systemphilosophie began to decline soon
after the deaths of Kant in 1804 and Hegel in 1831—“metaphysics” was already
in trouble during the final decades of the eighteenth century and was even more
so throughout the nineteenth. The reasons for this, however, are not exclusively
philosophical; rather, they involve broader shifts and ruptures within the nine-
teenth-century “intellectual field”: on the one hand, the rise of hermeneutics and
historicism led to a wide range of problems for the ideas of “pure reason” or a
“transcendental point of reference” for human knowledge and social action; on
the other, many European philosophers were increasingly busy dismantling meta-
physical commonplaces, albeit often unintentionally, under the influence of
newly emerging scientific discourses, such as physiology and other life sciences.
Viewed against the background of these changes, Nietzsche’s criticism of meta-
4 Introduction
physics appears far less radical but also far less problematic than it is commonly
believed to be. We should therefore attempt to understand the development of
his thought within the complex intellectual configurations of his time, something
we will need to consider throughout the following chapters.
“Thick Descriptions”
Any attempt to deal with the intellectual configurations that shaped the nine-
teenth century must also consider questions of method. I seek throughout to
explain as many dimensions of the relevant intellectual backgrounds as necessary.
Ideally the resulting dense descriptions of intellectual trajectories and contexts
should allow the occasional snapshot of a period within the history of thought
and of the epistemic constellations that marked that period. This approach is
indebted to Clifford Geertz’s concept of “thick description,” which he took from
Gilbert Ryle’s essays on what it means to think.3 Such a thick description, Geertz
notes, seeks to investigate a “multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many
of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once
strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which [the anthropologist] must contrive
somehow first to grasp and then to render.”4 Although Geertz undoubtedly
wished to restrict this concept to cultural anthropology, it can be quite useful
within intellectual history as well. Nevertheless, adopting Geertz’s perspective
does not necessarily lead to an interpretation of Nietzsche that regards his phil-
osophical enterprise, cultural background, and historical epoch as a “text.”5 Read-
ing philosophical and scientific writings through a textualization of history un-
doubtedly provides many interesting insights into the rhetorical dynamics at
play, but all too often it leaves us unable to situate these writings in a wider intel-
lectual and cultural framework—a framework that is in any event too heteroge-
neous to inform a “grand theory.”6 Despite these obvious problems, however,
we should not underestimate the role and rule of metaphor within intellectual
history, for as they emerge and proliferate, bodies of knowledge not only interact
with their surrounding intellectual fields but also depend on metaphors that, in
one way or another, structure these developments. The formation of specific
trends within intellectual history is thus a question not only of ideas but also of
language and rhetoric.7 Ultimately this means that, if it wishes to be successful,
intellectual history should go far beyond the broadly accepted disciplinary bound-
aries and focus particularly on the intersections of multiple discourses, the in-
terferences between these discourses, and the metaphorical convergences that
make up the conceptual patchwork we call “knowledge.”8
But what are we to make of such an idiosyncratic philosopher as Nietzsche?
Introduction 5
Is it really necessary, or even possible, to “historicize” his seemingly radical and

eclectic philosophical criticism? Some time ago Allan Megill suggested that there
are essentially four ways of reading Nietzsche.9 First, we can take his radical as-
sertions and philosophical contentions literally, although this will quickly lead
us to assume, as many analytical philosophers have done, that Nietzsche’s outra-
geous ideas must have resulted from a deluded understanding of philosophy.
Second, we can understand Nietzsche’s writings as a parody of the “metaphysical
tradition” that seeks to criticize and perhaps even overcome its inconsistencies
and troubles. This will certainly do justice to the more aesthetic dimension of
his writings, but it will also lead us to question whether his approach is relevant
to the history of philosophy. Third, we may argue that Nietzsche’s philosophical
enterprise aims at a form of self-parody, again highlighting the aestheticism of
his writings. After all, we cannot always be sure that Nietzsche took his own ideas
seriously, but this would certainly imply that we should regard him as more a
literary artiste than a philosopher. Nietzsche himself might have appreciated such
an approach, but it does not tell us much about the timeliness of his enterprise.
Finally, we can adopt a combination of these approaches, thereby emphasizing
the irreducible multiplicity of meanings that his writings employ and that con-
tinue to make him an attractive figure for contemporary literary criticism. Which-
ever perspective we choose, however, we must still seek to articulate “Nietzsche’s
project.” No doubt he is a “hard case,” as Megill suggests, and we are left with
plenty of ambiguities—ambiguities that tend to make intellectual historians feel
uncomfortable. One way around this problem, or at least to gain a better un-
derstanding of the situation, which raises questions for the discourse of intel-
lectual history itself, is to stabilize the multiplicity of meanings that abound in
his writings by a careful contextualization that should escape “the conventional
boundaries of the historical discipline.”10
Although his comments are helpful, Megill seems to overlook a fifth possibil-
ity for reading Nietzsche. The ambiguity in Nietzsche’s writings and ideas in
many ways mirrors the ambiguity of his own intellectual, cultural, and political
surroundings. These surroundings and their effects on the themes with which
he concerned himself are what continue to make his philosophical enterprise a
timely undertaking—more timely, perhaps, than we are prepared to admit. Thus,
if we wish to better understand how Nietzsche sought to formulate the relation-
ships among language, consciousness, and the body, we must map the ambi-
guities of his writings onto the epistemic constellations that shaped the cultural
consciousness and intellectual outlook of the later nineteenth century. To be
sure, it would be foolish and ill-advised to hope for a complete contextualization
of Nietzsche’s enterprise, for even “thick descriptions” have their practical limits.
6 Introduction
Nonetheless, inasmuch as such a contextualization must rely on the personal

interactions, scholarly and scientific practices, and cultural mentalities of the age,
we do need to focus on the way these elements interacted within his philo-
sophical enterprise.
Intellectual Fields
Although Georg Simmel has already outlined an approach that seeks to empha-
size interactions over “causes,” doing so at the end of the nineteenth century for
the social sciences, the project has been taken up by intellectual historians only
fairly recently, especially through the influence of Michel Foucault and Pierre
Bourdieu, who—despite their many differences—share much common ground
both with each other and with Simmel. Whereas Simmel focused on the inter-
relatedness of society’s constitutive elements and trends, Foucault widened this
approach by suggesting that it would be impossible to “locate” knowledge with-
in a particular historical, social, or technological setting, for it depends on a
shifting delineation of disciplinary boundaries, varying institutional structures,
and the construction of material objects.11 Thus, at an abstract level Simmel and
Foucault both insist on a complexity within social and historical contexts that
cannot be reduced to specific causes and effects. Arguing along similar lines,
Pierre Bourdieu and Fritz Ringer have introduced the notion of “intellectual
fields” to analyze this complexity and to describe how knowledge and cultural
mentalities are produced by the intersection of “orthodox” discourses, which
dominate the mainstream, and “heterodox” discourses, which develop at the
margins.12 To be sure, Bourdieu seeks to limit his notion of such fields to the
social arena, which is internally structured by power relations between individu-
als and institutions.13 If we address Nietzsche’s philosophical enterprise from this
perspective, it seems that actual institutions (e.g., the boarding school at Pforta
and the universities of Bonn, Leipzig, and Basel, as well as, perhaps, the circle
around Wagner or Christianity) played only a limited role in the formation of
his thought. Nevertheless, Nietzsche himself would have had a much wider
understanding of “institutions,” including in that category truth, morality, meta-
physics, and so on. If we thus widen what Bourdieu describes as a field by relat-
ing it more directly to the symbolic order of knowledge within specific historical
settings, which themselves are undoubtedly influenced by institutions strictly so
called, we can see that Nietzsche’s position within intellectual history occupies
a specific site of intersecting discursive fields: the philosophical tradition, phys-
iological research, rhetorical and linguistic thought, the specialization of scholar-
ship, the popularization of the life sciences, and so on. Many of these discourses
Introduction 7
were initially not located at the center of nineteenth-century intellectual history.

Rhetorical thought, as I will show, played only a limited role and was almost
completely replaced by comparative and historical linguistics. Physiology likewise
emerged at the boundaries of eighteenth-century anthropology and medicine
before it entered the institutional research setting of the nineteenth century. But
it is precisely this dynamic intersection between the mainstream and the margins,
itself set in a particular historical context, that shaped the development of Nietz-
sche’s philosophical enterprise. If we wish to historicize his reflections on lan-
guage, consciousness, and the body without losing their continued timeliness,
we must consider how his enterprise participated in these intellectual fields.
Nietzsche’s attempt to formulate and understand the complex relationships
among language, knowledge, and the mind poses questions that remain with us
today.
1
The Irreducibility of Language:
The History of Rhetoric in the Age of Typewriters
Between 1872 and 1874 Nietzsche composed three lecture series on the history
and theory of rhetoric, as well as an introductory course on Aristotle’s treatise
on rhetoric. At first sight Nietzsche’s interest in this topic is by no means surpris-
ing. After all, at this time he was a relatively young professor teaching Greek
language and literature at both the University of Basel and the city’s preparatory
school, the so-called Pädagogium. Much has been said about Nietzsche’s early
years in Basel and especially about his first book, the long-awaited study on the
origin of tragedy entitled Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (1872),
which led to a complete scholarly disaster after Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moel-
lendorff—a young colleague in Prussia who was to become one of the most
influential classicists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—re-
jected Nietzsche’s philological theories as misleading spare-time metaphysics with
little historical or literary evidence. Nietzsche’s own attempt to enrich his views
on tragedy with Schopenhauer’s philosophy of the will and Wagner’s foggy mu-
sical aestheticism did not help his scholarly reputation. As a consequence, Nietz-
sche’s early work has long been regarded as mainly philosophical, and following
the influential studies by Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Walter Kaufmann, and
R. J. Hollingdale, among others, his work in classical scholarship has been some-
what neglected.1 Only relatively recently have scholars attempted a fuller under-
standing of Nietzsche’s work in classical philology, revising many of the com-
monly held beliefs about its status as incoherent, fruitless, and negligible.2 Indeed,
revisiting Nietzsche’s philological work may well be worthwhile. Specifically,
locating it in its wider intellectual context may offer a new picture of his schol-
arly preoccupations that portrays his approach as a valuable and largely under-
estimated link between, on the one hand, the rise of classical studies in Ger-
many at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries
10 Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body
and, on the other, the perspective of more anthropologically and interdisciplin-

arily inclined scholars from the late nineteenth century, such as Hermann Usener
and Jane Ellen Harrison. Such a project calls for detailed examinations to high-
light such issues as Nietzsche’s discussions of mythology and religion, his inter-
est in the relationship between orality and literacy, his assumption of a specifi-
cally Greek linguistic culture, his ideas about the methodology and the historical
perspective of philological scholarship, and his general move toward a more
anthropological attitude concerning cultural and religious developments in ar-
chaic and ancient Greece.3 Such examinations remain to be undertaken, as does
a more detailed investigation into the way Nietzsche’s work as a classical scholar
informs prominent themes of his philosophical enterprise as a whole, but we
cannot ignore the relevance of philological research for his developing views on
language and knowledge.4 In fact, as I will show, many of his later philosophical
ideas about the relationships among language and knowledge, physiology, and
the mind often take recourse to topics that he discussed first in his philological
writings. It is therefore not surprising that many of his early reflections on lan-
guage are related to his lectures and fragmentary notes on the history and theo-
ry of rhetorical thought in ancient Greece and, to some extent, Rome. Nietzsche’s
discussion of the emergence of classical oratory and eloquence will prove to have
provided a crucial paradigm for his own thought. This paradigm allowed him
to combine a well-informed philological approach with a thorough philosophi-
cal perspective on language, which ultimately enabled him to relate his reflections
on language to both a critique of knowledge and a physiologically inspired
model of mental processes. In this chapter, however, I offer a detailed examina-
tion of his interest in rhetorical education and the evolution of a rhetorical
consciousness. On the one hand, this will provide a model for Nietzsche’s un-
derstanding of the historically tense relationship between rhetorical theory and
philosophical argument; on the other, it will explain some of the historical back-
grounds for his approach to the complex relationships among language, thought,
and human knowledge.
Some Historical Sources

At the beginning we need to be cautious. Nietzsche’s interest in rhetoric was not
based on the fairly trivial and largely unquestioned assumption that knowledge
is somehow related to language. Rather, his repeated assertion that knowledge
about the human world can be attained only through the use of metaphors
radicalizes the interrelation of language and thought. This particular emphasis
on metaphor as both the chief trope and a medium for epistemic processes means
The Irreducibility of Language 11
that the connection between language and thought is rhetorical. In other words,
reason begins with rhetoric, and rhetoric itself is largely responsible for the
structure, constitution, and development of knowledge—or so Nietzsche seems
to have believed in the early 1870s. Within his discussion of language and knowl-
edge, metaphor and rhetoric become powerful explanatory models. Thus, we
can also assume language and rhetoric to underlie much of Nietzsche’s philo-
sophical enterprise. To ignore the central role of rhetorical discourse for Nietzsche
would inevitably be to underestimate his philosophical thought as a whole, al-
though it would be equally problematic to reduce his project to some form of
“artistic” philosophy or rhetorical aestheticism.
Given rhetoric’s importance for the development of Nietzsche’s philosophical
perspective, it is hardly remarkable that he turned to rhetorical topics fairly
early in his career as a classical scholar. In the essay “Der Florentinische Traktat
über Homer und Hesiod, ihr Geschlecht und ihren Wettkampf,” which Nietz-
sche composed at the University of Leipzig as a pupil of the eminent philologist
Friedrich Ritschl and which was published under the latter’s auspices in 1870
and 1873 in the prestigious journal Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, he already
concentrates on several aspects of pre-Platonic eloquence and characterizes the
fable of the poetic competition between Homer and Hesiod as an outstanding
example of rhetorical consciousness and Greek eloquence (KGW II/1, p. 299).
In his “Encyclopaedie der klassischen Philologie”—a substantial introductory
course into the methods and the history of classical scholarship that he delivered
in Basel in the summer semester of 1871 and modeled on similar contemporary
introductions by, among others, Friedrich August Wolf, August Boeckh, Gottfried
Bernhardy, and Ritschl—he returns to the rhetorical thought of the Sophists and
stresses that the overall development of what he terms the Greek and Latin style
resulted largely from the prominent role public oratory played in Greece and
Rome (KGW II/3, p. 394). Along similar lines, Nietzsche concludes in his later
lecture series on the history of Greek literature (1874–75) that rhetorical thought
and practice decisively influenced the unfolding of ancient Greek literature and
its linguistic consciousness (KGW II/5, p. 280).5 His main works on rhetoric,
however, are the lectures and notes we now know under the titles “Geschichte
der griechischen Beredsamkeit,” “Darstellung der antiken Rhetorik,” and “Ein-
leitung zur Rhetorik des Aristoteles,” as well as the short text “Abriß der Ge-
schichte der Beredsamkeit.” Furthermore, his attempt to translate Aristotle’s
treatise on rhetoric when several standard German translations already existed
highlights his continued interest in the subject, even though he never finished
this particular project.
The chronological development of these lectures and notes, and of Nietzsche’s
interest in rhetoric as a whole, remains uncertain, but his interest in this topic
became increasingly manifest around 1872, although he would have been famil-
iar with the tradition of rhetorical thought much earlier: by that time both his
historical overview of Greek eloquence and his introduction to Aristotle were
completed, and the “Darstellung der antiken Rhetorik,” which contains some
of the more theoretical reflections, was at least partially written. During his
relatively short-lived professorship at the University of Basel, which lasted only
until 1879, he announced a total of nine lecture series and courses on rhetorical
topics, of which at least four did not take place.6
But Nietzsche may have turned his attention to rhetoric before he prepared
this 1872–73 lecture series. He had become familiar with Aristotle and Cicero as
a pupil at the prestigious Pforta boarding school and later as a student of classi-
cal philology in Bonn and Leipzig, and in Basel he again consulted different
editions of Plato’s works between April 1870 and December 1878. Also in 1870
he returned to Cicero, Quintilian, and Aristotle, and in May and October 1870
he apparently studied two of the standard collections of Greek rhetoricians—Jo-
hann Georg Baiter and Hermann Saupp’s Oratores Attici (1839–50) and Christian
Walz’s Rhetores Graeci (1832–36)—after he had consulted the first volume of
Friedrich Blass’s seminal study on the history of ancient Greek rhetoric, Die at-
tische Beredsamkeit (1868–80), for more detailed historical information. In addi-
tion, between 1870 and 1878 Nietzsche undertook a diligent and precise reading
of a great many secondary sources. These included, among others, Richard
Volkmann’s highly influential Hermagoras oder Elemente der Rhetorik (1865) and
Die Rhetorik der Griechen und Römer in systematischer Übersicht (1872), as well as
Anton Westermann’s Geschichte der Beredtsamkeit in Griechenland und Rom
(1833–35) and Rudolf Hirzel’s widely read Ueber das Rhetorische und seine Bedeu-
tung bei Plato (1871).
At the same time, the first volume of Gustav Gerber’s Die Sprache als Kunst
(1871–74) played a crucial yet still often exaggerated role for Nietzsche’s under-
standing of rhetoric. Even though Nietzsche quotes Gerber at some length in
his lectures and notes on rhetoric, as well as in his essay “Ueber Wahrheit und
Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne” (1873), and even though he found in Gerber
a thoroughly formulated theory that links the rhetorical aesthetics of language
to philosophical considerations about the nature of reference and knowledge,
Gerber does not seem to have been the main source for his reflections on rheto-
ric. Nietzsche’s account of rhetoric, as I will show, begins with a historical per-
spective on the emergence of ancient Greek and Roman eloquence within spe-
cific cultural and political circumstances, whereas Gerber approaches rhetorical
thought and its philosophical implications not by adverting to a historical or
philological perspective but by presenting an argument based on the aesthetic

dimension of language and its influence on thought and on a systematic analy-
sis of figures and tropes.7 Nietzsche’s own understanding of rhetoric, however,
and of the multifaceted relationship between language and knowledge, was in-
fluenced by a historical point of view, and his awareness of the serious philo-
sophical consequences of rhetorical thought was shaped considerably by this
perspective. Within this context, Nietzsche discovered the tense relationship
between rhetorical thought and philosophical discourse, which would profound-
ly influence his later reflections on language, knowledge, and the mind.
The Emergence of Rhetorical Thought

The basic historical framework for Nietzsche’s account of ancient Greek oratory
scarcely advanced beyond mainstream philological research in nineteenth-cen-
tury Germany. As such, his approach is largely based on an interpretation of the
relation between language and culture in antiquity. Although Nietzsche often
decries the “Grecomania” and “philhellenism” that dominated the professional
ideology of German classicists in the nineteenth century, most of his philologi-
cal writings largely agree with the tradition, from Winckelmann to Wilhelm von
Humboldt and beyond, that ancient Greece should be understood as the para-
digmatic cultural foundation of European thought.8 It thus becomes clear why
Nietzsche contends that the origin of rhetoric must be understood as dependent
on a specific cultural model and that the influence of rhetorical education on
ancient Greek linguistic consciousness was itself the product of particular his-
torical circumstances—namely, the culture of orality and the Athenian democ-
racy of the fifth century b.c.
Right from the beginning, then, Nietzsche’s reflections on language tended to
go well beyond a rhetorical aestheticism by establishing a link between language
and culture, which forces us to locate his philosophical ideas in a European
tradition that stretches back to Wilhelm von Humboldt, Johann Gottfried
Herder, and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac in the eighteenth century. Further-
more, this link became an increasingly prominent factor in his later “genealogi-
cal” project of the 1880s, which contributed to the “anthropology of knowledge”
contained in his writings such as Jenseits von Gut und Böse (1886) and Zur Gene-
alogie der Moral (1887). Nevertheless, these later writings differ crucially from
Nietzsche’s earlier philological work: although his lectures and notebooks on
rhetoric clearly express the importance of language for the formation of cul-
tural trends and even social processes, Nietzsche was still uncertain about the
epistemological foundations and anthropological consequences of such a link.
There is a considerable leap from his early work on the “natural history” of truth
to the discussions of morality in his later writings.
Referring to Karl Otfried Müller’s and Gottfried Bernhardy’s highly influential
histories of the Greek literary tradition, which set the scholarly benchmark for
decades, Nietzsche emphasizes the general importance of ancient Greek as the
“most speakable” language for the development of rhetoric: Greek rhetoric begins
as a form of “natural eloquence” [naturmäßige Beredsamkeit] (KGW II/4, p. 368).9
This also means, however, that Greek oratory and eloquence are based on a
linguistic consciousness totally alien to our modern understanding of language,
for whereas modern European culture is based largely on literacy, ancient Greece
was a predominantly oral culture in which writing was of only secondary im-
portance (KGW II/4, p. 425).10 Orality, in other words, generates the performa-
tive quality of eloquence and was thus a decisive factor for the emergence of
rhetorical thought. This dominance of the spoken over the written word has a
more practical angle, too, for spoken language is often more powerful than writ-
ten language, because, as Quintilian notes, “The speaker stimulates us by the
animation of his delivery, and kindles the imagination, not by presenting us with
an elaborate picture, but by bringing us into actual touch with the things them-
selves.”11
Nietzsche, however, had a second reason for locating the origin of rhetorical
thought in Greece—namely, the relationship between political culture and rhe-
torical education. Whereas Gottfried Bernhardy, for instance, argues that the
Greek language spread as Athens’s political influence widened, Nietzsche re-
verses this perspective and views Greek political and cultural expansion as a direct
product of Athen’s unusual linguistic power (KGW II/5, p. 14; KGW II/4, p.
367).12 He regards this power as having stemmed from linguistic purity, an aspect
that Greek rhetorical theory describes as hellenismos and Roman rhetoric as
latinitas, a quality by which the Greeks could distinguish themselves from the
barbaroi. The Greeks, that is, could “speak,” whereas the barbarians could mere-
ly “croak” (KGW II/4, p. 369).13 This supposed purity of language, Nietzsche
writes in his “Darstellung der antiken Rhetorik,” is possible only in a culture
with a heightened awareness for the intellectual and cultural functions of lan-
guage, which could be found especially among the upper social class and its
rhetorical education (KGW II/4, p. 428). The political relevance of rhetoric is
thus based on the fact that it can be employed to influence the beliefs and opin-
ions of a large audience (KGW II/4, p. 368).14 Nietzsche contends that the social
conditions fostering such a use of rhetoric developed in Athens around 510 b.c.:
Hippias, the last tyrant of the Peisistratidai, was expelled from the city, with the
subsequent implementation of a civic constitution based on the principles of
isonomia, the legal equality of citizens, and isegoria, the freedom of speech. The
destruction of authoritative aristocratic structures as a fixed reference point for
political decisions inevitably generated the pressing need for consensus to avoid
a threatening confusion of social values and administrative responsibilities. Un-
der Pericles political power was transferred to the so-called ekklesia, the civic
assembly, which sought to unite legislative, juridical, and executive powers, so
that Athens—as Thucydides remarks—became the “school of Hellas.”15 With
regard to this political situation, which introduced into Greek culture what
George Kennedy once termed a “rhetorical consciousness,” Nietzsche concludes
that the political constitution of democracy was directly responsible for the
widespread use and excessive appreciation of public oratory (KGW II/4, pp. 269,
415).16 The exchange of opinion, the establishment of consensus, and the influ-
encing of decision makers within Greek politics in many ways depended on a
rhetorical education that shaped the political debates. As such, oratory pre-
sented itself first and foremost as a practical enterprise that generally preceded
any rhetorical theory and that was realized mainly in court hearings, political
appeals, and other legal procedures.
Within these cultural and historical contexts, rhetorical thought was linked
to far-reaching philosophical problems that moved increasingly toward the cen-
ter of Nietzsche’s own historical perspective. This development will lead us to
rather difficult questions at the core of Nietzsche’s understanding of the relation-
ships among language, thought, and knowledge. For instance, how do people
reach consensus about their society’s core values? What is the epistemological
status of such values with regard to their conceptual foundations? How must
people use language if they are to refer to and grasp the complexities that make
up their social and natural environment? Is there something like a fundamental
rhetoricity of language and experience, and how does this affect the values and
beliefs with which we attempt to explain our world? Does rhetorical discourse—
which is supposed to rely on cunning strategies of persuasion, subjective opinions,
and the seductive power of figurative language—have any place within philo-
sophical thought, which is often supposed to be based on pure thought, abstract
argument, and logical coherence? These are important questions for any serious
discussion of rhetorical thought, and they play an important role within Nietz-
sche’s own philosophical enterprise as well. Especially crucial is the relationship
between rhetoric and the realm of philosophical discourse as generally under-
stood. As I will show, Nietzsche did not miss this problem’s historical significance,
but he increasingly understood the history of rhetoric from the Sophists to Ar-
istotle as a struggle between the seemingly incompatible claims of rhetoric and
philosophy.
Nietzsche’s account of the Sophists in his lecture series and notes on the his-
tory of rhetorical thought has not received much attention. It warrants a closer
look, however, especially because Nietzsche discovers among the Sophists a clear
intersection of rhetoric and philosophy that continued to influence his under-
standing of rhetorical thought as a whole. It is nevertheless curious to note that,
in his lectures and notes, he largely refrains from any detailed discussion of the
term sophistēs itself.17 He perhaps did so because he did not want to define the
Sophists as a specific group of orators, attending instead to their philosophical
inclinations. To understand what he means by the term Sophists, therefore, we
must turn to the philological lectures on the “pre-Platonic philosophers” he
delivered repeatedly between 1869 and 1876, as well as the short Philosophie im
tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen, written in 1872–73.
First, the term sophistēs has two interrelated meanings, for it refers both to
teachers who give practical or moral advice and to professional educators in the
rhetorical culture of fifth-century b.c. Athens.18 Nietzsche, however, focuses on
the sophoi instead of the sophistēs and defines them quite literally as teachers of
wisdom in the widest possible sense (KGW II/4, p. 226), since sophos means
“wise,” sophia generally means “wisdom,” and sophoi denotes “wise men” of any
kind and in any field (KGW II/4, p. 217). As a consequence, he regards Thales
as having been the first of the sophoi and the profession as having begun with
the seven sophoi of the oracle at Delphi (KGW II/4, pp. 219, 225, 227–29).
Given this understanding, the sophoi stood in close relation to religious ritual as
well as to linguistic, musical, and dramatic performance, and philosophy itself
becomes first of all an advanced form of poetic discourse still submerged in
mythical images (KGW II/4, pp. 217, 224). But—and this is an important aspect
of his understanding of ancient Greek philosophy in general—Nietzsche links
their philosophical approach to a new interest in language, inasmuch as pre-
Socratic philosophy stresses the conceptual dimension of thinking itself. Although
the sophoi attempted a systematic analysis of nature including abstract cosmo-
logical principles, they remained distinct from practical thinkers, so that Nietz-
sche repeatedly emphasizes a fundamental opposition between sophia and epistēmē,
that is, between “wisdom” and “science” (KGW II/4, pp. 176–77, 216–19).
Nietzsche also underlines the aesthetic dimension that he discovered in the
philosophical undertaking of the sophoi and that led him to pin their poeticized
wisdom against the positivistic formulation of philosophical discourse as a qua-
si-scientific enterprise he detected in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. This
differentiation between a form of philosophical thought that is aware of its own
indebtedness to language and to aesthetic principles and one that seeks to estab-
lish a privileged realm of pure reason becomes particularly obvious if we con-
sider his etymology of Greek sophos, which he relates to the Latin sapio. The
latter’s double meaning of “I taste/smell” and “I am wise” is supposedly charac-
teristic of sophos: philosophical wisdom, Nietzsche seems to argue, is a question
of aesthetic taste and discernment (KGW III/2, p. 310). Taste is, however, more
than just an aesthetic principle in the narrow sense of the phrase. Insofar as its
origin lies in perception or sensation (aisthesis), it implies a form of critical judg-
ment as the basis of the philosophical wisdom among the sophoi (KGW II/4, pp.
217–18). Thus, for Nietzsche the work of the sophoi seems to have been marked
by three main characteristics: sharp intelligence, linguistic consciousness, and
aesthetic knowledge—a description that fits the sophistēs in Nietzsche’s sense of
the term. The Sophists, in other words, are sophoi with a taste for linguistic ex-
pression.
As is Nietzsche’s knowledge of rhetorical thought in general, his account of
the sophistic movement and its position in ancient Greek culture is based on
both philosophical and philological sources. After he attended Karl Schaarschmidt’s
lectures on Plato and on the history of philosophy at the University of Bonn in
the winter semester of 1864–65, Nietzsche seems also to have consulted Scho-
penhauer’s short Fragmente zur Geschichte der Philosophie (1850), and we know
that he read Friedrich Albert Lange’s Geschichte des Materialismus (1866) in much
detail. Whereas Schaarschmidt attacks the logical confusions of sophistic argu-
ments as philosophically unsound and speculative, however, and whereas Scho-
penhauer regards the Sophists merely as fools, Lange alone portrays the sophis-
tic movement as an important part of the history of Greek philosophy, and he
describes the Sophists as the philosophical movement that influenced Greek
antiquity most deeply.19 Lange’s differentiated and balanced account would prove
to be a decisive factor for Nietzsche’s understanding of the philosophical dimen-
sion of ancient Greek rhetoric, but the philological sources—from Leonhard
Spengel’s seminal Ueber das Studium der Rhetorik bei den Alten (1842) to the
historical overviews by Blass and others—present a more ambiguous picture of
the Sophists’ relationship to the philosophical tradition. Although nineteenth-
century classical scholarship had to accept the sophistic movement as a major
force within ancient Greek intellectual life, it often depicted the Sophists them-
selves as proponents of logical nonsense and, above all, held them directly re-
sponsible for the decline of the Athenian state.20
At first sight, Nietzsche’s exposition of sophistic thought in “Geschichte der
griechischen Beredsamkeit” seems to move along the unquestioned lines of his
philological sources. Nietzsche portrays the sophistic movement as having begun
with Protagoras and then having led, via Gorgias as the founder of “artistic prose”
(Kunstprosa), to Isocrates as a politically motivated adversary of Plato’s Academy.21
Furthermore, he underlines Gorgias’s emphasis on rhetorical style as culminating

in an increasing aestheticization of public oratory and rhetorical thought and
casts the highly influential school around Isocrates as a crucial step toward the
institutionalization of rhetorical education, for it turned Athens into the center
of oratory. Closer inspection, however, shows that Nietzsche was particularly
interested in the philosophical tendencies of the Sophists, and he underlines their
radical departure from the literary and philosophical tradition: the Sophists are
those “who think differently” (die Andersdenkenden), and their appearance is
directly associated with the emergence and dissemination of abstract reasoning
(KGW II/4, pp. 170, 357; KGW II/3, p. 407). As such, the sophistic movement
had from its start a strong philosophical predisposition that became especially
manifest in its close relationship to pre-Platonic philosophy itself.
As early as his essay on Homer and Hesiod, Nietzsche outlined a genealogy of
orators that stresses the intimate connection between rhetoric and philosophy:
Gorgias’s teacher was Empedocles, who was said to be Zeno’s friend, whereas
both Empedocles and Zeno were pupils of Parmenides. Nietzsche seems to have
discovered an almost straight genealogical line that extends from pre-Socratic
philosophy to the rhetorical enterprise of the Sophists (KGW II/1, p. 302).22
Empedocles is a particularly interesting hybrid figure who sought to integrate
the art of rhetoric, as the art of logos, with the “enlightenment” of science. As
Nietzsche notes, Empedocles hovered among art, science, and rhetoric, yet he
was also a highly influential member of the political establishment, which makes
him an unusually outstanding figure, even among the Sophists. It is thus not
surprising that Nietzsche found this intersection of art and science especially
attractive, and he notes that, as the teacher of Isocrates, Empedocles stands for
a successful intertwining of rhetorical and philosophical education (KGW II/4,
pp. 328, 369, 381). As a consequence, Nietzsche concludes that this intertwining
of rhetorical thought and philosophical discourse should be seen as one of the
main features of higher education in pre-Platonic Greece (KGW II/4, p. 370).
As far as Nietzsche is concerned, the pre-Platonic philosophers (the sophoi)
and the rhetoricians (the sophistēs) are essentially two sides of the same coin, and
they were both largely concerned with the complex relationship between language
and thought, which marks much of Nietzsche’s own philosophical enterprise,
too: “The Philosophers and the Sophists,” he points out, “are the first thinkers
to reflect on language, synonymy, etymology, rhetoric” (KGW II/3, pp. 343–44).23
Insofar as the Sophists reflected on language, they inevitably faced far-reaching
epistemological questions with regard to, for instance, the subjectivity of beliefs,
the relativity of truth, and the foundation of knowledge in experience.24 Accord-
ing to Lange, who praises Protagoras for his radical approach, these epistemo-
logical considerations suggest that the external world exists for us only in the
form of appearances, and Nietzsche accepted this view wholeheartedly, for it is
clearly compatible with his earlier readings of both Lange and Schopenhauer. As
Nietzsche seems to have learned from his discussion of the Sophists, language
fails to provide any escape from this dilemma, for language itself has no basis in
an unmediated access to the objects and facts of the external world. As I will
show, the consequences of this crucial argument in Nietzsche’s reflections on the
rhetoricity of language and thought seem to be destructive and counterproduc-
tive, especially with regard to the value of truth and reason, but the position also
allows him to recognize the anthropological relevance of rhetoric.
Strategies of Persuasion
Nietzsche seems to have been rather disappointed by Plato’s treatment of the
rhetorical enterprise, so it is hardly surprising that he rejects Plato’s criticism of
rhetoric. Still, he demands a cautious approach to Plato’s writings, one that is
again based on both philological and philosophical perspectives (KGW II/4, p.
417). The numerous bibliographical references made in his notes and lectures
and the scholars whose commentaries he seems to have examined in more detail
indicate that his reading list must have been quite impressive, for it seems to
have stretched from Friedrich Ast’s Platon’s Leben und Schriften (1816) to more
contemporary studies, such as Franz Susemihl’s seminal Die genetische Entwick-
lung der Platonischen Philosophie (1859) and Rudolf Hirzel’s Ueber das Rhetorische
und seine Bedeutung bei Plato (1871). It would be confusing and probably fruitless
to discuss his sources in detail, but Nietzsche was obviously fully aware of Plato’s
particularly prominent position within the historiography of philosophical
thought following Hegel and Schleiermacher.25
Throughout his philological writings Nietzsche stresses the undeniable aes-
thetic quality of the Platonic dialogues, and even though Plato vigorously attacks
both art and sophistic oratory, he did share the wider cultural and intellectual
background of the Sophists (KGW II/4, pp. 8, 415). Like Empedocles, Plato
should be regarded as a hybrid figure, since he presents his highly abstract phil-
osophical arguments and debates artistically, which seems to betray his own
indebtedness to the persuasive power of rhetorical imagery. Platonic dialogue,
Nietzsche remarks, is a form of “conceptual poetry” (Poesie der Begriffe) (KGW
III/3, 3 [94]), which means that Plato’s own stance toward rhetoric and oratory
is rather peculiar: he rejects rhetoric but endorses its cunning persuasive strategies
and figurative language.
Nietzsche’s interest in this somewhat incoherent attitude toward rhetoric is in
many respects a sign of the times, for Plato’s curious relationship to rhetoric
provoked much confusion among classical scholars in nineteenth-century Ger-
many. Richard Volkmann, for instance, points out that Plato attacks not rheto-
ric and oratory in general but only the relativist political program of the Sophists,
which is supposed to have weakened the Athenian state, whereas Anton Wester-
mann claims that Plato’s writings show a true appreciation of the power of
rhetoric and that Plato had no desire at all to reject rhetorical discourse. Spengel
is slightly more cautious and attempts to situate Plato’s quite explicit rejection
of rhetoric in its historical context, arguing that Plato merely repeated Isocrates’
criticism of the Sophists.26 Nietzsche focuses on the rhetorical nature of Plato’s
writings (KGW II/4, pp. 8, 418), which makes Plato’s outright rejection of rhet-
oric all the more peculiar. This is especially true with regard to the typical dia-
logic situation, in which a fictitious Socrates replaces Plato and destroys his
antagonists’ arguments, especially those of the Sophists, with a method Brian
Vickers rightly regards as “righteous indignation.”27 Certainly the dialectical
encounters between Socrates and his interlocutors are contests in which each of
the different parties strives to win, although it is fairly clear from the outset that
Socrates will always prevail. Meeting Plato’s imaginary friend would have been
a rather disconcerting experience, but if effective oratory is supposed to be based
on dramatic techniques, as Nietzsche claims in “Darstellung der antiken Rheto-
rik” (KGW II/4, p. 433), then Plato’s Socratic meditations are a masterpiece of
this genre: a rhetorical work of art par excellence. As the following paragraphs
will show, Nietzsche rhetorically rejects Plato’s rejection of rhetoric, thereby
impressively exemplifying what he understands as the rhetoricity of philosophi-
cal discourse.
In his “Einführung in das Studium der platonischen Dialoge,” an introduc-
tory lecture series Nietzsche delivered at the University of Basel at least four times
between the winter semesters of 1871–72 and 1878–79, he pays special attention
to the Phaedrus and Gorgias. With regard to the latter, he appears to have ac-
cepted Plato’s broad attack on the relativist political intentions of the Sophists
(KGW II/4, p. 118).28 For Plato, the case seems to be rather simple and straight-
forward: rhetoricians involved in political debate and philosophical argument
must be guided exclusively by the principles of justice and truth; that is, they
must do justice to both the immediate political consequences of their delibera-
tions and the coherence of the underlying philosophical arguments, and they
must also demonstrate their arguments to be at least valid and preferably sound.
According to Plato and his understanding of the contemporary political situation
in Athens, however, the Sophists were not interested in delivering arguments
based on such fundamental principles; they did not care whether their delibera-
tions led to justice, nor did they pay much attention to establishing sound argu-
ments.29 Although Plato’s case against the Sophists is not wholly convincing, it
is certainly representative of the general rejection of rhetorical thought among
philosophers, many of whom have sought to demonstrate the existence of a realm
of pure thought independent from language and style, which explains why many
aspects of Plato’s criticism reappear throughout the modern philosophical tradi-
tion. This is the respect in which Nietzsche’s account of Plato’s stance toward the
rhetorical enterprise acquires particular importance for the development of Nietz-
sche’s ideas about the tense relationship between rhetoric and philosophy.
Plato rests his argument against the sophistic speculations on an exclusive
distinction between rhetoric, which aims at political decision making, and phil-
osophical thought, which aims at the discovery and dissemination of truth.30 For
Nietzsche, however, this seemingly clear-cut distinction raises three serious prob-
lems that haunt much of Plato’s writing. First, the Sophists did not reduce
rhetoric to political argument but instead often focused on far-reaching episte-
mological considerations regarding the nature of knowledge and language. As
such, Plato’s argument against the Sophists is somewhat reductive and short-
sighted. Second, the Gorgias does not limit itself to purely philosophical questions,
for it pursues a rather specific political agenda, the rejection of Athenian democ-
racy as a decaying culture lost in indecision, hypocrisy, and superficiality. Thus,
Plato’s arguments and his own political interests must be treated as cautiously as
his indebtedness to cunning rhetorical strategies.31 Third, the Gorgias relies on
an arsenal of thoroughgoingly rhetorical ploys. Nietzsche was well aware of these
problems, so he regarded the dialogue as rhetorically naïve and logically unsound
(KGW II/4, p. 118).
A similar argument appears in Nietzsche’s examination of the Phaedrus, where
Plato introduces his concept of rhetoric as psychagogia, philosophical guidance
of the soul with strong political implications (KGW II/4, pp. 174–75).32 This
notion is based on the technique of dialectics, or quasi-scientific analysis, as
Plato writes in his juxtaposition of rhetorike technē and medicine: “In both cases
you must analyze a nature, in one that of the body and in the other that of the
soul, if you are to proceed in a scientific manner, not merely by practice and
routine.”33 This certainly shows that Plato attached some value to the rhetorician’s
enterprise. Nonetheless, this positive conception of rhetoric is directly connect-
ed to political interests, for Plato portrays rhetoric as designed to inculcate par-
ticular beliefs in the minds of auditors, or as he says, “to give to the soul the
desired belief and virtue.”34 True rhetoric, according to Plato, is thus a form of
persuasion, and this is not without its problems, for he regards psychagogia as a
remedy for the decline of the Athenian state triggered by the misleading and
relativist arguments of the Sophists. As Nietzsche remarks, the issue at stake here
is the application of specific rhetorical strategies to guide the political and mor-
al beliefs of “the masses” (der Menge), which lack any serious philosophical insight
and are therefore unable to judge complicated issues for themselves (KGW II/4,
p. 100).35 As such, Plato’s notion of psychagogia is based on cunning persuasive
ploys (much as are the Sophists’ own discourses), but whereas the Sophists’ argu-
ments are often open-ended and supposedly marked by a relativist understand-
ing of truth and objectivity, Socratic rhetoric, the philosophical version of psy-
chagogia, is teleological—that is, a means for a clearly defined end. This becomes
especially evident at the beginning of the third book of the Republic when Plato
proposes his aristocratic alternative to the fruitless course of Athenian democ-
racy: the ruler is allowed to lie and deceive as long as it serves the autocratic state
and the best interests of the citizens. The guidance of souls through rhetoric
becomes an instrument of power (KGW II/4, pp. 56ff., 418–19), but the question
is whether this does not represent an attitude that is more sophistic than the
Sophists themselves.36
In summary, then, Nietzsche criticizes Plato’s rejection of rhetoric on the
grounds that Plato himself ranks among the greatest rhetoricians and that Pla-
tonic dialectics is heavily marked by the background of Greek rhetorical educa-
tion (KGW II/5, pp. 195, 198, 308–9). Plato’s depiction of rhetorical discourse as
“a certain business which has nothing fine about it” and as the “flattery” of
“deceivers” thus sounds particularly hollow.37 Moreover, Nietzsche uses this point
to highlight the shortcomings of Platonic philosophy in general, and in both his
introductory course on Plato and his voluminous lectures on the history of an-
cient Greek literature, he concludes that Plato’s eloquence does not support his
dialectical argument and that his rhetorical strategies undermine his philosoph-
ical claims: in the end, the main problems with which Plato deals are left unre-
solved, and his argument often yields no results (KGW II/4, p. 122; KGW II/5,
p. 198).38 The grandiloquent rhetoricity of Plato’s language, as well as his refusal
to admit its presence, endangers the success of his dialectical enterprise. Plato’s
attack on rhetoric, Nietzsche tells us, is bound to backfire.
The case is completely different with regard to Aristotle. Whereas Plato had
sought to exclude rhetoric from philosophy, Nietzsche viewed Aristotle as suc-
cessfully integrating rhetoric with philosophy and especially with the discourse
of logical argument. Aristotle’s rhetorical thought, he notes, is essentially philo-
sophical (KGW II/4, p. 419).39 In fact, Aristotle’s theory of rhetoric provides a
main reference point for Nietzsche’s “Darstellung der antiken Rhetorik,” espe-
cially with regard to the topical and argumentative structures in oratory, but
Nietzsche’s relation to Aristotle is nevertheless marked by a certain paradox. On
the one hand, he describes Aristotle (e.g., in his lectures on the history of Greek
literature) as having inaugurated a specific school of rhetorical thought that
influenced much of the Roman and the modern philosophical traditions (KGW
II/5, p. 205); on the other hand, he notes that Aristotle seems not to have been
interested in applying rhetorical aesthetics to his own writings. Nietzsche remarks
in his “Einleitung zur Rhetorik des Aristoteles” (1874–75) that the surviving
writings of Aristotle reveal an author who exhibits no “rhetorical talent,” only a
dry, lifeless, and ultimately boring style (KGW II/4, p. 527). A look at his works
will certainly verify this claim, but it leads to a somewhat paradoxical situation,
for it means that Aristotle, one of the most influential figures in the history of
Greek and Roman rhetoric (KGW II/4, pp. 420–21), is not a rhetorician, a rhetor,
in the narrow sense of the word. The eloquent Plato attacks the fancies of elo-
quence, but the stylistically dry Aristotle defends rhetoric. Seen from this per-
spective, the understanding of rhetoric Aristotle offers is more practical and
pragmatic than the rejection of it found in Plato, for the former regarded rheto-
rike technē as based on logical thought, enthymemes, and proofs.40 The compel-
ling aspect of Aristotle’s rhetoric, in other words, rests not on stylistic excellence
and persuasive strategies but on his realization that rhetorical thought is above
all a field of philosophical consequence—a view that would prove to be crucial
for Nietzsche’s understanding of the scope of rhetoric and the fundamental
rhetoricity he discovers at the heart of philosophical discourse and human knowl-
edge.
For Nietzsche, the example of Aristotle demonstrates that rhetoric cannot be
restricted to a particular field, such as the law or politics: rhetoric deals “with
matters that are in a manner within the cognizance of all men and not confined
to any special science,”41 a universal claim that Nietzsche accepts (KGW II/4, p.
419). The Aristotelian concept of rhetoric thus stresses the practical value of elo-
quence insofar as it aims at stimulating or producing beliefs in the hearer.42 But,
unlike Plato’s psychagogia, Aristotle’s notion of belief (doxa) is directly connected
to knowledge (epistēmē), so that the philosophical dimension of rhetorical thought
is not so much concerned with persuasion and psychological influence as it is
grounded on logical proof structures and unilinear connections between arguments:
rhetoric becomes the systematic organization of facts and particulars belonging to
a specific case, a topical argumentation based on the syllogistic links between these
facts and particulars, and a structured way of presenting a given case depending
on truth values, probabilities, and possibilities. This approach makes Aristotle’s
Rhetoric the definitive groundwork for any forensic or legal argument, and Nietz-
sche’s own discussion of the so-called genus iudiciale is almost entirely dedicated
to Aristotelian concepts and paradigms (KGW II/4, pp. 470–85).
It is not surprising that, much like Plato before him, Aristotle rigorously rejects
the argumentative freeplay of sophistic relativism (KGW II/3, p. 407), and he
proposes an alternative based on logic instead of a loose association of suppos-
edly subjective and highly improbable arguments.43 He regards rhetoric as a form
of practical reasoning in a variety of contexts: “I mean by dialectical and rhe-
torical syllogisms those which are concerned with what we call topics, which
may be applied alike to Law, Physics, Politics, and many other sciences that dif-
fer in kind.”44 Such a form of rhetorical reasoning is obviously based on signs,
or rather on the forms and functions of signification, so that Aristotle’s connec-
tion between rhetoric and logical arguments amounts to a disguised theory of
interpretation.45 Small wonder, then, that Aristotle devotes the main part of the
second book of his Rhetoric to the disposition of proofs and the structure of
arguments.46 Nietzsche viewed this systematic approach to rhetoric as the main
difference between Plato and Aristotle. Whereas the former casts “true rhetoric”
as a form of psychological and moral guidance, Aristotle underlines the close
connection between rhetoric and dialectics, so that he can integrate rhetoric with
philosophy and need not exclude it from philosophical thought as a form of
artful deception.
Nietzsche was well aware of Aristotle’s integrative approach, whereby dialectics
becomes a main ingredient of rhetorical thought.47 In his introduction to Aris-
totle, he therefore concludes that the orator should be not only closely familiar
with “human emotions and the passions” but also well versed in all kinds of
“logical stratagems” (logische Schlichen). The rhetorical enterprise is thus related
to both the “moral sciences” (Moralwissenschaft) and the science of “dialectics.”
Hence rhetorical thought is universal because, much like dialectics, it is concerned
not with any specific body of knowledge but merely with the formal principles
of knowledge (KGW II/4, pp. 525–26). This general and formal mode of rheto-
ric makes it a ubiquitous phenomenon that can be traced not only in poetry or
literature but in all kinds of discourse.
Nietzsche’s reception of Aristotle may appear somewhat one-sided, but it is in
Aristotle that he found the historical connection between rhetoric and philoso-
phy, which constitutes a crucial point throughout his reflections on language.
As two of Nietzsche’s sources, Wilhelm Wackernagel and Leonhard Spengel,
remark, Aristotle is in this respect the founder of rhetorical thought, for he
shifted the object of rhetoric from an attempt to move an audience’s emotions
to the more pragmatic project of formalizing critical judgment.48 For Aristotle,
this means emphasizing knowledge about facts in given cases and understanding
logical structures in demonstrative proofs.49 Rhetoric is not only enhanced by
logic but itself becomes a philosophical discipline, and Spengel, for instance,
calls Aristotle’s treatise a “philosophy of rhetoric.”50
Nietzsche paid close attention to the way in which Aristotle integrates rheto-
ric with philosophy, and Aristotle’s philosophical conception of rhetoric influ-
enced Nietzsche’s rhetorical critique of philosophical thought deeply, albeit in
an often hidden and indirect way. That rhetoric can serve as an interpretive
model for a variety of different epistemic fields—from texts and legal cases to
moral values, religious beliefs, and natural laws—is an aspect of Aristotle’s ac-
count that clearly appealed to Nietzsche. For one thing, he saw that rhetorical
thought could provide an interpretive model for a comprehensive philosophical
critique; in addition, he transformed Aristotle’s claim about the universal char-
acter of rhetorical argument into a thesis about the universal rhetoricity of knowl-
edge, philosophical or otherwise. In other words, if rhetoric can be applied to
the critical examination of claims within different fields of knowledge, these
different epistemic fields may themselves be the product of complex rhetorical
processes. These are undoubtedly far-reaching questions for Nietzsche’s philo-
sophical enterprise as a whole, and we will need to consider their consequences
in more detail. Although Nietzsche’s references to Aristotle are somewhat lim-
ited outside his philological writings, Aristotle provides Nietzsche’s approach
with an understanding of the enormous scope of rhetorical thought within phi-
losophy. The way in which Nietzsche discusses the complex relationship between
language and thought, or between rhetoric and knowledge, might not always be
compatible with Aristotle’s own ideas (it rarely is), but it would be shortsighted
to downplay the influence of Aristotle’s philosophical conception of rhetorical
thought.
Nietzsche’s conception of rhetorical thought is often discussed exclusively in
the light of his many theoretical reflections on the figurative character of language,
and much attention has been devoted to his undeniably fervent interest in the
epistemological implications of tropes such as metaphor and metonymy. This
is, of course, an important aspect of his linguistic thought, and its influence on
his philosophical enterprise as a whole should not be dismissed. First, Nietzsche’s
concern with what we might term the “philosophy of tropes” has many conse-
quences for his continually revised conception of the relationship between lan-
guage and thought throughout the 1870s, as well as for his later reflections on
interpretive activity as a quasi-anthropological foundation for both knowledge
and reason, which increasingly came to the fore in the early 1880s. Second, his
understanding of rhetorical thought and tropical language profoundly influenced
not only the distinctive stylistic quality of his own philosophical prose but also
the central conceptual constellations of his philosophical enterprise, such as

“genealogy,” “will to power,” “eternal recurrence,” “becoming,” and so on. I will
need to examine some of these issues in more detail throughout the following
chapters, and I will show that his continued, albeit often hidden, interest in
rhetorical thought should be regarded as a crucial factor for the development of
Nietzsche’s philosophical criticism.
Still, it would be remiss to reduce Nietzsche’s interest in rhetorical thought to
speculations regarding the philosophical implications of figurative language.
Rather, the history of rhetorical thought as a prominent component of ancient
Greek intellectual culture in particular plays a central role for his understanding
of the wider philosophical relevance of rhetoric in general. His historical perspec-
tive on the expansion of eloquence, oratory, and their theoretical underpinnings
is only partly philological and generally tends to exceed the realm of classical
scholarship as a historical discipline. In fact, one of his main concerns seems to
be the difficult relationship between rhetoric and philosophy, which continued
to shape Nietzsche’s philosophical enterprise.
To be sure, rhetorical discourse and philosophical argument are rarely at ease
with each other. Occasionally they are regarded as allied disciplines; more often
they are treated as separate entities. Much as metaphysics cannot do without
metaphor, however, philosophy as a whole cannot do without rhetoric, without
strategies of persuasion and tropical language.51 Furthermore, rhetorical thought
inevitably entails wide-ranging philosophical assumptions about language, refer-
ence, truth, subjectivity, interpretation, and so on—assumptions that are often
underestimated by philosophical perspectives that focus on “pure thought” and
“pure reason.” This tension between rhetoric and philosophy, and the fact that
both are interpretive discourses marking our conception of the world, is a central
aspect of Nietzsche’s historical account, one that Nietzsche highlights with regard
to a particular historical constellation from the Sophists via Plato to Aristotle.
By locating the cultural origin of rhetorical discourse in fifth-century b.c. Greece,
and therefore in the context of specific historical circumstances characterized by
a decisive shift from orality to literacy, he already hints at the historical intertwin-
ing of rhetoric and philosophy. The connection between the pre-Platonic sophoi
and the sophistēs serves as a starting point for Nietzsche’s discussion of the way
rhetorical education and philosophical knowledge often converge on both a
practical and a theoretical level. That Plato’s defense of supposedly pure philo-
sophical thought against the perceived rhetorical relativism of the Sophists is
itself indebted to rhetorical strategies, and that Plato introduces the idea of
psychagogia as a form of “true rhetoric,” merely confirms the undeniable rhetoric-
ity of philosophical discourse. Given all this, it is far from surprising that, ac-
cording to Nietzsche, Aristotle took the interpretive dimension of rhetorical

thought more seriously and inaugurated what is often called a philosophy of
rhetoric.
Nietzsche’s historical account does not abruptly end with Aristotle—he dis-
cusses, for instance, the constitution of public oratory and rhetorical theory in
Rome, which supposedly led to an increasing destruction of the Greek model of
general rhetorical education (KGW II/4, pp. 403–6)—but he seems to imply
that rhetoric in the Roman Empire and afterward should be understood largely
as a continuation of the Greek tradition, which already defined the complex
relations between rhetoric and philosophy. Considering his description of the
intellectual constellations that mark the development of rhetorical consciousness
in ancient Greece, it becomes clear that Nietzsche was interested in drawing
rhetoric back into the realm of philosophical thought, and this approach clearly
separates him from the main intellectual trends in nineteenth-century Germany,
since—with some notable exceptions, such as Gustav Gerber’s Die Sprache als
Kunst (1872–74) and, much later, Fritz Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der
Sprache (1901–3)—rhetorical thought played no role whatsoever within the
philosophical debates of that era, characterized as it was by the rise of scientific
materialism, the emergence of a neo-Kantian theory of knowledge, and the
growing historicist explanations of cultural processes.
Language in the Age of the Typewriter

Nietzsche’s fervent philosophical interest in the problem of language—an inter-
est that continued to shape his thought in later years—seems to have emerged,
at least initially, in the context of an attempt to account historically for the tense
relationship between rhetoric and philosophy in Greek antiquity. Although re-
marks on the importance of language can be found throughout his notebooks
of the 1860s and in Die Geburt der Tragödie, Nietzsche’s reflections on the irre-
ducibility of language gain momentum and sophistication in the lectures on
rhetoric. Nonetheless, this focus on language and thought, together with the
tentative beginnings of an epistemological skepticism, is not strictly speaking a
matter solely of rhetoric; it is further connected to a complex transition that, in
the course of the nineteenth century, changed the modern episteme. This tran-
sition led to a redefinition of knowledge and of being human that was gener-
ated by the intersection of seemingly outmoded philosophical questions and
contemporary science and technology. The sciences of the body, especially the
explosion of physiological research, and the new materialities of communication,
such as the typewriter and the telegraph, affected the philosophical understand-
ing of language in ways that are difficult to ignore. Although it would be pre-
mature to map his reflections on language onto this transition, Nietzsche did
turn to the problem of language just when language was becoming an unstable
object of reflection. Consider, as a particularly prominent example of this tran-
sition’s connection to Nietzsche’s enterprise and as a highly symbolic site that
reflects the conditions of the modern episteme, his later use of what is probably
philosophy’s most famous typewriter, “Hansen’s machine” (KGB III/1, pp. 144–
45). Nietzsche’s interest in rhetoric and his experience of the typewriter framed
his understanding of language in a highly symbolic way: the traditions of the
philosophy of language versus the scientific and technological conditions of
knowledge.
In 1882, roughly ten years after his lectures on rhetoric, Nietzsche’s eyesight was
fading, causing his handwriting to deteriorate. Throughout February and March,
while he was living in Genoa and working on the text that was to become Die
fröhliche Wissenschaft, Nietzsche occasionally used a typewriter to make reading
his manuscripts more bearable. This typewriter has been the subject of much
discussion and speculation that need not concern us here.52 Significantly, how-
ever, this apparatus was far more than a practical tool or a mere writing machine.
Although he seems to have contemplated the rather expensive purchase of such
a typewriter in the preceding year, it was his sister Elisabeth who finally sent him
this rather unwieldy gift (KGB III/1, pp. 163 and 166). Brought to Genoa by his
friend Paul Rée, the typewriter was clearly not the ideal writing instrument, at
least as far as philosophy was concerned. A somewhat outmoded model that had
been developed in Denmark during the 1860s, it might have been lighter and
easier to transport than was the far more successful American Remington model
of the 1870s and 1880s, as Nietzsche remarks (KGB III/1, p. 145), but it was also
plagued by mechanical problems: during the short period Nietzsche used the
typewriter, it had to be repaired at least twice (KGB III/1, pp. 169–70, 175, 186–87).
Furthermore, the ink faded relatively quickly, and the circular arrangement of
the keys failed to make things easier. A short article in the Berliner Tageblatt,
published in March 1882 and mentioned in one of Nietzsche’s letters to his friend
Franz Overbeck, in Basel (KGB III/1, p. 180), speculated that his use of this
typewriter would undoubtedly aid him in the speedy completion of his next
philosophical treatise, but the reality was clearly different. As a consequence of
the technical difficulties he encountered, Nietzsche typed mainly letters and
thirty-odd pages of light poetry that he collected under the general title 500 Auf-
schriften auf Tisch und Wand: Für Narrn von Narrenhand.53 On one of these
pages, which are marred by typographical errors throughout, the machine must
have become stuck: the first line reads “MELSDNDRGILSTHCZMQNMOY,”
with several other letters superimposed (S 89). For Nietzsche, the typewriter was
more difficult than the piano, and long sentences were not much of an option
(KGB III/1, p. 172).
Nonetheless, Nietzsche’s use of the typewriter is more than just a curious
anecdote from a philosopher’s life or a bizarre footnote to the history of modern
media. Rather, it signals a crucial change in the cultural consciousness of the
later nineteenth century, and Nietzsche himself realized the effect of this machine
on his own writing (KGB III/1, p. 172). The assumed immediacy of the written
word—seemingly connected in a direct way to the thoughts and ideas of the
author through the physical movement of the hand—was displaced by the flow
of disconnected letters on the page, one as standardized as the other. The pre-
sumed individuality of handwriting gave way to a new “atomism” of language
that surpassed the “atomism” of speech Nietzsche encountered in his studies on
rhythm and on Democritus.54 This new, mechanically generated “atomism” of
language, produced here through Nietzsche’s typewriter, reflected the cultural
effects of technology and the reorientation of the modern episteme in the second
half of the nineteenth century. As Friedrich Kittler has shown, this reorientation
related largely to the advent of certain types of media, but in the following
chapters I will argue that, from the perspective of the intellectual historian, it
related even more to the order of knowledge itself.55 The standardization and
rationalization of writing through the technologies of modernity exemplifies
once more that writing itself was invented not primarily for communication but
for calculating, cataloguing, and archiving complex sets of information, such as
inventories.56 During the second half of the nineteenth century, this quantitative
standardization also provided a new framework for the investigation of “life”
itself: physiology and psychology, freed from the constraints of philosophical
discourse and embedded in the experimental culture of the modern laboratory,
began to reformulate the human individual as an epistemic object of numbers,
curves, and waves that, in complex algorithms and diagrams, measure, register,
and record the functions of both the body and the “mind.”57 Despite the obvious
success of such models and practices, this development implies that the sym-
bolic systems that had stabilized meaning in culture and in the sciences, such as
“truth,” are subject to fundamental changes that reverberate in Nietzsche’s epis-
temological skepticism. Indeed, I will show that in particular the relationships
among language, thought, and reality became fragile, and the rise of the life
sciences led even the status of what it means to be “human” to undergo decisive
shifts.
Although we should be cautious about such general statements, these shifts
were not limited to the formation of scientific knowledge, to the life sciences, or
even to any specific discipline. On the contrary, the regimes of standardiza-

tion—supported between the 1840s and the 1880s by a range of institutional
arrangements, such as the German Staatswissenschaften, political economy, ju-
ridical processes, statistics, and demography—could shape the wider cultural
consciousness only because they began to determine the social world.58 It would
be counterproductive to go into any details at this stage, however; suffice it to
say that Nietzsche was certainly no stranger to this new experiential realm, from
the handwritten registration of his birth in the “church book” of Röcken on 15
October 1844 to the news of his death, printed and recorded on 25 August 1900
in the Weimarische Zeitung. Birth and school certificates gave him access to a
scholarly career. His days at the Pforta boarding school were highly regimented
and produced records of his schedule, his behavior, and his punishments.
Throughout his life he had to rely on railway timetables, data on the sale of his
books, and identity documents for his travels. He had to file reports about his
lectures and seminars in Basel, pay invoices, and submit prescriptions, and the
assessments of his health and therapies cover volumes. Thus, merely as a repre-
sentative of a particular social class defined by his education, his personal rela-
tionships, and his audience, Nietzsche lived a life that reflected the state of affairs
during the second half of the nineteenth century.
Given all this, it becomes clear that Nietzsche’s intellectual career fell pre-
cisely into the period during which the standardization of life and knowledge
gained momentum and older certainties, such as the commonplaces of the phil-
osophical tradition, seem to have dissolved. It would be foolish to assume that
these developments left no traces in his early reflections on the status of language,
the topic of his philological lectures devoted to rhetoric. In 1849, five years after
Nietzsche’s birth, the physiologist Gustav Theodor Fechner postulated that life
can be mathematized, and in 1868, three years before Nietzsche began to deliver
his lectures on rhetoric, the linguist Heymann Steinthal argued for a physiolog-
ical account of language; these developments make the concerns of Nietzsche’s
lectures seem oddly anachronistic—at least at first sight.59 In other words, during
the 1870s, when Nietzsche was in Basel working on language, language itself had
already become a problematic epistemic object with an uncertain future. It is in
this sense that we can say that Nietzsche’s typewriter and his interest in language
reflect, each in its own way, the intellectual fields that furnish the background
to his attempt to reassess the connections among language, consciousness, and
the body—an attempt that culminates in something I term, somewhat tenta-
tively, Nietzsche’s “anthropology of knowledge.” Within this context, the seem-
ing separation of the body from “consciousness” and “mind” (Bewußtsein and
Geist) that Nietzsche often ascribes to German idealism becomes an increas-
ingly pressing concern, so that the anthropological dimension of his philosoph-

ical enterprise is in many ways connected to his repeated attempt at “retranslat-
ing” mental existence into nature without merely reducing mental existence to
organic life, physiological functions, and physical events. It is thus symbolic that,
after his failed experiments with the typewriter in 1882, he clearly realized the
limitations of his treasured machine and returned to the “natural” flow of hand-
writing: the typewriter itself was more enthralling than its use, he remarked in
a letter at the end of February 1882 (KGB III/1, p. 173), and he subsequently
returned to the manual labor of his notebooks, preferably writing with a par-
ticular brand of nibs for his pen, the Humboldfeder Roederer B or Sönnecken’s
Rundschriftfedern no. 5 (KGB III/1, p. 216; KGB III/5, p. 358).60
Either way, considering the enormous gap between the oral performance of
rhetoric in ancient Greece that Nietzsche describes in his lectures and his own
experiments with the typewriter, it is difficult to ignore that language itself had
undergone radical transformations. Given all this, we might even argue that the
epistemological skepticism Nietzsche increasingly derived from his historical
account of the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy in Greek antiquity
mirrors the complex transitions of his own intellectual and cultural environ-
ment—it began with the failures of empiricism.
2
The Failures of Empiricism: Language, Science,
and the Philosophical Tradition
Rhetorical thought and its far-reaching implications for the complex relationships
among language, knowledge, and reason were not exactly at the center of nine-
teenth-century intellectual developments, either inside or outside philosophy.
Most studies of rhetoric from that time more or less repeat the canon of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, established by such eminent scholars as
Gerhard Johannes Vossius, Bernard Lamy, César-Chesneau Dumarsais, Johann
Christoph Gottsched, and Hugh Blair. The dissemination of these treatises
within European intellectual circles demonstrates their influence and importance.
Vossius’s Rhetorices contractae, sive partitorum oratoriarum (1621), for instance,
went through thirty-three editions in various languages by 1700, and Lamy’s
equally important De l’art de parler (1675) generated fifteen French editions by
1741. Likewise, Gottsched’s Ausführliche Redekunst (1736), which profoundly
influenced poetic discourse and political oratory in Germany, went into its fifth
edition as early as 1759, and Dumarsais’s highly systematic account of rhetorical
devices, Des tropes, ou des différents sens (1730), was soon translated into German
and English and dominated the curriculum of French schools and universities
until the mid-nineteenth century, as did, to some extent, Blair’s Lectures on
Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres (1783).1 Thus, as Brian Vickers rightly remarked, the
discipline of rhetoric “reached its highest degree of influence, in modern times,
in the great expansion of European education between 1500 and 1750.”2
From the last decades of the eighteenth century onward, rhetorical thought
increasingly disappeared from philosophical discourse—a development particu-
larly manifest within German idealism and the rise of hermeneutic thought in
the early nineteenth century. On the one hand, both Adam Müller’s Zwölf Reden
über die Beredsamkeit und deren Verfall in Deutschland (1812) and Johann Gott-
lieb Fichte’s Reden an die deutsche Nation (given in Berlin in 1807–8) call for a
The Failures of Empiricism 33
new national linguistic consciousness, which should be understood against the

background of the Napoleonic Wars and the political particularism of the Ger-
man states. On the other hand, rhetoric was practically erased from philosophy
and replaced by the paradigms of idealism, anthropology, and hermeneutics,
which developed from around 1750 onward. Kant denounced eloquence as a
fruitless game of language and argument without any philosophical significance,
whereas Johann Gottfried Herder’s project of a historical anthropology of culture
fully assimilated the theory of language within cultural thought, and Friedrich
Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher and Friedrich Schlegel regarded rhetorical phenom-
ena as part of the wider discourses of hermeneutics and poetry, respectively. One
principal consequence of this situation was that the study of oratory and elo-
quence was limited either to its pedagogical application within secondary schools
or to the field of classical scholarship, and in these contexts, studies on rhetoric
experienced an unprecedented renaissance. The eighth edition of Wilhelm En-
gelmann’s Bibliotheca scriptorum classicorum (1880–82), a comprehensive biblio-
graphical overview of ongoing research within the field of classical philology, lists
more than 400 works on Greek and Roman rhetoric, which are echoed by an
equally impressive number of educational works on rhetoric and oratory that
appeared around the same time.3 Pedagogical discourse and classical philology,
however, share the view that rhetoric has no philosophical dimension and should
be reduced solely to the study or imitation of Greek and Latin classical texts—a
development that, because of the continuing influence of Winckelmann’s aes-
thetic doctrines, is directly related to the ideological dimensions of “classicism”
and “philhellenism” in nineteenth-century German culture.4 Moving against
these intellectual and educational developments, Nietzsche returned to the phil-
osophical dimension of rhetorical thought, which he probably took more seri-
ously than did most of his contemporaries. Furthermore, this return to rhetoric
provided him a powerful tool against the “myth of the given,” that is, any phil-
osophical discourse that relies on the objectivity and universality of knowledge
without realizing its own historicity and indebtedness to language. In this context,
it will be necessary to relate Nietzsche’s ideas to both the philosophical and the
rhetorical traditions without losing sight of the complex intellectual environment
within which his ideas emerged.
Language, Science, Philosophy

The decreasing interest in the epistemological implications of rhetorical thought
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is in many ways linked to a
fundamental epistemological break within the intellectual culture of Germany,
especially from the early 1800s on. Philosophy was beginning to lose its intel-
lectual status as the dominant discipline providing orientation within the order
of knowledge and was slowly replaced, on the one hand, by historicist paradigms
and, on the other, by the increasingly important scientific disciplines—physics,
physiology, and biology—that introduced a new conception of the empirical
and of progress.5 With the decline of Hegelianism beginning in the middle of
the nineteenth century and the parallel rise of a specialist research culture at
German universities that slowly replaced the Humboldtian concept of Bildung,
the nomothetic natural sciences supplanted the idea of a philosophical Wissen-
schaft, or comprehensive Wissenschaftslehre, that had informed the organization
of knowledge in previous decades. Within the epistemic transitions that took
place in Germany between the 1840s and 1900 and that shaped the intellectual
environment during Nietzsche’s lifetime, physiology established itself as the lead-
ing scientific discourse, embedded in a tangled network of economic, social, and
political interests that shaped the research culture in Germany.6
As a discourse able to reach beyond the walls of lecture halls and laboratories,
physiology produced one of its most crucial effects in offering a far-reaching
redefinition of the body as both an organic entity and as a cultural object: reason
and the moral law, which in the late eighteenth century had defined what it
means to be human, were dissolved into an arrangement of stimuli, nerves,
sensory centers, brain regions, transmissions, waves, and molecules. The history
of the body in the nineteenth century is above all the history of that which the
historian Philipp Sarasin recently termed a “sensitive machine.”7 Culminating
in an increasing experimentalization of life, the science of physiology rested on
interconnections among instruments, techniques, theories, and observations and
their representations in images, textbooks, and popular lectures. Taken as a whole,
these elements rendered physiology as a site of symbolic production that tran-
scends the artificial boundaries between the “private” realm of the laboratory and
the “public” realm of the wider cultural imagination. Not surprisingly, physio-
logical models and themes affected neighboring fields; more specifically, they
feature prominently in Nietzsche’s writings from the mid-1870s onward, and
informed the way Nietzsche and his contemporaries began to think about lan-
guage, mind, and the body.
I will return to these issues throughout the following chapters, for Nietzsche
was an attentive reader of contemporary scientific publications and an equally
attentive observer of the epistemic transitions of his time. The wish to reduce
Nietzsche’s reflections on language to rhetorical discourse or to the realm of
epistemology tends to underestimate the relevance and timeliness of these reflec-
tions. To put it more sharply: we cannot understand Nietzsche in purely philo-
sophical terms. For now, however, it suffices to note that the scientific reorienta-
tions of the nineteenth century, together with the historicist ideas of the time,
influenced the study and theory of language considerably. As comparative and
historical linguistics emerged as leading disciplines through the work of, among
others, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Franz Bopp, and Friedrich Schlegel, general
epistemological questions about the relationship between language and knowl-
edge, which had dominated many intellectual debates in the eighteenth century,
were increasingly replaced by questions concerning linguistic typology, the re-
construction of Indo-European protolanguages, phonemic laws, morphological
descriptions, and research into the physiological workings of spoken language.8
Although this trend, which developed in the second half of the nineteenth cen-
tury, faced some notable exceptions, such as Gustav Gerber’s Die Sprache als
Kunst (1872–74) and Fritz Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (1901–
3), comparative historical linguistics, increasingly enriched by a psychological
and physiological framework, dominated the study of language throughout the
nineteenth century.
This background bore consequences for Nietzsche’s developing views on lan-
guage. In the last chapter it became obvious that his initial, historically oriented
interest in the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy ultimately shifted
his attention to the complex relationship between language and thought. It would
be wrong, however, to assume that he missed or ignored the development of the
theory of language into a “science of language,” for this had profoundly affected
theoretical debates within classical scholarship in nineteenth-century Germany.
The introduction of linguistic thought into classical scholarship was in fact a
fairly natural development. The field of comparative linguistics emerged at the
end of the eighteenth century, around the same time as classical philology became
a fully accredited academic subject at German universities. Whereas, for instance,
Schlegel’s studies of ancient Greek literature fall mostly within the period from
1794 to 1798, Schlegel easily switched from classical philology to linguistics and
in 1808 published his Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, which was fol-
lowed by Bopp’s Ueber das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache (1816), Jacob
Grimm’s Deutsche Grammatik (1819), and, somewhat belatedly, Wilhelm von
Humboldt’s posthumous Ueber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues
und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts (1836).9
Although Humboldt’s studies on language were published only from the 1820s
onward, and despite the success of Bopp and Grimm, Humboldt nevertheless
became the field’s most influential figure, and his ideas remained dominant fol-
lowing his death in 1835 and continuing into the mid-nineteenth century. Even
though some of the most prominent German linguists were critical of Humboldt’s
approach, they felt obliged to refer to his work, as is especially evident in Hey-
mann Steinthal’s Die Sprachwissenschaft Wilhelm von Humboldt’s und die Hegel’sche
Philosophie (1848) and August Schleicher’s Über die Bedeutung der Sprache für die
Naturgeschichte des Menschen (1865). Nonetheless, Humboldt’s version of com-
parative historical linguistics is rooted in much earlier paradigms, most notably
Herder’s discussion of language in Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache
(1772), which itself reflects both the tradition of Condillac and Locke and the
discourse of eighteenth-century cultural history.10 Humboldt’s ideas thus do not
merely follow the more rigorous paradigm of the empirical study of language
that emerged in the nineteenth century but also continue linguistic ideas that
dominated early modern European and Enlightenment thought. All of this dem-
onstrates that classical scholarship in nineteenth-century Germany had a close
relation to comparative linguistics, which itself often referred back to Humboldt
and Schlegel.11
On 30 April 1862 one of Nietzsche’s teachers, Georg Curtius, delivered his
inaugural lecture at the University of Leipzig under the title “Philologie und
Sprachwissenschaft.” In this lecture Curtius relied heavily on the studies of Bopp,
Humboldt, and Grimm, and he stressed the extreme importance of the com-
parative study of languages for philological research in general.12 Nevertheless,
Curtius, who condemned the French and British reduction of philology to mere
linguistic criticism, understood the “study of language” (Sprachforschung) to be
a wide concept, and much like Herder and Humboldt, he emphasized the inti-
mate connection between language and culture, at the same time emphasizing
the anthropological dimension of such an undertaking. Language, in other words,
is inextricably bound up with the manifestations of culture, and the intellectual
developments, models, and mentalities that govern any given cultural context
are represented in language above all else. His approach accordingly focuses on
the cultural dimension of language—that is, on its impact on thought—and less
on its teleological or organic development.13 This point is crucial for Curtius’s
linguistic understanding of antiquity, which is most fully realized in his Grund-
züge der griechischen Etymologie (1860), where he directly links the evolution of
intellectual capacities to that of linguistic forms and complexity. Nietzsche cer-
tainly encountered this approach when he attended Curtius’s lectures on Greek
and Latin grammar at the University of Leipzig, and it was also to influence his
genealogical project of a parallel history of language, thought, and cultural in-
stitutions.14 For Nietzsche, this particular understanding of the cultural dimen-
sion of language became increasingly important. As a preparation for his own
lecture series on Latin grammar, which he delivered in Basel in the winter se-
mester of 1869–70, he not only read studies directly concerned with Latin itself
but also considered wider aspects of comparative and historical linguistics when
he turned, for instance, to Theodor Benfey’s highly acclaimed Geschichte der
Sprachwissenschaft und orientalischen Philologie in Deutschland (1869), Heymann
Steinthal’s Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft bei den Griechen und Römern (1863),
and the German translation of Friedrich Max Müller’s Lectures on the Science of
Language (1861–64).15 Benfey’s historical overview in particular offered Nietzsche
a new insight into the development of linguistics as a discipline and into the
most prominent positions in this field, such as those of Schlegel, Bopp, Grimm,
and Humboldt.16
At first sight, Nietzsche seems to claim that the classical scholar should use the
methods of comparative historical linguistics but not regard them as the main
focus of the enterprise. A “passing concern” with the theories and results of
“comparative linguistics,” he remarks in his “Encyclopaedie der klassischen Phi-
lologie,” is certainly important for the education of the classical philologist, but
linguistics should be regarded only as a means to an end, not as the end itself
(KGW II/3, pp. 389–90). Closer inspection, however, shows the situation to be
somewhat different, because Nietzsche discusses linguistic problems quite often
throughout his philological writings. He demands, for instance, a historical com-
parison of Latin with other related languages and stresses the necessity of a
historically oriented approach to the problem of language (KGW II/2, pp. 188–
92; KGW II/3, p. 395). Consequently, he discusses the historical development of
Latin in his lectures devoted to grammar (KGW II/2, pp. 196–99), and in the
later “Geschichte der griechischen Litteratur” he traces the historical development
of ancient Greek dialects from Homeric times to the Athenian city-state and
beyond (KGW II/5, pp. 9–18). In “Darstellung der antiken Rhetorik” Nietzsche
emphasizes the temporal dynamics of language development in different cultures,
from Siberia and central Africa to mid-nineteenth-century Europe (KGW II/4,
pp. 441–42). Furthermore, he points out the relationship of the history of lan-
guage to mythology in the wide-ranging introductory lecture series on the his-
tory and methods of classical scholarship that he delivered in the summer semes-
ter of 1871 (KGW II/3, pp. 397, 410), and tried his hand at some comparative
linguistics and etymology (KGW II/2, pp. 267–81; KGW II/3, pp. 394–95). This
background would later influence his understanding of the relationship between
language and thought considerably. For now, it suffices to note that the discipline
of linguistics influenced Nietzsche significantly, but we should be careful in as-
sessing its role. On the one hand, he praises the outstanding contributions of
linguistics (KGW II/4, p. 130), but on the other, he grew increasingly critical of
the fact that some parts of classical scholarship seemed to be exclusively domi-
nated by comparative and historical linguistics. In his notes of March 1875—when
he was working on the unfinished Wir Philologen—he laments the increasing

number of philologists who had left classical scholarship to pursue pure linguis-
tics (KGW IV/1, 3 [4]).17 Nietzsche does not claim that linguistics is useless, but
he demands that it be used with care and caution (KGW III/3, 7 [74]).
Nietzsche’s interest in language was thus not restricted to the field of rhetoric
but also informed by contemporary debates within comparative historical lin-
guistics. This did not, however, lead him to share the general neglect of the
philosophical dimension of rhetoric apparent throughout the nineteenth cen-
tury; rather, it seems to have fostered his awareness for the complex relationship
between language and knowledge and for the possibility that this relationship
might eventually be explained in terms of rhetoric.
Nietzsche’s combination of rhetoric and linguistics was furthermore enriched
by his early interest in philosophy at large. Although his planned doctoral dis-
sertations on Democritus and Kant were never realized, Nietzsche used Dem-
ocritus in particular as an introduction to pre-Socratic philosophy and to mate-
rialism in general, and in 1865 he had his main initiation to philosophy when he
stumbled upon Arthur Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1819;
2d ed., 1844). He subsequently acquired Schopenhauer’s Parerga und Paralipomena
(1851), and in 1866 he read Friedrich Albert Lange’s Geschichte des Materialismus
und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart (1866) before turning to Eduard
von Hartmann’s Philosophie des Unbewussten (1869).18 One of the main reference
points of this philosophical background is certainly Kant, although Nietzsche’s
reception of Kant’s critical project remains controversial. His knowledge of Kant’s
philosophical enterprise seems to have largely been mediated through the writ-
ings of Schopenhauer and Lange, but it was considerably influenced by an in-
troductory lecture series on the general history of philosophy that his philosophy
professor at the University of Bonn, Karl Schaarschmidt, gave in the winter se-
mester of 1864–65.19 Be this as it may, Nietzsche turned to Kant in more detail
during the winter of 1867–68, when he began to outline a possible dissertation
on teleology and organicist concepts of nature, a topic that seems to be quite
heavily influenced by debates within the nineteenth-century life sciences. Nietz-
sche’s projected dissertation, it seems, was supposed to consist of four chapters,
one each on the Kantian concept of “purposiveness,” the concept of “organism,”
the possibility of understanding the teleology of life in mechanical terms, and
the significance of teleology in nature (KGW I/4, 62 [44]). Within this context,
Nietzsche refers several times to Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781) and
Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), and his own considerations pretty clearly follow a
Kantian line of argument that seems to have been influenced by the contempo-
rary studies of Kuno Fischer, Karl Rosenkranz, and Friedrich Albert Lange.20 At
this point Nietzsche seems to have little new to say, which perhaps explains why
he dropped the topic altogether. Nevertheless, his reading of Kant would later
influence his own thought profoundly, and Kant himself will accompany us
throughout this study.
These early philosophical interests greatly shaped Nietzsche’s later understand-
ing of the way language relates to thought. Not only did they introduce him to
the main debates within the philosophical tradition; in addition, they enabled
him to link the theoretical questions he met in the fields of rhetoric and linguis-
tics to wider epistemological and anthropological concerns about the relationship
between language and knowledge, of mental existence and organic life. This
background became increasingly important for his own intellectual development,
and I will return to it on several occasions throughout this study.
Note, however, that Nietzsche’s interest in language was based not only on an
intertwining of rhetoric, linguistic thought, and philosophy but also on far-
reaching physiological and psychological arguments. Consider, for instance,
Hartmann’s Philosophie des Unbewussten, which Nietzsche read shortly before he
outlined his lectures on Latin grammar. This book includes a chapter on language
in which Hartmann insists on a psycho-physiological connection between lan-
guage and instinct.21 Hartmann begins his account by quoting Schelling’s His-
torisch-kritische Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie: “Since without lan-
guage we would be unable to conceive not only of a philosophical consciousness
[philosophisches Bewußtseyn] but of human consciousness [menschliches Bewußt-
seyn] in general, the origin of language cannot be derived from consciousness. . . . It
is with language as it is with all organisms; we believe them to emerge ran-
domly, but we cannot ignore the unfathomable purpose of their development,
even in their smallest details.”22 On the basis of this inconspicuous passage,
Nietzsche argues that Schelling’s description of language’s organic evolution as
paralleling the evolution of consciousness is to some extent compatible with his
own reflections (KGW II/2, p. 188).That is, Hartmann’s reading of Schelling
offered Nietzsche the idea that language and thought are congruent.
Although his own ideas about instinct are somewhat vague, Nietzsche quite
understandably took note of such physiological and psychological concepts.
Much like comparative and historical linguistics, the epistemic discourses of
physiology and psychology grew increasingly important within the intellectual
field of nineteenth-century Germany. They took part in a “biologization” of
knowledge and human behavior, and he clearly recognized their pivotal contri-
butions to contemporary debates in the life sciences and anthropology. But for
now, it suffices to realize that Hartmann’s arguments for the importance of in-
stinct with regard to the development of language and thought led Nietzsche to
assume that knowledge must be understood in terms of language. This assump-

tion would have far-reaching consequences for his subsequent rejection of the
position we might somewhat reductively call “philosophical empiricism” or “ver-
bal realism.” It also raises a question, however: how are we to understand Nietz-
sche’s return to rhetorical thought vis-à-vis the philosophical tradition? To answer
this question, it will be useful to locate his interest in the epistemological impli-
cations of rhetorical thought within a historical context that stretches from Locke
to Kant.
“Things As They Are”

Initially Nietzsche viewed the tension between rhetoric and philosophy to have
originated in Plato’s rejection of eloquence in favor of dialectical argument,
whereas Aristotle supported rhetoric’s use for the art of reasoning. This tension
between rhetoric and philosophy continued, resurfacing with, perhaps, Locke’s
Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) to fuel debates about the nature
of language and its relevance for philosophical concepts. The philosophical rejec-
tion of rhetoric along quasi-Platonic lines is glaringly obvious in Locke’s denun-
ciation of the rhetorical enterprise as a “perfect cheat”: “if we . . . speak of Things
as they are, we must allow, that all the Art of Rhetorick, besides Order and Clear-
ness, all the artificial and figurative application of Words Eloquence hath in-
vented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the Passions, and
thereby mislead the Judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheat. . . . ‘Tis evident
how much Men love to deceive, and be deceived, since Rhetorick, that powerful
instrument of Error and Deceit, has its established Professors, is publickly taught,
and has always been had in great Reputation.”23
Ironically, Locke’s denunciation of rhetoric is another fine example of the ars
bene dicendi: he rejects eloquence in a highly eloquent style. Rhetoric and elo-
quence, it seems, can be rejected only rhetorically.24 This fundamental dilemma
runs through the history of the relation between rhetoric and philosophy. Rhet-
oric is obviously less ornamental and decorative than Locke suggests, and his
argument, which in many respects echoes the spirit of Bacon’s and Descartes’s
call for a reassessment of empirical knowledge, seems directed primarily against
the Scholastic obscurity he detects in theologically inspired philosophy.25 Locke
also sides with Hobbes’s earlier rejection of rhetoric as arousing the “passions of
the mind” but being practically useless,26 and he upholds the Royal Society’s
famous and misleading motto nullius in verba and its search for a universal
language of conceptually clear and accurate philosophical reasoning free from
linguistic confusion. The attempted exclusion of rhetoric from philosophical
discourse aims at a precisely defined terminology for philosophical argument,

which ironically would lead to the end of philosophy itself, for if every concept
or idea could be defined with utmost clarity and no ambiguity, there would be
no need for philosophical argument and debate. To be sure, Locke was not a
logical positivist, but his outright rejection of rhetoric is marked by a certain
naïveté with regard to language and communication. He also represents a phil-
osophical position that stands in clear contrast to Nietzsche’s emphasis on the
rhetorical quality of language and, thus, of philosophy as a whole.
Leibniz offers a slightly more cautious approach. Although he was far from
willing to embrace any fundamental rhetoricity of philosophical thought, his
short but influential treatise Meditationes de cognitione, veritate et ideis (1684)
concedes that conceptual clarity is a rather problematic assumption and not
without its own conceptual ambiguities: concepts can be defined and clarified
only by other concepts, which in turn need to be clarified by further concepts,
and so on.27 Several years later Leibniz provided a quasi-anthropological reason
for this somewhat unfortunate but inevitable situation in his Nouveaux essais sur
l’entendement humain (written in 1704): the confusion and imprecision that
govern our concepts, ideas, and judgments result directly from the undeniable
fact that human nature itself is in a constant state of imperfection (une imperfec-
tion de nostre nature).28 Following Leibniz, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten at-
tempted to resolve this peculiar philosophical predicament by introducing the
notion of a veritas aestheticologica, that is, a concept of truth that seeks to relate
the cognitive clarity of logical reasoning to the cognitive confusion of subjective
experience. In this respect Baumgarten widened the perspective of philosophical
discourse by emphasizing the necessity of taking its figural dimension more seri-
ously—although he regarded aesthetics itself as a rather specific case of philoso-
phy.29
By accepting the epistemological value of what he calls cognitio confusa, or
“confused thought,” Baumgarten was able to provide a theoretical framework
for the liberal arts, especially poetry, but—much like Leibniz before him—he
was not interested in arguing for the rhetorical nature of philosophical thought.
This position, however, differs from that of Condillac, who to some extent shared
Locke’s general philosophical outlook but could not altogether reject the rhe-
torical dimension of language and conceptual thought. On the one hand, in his
Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (1746) Condillac follows Locke’s
earlier comments in noting the mysteriously seductive and compelling power of
language. Curiously, he writes, we often fall victim to this particular aspect of
language, for the more confident we are in using it, the less we are aware of its
seductive and occasionally misleading force.30 On the other hand, Condillac did
not want to reject rhetoric altogether, perhaps because much of his thought about
language stands in a tradition that reaches back to the seventeenth century, es-
pecially to Lamy’s rhetorical treatise and the Logique de Port-Royal, and that—be-
cause of its Aristotelian background—does not fully separate logical argument
from rhetorical structures. As a consequence, he emphasizes the necessity of
figurative speech and its topical quality. It is virtually impossible to present any
argument without abstract notions, so that figures and metaphors can make
speech clearer instead of more obscure. Rhetoric, in other words, can serve to
introduce provisional order into the meandering confusion of our conceptual
reasoning.31
Nietzsche could not have supported Locke’s rejection of rhetoric, but he did
agree with Leibniz that philosophical concepts, and therefore philosophical rea-
soning as a whole, are inevitably marked by a certain ambiguity that can be traced
back to the language within which philosophical ideas are presented. Whereas
Leibniz found this to be a somewhat unfortunate and lamentable situation,
however, Nietzsche regarded it as a necessary precondition for philosophical
thought as well as for the constitution and production of knowledge. Nietzsche
also came to agree with Baumgarten that philosophy should take the value of
the cognitio confusa more seriously, but he hesitated to restrict its value solely to
the realm of aesthetic theory. Furthermore, Nietzsche accepted Condillac’s idea
that rhetoric is ultimately a linguistic phenomenon of a general nature, so that
it cannot be eliminated from philosophical discourse altogether. The philosoph-
ical tradition must therefore take linguistic and rhetorical problems on board,
and this leads to the somewhat curious situation that the clarity of knowledge
demanded in early modern European philosophy from Descartes to Leibniz is
constantly undermined by its own figurative language. The constitution of rea-
son and philosophy is ultimately bound up with language, and the fundamental
conflict between rhetoric and philosophy that we can observe from Plato to
Locke and beyond played a crucial role within Nietzsche’s understanding of the
relationship between language and knowledge.
In his early philologically oriented history of eloquence in ancient Greek cul-
ture, Nietzsche remarks that the discourse of rhetoric should be regarded as
“contagious” (KGW II/4, p. 367), and at the beginning of his more theoreti-
cally inclined notes “Darstellung der antiken Rhetorik” he quotes Locke’s de-
nunciation of eloquence and criticizes the general neglect of rhetorical thought
within the modern philosophical tradition. This tradition, he argues, erases the
educational and philosophical paradigms of classical antiquity, so that in modern
times even the most successful application of rhetorical devices became at best
a sort of dilettantism that lacks the theoretical sophistication to be found among

the Sophists and Aristotle. For Nietzsche, rhetoric is the ideal and culmination
of education in ancient Greece (KGW II/4, pp. 415–16).
Surprisingly, in the present context Nietzsche refers to Kant’s Kritik der Ur-
teilskraft and quotes part of its discussion of eloquence:
The arts of speech are oratory and poetry. Oratory is the art of engaging in a task of
the understanding as a free play of the imagination; poetry is the art of conducting
a free play of the imagination as a task of the understanding.
Thus the orator announces a task and, so as to entertain his audience, carries it
out as if it were merely a play with ideas. The poet announces merely an entertaining
play with ideas, and yet the understanding gets as much out of this as if he had
intended merely to engage in its own task.32
Obviously Nietzsche cites this passage somewhat out of context when he argues
that Kant accurately describes the specific character of Hellenic culture as a play-
ful appreciation of conceptual reasoning (KGW II/4, p. 416). In fact, Kant’s
passage is not an apology for eloquent playfulness in Greek culture but a thor-
oughgoing rejection of rhetoric on the grounds that oratory is above all a form
of public entertainment. Orators provide an interesting and imaginative presen-
tation, but they do not use understanding in any purposeful manner, so that
rhetoric and eloquence work only on the level of the imagination and cannot be
regarded as entailing a philosophical dimension beyond aesthetic play. Nietzsche
fails to take this point into account, probably because his positive view of Kantian
idealism during the early 1870s was mediated by Lange’s study on the history of
materialism and by the emerging neo-Kantianism prevalent within German
philosophical debate during the era.33 As a consequence, Nietzsche appreciates
Kant’s harsh rejection of the metaphysical dogmatism that underlies his project
of a critical philosophy (KGW III/4, 19 [34]). Nietzsche, however, seems to have
forgotten the serious problems that Kant faces here, for even pure reason is in-
debted, one way or another, to conceptual thought and thus to language.
Kant’s critical project aims to place reason and metaphysics on the safe ground
of Newtonian science, and along the lines of the mathematical sciences, which
Kant took as the paradigm of the deductive method.34 The transcendental frame-
work of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft introduces a model of reason that stresses
the importance of causal-logical thought, even though it assumes a priori prin-
ciples, such as space and time, that precede the notion of causality. Nevertheless,
in the first version of his introduction to the Kritik der Urteilskraft, Kant states
that this transcendental perspective consists in regarding nature as structured a
priori according to a logical system of its manifold appearances governed by

empirical laws.35 When Kant attempts to order the manifold appearances of
nature, experience, and knowledge, his enterprise confronts the rhetoricity of
conceptual thought. To grasp reality—to grasp, that is, valid philosophical con-
cepts—is inevitably to rely on “mental images” (Anschauungen), so that the rep-
resentation of conceptual thought often involves something Kant terms a “hy-
potyposis.” Hypotyposis, however, is a prominent and powerful rhetorical figure
that Cicero and Quintilian describe as a vivid and almost visual demonstration
and that Kant regards as an “illustration” (Versinnlichung).36 As Kant notes,
hypotyposes are based on the associative power of the imagination, so that they
often function on a symbolic level and follow the principles of an analogy. As
such, a hypotyposis can consist of certain words and even algebraic or mimetic
signs that can illustrate particularly abstract concepts. Philosophical discourse
rests on such devices to a considerable extent, and Kant himself admits that
our language is replete with such indirect representations according to an analogy,
where the expression does not contain the actual schema for the concept but contains
merely a symbol for our reflection. Thus the words foundation (support, basis), to
depend (to be held from above), to flow (instead of to follow) from something,
substance (the support of accidents [Träger von Akzidenzen], as Locke puts it), and
countless others are not schematic but symbolic hypotyposes, expressing concepts
not by means of a direct intuition but only according to an analogy with one, that
is, a transfer of our reflection on an object of intuition to an entirely different con-
cept, to which perhaps no intuition can ever directly correspond.37
When Kant speaks in this context of an Übertragung, he means a form of trans-

lation or transference; because translatio is properly speaking the fundamental
principle of metaphor, he must accept, however reluctantly, the rhetorical and
even tropical quality of philosophical thought. Somewhat embarrassed, he must
even concede that this hitherto neglected aspect of philosophical thought deserves
much attention—although Kant himself is far from willing to extensively discuss
the relationship between language and knowledge, a project that might ulti-
mately threaten his notion of “pure reason.”38 Nevertheless, whereas Kant did
not want to draw the consequences from his obviously unintentional position
on the rhetorical nature of philosophical discourse, Nietzsche fully accepted the
latently rhetorical constitution of philosophy and thus the conclusion that phil-
osophical argument is necessarily marked by conceptual ambiguity and indeter-
minacy. Far from lamenting this as an unfortunate predicament, he adopted it
as a main premise underlying his discussion of the relationship between language
and the mind. Thus, both the rhetoricity of thought and the linguistic nature of
conceptual reasoning led him to investigate the internal logic with which we
attempt to understand and construct our natural and social environments.
Recent scholarship often stresses the importance of Nietzsche’s interest in
rhetoric and equally often argues that his rhetorical understanding of language
largely provides the foundation for his criticism of metaphysical commonplaces.
Surprisingly, however, we still lack a rigorous historical discussion of rhetoric’s
importance for his philosophical enterprise as a whole. On the one hand, Nietz-
sche clearly believed that, as Richard Rorty puts it, “pictures rather than propo-
sitions, metaphors rather than statements, . . . determine most of our philo-
sophical convictions.”39 It is in this respect that Nietzsche’s rhetorical considerations
can be seen as anticipating more recent discussions regarding the cognitive di-
mension of metaphorical discourse, beginning with the work of I. A. Richards,
Max Black, and Hans Blumenberg and still continuing within the philosophy
of language.40 On the other hand, his discussion of rhetoric, and especially met-
aphor, is not limited to communication and speech acts in the narrow senses of
those terms but has quite far-reaching consequences for his philosophical enter-
prise, at the heart of which lies an increasingly anthropological stance that fo-
cuses on the relationship between mental existence and organic life.
When Nietzsche began his theoretical discussion of rhetoric, he had already
delivered the historical part of his lectures on the history of eloquence in ancient
Greece in the winter semester of 1872–73, and he had already dealt with Plato
and Aristotle in his “Darstellung der antiken Rhetorik.” This groundwork let
him define rhetoric as a universal dimension of language. We might tradition-
ally assume, he argues, that whatever we describe as “rhetorical” consists above
all in a consciously artistic or artificial use of language, but in fact we should
regard this rhetoricity as a kind of unconscious driving force inherent to all
language and responsible for its dynamic development. There is no such thing
as an “unrhetorical natural language,” so that—as an artistic form of presenta-
tion—oratory merely continues and renders conscious the creative dimension
of language (“die Rhetorik eine Fortbildung der in der Sprache gelegenen Kunst-
mittel”). Nietzsche can thus stipulate that language and rhetoric are not con-
cerned with truth or the “essence of reality”; rather, they merely transfer a high-
ly subjective impression, or belief, from one person to another (KGW II/4, pp.
425–26).
This definition encapsulates much of Nietzsche’s understanding of the rhe-
torical enterprise, and as such, it gives him a starting point for a more rigorous
critique of language and philosophy. The central aspect of this passage is that
rhetoric does not represent an artificial use of language and that language is always
latently rhetorical.41 When we use language in any particular way, we must rely
on rhetorical features. This means that every speech act is in itself a rhetorical
phenomenon: we persuade, tell a story, accuse, try to move, aim to please, use
irony, advise, recommend, apply foreign expressions, or speak indirectly, and all
these actions reflect highly complex rhetorical strategies that are discussed in
most rhetoric textbooks from Aristotle to Quintilian and beyond. This ubiq-
uity does not imply that rhetoric gives us direct access to reality or that a rhe-
torical system solves all our problems with regard to language—such interpreta-
tions are generally too rigid and fail to acknowledge that language is not a closed
and stable system but exhibits an uncanny tendency to change and form a seem-
ingly infinite number of vernaculars. It simply means that the rhetorical organi-
zation of knowledge, perception, and language can be regarded as a quasi-an-
thropological phenomenon.42 This is an important point for Nietzsche. He claims
that we live in a rhetorical world, but the rhetorical nature of language implies
that it does not refer to reality in any direct and necessary way.
“Truth” and “Mammals”

Language’s incapacity to provide us immediate access to reality is an important
aspect of Nietzsche’s definition of rhetoric and leads us back to the philosophical
tradition. In sharp contrast to Nietzsche, Plato assumes a direct correspondence
between names and things, and Locke sees experience of the external world as
the origin of knowledge insofar as it provides more or less direct access to sen-
sible objects and a source for ideas and mental images.43 Hume is more cautious,
however, and accepts Locke’s argument only with regard to the so-called simple
ideas, whereas most of our ideas are complex, based on the abstract notions of
cause, effect, resemblance, and association, which themselves are not directly
based on reality.44 Kant, a perceptive student of Hume who read his Treatise of
Human Nature (1739–40) in Johann Georg Hamann’s partial translation, drops
the Lockean concept of simple versus complex ideas altogether and concludes
in his Kritik der reinen Vernunft that, despite the a priori nature of space and
time, we have no access to things-in-themselves.45 Empirically we deal with ap-
pearances that are merely “mental representations” or “intuitions” (Vorstellungen)
of things we cannot access directly.46 Kant does not refer to language, however,
but Hegel applies Kant’s argument to linguistic expressions and states in his
voluminous lectures on aesthetic theory, delivered in Heidelberg and Berlin
between 1817 and 1829, that words are merely signs for mental representations,
not signs of reality.47 Nietzsche, too, seems to argue along these Kantian or ide-
alist lines and seeks to refute the tradition of metaphysical realism from Plato to
Locke and beyond.48 But—and this is an important distinction—neither Locke
nor Hume and Kant take the problem of language seriously. For all three, lan-
guage presents no problem at all, at least as long as it is used properly. But when
is language used properly? When an expression makes sense? When the expres-
sion corresponds to reality? But what is “making sense” or “correspondence,”
and why should language make sense only if it corresponds to reality—what-
ever this means? Thus, Nietzsche argues that language cannot adequately repre-
sent reality or the external world in the sense of the Scholastic notion of an
adaequatio rei et intellectus, or correspondence between thing and mind. This
point is not without importance, for Nietzsche alludes to a philosophical tradi-
tion that stretches back to Avicenna and patristic thought and culminates in
Thomas Aquinas’s definition of truth as an adjustment between, and a making
equal of, the facts of the external world and the intellect.49 In the eighteenth
century Giambattista Vico reasserted this correspondence in a somewhat differ-
ent manner, as an adequate translation of facts and truths in words (“factum et
verum cum verbo convertuntur”). He restricts this correspondence, however, to
an ideal Adamitic language and does not claim that any such definition can ac-
count for a direct access to the external world.50 Similarly, Kant carefully avoids
speaking of a correspondence between language and reality, positing only a “cor-
respondence between knowledge and appearances” (“Übereinstimmung der
Erkenntnis mit ihrem Gegenstande”).51 As can be expected, the most radical
rejection of a correspondence among language, ideas, and reality can be found
in Nietzsche, who repeatedly claims that any such correspondence fails once we
take the inadequacy and indeterminacy of linguistic expression seriously.52
Nietzsche develops this view above all in “Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im aus-
sermoralischen Sinne,” which he based on notes from around 1872 and com-
pleted in 1873. It has often been claimed that, in this relatively short text, he
entertains an outright rejection of the correspondence theory of truth, that is,
the theory that language maps directly onto the world and thus provides mean-
ing.53 In its most general form, such a correspondence theory claims that the
truth of any given proposition, such as “Snow is white,” is in one way or an-
other directly connected to states of affairs—in this case, that snow is white.
Such an understanding of truth as correspondence was formulated by Plato and
Aristotle, so that Nietzsche was no doubt aware of it: true statements correlate
to facts, whereas false statements do not, and no statement can be simultane-
ously true and false.54
Initially such an approach does not seem to represent a particularly problem-
atic account of truth, and most common-sense arguments about the truth of a
given statement seem to be based on the idea of such a correspondence. Never-
theless, correspondence theories face a peculiar problem, for the proposition
“‘Snow is white’ is true if snow is white” resembles the logical proposition that
“P” is true only if P. There is no doubt that any such proposition is true, but it
tell us little about snow or P. Correspondence theories work only when truth
claims are embedded in a complex frame of reference, and more modern formu-
lations of this theory, such as those of J. L. Austin and Bertrand Russell, drop
the direct correspondence suggested by Plato and Aristotle.55 Be this as it may,
correspondence theories all centrally assume a correlation or congruence between
statements about facts and the facts themselves, that is, “P” is true if “P” ex-
presses a fact. In his essay on truth and falsehood, Nietzsche introduces a similar
example and notes that, once we have defined mammals, concluding that cam-
els are mammals tells us little about mammals or camels, apart from the obvious:
“If I create the definition of a mammal and then, having inspected a camel,
declare: Behold, a mammal, then a truth has certainly been brought to light, but
it is of limited value, by which I mean that it . . . contains not a single point
which could be said to be ‘true in itself ’ and in a generally valid sense” (TL
147).
With this argument Nietzsche seems to reject the Kantian distinction between
so-called analytic and synthetic judgments.56 A proposition such as “Snow is
white” would be an analytic judgment, because to determine its truth value we
need only understand the concept of snow, which already entails the concept of
being white. In contrast, a proposition such as “All roses are red” would have to
be regarded as a synthetic judgment, because we could ascertain its truth value
only by examining all roses, and any such information will be experiential and
a posteriori. There is, however, a serious problem with this clear-cut distinction,
for it is virtually impossible to decide whether statements such as “All camels are
mammals” are analytic or synthetic. Furthermore, analytic judgments do not
contain much information, and—to make matters worse—to say that analytic
judgments exist seems to be a synthetic judgment. In this respect, it is question-
able whether any such distinction makes sense, and Nietzsche seems to be im-
plicitly advancing this position in his essay on truth and falsehood:57 analytic
judgments are based on a correspondence, and if we wish to establish such a
notion of truth, we are in fact left with a tautology. We might even be willing to
accept that our notion of truth follows tautological principles, but at least we
seem to have an understanding of truth based on a correspondence between
statements and facts. Things are more complicated, however, for the idea of
correspondence has two more serious flaws, each of which clearly shows that, as
Bernard Williams recently noted, “there can be no interesting correspondence
theory.”58
First of all, any correspondence theory of truth is viciously circular. To say that
the proposition “All camels are mammals” is true, we must have already defined
what can be seen as a camel and a mammal, and we must have agreed as to the
meaning of “is true.” In other words, we need to have established certain con-
ceptual schemata, and a particular statement can be verified only if it adheres to
these schemata. Seen from this perspective, the truth of a statement results from
already established beliefs about the world at large. In an intriguing argument,
Hilary Putnam described the same problem with regard to the predicate calculus
format favored by analytical logicians.59 The aim of the predicate calculus format
is to verify whether propositions are valid, but to put propositions into this
format requires that we interpret them. We have to decide, for instance, wheth-
er they can be expressed in this format in the first place. Thus, Putnam points
out, predicate calculus cannot deliver any final conclusion about propositions
in isolation. The case is similar with regard to the correspondence theory, for to
argue that the truth of any given statement is based on its correspondence to
facts, or factual knowledge, we need to have already interpreted and defined our
notions of truth and correspondence. Thus, Nietzsche could point out in a
somewhat polemical fashion: “If someone hides something behind a bush, looks
for it in the same place and then finds it there, his seeking and finding is nothing
much to boast about; but this is exactly how things are as far as the seeking and
finding of ‘truth’ within the territory of reason is concerned” (TL 147).
Nietzsche was certainly not the first to note this circularity of truth statements,
however. In a posthumously published lecture series on logic that Kant delivered
several times from 1765 on, he discarded correspondence theories for similar
reasons:
Truth, it is said, consists in the correspondence [Übereinstimmung] of cognition with
its object. In consequence of this mere nominal explanation, my cognition, to count
as true, is supposed to correspond to its object. Now I can compare the object with
my cognition, however, only by cognizing it. Hence my cognition is supposed to
confirm itself, which is far short of being sufficient for truth. For since the object is
outside me, the cognition in me, all I can ever pass judgment on is whether my
cognition of the object corresponds with my cognition of the object.60
Correspondence, Kant continues, is not a sufficient precondition for truth, and

to avoid the circularity he identifies, he distinguishes between the material aspect
of statements—that is, their reference to reality—and their formal aspect.61 Facts,
as he notes in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, cannot have any general truth values
because truth is a formal condition of statements.62 Following Aristotle, he sug-
gests three criteria for truth: the principle of noncontradiction, the principle of
sufficient reason, and the principle of the excluded middle.63 Nietzsche later
rejected these criteria for the same reason he rejected the correspondence theory,
for he viewed them merely as representing an advanced notion of correspondence:
a statement would be true only if it corresponded to all three principles, and this
would again raise the question of whence these principles arise. As I will show
later, Nietzsche did not avoid this question and had much to say about the neces-
sity of logical thought and the way it is embedded in our physiological organiza-
tion. For now, we need only realize that, unlike Nietzsche, Kant found a tran-
scendental foundation for these formal principles: for him, they represent the
most general and formal laws of reason and as such are a priori conditions.64
Many interpreters have suggested that Nietzsche’s own criticism of truth must
comply with these logical laws even though he seems to reject them. If, how-
ever, we keep in mind that Nietzsche regarded any such formal conditions of
thought as resulting from rhetorical strategies that inhabit the language we use
and inform our conceptual framework, then we can see that he was unable to
accept Kant’s position: for Nietzsche, the criteria of truth can be found only in
language and in concepts, so that they must be a posteriori.
Let us now turn to the second problem of the correspondence theory—name-
ly, its tendency toward infinite regression. As already noted, a statement such as
“‘Snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white” requires a fair amount of
knowledge about snow, whiteness, and so on. The problem, however, is that such
statements can be formulated in terms of correspondence only if the first part
(“Snow is white”) belongs to a different language than does the second part (“is
true if and only if snow is white”). One solution to this problem has been sug-
gested by Alfred Tarski with regard to formalized languages: to verify propositions
such as “snow is white” and “all camels are mammals,” we translate their con-
stituent parts into a metalanguage within which we define what qualifies as snow,
camels, and so on.65 This implies, however, that the definitions within this meta-
language can be true if and only if they can be verified by another metalanguage,
which leads to an infinite regression. This result can be avoided in formalized
languages but probably not in natural languages, whose rules are not fixed but
tend to change over time and from one speech community to the next. This is
exactly why Nietzsche, in his essay on truth and falsehood, rejects any attempt
at formulating truth in terms of correspondence, for applying such a theory to
a natural language requires direct access to reality and, as it were, to things-in-
themselves free from linguistic mediation. Considering the plurality of languages,
he claims, it becomes obvious that there is no one language capable of formulat-
ing such a position: “A comparison of the different languages makes it obvious
that, where words are concerned, what matters is never truth, never the adequate
expression: otherwise there would not be so many languages. The ‘thing-in-it-
self ’ . . . is impossible for even the sculptor of language [Sprachbildner] to grasp,

and indeed not at all desirable” (TL 144). Perhaps, then, it is impossible to define
any notion of truth, for any attempt to do so will always be ideologically laden
in one way or another.66 Definitions of truth, in other words, will never be able
to fulfill their own premises.
Metaphysics and Persuasion

It is generally agreed that Nietzsche’s outright rejection of things-in-themselves,
which runs like a thread through most of his epistemological considerations, is
based on the notion that we can have no access to such objects. This access-based
understanding reads Nietzsche through Kantian eyes, however, and implies that
things-in-themselves exist even though we cannot reach them directly. In his
Kritik der reinen Vernunft Kant claims that intelligible experience depends on
appearances embedded in a network of spatial and temporal relations; things-
in-themselves give rise to these appearances, but we can never apprehend them
directly. Thus, even though we cannot have any direct knowledge of things-in-
themselves, Kant assumes their existence as quasi-transcendental points of refer-
ence or the origins of our experiences.67 Thinking along similar lines, Schopen-
hauer concludes that things-in-themselves must be regarded as the sources of the
appearances and representations that in turn provide the foundation of human
knowledge, and both Lange and Hartmann regard these noumenal things-in-
themselves as at least philosophically interesting.68 Working in contrast to these
positions, Nietzsche is more critical. Initially, in Die Geburt der Tragödie, he
argues for a dichotomy between things-in-themselves and the world of appear-
ances (BT 41), but even here he remarks that it is problematic to speak of things-
in-themselves, for we cannot have any clear idea of them (BT 87), and with
reference to Kant, he remarks laconically that we cannot count on his things-in-
themselves (KGW III/4, 19 [28]). Consequently he began to give up this di-
chotomy and ultimately rejected any notion of things-in-themselves as a kind
of metaphysical mythology, for if there are no things-in-themselves, then the
whole dichotomy between “reality as it truly is” and “reality as it appears to be”
makes no sense.69 Both notions thus become untenable (KGW VII/3, 40 [53]
and KGW VIII/1, 2 [77]).
Nietzsche thus dropped metaphysical realism, or what Kenneth Burke once
termed “naive verbal realism,”70 and anticipated the pragmatic point of view that
linguistic expressions are explicable only by other linguistic expressions—a view
that was already central to Leibniz’s discussion of human understanding and that
would be revived a century later by both American pragmatism and French
poststructuralism.71 Our beliefs are always influenced and modified by the con-
ceptual apparatus we use (KGW III/4, 23 [43]), and when we speak of “things”
and refer to “reality,” we tend to confuse them with the concepts we use—or to
put it in Nietzsche’s words, we confuse the idea of pencils with pencils themselves
(KGW III/4, 19 [242]). But what happens if language cannot provide an im-
mediate access to reality? Language might not represent anything real or teach
us about anything beyond itself, but it nevertheless persuades; as Nietzsche notes
in his earlier lectures on rhetoric, language seeks to transfer a subjective opinion
(KGW II/4, pp. 425–26). This is an important point in Nietzsche’s understand-
ing of rhetoric, and it requires clarification.
Nietzsche’s understanding of rhetoric combines the practical dimension of
persuasion with the epistemological dimension of tropes and figures. That lan-
guage is rhetoric means not only that it depends on tropes but also that it is, at
least in most cases, a form of persuasion. The importance of rhetorical persuasion
is often underestimated. Even though some commentators have alluded to the
connection between rhetoric and persuasion, most authors side with Paul de
Man’s assumption that Nietzsche moved the study of rhetoric away from its
strategies of persuasion and toward a theory of tropes.72 Figures and tropes cer-
tainly do play a prominent role in Nietzsche’s understanding of rhetoric, but
they do not precede the concept of persuasion. Nietzsche’s procedure in “Darstel-
lung der antiken Rhetoric” is quite systematic. It begins with historical definitions
of rhetoric and moves on to the question of persuasion before examining any
aesthetic and epistemological implications of figurative language. Seen from this
perspective, the assumption of a predominance of tropes and figures in Nietz-
sche’s treatment of rhetoric appears to have resulted from an overestimation of
Gerber’s influence. Gerber, however, was concerned not with rhetorical eloquence
or oratory but, as he says, with the “investigation of language as a form of art”
(Betrachtung der Sprache als Kunst).73 For Nietzsche, the power of rhetoric derives
from rhetoric’s not only aesthetic but also practical, or even anthropological,
nature.
Historically speaking, the impact of rhetoric on ancient Greek culture was
only partly based on the beauty of poetic expressions in oratory and its repre-
sentatives from Gorgias to Lysias, for Greek eloquence constituted political
power (KGW II/4, p. 367), and in this respect the practical effectiveness of rhe-
torical persuasion played an essential role. Nietzsche exemplifies this point with
reference to the clash between Roman law and Greek oratory in the second
century b.c.: “The event which opened Rome to the influence of Greek eloquence
was the diplomatic mission of the Athenians in 155 b.c. in order to reduce finan-
cial reparations for the destruction of Oropos. . . . The effect was so enormous
that Cato recommended the expulsion of the mission” (KGW II/4, p. 518). This
anecdote from Nietzsche’s short “Abriß der Geschichte der Beredsamkeit” is an
amusing example of the power of rhetoric. Rome certainly did not want to be
persuaded to reduce any monetary payments it was due, but the eloquent per-
suasiveness of the Greek delegation refuted the arguments of the Roman Senate
to such an extent that the only solution seemed to be to expel the delegation.
The same rhetorical outwitting of judicial authorities can be observed in Nietz-
sche’s account of the notoriously famous quarrel between the Sicilian rhetorician
Corax and his pupil Tisias (KGW II/4, p. 369).74 Tisias had a contract with his
master, Corax. This contract stated that Corax would receive payment for Tisias’s
rhetorical education only if Tisias won his first court case. After he had finished
his training, Tisias refused to pay, and Corax consequently sued him. The ensu-
ing court case became a rhetorical worst-case scenario of inconclusive logical
arguments, for Corax’s presents a classic dilemma according to the logical struc-
ture of the so-called modus ponens: either p or not-p; if p, then r; if not-p, then
r; therefore r. The same counts, mutatis mutandis, for Tisias’s argument. Both
arguments are logically valid, which violates the principle of noncontradiction
and shows the pitfalls of Aristotle’s emphasis on the dialectical side of rhetoric.75
That p and not-p as well as r and not-r are valid at the same time is based, as
Jean-François Lyotard has shown, on the strange phenomenon that the arguments
refer not to each other but only to themselves.76 Corax contends that if he wins
the case, he should receive his payment because of the court’s decision; if he
loses, he should still receive the payment, this time because of the contract.
Similarly, Tisias argues that if he wins the case, he need not pay because of the
court’s decision; if he loses, he still need not pay, this time because of the contract.
The question is not only whether Corax is right and Tisias is wrong but also
whether the contract has more legal authority than the court. Either argument
excludes the other, and the confused and baffled judges consequently dismissed
the whole case.
The Greek delegation in Rome and the quarrel between Corax and Tisias are
extreme cases of rhetorical efficiency that led to radical reactions. Both cases,
however, also demonstrate that persuasion plays a prominent role with regard to
the cultural force of rhetoric, and Nietzsche’s initial account of the classic defini-
tion of rhetoric in “Darstellung der antiken Rhetoric” stresses the goal of the
orator’s performance as making the audience believe in his or her set of arguments
(KGW II/4, p. 417). With this assertion he follows Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero,
on the one hand, and his more traditional secondary sources, Spengel and Volk-
mann, on the other: rhetoric is the art of being right (KGW II/4, p. 420).77
Nietzsche’s understanding of persuasion, however, is based not exclusively on
the common-sense version of persuading somebody to do something but also

on the notion of transferring a belief from one person to another. These defini-
tions may sound similar, but they are fundamentally different. Whereas persua-
sion in the ordinary sense is a particular speech act pursued in specific circum-
stances, persuasion in the sense of transferring an opinion, or doxa (KGW II/4,
pp. 418 and 426), is common to most speech acts. Teaching, promising, advising,
refuting, accusing, explaining, narrating, instructing, and lying are all forms of
transferring an opinion, a belief, or an assumption from one person to another.
It is difficult, however, to regard persuading in the ordinary sense as lying, prom-
ising, teaching, and so forth. This understanding of persuasion as transference
lets Nietzsche explain how persuasion in the ordinary sense need not always be
a part of rhetoric. Epideictic rhetoric, for instance, aims not at persuading but
at entertaining an audience, and some of the best and most famous speeches do
not have much of a persuasive element (KGW II/4, p. 417). Thus, rhetoric can-
not be defined as persuasion in the narrow sense of the word. The concept of
persuasion as transference, however, is based on the broader notion of language
as mediating beliefs, opinions, and knowledge (KGW II/4, p. 426).
Nietzsche took his concept of persuasion not from classical sources but, sur-
prisingly, from Schopenhauer. In the second volume of Die Welt als Wille und
Vorstellung, Schopenhauer remarks: “Eloquence is the faculty of stirring up in
others our view of a thing, or our opinions regarding it, of kindling in them our
feeling about it, and thus of putting them in sympathy with us; and all this by
our conducting the stream of our ideas into their heads by means of words, with
such force that this stream diverts their own thoughts from the course already
taken, and carries them away with it along its own course.”78 Nietzsche quotes
some of this passage in “Darstellung der antiken Rhetorik” (KGW II/4, p. 416),
and it becomes clear that his concept of rhetorical persuasion is based not on the
practical notion of convincing but on the more philosophical notion of construct-
ing and communicating beliefs by means of language or transference.
Transference itself is a key concept in Nietzsche’s understanding of rhetoric.
It is not limited to his discussion of rhetorical persuasivity but represents a cru-
cial ingredient of his reflections on rhetoric in general. Transference as Übertra-
gung is repeatedly discussed in his notes of 1872–73 and has at least three differ-
ent sources: first, it directly translates the Greek metaphora (meta + pherein) or
the Latin equivalent translatio; second, it bears traces of the previously cited
passage in which Schopenhauer defines the aim of eloquence as a transference
of belief and opinion; and third, it echoes Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who
assumed that our awareness of external reality is based solely on such a transfer-
ence. The first definition of transference, as metaphora, will be discussed later in
the context of Nietzsche’s physiological account of perception, but Lichtenberg’s

idea deserves some attention.
The concept of transference as a form of Übertragung is indebted to Nietzsche’s
relatively early reception of Lichtenberg’s aphorisms, or Sudelbücher, written
between 1765 and 1799 and first published in 1801. Martin Stingelin has shown
that Lichtenberg played a major role for the early Nietzsche:79 he is first men-
tioned in an April 1867 letter to Carl von Gersdorff (KGB I/2, p. 209) and is
continuously present in Nietzsche’s works and notebooks between 1873 and 1878.
In an autobiographical note written in 1901, Louis Kelterborn, one of the few
students who attended Nietzsche’s lectures on rhetoric, remarks that Nietzsche
often referred to Lichtenberg as one of his favorite German authors.80 In the first
volume of Lichtenberg’s Vermischte Schriften (1867 ed.), which was part of Nietz-
sche’s personal library and shows many signs of intensive reading, from dog-eared
pages to underlined paragraphs, Lichtenberg assumes that our use of language
is ubiquitously marked by “anthropomorphisms” in the wider sense of the term.81
For Lichtenberg, then, language is to some extent a transference of subjective
perceptions or beliefs to other people and even things. Hence, in “Darstellung
der antiken Rhetorik” Nietzsche links Schopenhauer’s concept of Übertragung
to Lichtenberg’s with regard to the persuasive power inherent in language and
concludes that rhetorical persuasion should be regarded primarily as a transfer-
ence of belief. Nietzsche’s repeated assertion that all language is latently rhe-
torical thus refers to both the persuasive and the tropical properties of language.
It is now time to consider some of the philosophical implications of this under-
standing of figurative language.
Necessary Fictions in a Human World

Nietzsche’s rhetorical thought led him to rethink central epistemological notions,
such as truth, reality, and things-in-themselves. Even though many of Nietzsche’s
more radical claims might be debatable, they have considerable implications for
his beliefs about the ways we gain knowledge about our natural and cultural
environments. Within this context the notion of anthropomorphism, which had
already featured prominently in Lichtenberg’s work, grew increasingly important.
For example, during the 1870s Nietzsche often claimed that our understanding
of reality is essentially based on the principle of anthropomorphism, but to reach
this conclusion, he had to take several steps that we must examine quite care-
fully. Many commentators dealing with his early reflections on language and
thought, especially Ernst Behler and J. Hillis Miller, have stressed the importance
of anthropomorphism for Nietzsche’s epistemological framework, but they have
failed to show how this concept relates to his equally important rhetorical mod-
el of mental processes.82 Indeed, other commentators have pointed out that, seen
from a philosophical perspective, his concept of anthropomorphism is fairly
inconclusive and that it does not really contribute to any understanding of the
way we relate to the world at large.83 But once again things are not quite as
simple as that, for Nietzsche’s conception of anthropomorphism in fact reiterates
a Kantian line of argument.
First of all, Nietzsche assumes perception to provide the basis for any conscious
or unconscious mental activity. This does not mean, however, that mental activ-
ity depends on the existence of things, let alone the existence of some objective
reality. Perception cannot entail a realist ontology, for every statement about
reality, be it about trees, propositions, or other people’s minds, already presup-
poses the existence of something that is not us and that we regard as external
reality. To say that things exist is not to say much at all but merely to state the
obvious, and Nietzsche nowhere denies that things exist. What he denies is the
idea that such things are things-in-themselves, as well as the claim that some
things exist for us independently of our mental activity:84 the existence of things
is not the result of some unmediated perception of facts but already the product
of interpretation and therefore of mental activity. The statement that facts exist
or obtain cannot itself be a factual proposition but is already a metaphorical
fabrication of the mind that presupposes the perception and construction of
similarities and differences: if we conclude that a tree stands in front of us, we
have already differentiated this tree from other kinds of things, such as horses,
flowers, books, and houses. Furthermore, we have located the tree in a spatial
environment (e.g., in front of us, not to the side or to the back); we have some
grasp of shape, color, and distance; and we realize that this tree is compatible
with some sort of implicit knowledge we have about trees in general, such as the
function of chlorophyll or the oxygen cycle. Obviously, none of this implies that
things do not exist; it merely suggests that “existence,” “fact,” “reality,” or “being
there” are themselves concepts that we use to describe what we perceive as real
or imaginary. If Nietzsche were to maintain that nothing exists at all, his whole
argument would be pointless, and he would not need to stress the importance
of perception for mental activity.
Although Nietzsche does not present this argument as explicitly as has been
done here, it is a fundamental presupposition for his understanding of the mind.
With his insistence that perception starts with nerve stimulation and not with
things—a claim we can find in his essay on truth and falsehood as well as in his
lectures on rhetoric (TL 144; KGW II/4, p. 426)—he is able to reject most argu-
ments for a realist ontology. He goes one step further, however, for perception
is not a one-way process. Any kind of mental activity refers back to nerve stim-
uli, so that we are confronted with a kind of feedback loop: nerve stimulations
generate judgments and beliefs, but we deal with nerve stimuli and their transla-
tion into other forms of mental activity in ways dependent on our conscious or
unconscious beliefs. For Nietzsche, mental activity is therefore based on the
manner in which we relate our beliefs, which are produced by nerve stimulation,
to reality as we perceive it, which is in turn generated by nerve stimulations.
Thus, mental activity represents a twofold relation: between stimulations and
beliefs and between beliefs and further stimulation. What is at stake here is not
only a rhetorical issue but a more fundamental physiological problem that had
a lasting impact on Nietzsche’s philosophical project. Around 1872, however,
Nietzsche still hesitated to conceive of this problem in physiological terms, and
in “Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne” he speaks of “an-
thropomorphism,” which he portrays as the sum of our relations to the world
as we perceive it (TL 146). Surprisingly, this is an essentially Kantian conception,
for Kant notes quite explicitly that what we regard as the world is nothing but
the sum of the manifold appearances surrounding us.85 This Kantian perspective
is a crucial aspect of Nietzsche’s attempt to formulate the relationship between
intellectual processes and external reality. Nietzsche took this argument quite
seriously, especially in the context of his early reflections on language and rheto-
ric from the mid-1870s, where he repeatedly states that our interaction with the
world should be understood as anthropomorphic.86
Rhetorically speaking, anthropomorphism is the use of descriptors we nor-
mally restrict to those we regard as human to describe something that does not
qualify as human. Examples of this mode of speech include expressions such as
“The table cries,” “The rain is sad,” or “The cat speaks.” Language is full of such
anthropomorphisms, and it is virtually impossible not to use them. Opening
statements such as “This argument shows that X” qualify as anthropomorphisms
insofar as, strictly speaking, arguments cannot show anything, for only people
use arguments to show something.
In the context of Nietzsche’s reflections on rhetoric and the rhetorical consti-
tution of perception, anthropomorphism is a form of metaphor, for either human
features are transferred to something nonhuman (e.g., things and abstractions),
or something nonhuman is translated into human terms. Thus, an anthropo-
morphism expresses a relation between us and our environment; it is the trope
according to which it is possible to describe our mental assimilation of external
reality:
As the astrologer studies the stars in the service of human beings and in relation to
humanity’s happiness and suffering, . . . a scientist [Forscher] regards the whole world
as linked to humankind, as the infinitely refracted echo of an original sound, that

of humanity, and as the multiple copy of a single, original image, that of humanity.
His procedure is: to measure all things against man, and in doing so he takes as his
point of departure the erroneous belief that he has these things directly before him,
as pure objects. (TL 148)
The issue here is not that our knowledge of the world is anthropomorphic but
that we tend to forget the anthropomorphic constitution of our knowledge. For
Nietzsche, anthropomorphism is not something wholly negative—after all, it is
the only possible way in which we can relate to our environment. Rather, a
problem arises only if we take anthropomorphisms for the real thing, if we
overgeneralize and conclude that nature does adhere to a human model or that
we have a direct access to natural laws.
Nietzsche’s discussion of anthropomorphism highlights an intriguing problem
already present in eighteenth-century thought. For instance, in the context of
natural history biological evolution is described predominately in terms of hu-
man lifespan development, but this procedure culminated in an attempt to
discover the soul of animals and plants and led to the widespread assumption
that the world is teleologically organized according to formative drives and the
underlying principles of living organisms.87 The philosophical relevance of an-
thropomorphism becomes especially evident in Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft,
where, in the first version of his introduction, Kant postulates a “purposiveness
of nature” (Zweckmäßigkeit der Natur). Taking this idea at face value leads to
rather grotesque speculations, for instance, that snow exists only so that people
can use sleds—although this is hardly what Kant had in mind. The purposiveness
of nature, he notes explicitly, should be regarded not as an attribute of nature
but as something attributed to nature by human reason; we assume such a pur-
posiveness to explain the evolution of nature, which seems to us somehow orga-
nized—or which makes more sense to us when understood as organized. The
faculty of judgment presumes the purposive character of nature and of natural
laws, for human beings always judge their own actions according to cause, effect,
intent, and purpose.88 To argue for a purposiveness of nature is to translate or
transfer the structure of our own actions onto nature as a whole, or as Kant notes,
“if we wish to investigate the organized products of nature by continued obser-
vation, we find it completely unavoidable to project onto nature the concept of
an intention, so that even for our empirical use of reason this concept is an ab-
solutely necessary maxim.”89 For Kant, purposiveness is an auxiliary construction
that enables us to discover organizational structures and laws in nature according
to the a priori principles of reason. In other words, nature is not purposive as
such, but we regard it in terms that seem to suggest a teleological constitution.
Kant bases his understanding of nature’s purposiveness on arguments he de-

veloped several years earlier in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, where he asks
whether it is possible to assume a transcendental point of reference for all knowl-
edge and experience in analogy to the realm of human experience. He replies
that such a transcendental point of reference is possible only if it remains a
quasi-hypothetical idea, that is, a regulative fiction that orders the procedures of
human understanding. What Kant is discussing, although he avoids any such
theological terminology, is the existence of God. The idea of God, which ulti-
mately provides the unity of reason and nature, is above all an idea within the
human mind, and as such, it is inevitably marked by “certain anthropomor-
phisms.”90 The purposiveness of nature as portrayed in the Kritik der Urteilskraft
is based on similar principles, and it nicely exemplifies what Nietzsche would
later term “anthropomorphism.” If we forget that “purpose” is a human concept
and not an inherent property of nature, then, Kant notes, we are faced with
theological speculation and not with knowledge.91
The principle underlying Kant’s model of apperception is based on a leap from
the perception of manifold appearances to their synthesis in the understanding,
the so-called analogies of experience, which he outlines in the Kritik der reinen
Vernunft: “An analogy of experience will be only a rule in accordance with which
unity of experience is to arise from perceptions . . . , and as a principle it will not
be valid of the objects (of the appearances) constitutively but merely regulatively.”92
The analogies of experience safeguard the syntheses of mental representations
and of the understanding in the face of manifold appearances marked by a fun-
damental heterogeneity, and on a much less philosophically sophisticated level
with a stronger anthropological perspective, this is also the case with regard to
Nietzsche’s concept of anthropomorphism. In fact, Kant’s hidden influence on
Nietzsche’s formulation of this concept should not be surprising, for in a series
of notes composed in the winter of 1867–68 Nietzsche discusses Kant’s ideas
about the purposiveness and teleology of nature in some detail. Nietzsche’s con-
clusion, that teleology is a way in which we seek to explain nature according to
human actions (KGW I/4, 62 [4, 15, 24]), is mirrored in his later understanding
of anthropomorphism. As a special case of metaphor, anthropomorphism regu-
lates the experience of the external world by providing a synthesis of otherwise
unrelated sensory impressions and mental representations.
There is, however, a fundamental difference between Kant and Nietzsche. Kant
argues that any such analogical synthesis is ultimately based on the a priori
principles of space and time, whereas Nietzsche construes perception and the
concepts of space and time as merely the result of, first, physiological processes
translating stimuli into nervous processes and mental images and, second, met-
aphorical processes combining different mental representations according to

their resemblance or difference. For Nietzsche, then, were we to forget that our
knowledge about anything is based on such processes of translation, we would
establish a mythological understanding of our environment in which trees and
apples have human qualities and in which concepts are a product of nature, not
of mental activity. This is why he must view Kant’s a priori principles with some
suspicion and why he tends to reject Kant’s teleological ideas.93
Further, Nietzsche must argue that anthropomorphic expressions predominate
in language because we perceive reality not as such but only by relating it to
ourselves and to our mental activity, stimuli, judgments, and beliefs. Lichtenberg
and Goethe, to whom Nietzsche always referred with much admiration, had
already noted the ubiquity of this phenomenon, and Nietzsche’s own account is
certainly indebted to their observations.94 When he repeatedly points out that
our conceptualization of the world follows the principles of anthropomorphism,
this merely suggests that everything we regard as reality is related to ourselves,
and—as he notes in 1872–73—that our interaction with the world is based on
the relativity of this knowledge (KGW III/4, 19 [37]).
Interestingly, Nietzsche dropped the notion of anthropomorphism sometime
during the mid-1870s—in part because he had already established metaphor as
the master trope par excellence, and anthropomorphism is simply a form of
metaphor. Hence, he could discard anthropomorphism and claim that our knowl-
edge of the world is a construction of metaphors, which still follows the model
of anthropomorphism. This becomes especially obvious in a central passage of
Jenseits von Gut und Böse, where he seeks to define the epistemological status of
the physical sciences as a master discourse concerned with the laws of nature. It
becomes increasingly clear, he suggests, that physics is unable to explain nature,
since it is above all an interpretive process projecting onto nature certain prin-
ciples—cause, effect, space, time, force, and so on—that originate first of all with
mental processes: “Now it is perhaps beginning to dawn on maybe five or six
brains that physics too is merely an interpretation and arrangement of the world
(according to ourselves! if I may say so) and not an explanation of the world”
(BGE 14). The epistemological effects of metaphor—that is, the way in which
our knowledge about the world is based on the rhetoricity of language—is per-
haps more universal than the “logic of anthropomorphism” Nietzsche described
in the early 1870s. Metaphor thus moves increasingly to the center of his philo-
sophical enterprise.
3
What Is a Trope?
The Discourse of Metaphor and
the Language of the Body
Nietzsche’s views on metaphor and figurative language continue to be somewhat

controversial, especially with regard to their implications for philosophical dis-
course. From I. A. Richards’s Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936) and Max Black’s Mod-
els and Metaphors (1962) to Donald Davidson’s seminal essay “What Metaphors
Mean” (1984) and beyond, the philosophical debate about metaphors and met-
aphoricity has occasionally referred back to Nietzsche’s arguments, but the im-
plications of his approach have not always been taken seriously—at least partly
because his position is far from clear. At first sight, it seems that Nietzsche
wanted to give up any real distinction between figurative and literal language,
so that language, as well as the production of knowledge and the interpretation
of the human environment, is always somehow metaphorical. Such a position,
many commentators have argued, is inevitably self-contradictory:1 claiming that
everything is metaphorical means that nothing is metaphorical, for the notion
of metaphor makes sense only in opposition to a commonly accepted literality.
If there is no literal language, the distinction between literality and metaphoric-
ity breaks down, and so does the concept of metaphor. Nonetheless, other com-
mentators more enthusiastic of Nietzsche’s approach, such as Paul de Man and
J. Hillis Miller, have noted in a deconstructive stance that figurative language is
the main linguistic paradigm:2 Nietzsche’s emphasis on the basic rhetoricity of
all discourse not only aims to subvert the supposedly clear-cut distinction between
oratio recta and oratio obliqua but also shows that the assumption of literality is
a philosophically dangerous and misleading position. If Nietzsche had simply
declared that everything is metaphorical, his approach would certainly be non-
sensical, but his emphasis on the metaphorical character of language and knowl-
edge entails something rather more complex. The main question is whether we
can take his arguments at face value or whether there is a complex intellectual
background that we need to consider in more detail.
Beyond this issue of self-contradiction, however, exclusively philosophical
discussions of Nietzsche’s rhetorical thought have not always been successful or
convincing because they have tended to focus on the figurative dimension of
language and its epistemological effects. This is perhaps especially the case for
those who approach Nietzsche from an aesthetic perspective or regard him as a
poststructuralist avant la lettre. Doing so is possible, however, only if we detach
his reflections on language and rhetoric from other interests that equally shaped
his philosophical enterprise, as well as from the wider intellectual environment
within which they emerged. Inasmuch as his discussion of language was from
the beginning inextricably linked to the problems of consciousness and percep-
tion, these reflections are also connected to a particular notion of the body.
Metaphor is thus grounded in both rhetoric and physiology; it concerns not only
language but also the body. Before we can reach this conclusion, however, we
need to traverse some contested territory and attempt to situate Nietzsche’s
emphasis on the primacy of metaphor in its intellectual context, for his account
of metaphor is more complicated than is generally assumed.
The Primacy of Metaphor

Nietzsche’s own style is highly metaphorical, full of all kinds of figures and tropes
used to highlight particular arguments or explain particular ideas.3 Throughout
his writings Nietzsche employs a wide range of images from an equally wide
range of fields—from architecture, music, and biology to physics, geology, ar-
chaeology, and even the physiology of the human gastric system. For instance,
he speaks of historical developments as geological fault lines, compares philo-
sophical concepts to the different plants of a specific continent, and likens mo-
rality to hieroglyphic (HA II:i.223; BGE 20; GM, preface, p. 7). His ubiquitous
use of figurative language certainly makes his writings far more colorful than
those of his philosophical contemporaries, and it is not surprising that his own
models are Pindar, Sallust, Horace, La Rochefoucauld, and Lichtenberg. Already
in his early lecture series “Encyclopaedie der klassischen Philologie,” which he
delivered at the University of Basel in the summer of 1871, he emphasized the
importance of style (KGW II/3, p. 394), and—as has often been noted—he
increasingly regarded style as a representation of thought, that is, as an expression
of a particular way of thinking, of approaching philosophical problems.4
Nietzsche used these stylistic features, however, less to narcissistically indulge
in rhetorical ornament than to recognize his idea that language is based on a
What Is a Trope ? 63
fundamental metaphoricity with a historical dimension. As such, his emphatic

interest in the metaphorical character of philosophical discourse must be related
to a rather complex intellectual background that leads us into eighteenth-cen-
tury discussions regarding the origin and the evolution of language. Both Con-
dillac and Rousseau, for instance, stressed that early stages of linguistic develop-
ment, especially with regard to archaic societies, are marked by highly poetic and
figurative patterns representing a sensual and almost onomatopoetic form of
linguistic expression—a theory that Thomas Blackwell applied to Homeric
Greece and that Giambattista Vico regarded in his Scienza Nuova (1725) as the
anthropological foundation for the evolution of human reasoning.5
As is shown by his 1869–70 lectures on Latin grammar, which were preceded
by two general historical sections on the origin and the comparison of lan-
guages, Nietzsche was quite aware of this particular background (KGW II/2, pp.
186–87), and two of his sources may have been Theodor Benfey’s Geschichte der
Sprachwissenschaft (1869) and Friedrich August Wolf ’s posthumously published
Vorlesungen über die Alterthumswissenschaft (1831–39), which refer to these discus-
sions in some detail.6 A particularly interesting example of these eighteenth-
century debates can be found in the first version of Johann Gottfried Herder’s
collection of fragments Über die neuere deutsche Literatur (1767). Like any other
organism, Herder claims, language is subject to a certain lifespan development:
the first stage, in which language is an emotive expression, is followed by a more
poetic and musical second stage; the third stage is the age of prose, an ordered
and coherently structured language conveying an equally ordered way of think-
ing, whereas the fourth stage is the philosophical culmination of language, when
it closely follows a logical set of rules.7 Although there is no evidence that Nietz-
sche read Herder’s fragments in any detail, we are safe in assuming that he was
fully aware of the general trends in the eighteenth-century discussion. Further-
more, the metaphor of lifespan development used to describe language’s move-
ment from a highly figurative to a highly logical state influenced some of the
debates within the emerging fields of comparative and historical linguistics in
the nineteenth century, and Nietzsche was quite familiar with this background,
for instance, through the work of Benfey, Schleicher, and Steinthal. One of the
main debates in this context focused once again on the origin of language, for
new results in the field of Indo-European linguistics and the search for an Indo-
European protolanguage, coupled with models derived from psychology and the
life sciences, had yielded much information on the early stages of certain lan-
guages, such as Greek, Basque, and Sanskrit.8 On 8 November 1866, for instance,
Wilhelm Wackernagel, professor of German philology at the University of Basel,
delivered a lecture entitled “Über den Ursprung und die Entwicklung der
Sprache” in honor of Franz Bopp, one of the founders of comparative linguistics.

The printed version of this lecture appeared in 1872, when Nietzsche was already
a professor of classical scholarship at the same university, and although Wacker-
nagel died in 1869, Nietzsche read his Geschichte der deutschen Literatur (1848–55)
as well as his collection of lectures entitled Poetik, Rhetorik und Stilistik (1873),
so we can assume that he knew Wackernagel’s lecture on the origin of language
as well. In that lecture Wackernagel largely adopts Herder’s model, which had
become something of a commonplace in nineteenth-century linguistic thought,
and he argues that the lifespan of language leads from a childlike and adolescent
stage dominated by poetic figures of speech to a more mature stage that renders
language increasingly abstract and finally to an old stage that is fully dominated
by abstract grammatical and logical forms.
Wackernagel viewed language as developing continually according to this
organic model, but he also envisaged a negative outcome to this progression,
for at the final stage, he contends, all language is marked by abstraction and
loses its sensual origin. The organic development of language thus includes its
degeneration.9 The important point, however, is not so much the late decay of
language as the presumed fact that early (i.e., archaic and ancient) languages
consist almost exclusively of metaphorical and tropical patterns. Nietzsche stands
firmly in this tradition when he speaks of language as an Urgedicht (KGW V/2,
14 [8]), and he recognized a historical dimension to the metaphoricity of language
that most commentators had overlooked: metaphor marks language not just as
we use it today, for even its origins must be understood in terms of figuration.
To put it in more “scientific” terms, metaphor operates not just synchronically
but also diachronically.10 In contrast to Rousseau and Wackernagel, but in ac-
cordance with Vico and Herder, Nietzsche implicitly suggests that the figurative
quality present in the early stages of linguistic development has not been lost
completely, and although most aspects of the eighteenth-century debate were
marked by the belief that one can observe a shift from mythos to logos in the
history of thought and language, Nietzsche had to contend that myth, and
therefore metaphor, remained prominent paradigms of conceptual thought. As
should be clear, this does not stray far from the positions of both Vico and
Herder, who, approaching the subject from somewhat different perspectives,
emphasized the undeniable continued presence of a mythopoetic consciousness
marked by figurative concepts.11 The languages of all nations and cultures, Vico
points out, are dominated by metaphorical projections that seek to transfer
human qualities to insensate objects and that are based on mental images as the
synthetic combinations of different sensory impressions and perceptions.12 But
this also means that the metaphoricity of language leads us back in time: it is a
remnant of things past, and in its dynamics we might even be able to discern
the historical development of conceptual thought. This claim constitutes a cen-
tral issue for Nietzsche’s historical discussion of the relationship between language
and thought.
Viewed against the complex intellectual background involved, Nietzsche’s
insistence on the ubiquitous figurative character of language takes on a new and
surprising quality. When Nietzsche notes in “Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im aus-
sermoralischen Sinne” that thought and knowledge develop on the basis of
metaphors (TL 150), he refers not only to the dependence our beliefs and ideas
about the world have on the essentially rhetorical nature of our language but
also to a historical dimension: figurative speech and the rhetorical basis of knowl-
edge are prior to anything we would regard as conceptual or literal.13 This becomes
especially clear in a key passage from his lecture notes “Darstellung der antiken
Rhetorik,” when he somewhat unexpectedly quotes from Jean Paul’s Vorschule
der Aesthetik (1804), which once again refers to the debates of the eighteenth
century: “In the same way in which writing with images preceded writing with
letters, metaphor, inasmuch as it refers to relations and not to things, is the
earlier diction [so war im Sprechen die Metapher, insofern sie Verhältnisse und nicht
Gegenstände bezeichnet, das frühere Wort], which faded only gradually into a lit-
eral expression. . . . With regard to mental relations [in Rücksicht geistiger Bezie-
hungen] every language is a dictionary of faded metaphors.”14 Language, Jean
Paul suggests, consists almost entirely of metaphors, and this fundamental met-
aphoricity is historically prior to any literal form of language. By this token, even
our common understanding of literal language, oratio recta or eigentlicher Aus-
druck, is of metaphorical origin. The English word literal, for instance, comes
from Latin littera, which means “letter,” “report,” “writing,” “science,” and even
“education,” and when we take a statement literally, we seek to follow the letters
and words as if they were written down and petrified. Literality is a form of
radical empiricism with regard to meaning in language. The Latin adjective
recta means “straight” in the sense of direction (a via recta is a straight road), but
to call something straight is also to imply that it does not deviate from some
form of standard or normative canon. In turn, the Greek term kanon originally
referred to a rod, line, or ruler, all tools used by masons and carpenters as stan-
dards for measurement; the Greek word itself comes from Sumeric gin, denoting
a particularly straight form of reed. A similar metaphorical transformation can
be observed with regard to the German words eigentlich and Ausdruck, for the
former means “belonging to,” while the latter refers to the result of pressing
something out of something else, an “ex-pression.”
Although our daily use of these and other words seduces us into believing that
they are fairly simple concepts whose meanings we can grasp in most cases, they
are in fact conventional, frozen, or dead metaphors.15 In his Vorlesungen über die
Ästhetik (1835–38) Hegel describes such instances as metaphors to which we have
become accustomed and that no longer demand our precise attention or any
imaginative leap from one meaning to another:
In the first place, every language already contains a mass of metaphors. They arise
from the fact that a word which originally signifies only something sensuous is car-
ried over into the spiritual sphere. . . . But gradually the metaphorical element in
the use of such a word disappears and by custom the word changes from a meta-
phorical to a literal expression, because, owing to readiness to grasp in the image
only the meaning, image and meaning are no longer distinguished and the image
directly affords only the abstract meaning itself instead of a concrete picture.16
The more we are used to certain terms as integral parts of our language, the more
we tend to forget that these terms are metaphorical and employed to convey
particular images to the mind. Increasing historical distance turns metaphoric-
ity into putative literality, and the figurative dimension of a particular word is
widely replaced by its abstract meaning. Hegel exemplifies this with regard to
the German word begreifen, which no longer denotes physically grasping at
something but means “to comprehend.”17
In strictly rhetorical terms such a conventionalized metaphor would have to
be counted as catachresis. Quintilian, for instance, remarks that catachresis should
be regarded essentially as an abuse (abusio), or deformation, of language inasmuch
as we use it when we do not have the right word to describe something and
therefore use a different word that describes something similar. Although cata-
chresis is a tropical form, it can easily be integrated into our conventional way
of speaking.18 At the same time, it is also possible to define many catachreses as
dead and conventionalized metaphors that we view as literal because we have
forgotten their figurative origins, and what we traditionally regard as a literal
expression is merely, as Nietzsche puts it, a “habitual signification” (usuelle Be-
zeichnung]—that is, a metaphor to which we have become accustomed (KGW
II/4, p. 443). On the one hand, we tend to ignore the metaphorical origin of
such terms, so that their meaning, as Nelson Goodman notes, “fades to mere
truth.”19 On the other hand, it is generally difficult to distinguish conventional
metaphors from creative or poetic ones—there are too many borderline cases,
and a particular word may be seen as a creative metaphor in one context but
constitute merely a conventional metaphor in another. As David Cooper points
out, “metaphorical utterances do not at all universally wear their metaphorical-
ity on their sleeves.”20 Nevertheless, the central function of metaphor within our
language and conceptual thought leads us to the historical dimension of both

language and thought. Jean Paul and Hegel were well aware of this historical
dimension, although neither of them considered its philosophical implications
in more detail. For Nietzsche, however, the historicity of metaphor would prove
to be of increasing importance: literality is merely a developmental stage of the
figurative character of language, and inasmuch as every language should be re-
garded as a dictionary of faded metaphors, every language is still dominated by
metaphor. Language, he suggests, became literal because we forgot its figurative
quality and started treating as literal what is actually metaphorical. Nietzsche
puts this passage at the center of his discussion of the rhetoricity of language
(KGW II/4, pp. 442–43), and he not surprisingly repeats Jean Paul’s argument
in his essay on truth and falsehood: literal expressions, which we regard as truth,
are nothing but “illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions,
metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all their
sensuous vigor, coins which, having lost their stamp, are now regarded as metal
and no longer as coins” (TL 146). Nietzsche’s contention that the concepts and
expressions we perceive as literal are nothing but illusions might seem radical
and, with regard to its far-reaching philosophical implications, rather counter-
productive. If both literal and metaphorical expressions are of an illusory and
deceptive nature, then apparently little can be said in the first place, and it makes
little sense to speak of truth, beliefs, values, knowledge, and so on. Nietzsche
seems to have had something else in mind, however, and this becomes clearer if
we compare his position with that of Hans Blumenberg.
In an essay in which he proposes what he terms “metaphorology,” Blumenberg
differentiates two kinds of metaphors that structure our conceptual knowledge
and our perception of the environment: on the one hand, certain metaphors—
such as spirit, Geist, ésprit, spiritus—are residues of mythopoetic thought that
have survived the intellectual and historical transition from mythos to logos that
is often regarded as one of the main developments within the history of thought.
On the other hand, some metaphors are themselves fundamental ingredients of
logical thought and philosophical reflections, such as the terms reflection or
logic. It is doubtful that any such distinction makes much sense, however, for
differentiating these two kinds of metaphors is often well-nigh impossible, and
to avoid this problem Blumenberg introduces the idea of “absolute metaphors,”
which he takes to be distinct from concepts or pure abstractions. As such, abso-
lute metaphors are neither tools for stylistic decoration nor the products of a
simple intuitive analogy between different sense impressions. Instead, they appear
when there is no particular mental image corresponding to a particular “repre-
sentation” (Anschauung).21 Kant calls these metaphors “hypotyposes” and char-
acterizes them as central to most forms of knowledge and reasoning. Blumenberg

goes one step further and argues that practically all fundamental philosophical
notions are absolute metaphors. His main example is truth, an indubitably nec-
essary part of any reasoning about the world, ourselves, and human agency that
is nonetheless not based on analogy or a specific mental image. In much the same
way as Blumenberg radicalizes Kant’s position, Nietzsche insists that philoso-
phy—and in fact any form of conceptual thought—cannot operate without such
metaphors. As should be clear, however, we are often unaware of both the met-
aphorical nature of our conceptual knowledge and the fact that it is shaped by
rather complex historical transformations. In this context, Blumenberg notes
that the metaphoricity of conceptual knowledge is secluded from view,22 and
Nietzsche’s philosophical enterprise seeks to come to terms with exactly this
hidden dimension of conceptual knowledge: the metaphorical nature of concep-
tual knowledge leads us to its historicity; the histories of language and thought
thus converge. But what, then, is a trope?
What Is a Trope?
Nietzsche’s examination of rhetorical tropes and figures thematizes underlying
philosophical questions and proposes a concept of metaphor as the master trope
par excellence. Clearly, then, his “Darstellung der antiken Rhetorik” does not
simply follow traditional accounts of rhetoric, as J. Hillis Miller and Gary Sha-
piro have suggested it does,23 but develops a framework for his later criticism of
philosophy. Seen from this perspective, Nietzsche’s definition of tropes conflicts
strikingly with the general assumption that tropes, “figures of speech,” can be
defined only in contrast to a literal use of language. But for Nietzsche there is
no such thing as a literal meaning or literal use of language:
The most important artistic features of rhetoric are the tropes, indirect designations
[die uneigentlichen Bezeichnungen]. With regard to their meaning, however, all words,
as such and right from the beginning, are tropes. Instead of the true event they
represent an acoustic image [Tonbild] which fades over time: language never ex-
presses anything in its entirety but only emphasizes a seemingly notable feature. . . . In
summa: words are tropes not only occasionally but essentially. We are unable to
speak of a “literal meaning,” which is merely translated through a special form.
(KGW II/4, pp. 426–27)
Obviously Nietzsche did not take this definition from the mainstream of nine-
teenth-century studies on rhetoric. Anton Westermann, Leonhard Spengel, and
Friedrich Blass provide only a historical account of rhetoric and refrain from any
systematic discussion, and both Richard Volkmann and Wilhelm Wackernagel

characterize tropes as a form of linguistic deviation, as an at best poetically grace-
ful deviation from the literal meaning of a given expression. 24 Nietzsche, in
contrast, denies that there is anything like literal language strictly speaking, so
that he must reject the classic definition of tropus as improprietas.25 To understand
the far-reaching implications of this step, we need to turn once again to the
rhetorical tradition.
For Quintilian, tropes are based on immutatio (change), on the replacement
of a correct word (verbum proprium) by another word that has a different mean-
ing or, at least, different connotations (verbum improprium). This interchange
or substitution is regarded as the principal basis of tropical language in virtually
all rhetorical textbooks from antiquity and early modern Europe to the system-
atic accounts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A particularly prominent
example is Dumarsais’s Des tropes ou des différents sens, which defines tropes as
rhetorical devices for attaching meanings to words whose “literal” meanings
differ somewhat from those attached. Dumarsais links this definition to an ety-
mological argument, for the Latin barbarism tropus comes from the Greek tropos,
which in Latin is normally rendered as conversio, that is, “change,” “alteration,”
or simply “conversion.” The root of conversio is certainly the verb verto, which
Dumarsais takes quite literally as je tourne, or “I turn.”26 Verto, however, means
both “I turn” and “I interpret/translate,” so that a rhetorical trope is based on
an interpretive alteration of meaning that replaces what Quintilian and other
rhetoricians call verbum proprium. Literal meaning is regulated by the conven-
tions of a particular linguistic community, by what Quintilian terms consuetudo;
these conventions, which are not fixed but changeable, form a network within
the realm of ordinary language that changes over time.27 Tropes, in contrast, are
verba impropria, which infringe on conventionally accepted linguistic habits;
they are a voluntary deviation from the norm and substitute an unusual speech
act for a conventional one. Such a substitution occurs, for instance, in the case
of synecdoche, as when we speak of ships but refer to them as sails. Normally
the word sails refers not to ships but only to particular parts of ships, but if we
use it to refer to ships as a whole, we voluntarily change the normal meaning of
the word sails, and the new meaning is wholly dependent on the speaker’s volun-
tas, or intention.
Nietzsche’s argument that tropes are not deviations but the fundamental lin-
guistic paradigm does not agree with this classic differentiation between literal
and figurative speech, and his main source regarding this point is not Quintilian
but Gerber’s Sprache als Kunst. Indeed, Gerber influenced Nietzsche considerably,
although we ought not reduce Nietzsche’s arguments to Gerber’s. In his voluminous
study Gerber concludes that language is always tropical, so that it is therefore

devoid of any literal expressions.28 Nietzsche quotes these passages almost word
for word, and most scholars agree that this citation provides the basis of his lin-
guistic thought—namely, that all language is figurative and that figures do not
refer to any underlying literality. Again, however, this assumption faces a problem:
figurative language, it seems, can exist only if there is something like literal lan-
guage; figurative language thus implies literal language, for “to say that all language
is figurative vacates the concept of the trope, which only makes sense in com-
parison to a putative literality.”29 So far so good—but why was Nietzsche so
skeptical about literal language? Why did he want to reject and belittle literality?
Of Colors, Smells, and Simple Ideas

It is necessary to read Nietzsche’s definition of tropes more closely, and against
the background of the precarious relationship between language and thought,
to help explain why Nietzsche was willing to adopt such a highly controversial
position. In fact, his concept of the trope is much wider than the common view
of tropes as figures of speech. His account of tropical language certainly has a
rhetorical basis, and his examples of metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche be-
long to the realm of rhetorical textbooks, but his understanding of tropes is not
based on rhetoric alone. Rather, it rests on a linguistic phenomenon that renders
rhetorical speech possible in the first place, namely, the indeterminacy of most
if not all speech acts. Gerber, for instance, states that linguistic meaning is nec-
essarily indeterminate, and Nietzsche repeats the claim that language cannot
represent all possible aspects of any given external reality or mental image but
must emphasize a particular aspect of the reality it seeks to describe (KGW II/4,
p. 426).30 Full-blown speech acts—including, for example, every kind of prom-
ise—as well as single words such as tree, do not express all aspects and dimensions
of their referents. The implications of this point become especially clear if we
consider the problem of ideas and language as Locke discusses it. Comparing
Locke and Nietzsche is not such a curious undertaking as it might seem. Locke’s
reflections on language certainly appear to conflict with Nietzsche’s philosophi-
cal enterprise, especially as Locke is traditionally regarded as numbering among
analytic philosophy’s ancestors. Again, Nietzsche first encountered Locke’s
thought, on which he comments throughout his published and unpublished
writings, in Schaarschmidt’s lectures on the general history of philosophy; in
Albert Schwegler’s brief survey of the history of philosophy, Geschichte der Phi-
losophie im Umriß (1848); and in Lange’s Geschichte der Materialismus.31
Locke confronts the indeterminacy of linguistic expressions when explaining
his notion of simple ideas.32 In book 2 of the Essay Concerning Human Under-
standing, Locke argues that all ideas come from sensation or reflection and that
reflection sets in after sensation: “’tis pretty late, before most Children get Ideas
of the Operations of their own Minds.”33 Locke then distinguishes simple from
complex ideas and stresses that simple ideas must be regarded as the building
blocks of human knowledge. But what are simple ideas? Locke explicitly refers
to sensory experiences such as sights, feels, smells, and tastes, which he construes
as the products of a clear and distinct form of direct perception. Such sensory
experiences cannot be broken down into different ideas and thus provide the
mind what Locke calls simple ideas: they represent a direct and almost unme-
diated access to reality or, more carefully put, to external objects.34 According to
Locke, a simple idea might be the “smell of a Rose”35—but this fails to explain
why this idea should be “simple.” One problem here is Locke’s apparent failure
to account for the vagueness of such ideas: the smell of a rose might not always
be distinguished from the smell of other flowers, and even though Locke dis-
cusses the confusion of ideas to some extent, he basically dismisses it as resulting
from our peculiar habit of giving different names to a single idea.36 He seems to
miss the fact that such simple ideas are marked by a certain inherent vagueness
that depends on external circumstances. This is especially the case with regard
to sensory experiences, such as smelling a rose or seeing a particular color.
There is a more fundamental problem with Locke’s notion of simple ideas,
however, for as soon as we smell a rose, we differentiate this odor from that of,
say, mud or wine or smoke, and because this differentiation takes place, the smell
of roses cannot be a simple idea strictly so called. Smelling a rose implies a whole
set of referential frames and interpretive actions, and without them we would
not be aware that we smell a rose. The attempt to determine a simple idea dem-
onstrates that simple ideas are neither simple nor determined: things, colors,
smells, and all other putatively simple ideas, whether they represent mental states
or not, are signs and therefore require a substantial amount of interpretation.
Locke’s main problem, or so it seems, is his almost complete assimilation of
sensory experience and intellectual processes, with little difference between per-
ception and thinking.37 Locke never addresses this problem, whereas Nietzsche
emphasizes the break between perception and mental processes and, arguing on
the basis of his earlier linguistic reflections, stresses that we cannot gain any im-
mediate knowledge (BGE 16).38
The relation between Locke and Nietzsche becomes more obvious in view of
the former’s description of language. Even though Locke readily acknowledges
that some words do not represent ideas (such as the Latin word nihil, which does
not refer to any specific sensory perception), he nevertheless claims: “Words in
their primary or immediate Signification, stand for nothing, but the Ideas in the
Mind of him that uses them, how imperfectly soever, or carelesly [sic] those Ideas
are collected from Things, which they are supposed to represent. When a Man
speaks to another, it is, that he may be understood; and the end of Speech is,
that those Sounds, as Marks, may make known his Ideas to the Hearer. That
then which Words are the Marks of, are the Ideas of the Speaker.”39 Here Locke
proposes a semantic theory of linguistic meaning and signification, and he uses
the rest of book 3 to elaborate this approach without reaching a conclusive posi-
tion.40 It is not possible to elucidate all the implications of this passage here, let
alone Locke’s theory of meaning. It suffices to note that on this account words
represent ideas, simple and complex.
Many of Locke’s reflections can be related to Antoine Arnauld and Pierre
Nicole’s Logique de Port-Royal (1662), and Nietzsche might have been aware of
this intellectual background through his later reading of Charles-Augustin de
Sainte-Beuve’s Port Royal (1840–59), the fourth book of which contains a detailed
historical account of the intellectual schools and trends within the Cistercian
monastery of Port-Royal-des-Champs and the Logique (KGW VIII/1, 1 [136];
KGW VIII/2, 10 [120]). The first edition of the Logique does not regard language
and signification as a significant philosophical problem and merely points out
that ideas and mental images are connected to words and vice versa (“les idées
jointes aux mots, & les mots joints aux idées”), which is fairly compatible with
Locke’s line of argument.41 But the situation changes with the more influential
fifth edition of 1683. Here Arnauld and Nicole address serious questions regard-
ing signification and reference, and they emphasize not only that our ideas are
related to signs but that they are signs. They thus conclude that signs consist of
two different ideas, one pertaining to signifiers, such as words, maps, and paint-
ings, and another pertaining to the signified, such as objects, countries, and
scenes,42 so that, although language refers to reality, there is no necessary relation
between words and things. A prime example for this is the so-called repraesenta-
tio Christi, the transubstantiation of bread and wine; arguing from Augustine’s
theological hermeneutics, Arnauld and Nicole describe the Eucharist as a process
of symbolic signification, as a semiotic event without real reference.43 The bread
refers to the body of Christ, which itself symbolizes divine providence, the uni-
ty of the Church, the suffering of life, and so on, but there is no body present,
and the bread is, after all, just bread. Nietzsche takes up this argument in Der
Antichrist (1888) and casts religious activity in terms of a “language of signs”
(Zeichensprache) or “semiotics” (Semiotik) (A 31).44 Such an invention of highly
symbolic signs for a whole complex of other signs, moreover, is not limited to
theological contexts but marks any form of human activity. By 1870–71, then,
Nietzsche was already maintaining that language consists only of the continuous
projection of images and symbols:
Language, a sum of concepts.
The concept, in the first moment of its emergence, an artistic phenomenon: the
symbolization of a whole variety of appearances, originally an image, a hieroglyph.
Thus, an image in place of a thing.
. . . This is the way human beings begin with their projection of images and symbols.
(KGW III/3, 8 [41])
From the 1880s onward, Nietzsche would thus characterize thinking and any
mental process as a “language of signs” (KGW VIII/1, 1 [28]).
This line of argument separates Nietzsche sharply from Locke, who argues
throughout the Essay that there are more or less direct links among words, ideas,
and reality, for words are supposed to be clear representations of ideas, which in
turn provide direct access to external objects and thus to reality. To understand
the nature of language, then, Locke must say whether words represent things or
ideas. Successful communication, it seems, is possible only if the relation between
words and things is fixed and we are dealing with a logically perfect language
that eliminates all semantic vagueness. Indeed, when Locke laments the general
imperfection of words,45 he is in accord with the seventeenth-century attempt
to establish a universal grammar as an alternative to the fruitless semiotic confu-
sion of ordinary language. Even though he points out that the common usage
of words and grammar regulates the meaning of expressions in most circum-
stances, he must admit that no authority or point of reference can determine
precise signification within language. This is, however, exactly why ordinary
language, marked by indeterminacy and vagueness, is insufficient in providing
a foundation for “philosophical Discourse.”46 A universal language, logically
perfect and with fixed reference, would solve this problem—but fortunately,
there is no such thing.47
“The World of Signs”

I have discussed Locke’s examination of the connection between words and ideas
because his argument expresses precisely the position that Nietzsche rejects on
the grounds of rhetoric. To do so, Nietzsche contends not only that language is
thoroughly figurative and tropical but also that reference cannot be fixed or
determined. The latter claim underpins the former. His idea that language is
figurative and that there is no such thing as literal meaning is in many ways based
on Gerber’s assumption that, as soon as we use language to move away from
concrete experience, we must rely on abstractions.48 Nietzsche notes that all

linguistic concepts are inevitably abstractions in one way or another, and in a
fragment from 1876–77 he goes on to emphasize the indeterminate character of
linguistic signification. At first sight, he notes, one might suppose that “each
word or concept contains a series of predicates which one would merely need to
extract” to define the meaning of the word or concept. A complete list of such
predicates and attributes would ideally define the meaning of every word. On
closer inspection, however, it becomes obvious that words and concepts contain
merely an “uncertain allusion to things,” so that, strictly speaking, definitions
outline the meanings of specific concepts only with regard to equally specific
contexts—meaning is “not obligatory” (unverbindlich) but rather undergoes
substantial changes, depending on the speaker, the speech community, and the
circumstances in which concepts are used (KGW IV/2, 23 [135]).
The indeterminacy of language, which is a fundamental problem but also the
primary precondition for any form of linguistic communication, is centrally
important for Nietzsche, and references to it can be found throughout his writ-
ings from his early lectures on rhetoric and the essay on truth and falsehood to
a large variety of fragments from his notebooks of the 1880s. In contrast to Locke,
Nietzsche does not envisage any exit from this prison house of linguistic confu-
sion, and in the first volume of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (1878) he points
out that our unquestioned and uncritical belief in the objectivity of language
and, especially, philosophical concepts prevents us from recognizing their high-
ly problematic constitution: “To the extent that man has for long ages believed
in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated
to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really
thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world. The sculptor of
language [Sprachbildner] was not so modest as to believe that he was only giving
things designations, he conceived rather that with words he was expressing the
essence of things” (HA I:11).
The construction of words, Nietzsche argues, is so powerful that it almost
automatically seduces us into believing that, insofar as we mistake words for
things, language solves our philosophical problems with regard to reality. He
initially appears to be contrasting language to reality, but in fact his project in
no way seeks to erect an opposition between language and reality, appearance
and things. On the contrary, Nietzsche regards our conception of reality as being
closely bound up with our linguistic habits: as soon as we have words, he notes
in a fragment of 1876–77, we involuntarily suppose that they refer to things that
exist (KGW IV/2, 23 [163]), and he is skeptical about language’s ability to express
or to denote things or states of affairs adequately. Given that we cannot avoid
using language, however, and that even the most radical linguistic skepticism
must inevitably be expressed in words, linguistic signification appears not to be
such a hopeless enterprise after all—at least as long as we bear in mind that
language is a problem. In Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882) Nietzsche proposes
that language enables us to “produce” things, to shape our conception of reality:
“This has given me the greatest trouble and still does: to realize that what things
are called is incomparably more important than what they are. . . . it is sufficient
to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create, in the
long run, new ‘things’” (GS 58). This is an extremely important point, for fol-
lowing his philological lectures on rhetoric he began to develop the view that
any philosophical investigation of knowledge and of that which we can know
makes sense only if we reflect on the conceptual and linguistic background.
For Nietzsche, language lets us grasp, order, and judge what we regard as real-
ity, and it also gives us the means to reflect on this reality through the develop-
ment of general terms and concepts, which lets us realize similarities and relations
among things and see contexts and construct coherent systems of beliefs about
this reality. Our experience and knowledge of reality, Nietzsche notes in 1872–73,
is therefore embedded in a network of concepts delineating what we perceive as
our environment (durch Begriffe eingefangen und abgegränzt [KGW III/4, 19
(228)]). That he refers to boundaries, limits, and delineations reveals once more
the general anthropological angle of his considerations, which is close to what
Pierre Bourdieu, more than a century later, regards as an inevitable classification
of the world, of social and mental experience. As Bourdieu notes, “A vision of
the world is a division of the world, based on the fundamental principle of divi-
sion which distributes all the things of the world to the complementary classes,”
which leads him to conclude that “the cultural act par excellence is the one that
traces the line that produces a separate, delimited space.”49
Whereas Bourdieu views this delineation as a primarily social process, produced
by human agency within specific social classes, Nietzsche sees it as a mental
operation that we cannot escape and that becomes manifest in language. Gen-
eral terms and concepts (e.g., subject, object, predicate, being, fact, cause and
effect) result from our need to compartmentalize our perceptions of reality to
make sense of it (KGW VIII/1, 2 [77]). As such, Nietzsche seems to follow Kant’s
notion of the hypotyposes that are responsible for the symbolic quality of phil-
osophical discourse and that underline the indeterminacy of linguistic reference.
In this respect, his point of view is also compatible with that of Leibniz, who
accepts the vagueness of conceptual knowledge as an expression of the undeniable
imperfection of human faculties. This understanding of the relationship between
language and knowledge led Nietzsche to argue in the early 1880s that it is virtu-
ally impossible to live without general concepts of a metaphysical quality (KGW

V/2, 11 [252]) and that these concepts are experimental arrangements of significa-
tion (Versuche) and a kind of “regulative fictions” that serve our desire to regard
our environment as ordered (KGW VII/3, 35 [35–36]). He is thus finally able to
conclude that, despite their obvious limitations, the conceptual nature and lin-
guistic background of knowledge provide an unusually powerful and efficient
faculty for understanding and interpreting our environment: “With the invention
of such a rigid world of concepts and numbers, man gains a means of grasping
an enormous amount of facts through signs and of imprinting them on his
memory. This apparatus of signs [Zeichen-Apparat] is his superiority, especially
since it distances him the furthest from individual facts. The reduction of expe-
rience to signs, and the increasing amount of things which can be grasped ac-
cordingly: is his greatest strength” (KGW VII/3, 34 [131]).
The close relationship between our beliefs and our concepts does not express
any hidden order of the world; rather, conceptual knowledge merely enables us
to deal with reality and life. The experimental and preliminary nature of con-
ceptual knowledge is itself based on the dynamics of linguistic developments.
The concepts with which we strive to establish meaning inevitably change over
time: they emerge in or react to certain cultural, intellectual, and historical cir-
cumstances; they alter their meaning and validity over time; and they might even
disappear altogether (KGW VII/3, 40 [51]). Nietzsche thus construes thinking
as a continuous ordering and rearranging of conceptual knowledge that con-
structs, above all, a “world of signs” requiring constant interpretation (KGW
VII/3, 34 [131]). As such, conceptual knowledge is in many respects a simplifica-
tion of the human environment according to genera and species that enable us
both to grasp and to judge and control what is generally called “reality” (KGW
VII/3, 34 [247], 40 [17, 36]).
Metaphor is crucially important, then, and Nietzsche is not the only philoso-
pher to have stressed its role in the formation of human knowledge. In “The
Explanatory Function of Metaphor” Mary B. Hesse discusses the role of metaphor
within the natural sciences in particular and the production of knowledge in
general. The connection between two different epistemic fields, she points out,
rests on a model of translation that can generate new knowledge by drawing
analogies. We might be faced, for instance, with two different bodies of knowl-
edge that we might label primary and secondary. Understanding the primary
body of knowledge in a metaphorical way would mean transferring to it words,
concepts, or statements that under normal circumstances are used exclusively
within the context of the secondary body of knowledge. Furthermore, we trans-
fer these words’ and concepts’ connotations and associated ideas from the second-
ary to the primary body of knowledge, certain aspects and features of which will
be subsequently emphasized or suppressed. Ultimately, this leads us to consider
the primary body of knowledge through the frame of the secondary.50
According to Hesse, who views this process as the intertwining of otherwise
incommensurable referential discourses, we should regard such a transference or
translation as a general model that shapes the production of knowledge and that
can be discovered in both scientific and philosophical contexts. Physics, for in-
stance, relies on mathematical axioms; biology combines concepts from chem-
istry, physics, and mathematics; and philosophy itself often transfers concepts
from all kinds of secondary fields. Furthermore, as Jan Golinski has pointed out,
we should not conceive of such metaphorical processes as paralleling the way lay
people (such as philosophers) often misinterpret the technicalities and termi-
nologies of specific fields of knowledge. Rather, we should understand such
processes as enabling us to transplant knowledge from one linguistic commu-
nity to other linguistic communities and as providing the foundation for the
creation of meaning within particular discourses.51 Nietzsche offers something
quite similar when he emphasizes the importance of metaphor and rhetoric for
our interpretive approaches to the world. For Nietzsche, knowledge is deeply
embedded in the metaphorical descriptions and redescriptions of the disparate
ways in which we tend to perceive the world and relate to our environment.52
“In the Slings of Grammar”

In Jenseits von Gut und Böse Nietzsche presents a rather complex argument about
the emergence of philosophical concepts that repeats some of the ideas about
the relationship between language and thought already discussed:
That individual philosophical concepts are not arbitrary and do not grow on their
own, but rather grow in reference and relation to each other; that however suddenly
and randomly they seem to emerge in the history of thought, they still belong to a
system just as much as all the members of the fauna of a continent do: this is ulti-
mately revealed by the certainty with which the most diverse philosophers always fill
out a definite basic scheme of possible philosophies. . . . Especially where there are
linguistic affinities, then because of the common philosophy of grammar—I mean:
due to the unconscious domination and direction through similar grammatical func-
tions—, it is obvious that everything lies ready from the very start for a similar devel-
opment and sequence of philosophical systems, while at the same time the way seems
as good as blocked to certain other possibilities of interpreting the world. (BGE 20)
Two points in this passage are particularly important. First, Nietzsche stresses
the historical dimension of conceptual development with regard to philosophi-
cal thought, which is supposed to be governed by certain laws or rather by a

fundamental scheme in a broad range of different philosophical traditions, cul-
tures, and languages. We should approach this idea cautiously, however, for
Nietzsche does not argue that all philosophical systems are the same and that
they develop in a teleological manner. Rather, he points out that they depend
on a specific phenomenon, namely, grammar. This leads to the second important
point, which is that the grammar of conceptual systems is based on language,
for the family resemblance among different languages is, at least according to
Nietzsche, a direct expression of this grammar of thought and its physiological
background. The grammatical structures within language, he points out, influ-
ence the logical coherence of our conceptual system—that is, the associations
we make, the mental images we relate to one another, and the way in which both
of these influence our understanding of the world. Even if we switch to a differ-
ent language, certain rudimentary grammatical structures, such as the relations
among the subject, object, and predicate, continue to inform our conceptual
beliefs. In terms of both epistemology and physiology, we are unable to escape
these cognitive limitations. Thus, much as it is impossible to think without
language, in the broadest possible sense it is impossible to adopt a nongram-
matical perspective on the world, a point Nietzsche repeated often beginning in
the late 1870s.53
But how does this particular conceptual scheme—the grammar of thought,
as it were—come about? The study of grammar constitutes a central field in
classical scholarship, but already in his early lecture series on Latin grammar,
“Vorlesungen über lateinische Grammatik,” which he delivered as an introduc-
tory course in the winter of 1869–70, Nietzsche encounters a fair amount of
philosophical questions about the interdependence of language and thought that
exceed the usual scope of grammatical studies in classical scholarship. Although
Nietzsche undertakes these theoretical excursions into this complex interdepen-
dence as preparation for a lengthy and meticulous account of Latin grammatical
structures (KGW II/2, pp. 214–66), he is clearly aware of the epistemological
implications with which any account of grammar must deal. Conceptual thought,
he therefore notes, is possible only on the basis of language, so that some of “the
most profound philosophical issues” (die tiefsten philosoph. Erkenntnisse) are in-
herent in language (KGW II/2, p. 185).
In the summer of 1875, when he was still working on his philological writings,
Nietzsche returned to the topic of grammar and was able to formulate a more
philosophically oriented account. He decided that any serious attempt at under-
standing the intricacies of linguistic expression would involve paying attention
to its grammatical dimension. August Schleicher’s investigation into the grammar
of Indo-European languages and Heymann Steinthal’s history of ancient Greek

and Roman linguistic thought, both of which Nietzsche had read while prepar-
ing his lectures on Latin grammar, offered him interesting material that surely
inspired his own conjectures about the nature of grammatical structures. Al-
though Steinthal and especially Schleicher draw no general philosophical conclu-
sions in their inquiries, Nietzsche would have found a more philosophically
inclined discussion in Eduard von Hartmann’s Philosophie des Unbewussten (1869),
which he read in some detail around the same time. Hartmann argues that the
metaphysical talk of subject and object, as well as the logical terminology of
subject and predicate, result principally from grammatical relations, which struc-
ture not only philosophy but also most if not all of our conceptual knowledge.54
This idea, however, which was to profoundly influence Nietzsche’s understand-
ing of language’s relationship to thought, was not as new as one might assume
it to have been. In his 1772 prize-winning essay on the origin of language, for
example, Herder notes that grammar represents a philosophy about language—
that is, that it should be regarded as a fundamental link between the internal
association of mental images and the external combination of sounds that make
up speech, for it explains the logical functions underlying linguistic utterances.55
In Ueber das Entstehen der grammatischen Formen (1822–24), Wilhelm von Hum-
boldt adopts a similar stance and argues explicitly that grammar fairly directly
represents the “organism of thought,” a claim that merely enriches Herder’s no-
tion with a more biologically oriented metaphor.56
Nietzsche was undoubtedly aware of these positions—for instance, through
Theodor Benfey’s general history of German linguistic thought and Gustav
Gerber’s somewhat speculative treatise on the aesthetics of language.57 As many
commentators have pointed out, when Nietzsche employs grammatical argu-
ments to reject central metaphysical notions as conceptual fictions, he certainly
has this particular background in mind.58 Hence, he naturally assumes that
grammatical concepts such as “subject” and “predicate,” which any successful
use of language requires, structure much of our thinking. If this is the case, then
he must reject those supposedly metaphysical notions that claim to represent a
nonconceptual and therefore nonlinguistic worldview, such as being, presence,
cause, and above all the notions of subject, predicate, and object. Thus, when
he writes in Der Wanderer und sein Schatten (1880) that language contains a hid-
den philosophical mythology (HA II:ii.11), he refers to the philosophical mythol-
ogy of grammatical concepts, which suggest the existence of subjects, predicates,
and objects but are actually nothing but anthropologically necessary construc-
tions helping us to order our environment and to attach meaning to experience.
The relentless belief in the nonconceptual value of grammar as representing a
more or less direct access to the world not only generates a kind of philosophical
mythology of objects, subjects, and substances but also limits our understanding
of the world:
That which separates me most thoroughly from the metaphysicians is: I do not agree
to their view that it is the “I” which thinks: rather, I take the “I” itself to be a men-
tal construction, which is of the same category as “matter,” “thing,” “substance,”
“individual,” “purpose,” “number”: therefore as a merely regulative fiction according
to which we project some kind of permanence . . . onto a world of becoming. The
belief in grammar, in the linguistic subject, object, in verbs has, thus far, subjugated
the metaphysicians. (KGW VII/3, 35 [35])
Following up on this remark, which essentially summarizes the direction of his

epistemological criticism during the 1880s, Nietzsche concluded several months
later that metaphysical thought itself results from an unjustified overgeneraliza-
tion of grammatical categories (KGW VIII/1, 2 [139]).59 This radical claim needs
some further examination.
The notion that grammar represents a fundamental link between language
and thought appears prominently throughout Nietzsche’s writings from the 1870s
and 1880s. Thinking and knowledge, as he points out in book 5 of Die fröhliche
Wissenschaft, an addition to the second edition (1887), can develop only within
the framework of grammatical structures—we are, so to speak, always “in the
slings of grammar” (in den Schlingen der Grammatik) (GS 354). Central philo-
sophical concepts, such as subject and predicate, are grammatical because they
structure philosophical discourse, but they are also figurative because they are
metaphors: for example, the ob-ject is that which is thrown (jacta) before (ob)
the mind to be contemplated.
Things are not quite that simple, however, for Nietzsche was not the first to
hint at the rather fragile foundation of metaphysics. Consider, for instance, Kant’s
definition of object in the second edition of his Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1787).
Our perception of reality, he explains, is based on manifold appearances that are
structured by the formal conditions of space and time, and an object consists in
the synthesis of different appearances, first in the process of perception and then
in the faculty of the understanding.60 There is, for instance, no such thing as a
house—or rather, there are no houses-in-themselves but merely objects we con-
sider to be houses, for such objects are formed by the synthesis of manifold
appearances within our perception and understanding.61 The Kantian object
thus results from a kind of figurative synthesis that intuitively draws the percep-
tion of different appearances into one, that relates them to one another. The
mental representation of the external world—a particularly difficult phenomenon
for Kant—is a question of ordering, combining, and unifying incommensurable

appearances.62 Significantly, the schemata of pure reason provide the formal
condition for this synthesis, and for the understanding, the existence of objects
depends on such schemata.63 Although Nietzsche generally rejects the idea of
pure reason, Kant’s notion of schemata is surprisingly close to Nietzsche’s concept
of the grammar of thought, and Kant’s assumption that objects are produced by
a figurative synthesis in many respects corresponds to Nietzsche’s notion of the
way metaphors, concepts, images, and tropes are generated in the mind. For
Kant as well as for Nietzsche, objects do not really exist in the sense that we do
not have any direct access to them. Objects are thus a kind of conceptual fiction.
Whereas Kant emphasizes that our representations are embedded in a transcen-
dental aesthetics of space and time, however, Nietzsche goes one step further and
considers concepts to be largely rhetorical, embedded in the predispositions of
human physiology. They differ in another way, too, for Kant clearly distin-
guishes images from schemata, whereas Nietzsche would have to argue that the
two are interrelated inasmuch as schemata are merely an advanced form of rhe-
torical figuration; they are the rules by which we combine mental images—that
is, they are what I have described as the grammar of thought.
Nietzsche’s account is certainly more colorful than Kant’s, but his understand-
ing of a grammar of thought does not depart all that radically from the philo-
sophical tradition of the German Enlightenment. But does this mean that Nietz-
sche had nothing new to say? Is Nietzsche in fact a Kantian in disguise? Perhaps
Nietzsche would have disagreed with my interpretation, but considering the
idealism that Kant espoused and his attempt to position himself against notions
he perceived as unspecified metaphysical speculations, Nietzsche’s position ap-
pears to be not too far removed from Kant’s, although perhaps somewhat less
philosophically sophisticated. Despite the many commentators who view Nietz-
sche as the destroyer of reason and philosophy and the harbinger of epistemo-
logical relativism, the strength of his approach lies in his continuation of the
Enlightenment’s critical stance. Nietzsche certainly had serious difficulties with
the optimistic belief in rationalism, but so did Kant’s most famous pupil, Herder,
and occasionally even Kant himself.
If Nietzsche wanted to be consistent in his understanding of the relationship
between language and thought, as he undoubtedly did, then his early statement
that “language is rhetoric” (KGW II/4, p. 426) takes on a new quality and com-
bines both grammatical structures and figuration. Indeed, his later remarks on
grammar were influenced by his earlier views on tropes. By turning the rhetori-
cal dimension of philosophical argument against notions he understood as the
philosophical preconceptions of metaphysical thought, he moved far beyond the
traditional discourse of rhetorical thought, but this is only one aspect of Nietz-
sche’s discussion of metaphor and rhetoric, for he also began to realize that his
account of metaphor makes sense only within an anthropological framework.
Nietzsche, in other words, needed to link language to the body.
Language and the Body

Nietzsche’s account of the function of metaphor would significantly affect his
subsequent understanding of language’s relationship to thought, as well as his
emerging notions of knowledge and interpretation. Commentators following
the more radical positions of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man often consider
Nietzsche’s understanding of language as metaphorical to be the cornerstone of
his philosophical criticism, while those commentators influenced by Donald
Davidson’s analytic discussion of metaphor, most notably Maudemarie Clark,
regard Nietzsche’s account of metaphor as “a very weak position,” inasmuch as
Nietzsche provides no sound arguments with regard to reference, representation,
and truth.64 Nevertheless, there is much to be said for an interpretation of Nietz-
sche’s interest in metaphor that seeks to widen the scope of his reflections beyond
the philosophy of language and purely epistemological questions. For Nietzsche,
as for many other authors writing during the second half of the nineteenth
century, the problem of language and thought is embedded in a wider intellec-
tual framework marked by the growing influence of something we can describe
as the “sciences of the body.”
By relating Nietzsche’s views on language and thought to the physiological
debates of his time, we can better understand his seemingly radical suggestions
and unfounded epistemological claims. In the same way as Nietzsche’s criticism
of metaphysics and some of his most fashionable concepts, such as the “will to
power,” are informed by his reception of contemporary science, especially biol-
ogy and physiology, his attempt to rethink the importance of language for the
formation of knowledge needs to be related to his attempt to bridge the gap
between philosophy and science. Within this context, his early encounter with
Lange’s Geschichte des Materialismus was crucially important, for Lange empha-
sizes how human knowledge and scientific explanations depend on both abstrac-
tion and physiology. According to Lange, modern science is marked by an un-
canny tendency to explain the empirical, that is, physical events and objects,
through acting “forces” that essentially personify nature. At the heart of human
knowledge, thus, stands our continuous attempt to transfer the attributes of
human life to matter and nature.65 Only through the projection of these attributes
can we understand physical processes in terms of “forces,” a process that enables
us to recognize “things” in the natural world, that is, groupings of appearances.66

For Lange, however, the formation of knowledge cannot be completely reduced
to such conceptual abstractions, for such abstractions are themselves generated
within the brain. Lange’s epistemological materialism thus requires an investiga-
tion into the realm of physiological processes, for mental activities somehow
originate in the brain, just as perception originates in various organs; all these
depend on nerves, electrochemical flows, muscular contractions, glandular secre-
tions, and so on. With this emphasis on human physiology, Lange introduced a
new evidentiary paradigm into his philosophical considerations: we might not
be able to “see” into our mental world, but we can experiment with the physical
processes involved and draw general conclusions.67 Lange consequently argues
that our knowledge about the external world is a product of our biological and
physiological organization, a claim that would become crucially important for
Nietzsche’s account of knowledge:
1) The world of our senses [Sinnenwelt] is the product of our organization.
2) Our visible (bodily) organs are, like all other parts of the realm of appearances,
merely images of an unknown object.
3) Our true organization is thus as unknown as the things of external reality [die
wirklichen Aussendinge]. We always have the product of both of them in front of
us.68
This insight was so important to Nietzsche that he could not resist reproducing
the passage just quoted in a letter to his friend Carl von Gersdorff written in
August 1866 (KGB I/2, pp. 159–60). Any serious examination of Nietzsche’s
understanding of language and thought must thus focus on the ways in which
his notion of metaphor is connected to the intellectual fields and epistemic
transitions of his time. In particular, debates about “organic electricity” and
“psychophysics,” which had begun in the eighteenth century and intensified
throughout the nineteenth century, played a prominent role. In addition, we
must consider the status of psychology and physiology as emerging scientific
disciplines in Germany, as well as induction as a scientific paradigm in nineteenth-
century thought. As it turns out, Nietzsche’s ideas about the nature of metaphor
are neither as radical nor as far-fetched as they are commonly believed to be. In
fact, metaphor became a central explanatory model for the relationships among
language, thought, and reality, and as such it had a lasting influence on Nietz-
sche’s emerging anthropological concerns. Nevertheless, grounding the increas-
ing anthropological orientation of Nietzsche’s thought in the relationship between
language and the body causes considerable problems.
Addressing these problems from rather a different perspective, Eric Blondel,
Christof Kalb, and Günter Abel have convincingly argued that Nietzsche’s “phi-
losophy of language,” his “philosophy of interpretation,” and his “philosophy of
mind” (if such a thing exists) are inextricably bound up with his notion of the
body—a topic that in any case has generated much excitement in recent scholar-
ship. It is indeed worthwhile and even necessary to reexamine Nietzsche’s reflec-
tions on language, together with his ideas about the formation of consciousness,
along the lines of his changing understanding of the physical and physiological:
mental life should thus be conceived as comprising not only tropes, concepts,
and images but also a “sign language of the body” (Zeichensprache des Leibes), as
Nietzsche noted in the summer of 1883 (KGW VII/1, 7 [126]).69 Whereas Blondel
seems to be interested mainly in Nietzsche’s understanding of culture, and Abel
seeks to link Nietzsche’s scattered remarks on consciousness to recent develop-
ments in the philosophy of mind, only Kalb seeks to support his suggestions
with a complex historical argument that can highlight the close connection
between language and the body in Nietzsche’s enterprise. Briefly, the argument
runs as follows: Nietzsche’s emphasis on the idea of an “unconscious will,” un-
doubtedly inspired by Schopenhauer, and on the prevalence of biological “drives”
and “pulsions,” in large part indebted to Lange, signals a problematic turn toward
a more materialist or empiricist position. On the one hand, this trend let Nietz-
sche distance his own philosophical enterprise from Schopenhauer’s “metaphys-
ics of the will” while adapting to an intellectual environment within which the
realm of the empirical had begun to play an increasingly dominant role. As such,
Nietzsche’s early materialist tendencies provided the foundation for things to
come. On the other hand, his philosophical enterprise also began to generate a
certain contradiction, for the materialist rehabilitation of the empirical, which
can be observed throughout the middle and later phase of his intellectual career,
contrasts starkly with the epistemological conclusions that he drew from his
early notes on language and the uncertain status of whatever we perceive as
“reality.”70 Kalb consequently concludes that the anthropological dimension of
Nietzsche’s project consists in investigating the multifarious ways in which cul-
tural institutions seek to channel and restrict physiological drives and pulsions
through complex conceptual regimes, signs, and linguistic conventions.71
Whatever its merits, this interpretation seems to imply that Nietzsche supposed
the mental to be reducible to the physical; the cultural, to biological self-regula-
tion.72 To be sure, instead of favoring “mind” (Geist) as the main starting point
for reason and knowledge, Nietzsche increasingly came to argue that reason and
knowledge depend on the body’s physiological organization, and in this respect
he was clearly a child of his time. As the following chapters will show, however,
this does not imply that Nietzsche wanted to reduce mental existence to physi-
cal functions. On the contrary, the necessary fictions of the mental world, them-
selves dependent on rhetoric, grammar, and metaphor, are what allow us to
suggest that human physiology and biological organization play a fundamental
role in the formation of knowledge and culture. Once Nietzsche widened the
perspective of his philosophical criticism toward this more anthropological stance
in the late 1870s, he was able to observe, as he does in Zur Genealogie der Moral
(1887), that “forgetting” the unclear and unstable foundations of knowledge has
a clear “benefit,” namely, the “ruling, predicting, predetermining” that can be
found, for instance, in scientific knowledge: “man himself will really have to
become reliable, regular, necessary, even in his own self-image” (GM II:1). The
fiction of regularity and continuity, which runs counter to the heterogeneity of
experience, serves as the necessary basis for a kind of creative sovereignty allow-
ing the individual to control and conceptualize his or her environment: “how
could [man], with his self-mastery, not realize that he has . . . mastery over cir-
cumstances, over nature and over all creatures with a less durable and reliable
will?” (GM II:2).73 Thus, the assumption that this mental world of abstractions
can be reduced to physical functions itself remains part of the abstractions with
which we seek to control our environment through knowledge.
Nietzsche’s attempt to, as it were, naturalize human knowledge and agency is
more complicated than it initially appears. His unwillingness throughout the
1870s and 1880s to adopt a strictly materialist stance that would have allowed
him to reduce mental existence to organic life, while at the same time emphasiz-
ing the connection between the mental and the organic, makes his position
truly peculiar. The situation becomes more intelligible, however, once we realize
that his position is bound up with a particular understanding of “science.” Indeed,
his remarks in Zur Genealogie der Moral acquire a different meaning if we realize
that Nietzsche asked his publisher, C. G. Naumann, to forward free inspection
copies of his new book not only to his friends and acquaintances, such as Jacob
Burckhardt, Erwin Rohde, and Carl von Gersdorff, but also to a colorful list of
German scientists working within the experimental setting of physiology and
psychology, among them Wilhelm Wundt, Ernst Mach, Emil DuBois-Reymond,
and Hermann von Helmholtz. In particular, Helmholtz, who had just founded
the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt in Braunschweig with the support of
his friend and ally Werner von Siemens, must have been baffled. Nietzsche was
convinced that there were lessons such individuals could learn from his book,
but no doubt none of these scientists heeded his advice. Nevertheless, his re-
minder about the unstable foundations of knowledge, which he regarded as
resting on certain regulative fictions, expresses a position vis-à-vis the scientific
establishment and institutions of nineteenth-century Germany that was shared
by Johann Carl Friedrich Zöllner, whose treatise Über die Natur der Cometen
(1872) was one of Nietzsche’s main sources for understanding the strategies and
self-conception of the scientific establishment. Zöllner’s treatise, which is only
peripherally concerned with comets and astronomy, programmatically attacks
the supposedly unquestioned “positivism” of the contemporary natural sciences,
heavily criticizing the mere accumulation of seemingly “factual” knowledge he
detected especially in the work of Helmholtz.74
Lamenting the general lack of interest in the epistemological foundations of
science did not prove to be a successful approach for Zöllner, whose general
philosophical outlook resembles that of Lange without being quite as circumspect
and sophisticated. Also, targeting Helmholtz in a rather personal manner, while
cultivating an interest in the occult and obscure, did not really help his position.75
Although Zöllner had much positive to say about Helmholtz’s early work on the
physiology of perception, he was extremely critical of Helmholtz’s notion of
energy and felt that his association with the British scientists William Thomson
(Lord Kelvin) and Peter Guthrie Tait did not help German science. Clearly,
Helmholtz was not amused by the treatment he received in Zöllner’s attack on
the first German edition of Thomson’s and Guthrie’s seminal Treatise on Natural
Philosophy (1867), which he had translated, and in the second edition he sought
to put Zöllner in his rightful place by casting him as more a talented laboratory
technician than a scientist.76 Nonetheless, although Zöllner’s arguments might
not have always been sober, his doubts about the materialist trends of German
science were not completely unfounded, especially when Zöllner argued that
scientific knowledge results less from an objective and neutral approach to the
empirical than from “unconscious judgments” that precede our notion of real-
ity.77 Nietzsche was clearly moving in a similar direction, but he maneuvered
himself into a strange position many years later when he asked his publisher to
send complimentary copies of Zur Genealogie der Moral to Helmholtz and oth-
er luminaries of the scientific establishment, whose own self-conceptions were
tied up not with epistemological reflection but with the development of grand-
scale research projects that established manifold relations among laboratories,
industry, and capital, resulting, for example, in the Physikalisch-Technische
Reichsanstalt.78
Nevertheless, considering the list of scientists Nietzsche had in mind, includ-
ing Wundt and DuBois-Reymond, it seems as though he sought to target the
main representatives of the new physiology that, following Helmholtz in one
way or another, attempted to explain organic and mental processes in physical
terms. After his reading of Lange and Zöllner, and once he discovered that our
understanding of the empirical depends not on direct access to “objective” real-
ity but on metaphors and abstractions, Nietzsche was unable to share the mate-
rialism of the field occasionally termed “organic physics.” Much like Lange,
however, and unlike Zöllner, he was not willing to return to metaphysical spec-
ulations, which made his own position increasingly difficult. To avoid deciding
between materialism or idealism, he therefore began to argue for the parallel
development of language, consciousness, and the body, without reducing either
of the first two to the third. This approach, which seems to have become mani-
fest some time during the later 1870s, also represents the backbone of his increas-
ingly anthropological perspective, and it was especially his understanding of
metaphor as a powerful explanatory model for the interactions among language,
mind, and nature that allowed him to argue for such a position. Either way, he
was able to adopt such a stance only because his reflections on the primacy of
metaphor are linked, in more ways than one, to some of the central topoi of
nineteenth-century scientific debates, namely, the physiology of nervous pro-
cesses and brain functions as the basis of human intellectual faculties. Thus, at
the heart of Nietzsche’s philosophical enterprise lies an attempt to understand
what it means to be “human,” and within this context, his notion of metaphor
plays a fundamental role.
4
The Nervous Systems of Modern Consciousness:
Metaphor, Physiology, and the Self
Nietzsche often notes that knowledge depends on metaphor, and his numerous
reflections on both the philosophical status of metaphor and the relationship
between language and knowledge have generated a considerable amount of
philosophical criticism. It is now time to consider Nietzsche’s notion of metaphor
in more detail, for it is virtually impossible to overlook its enormous importance
in his thought, from his early writings, such as the “Darstellung der antiken
Rhetorik” and “Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne,” to his
later notes on interpretation and the “will to power.” Within these writings,
however, metaphor becomes an increasingly difficult concept irreducible to a
narrowly defined rhetorical function. Indeed, metaphor seems to have slowly
grown into an explanatory model that exceeds the scope of traditional rhetorical
thought and that, for Nietzsche, displays a far-reaching anthropological dimen-
sion. As usual, things are quite complicated, and we will need to proceed slowly
to grasp the complexities of this notion of metaphor and to understand the way
in which Nietzsche sought to integrate it with other fields of knowledge, such
as the debates within physiology and the life-sciences during the second half of
the nineteenth century. The intertwining of rhetoric with other epistemic dis-
courses seeking to investigate the status of human nature and the conditions of
life led Nietzsche to raise serious questions with regard to thinking, memory,
mind, and consciousness.
Even a cursory account can reveal that Nietzsche presents a highly controver-
sial concept of metaphor and that he seems to suggest a particularly wide defini-
tion of what metaphor is supposed to be. One of the many reasons he might
have chosen such a loose definition is that attempts to limit the meaning of
metaphor are always flawed and often tautological. Aristotle’s definition of met-
aphor is itself an obviously metaphoric use of language.1 A related problem ap-
Nervous Systems of Modern Consciousness 89
pears in Eva Feder Kittay’s otherwise rigorous study on the subject (“metaphor-
ical expressions can be used to refer metaphorically”), and Janet M. Soskice’s
attempt to define metaphor as “that figure of speech whereby we speak of one
thing in terms which are suggestive of another” is far too broad, for it applies to
virtually all rhetorical tropes, most rhetorical figures, and even speech acts such
as lying, which are normally not considered to be metaphorical.2 Nietzsche was
aware of this problem, and though he emphasizes the importance of metaphor
within philosophical discourse, his own attempts to describe metaphoricity re-
main somewhat sketchy. The conceptual confusion that haunts all philosophical
accounts of rhetorical tropes may perhaps explain why he was willing to abandon
all rigid designations of the term metaphor while examining some of the concept’s
epistemological implications. Nietzsche takes the crucial step that shifts metaphor
from specific speech acts to a broader epistemological category at the beginning
of his “Darstellung der antiken Rhetorik,” where he turns to the relationship
between nerve stimulation and linguistic utterance. Did he truly want to suggest
a physiological origin for the ubiquity of metaphor? If so, does this mean that
he shifted his emphasis from a purely rhetorical concept of metaphor to a wider
anthropological framework?
Although this is a surprising turn in his work on rhetoric, Nietzsche’s interest
in the physiological origin of speech acts had far-reaching consequences for his
understanding of perception and consciousness. Again, Nietzsche regarded men-
tal activity as directly dependent on signs and images and thus on manifold forms
of signification. Such an understanding of mental activity was not new, for Ar-
istotle notes in De anima that thinking is essentially based on the use of signs
and images.3 Strangely, however, he also claims that images or signs are not
themselves thoughts. This conception changed in the course of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, and writers from Condillac and Herder onward con-
strued thoughts as signs, but the question remains: signs of what? A tentative
answer can be found in more recent approaches in philosophical psychology and
cognitive science that have occasionally characterized thinking as a form of “in-
ner verbalization” or at least as concept formation.4
It might initially seem that Nietzsche followed these ideas, but a closer inspec-
tion reveals that he had a specific understanding of mental activity that he based
not only on rhetorical models and the fundamental rhetoricity of reason but also
on contemporary physiology and psychology. By the 1860s Nietzsche was already
occasionally reading and referring to physiological and psychological studies,
and his reading lists of the time include a range of fairly illustrious examples,
such as Rudolf Virchow’s Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur wissenschaftlichen Me-
dizin (1865), Wilhelm Wundt’s Vorlesungen über die Menschen- und Thierseele
(1863), and Johannes Müller’s seminal Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen
(1835).5 In Arthur Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1819; 2d ed.,
1844), Friedrich Albert Lange’s Geschichte des Materialismus (1866), and Eduard
von Hartmann’s Philosophie des Unbewussten (1869), Nietzsche encountered nu-
merous and at times detailed expositions of physiology and psychology, and in
Johann Carl Friedrich Zöllner’s Über die Natur der Cometen (1872), he found a
general, albeit critical, exposition of Hermann von Helmholtz’s understanding
of perception and scientific knowledge, which largely dominated nineteenth-
century German physiological debates. So far, however, it has gone unnoticed
that Nietzsche relates these discussions to his reflections on language and rheto-
ric. His doing so led Nietzsche to an understanding of rhetoric as a model that
can formulate the relationships among the external world, physical stimulation,
nervous processes, mental representations, and knowledge. To explain this in-
tertwining of rhetoric and (neuro)physiology in more detail, however, it is nec-
essary to consider some of Nietzsche’s own sources, as well as the wider intel-
lectual constellations within which he moved.
Both physiology and psychology emerged as fields of research between the late
eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries. Neurophysiology developed from
the discourse of medicine, whereas psychology detached itself from philosophi-
cal thought, but despite their different origins, in the nineteenth century they
moved toward a common point: the functional description of mental activity.6
In his programmatic Psychologie als Wissenschaft (1824–25), for instance, Johann
Friedrich Herbart demands that psychology proceed along the lines of the natu-
ral sciences’ experimental paradigms, and in his equally important Elemente der
Psychophysik (1860), Gustav Theodor Fechner follows Herbart’s suggestions and
proposes a scientific reassessment of traditional psychological commonplaces in
terms of the functional relationships among physical and mental factors.7 This
conception of physiology and psychology, which were trying to establish them-
selves as empirical sciences, did not go unnoticed, and Nietzsche incorporated
many aspects of these emerging scientific disciplines into his philosophical en-
terprise.8 Indeed, his vivid interest in physiological issues has attracted a consid-
erable amount of scholarly attention; Gregory Moore, for example, recently
examined how the metaphors that dominated physiological discourse in the
increasingly “medicalized” culture of the later nineteenth century also shaped
Nietzsche’s notions of power, morality, and art.9 What is occasionally termed the
“biologization” of Nietzsche’s thought, however, became particularly prominent
during the 1880s, when the much-quoted notions of decadence and degeneration
began to mark his writings. As a consequence, many discussions of Nietzsche’s
philosophical appropriation of physiology limit themselves to the period between
1878 and 1888 and focus either on his reflections on aesthetics and morality or
on his conceptions of decadence and the human body. It is necessary to realize,
however, that the effects of Nietzsche’s interest in physiology, especially the
physiology of perception, appeared much earlier—namely, in his studies on
language, rhetoric, and the mind.
Language, Translation, and the Science of Perception

In “Darstellung der antiken Rhetorik” Nietzsche describes the relation between
reality and language in detail.10 He argues that linguistic reference must fail
because it refers not to reality or knowledge but only to stimuli and beliefs: “In
using language, man does not perceive things or events but only stimuli: he does
not express sensations [Empfindungen] but merely images of sensations [Abbil-
dungen von Empfindungen]. Initially triggered by a nervous stimulus, the sensa-
tion does not provide any access to the thing itself: this sensation is represented
externally by an image” (KGW II/4, p. 426). In this passage Nietzsche argues for
a physiological origin of belief much like that outlined, for instance, in Rudolph
Hermann Lotze’s Medicinische Psychologie oder Physiologie der Seele (1855), Otto
Funke’s Lehrbuch der Physiologie (1855–57), and especially Lange’s monumental
history of materialism, which devotes much attention to the status of the human
sciences in the nineteenth century. For Lange, perception is already a form of
abstraction and results in mental representations.11 This account corresponds to
Gerber’s argument that we can think only in chains of mental images and that
these images necessarily structure our linguistic abilities.12 Nietzsche combines
these approaches in his assertion that language is a representation of abstract
images produced by perception. This paradigm of representation (mental and
linguistic) seems to be based both on Aristotle’s idea that perception (aisthesis)
is related to images (phantasmata) and on Lange’s and Zöllner’s insistence that
there is no such thing as pure, unmediated perception.13
Zöllner’s Über die Natur der Cometen, an idiosyncratic collection of philo-
sophical essays, scientific papers, and aphoristic reflections, was especially im-
portant for Nietzsche’s understanding of contemporary science. Indeed, Zöllner
provides a tableau of intersecting scientific positions, including those of Helm-
holtz and Fechner. In an overly detailed epistemological critique of contemporary
science that occasionally borders on the obscure, he finally presents the view that
“unconscious judgments” (unbewusste Schlüsse) must be regarded as the starting
point for all knowledge, scientific or otherwise. For Zöllner, then, the self-con-
scious application of reason cannot be regarded as the foundation for knowledge,
because it will always be preceded by a kind of psychological automatism that
lets us realize the need for specific logical deductions.14 Although he sought to
test this idea against a rather specific scientific theory—John Tyndall’s theory of
comets—he nevertheless regarded such unconscious judgments as an ubiquitous
psychological phenomenon.
This approach seems quite close to Nietzsche’s epistemological skepticism, but
the two differ fundamentally. Zöllner assumes such unconscious judgments to
be the foundation of reason, whereas Nietzsche, influenced by rhetorical theory
and his doubts about the value of truth, rejects any notion of unconscious judg-
ments, which essentially represent a form of unconscious reason. Nietzsche seems
to have been unhappy with this notion of unconscious judgments for yet an-
other reason, however—namely, Zöllner’s debt to a specific understanding of
physiology as a “human science”: the mathematization of physiological pro-
cesses, such as visual perception and the formation of spatial consciousness, which
was advanced by Helmholtz, Fechner, and Ernst Heinrich Weber, led Zöllner to
demand a “psychophysics” of such physiological processes.15 Thus, although
Zöllner criticizes Helmholtz for his desire to reduce appearances in nature to
mathematically measurable events, his own approach is not far removed from
the one he ascribes to Helmholtz. Nietzsche, however, reprimands Zöllner for
overlooking the rhetorical and linguistic nature of mental representations and,
by implication, of perception: human perception and any ensuing mental activ-
ity is based on tropes, not on unconscious judgments:
It is tropes, not unconscious judgments, on which our sensory perceptions are based.
To identify one similar thing with another—to discover some kind of similarity
between different things, is the primordial process [Urprozeß]. Memory thrives on
this activity and exercises it constantly. . . . Abstraction is a highly significant prod-
uct [Erzeugniß]. It is an impression that has been retained and petrified in memory
and that is compatible with very many appearances and, therefore, very crude and
inadequate. (KGW III/4, 19 [217])16
By highlighting the inadequate character of abstraction, Nietzsche also indi-

rectly criticizes Zöllner’s understanding of science. Despite his unease about the
seeming lack of theoretical reflection he discovered among his peers, Zöllner
nevertheless subscribed to a notion of science as a highly logical and deductive
enterprise with firm foundations. The fact that Zöllner drew his collection’s
motto from William Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences (1837) and dedi-
cated the book to the memory of Johannes Kepler tells something about the
theoretical orientation of Zöllner’s approach—after all, he was a professor of
astrophysics at the University of Leipzig, and his institutional position is men-
tioned on the title page. Most telling, though, is his attempt to appeal to the
most prominent scientific authority, even in the nineteenth century: the intro-
duction to his book is preceded by Isaac Newton’s regulae philosophandi, his “rules
of reasoning in natural philosophy,” which present the exact sciences as a logical
deduction from phenomena according to the sufficient relationship between
causes and effects.17 Of course, Helmholtz would not have disagreed with the
authority of Whewell, Kepler, and Newton, but things are different with Nietz-
sche: once he had discovered the primacy of metaphor for the formation of
knowledge, he was unable to accept such logical rules of deduction, at least not
in the form presented by Newton, for he had to hold on to the view that causes,
effects, rules, logical deduction, and natural phenomena are based on meta-
phorical abstractions. In fact, Nietzsche would take this cognitive skepticism one
step further, rather radically describing perception and nervous processes along
the lines of rhetoric. His criticism of Zöllner’s “unconscious judgments” led him
to seek a foundation, or starting point, for knowledge that is grounded both in
metaphor as an explanatory model and in human physiology as the natural
precondition for metaphor. Ultimately, this would force him to reassess our no-
tions of consciousness and selfhood, but because this approach is essentially based
on a specific understanding of metaphor, we must first examine the meaning of
this concept in more detail.
In his notes under the title “Darstellung der antiken Rhetorik,” Nietzsche
quotes Gerber’s Sprache als Kunst and declares that ordinary language is always
figurative (KGW II/4, p. 427).18 He subsequently narrows this definition and
notes that tropes are based on a form of translation;19 on the level of oratory, that
is, words are replaced by other words with a different semantic framework (KGW
II/4, p. 449). Now the chief model for such a translation or transposition is
metaphor, as he remarks with reference to Isocrates and Aristotle (KGW II/4, p.
443).20 Nietzsche apparently recalled that he had to introduce his students to the
principles and features of ancient rhetoric, however, and he therefore goes on to
define metaphor in classical terms, and without much further philosophical
speculation, as “a shorter simile” (KGW II/4, pp. 443 and 462) and urges caution
with regard to its excessive use. Still, a closer reading reveals that he was more
interested in a different aspect of metaphor, namely, its definition as transla-
tion.
Again, both Quintilian and Cicero considered metaphorical speech to be a
necessary ingredient of linguistic expression because the absence of a correct
literal expression often forces us to use metaphor.21 Cicero acknowledges that
metaphor ultimately became a pleasing and entertaining mode of speech, but its
origin lay in our need to express things that are not represented by any literal
expression.22 Nietzsche was aware of this argument (KGW II/4, p. 442), and he
agreed with Cicero that the indeterminacy of language is the source of figurative,
tropical, and ultimately metaphorical speech—this argument undoubtedly comes
from Cicero, who notes in De oratore: “There is nothing in the world the name
of which cannot be used in connection with other things.”23 Here Cicero means
that we need not call a tree by the word tree or a snake by the word snake; we
can and sometimes must use different words for a particular thing. In this sense,
metaphor itself means an act of transference or transposition based on some form
of likeness, and when Nietzsche discusses metaphor in “Darstellung der antiken
Rhetorik,” he focuses less on its classical definition as simile and more on the
meaning of meta and pherein as Übertragung.24 Furthermore, he encountered this
description of metaphor in Gerber’s Sprache als Kunst,25 but again, his primary
sources were Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian: Aristotle’s term metaphora, intro-
duced in his Rhetoric, is rendered in Latin by Cicero and Quintilian as translatio,
which becomes somewhat of a commonplace in the rhetorical textbooks of the
Western tradition from Augustine onward.26
The description of language as a form of transference or translation has a
further dimension of which Nietzsche was definitely aware, namely, the eigh-
teenth-century discussion regarding the origin of language. At least since the
Renaissance, archaic languages have usually been seen as rich in images, symbols,
and tropes, or as Rousseau remarked, “the first form of language must have been
of a figurative character” (le premier langage a dut être figuré).27 One prominent
participant in this discussion was Herder’s mentor, Johann Georg Hamann, and
Nietzsche read part of Hamann’s writings between January and March 1873 while
he was working on his lectures on rhetoric as well as the essay on truth and false-
hood.28 He would not have missed Hamann’s Aesthetica in nuce (1762), where
Hamann criticizes the rationalistic exegesis of scripture and suggests instead that
language is a form of epiphanic translation, a passage through different spheres
according to a teleological and theological hierarchy. Speaking, he explains, is a
translation from the “language of angels” to the language of human beings, that
is, a translation of ideas into words, things into names, and images into signs.29
Hamann’s thesis, which is to some extent prefigured in Augustine’s De doc-
trina Christiana and Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, states that all signs are trans-
lated. This would prove to be an important idea for Nietzsche, even though he
did not share Hamann’s Neoplatonic tendencies or the theological overtones of
his linguistic thought. The idea that linguistic activity can be understood as a
kind of translation, however, can be found throughout the Western tradition,
from Aristotle to Hamann and beyond. When added to Nietzsche’s understand-
ing of metaphor as representing language’s translational dimension, this idea
means that all language is metaphorical. Indeed, Nietzsche had good reasons for
using metaphor in such a wide sense.
As can be seen with regard to Aristotle and Augustine, ancient philosophy of
language and Patristic hermeneutics focused mainly on the relation between
language and reality and less on the more complicated connection between
language and thought.30 This situation changed following the Logique de Port-
Royal and Locke’s reflections on linguistic signification, when, for instance, Jo-
hann Georg Sulzer’s Anmerkungen über den gegenseitigen Einfluß der Vernunft in
die Sprache und der Sprache in die Vernunft (1767) and Johann Gottfried Herder’s
Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (1772) paid considerable attention to
the interdependence of language and thought. Despite the emergence of physi-
ology, psychology, and phrenology in the late eighteenth century, and despite
the success of works such as Samuel Thomas Soemmering’s Über das Organ der
Seele (1796), the connection between language and mental states continued to
be a serious problem for any reflection on language.31 Nietzsche attempted to
solve this problem by linking his understanding of language as metaphor to the
findings of nineteenth-century neurophysiology, and we must understand his
definition of metaphor as transmission in precisely this context.
Physiology experienced an unprecedented explosion of empirical research in
the mid-nineteenth century, subsequently becoming one of the central fields
within the much wider discourse of the life sciences at German universities. Not
surprisingly, these developments influenced the study of human language fairly
directly, particularly physiological and psychological investigations of the way
language operates. Nor was this situation limited to the German context, for the
work of the Paris neurologist Pierre Paul Broca on aphasia and the localization
of the linguistic faculty in the brain led to a growing intertwining of physiolog-
ical and linguistic research. Influenced by anatomical and experimental studies
of human physiology, and often inspired by contemporary research on the hu-
man perception of sound, such as Hermann von Helmholtz’s seminal study Die
Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der
Musik (1863)—which Nietzsche read in the early 1870s—the medical profession
in Germany and Austria increasingly regarded language as a particularly intrigu-
ing problem.32 This was especially the case toward the middle of the nineteenth
century, when the Viennese physician Ernst W. Brücke published his Grundzüge
der Physiologie und Systematik der Sprachlaute (1856), which was aimed primarily
at teachers of the deaf, and when Carl Ludwig Merkel, professor of medicine at
the University of Leipzig, presented his voluminous study Anatomie und Physi-
ologie des menschlichen Stimm- und Sprach-Organs (1857), which contained almost
one thousand pages of experiments, examples, and discussions. But this growing
interest in linguistic topics was not limited to medical physiologists. Influenced
by the expanding experimental laboratory culture within the human sciences,
psychologists turned to a detailed examination of language as an exceptionally
important aspect of human development. For example, Wilhelm Wundt, who
worked under Helmholtz at the University of Heidelberg’s Institute of Physiol-
ogy from 1857 to 1864 and founded the first laboratory for experimental psychol-
ogy in Leipzig in 1879, was especially interested in the relationship between
mental sensations and sensory processes, and in his later work he used some of
his experimentally obtained results to investigate what it means to think aloud.
Likewise, another psychologist from Heidelberg, Otto Caspari, casts language
as an extremely important factor for the psychological development of the human
mind in his study Die Sprache als psychischer Entwicklungsgrund, published in
1864, when Nietzsche entered the University of Bonn.33
Übertragung and transference are the terms nineteenth-century physiology and
psychology used to denote the relation between initial nerve stimulation and
subsequent mental states. When Helmholtz measured the rate of nerve conduc-
tion and found that the transmission of the nervous impulse from stimuli to
sensation is relatively slow, he introduced an inductive model based on the rela-
tion between particular stimulation and more general mental processes.34 Not
only is this an empiricist position in that it portrays the acquisition of belief to
be based on sensory experience; in addition, it implies that thinking results from
electromotive transmissions. Remember that when Nietzsche attempted to de-
scribe the relationship between perception and language as the basis of rhetori-
cal tropology, he assumed a break between physical events and mental states
(KGW II/4, p. 426). The issue now becomes how physical events, nerve stimu-
lation, sensory perception, and mental representations are connected with one
another, an issue that experimental psychologists and physiologists debated
throughout the nineteenth century. Nietzsche does not answer this question in
his lectures and notes on rhetoric, because it is sufficient for him to point out
that linguistic utterances represent not physical events or the external world but
only mental states. He does not ignore the problematic connection between
perception and language, however; rather, in “Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im
aussermoralischen Sinne” and his notebooks of 1872–73, he rephrases it in phys-
iological terms as a form of transference, translation, or transmission from nerve
stimulation to linguistic utterances: the way from perception to language is a
“metaphorical” leap between two completely different and unrelated realms of
experience. To understand the full extent of this argument and its development,
it is necessary to pay some attention to his sources and, once again, to the intel-
lectual contexts of his time.
When Nietzsche read Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung in
October or November 1865, he found in the second volume a thorough philo-
sophical critique of Locke’s and Kant’s theories of perception, understanding,
and knowledge from an antimetaphysical perspective that attempted to include
some of the scientific debates from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. He encountered not only a rejection of direct access to reality but also
numerous passages where Schopenhauer elaborates his criticism of traditional
epistemological theories with the help of examples drawn from contemporary
physiology.35 Some of these examples are strikingly bizarre and not always com-
patible with the physiological debates taking place toward the middle of the
nineteenth century, but importantly, Schopenhauer discusses the relationship
between sensory perception and mental processes. A child of his own eclectic
time, and rather critical toward the general positions of German idealism, Scho-
penhauer seems to present a strictly materialist point of view and argues that our
perception of “reality”—that is, our perception of the external world and of our
own mental states—results from physiological processes. Mental representations
are nothing but brain functions: “For in consequence of our objective consider-
ation of the intellect, the world as representation, as it exists extended in space
and time and continues to move regularly according to the strict rule of causal-
ity, is primarily only a physiological phenomenon, a function of the brain that
brings this about on the occasions of certain external stimuli, it is true, but yet
in accordance with its own laws.”36 Schopenhauer goes on to exemplify this
particular point with reference to the physiology of the brain. The central nervous
system, he contends, consists of two kinds of nerves: those that respond to ex-
ternal stimuli and those that convey this stimulation to the brain and across the
complex nervous system—Schopenhauer himself speaks of a “transmission” of
impulses.37 Schopenhauer follows the Aristotelian principle that anything in our
understanding or intellect must have previously been received through sensory
perception (“nihil est in intellectu, nisi quod antea fuerit in sensu”), but this does
not mean that he pursues a simplistically empiricist position. Rather, he argues
that propositional knowledge of any kind must be regarded as the product of
complex sensory and nervous processes, and he emphasizes the direct connection
between nervous impulses in perception and their respective mental representa-
tions: perception is an immediate and nonconceptual physiological act marked
by a transmission between nerves and brain.
This is an important point for Nietzsche, because insofar as perception is a
process of translation from nervous stimulation to consciousness, it can be de-

scribed in rhetorical terms as involving metaphor.38 After he read Schopenhauer,
moreover, Nietzsche found more circumstantial evidence for this argument in
the physiological and scientific treatises to which he turned during his years as
a student in Bonn and Leipzig and as a young professor in Basel. This scientific
interest, which was not unusual among nineteenth-century philosophers, per-
sisted in Nietzsche until the late 1880s. Nietzsche was thus responding to an
intellectual environment in which the studies of Helmholtz became more dom-
inant than, say, the philosophical systems of Kant or Hegel and in which, for
instance, Emil DuBois-Reymond’s Über die Grenzen des Naturerkennens (1872)
and Franz Brentano’s Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (1874) laid the
groundwork for a theory of knowledge that would continue to be debated in the
twentieth century.39 In addition, Lange’s voluminous history and critique of
materialism provided Nietzsche with a contrastive analysis of the philosophical
implications of the natural sciences in the nineteenth century. Throughout the
1880s—and to some extent triggered by his reading of Paul Rée’s Der Ursprung
der moralischen Empfindungen (1877), which relies heavily on a Darwinian frame-
work—Nietzsche continued to base many of his philosophical reflections about
morality and religion on biological models derived from, for instance, Wilhelm
Roux’s Der Kampf der Theile im Organismus (1881) and the German edition of
Michael Foster’s Text Book of Physiology (1877). A principal representative of
German embryology, Roux was a prominent figure within nineteenth-century
physiology, as was Foster, the founder of the Cambridge School of Physiology,
which contributed enormously toward the professionalization of physiology in
Victorian Britain.40
Admittedly, Nietzsche’s knowledge of specific topics and debates in the natu-
ral sciences and life sciences was highly selective, but his reading lists and the
references scattered throughout his notebooks from the mid-1860s onward show
that he was quite aware of the scientific trends of his time. He often gained a
better insight into these trends through summary accounts and secondhand
references, but these selective readings influenced his emerging theoretical reflec-
tions on physiology and the mind quite strongly. Furthermore, these texts offered
him a more detailed and sophisticated account of the translational relationship
between physical events and mental representations than Schopenhauer pro-
vided; more important, they almost always described this relationship in terms
of a transmission or transference. The notion of transmission that appears in the
writings from Helmholtz onward, however, is based on the phenomenon of
electricity, which had been en vogue in the intellectual circles of German roman-
ticism. During the nineteenth century, electricity, conductors, and the principles
of electromagnetic induction not only became central issues in physiological

research but also came to fuel the public imagination considerably.41 Thus, to
understand Nietzsche’s rhetorical concept of metaphorical Übertragung in the
context of his physiological interpretation of mental activity, we must turn to
the status of electricity in nineteenth-century physics and neurophysiology, as
well as to the model of inductive reasoning.
Organic Electricity and the Inductive Sciences

Some of the most central discussions in late eighteenth-century physics focused
on the phenomena of electricity and magnetism, which could not be explained
with the mathematics of the dominant Newtonian paradigm for physical events.
As a consequence, studies such as Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments and Observa-
tions on Electricity (1751–54), Joseph Priestley’s History and Present State of Electric-
ity (1767), and Johann Christian Polycarp Erxleben’s Die Anfangsgründe der
Naturlehre (1772) shifted scientific attention from celestial mechanics and the
properties of light to the so-called imponderable phenomenon of electric flows.
This shift may initially appear to have little connection to Nietzsche’s rhetorical
thought and his ideas about language, consciousness, and the body, yet a con-
nection exists, for what seems to have been a minor change in direction within
a rather specific area of scientific research was in fact a fundamental epistemic
shift away from static conceptions of nature—a shift that lay at the center of
nineteenth-century science. The importance of this shift, and its influence on
the scientific outlook of the nineteenth century, reveals itself in the dissemination
of theories concerning electricity. By 1774, roughly twenty years after its initial
publication, Franklin’s study was available in five English editions, and by 1758
it had been translated into German by the Swedish physicist Johann Carl Wilcke.
In 1772 Priestley’s treatise was translated into German by the physician Johann
Georg Krünitz, and from 1784 onward Erxleben’s highly influential textbook was
continually revised and enlarged by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who took
over Erxleben’s professorship in physics at the University of Göttingen. This
enormous interest in electricity paved the way for the ground-breaking research
of Alessandro Volta in Italy.42 In particular, Volta’s renowned lectures at the
University of Padua from 1778 to 1784 and his development of the electrophorus,
a device consisting of an insulator and a metal plate that generates static electric-
ity, moved the phenomenon of electrical flows to the center of late-eighteenth-
century physics.43
Volta’s research also initiated a remarkable controversy with Luigi Galvani.
Whereas Volta maintained that electrical flows should be understood in terms
of “metallic electricity,” Galvani challenged this view in De viribus electricitatis

in motu musculari commentarius (1791), arguing that electric flows are mainly an
organic phenomenon. Galvani attempted to prove his theory with a famous
experiment, carried out in 1786, that investigated the effect of applying electric
current to the muscles in the leg of a frog. The experiment involved an arc made
of two different metals; one end was placed in contact with a nerve, and the
other, with a muscle. The electric current between the two metals would stimu-
late the nerve and thus move the muscle—at least, this was Galvani’s conclusion.
Volta replied that the electric current itself is independent from the frog’s nerve
and muscle, which act only as conductors.44 Nevertheless, although Volta’s ex-
perimental studies and his explanations proved to deliver more successful ex-
planatory models, Galvani’s theory of “animal electricity,” now known as “Gal-
vanic stimulation” and regarded as the basis for the modern conception of
neural activity, profoundly affected the understanding of electrical flows within
German romantic Naturphilosophie: Johann Wilhelm Ritter, for instance, came
to regard electricity as an immaterial force of nature that pervades both the in-
organic and the organic world.45
In the years after Ritter’s somewhat speculative suggestions, nineteenth-cen-
tury research into electricity proceeded within an understanding of physics as
an exact and unified science of nature, and the seminal work of Hans Christian
Oersted, Michael Faraday, and James Clerk Maxwell sought to explain electrical
currents, electromagnetism, and electrodynamics both experimentally and math-
ematically. This approach was especially successful in Germany, where the con-
tinuing institutionalization of the physical sciences through the rising labora-
tory culture led to an unprecedented explosion in experimental research.46
Although Nietzsche was certainly aware of these developments through his
ongoing interest in the natural sciences, his knowledge of nineteenth-century
physics was no doubt relatively limited. Research into electric currents was not
restricted to the exact science of physics, however, for Galvani’s and Ritter’s ideas
about “animal electricity,” or more precisely, “organic electricity,” received much
attention in medical circles, and electrostatic generators were occasionally used
in attempts to cure ailments from nervous disorders and headaches to deafness
and blindness. The range of these experiments often verges on the bizarre, but
even so, the connection between electricity and the physiology of living organ-
isms became a fairly well established paradigm. Indeed, it received renewed at-
tention throughout the nineteenth century, so that in his voluminous Untersu-
chungen über thierische Electricität (1848–84), for instance, Emil DuBois-Reymond
attempted to apply the results of research on electricity to the physiology of
animals.47 Finally, the Berlin school that emerged around Helmholtz, which
sought to understand physiology according to physical principles, helped make

physiology itself a central scientific discipline in nineteenth-century Germany,
and the idea of measurable electric currents in organic material such as human
nerve fibers played an essential role in this field of study.
Nineteenth-century neurophysiology used electricity on two distinct levels.
On the one hand, artificially induced electrical flows in the brains of animals
(e.g., dogs, frogs, and rabbits) were examined to explain the connection between
certain mental states, such as pain, and motor nerves, such as those triggering
the sudden movement of a leg.48 On the other hand, similar methods were used
to localize mental operations in specific regions of the brain according to a
topographical model, a procedure that appears in the work of, for example, Pierre
Paul Broca, Pierre Flourens, and David Ferrier.49 Broca’s work on aphasia is es-
pecially interesting here, for Broca discovered that lesions in a relatively small
area of the frontal lobe can lead to a loss of speech, a finding that confirmed the
possibility of localizing specific mental functions, such as the expression of
thoughts through words, in the brain.50 His celebrated research thus exemplifies
how the study of language was increasingly intertwining with the study of men-
tal functions. The wide reception of such work, however, resulted in part from
the fact that, because of the steady refinement of laboratory technologies in the
second half of the nineteenth century, the human body became part of an ex-
perimental arrangement dominated to a considerable extent by electromagnetic
induction.51
Nietzsche was a keen reader of neurophysiological studies, such as Eduard
Hitzig’s Untersuchungen über das Gehirn (1874), which—based on earlier ex-
perimental work Hitzig carried out with his colleague Gustav Fritsch—discuss-
es the identification of sensory and motoric regions in the cerebral cortex, as well
as experiments showing that electrical stimulation of the latter leads to related
muscular movements.52 Supported by his reading of Lange’s Geschichte des Ma-
terialismus and the German translation of Alexander Bain’s Mind and Body (1873),
Nietzsche would not have missed these results, which featured prominently in
the contemporary discussions about nerves and brain. He might not have been
able to follow these discussions in every detail, but he seems to have been aware
of the general trends of nineteenth-century neurophysiology. In any case, he had
a more personal encounter with them. Faced with a growing number of symp-
toms, especially headaches and failing eyesight, he traveled to Frankfurt am Main
at the beginning of October 1877 to consult with the physician Otto Eiser, whose
medical expertise reflected the experimental paradigms of the day and who ac-
cordingly recommended a treatment of “electrotherapy.” A memorandum writ-
ten after Nietzsche’s appointment shows Eiser speculating that Nietzsche’s pain
attacks and other symptoms might have been related to an impaired function of
the so-called nervus sympathicus, part of what today is termed the autonomic
nervous system. Eiser suggested a “Galvanic current” with low intensity as the
ideal way forward (KGB II/6.2, p. 715). Keen on curing his ailments, Nietzsche
followed Eiser’s recommendations and was subsequently treated in Basel by Hein-
rich Schiess-Gemuseus, a professor of ophthalmology, and Eiser continued to
express high hopes for the results of this “electrotherapy” in his correspondence
to Nietzsche (KGB II/6.2, pp. 750, 765, 775).53 Through this biographical detail,
Nietzsche seems to have written himself into the very discourse that would
furnish the background to his understanding of the physiology of nervous pro-
cesses, perception, and consciousness.
Nineteenth-century physiology’s translational model of nervous processes as
electrical transmission was not an isolated phenomenon, however; even as elec-
trophysics and physiology were dealing with the question of conductors and
electrical inductions, the concept of induction as a principle of logical thought
was becoming increasingly important in philosophy. In his Philosophy of the
Inductive Sciences, founded upon their History (1840), William Whewell, a found-
er of the philosophy of science at Cambridge, attempted to formulate the prin-
ciple of inductive reasoning as the methodological foundation for the acquisition
of knowledge within the natural sciences. Whewell bases his account on the
Kantian assumption that perceptions of the external world are immediately re-
lated to one another through mental contributions, such as space and time.
Without such contributions, different perceptions, and therefore different aspects
of the external world, cannot be drawn together, so that these mental phenom-
ena represent the first step from the reception of disparate “facts” to a unified
scientific theory. Although there is no indication that Nietzsche read Whewell,
his theory of science is discussed in some detail, and with many quotations, in
Zöllner’s Über die Natur der Cometen, which Nietzsche studied in the early
1870s.54
John Stuart Mill criticized this notion of induction as leading to a theoretical
hypothesis about nature, but his System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive (1843)
returns to this intriguing problem and suggests that all sciences follow the logic
of induction inasmuch as their axioms need to generalize from the data of expe-
rience. In contrast to Whewell, Mill argues that this results not in hypotheses
about nature but in verifiable truth claims grounded in nature. Whether propo-
sitions about the world are based on verifiable causes or an intuitive synthesis of
perception and representation, the model of induction—that is, of inferring the
general from the particular—follows the principle of a more or less gradual
transition from one proposition about the world to another. Thus, Mill seeks to
establish inductive logic as the unifying principle of scientific reasoning, but he

also thematizes the close relationship between inductive and analogical judg-
ments, a point discussed in the rhetorical treatises of Cicero, Quintilian, and
Aristotle.55 Furthermore, he presents a model of the mind, or of mental pro-
cesses, that is indebted to the associational psychology of Locke and Hume, so
that induction becomes a fundamental feature of mental operations.56 In the first
edition of his treatise, Mill supports his views by appealing to James Mill’s Anal-
ysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829); that book was in turn a prin-
cipal source for Afrikan Spir’s Denken und Wirklichkeit (1873), which Nietzsche
consulted on many occasions throughout the 1870s.57 In later editions Mill cited
Alexander Bain’s work The Senses and the Intellect (1855) and Herbert Spencer’s
Principles of Psychology (1855) in his footnotes, and we can be sure that Nietzsche,
who read Mill’s treatises on ethics and the social sciences in German translation,
was fully aware of the general context within which Mill’s arguments developed.58
As is shown by several comments, beginning with a passing remark in Die fröhli-
che Wissenschaft (GS 373), Nietzsche continued to be interested in Spencer, and
Spir’s name first appears in an equally inconspicuous note from spring 1873 (KGW
III/4, 26 [1]). Ironically, Nietzsche, who owned the German edition of Mill’s
collected works edited by Theodor Gomperz and published between 1869 and
1880, did not have to read A System of Logic to situate it in its wider intellectual
field.
Induction, association, analogy, and translation constitute key elements of
Nietzsche’s intertwining of metaphor and mental processes, a melding based on
the relatively new idea that electricity flowing through nerve fibers explains how
stimulated nerves produce mental activity. This background is crucial for Nietz-
sche’s rhetorical concept of a metaphorical Übertragung involving nerve stimula-
tion, mental representations, language, and the general concepts with which we
seek to understand and ultimately control our environment. He could have
derived this idea from a variety of sources, but I will limit my discussion to some
central examples of which Nietzsche definitely had some acquaintance, either
direct or secondhand.
Nervous Systems and the Materialities of Communication

First, consider Ludwig Büchner’s Kraft und Stoff (1855) and Rudolph Hermann
Lotze’s Medicinische Psychologie, oder Physiologie der Seele (1852). After completing
his medical degree at the University of Giessen with a somewhat controversial
dissertation on Marshall Hall’s theory of “excito-motory” spinal nerves in 1848,59
Büchner became a particularly prominent contributor to contemporary discus-
sions about scientific materialism, and his popular and enormously successful
treatise on force and matter, advocating a radical form of scientific monism, went
through more then twenty editions. In this text he also returns to his earlier
deliberations on the physiology of the nervous system. Despite his medical back-
ground, his account lacks the sophisticated perspective of, say, DuBois-Reymond
or Hitzig. Presenting these issues in a more general manner aimed at a wider
audience, Büchner emphasizes a constant “metamorphosis” or “transposition”
of forces in nature, which he exemplifies with reference to the nervous system:
mental processes can be explained in terms of “electric currents.”60
Lotze studied philosophy and medicine at the University of Leipzig from 1834
to 1838, later succeeding Herbart at the University of Göttingen. His study, far
more precise than Büchner’s, aims at a detailed understanding of nerve pro-
cesses. A year earlier, in his Allgemeine Physiologie des körperlichen Lebens (1851),
he had presented an account of human physiology and especially neurophysiol-
ogy, and he continued this discussion in more detail in his Medicinische Psy-
chologie.61 Although Lotze was skeptical about the concept of “organic electric-
ity,” he regarded nerve processes as transitions between fibers that result in a
“transmission of stimulation” from an initial excitation to an ensuing form of
mental activity.62 He notes that “nerve processes” are the “medium between the
external world of stimuli and the internal world of representations” and then
describes the step from an external stimulus to internal mental representations
as a continuous metamorphosis: “That which we call the nervous process [Ner-
venprocess], and which alone we are able to study scientifically, will always consist
in a physical action [physische Bewegung] transmitted from one part to another.”63
According to Lotze, this physiological translation or transformation of nerve
processes advances in several steps: from external reality to stimuli, from stimu-
li to the nerve endings, from there to the various nerve processes which lead to
the brain and trigger an unconscious mental state, which itself turns into a spe-
cific perception.64 Although this account seems to require Lotze to assume a
direct physiological access to reality, he concludes that the complicated neuro-
physiological transpositions involved in any act of perception render such direct
access impossible.
This translational description of sensory perception is explained in even more
detail in Otto Funke’s Lehrbuch der Physiologie (1855–57), which Nietzsche read
in 1870 shortly after he turned his attention to the problem of language and while
he was already working on his later lectures on rhetoric. Presumably Funke’s
voluminous work influenced Nietzsche’s scientific knowledge as well as his con-
cept of Übertragung. In fact, Funke is quite explicit and describes the nerve fiber
as a “conductor,” that is, a “mechanism” that transfers a particular impulse from
one end to another, thereby connecting to other nerve fibers. In this respect,
Funke concludes, the process involved in human perception must be understood
quite literally as a “transmission from fiber to fiber.”65
This physiological description of sensory perception as a translational process,
originally formulated by Büchner, Lotze, and Funke, appears fairly commonly
in nineteenth-century works, including the writings of Helmholtz, Fechner’s
treatise on psychophysics, and Hartmann’s study on the unconscious.66 Not
surprisingly, then, this particular model influenced Nietzsche’s notion of percep-
tion and mental processes. These physiological reflections clearly display materi-
alist leanings, and Lange’s history of materialism provided Nietzsche the ultimate
connection between perception, nervous processes, and linguistic utterances.
Lange, who explicitly states that the physiology of sensory perception is an im-
portant field of scientific research with manifold philosophical implications, uses
almost all the descriptive terms of psychophysics and neurophysiology mentioned
previously.67 In fact, he speaks of “nerve conductors,” “nerve impulses,” the
“circulation of nervous processes,” and the “electric tension” within nerve fibers,
but in contrast to the physiological studies of, for instance, Lotze and Funke,
Lange also connects the nervous system to language. After rejecting the concept
of the soul and replacing it with the concept of the brain, he notes that nerve
fibers not only act as “conductors” of “electric currents” but also directly affect
“the contraction of muscles.”68 Lange was certainly thinking of the mouth,
tongue, and the laryngeal muscles, as well as the “respiratory muscles,” all of
which are set in motion by “nerve currents.” Thus, mental states such as think-
ing or feeling are physiological functions, but so too are the foundations of
language. Hence, Lange can assume a “peculiar connection between thinking
and speaking” that is based less on philosophical speculation than on, as he sees
it, physiological evidence. This is a crucial point, and Nietzsche no doubt noted
it, especially because Lange describes these nerve processes as a constant “fluc-
tuation of stimulation.”69
When Nietzsche turned to Gerber’s philosophy of language, he encountered
the final stage of this argument: according to Gerber, linguistic activity originates
in the physiological processes of perception.70 Nietzsche integrates this point in
his lectures on rhetoric, suggesting that perception is based less on external real-
ity than on nervous impulses that produce an “image” of reality. He thus remarks
that perceptions refer not to things but only to stimulations that produce im-
ages (KGW II/4, p. 426). But why does Nietzsche speculate about such issues in
lectures that are otherwise dedicated to Greek and Roman rhetoric? The most
important aspect of rhetoric—namely, the tropical nature of language—is a form
of transference or transposition, and metaphor became a master trope for Nietz-
sche insofar as it accurately describes such transference. It is now clear that he

was able to apply the same model to the relation between perception and lan-
guage.
The step from stimuli to language involves two distinct transpositions from
one realm of experience to another. This argument, which Nietzsche proposes
in his detailed lectures and notes on rhetoric on the basis of his secondhand
knowledge of nineteenth-century physiology, is fully expressed in a central pas-
sage of “Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne” that is often
seen as epistemologically fruitless: “The stimulation of a nerve is first translated
into an image! first metaphor. The image is then imitated by a sound! Second
metaphor. And each time there is a complete leap from one sphere straight into
a completely different and new one” (TL 144). The concept of transference or
transposition obviously plays a crucial role here. Language, Nietzsche seems to
suggest, is a figurative discourse in itself (that is, in the form of speech and writ-
ing), but the metaphoricity of language results from a more fundamental meta-
phorical process located beyond or perhaps before language. At stake here are
the relationships among the materiality of nervous processes, the formation of
introspective mental images, and the ensuing representations of these images in
verbalization.
Nietzsche’s use of the term metaphor here might be confusing, for metaphor
can exist only within language. What he seems to mean, however, is metaphor
as an explanatory model that can comprise the complexity of nervous processes,
mental representation, and language, and this model rests on the most basic
understanding of metaphor as a form of transferring or transmitting some kind
of information, content, or impulse from one level to another—or as Nietzsche
puts it, from one experiential sphere to another. This is an important point, and
Nietzsche’s inconspicuous statement in the essay on truth and falsehood is in
fact the product of a complex epistemic constellation that marked the history of
knowledge in the second part of the nineteenth century.
As was already noted, Helmholtz, Funke, and many other contemporary
physiologists referred to conductors of electricity, an electromagnetic apparatus,
and other, similar equipment of nineteenth-century laboratory culture to describe
nervous processes and the transmission from initial stimulation to neural con-
nections. This is hardly surprising, for nineteenth-century neurophysiology relied
on a variety of already fairly well established scientific and technological concepts
that served as convincing descriptive models with a clear explanatory function:
to elucidate nerve processes as electrical flows. Nonetheless, both neurophysiol-
ogy and what we might term the “technologies of electricity” rely on a specific
notion of transmission. In fact, the word itself was not widely in use before the
nineteenth century; here it is defined as a form of sending. As such, it involves

the model of communicating at a distance, and over the nineteenth century the
preferred model for transmission changed significantly and radically, from post-
al networks to electric flows. In the 1830s Samuel F. B. Morse and Charles Weath-
erstone begin to experiment with the transmission of signals, and therefore signs,
through electrical impulses. In the 1850s Charles Bourseul in France and Philipp
Reis in Germany suggested that it would be at least theoretically possible to
transform sound into such impulses and flows, and twenty years later their sug-
gestion resulted in Alexander Graham Bell’s patent for the telephone. Bell’s 1875
apparatus was able to transmit sound waves as electrical flows, a process that—de-
spite Bell’s unawareness of the electromagnetic principles involved—is based on
Faraday’s concept of electromagnetic induction. Around the time Nietzsche
noted that the leap from nervous processes to mental images and language is
marked by a gradual transformation of stimulation into language, the telegraph
and telephone established this transformation as the basic principle of commu-
nication. We might even argue that this led to a dislocation of what is perceived
as real. Ironically, then, the intersection of technology and the life sciences, which
at first sight seems to have relied on a more immediate approach to the realm of
the empirical, began to displace the empirical, and as Nietzsche clearly realized,
this displacement rendered the modern episteme highly problematic.
Nietzsche was of course familiar with the technological conditions of his time.
His travels through Germany, Switzerland, France, and Italy were possible only
because of the exponentially growing network of railway links among Leipzig,
Munich, Basel, Zurich, Nice, and Genoa, which made even the provincial wil-
dernesses of Naumburg, Sils-Maria, and Bayreuth relatively accessible to the
modern traveler. Speed’s dislocation of space and time, so aptly described by
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, informed Nietzsche’s experience of modernity, and the
organization of travel in the final decades of the nineteenth century furthermore
relied on a new infrastructure of communication—coils, wires, telegraph poles,
and electric signals—that often ran (and still run) along these railway lines.71
This network of railway links and telegraph wires, along with the resemblance
that the underlying principles of transport and sending bear to principles of the
nervous system, reveals the telegraph to have become the “nervous system” of
geographical and political territories.72 Thus, in Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen
(1873–76) Nietzsche laments the way modern consciousness seems to depend
largely on the circulation of information through newspapers and telegraphs, as
well as the strangeness of the new technological metaphors that have been derived
from the railway, the telegraph, and (curiously) the steam engine (UM I:11, IV:6).
These early remarks still reveal a nostalgic longing for a time of cultural authen-
ticity, however; in the second volume of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (1880),

he begins to express the notion that we cannot begin to imagine the long-term
implications of these technologies for the cultural consciousness of modernity
(HA II:ii:278).
In any case, Nietzsche’s travels through technological space were not the only
way in which he experienced the possibilities and limits of such “materialities of
communication.” His experience with the typewriter in March 1882 resulted in
a somewhat obscure remark in one of his letters: “Apart from the typewriter, a
machine that reads aloud [Vorlesemaschine] would be a very beautiful invention”
(KGB III/1, p. 151). With this inconspicuous remark he indicates the possibilities
of a technological arrangement that had been described at some length in Wolf-
gang von Kempelen’s relatively obscure Über den Mechanismus der menschlichen
Sprache (1791) and the 1803 edition of Erasmus Darwin’s philosophical poem The
Temple of Nature: or, The Origin of Society: the “talking machine.” Based mostly
on the principles of a small organ, this instrument was made of leather or rubber,
often with a silk ribbon as the vocal cord, and operated by keys that regulated
the flow of air through the apparatus. In his Life of Erasmus Darwin (1879), which
was a best-seller in both Germany and Britain, Ernst Ludwig Krause, the found-
er of the journal Kosmos and an acquaintance of Ernst Haeckel and Charles
Darwin, provides some information about this seemingly magical machine, which
became more prominent through the work of Joseph Faber.73 In the early 1840s,
probably inspired by von Kempelen’s account, Faber constructed a working
model of this machine that he exhibited in London and Philadelphia. Although
Faber’s model was bulky, it continued to fuel the public imagination throughout
the 1870s.74 Ultimately, however, the materialities of communication gravitated
toward the telegraph, telephone, and Thomas A. Edison’s phonograph, devices
that were based on electricity instead of air flows and that proved to be more
user friendly and applicable to a wide range of uses, from pure entertainment to
the recording of a patient’s clinical history, documenting the sounds of the nat-
ural world, and even archiving material for ethnomusical studies.75 Edison’s
phonograph was not commercially available in 1882, but Nietzsche’s passing
observation about the Vorlesemaschine should nevertheless be seen in the context
of a technological setting that changed the perception of language fundamen-
tally. In much the same way as the typewriter inaugurated the disappearance of
handwriting’s claim to authenticity, both the phonograph and Nietzsche’s imag-
inary Vorlesemaschine led to a separation of the human voice from the human
body. Ironically, although Nietzsche could not have foreseen the future success
of the phonograph, twenty years after his mental and physical breakdown, the
American Copyright Act of 1909 would define phonographs and gramophones
not as “recording machines” but as “reading machines.”76 Old metaphors die

hard.
The second half of the nineteenth century thus offers a paradox: communica-
tion and language were increasingly detached from the body, while the body
continued to serve as a model for communication. This situation posed seri-
ously problems for any account of knowledge and reality that sought to take
these new conditions into account. In his essay on truth and falsehood, therefore,
Nietzsche deploys his physiological speculations to present a fairly radical epis-
temological criticism of our notion of reality, concluding that not even natural
laws, together with the categories of space and time, can safeguard a unified form
of that which is supposed to be real:
Even the relation of a nervous stimulus to the image produced thereby is inher-
ently not a necessary relationship; but when the same image has been produced
millions of times and has been passed down through many generations of human-
ity, indeed eventually appears in the whole of humanity as a consequence of the
same occasion, it finally acquires the same significance for all human beings, as if it
were the only necessary image and as if that relation of the original nervous stimu-
lus to the image produced were a relation of strict causality. . . . Consequently, what
is a law of nature? It is not known to us in itself but only in its effects, that is, in its
relations to other laws of nature which are in turn known to us only as relations.
Thus, all these relations refer only to one another, and they are utterly incompre-
hensible to us in their essential nature; the only things we really know about them
are things which we bring to bear on them: time and space, in other words, relations
of succession and number. (TL 149)
Within the scientific and technological environments of the nineteenth century,

it seems, reality must dissolve into perspectival images, which are seen as “real”
precisely because they are quantifiable. Nietzsche’s epistemological criticism,
then, not only builds on his rhetorical thought but also reacts to a certain dislo-
cation of reality generated by the advent of technology and media that shaped
Nietzsche’s cultural environment. The techniques of sending and representing,
most of them based on electricity in one way or another, seem to have destroyed
the assumed immediacy and authenticity of written and oral information. The
perception of reality in the nineteenth century depended increasingly on the
simulating and figurative effects of media and technology, which transform the
experience of reality into a construction of that which is culturally seen as
“real.”77
These cultural effects of technological change, together with a new physiolog-
ical understanding of the relationship between stimuli and mental representa-
tions, pose intricate questions for a philosophically oriented account of percep-
tion, knowledge, and language. Nietzsche may not have been aware of all the
implications I have mentioned, but this wider epistemic constellation of physi-
ology and technology is mirrored by his account of the way we perceive our
environment. His intertwining of rhetorical thought and contemporary neuro-
physiological discourse becomes particularly obvious in a longer fragment writ-
ten in 1872–73, when he was pondering the epistemological issues of “Ueber
Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne.” This fragment corresponds in
many ways to accounts in Lotze and Funke, for example, but he superimposes
rhetorical principles on these physiological descriptions:
Stimulus—mnemomic image
connected by means of metaphor (analogical inference).
Result: similarities are discovered and revitalized. In a mnemonic image the re-
peated stimulus occurs once again.
Stimulus perceived—then repeated, in many metaphors, whereby related images from
various categories flow together. Every perception achieves a multiple imitation of
the stimulus, but transferred into different realms.
Stimulus sensed
transferred to related nerves
repeated there, in transferred form, etc.
What occurs is a translation of one sense impression into another. . . . This a wholly
universal phenomenon. (KGW III/4, 19 [227])
Different stimuli lead to specific mental images, and the relationships among
the latter are marked by resemblance or difference, so that different mental im-
ages can intuitively be drawn into one and in turn trigger new stimuli and nerve
processes leading to other constellations of such mental images. Physiologically
speaking, stimuli are constantly transformed as nervous processes and mental
images; rhetorically speaking, this process can be described as a metaphorical
operation. As Nietzsche notes, the transition from perception to language and
from one complex of mental representations to another proceeds in a “meta-
phorical” manner, as a translation from image to image (KGW III/4, 19 [107]),
and does not start with any kind of external reality or Kantian thing-in-itself.
Significantly, Nietzsche does not maintain that physiological states are meta-
phors—he clearly understands them to be biological phenomena, for he often
endorses a biologization of knowledge, a principle that continued to influence
his later thought. Thus, building from his earlier scientific reading and subsequent
reflections on the status of perception, throughout the 1880s he was able to
maintain fairly straightforwardly that any form of experience, from ethical feel-
ings to apperceptions of reality, must be seen as the result of “our own nervous
processes” (KGW V/1, 10 [E95]) and of processes within the brain (KGW V/1, 1
[115]). His by far most explicit statement with regard to the physiological foun-
dation of knowledge appears in his notebooks of spring 1884, where he points
out that what we perceive to be the operations of intellectual faculties should be
regarded as a sophisticated result of organic functions: “That which is com-
monly attributed to the mind [Geist] seems to me to be the essence of the or-
ganic [das Wesen des Organischen]: and in the highest functions of the mind I can
find only a sublimated form of organic functions (assimilation selection secretion
etc.)” (KGW VII/2, 25 [356]). This does not contradict his earlier reflections on
the relationships among perception, mental images, and language, for Nietzsche
here still assumes intellectual operations to be “metaphors” of organic functions,
and his earlier idea that the interaction of psychological states and our awareness
of them can be efficiently described in terms of metaphor and according to a
rhetorical model is more important for his understanding of the mind than is
generally assumed.
This does not mean, however, that we should understand Nietzsche as an
eliminative materialist insofar as he tends to reduce mental events to neurologi-
cal processes. Whether he is a materialist or, as Maudemaire Clark has claimed,
an empiricist78 is beside the point, especially with regard to the development of
his linguistic thought and its rhetorical background. No philosophical reflection
on language should adopt an empiricist perspective, for language operates as a
medium between that which we perceive as reality and that which we regard as
our mental world. Nietzsche does occasionally employ materialist arguments, for
he seems to understand thought as a product of organic processes. Nevertheless,
his emphasis on language as a medium that prevents direct knowledge of the
physical world, and his implicit assumption that rhetoric is merely a model for
much more complicated mental processes, makes it impossible for him to adopt
a full-fledged materialist position. And in any case, as Lange points out, it does
not really matter whether we speak of “mental” or “physical” processes.79
If we have no direct access to the physical world, then we cannot appeal to
physical events in characterizing the relationship between, on the one hand,
sensory stimulations and nervous processes and, on the other, mental represen-
tations and language. The step from physical functions to mental representations
will always involve a leap from one sphere into another. Metaphor, and by im-
plication rhetoric, can serve as a fairly powerful model to describe and explain
this relationship, for the history of psychology is in fact governed by metaphors
and models designed to account for the complexities of mental representations.80
Nietzsche thus uses materialist arguments when they seem reasonable, but his
reading of Lange’s Geschichte des Materialismus left him fully aware of the prob-
lematic epistemological status of such arguments. What is at stake here, then, is
his emphasis on the tropical or metaphorical character of perceiving and know-

ing. This does not mean that perception itself is a metaphorical process; rather,
it merely makes sense to conceive of it as such. In this respect Nietzsche’s vision
of metaphor and rhetoric as a springboard into questions regarding the relation-
ships among physiology, thought, and language inevitably generates an anthro-
pological perspective. As a result, it will be necessary to take a closer look at how
he formulates the relationship between the mind and the external world.
Language, Self, and Mind

In “Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne” Nietzsche intro-
duces a startling image to describe the order of our conceptual knowledge: a
Roman columbarium (TL 146–47). It is not surprising that Nietzsche, the much-
quoted philosopher of the labyrinth, turns to architectural images. After all, such
architectural models and metaphors have always featured prominently in mod-
ern European philosophical thought.81 It is surprising, however, that many com-
mentators have overlooked Nietzsche’s columbarium.82 As I will show, his use of
this image is not arbitrary; far more than a figure of speech, it is deeply con-
nected to his rhetorical understanding of the way knowledge is produced. Again,
under the influence of Aristotle, Nietzsche paid much attention to the topical
dimension of rhetoric, to the structuring of arguments and commonplaces in a
sequential order (dispositio); this is background against which we should recon-
sider his use of the columbarium. A columbarium is literally a pigeon house, or
dovecote, but it also refers to a communal subterranean mausoleum whose walls
are geometrically structured by niches.83 These recesses contain cinerary urns
that are ordered according to a topical model resembling a net of coordinates
(gradus, ordo, linia, locus). Every line and recess is numbered, and the ashes of
relatives and families are often arranged horizontally in a so-called linia perpetua,
whereas the vertical sequence represents the status of the dead. Lower niches, for
example, are more expensive because they are easily accessible.
Nietzsche’s interest in the columbarium as an architectural monument is not
surprising. Nietzsche mentioned it for the first time in his philological lecture
series “Einleitung in die lateinische Epigraphik,” which he delivered at the Uni-
versity of Basel in the winter semester 1871–72 (KGW II/4, p. 202). During the
early nineteenth century several of these sepulchral chambers were excavated
around Rome, and Nietzsche would have been aware of this, for instance, through
Otto Jahn’s archaeological lectures at the University of Bonn in 1864–65 or his
cursory readings in classical archaeology. In 1859 Jahn devoted a study to one of
the most prominent columbaria, and Johann Jakob Bachofen’s Versuch über die
Gräbersymbolik der Alten (1859) would have provided Nietzsche an extensive

treatment of Roman sepulchral monuments and their decoration, as well as a
table depicting the architectural structure of a columbarium that had been dis-
covered just outside Rome on the Via Latina in 1832.84
The columbarium acquires a new significance in the essay on truth and false-
hood, for Nietzsche applies it in an explicitly rhetorical context, where presum-
ably it represents the topical construction of our conceptual knowledge accord-
ing to an architectural model. Although the model in question is clearly
indebted to Aristotle’s Topics and Cicero’s De inventione, it also reflects the sys-
tematization of knowledge pursued by European philosophers in the modern
era. In his Discours de la méthode (1637) Descartes uses a variety of architectural
images (cities, buildings, and topographies), and he compares the proportional-
ity of architecture to the clarity and order of rational arguments.85 It is necessary,
Descartes writes, to structure our thought according to “parts” (parcelles) and “to
conduct our thoughts in an orderly fashion” (par ordre). Only then we can come
to “chains of reasoning” (chaisnes de raisons) that allow for conclusive judgments.86
Although Descartes had no incentive to admit to the rhetorical background of
this model, it is clearly indebted to a topical structure that would inform Nietz-
sche’s understanding of interpretation and conceptual knowledge. It is the place
where metaphor and memory, language and thought, converge.
In his notebooks from 1869–70, Nietzsche casually remarks that thinking
depends on retaining a fairly large variety of symbols and signs in one’s memory
(KGW III/3, 5 [80]), and in subsequent fragments from 1873 he describes human
memory as the mental construction of similarities and differences between cur-
rent and past perceptions and beliefs, which in rhetorical terms would have to
be understood as a largely metaphorical process: “All remembering is comparing,
that is, making things identical” (KGW III/4, 29 [29]). Much as the meta-
phorical character of our language and concepts lets us draw together different
perceptions and thus generate fairly complicated conceptual judgments about
the world, the faculty of memory leads us to assume the existence of identities
and differences within this world. Memory thus allows for an intellectual orga-
nization of our heterogeneous perceptions; that is, it allows us to realize that
certain things with rather specific attributes fall, for instance, into the category
of “apples.” For Nietzsche, memory seems to be a mostly unconscious and in-
tuitive cognitive process that enables us to recognize objects, events, and feelings
by identifying and comparing them with similar objects, events, and feelings of
which we have some acquaintance, either directly, through perception, or indi-
rectly, through reports: “The so-called unconscious judgments [unbewußte
Schlüsse] can be traced back to the all-preserving memory that provides us with
parallel experiences and, therefore, already knows the consequences of an action.

It is not the anticipation of the effect, but the feeling: identical causes, identical
effects, generated by a mnemonic image” (KGW III/4, 19 [147]). Thus, even a
fairly cursory glance at Nietzsche’s notebooks reveals the importance of memo-
ry, which is clearly a crucial aspect of his understanding of the mind (KGW III/4,
19 [179, 217]; KGW V/I, 6 [349]; KGW V/2, 11 [138]).
At the same time, this notion of memory is directly related to his rhetorical
studies and lecture notes, although his discussion of rhetorical memoria was
probably not the sole influence on his subsequent formulation of memory as a
central factor within intellectual and cultural development.87 Be this as it may,
in “Darstellung der antiken Rhetorik” he considers how a public orator in ancient
Greece or Rome would have been able to memorize a particularly long and
complicated speech. Following the well-known instructions given by Cicero and
Quintilian and in the so-called Rhetorica ad Herennium, themselves convenient-
ly summarized in Richard Volkmann’s Die Rhetorik der Griechen und Römer
(1872), Nietzsche explains that the orator merely had to imagine the spatial ar-
rangement of a particular building, its rooms and contents, which—as distinctive
places within a complex whole—can represent not only the order of the speech
but also its different arguments in the form of images (KGW II/4, pp. 500–501).88
Much like a spatial arrangement of places (loci, topoi) and images (imagines,
simulacra), memory supports the organization and succession of arguments.
Beyond its practical application for learning a specific speech by heart, however,
this spatial order can also serve as a wider model for the cognitive faculty of
memory. Indeed, both Cicero and Quintilian stress this particular cognitive
dimension of memory, which is first discussed in Aristotle’s more epistemologi-
cally inclined treatise on memory and reminiscence.89
Right from the beginning, then, the discourse of memory moved beyond
aesthetic considerations and more practical questions of rhetorical organization
to some of the most fundamental philosophical issues—namely, the functions
of the mind and the formation of the self. In his Einleitung in die Erfindungskunst
(1760), one of the many eighteenth-century treatises concerned with imagination,
the rather second-rate German philosopher Carl Friedrich Flögel pointed out
that memory should be regarded as a form of reason. Flögel’s suggestions are not
all that obscure, for throughout the eighteenth century, and to some extent still
in the nineteenth century, theories of memory always referred back to the psy-
chology of association.90 Because the organization of knowledge was often con-
ceived within the modern European tradition along the lines of the relationships
among imagination, reason, and memory, any serious theoretical reflection on
memory—from Aristotle to Nietzsche and beyond—had serious epistemological
implications that manifested themselves not only in philosophical thought itself

but also in literature and the arts. As such, the discourse about the function of
memory and the mind wrought effects on its wider cultural contexts, and Nietz-
sche’s own position no doubt reflects the intellectual tensions of his own age as
well as the technological and scientific changes that marked his environment.91
The reason Nietzsche turned to the problem of memory in the first place is
obvious enough, for within the philosophical tradition, which was often informed
by theological doctrine, the cognitive processes of memory are directly con-
nected to a notion of the self as a unified point of reference safeguarding per-
sonal identity and the continuity of human experience. Plato’s emphasis on the
immortality of the soul, most vividly expressed in the Phaedo, in many ways
provided the starting point for the protracted dualism of the mind-body problem,
which Nietzsche sees as the quasi-mythical foundation for the absurdities of
metaphysical thought. Plato’s conception of the soul as an immaterial agent that
is both self-identical and unchanging can be regarded as the historical basis for
the idea of a unified self that dominates much early modern European philoso-
phy, especially the writings of Descartes and Locke.92 In contrast, Aristotle’s
contention that mind and matter cannot be separated quite as clearly, and that
the soul itself consists of different parts with different functions, contains the
seeds of a philosophical critique that would ultimately undermine the idea of a
unified or unitary self.93 The tensions between Plato’s and Aristotle’s respective
claims set the stage for a further question: should the self be regarded as a unified
agent accessible by introspection or as the product of widely divergent sym-
bolic interactions between the mind and external reality that render the self a
multiple and changing point of reference? As Vincent Descombes points out in
a detailed assessment of the roots of cognitive science, this question still haunts
much recent thought on the role of human consciousness and mental processes.94
Nietzsche’s interest in these issues is perhaps not only more timely than is gener-
ally assumed but also indicative of the extent to which our notion of the self
remains uncertain.
Either way, the self as the main point of reference for human action, and
therefore for the formation of moral consciousness, is undoubtedly an intriguing
philosophical issue. Every attempt to explicate what Charles Taylor aptly terms
“the self in moral space” contributes somehow to the manner in which we perceive
the human condition, although we might have to accept, as Bernard Williams
has argued, that any notion of a morally authentic self has much to do with
“wishful thinking” and “self-deception.”95 For many early modern European
conceptions of the human, however, self-consciousness must be regarded as a
given if rationality and reason are to make any sense. Philosophers of this era
located reason in the self, which necessarily had to be constructed as unified.

The groundwork for this view was to some extent laid by Descartes’s Meditatio-
nes de prima philosophia (1641), which portrays thinking as the central function
of the soul, combining such diverse human activities as feeling, imagining, doubt-
ing, desiring, and so forth.96 In his Einleitung zu der Vernunfft-Lehre (1691) Chris-
tian Thomasius adopts this model and supplies the anthropological connection
between reason and the self. If we wish to understand the world, Thomasius
argues, we must understand the nature of reason, for reason underlies any un-
derstanding. But we can know what reason is, he continues, only once we have
established what it means to be human, that is, once we have gained some
clearer insight into our own selfhood.97 The use of mental faculties such as reason,
imagination, and reflection, Thomasius suggests, is possible only if we have an
a priori understanding of our own wholeness and of the unity of all our intel-
lectual faculties.
Such models of the self and consciousness run into difficulties if we accept
Nietzsche’s claim that reason depends on the tropical nature of language and
that philosophical concepts have linguistic origins. It runs into even greater dif-
ficulties if we accept his rhetorical model for the relationship between, on the
one hand, the physical world of stimuli and nervous processes and, on the oth-
er, the abstract world of mental representations and language. We can accord-
ingly expect Nietzsche to have rejected any notion of subjectivity and conscious-
ness that relies on an immediate connection between being and “thinking.”
During the late 1870s, as he became increasingly critical of metaphysics, he also
became interested in the concepts of mind and consciousness, and in the early
1880s he finally discussed the inadequacies of the assumption of a self-contained
thinking individual that can be found in Descartes and Locke. Self-awareness,
Nietzsche points out, does not depend on privileged access to pure thought; it
is not a product of introspection or immediate self-awareness but rather a result
of our immersion in language, of the metaphorical operations drawing different
mental images into one, and of the physiological processes of the brain.
In his Meditationes and elsewhere Descartes argues that self-consciousness, and
therefore selfhood, is our awareness that we think.98 Thinking thus distinguish-
es us from all other existing matter, for it is self-contained and has no extension,
as do, for instance, trees, stones, and rivers.99 Although he seems to admit a close
relation between a thinking thing (or substance) and an extended thing (or
substance) insofar as thinking takes place within the body, he also argues that
thought and knowledge do not rest on bodily predispositions but depend solely
on immaterial mental activity. The mind thus differs crucially from the body:
objects in nature, such as the human body, can be divided into their parts,
whereas the mind itself is by definition indivisible.100 The fact that the res cogitans
cannot be divided into subdepartments as human bodies can be divided into
arms, legs, and so forth leads to a unified and even unitary conception of self-
consciousness as the foundation for all human endeavor. Even though the world
of appearances may be marked by a considerable amount of incertitude, the
statements “I am” and “I exist” are “necessarily true,” and our self-consciousness
is an innate idea that cannot be doubted.101
Locke may have denied that there are any innate ideas, or eternal truths, that
require no further clarification, such as Descartes’s notion of the res cogitans, but
despite his more empiricist approach (and informed by the general outlook of
Cartesian thought), he links the existence of the self to the irreducibility of im-
mediate self-awareness: it is “impossible,” he notes in the Essay Concerning Hu-
man Understanding, “for any one to perceive, without perceiving, that he does
perceive.” For Locke, personal identity rests on the “sameness of a rational Be-
ing.”102 Much like Plato, then, Locke argues for the self as an immaterial and
unchanging agent, or entity, the basis of which is not necessarily connected to
our relationship to the world. Self-identity safeguards rationality and vice versa.
More important for both Descartes and Locke, however, the self does not in any
way depend on the language we use to formulate statements about the self; it is
not linked to the concepts we employ to situate ourselves within a specific cul-
tural/natural environment. Interestingly enough, despite Kant’s subsequent
criticism of the Cartesian res cogitans as an “empty expression,” and despite his
insistence that the self must be subject to the same transcendental principles as
empirical knowledge, the radicalization of Bewußtseinsphilosopie in German ide-
alism led to its return in disguise.103 Johann Gottlieb Fichte provides a particu-
larly prominent example of this in his Wissenschaftslehre, at the center of which
stands the self positing itself as an absolute point of reference. Fichte, in other
words, argues for the primacy of the self/subjective ego as an independent unity
that underlies all knowledge and philosophy.104 In many ways Fichte’s position
is more radical than those of Descartes and Locke, inasmuch as his account of
the self/ego forgoes any reference to innate ideas or introspection. Rather, for
Fichte the self is self-sufficient: “within the self—whether it be specifically posit-
ing, or judging, or whatever it may be—there is something that is permanently
uniform, forever one and the same,” and this is the logical identity of “I am
I.”105
Fichte denies the need to regard the self in relation to something other, a move
necessary for his claim that being precedes knowledge, language, concepts, and
so forth. Precisely because Nietzsche recognizes the effects of metaphor, how-
ever, and because the intertwining of metaphor and knowledge stands at the
center of his philosophical enterprise, he is unable to accept the positions of

Descartes, Locke, and Fichte. For Nietzsche, even to consider the self as a unitary
transcendental point of reference, or to toy with the tautology “I = I,” is simply
silly: our understanding of being, thinking, and self is formed by rhetorical and
linguistic operations at various levels, including the physiological. Any immedi-
ate access to selfhood and thinking is nothing but a mythological construction
or metaphysical fiction, and in a passage from Jenseits von Gut und Böse (1886)
that is worth quoting at length, Nietzsche notes that no pure thought can serve
as a foundation for Descartes’s res cogitans, Locke’s unitary self, or Fichte’s “I”:
There are still harmless self-observers who believe in the existence of “immediate
certainties,” such as “I think.” . . . But I will say a hundred times that “immediate
certainty” . . . contains a contradictio in adjecto. For once and for all, we should
free ourselves from the seduction of words! Let the people believe that knowing
means knowing to the very end; the philosopher has to say: “When I dissect the
process expressed in the proposition ‘I think,’ I get a whole set of bold claims that
are difficult, perhaps impossible, to justify,—for instance, that I am the one who is
thinking, that there must be something that is thinking in the first place, that think-
ing is an activity and the effect of a being who is considered the cause, that there is
an ‘I,’ and finally, that it has already been determined what is meant by think-
ing,—that I know what thinking is. Because if I had not already made up my mind
what thinking is, how could I tell whether what is just happening is not perhaps
‘willing’ or ‘feeling’? Enough: this ‘I think’ presupposes that I compare my present
state with other states that I have seen in myself, in order to determine what it is:
and because of this retrospective comparison with other types of ‘knowing’ [ander-
weitiges Wissen], this present state has absolutely no ‘immediate certainty’ for me.”
(BGE 16)
To know that we think, Nietzsche argues, we must distinguish thinking from all
other kinds of mental and physical activity, and there is consequently no such
thing as a unified (self-)consciousness.
Nietzsche’s rejection of the thinking self, which is often hailed as one of his
most subversive strategies against the philosophical tradition, has spawned a wide
range of interpretations. Some commentators have considered Nietzsche’s move
against Descartes as one of the most attractive aspects of his whole philosophical
enterprise, indeed, as the main tenet of his attack on “metaphysics.”106 Oth-
ers—most notably Alain Renaut and Luc Ferry—have somewhat more criti-
cally pointed out that Nietzsche inaugurated the philosophical elimination of
the human individual that led to Heidegger’s “antihumanism,” with its disastrous
political consequences—Nietzsche’s anthropology, they argue, not only rejects
the rationality of the human individual but necessarily culminates in a fatalist
rejection of modern liberal and democratic values.107 Whether to take Nietzsche’s

deconstruction of self-consciousness seriously seems to be more a question of
philosophical conviction than a matter of historical understanding.
Nevertheless, considering the general trajectory of his argument in Jenseits von
Gut und Böse, Nietzsche’s position seems to share much with that of David Hume,
who argues in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) that our everyday experi-
ence of introspection conflicts with the philosophical assumption that there is a
unified and immediately accessible self as a metaphysical point of reference safe-
guarding the continuity of experience in a world of “flux.”108 For Hume, per-
sonal identity, and thus any notion of the “self,” should be regarded as a rela-
tively unstable product of many largely incommensurable “impressions”—that
is, ideas, associations, and perceptions. Our selves, he remarks, “are nothing but
a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with
an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. . . . The
mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their ap-
pearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures
and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in
different; whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity
and identity.”109 Notions of the self tend to disguise the complexity of experience
and mental processes.110 Unlike Descartes and Locke but much like Nietzsche,
Hume argues that the self—if this idea is to make any sense—cannot be derived
from a single idea. The self remains what we might term a necessary fiction in a
human world inasmuch as it is based on resemblance between otherwise com-
pletely different perceptions and therefore treats these perceptions as though they
were identical.111
Nietzsche’s knowledge of Hume’s arguments was no doubt limited, although
in his notes of Carl Schaarschmidt’s philosophy lectures in Bonn from the sum-
mer semester of 1865, he discusses Hume’s theory of causality, which is also the
subject of a chapter in Albert Schwegler’s Geschichte der Philosophie im Umriß
(1848), itself recommended by Schaarschmidt (GSA 41/76, pp. 49–50).112 More
significantly, Hume’s reception in German idealism, most notably through Kant,
made Hume a common influence on German philosophy, even in the nineteenth
century.113 Within neo-Kantianism from the 1860s on, Hume featured as a
prominent predecessor to Kant’s critical philosophy, and despite his limited
textual knowledge, Nietzsche would have known this.114 Thus, although many
commentators have regarded Hume as a reference for Nietzsche’s theory of cau-
sality or at least noted the strange coincidence of their respective positions on
that subject, Hume significantly influenced Nietzsche’s rejection of a unified self
as well.115
Hume, however, was not the only influence on Nietzsche’s critical rejection of
the Cartesian self. Christopher Janaway has argued that Nietzsche took this
deconstruction of the self from Schopenhauer’s materialism, using it to attack
the metaphysical conception of subjectivity. Considering Schopenhauer’s pro-
found influence on the early development of Nietzsche’s thought, much can be
said for his importance.116 There is another historical connection, however—
namely, Gustav Teichmüller’s metaphysical treatise Die wirkliche und die schein-
bare Welt, which Nietzsche read shortly after its publication in 1882. Much like
Nietzsche himself, Teichmüller remarks that we can be aware of our thinking
only once we have distinguished thinking itself from other forms of mental activ-
ity, that is, once we have established a relationship between thinking and, for
instance, wishing, feeling, and so on.117 Whereas Nietzsche asserts that this claim
leads to a rejection of any unified form of self-consciousness, however, Teichmül-
ler holds on to the Cartesian model, which serves as a transcendental point of
reference for the heterogeneous intellectual operations of the individual.118 For
Nietzsche, such a distinction between thinking and other activities is based on
the assumption that thinking differs from, say, feeling, doing, desiring, and so
forth. The meanings of the respective terms, however, are conceptual phenom-
ena: things and physiological processes do not mean anything, for only through
some kind of conceptual language can we attach meaning to them and integrate
them into our order of already accepted beliefs. This consideration explains why
Nietzsche does not really seek to abolish the subject altogether. Rather, he allows
for personal identity and selfhood to result from heterogeneous experiences,
which are, as it were, frozen at a specific moment in time, only to change im-
mediately afterward. The conceptual and rhetorical nature of knowledge Nietz-
sche emphasizes in many of his writings from the early 1870s onward not only
questions the self as a unitary point of reference for human action but also safe-
guards against the complete dissolution of the self into a merely perspectival
epiphenomenon.
Nietzsche’s skepticism about the dissolution of the self may at first appear quite
astounding, especially given his general distrust of such supposedly metaphysical
notions. What is at stake here, however, is not only the philosophically prob-
lematic idea of a unitary self but also the notion that the self is endangered by
the technological and epistemic transitions of the nineteenth century. The ap-
plication of new technologies (e.g., the railway, the telegraph, the typewriter, and
photography), together with the industrialization of work, changed the individ-
ual’s position in and perception of space and time. This development has been
examined in much detail by Wolfgang Schivelbusch and Friedrich Kittler, and
Jonathan Crary recently described the effects of this development as “a sus-
pended temporality, a hovering out of time” marked by both “perceptual fixation

and disintegration.”119
Directly connected to this dissolution of the self through technology, and
closely related to Nietzsche’s interest in the contemporary life sciences, is the
experimentalization of life in the instrumental settings of the psychological and
physiological laboratories in Heidelberg, Berlin, and elsewhere. The description
of organic life through mechanical or physicalist models, often based on Helm-
holtz’s and Wundt’s measurement of nervous processes, established what Stefan
Rieger terms “dispositives of normality”: the project of viewing human life as a
physiological entity immediately allows it to be standardized according to math-
ematical methods. The relationship between physical and mental processes, it
seems, becomes above all a functional relationship.120 Consider, for example, the
results obtained by Fechner and Wundt, who were influenced by the Leipzig
anatomist Ernst Heinrich Weber’s experiments on physical stimuli, themselves
based on the mathematical model provided in Wilhelm Weber’s electrodynam-
ics. In measuring intensity of stimuli and sensations, Fechner and Wundt both
realized that these quantities do not vary directly but must be calculated accord-
ing to algorithms that describe the threshold, or limit values, between which a
change of intensity in the stimuli is accompanied by a change in the intensity of
sensations.121 Nietzsche might not have grasped the finer details of this research,
but once again Zöllner’s Über die Natur der Cometen, which artificially built up
Wilhelm Weber and Gustav Theodor Fechner as opponents of the Helmholtz
school, helped out by outlining Weber’s physical laws in detail.122 Not only is
Weber’s Electrodynamische Maassbestimmungen (1846) related to Helmholtz’s fa-
mous Über die Erhaltung der Kraft (1847), but both deliver the theoretical foun-
dations for the increasing mathematization of physiology. The effects of this
development were fundamental, and Nietzsche would not have missed their
implications: the unitary self of Descartes and Locke was dissolved into functions,
signals, and reaction times that can be registered, recorded, and represented by
a variety of instruments and machines in the physiological and psychological
laboratory.123 One might say that in the nineteenth century, that which is human
came to depend on technological arrangements.
Seen against this background, Nietzsche’s fervent criticism of a unitary self is
not completely surprising. The times witnessed a collapse between a notion of
the self as a unitary and unchanging point of reference for human action and a
notion of the self as the product of largely symbolic interactions. Nietzsche might
have conceived of the subject/self as multiple, but he could do so only because
he assumed, much like Hume before him, a fictitious unity of mental processes
as a necessary point of reference for human action—as artificial as such a unity
might be. This should not mean that he desired such a unity or even that he
lamented its irreversible loss. The self turns into a problem only when we ex-
trapolate from the concepts, words, and expressions we use to describe our ficti-
tious self-identification or with which we describe the self as an agency, conclud-
ing that a unitary and permanent “self ” underlies our mental existence and social
actions: “Wherever primitive mankind set a word, they believed to have made a
discovery. How different the truth is!—they had touched upon a problem, and
by supposing they had solved it they had created a hindrance to its solution.—
Now with every piece of knowledge one has to stumble over dead, petrified
words, and one will sooner break a leg than a word” (D 47). Thus, in the sense
that all metaphysical language is marked by this fallacy—that we tend to take
an abstract idea for the “real thing”—our notions of the self are embedded in
complex conceptual and grammatical structures, and their logic seduces us into
believing that such selves exist. As a consequence, Nietzsche adds in Jenseits von
Gut und Böse:
As far as the superstitions of the logicians are concerned: I will not stop emphasizing
a tiny little fact that these superstitious men are loath to admit: that a thought comes
when “it” wants, and not when “I” want. It is, therefore, a falsification of the facts
to say that the subject “I” is the condition of the predicate “think.” It thinks: but to
say the “it” is just that famous old “I”—well, that is just an assumption or opinion,
to put it mildly, and by no means an “immediate certainty.” In fact, there is already
too much packed into the “it thinks”: even the “it” contains an interpretation of the
process, and does not belong to the process itself. People are following grammatical
habits here in drawing conclusions, reasoning that “thinking is an activity, behind
every activity something is active, therefore—.” (BGE 17)
Small wonder, then, that Nietzsche speaks of the “so-called ‘ego’ ” or of “the un-
known world of the ‘subject’ ” (D 115, 116).
That Nietzsche wanted to retain the self as a necessary and inevitable rhetori-
cal construction can best be understood as an attempt to come to terms with the
technological and scientific changes that were shaping his cultural environment.
At the same time, his account of the self has considerable implications for his
philosophical enterprise as a whole. Despite his repeated and often misunderstood
Heraclitean contention that everything is somehow in “flux,” meaning can nev-
ertheless be created through the necessary fictions permeating our lives, such as
the self, causality, substance, and object—at least as long as we are aware that
they are regulative fictions. Such regulative fictions depend on a certain ordering
of our “system” of beliefs, which is changeable and discontinuous precisely be-
cause it is subject to both the metaphoricity of language and our deficient phys-
iological organization. Within this system meaning can be established only by
comparing certain concepts with others. Concepts, beliefs, and propositions are
thus interrelated in an essentially rhetorical process, for comparison is possible
only through seeing similarities and differences, through transferring concepts
into different contexts, and through relating them to one another and to the
world as we perceive it. To be aware of anything at all—be it thought, the world,
chairs, or other people’s minds—we require conceptual thought, and the gen-
eration of concepts is, for Nietzsche, a rhetorical phenomenon. In this context,
Descartes’s res cogitans appears as an epiphenomenon of language and a wide
range of physiological processes, and in the fifth book of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft
(1887), Nietzsche pointedly concludes that the development of language and the
development of consciousness are inextricably linked: “conscious thinking takes
the form of words, which is to say signs of communication, and this fact uncovers
the origin of consciousness. In brief, the development of language and the de-
velopment of consciousness . . . go hand in hand. . . . The human being invent-
ing signs is at the same time the human being that becomes ever more clearly
conscious of himself ” (GS 254).
This appears to render consciousness problematic, for Nietzsche’s firm rejection
of a unitary self seems to preclude any serious alternative. When Nietzsche speaks
of mind and consciousness, however, he presents ideas that evolved against the
previously discussed complex background of perception, nervous processes,
metaphor, and memory. This perspective casts several relevant arguments, espe-
cially Teichmüller’s, in a new light, showing them to represent a more philo-
sophically oriented account of ideas with which Nietzsche toyed throughout the
1870s. This throws new light, too, on Nietzsche’s criticism of the Cartesian self,
a development that resulted largely from his interests in physiological and bio-
logical models. The inevitability of regarding one’s consciousness as the product
of a metaphorical process is not only the outcome of conceptual, or unconscious,
operations; it is also the effect of physiological processes and biological predis-
positions. As such, Nietzsche’s understanding of consciousness is based on both
conceptual and bodily aspects, on both rhetoric and physiology. For Nietzsche,
the unity of the self depends on the interplay between highly heterogeneous
conceptual and physiological processes. This is ultimately what he seems to mean
when he suggests that the emergence of consciousness and language went hand
in hand. He wants not to destroy our notion of self-consciousness but to point
out its fragile foundations. The self is still a necessary point of reference for hu-
man action and social life, but any such notion is above all a kind of regulative
fiction allowing us to situate ourselves in relation to external reality and to
other people’s actions, thoughts, and languages.
5
Interpretation and Life:
Outlines of an Anthropology of Knowledge
Throughout the early 1880s Nietzsche spent much of his time composing Also
sprach Zarathustra, a difficult and particularly ambiguous piece. Shortly afterward,
however, he returned to familiar but unanswered questions that had dominated
his work during the late 1870s and are especially manifest in the three parts of
Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. The introductory aphorisms of this work present
the idea of a “historical philosophy” and thus the historical perspective that was
to influence many of his later elaborate discussions of morality, religion, and art.
Whereas many of Nietzsche’s writings from the 1860s to the early 1870s sketch
a rather positive image of philosophy as a worthwhile enterprise, this historical
perspective allowed him to take a rather critical stance toward philosophical
thought, which—as he repeatedly notes—is founded on a fair amount of basic
illusions shaping the development of metaphysics. In the summer of 1885 he
returned to these issues in Jenseits von Gut und Böse (1886) and in Zur Genealogie
der Moral (1887). These two works are intertwined in their philosophical perspec-
tive, and as the term genealogy suggests, they present a rather critical, or ana-
lytical, approach to the history of philosophy and some of its central concepts.
Nonetheless, many of Nietzsche’s scathing remarks about philosophy and meta-
physics were deeply influenced by the premises of his earlier reflections on the
interrelationships among language, thought, and physiology. Any attempt to
understand his much-cited “criticism of metaphysics” without reference to this
background would be somewhat short-sighted. This becomes clear in the first
part of Jenseits von Gut und Böse, which is devoted to, as Nietzsche calls them,
the “preconceptions of the philosophers” (Vorurtheile der Philosophen). Concepts
such as truth and things-in-themselves and discursive structures such as the bi-
nary opposition of values are far less self-evident than they are generally assumed
to be; rather, they seem to result from an underestimated interplay between the
Interpretation and Life 125
suggestive power of language and our physiological limitations. Nietzsche, in

other words, moved from metaphysics to anthropology, making the issue an
anthropology of knowledge that is based neither on a primordial difference
between mental existence and organic life nor on their presumed identity. This
position is no doubt a difficult one.
“There Is No Metaphysics”
It has often been claimed that a relentlessly critical attitude to metaphysics con-
stitutes a cornerstone of Nietzsche’s philosophical enterprise. Metaphysics itself
is broadly understood as a tradition of philosophical inquiry stretching from
Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Hegel, concerned largely with two philosophical
questions: what is it for something to exist, and how can we know that anything
does? Nietzsche certainly addresses these questions, so if they lie at the heart of
metaphysics, Nietzsche must be counted among the metaphysicians. Again,
however, the issues are somewhat more complex than they appear.
In the writings that were posthumously collected, probably by Andronicus of
Rhodes, under the title Metaphysics, Aristotle clearly describes the questions that
face what he terms “first philosophy”: what are the first principles of knowledge,
and what is being?1 That is, metaphysical discourse must consider whether things
exist and, if they do, what these things are. Nietzsche deals with the same ques-
tions, albeit from a completely different perspective. There is, however, another
problem that arises within the “metaphysical tradition”; although their philo-
sophical approaches are often considered metaphysical, both Kant and Hegel are
profoundly suspicious of the tradition as they understand it. The cursory remarks
in the preface to the second edition of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft are a case
in point, for Kant laments the then-present state of philosophy in the hands of
those he believes to be dogmatic representatives of German metaphysical Schul-
philosophie, whereas he notes in his Prolegomena zu einer jeden Metaphysik die als
Wissenschaft wird auftreten können (1783) that metaphysics should be regarded as
a science that investigates the formal conditions of reason necessarily antecedent
to any other form of knowledge or science.2 According to Kant, metaphysics
should thus be philosophical reasoning that investigates the fundamental prin-
ciples of knowledge—but this is not far from Nietzsche’s understanding of his
own philosophical position.
Generally speaking, it is rather difficult to call Nietzsche a metaphysician, but
it is also quite difficult to find any coherent view of metaphysics itself, and even
today there is little agreement on what metaphysical discourse entails.3 There
have been many attempts to define and outline Nietzsche’s relationship to meta-
physical thought, and to consider these arguments in detail would take us too
far afield. Significantly, however, the early reception of his philosophical enter-
prise, especially by Martin Heidegger and Walter Kaufmann, was plagued by
this issue. Furthermore, some more recent commentators have discovered an
ontological dimension in Nietzsche’s views on nihilism and the will to power,
which brings his arguments into close proximity to a metaphysical position as
conventionally construed, and Peter Poellner even argues that Nietzsche’s late
fragments contain his “metaphysics”—although Poellner himself finds this some-
what “puzzling.”4
Nietzsche’s own position is far from clear. The notes he took as a student at-
tending Karl Schaarschmidt’s introductory course on the history of philosophy
at the University of Bonn in 1864 show he had difficulties with the scope and
meaning of metaphysics even then, for he begins by following Aristotle’s discus-
sion quite closely, but after having encountered Kant and Hume, he laconically
notes: “There is no metaphysics” (Es giebt also keine Metaphysik) (GSA 41/76, p.
51). Sometime between summer 1872 and the beginning of 1873 he concluded
that the “end of metaphysics” must be counted among the main consequences
of Kant’s critical philosophy of science (KGW III/4, 19 [51]), but in 1878, at the
beginning of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, he remarked that perhaps there is
after all something like a “metaphysical world” of supersensible reality (HA
I:9)—at least in the form of a regulative fiction that allows us to presume the
existence of certain epistemological and anthropological universals such as truth
and morality. Two years later, toward the end of the same project, he seems to
have reversed his initial position, now declaring that metaphysical explanations
are some kind of occult obscurantism (HA II:ii.17). By the mid-1880s, however,
he seems to have once again accepted that there are some valuable “metaphysical
questions,” such as the following: What is thinking? Why do we believe in the
notions of cause and effect? Why do we assume ourselves as individuals to be
the reference point of philosophical explanations?
Nietzsche does struggle with the idea of metaphysics, but instead of complicat-
ing matters by describing his relationship to metaphysical thought in terms of
an unclear understanding of this philosophical domain, perhaps we should adopt
a more pragmatic approach. What Nietzsche seeks to address when he speaks
about metaphysics is a philosophical position that (1) assumes a supersensible
reality of things-in-themselves; (2) construes philosophical thought to be inde-
pendent from historical transformations; and (3) portrays philosophical discourse
as an autonomous realm of pure thought independent from language, grammar,
and rhetoric. Viewed against this background, his stance against the illusory
nature of metaphysical concepts makes sense, for such a notion of metaphysics
would be well-nigh theological. Metaphysical explanations, then, are perhaps a

form of mythology—that is, a discourse that projects human attributes onto the
natural world. Again, Nietzsche terms this “anthropomorphism.” He views an-
thropomorphism as one of the fundamental models with which we gain knowl-
edge about our environment; above all, it is a psychological factor inasmuch as
we tend to project human attributes and attributes of human actions onto non-
human nature and abstract concepts. Anthropomorphism is thus a necessary
aspect of any talk about any reality—supersensible or not.5 This is especially true
of so-called metaphysical concepts, however: the idea of a “prime mover” or
nonhuman designer as the origin of things, for instance, pervades the philo-
sophical tradition from Aristotle to Kant and beyond, but this is just one ex-
ample from a whole range of philosophical concepts that, at least according to
Nietzsche, follow the logic of anthropomorphism and are marked by a funda-
mental rhetoricity. This line of argument emerged in Nietzsche’s thought fairly
early on in his lecture series on rhetoric and his essay on truth and falsehood,
but it also informs many aspects of his subsequent philosophical criticism, par-
ticularly his stance toward the conceptual commonplaces that are regarded as
timeless philosophical absolutes. This becomes quite clear in a decisive passage
in Götzen-Dämmerung, completed in 1888 but published in 1889:
Language belongs with regard to its origin to the age of the most rudimentary form
of psychology: we find ourselves in the midst of a crude fetishism when we call to
mind the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language, or more precisely:
of reason. It is this which sees everywhere deed and doer; this which believes in will
as cause in general; this which believes in the “I” [Ich], in the I as a being, in the I
as substance, and which projects its belief in the I-substance [Ich-Substanz] onto all
things—only thus does it create the concept “thing.” Being is everywhere thought
in, foisted on, as cause; it is only from the conception “I” that there follows, deriva-
tively, the concept “being.” . . . Today we know it is merely a word. (TI III:5)6
The conceptual commonplaces of philosophical thought, Nietzsche points out,

are merely words. We tend to forget this rather uncomfortable fact, for it seems
to endanger the foundations of our knowledge. At the same time, it is important
to realize what he is not saying—namely, that such conceptual commonplaces
should be destroyed. Nietzsche recognizes that we cannot speak about reality, or
indeed know anything, without these illusions; they are necessary fictions in a
human world.
To gain a clearer picture of the timeliness of Nietzsche’s skepticism, it might
be helpful to put his criticism of the metaphysical tradition in its historical
context and to consider his linguistic thought as a product of its time by relating
it to the intellectual fault lines running through the history of European thought.
After all, Nietzsche operated within a specific intellectual environment, and he
reacted to certain trends within this environment, especially the slow disintegra-
tion (beginning with the deaths of Kant and Hegel in 1804 and 1831, respec-
tively) of those systems of thought that had developed throughout the eighteenth
century but were being replaced by the specialization of scholarship and science.
Philosophy itself, which had earlier stood at the center of the academic scene
and toward which most intellectual circles in Enlightenment Germany had
gravitated, faced a variety of new realities, and it reacted to these with various
approaches: materialism, positivism, historicism, neo-Kantianism, the philosophy
of life, the philosophy of existence—these and other labels are often employed
to describe the complexities of German philosophical thought in the nineteenth
century, an often underestimated transitional period of decisive importance for
later developments.
The later nineteenth century witnessed a wider front against German idealism
that was directly informed by repeated attempts to accommodate the observa-
tional and theoretical results of the era’s scientific culture—physics, physiology,
medicine, biology—into a coherent philosophical framework. Although this is
certainly reductive, we can identify two nineteenth-century philosophical devel-
opments that can be read as embodying a critical attitude toward “metaphysical,”
“transcendental,” or “speculative” modes of philosophical thought. First, the rise
of the theory of knowledge in the second half of the century, often in conjunc-
tion with a renewed interest in Kant’s critical project as a sound foundation for
any philosophy of science, resulted directly from the attempt to integrate differ-
ent fields of knowledge into philosophy.7 Another result, or another variant of
the theory of knowledge, was a renewed philosophical interest in the methodol-
ogy of the sciences often termed “inductive.” This was not limited to Germany,
for its influence is reflected in not only the work of the French philosopher
Auguste Comte but also, among others, William Whewell’s Philosophy of the
Inductive Sciences (1840); John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic (1843); George Boole’s
Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854); and, somewhat later, Gottlob Frege’s
Begriffsschrift, eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete Formelsprache des reinen Den-
kens (1878). This logical investigation of the laws of thinking and reasoning was
often directed against the speculative methods of German idealism, or a purely
psychological philosophy, and sought to replace the quasi-theological obscurity
of metaphysical concepts with logical models inspired by scientific rationaliza-
tion. Much like the philosophical tradition from Descartes to Kant, however, it
often failed to acknowledge the indeterminacy and vagueness of its own concep-
tual foundations. Above all, it inevitably adopted a nonhistorical perspective
inasmuch as logical laws of thought as such must count in every historical epoch
and within every cultural framework, independent from both language and
physiology. Although Nietzsche was unaware of Boole or Frege, he was familiar
with the ideas of Mill, whose seminal study was translated into German as early
as 1849, and his reading of Afrikan Spir’s Denken und Wirklichkeit (1873) shortly
after its initial publication provided him much-needed general guidance in the
field of logic.8 Indeed, Nietzsche took the problem of logic quite seriously, but
as was the case in his discussion of grammar, his reflections on the relationship
between language and thought led him to intertwine arguments about the neces-
sity of logical thought with a continued emphasis on the rhetoricity of
thought.
Although Nietzsche is often seen as having been strongly averse to the ordered
rationality of analytical thought, he was not indifferent to the logical tradition
of nineteenth-century philosophy—at least as far as he was familiar with this
tradition. Of course, he often attacks what we might today term “logical positiv-
ism,” that is, a form of empiricism according to which all true propositions can
be reduced to logical structures free from linguistic vagueness and metaphysical
speculation. But his understanding of logic is far more complex than that.9 His
critical attitude toward logic is directed less against logical thought itself than
against the idea that—as he puts it in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches—all aspects
of human life can be explained within the framework of a philosophy of logic
(HA I:31). Although Nietzsche characterizes philosophical (i.e., formal) logic as
a continuation of metaphysical thought (HA I:16), he treats logical thought itself
as a particular form of discourse that, as does grammar, serves to structure the
association of different mental images and different concepts within language,
and he speaks of logic as a “convention” about the meaning and reference of
“signs” (TI III:3).10 Much as we have no choice but to use language, we must
believe in the logical character of our reasoning, “believe in logical thought,” for
logical thought and the conventions of logical reasoning let us grasp and sim-
plify the heterogeneous field of our experience through the use of signs (KGW
VIII/2, 9 [144]). Logic, as he remarked sometime in the summer of 1885, is “only
an art of schematization and abbreviation [Schematisir- und Abkürzungskunst],
an attempt to come to terms with multiplicity through an art of expression,—no
‘understanding,’ but a signification for the purpose of communicating” (KGW
VIII/1, 5 [16]). Nietzsche thus in no way denied the value of fundamental logical
principles, such as the Aristotelian laws of identity and noncontradiction, but
he considered logic to be, above all, a formal tool for interpretive statements
about reality. Seen from this perspective, logic is unable to safeguard truth claims
or to support any substantive claims about the nature of reality, but this does
not mean that Nietzsche wanted to deride or reject logical thought in general.
Thus, logic is first a form of judgment and second that which allows the devel-
opment of reason (HA I:18; KGW III/4, 19 [215]).
In other words, logic is a formal condition for interpretive judgments about
the world that is based on our physiological and mental makeup, and this brings
Nietzsche’s ideas quite close to Kant’s understanding of logic. Like Kant, Nietz-
sche assumes logic to be a formal condition of knowledge. Nonetheless, Kant
and Nietzsche differ crucially, for the former holds that, as a formal condition
of thought, pure logic cannot be based on empirical, or psychological, principles,11
whereas Nietzsche points specifically to psychological and physiological pro-
cesses as the basis of logical thought. When Kant speaks of logic in a transcen-
dental way as representing “the form of thinking in general,”12 he clearly means
to detach logical thought from the realms of psychology and physiology, but in
Nietzsche’s account these realms are the foundation of logic itself. As a conse-
quence, Nietzsche criticizes Kant’s principle of pure reason as an unsubstanti-
ated overgeneralization (KGW V/2, 11 [132]): if logical thought rests on physi-
ological and psychological preconditions, then it is impossible to assume the
existence of pure reason. This does not mean, however, that Nietzsche sought to
abolish reason altogether. Reason remains a valid principle on his account, but
only inasmuch as it describes our activity of constructing interpretations from
our experiences of reality. These forms of interpretation constitute a continuous
process that invents and rejects relations among different experiences, that orders
and rearranges these relations, and that should be understood as a ceaseless re-
shaping of our beliefs and judgments about the world.13 This kind of interpreta-
tive activity is based on a rhetorical and physiological model rather than, as some
commentators have suggested, a hermeneutical one.14
Traditionally speaking, the constitution and relation of concepts, beliefs, rea-
sons, and proofs, as well as their ordering and rearrangement, fall within the
rhetorical fields of inventio (invention) and dispositio (arrangement). At stake
here is a topical order of concepts, and Nietzsche’s early description of the way
we gain any knowledge about the ostensibly external world—or about ourselves,
for that matter—follows such a topical model. Nietzsche seems to rehabilitate a
view of knowledge that was an integral part of rhetorical education from Aris-
totle, Cicero, and Quintilian up to late Renaissance and early baroque thought
but disappeared increasingly with the rise of scientifically oriented rationalism
following Descartes and, in Germany, Christian Wolff. A classical philologist
with a keen interest in the history of philosophical thought, Nietzsche was cer-
tainly aware of the value and use of topical arguments, for he had read both
Richard Volkmann’s systematic exposition of rhetorical strategies and the first

volume of Carl Prantl’s influential history of logical thought.15
Nietzsche’s interest in topics becomes particularly obvious in his notes for the
lecture series “Darstellung der antiken Rhetorik,” where he deals with this issue
as the arrangement of arguments and the order of subjects in the context of legal
and forensic discourse and with regard to the rhetorical concept of memory. Here
he states that topics deal with the “succession of places” (Reihenfolge der Örter),
that is, with the position of specific arguments and subjects that are interrelated
through the order of “mental associations” (Vorstellungsassociationen) and that
lead to a “chain” of concepts and images in the speaker’s mind (KGW II/4, p.
501). That Nietzsche speaks of mental associations already hints at the philo-
sophical dimension of topical arrangements with regard to the order of mental
representations, and Nietzsche seems to transfer these still fairly limited rhe-
torical principles from the realm of the specific speech acts found in, for instance,
forensic oratory to a more general discussion about the constitution of thought
and thinking. This appears more clearly in some of the reflections on language
and thought from his notebooks of 1872–73. Thinking, he notes, is first of all a
selective process, inasmuch as the human mind chooses specific mental repre-
sentations that are subsequently arranged in a topical manner, so that the human
mind moves from one image to another:
While thinking one must already possess, by means of the imagination, what one
is looking for—only then can it be judged by reflection. This is done by measuring
it against common chains of images which have been tested already. . . .
There are far more chains of images in the brain than are made use of for thinking:
the intellect quickly selects similar images: these selections themselves generate a
whole variety of further images: but once again the intellect selects another one,
etc.
Conscious thought is merely a selection of mental representations [Vorstellungen].
It is a long way from here to abstraction. (KGW III/4, 19 [78])
This definition of thinking is not limited to the fragments of Nietzsche’s early

notebooks but informs his later notion of reasoning, too. In 1880, for instance,
Nietzsche was still defining thinking as an association of different mental repre-
sentations (see KGW V/1, 6 [238]).
This approach profoundly influenced Nietzsche’s reflections of “interpretation.”
Although conceptual thought might be unable to provide any direct access to
external reality, it nevertheless enables us to order and schematize our perceptions
and experiences. Hence, in 1886–87 Nietzsche was still claiming that thought
requires concepts and that “reason” (das vernünftige Denken), if it exists, must be
defined as a conceptual scheme that allows us to construct fairly coherent state-

ments and judgments about reality as we perceive it:
Fundamental solution:
we believe in reason: the latter is, however, the philosophy of gray concepts, lan-
guage is built upon the most naïve prejudices
now we read disharmonies and problems into things, since we think only in lin-
guistic forms—therefore we believe in the “eternal truth” of “reason” (e.g. subject
predicate etc.
we cease to think if we refuse to do so under linguistic constraints, we barely ar-
rive at the doubt to see this limitation as a limitation
Thinking according to reason is interpreting according to a scheme which we are un-
able to throw off. (KGW VIII/1, 5 [22])
Thus, rather than pursue a purely epistemological account of knowledge, Nietz-

sche seems to develop a notion of knowledge based both on the close relationship
between language and thought and on the psychological and physiological con-
ditions of thinking.
The Physiology of Interpretation

Although Nietzsche’s philosophical enterprise is often described as a philosophy
in flux, even in his early essay on truth and falsehood, which is generally re-
garded as the founding document of an extreme epistemological relativism,
Nietzsche explicitly states that we must believe in “reason and its concepts” to
save ourselves from being lost in a world of heterogeneous appearances (TL 150).
Interestingly, however, he juxtaposes this conceptual architecture with the image
of a creative individual who never stops questioning the validity of reason and
its conceptual order (TL 148, 152). The dynamics between order and disorder,
between simplicity and complexity, that Nietzsche sketches in this essay contin-
ued to influence his understanding of interpreting the world and constructing
meaning within a meaningless environment. The necessity of change goes hand
in hand with the construction of conceptual order, and the dialectic of order and
change is crucially important for Nietzsche, because it seems to represent the
intricacies of our conceptual interpretation of the world (HA I:155):16 the drive
toward conceptual order is complemented by a creative or artistic drive that seeks
to question and subvert this order. Nietzsche’s tendency to speak of a drive in
this context already hints at the physiological background of the conceptual and
interpretive processes and strategies with which we seek to grasp our environ-
ment. This allusion, however, means that we need to situate his understanding
of the dynamic relationship between order and change, which often lies at the
heart of his epistemological reflections, in a complex intellectual context rooted

in the anthropological debates of the later Enlightenment.
During the final decades of the eighteenth century, stimulated by the steady
growth of biological knowledge, German anthropology discovered the physio-
logical makeup of human beings to be a crucial factor for individual and social
development. As a consequence, much anthropological thought from this time
relies on the notions of drive (Trieb), self-generation (Bildung), and life force
(Lebenskraft) to reassess the relationship between natural and cultural existence.17
The philosophical speculations Hermann Samuel Reimarus includes in his Allge-
meine Betrachtung über die Triebe der Thiere, hauptsächlich über ihre Kunsttriebe
(1760) reflect the early state of this debate, which spread beyond anthropological
discourse and the biological sciences to other fields, such as aesthetics, literature,
and cultural history. Nevertheless, the central figure here was Johann Friedrich
Blumenbach, from 1781 a professor of medicine at the prestigious University of
Göttingen; his Über den Bildungstrieb und das Zeugungsgeschäfte (1781) trans-
formed a confusing range of highly speculative ideas into a fairly coherent body
of knowledge that established the notions of Trieb and Bildung at the center of
Enlightenment anthropology. Inasmuch as such organicist notions could be used
to describe both natural and cultural developments within a teleological frame-
work that promised a tendency toward “perfectibility” (to use Hegel’s later term),
human life was relocated at the intersection of nature and culture. Herder’s Ideen
zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–91), one of the era’s most
important works in cultural anthropology, is a case in point, for much of its
argument is founded on the idea that the history of culture is nothing more than
a specific variant of the history of nature.18 This redefinition of the human, which
occurred between the 1760s and the early 1800s, also led to a fundamental shift
in the way in which language and conceptual thought were seen vis-à-vis the
relationship between nature and culture. Whereas in the 1770s even Herder re-
marked that language cannot be regarded as originating from natural “artistic
drives” (Kunsttriebe) but must be viewed as originating in “reason,” beginning
in the early 1880s Wilhelm von Humboldt argued that language and concep-
tual thought cannot be reduced to a cultural phenomenon but must be viewed
largely as representing unconscious drives and as being part of the general or-
ganic background of cultural processes.19 Humboldt’s ideas often served as a link
between eighteenth-century philosophy of language and the linguistic sciences
of the nineteenth century; not surprisingly, therefore, the notions of Trieb and
Bildung had a lasting influence on linguistic thought during Nietzsche’s life,
especially given that an organicist account of language and conceptual thought
was clearly compatible with the wider evolutionary framework that informed
linguistic thought around that time.20 As a consequence, Gustav Gerber and

Wilhelm Wackernagel—two prominent sources for Nietzsche’s early reflections
on language—regarded language as the product of a Kunsttrieb (creative drive),
whereas Friedrich Albert Lange, himself an important influence on Nietzsche’s
biologization of knowledge, spoke more generally of a “building drive of man-
kind” that leads to the construction of complex conceptual systems with which
we seek to understand and explain the world.21
Through his early interest in the contemporary life sciences, and especially his
unfinished doctoral dissertation, “Die Teleologie seit Kant,” written in April–May
1868, Nietzsche seems to have been acutely aware of the complicated background
behind such organicist models. The questions he encountered in this context
continued to be a pressing concern throughout the 1870s, and in the 1880s he
began to draw more extensively on this background in his notebooks and pub-
lished writings. By this point Nietzsche was able to refine his partial understand-
ing of the contemporary life sciences and their anthropological discourse by
turning to a fairly wide, heterogeneous range of publications, such as Alfred
Espinas’s Die thierischen Gesellschaften (1879), Georg Heinrich Schneider’s Der
thierische Wille (1880), and William H. Rolph’s Biologische Probleme, zugleich als
Versuch zur Entwicklung einer rationellen Ethik (1884),22 all contributions to the
emerging field of evolutionary theory. This indicates that the epistemological
critique of truth, reason, and conceptual thought Nietzsche delivered throughout
the 1870s and 1880s received its shape not only from his reflections on language
and rhetoric but also from models that emerged in the anthropological discourse
of the late eighteenth century and that became increasingly prominent in the
life sciences of the nineteenth century. Much like the representatives of late-
Enlightenment anthropology, especially Herder, Nietzsche thus sought to found
his philosophical critique on an essentially anthropological insight—namely, the
overlap of nature and culture as exemplified by the physiological background of
human knowledge. His repeated emphasis on the dynamics of order and change
is in this respect further related to another eighteenth-century source, Friedrich
Schiller’s Ueber die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (1795), a collection of let-
ters that seek to draw some preliminary conclusions from contemporary anthro-
pological debates. Here Schiller expresses the idea that the experience of human
life is marked by a “creative drive” that mediates between the limitations of the
human condition and our longing for independence from these constraints.23
Nietzsche, who was familiar with these letters, took the epistemological conse-
quences of Schiller’s stipulations quite seriously, concluding that the interpretive
activity with which we attempt to understand our environment and ourselves is
marked by a continuous construction and deconstruction of our conceptual
order or belief system. He emphasized this idea throughout his published writ-
ings and unpublished notebooks from the mid-1870s onward.24
The preceding discussion suggests several conclusions about the precarious
position that Nietzsche’s epistemological reflections occupy within the German
philosophical tradition. First, his fervent emphasis on the continuous change
and rearrangement of our conceptual apparatus should be located firmly within
a specific strand of German thought—namely, the late eighteenth-century cri-
tique of Enlightenment rationalism that questions its attempt to integrate all
aspects of human experience and all functions of human knowledge into a coher-
ent and self-grounding philosophical system. Thus, unlike the main representa-
tives of idealist Systemphilosophie, especially Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, Nietzsche
clearly sides with supposedly less analytical philosophers, such as Lessing and
Herder, who viewed the systematization of philosophical reflection with much
suspicion. In the introductory pages to his essay Laokoon (1766), which was to
revise the aesthetic theory of the later Enlightenment, Lessing pointedly remarks
that the German philosophy of his time was hardly lacking in dogmatic and
arbitrary philosophical systems that could be used to deduce and prove any
philosophical claims en vogue.25 Around the same time the young Herder began
to develop his own aesthetic ideas, and in a fragmentary essay on Alexander
Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Aesthetica (1750–58) and Metaphysica (1739), he reaches a
conclusion similar to Lessing’s, although he puts it more bluntly: it is a profound
weakness of human nature to wish for a philosophical system that can never be
reached, he writes, and pointing out the fallacy of such undertakings is perhaps
more worthwhile than any three such systems.26 Their distrust of philosophical
systems led both Lessing and Herder to opt for a more pragmatic stance that can
accept the epistemological implications of that which is occasionally termed an
“anthropological turn,” which questions the universal claims of reason. Lichten-
berg’s aphorisms, the so-called Sudelbücher (1765–99), offer another example for
this more fluid way of philosophizing, but just as Lichtenberg, Lessing, and
Herder oscillate between the optimism of a cosmopolitan Aufklärung (enlighten-
ment) and an anthropologically inspired skepticism about pure reason, Nietzsche’s
own position is highly ambivalent. Although operating within a completely dif-
ferent intellectual field, Nietzsche’s philosophical enterprise gained an increas-
ingly anthropological perspective grounded both in his reflections on language
and in his interest in the life sciences and physiology.
Although some commentators, such Udo Tietz, have recently stressed the
anthropological dimension of Nietzsche’s philosophical enterprise, it is often
seen exclusively in terms of a “philosophy of the body” that largely overlooks the
relevance of his reflections on language and their historical contexts.27 Tietz is
certainly correct in pointing out that Nietzsche transforms Kant’s “Copernican

turn” into an “anthropological turn”—in the sense that the a priori is a question
not of consciousness but of our physical organization—but his tendency to reduce
Nietzsche’s anthropological perspective to the opposition “man/animal” prevents
him from taking the close interrelationships among language, consciousness, and
the body seriously.28 As a consequence, Tietz concludes that Nietzsche was unable
to show how “scientific knowledge can be reconstructed from nerve processes.”
But this was not what Nietzsche set out to do.29 To understand his project, we
must acknowledge that a specific understanding of nerve processes informs Nietz-
sche’s views on language and thus his epistemological critique. Once we do this,
we can see that his anthropological perspective is grounded as much in language
as in the body.
Anthropological themes obviously play a prominent role in Nietzsche’s early
writings, but perhaps his “philosophy of interpretation” shows the anthropo-
logical orientation of his philosophical enterprise most clearly, inasmuch as Nietz-
sche argues that our interpretive activities, which are influenced by our physi-
ological organization and our need to rely on language, metaphors, and signs,
leads to a conceptual rearrangement of the world that allows us to survive in an
otherwise incomprehensible environment (KGW VII/2, 25 [94]). Moreover, this
idea of a continuous interpretive restructuring of our conceptual system forms
the basis for his much-discussed “revaluation of all values,” which appears in his
notebooks from the early 1880s on and is a central tenet of his Götzen-Däm-
merung. Nonetheless, Nietzsche’s so-called philosophy of interpretation remains
a contested issue, and the fundamental importance of this notion within the
development of his philosophical criticism has been noted from the early recep-
tion of Nietzsche’s writings to the more recent contributions of Günter Abel,
Alan D. Schrift, Christoph Cox, and others.30 It would not be useful to further
complicate matters here by reviewing these critical approaches in their entirety,
but it is worthwhile to consider Nietzsche’s concept of interpretation with regard
to the anthropological orientation of his thought and the way in which it was
embedded in the intellectual fields and epistemic configurations that intersected
in nineteenth-century Germany.
Again, Nietzsche regarded interpretation as a fundamental aspect of life, which
led him to the idea that every perception, experience, or description of reality is
a form of interpretive activity (KGW VIII/1, 1 [115]). Indeed, he even suggests
that this is the main idea of all his writings: “That the value of the world lies in
our interpretations (—that perhaps, somewhere else, interpretations other than
mere human ones are possible—) that interpretations thus far are perspectival
estimations [perspektivische Schätzungen] according to which we keep ourselves
in life, that is, in the will to power, for the growth of power . . . , that every
enforcement [Verstärkung] and expansion of power [Machterweiterung] opens up
new perspectives and leads us to believe in new horizons—this runs throughout
my writings” (KGW VIII/1, 2 [108]).31
We should again be cautious, however, for Nietzsche does not simply link his
concept of interpretation to the increasingly anthropological perspective of his
writings or to models derived from the contemporary life sciences and their
evolutionary framework. Specifically, he seems to radicalize a concept that is
firmly rooted in European intellectual history and that plays a particularly im-
portant role in Nietzsche’s own chosen profession, classical scholarship. As with
many of Nietzsche’s key concepts, interpretation was already a widely discussed
philosophical issue in antiquity, when it was related primarily to logical reason-
ing, as in Aristotle’s De interpretatione, and the interpretation of legal statutes,
as in Roman law. In Patristic literature the field of interpretation shifts from
logical and legal contexts to the often allegorical exegesis of the scriptures, but
following the Renaissance the discourse of interpretation branched into three
distinct directions connected to one another by a profound interest in funda-
mental methodological questions. First, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
produced a more critical approach to classical antiquity that questioned the
authenticity of many surviving linguistic artifacts and, in such treatises as Joseph
Scaliger’s De arte critica diatribe (1619), demanded a methodological reassessment
of interpretive practices. Second, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the
theological exegesis of scriptures shifted from allegorical explanations to a more
rigid and theoretically informed approach that appears, for instance, in Johann
August Ernesti’s Institutio interpretatio novi testamenti (1761) and Gottlob Wilhelm
Meyer’s Versuch einer Hermeneutik des Alten Testaments (1799–1800). Third, writ-
ings such as Johann Martin Chladenius’s Einleitung zur richtigen Auslegung
vernünfftiger Reden und Schriften (1742) and Georg Friedrich Meier’s Versuch
einer allgemeinen Auslegekunst (1757) stimulated a renewed philosophical interest
in hermeneutical questions, which remained very much alive in the first half of
the nineteenth century, as is demonstrated by, for instance, the writings of Fried-
rich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher and Friedrich Ast.32
Although Nietzsche might have been unaware of this historical trajectory’s
finer points, he was familiar with some of the main positions through his work
as a classics scholar at the University of Basel from 1869 to 1879. Questions of
hermeneutics and interpretation stood at the center of many new developments
contributed by scholars prominent in nineteenth-century classical philology,
from Friedrich August Wolf to August Boeckh, who often referred to the earlier
traditions mentioned previously.33 Nietzsche’s interest in interpretation thus
emerged first in the context of classical scholarship, and in his lecture series
“Encyclopaedie der klassischen Philologie,” which he delivered in the summer
of 1871, he followed the arguments of his philological predecessors and discussed
hermeneutics with regard to the interpretation of texts (KGW II/3, p. 373). Fol-
lowing his studies on rhetoric, however, and influenced by his philosophical
reflections on language, thought, and the body, his concept of interpretation
changed radically, turning increasingly into an anthropological paradigm: because
we have no direct access to reality, we must project our preestablished and con-
tinuously changing belief system onto the world (KGW VIII/1, 2 [77]). Nietzsche
seems to suggest that, subject to the dynamics of order and change, the interpre-
tive assimilation and accommodation of our cultural and natural environments
cannot result from mental processes alone, for our physiological makeup and
drives play a role, too. Even as a specific body of knowledge about the world is
constructed by some form of interpretive activity, that activity is in turn shaped
and limited by the physiological processes underlying our mental operations,
especially the complex transitions among stimulations, ensuing nerve processes,
and mental images. As such, it would be short-sighted to regard Nietzsche’s
concept of interpretation as a primarily hermeneutic or epistemological model.
For Nietzsche, then, epistemology is always embedded in physiology. To be sure,
we perhaps rarely realize how the principles underlying our knowledge about the
world—for example, grammar, logic, causality, substance, self—are limited by
our physiological organization. Nevertheless, the irreducibility of language and
concepts as the medium through which we “see” the world depends on this
physiological organization. Again, this does not mean that Nietzsche sought to
reduce mental operations to physical functions; rather, the point is that the
mental and the physical, mind and world, cannot be separated.
Every perception of reality, Nietzsche seems to suggest, is a form of interpretive
activity based on three principles. First, much like the rhetorical construction of
our conceptual schemata, interpretation is an unconscious process; that is, he
regards it as an intuitive mental process triggered by physiological conditions
(KGW VII/1, 7 [228]). Second, as he remarks in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, in-
terpretation is an infinite or indefinite process inasmuch as every perception,
experience, and thought inevitably leads to new interpretive activities. Conse-
quently, “reality” is merely an abstract name for the sum of the infinite possible
interpretations that we use to understand and assimilate our environment (KGW
VIII/2, 9 [91]) and that are at the same time part of a specific physiological
framework. Third, interpretation is an anthropological process that we use to
control our environment and that is necessarily based on our physiological pre-
conditions. To interpret anything, Nietzsche writes in Zur Genealogie der Moral,
means “that anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually

interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new pur-
pose by a power superior to it.” In addition, it means “that everything that occurs
in the organic world consists of overpowering, dominating, and in their turn,
overpowering and dominating consist of re-interpretation, adjustment, in the
process of which their former ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ must necessarily be ob-
scured or completely obliterated” (GM II:12). In other words, interpretation is
the basis of the phenomenon Nietzsche occasionally terms “will to power.” A
detailed discussion of this highly controversial philosophical paradigm would
fall beyond the scope of this book, but note that Nietzsche’s thesis of a will to
power cannot and should not be regarded as a metaphysical principle or a phil-
osophically disguised justification of political oppression on the basis of a some-
what dangerous misconception of evolutionary biology. However unfortunate
and polemical this expression might sound to us now, the “will to power” is
merely a metaphor used to account for the way in which our intellectual pursuits
are subject to significant biological factors.
Influenced especially by Wilhelm Roux’s idea that the changing organization
of the body, down to the cellular and molecular levels, results from the “sensitiv-
ity” (Sensibilität) with which organisms react to and assimilate changes in their
environment, and also by Wilhelm Henry Rolph’s notion of life as a form of
organic “expansion,” Nietzsche clearly regarded our physiological evolution as
an “increase in life.”34 Especially for Roux, the evolutionary organization of the
body, that is, of the cells and structures within the physical entity we call the
“body,” follows self-regulating principles independent of any wider teleological
development: an organism’s growth depends on the “struggle” (Kampf ) among
its constituent parts (cells, molecules, and so on).35 Although Roux often shared
the philosophical interests of his teacher Rudolf Virchow, whose work Nietzsche
seems to have encountered during the late 1860s, he was not particularly inter-
ested in drawing fundamental philosophical conclusions from his studies in
Entwicklungsmechanik (developmental mechanics) and embryology, and his
later work is far more anatomical in orientation, focusing in particular on bio-
logical morphology.36 For Nietzsche, however, Roux’s and Rolph’s stipulations
implied far-reaching consequences, for their ideas of an “increase in life” and a
“struggle” among different components, which provide the biological background
to his doctrine of the “will to power,” influenced his theory of interpretation
considerably:37 much as expansion and growth are part of organic life, the con-
scious and unconscious interpretive strategies with which we seek to grasp our
natural and cultural environments depend on our physiological organization—
and limitations. The accounts of organic processes Nietzsche encountered in the
works of Roux and others are, in this respect, the biological background of our
attempt to control our environment through language, signs, mental images,
and concepts. As such, Nietzsche’s notion of the will to power—together with
another unfortunate expression, the Übermensch, probably his most politicized
concept—is above all a metaphorical abstraction that helped him formulate what
he understood as the close relationship or even convergence of physical and
mental existence. Perhaps, then, one could argue that the will to power, despite
its many overtones, constitutes the backbone of the anthropological orientation
of Nietzsche’s thought from the late 1870s onward. This also implies, however,
that the will to power cannot be understood as a teleological principle that turns
ideas derived from the contemporary sciences into metaphysical speculation.38
Rather, the will to power is the drive to control and adapt to our environment
through interpretive activities that are themselves shaped by our physiological
makeup. This is also why Nietzsche’s views on interpretation should be seen in
terms of a “physiology of interpretation.”
So far, so good, but Nietzsche still faces a fundamental problem with regard
to this concept of interpretation—namely, the problem of perspectivism and
relativism. Interpretations, or so Nietzsche seems to claim, tend to be relative;
that is, no interpretation is more “objective,” or “true” than any other possible
interpretation. As he writes in a fragment from the mid-1880s, interpretations
are a form of “perspectival estimations” (perspektivische Schätzungen) (KGW
VIII/1, 2 [108]). This initially appears to be a radical assumption resulting di-
rectly from his earlier claims that we have no immediate access to reality and
that the metaphoricity of language prevents us from attaining an objective per-
spective on the world. Nietzsche emphasizes this perspectival character of knowl-
edge throughout his writings from the late 1870s to his final notebooks from the
late 1880s. In addition, Gustav Teichmüller’s treatise Die wahre und die scheinbare
Welt, which he read shortly after its publication in 1882, provided further philo-
sophical support for his so-called doctrine of perspectivism.
Considerably influenced, as was Nietzsche, by the contemporary physiology
of perception, especially the works of DuBois-Reymond, Helmholtz, and Wundt,
Teichmüller sought to overcome what he regarded as the limitations of Kantian
metaphysics by developing a phenomenology of the “real” (wirkliche Welt). Teich-
müller’s approach is in many ways based on the idea that our sensory experi-
ences and mental processes highlight the perspectival character of all knowledge
even before this knowledge becomes fixed through language. Once we accept
that there are no a priori structures safeguarding the unity of knowledge and
consciousness, the fragmentation of experience becomes obvious: “Since our
consciousness about the world has been formed by association, amalgamation
and thinking, our knowledge and opinions about the world invariably dissolve
into points and forms of relations [Beziehungspunkte und Beziehungsformen]”—
things, in other words, are “perspectival images.”39 Teichmüller goes on to ex-
emplify this claim in the second part of his study, where he seeks to develop a
phenomenology of the “real world”: if we relate the seemingly obvious perspec-
tivism of our everyday perceptions of the world to the a priori conditions of
reason, he suggests, we must conclude that these conditions (e.g., time, space,
motion, and existence) are merely perspectival projections we use to structure
what we perceive as reality.40 This must have been an interesting point for Nietz-
sche, but although Teichmüller sought to radically reinterpret Kantian philoso-
phy, he nevertheless presupposed, along the lines of Descartes, Locke, and Kant,
that reason precedes language.41 Nietzsche was clearly unable to accept the latter
part of Teichmüller’s argument, but he did integrate the idea of a radical per-
spectivism into his own philosophical enterprise. The different metaphors and
conceptual schemata that we use to structure perceptions and interpretations of
reality are connected to different outlooks on the world, so that, as he suggests
in Jenseits von Gut und Böse, “perspectival thought” (das Perspektivische) is the
“precondition of life” (Grundbedingung allen Lebens) (BGE, preface). But what
is the relationship between interpretation and perspectivism?
Perspectivism and the constant threat of relativism are undoubtedly difficult
problems for Nietzsche. If knowledge and its physiological background are sup-
posed to lead to perspectival interpretations and thus to equally valid interpreta-
tions of the world, then everything seems to be relative. Addressing this problem,
some—for example, Maudemarie Clark—have argued that perspectivism can
hold water only if some perspectives are regarded as quasi-objectively valid,
whereas others can be disregarded as wrong or improbable.42 Somewhat simi-
larly, Alexander Nehamas concludes that perspectivism should not be equated
with relativism, for the former implies that some perspectives can be shown to
be better or more suggestive than others, even if none is objectively true.43 There
is good reason to believe that we can understand Nietzsche’s doctrine of perspec-
tivism in exactly this way, especially when we relate it to his continued emphasis
on the necessity of using grammar and logic. Different conceptual schemata,
different interpretations and statements about the world, are not necessarily
incompatible with one another; indeed, interpretations can be “perspectival”
only if they are comparable with one another. In other words, Nietzsche’s idea
of a perspectival interpretation of the world aims at the activity Donald David-
son once termed “getting a best fit.”44 On this account, we cannot separate
Nietzsche’s understanding of perspectivism from his concept of interpretation.
Perspectives, we might say, are the physiological preconditions that shape our
view on the world; they also represent our historical circumstances and the state
of our conceptual knowledge, as well as our interests, values, and inclinations.
Interpretation, however, is the way in which we deal with these perspectives,
their organization according to rhetorical and physiological processes.45 For Nietz-
sche, then, the mental and the organic are always intertwined, and their intricate
relationship is at the heart of his anthropology of knowledge.46
If knowledge results from such complex processes, however, and if neither
language nor perception can provide direct access to reality, then our concepts
are marked by a certain vagueness and indeterminacy. Nietzsche himself describes
them as Versuche—roughly, an experimental interpretation of the world (KGW
VII/3, 35 [36])—and this idea of an “experimental philosophy” that produces
hypothetical interpretations about the world should be seen as standing in close
relation to the flourishing of experimental research in nineteenth-century Ger-
many, especially in physiology and in psychology. Again, an examination of the
so-called experimentalization of knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries might shed some light on Nietzsche’s curious position.
Not surprisingly, the rise of the experimental paradigm had a profound and
lasting effect on the discourse of philosophy. Lamenting the disastrous dogmatism
of German Schulphilosophie, Kant offers in his critical project a prime example
for the reception of the experimental paradigm, especially in that—at least in
the Kritik der reinen Vernunft—he seeks to ground a philosophical “science of
reason” in principles as self-evident and certain as those of Newtonian science.
Referring to Galileo Galilei’s mechanics, Evangelista Torricelli’s barometer, and
the chemical procedures developed by Georg Ernst Stahl in Germany and Antoine
Lavoisier in France, Kant argues that reason “must approach nature with its
principles in one hand, according to which alone the agreement among appear-
ances can count as laws, and, in the other hand, the experiments thought out in
accordance with these principles.” As a consequence, he continues, the philo-
sophical “experiment of pure reason” must be seen as analogous to the “syn-
thetic procedure” of chemistry.47 With the somewhat belated reception of New-
tonian science at German universities and scientific academies during the later
eighteenth century, and with the parallel rise of competing experimental models
in chemistry, anatomy, and the study of electricity and magnetism, authors such
as Lichtenberg and Schelling were keen to integrate aspects of these disciplines
into their respective philosophical reflections. Nonetheless, it was in German
romantic Naturphilosophie—itself deeply connected to the late idealism of
Schelling—that the emerging experimental science and philosophy gained the
most ground.48 For Novalis, to give a fairly random example, philosophical re-
flection necessarily experiments with images, concepts, and logical judgments
in much the same way as physics and chemistry experiment with natural ele-
ments: combination, rearrangement, observation of results, and so on are the
methods to be found in both the natural and the philosophical sciences.49 No-
valis’s remarks of 1798–99, however, could not anticipate the fundamental changes
that would take place in the following decades—institutional and theoretical
changes that led to an explosion of experimental research in the German states.
Although these changes cannot really be reduced to any single cause, three prom-
inent factors contributed to the success of the experimental paradigm in nine-
teenth-century Germany: first, the reorganization and modernization of German
academic education during the early 1800s subsequent to Wilhelm von Hum-
boldt’s vision for the new university in Berlin; second, the introduction of new
technological means during the 1830s and 1840s, often connected to the eco-
nomic interests of the industrial sector; and third, the increasing specialization
of different scientific disciplines within the large-scale research culture of impe-
rial Germany from the early 1870s onward.50
As both a member and an observer of the contemporary academic commu-
nity who analyzed and criticized its trends in a series of public lectures, entitled
“Über die Zukunft unserer Bildungsanstalten,” in Basel in early 1872, Nietzsche
was no stranger to these shifting intellectual fields. Together with a new empha-
sis on the materialities of communication, these factors can also be seen as the
driving force behind the rise of physiology as the leading scientific discipline of
the time, which could not have occurred without the close interrelationship of
science, technology, and industry, itself heavily criticized by one of Nietzsche’s
early sources, Zöllner’s Über die Natur der Cometen.51 These developments also
mean, however, that the philosophical systems of the 1820s to the 1850s, often
influenced by Hegelianism and generally lacking any serious foundation in the
realm of the empirical, gave way to the experimental knowledge produced in the
physiological and psychological laboratories, while the results of these new dis-
ciplines entered the public imagination of the educated bourgeoisie after the
revolutions of 1848.52 What it means to be “human”—that is, the relationship
between organic and mental life—could no longer be discussed in purely philo-
sophical terms; such accounts henceforth required the sort of evidence that can
be generated only within an experimental setting and for which Wilhelm Wundt’s
Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie (1874) and Emil DuBois-Reymond’s
Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur allgemeinen Muskel- und Nervenphysik (1875–77)
can serve as particularly prominent examples. Indeed, epistemic entities, such as
life, consciousness, and body, are created within this setting in the first place.53
In fact, it seems that by the early 1890s, after Nietzsche had suffered his mental
breakdown and Oskar Langendorff had published his Physiologische Grafik (1891),
tellingly subtitled Ein Leitfaden der in der Physiologie gebräuchlichen Registrir-

methoden, the technological arrangements of the experimental setting occasion-
ally became more important than the physiological experiments themselves.
But the experimental paradigm was not restricted to the examination of bodi-
ly functions. From the advent of comparative linguistics, the study of language
had adhered to a scientific model, and in nineteenth-century laboratory culture
language itself became an epistemic entity embedded in specific experimental
arrangements: the study of language no longer proceeded along exclusively his-
torical or philosophical lines of inquiry but was increasingly regarded as a con-
stituent part of organic life that can be examined according to physiological
models.54 By the 1870s Kant’s idea of an experiment of reason was taken more
seriously than Kant would probably have liked. In fact, the experimentalization
of life seems to have dissolved the faculty of reason into an epiphenomenon of
human experience that can be reduced to a specific function of the relationship
between mental and organic life: “we are able to experiment with nerves,” Fried-
rich Albert Lange remarks, fascinated.55
This background shows that Nietzsche’s idea of an experimental philosophy
not only sought to accommodate the new paradigms of his scientific environment
but also led to similar conclusions: reason and knowledge result from the inter-
play between the organic and the mental. Ironically, moreover, the epistemic
distance between the phenomena to be examined and the instruments of obser-
vation increasingly diminished: the new emphasis on the empirical led not to a
quasi-objective perspective on natural phenomena but to an experimental ma-
nipulation of nature. Interestingly enough, this closely resembles the result of
the process Nietzsche calls “interpretation.” Situated somewhere between philo-
sophical discourse and the natural sciences, his notion of experiment (Versuch)
was deployed to redefine the relationship between mental and organic existence
just as nineteenth-century physiology and psychology reconceptualized what it
means to be human.56 Suddenly, the reminders about the uncertain foundations
of knowledge articulated by such seemingly unseasonable authors as Zöllner,
Lange, and Nietzsche become less eccentric than they might have initially seemed
to be (although this might not have been obvious to the scientists working
within the research culture of imperial Germany).
To be sure, the implications of Nietzsche’s understanding of interpretation as
a form of experiment are rather frustrating. This account not only implies that
language and reference are inherently indeterminate but also seems to entail the
inevitable conclusion that language and the conceptual knowledge based on it
are entirely relative. But Nietzsche does not quite say this. Although he might
occasionally—and polemically—stress that the concepts in which we trust are
“illusory,” he fervently believed that the illusion is nevertheless necessary and

convenient: without it we could not say or know anything at all. Nietzsche does
not argue that everything is somehow relative and that any statement about the
world is as good as any other. He merely suggests that any form of proposi-
tional knowledge can be judged only with reference to other statements, and a
good example of this is the constitution of natural laws, which, he notes, refer
not to natural phenomena or reality but merely to other axioms and beliefs that
we already accept as true or valid: “All natural laws are merely relations of an x
to a y and a z. We define natural laws as relations to an xyz, each of which is, in
turn, known to us only as relations to other xyz” (KGW III/4, 9 [235]). The dis-
covery of natural laws, he claims, establishes above all a metaphorical network
of relations among beliefs, and this network furthermore depends on our phys-
iological predispositions. This understanding of scientific explanation, which
emerged at the beginning of the 1870s—that is, when the life sciences were pos-
ing new theoretical questions about their referentiality and when Nietzsche was
outlining his thoughts on rhetoric—continued to profoundly influence his ideas
about the way conceptual knowledge and its increasing complexity govern our
attempts at interpreting our environment. In 1881 he finally concluded that, over
long periods of time, both science and conceptual knowledge culminate in a
dense network of truth claims, value judgments, and philosophical common-
places from which we cannot escape: “Gradually, an impenetrable web has
emerged! Caught up in it we come into life, and even science is unable to free
us” (KGW V/2, 11 [252]). For Nietzsche, the complexity of knowledge is, pace
Descartes and Kant, based on neither the simplicity of certain innate principles
nor a transcendental point of reference; rather, it results from the anthropologi-
cal inevitability of metaphor and interpretation, which themselves are embedded
within a physiological framework.
Memory Traces and the Organization of Life

Although the hope for a relatively unified account of human knowledge contin-
ued to shape much philosophical thought throughout the nineteenth century,
and although this tendency features prominently in some of Nietzsche’s sources
(e.g., Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Spir, Teichmüller), both the sciences and phi-
losophy of the era faced epistemic difficulties that the idiosyncrasies of Nietzsche’s
position accurately reflect. Many developments within the “modern episteme”
certainly sought to redefine precisely the relationship between the mental and
the organic. Some of the results were spectacular, whereas others verge on the
bizarre. Indeed, the nineteenth century was an exciting time for physiology and
the other life sciences. Nevertheless, many of these results were inconclusive
outside the relatively stable environment of physiological and psychological
laboratories. In fact, much experimental psychological research, such as that of
Wilhelm Wundt, rarely contributed substantially to philosophical discourse and
merely tended to confirm a body of philosophical knowledge that had largely
been in place since the middle of the eighteenth century. Moreover, some phys-
iologists became increasingly skeptical about their own results. Emil DuBois-
Reymond’s Über die Grenzen des Naturerkennens, a lecture first delivered in Au-
gust 1872 and soon thereafter published in French and English translations, is a
case in point. It would certainly be a triumph of science, DuBois-Reymond says,
to establish the precise relation between “a specific mental process” and corre-
sponding molecular processes in the “nerve fibers,” but that would not explain
the psychological states involved, such as pain or joy. Even the most precise
anatomical knowledge about the brain does not convey much insight into men-
tal life, and although much evidence suggests that these mental processes result
from physical processes, it is impossible to understand mental life purely in terms
of physical functions.57 The idea that reducing mental processes to brain func-
tions explains more than a mere biological given, as Lange reminds his readers,
is simply “childish” and “naïve.”58 In many ways Nietzsche’s anthropology of
knowledge centers on the same realization: the philosophical questions triggered
by his reflections on language, metaphor, and thought cannot be detached from
the physiological conditions of experience; knowledge is inextricably linked to
the body. Nietzsche thus faces much the same question as that facing DuBois-
Reymond: what provides the bridge between the mental and the organic and,
by implication, between culture and nature? Although we need to proceed cau-
tiously, a phenomenon we already encountered in Nietzsche’s rhetorical thought
may illuminate this issue: memory.
In a surprising turn away from the topical memoria of rhetorical theory, Nietz-
sche introduces a more cognitive account of memory in the notes to his lecture
series “Darstellung der antiken Rhetorik.” This account does not depend on the
notion of an arrangement of places within a confined space; rather, it is based
on the idea that the association of mental images itself can deliver the successive
parts of a speech (KGW II/4, p. 501). Of course, the mental association of im-
ages and representations features prominently in philosophical attempts to un-
derstand the operations of mind and memory from Aristotle to Descartes, Hume,
and beyond.59 For Nietzsche, the nexus between association and memory proves
to be an influential point, for it allows him to understand memory in rhetorical
terms as a metaphorical process, making it a concept that describes the pro-
cesses of thinking itself. In Nietzsche’s notes from 1872–73, however, the actual
status and constitution of memory are somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand,
Nietzsche seems to claim that human memory bears no relation to nervous
processes or brain functions but should be understood as a hereditary attribute
of human life: “Memory has nothing to do with nerves, or with the brain. It is
a primordial characteristic [Ureigenschaft]. For human beings carry with them
the memory of all previous generations” (KGW III/4, 19 [162]). On the other
hand, he relates memory to the problem of perception and contends that we
should conceive of it as a “physiological process” (KGW III/4, 19 [179]) that as
such should depend on the transmission of nerve impulses. At first sight, then,
Nietzsche’s ideas seem mutually contradictory, and he seems unable to deliver
any well-rounded account of the forms and functions of memory. A closer in-
spection, however, reveals that these apparent inconsistencies reflect a much
wider debate within nineteenth-century neurophysiology, experimental psychol-
ogy, and the life sciences at large.
Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, memory came to play
an increasingly prominent role within an emerging scientific redefinition of
mental and bodily functions, a development in many respects triggered by the
rise of the life sciences and new psychological paradigms beginning around 1800.
A particularly prominent example for this reassessment of memory as a psycho-
logical function can be found in a series of lectures given by the German anato-
mist Carl Gustav Carus. Carus, a friend of Alexander von Humboldt and a
representative of the crossing between medical discourse and romantic Naturphi-
losophie, delivered these lectures in Dresden during the winter semester 1829–30.
After a lengthy discussion of language influenced by the commonplaces of eigh-
teenth-century thought and German idealism, Carus turns to memory, which
he casts as one of the most important and most promising fields of psychologi-
cal research. Much like Nietzsche after him and many other psychologically
inclined writers before him, Carus emphasizes the cognitive dimension of mem-
ory, which can retain and combine our heterogeneous sensory perceptions and
must therefore be seen as safeguarding our ability to think and reason about the
external world.60 Unlike his philosophical predecessors, however, Carus also
sought to give these intellectual processes a bodily foundation. Considering that,
say, thinking cannot be detached from the human body, he concludes that the
mental representations of our manifold sensory perceptions must be related to
physiological changes, so that as an intellectual faculty, memory merely mirrors
complex alterations within the physiological organization of the body.61 With
this combination of intellectual and physical factors, which he continued to
highlight in later works, Carus opened up an area of scientific debate that, in-
fluenced by the widespread dissemination of evolutionary theories, was to cul-
minate in the later nineteenth century by focusing on the material constitution

of memory.
Stimulated by Helmholtz’s research on visual and auditory perception and by
his equally important research on the rate of nerve conductivity, many nineteenth-
century experimental psychologists followed Carus’s line of argument more or
less explicitly by regarding memory as exclusively based on processes of percep-
tion. Nonetheless, the increasing knowledge about the physiology of the brain
provided by the detailed studies of, among others, Pierre Flourens, Eduard Hitzig,
and David Ferrier showed that the more important point was the second aspect
of Carus’s theory, namely, the close relationship between memory and the phys-
ical organization of the brain.62 A prominent example for this reorientation is
the work of Ewald Hering, who studied medicine at the University of Leipzig
between 1853 and 1858, partly under Gustav Theodor Fechner, and who later held
the chairs in physiology at the Josephinum in Vienna and at the universities of
Prague and Leipzig. Although Hering is most famous for his work on visual
space, eye movement, and the sensory reception of color, he also presented a
decisive lecture entitled “Über das Gedächtnis als eine allgemeine Funktion der
organisierten Materie” (“On Memory as a General Function of Organized Mat-
ter”). In this lecture, which he delivered at the Viennese Academy of Sciences in
May 1870, Hering focused on the pathways in the brain and proposed a defini-
tion of memory as an association of physical traces within brain matter. Before
the Spanish neuroanatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal showed that memory is
based on synapses and neural connectivity, which he did toward the end of the
nineteenth century, Hering—unaware of synapses—defined memory as the in-
nate ability of brain matter to reproduce itself.63 The material constitution and
organization of the brain, Hering surmised, changes depending on processes of
sensory perception and nerve stimulation, which leave a so-called memory trace,
or engram—that is, a physiological inscription of past events.64 As Zöllner notes
in his detailed account of Hering’s lecture, personal memories might vanish, but
“the unconscious memory of nature . . . is indestructible.”65 Because mammals
do not lose their memories after periods of unconsciousness, memory cannot be
regarded as a purely mental process but must be understood in terms of mate-
rial processes.
One of the most interesting and perhaps most lasting aspects of Hering’s
theory was what we might term the “biologization of memory,” a project clear-
ly compatible with the study of evolutionary morphology at German universities
during the nineteenth century. If memory can be understood as a biological
phenomenon, then perhaps not just the cellular organization of the brain and
of the nervous system as a whole but also engrams are influenced by evolution-
ary factors, such as hereditary succession. The British debate on evolution had
sparked related notions: as early as the 1860s Francis Galton had speculated about
the possible link between heredity and intellectual characteristics. In France
Théodule Ribot examined these aspects with regard to psychological phenom-
ena in general, and in 1877 Paul Robert Schuster delivered an inaugural lecture
at the University of Leipzig in which he discussed whether unconscious mental
representations can be passed along evolutionary lines.66 Although there is no
direct textual evidence that Nietzsche read Hering’s lecture, he was familiar with
his position from having read Zöllner’s Über die Natur der Cometen. Zöllner also
prepared Schuster’s inaugural lecture for publication, and a critical assessment
of Ribot’s theory of memory can be found in Teichmüller’s Die wirkliche und die
scheinbare Welt.67 Furthermore, in a later account by Resa von Schirnhofer, a
close friend of Malwida von Meysenburg and Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth, she
remembers vividly that, during a visit to Nietzsche’s home in Nice at the begin-
ning of April 1884, Nietzsche showed her a copy of Galton’s Inquiries into the
Human Faculty and Its Development (1883).68 Not only did he explain Galton’s
ideas to her, but Galton’s influence can be traced throughout the Nachlaß frag-
ments of 1883–74 and Jenseits von Gut und Böse. As was often the case, Nietzsche’s
knowledge of the intellectual fields and trends that shaped the episteme of his
time was secondhand, but as a classical philologist by education and profession,
he clearly was a perceptive and attentive reader.
In addition, the ideas presented by Hering, Ribot, and Galton often inter-
sected with research into animal morphology, a thriving field a German univer-
sities throughout the nineteenth century. The details of this research and its
precise relationship to physiology need not concern us here, but one of its main
representatives, Ernst Haeckel, whose writings influenced Nietzsche’s understand-
ing of the life sciences considerably, was to take up the biologization of memory
within the framework of Entwicklungsmechanik. After he delivered his first lec-
tures on Darwin’s concept of evolution in the early 1860s, and after he published
his famous Die generelle Morphologie der Organismen in 1866, Haeckel increas-
ingly came to believe that the development of individual organisms mirrors the
evolutionary development of whole species, and within this context the idea of
a biological memory was to gain a new dimension.69 In a somewhat obscure and
speculative study bearing the title Die Perigenesis der Plastidule (1876), Haeckel
developed the view of memory as a biological function that resides in the cel-
lular organization of living organisms and is transmitted through genetic in-
heritance.70
This is an important point for Nietzsche’s shifting understanding of memory,
but we must be careful with regard to his relationship to Haeckel. Although
Haeckel’s writings and their subsequent popularization in Germany did shape

Nietzsche’s understanding of the life sciences to some extent, Nietzsche’s cur-
sory remarks on the morphologist were not always positive.71 Nevertheless, Nietz-
sche continued to believe in the biological and evolutionary foundation of
memory, and he could find further support for this view in the work of one of
Haeckel’s former students, Wilhelm Roux’s Der Kampf der Theile im Organismus,
which Nietzsche consulted quite often immediately after its initial publication
in 1881.72 Like Haeckel, Roux uses the concept of memory in the context of
heredity and argues that the development of organisms according to chemical
processes is a form of genetic memory within the respective organism, as well as
across generations of such an organism.73 For Nietzsche, the assumption that
organic memory is above all an organization of complexity within organisms
proved to be an interesting idea widely supported in other scientific literature
he studied during this time, such as Oscar Schmidt’s Descendenzlehre und Dar-
winismus (1873) and Carl Nägeli’s Mechanisch-physiologische Theorie der Abstam-
mungslehre (1884).74
All this helps explain why, in his early notes on the subject from 1872–73,
Nietzsche delivered a somewhat incoherent account of memory. He was unable
to decide whether he should regard memory as an intellectual faculty, as a result
of physiological processes, or as a hereditary attribute of human life in general.
At first sight, these three definitions seem to exclude one another, but in fact
Nietzsche was able to combine these three aspects and deliver an account of
memory that is indebted to the previously discussed scientific approaches yet
still compatible with a rhetorical model. In a fragment from his notebooks of
1880, he treats memory as a physiological or biological process, which seems to
echo the discussion of Hering, Haeckel, and Roux: “There is no organ of ‘mem-
ory’: all nerves, e.g., in the legs, refer back to earlier experiences. Every word,
every number is the result of a physical process and has become fortified some-
where in the nervous system. Whatever has been organized within the nerves
[den Nerven anorganisirt] continues to live on in them. There are mountainous
waves of stimulation when this life enters into consciousness, when we remember”
(KGW V/1, 2 [68]).
Unlike the theory of evolution Darwin proposes in On the Origin of Species
(1859), which rests on the idea of a natural selection of traits that individual
organisms inherit, Nietzsche’s discussion of memory as a physiological process
seems to adopt a stance closer to the evolutionary framework developed in Jean-
Baptiste Lamarck’s Philosophie zoologique (1809): physiological changes do not
lead to a selection of specific traits but rather accumulate over generations and
influence the adaptation of the organism to its changing environment. For Nietz-
sche, this is especially true with regard to memory, but despite this seemingly
physicalist account, he slowly shifted the focus of his considerations from the
human body and its biological organization to society and culture as a whole.
This links the evolutionary models involved to the general genealogical perspec-
tive of his work from the mid-1870s onward. The accumulative effect of Lamarck-
ian evolution mirrors the historical dimension of cultural tradition. Like Herder
before him, then, Nietzsche suggests that the history of culture is a variant of
natural history, and memory is the place where the evolution of organic life meets
the development of mental existence. Consequently, he was able to write in 1884
that memory “is the sum total of all experiences of all organic life, alive, ordering
themselves, forming each other, quarreling with each other, simplifying, contract-
ing and transforming themselves into many components.” This process, he notes,
should be regarded as the basis for the “generation of conceptual thought” (Be-
griffsbildung) (KGW VII/2, 26 [94]).
In a sense, then, Nietzsche understood “organic memory” as the physiological
background of those interpretive, rhetorical, and linguistic processes with which
human individuals seek to come to terms with their changing environments—the
conditions of human knowledge and experience are simultaneously mental and
organic. It is doubtful, however, that this close relationship between mental and
organic existence, which Nietzsche sketched out on several occasions, can safe-
guard the unity of knowledge and experience. Perhaps, given these ideas’ ideo-
logical force and popularity, organic memory “must be viewed in the context
of . . . European desires for national identity and epistemological unity,” as
Laura Otis has argued.75 For Nietzsche, however, such desires would be foolish
at best. Nietzsche may have rested his increasingly genealogical perspective on
the assumption that culture cannot be separated from its foundation in nature,
but that does entail a desire for the sort of unity of mental and organic existence
found, for instance, in the monism of Ludwig Büchner or Otto Caspari. Although
monism continued to influence German intellectual culture in the final decades
of the nineteenth century, and although Nietzsche’s remarks can easily be mis-
understood in this regard, he by no means argued for such a position.
Nietzsche hesitated to adopt such an essentially physicalist position because
of his reading of Lange and Teichmüller. Set against the time’s renewed interest
in Kant’s philosophy of science, Lange’s voluminous Geschichte des Materialismus
in particular sought to examine the epistemological implications of scientific
materialism and the positivist understanding of scientific knowledge Lange de-
tected in contemporary physiology. Although he acknowledges in this work that
our perception and image of reality are a product of our biological organization,
he expresses doubts that this allows us to explain our knowledge about the world
in purely physical terms: our understanding of this biological organization itself

depends on the mental abstractions, such as force and substance, with which we
seek to explain our environment. As a consequence, direct access to our bio-
logical organization is as unattainable as is access to Kantian things-in-them-
selves.76 In a sense, then, scientific materialism, which makes sense only if an
unmediated access to empirical reality is possible, is merely a form of metaphys-
ics in disguise, and sixteen years later Nietzsche could find the same argument
in the closing paragraphs of Teichmüller’s Die wirkliche und die scheinbare Welt:
disputing Ribot’s idea that muscles, nerve fibers, and brain cells carry some form
of organic memory, Teichmüller points out that our belief in the existence of
such physical objects is merely a perspectival abstraction that draws different
appearances into an explanatory model such as, for instance, “brain cells.”77 If
this is true, and Teichmüller believed it to be so, we cannot reduce abstract
thought to physical processes, for their very existence is first and foremost a result
of abstract thought. This dilemma, he continues, constitutes the “riddle of ma-
terialism,” and much like Lange, he duly rejects materialism and positivism as
viable philosophical options.78
Nevertheless, neither Teichmüller nor Lange disregard or belittle the value of
contemporary research in the life sciences as a consequence; they merely remind
us about the philosophical limitations of results obtained within an empirical
research setting. Reading Lange and Teichmüller must have been an interesting
lesson for Nietzsche, and despite his growing obsession with biological themes,
he was unable to accept a unified theory of nature and culture as it was proposed,
for instance, by Ludwig Büchner. The decisive aspect of his notion of memory
is therefore not so much its biological foundation but its status as a medium
between mental and organic existence. Because seeing memory as the basis for
the generation of conceptual thought and knowledge implies a historical dimen-
sion, Nietzsche could use memory to describe the evolutionary history of our
conceptual thought and, by implication, of the cultural institutions, moral val-
ues, and truth claims produced by our conceptual commonplaces and by the
nexus of language, consciousness, and the body.
The “Natural History” of Truth and Morality

Keeping in mind the complex background of Nietzsche’s anthropological con-
siderations previously outlined, it is now possible to return to and perhaps even
illuminate his treatment of one of the most central cultural institutions, namely,
the reign of truth and moral authenticity. At the center of much of his work
from the late 1870s onward stands a genealogical examination of those concepts
with which we seek to govern social life, such as truth, falsehood, convention,
custom, and so on. Even his philologically oriented account of rhetoric in the
early 1870s showed rhetoric to be deeply connected to social life and the forma-
tion of cultural institutions. Thus, Nietzsche regarded the discipline of rhetoric,
and the rise of rhetorical theory in general, as directly connected to specific social
contexts, such as the shift from an oral culture to a culture of literacy, the emer-
gence of the Athenian polis, and the function of public debate under the rule of
Pericles. Although Nietzsche’s perspective changed considerably in the following
years, especially after he retired from the University of Basel in 1879, this gen-
eral social and cultural dimension of rhetoric and language still appears in many
of his later writings, such as Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Zur Genealogie der Moral,
and Götzen-Dämmerung. Nevertheless, he shifted his attention from specific
historical contexts to a wider account of the interrelationship of language,
thought, and culture as it is governed by social interaction and as it governs such
interaction itself. This interaction was in many ways embedded in a physiologi-
cal background that became an increasingly prominent factor in Nietzsche’s
thought. The reign of truth and moral authenticity he discovered at the center
of the order of culture is thus marked by an interplay between organic and
mental life that we need to examine with regard to three factors shaping Nietz-
sche’s understanding of cultural institutions: convention, truth, and morality.
Convention is always a difficult philosophical issue. Nietzsche initially appears
to criticize any notion of convention as an expression of cultural and philo-
sophical mediocrity—after all, Nietzsche’s own enterprise is supposed to be de-
fying convention. In fact, however, he admits early in the 1870s that society re-
quires some sort of “fixed agreement” to end the disastrous state of a continuous
war of all against all (KGW III/4, 19 [229]). As such, his notion of convention
is strikingly ambivalent, and this ambivalence is repeated in his famous essay on
truth and falsehood when he seems to support convention as the basis for soci-
ety yet reject convention as a falsification of facts, as a convenient lie and decep-
tion (TL 80–84). Maudemarie Clark and other commentators have therefore
concluded that Nietzsche’s argument concerning the precarious state of social
and linguistic convention is somewhat weak and contradictory.79 Perhaps it is
necessary to consider afresh some of his arguments in this essay, “Ueber Wahrheit
und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne,” where Nietzsche delivers his most de-
tailed account of convention. First, Nietzsche points out that convention seeks
to establish a mutual agreement with regard to a society’s judgments of right or
wrong, true or false, and good or evil. But Nietzsche goes one step further and
enriches the social aspect of convention with a linguistic dimension: social con-
vention, then, rests on an agreement as to the way members of a given society
speak about their environment. He seems to be speaking of a fixation of reference

and meaning, that is, “a uniformly valid and binding designation . . . invented
for things.” It is this “legislation of language,” he continues, that “establishes the
first laws of truth” (TL 81).
At first sight Nietzsche seems to be siding with Locke, who noted that language
provides the common ground for any given society or culture.80 Unlike Locke,
however, he not only notes the interdependence of linguistic convention and
social interaction but also emphasizes that any such convention is arbitrary.
Needless to say, Locke would probably have rejected such an idea. For Nietzsche,
this means that any fixation of reference is artificial in the sense that it cannot
be based on a correspondence between words and things or between the language
we use and the experiences we seek to describe. To the extent that social exchange
rests on language and the formation of conceptual knowledge, Nietzsche sees it
as dependent on metaphors. He therefore argues that our only hope for gaining
any form of knowledge consists in the repeated use of specific metaphors in
similar circumstances, so that these metaphors become conventionalized over
time. This introduces a clear yet generally overlooked historical dimension into
the essay. A conventional expression is thus, as Nietzsche remarks, an illusion
that we take for reality, and we do so precisely because we tend to forget the
metaphorical status of those concepts we use to understand our environment
(KGW III/4, 19 [229]).
The argument bears a peculiar aspect, however, for Nietzsche goes on to de-
scribe such conventions as “lies” and “deceptions,” which is a rather odd and
somewhat moralistic account. The contrast between what can be counted as
“true” and what has to be counted as “false” plays an important role here. First,
he argues that the opposition between truth and falsehood is itself the product
of our language and of the concepts we use. It is, in other words, the result of
convention. Nietzsche certainly does not deny that in the usual sense of the term,
lies generally warrant moral reproach (TL 81). The case is different, however,
when he speaks of lies in general, that is, lies in an extramoral sense. He even
speaks about such lies as being connected to a fundamental drive toward falsify-
ing reality (KGW III/4, 29 [20]). This might seem bizarre, but once we shift our
attention away from the moralistic overtones of the word lie and consider it
within the framework of Nietzsche’s epistemological ideas, things become clear-
er: conventionalized expressions are lies precisely because they suggest a direct
reference to reality that they cannot provide; at the same time, such conventions
about the referential claims of our conceptual framework carry no moral value,
for they are in any event necessary insofar as they safeguard any form of social
interaction and communication and enable us to interpret our environment.
As can be expected, Nietzsche’s distinction between moral and extramoral lies

distressed many commentators considerably. His position becomes more under-
standable, however, if we return to his discussion of Plato’s notion of psychogogia
as a rhetorical guidance of the soul toward knowledge. Referring to Plato’s Re-
public, Nietzsche remarks in “Darstellung der antiken Rhetorik” that lies can
sometimes be justified because they are useful (KGW II/4, pp. 418–19).81 In his
notebooks of 1887–88 he turns his attention once more to the problem of lying,
which at this point seems to be defined as the inevitable falsification of reality
through our senses and intellectual faculties. On the one hand, we cannot prevent
ourselves from lying in an extramoral sense because of our physiological makeup
and our need to rely on complex interpretations about our world, a need that is
itself driven by the more or less conventionalized metaphors we must use. No
interpretation of the external world can provide direct access to things-in-them-
selves, so that any proposition about this external world must be regarded as a
lie. On the other hand, we need not regard this as a deficiency of human life;
rather, social evolution seems to require such lies, for they can produce firm and
relatively unquestioned beliefs, such as those expressed in the general statements
of metaphysics, religion, morality, and science (KGW VIII/2, 11 [415]). Extra-
moral lies thus result from an unconscious rhetorical persuasion that leads us to
believe in a fixed conceptual order that enables us to make conclusive judgments
about the world, so that we must regard these judgments as expressing some sort
of truth.
For Nietzsche, then, the problem of truth and falsehood is directly connected
to utility, convenience, and survival in a world he regards as far too complicated
and heterogeneous for human beings to understand completely. Claims about
reality, such as natural laws, and claims about culture, such as moral values, would
therefore be linked to the practical interests manifest in evolution, survival, social
interaction, and so on. This extravagant claim would bring the general perspec-
tive of Nietzsche’s considerations close to the reductive sociobiological evolution-
ism that some (e.g., Daniel Dennett) have ascribed to his later works.82 In fact,
Nietzsche rarely shows interest in reducing mental existence to physical functions
or cultural processes to natural evolution; rather, for both pairs he stresses the
interdependence of each term with its complement. Still, although we cannot
conceive of one without referring to the other, they are not identical. Nietzsche’s
position, as difficult and precarious it might be, highlights an important issue
that remains a fundamental problem—namely, as Bernard Williams aptly sug-
gests, that it is a “mistake to suppose . . . that every cultural development can be
shown to contribute to the inclusive fitness of the human beings who live in that
culture.”83 Perhaps unfortunately, this also means that Nietzsche’s position, es-
pecially in his later writings, is far less radical and subversive than it is com-
monly believed to be. But is it possible to differentiate between moral and ex-
tramoral lies, and indeed, is it possible to distinguish between truth and falsehood
at all?
Some commentators have pointed out that the distinction between moral and
extramoral lies is necessary to make sense of Nietzsche’s somewhat strange argu-
ment:84 moral lies are related to moral values, whereas extramoral lies express an
epistemological predisposition. That is, we need not lie in social interactions,
but we must lie in our propositional and cognitive claims about reality. It is also
possible, however, to maintain that moral and extramoral lies differ only mini-
mally, for both entail an illusory reality; moral and extramoral lies both consist
in making “something which is unreal appear to be real” (TL 81).85 After all,
extramoral lies presumably affect our understanding of morality just as episte-
mological ideas affect ethical reasoning. Lying, then, is a form of insincere asser-
tion that does exactly what any other assertion does: it makes a statement that
is supposed to express a specific belief. Nietzsche is quite explicit about this issue
in his essay on truth and falsehood, but this position leads him into another
dilemma: if he argues that social and linguistic conventions are lies not only
because they are arbitrary but also because our physiological limitations make
them so, then he must use a conventional notion of truth and falsehood. The
conventions of his own language cannot escape the logic of his argument, which
now seems inconsistent precisely because it must be a lie.
Whichever way we turn this line of argument, it is logically inconsistent, but
Nietzsche runs into these difficulties not because he tries to show the uselessness
of convention but because he finds any fixed differentiation between truth and
lie inherently problematic. Our notions of truth have more to do with language,
the history of our conceptual knowledge, and our physiological organization
than with direct access to external reality or a transcendental point of reference.
After all, Nietzsche notes explicitly that the grammatical and rhetorical structures
of language, and thus of conceptual thought, generate the logical laws according
to which we judge a proposition as true, and it is necessary to realize that the
grammatical and rhetorical dimensions of language, as well as of the concepts
we use to understand reality, develop over time; that is, they are marked by
historical transformations. We make statements about reality and about ourselves
in a particular language and within a particular conceptual framework, but the
more we make such statements, the more they are connected to claims about
their truth. Nietzsche presents this point of view in more detail in an interesting
note written in autumn 1880, which appears to draw some radical conclusions
from his earlier views: “first of all, human beings and animals construct a new
world of errors and gradually refine these errors, so that endless contradictions
can be discovered and the amount of possible errors is reduced, or the errors are
continued. ‘Truth’ is, actually, only in things invented by man e.g. number. . . . For
us, the world is thus the sum of relations to a limited sphere of erroneous basic
assumptions” (KGW V/1, 6 [441]). Truth, Nietzsche suggests, can exist only in
our mental world. There is no truth in nature and perforce none in physiology.
Rather, it is a conceptual tool we introduce to understand our environment, even
though we are unable to gain any direct access to this environment—or espe-
cially because we are unable to do so. Our notion of truth is therefore the prod-
uct of a long-term conceptual development.
The historicity of truth is an extremely important aspect of Nietzsche’s discus-
sion that—for one reason or another—is regularly overlooked but that continued
to inform his later notion of truth in the increasingly genealogical perspective
of his philosophical enterprise. It would therefore be unwise to detach his discus-
sion of truth from the genealogical arguments he develops in, for instance, Jen-
seits von Gut und Böse, Zur Genealogie der Moral, Götzen-Dämmerung, and his
notebook jottings for those works. In fact, the historical, or genealogical, dimen-
sion of Nietzsche’s argument allows him to avoid a fundamental problem that,
as Bernard Williams has pointed out, tends to haunt many theories of truth: “it
is just not true that the dispositions of truthfulness that we have, or that anyone
else has had, can be adequately explained in functional terms,” for “their value
always and necessarily goes beyond their function.”86 It is one thing to argue that
notions of truth serve a specific function within a given social or cultural frame-
work, but it is quite another to consider the value these notions have within this
framework. Nietzsche was interested less in the function of truth, which he ac-
cepted as a given, than in the value of this function. This complicates matters
enormously, for this genealogical dimension prevents our judging his discussion
of truth from a purely analytical, or formal, point of view. We must realize,
rather, how truth is part of the interplay between mental and organic life without
succumbing to the view that truth is a natural kind.
Nietzsche’s concept of truth is undoubtedly one of the most-debated issues of
his philosophical criticism, and commentators from Martin Heidegger onward
have approached this topic without reaching much consensus. It is virtually
impossible to review these interpretations in detail, because this somewhat be-
wildering situation undoubtedly stems from Nietzsche’s use of the terms true
and truth, which is mostly puzzling, often apparently self-contradictory, and
occasionally nonsensical. Truth, Nietzsche claims, is an army of metaphors; it is
nothing but a strong belief or a product of social conventions. He also argues
that truth is ineffable or a tautology or that it is simply doomed to fail—only to
suggest that it provides some form of order, that it should be understood as

probability, or that it might successfully be replaced by notions such as the “will
to truth” or the “value of truth.” Finally, there is the radical assumption that has
stylized Nietzsche into the bête noire of modern philosophy, namely, that truth
does not exist at all.87 Many of his interpreters offer suggestions no less colorful
than his own accounts of truth, for they argue, among other things, that his
understanding of truth is ontological, idealistic, inconsistent, or absurd; that he
links truth to justice, treats it as a product of interpretation, or defines it as cor-
respondence; or even that he presents us with several different versions of truth.88
It seems pointless to add to this confusion, but it might be worthwhile to recon-
sider Nietzsche’s account of truth in the light of his genealogical project and thus
of the historicity of what we believe to be truth.
First of all, Nietzsche rejected any notion of truth based on access to some sort
of supersensible reality, such as things-in-themselves. Second, his positions forced
him to be highly critical of any attempt to formulate truth in the sense of a cor-
respondence between things and words, or between reality as perceived and real-
ity as conceived. Inasmuch as truth is a concept, and inasmuch as it can be es-
tablished only within propositional discourse—that is, within language—it
cannot be based on any form of nonconceptual or a priori knowledge: his ques-
tion as to whether language can adequately represent external reality must be
answered in the negative (but it is a rhetorical question anyway). Nevertheless,
throughout his writings Nietzsche discusses notions of truth, truthfulness, falsi-
fication, and so on at length. Truth, it seems, has some raison d’être, especially
in his later writings, and it would be unwise to argue that his philosophical
enterprise is generally marked by a complete denial of truth. There is, as Maude-
marie Clark has convincingly shown, a fundamental shift in Nietzsche’s treatment
of this issue: he seems to have had a fairly critical attitude toward notions of truth
from the early 1870s to the early 1880s, but he appears to have overcome this
negative view around 1885–86.89 He underwent this shift, however, not because
he redefined his understanding of truth but because he began to spell out the
details of a more historically oriented notion of truth that is directly connected
to his new genealogical perspective but that was already present in his earlier
essay on truth and falsehood and in his notebooks from 1872–73. Thus, toward
the end of Zur Genealogie der Moral, he pointedly asks about the origin of our
“will to truth” and our relentless belief in the “value of truth” (GM III:4), a
question that had already appeared in his notebooks from 1872–73 (KGW III/4,
19 [244]). At stake here is whether, from a historical and anthropological point
of view, the distinction between truth and lie, or between truth and falsehood,
can be considered an absolute distinction. The real question is how the idea of
a “true world” arose.
Nietzsche approaches this problem especially in Götzen-Dämmerung, which
is based on his notebooks from 1887–88 and was published in 1889. In part 4 he
outlines what he regards as philosophy’s most crucial misunderstanding, the
separation of a true world of things-in-themselves from a world of appearances,
which he detects in the philosophical tradition from Plato to Kant and beyond
and which influences the formation of Christian theology, too (TI IV:1–6).
Whereas ancient Greek philosophy is supposed to present the idea that it is pos-
sible, at least for the sophoi, to gain direct access to things-in-themselves and
therefore to some form of transcendental truth, Christian theology considers any
such access to be possible only in the realm of the spiritual. The next step, it
seems, is taken by German idealists, especially Kant and Hegel, for whom such
things-in-themselves are transcendental principles and points of reference, even
though we have no access to them at all. According to Nietzsche’s historical ac-
count, which is somewhat debatable, this leads to the scientific materialism and
positivism of the nineteenth century, which still held on to the distinction be-
tween a “true world” of objective reality and a “world of appearances.” But,
Nietzsche asks, if we have no access to a true world and objective reality, perhaps
it makes little sense to believe in such a world. If so—indeed, if there is no such
thing as a true world—then there can be no world of appearances. Interestingly,
then, if truth is supposed to account for an objective reality but there is no such
reality, then truth itself has to be a “lie”—or to put it in Nietzsche’s terms, the
true world is a “fable.”
Considering the idea of a true world and truth itself along this genealogical
trajectory shows why Nietzsche has to argue for the illusory status of a rather
specific notion of truth: as long as we believe that truth is connected to super-
sensible objectivity, our notion of truth will always be based on a primordial
illusion. Although this seems to be a fairly negative understanding of truth, there
is another way of looking at this account: Nietzsche nowhere denies that there
is a fundamental and, so to speak, anthropological drive to “truthfulness” con-
nected to our continuous attempts at explaining our environment according to
specific schemata within our language and within our conceptual and physio-
logical framework. Accordingly, the “will to truth” is an interpretive action that
culminates in the assumption of a fixed order of signs that facilitates social in-
teraction and enables us to come to (albeit hypothetically) conclusive judgments
about the world (KGW VIII/1, 9 [60]). This order, he notes, is represented by
our conceptual framework—by the metaphors, terminologies, and languages we
use—and any such conceptual framework necessarily develops over time and
exhibits a certain genealogy:
As “truth” will establish itself whatever corresponds to the necessary conditions of
life within a particular period . . . : over time, that sum of opinions which have the
greatest utility, i.e., the possibility of the longest duration, will have been incorpo-
rated into humanity. The most essential of those opinions on which the endurance
of humanity rests have long since been embodied, e.g., the belief in identity number
space etc. . . . It will, thus, hardly be a history of “truth,” but one of the organic
construction of errors, which grows into body and soul and which, finally, dominates
sensations and instincts. (KGW V/2, 11 [262])
Just as we cannot change our beliefs at will, we cannot change our idea of truth.
The truths and beliefs at the core of cultural and social institutions tend to be
involuntary. They are a product of complex rhetorical transformations of mean-
ing over long periods of time that furthermore depend on physiological condi-
tions. Not without reason, Nietzsche speaks of “sensations” and “instincts.”
All this means that, for Nietzsche, the notion of truth is less important than
the interdependence of language, consciousness, and its historical development.
What makes a particular cultural institution a cultural institution is not really
its truth but its history, its age, the way it has been assimilated. Nietzsche clear-
ly holds this view in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, where he remarks that the power
and survival of knowledge stem not from its truth value but from its age and the
way in which it has been integrated into our worldview:
Over immense periods of time the intellect produced nothing but errors. . . . It was
only very late that such propositions were denied and doubted; it was only very late
that truth emerged—as the weakest form of knowledge. It seemed that one was
unable to live with it: our organism was prepared for the opposite; all its higher
functions, sense perception and every kind of sensation worked with those basic
errors which have been incorporated since time immemorial. . . . Thus the strength
of knowledge does not depend on its degree of truth but on its age, on the degree
to which it has been incorporated, on its character as a condition of life. (GS 110)
Cultural values, such as what Bernard Williams terms the “virtues of accuracy
and sincerity,”90 clearly lie at the heart of this historical trajectory, as do the
cognitive claims of scientific endeavor. Nietzsche goes one step further, however,
for his idea that the long-term success of knowledge consists in its being a “con-
dition of life” brings us back to the anthropological dimension of his philo-
sophical enterprise; that is, it highlights the intertwining of mental and organic
life. His project of a genealogy can thus be understood in an anthropological
way. As an attempt to explain how a specific cultural institution (e.g., morality,
religion, art, or science) has come about, genealogy is also an attempt to describe
how this cultural institution is part of natural processes without reducing the
history of culture to the history of nature. The issue in Nietzsche’s genealogical
project is not reduction but explanation.
With this shift from the interplay among language, thought, and physiology
to something we might call the “order of culture,” Nietzsche returns to the no-
tion of memory to bridge the gap between the mental and the organic. In Zur
Genealogie der Moral, for instance, he introduces the terms “mnemonic technique”
and “mnemonics” to characterize the emergence of moral sentiments and moral
conscience (GM II:3).91 Throughout history, he points out, society as an orga-
nization of individuals involuntarily forced itself to internalize moral sentiments,
using violence and recurring mnemic images to facilitate social interaction. These
images and the violence connected to them not only leave memory traces with-
in single individuals but also imprint these traces onto social organization as a
whole. The emerging moral sentiments and values can be transferred uncon-
sciously to subsequent generations, which will follow the unquestioned author-
ity of such memory traces: “With the aid of such images and procedures, man
was eventually able to retain five or six ‘I-don’t-want-to’s’ in his memory, in con-
nection with which a promise had been made, in order to enjoy the advantages
of society—and there you are! With the aid of this sort of memory, people fi-
nally came to ‘reason’” (GM II:3). What we call “reason,” Nietzsche suggests,
results from the cultural memory of conceptual commonplaces, the sum of their
historical development. In this respect his understanding of cultural memory is
inextricably linked to language and rhetoric, and it represents a self-replicating
behavioral and conceptual pattern that is passed between generations and cultures
by imitation and internalization.
Again, Nietzsche in no way sought to reduce mental operations to physical
functions or to reduce cultural transformations exclusively to biological and
evolutionary phenomena. The close relationship between language and mind
that informs the development of both culture and knowledge continued to play
an important role in his thought and prevented him from accepting a reduction-
ist, sociobiological position. Rather, the intuitive and involuntary intellectual
operations central to language, rhetoric, and interpretation are themselves based
on the fundamental break between the physical and the mental world. Intel-
lectual processes, whatever they are, seek to represent that which we perceive as
external reality but which, according to Nietzsche, is generated by complex
physiological and evolutionary processes, and in turn these intellectual pro-
cesses are represented or expressed by the manifestations and institutions of
culture. At issue here is a multifaceted mimetic operation that Nietzsche describes
in some detail in a note of 1872–73: “Imitation is the means of all culture;

gradually it produces instinct. All comparing (primordial thinking) is a form of
imitation. . . . Imitation requires an apprehension and subsequently a constant
translation of the apprehended image into thousand metaphors, all of which
have an effect” (KGW III/4, 19 [226]). Nietzsche’s insistence on imitation thus
continued to inform his later understanding of cultural institutions, such as truth
and morality, in his genealogical project; his anthropological perspective rests on
acknowledging that what he describes as imitation occurs in both culture and
organic life. His “natural history of truth and morality” can therefore be under-
stood as a reflection on that which Pierre Bourdieu has termed habitus, that is,
“an acquired system of generative schemes” that are “em-bodied, turned into a
permanent disposition, a durable manner of standing, speaking and thereby of
feeling and thinking.” Such a habitus cannot be changed voluntarily but pro-
duces what Bourdieu elsewhere calls “strategies of reproduction,” practices that
seek to stabilize cultural power through, for instance, particular notions of truth
and morality, themselves often connected to a specific way of speaking.92 Of
course, one could merely say that people tend to behave, speak, and think much
as their neighbors do, but for both Nietzsche and Bourdieu, this is not be taken
lightly. There is, however, a crucial difference between Bourdieu’s and Nietzsche’s
approaches, for Bourdieu’s notion of habitus implies that the schemes with which
we order our environment are acquired and conditioned culturally over rela-
tively long periods of time, whereas Nietzsche would argue that they are simul-
taneously cultural and physiological.
Many of Nietzsche’s ideas are incompatible with the epistemic problems we
face in the twenty-first century, even though some of his arguments remain with
us when we seek to understand how knowledge is produced, connected to or-
ganic life, or influenced by complicated historical transformations. Nietzsche’s
anthropology of knowledge, however, is directly connected to the trends, shifts,
and decisive epistemic ruptures of the nineteenth century. The fervent interest
in language and rhetoric manifested throughout almost all Nietzsche’s writings
thus served as the basis for the much wider and more ambitious project of revis-
ing what it means to do “philosophy.” Still, even though Nietzsche was a child
of his time, the problems and issues his philosophical enterprise yields are not
far removed from our own world. His project of “‘naturalizing’ our humanity”
(GS 109) by rethinking language, consciousness, and the body along anthropo-
logical lines continues to be a timely concern.
Notes
Introduction
1. Peter Carruthers, Human Knowledge and Human Nature: A New Introduction to an
Ancient Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 193.
2. This seems to be what Alain Renaut means when he laments that “academic tradi-
tion has too often accustomed us to regarding—even practicing—the history of phi-
losophy as a respectable but rather uncreative discipline, inspired solely by a concern for
philological accuracy, which makes it possible to appreciate and preserve great ideas.” He
suggests instead “a history of philosophy . . . that is both philosophical and at the same
time more historical” (Renaut, The Era of the Individual: A Contribution to a History of
Subjectivity, trans. M. B. DeBevoise and Franklin Philip [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1997], xxi). Whether his own attempt to write a history of modern
philosophy as a history of subjectivity succeeds in this sense remains debatable.
3. See Gilbert Ryle, “Thinking and Reflecting” and “The Thinking of Thoughts: What
Is Le penseur Doing?” in his Collected Papers (London: Hutchinson, 1971), 2:465–79,
2:480–96, respectively. Definitions of “thick description” can be found on 2:474 and
2:484.
4. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,”
The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3–30, quota-
tion on 10.
5. Such a “textualization” of cultural and intellectual history is often indebted to Stephen
Greenblatt, “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Vees-
er, 1–14 (New York: Routledge, 1989); and Hayden White, “The Historical Text as Liter-
ary Artifact,” The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation
(Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 26–57.
6. It is not surprising, then, that the so-called linguistic turn of intellectual history has
received much criticism centered on the undue “hyperbolic” reduction of history to a
kind of textual universe. See John H. Zammito, “Are We Being Theoretical Yet? The New
Historicism, the New Philosophy of History, and ‘Practicing Historians,’” Journal of
164 Notes to Pages 4–10
Modern History 65 (1993): 784–814, esp. 799–806. See also John Toews, “Intellectual His-
tory after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Ex-
perience,” American Historical Review 92 (1987): 879–907.
7. See James J. Bono, “Science, Discourse, and Literature: The Role/Rule of Metaphor,”
in Literature and Science: Theory and Practice, ed. Stuart Peterfreund, 59–89 (Boston,
Mass.: Northeastern University Press, 1990).
8. On the complexities involved, see, for instance, Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowl-
edge: Constructivism and the History of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998), 119–32; Joseph Rouse, “Beyond Epistemic Sovereignty,” in The Disunity of Science:
Boundaries, Contexts, and Power, ed. Peter Galison and David J. Strump, 398–416 (Stan-
ford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996); and William J. Bouwsma, “From History
of Ideas to History of Meaning,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 12 (1981): 279–92.
9. See Allan Megill, “Historicizing Nietzsche? Paradoxes and Lessons of a Hard Case,”
Journal of Modern History 68 (1996): 114–52, esp. 119–21.
10. Ibid., 124, 152.
11. See Georg Simmel, Über soziale Differenzierung: Soziologische und psychologische
Untersuchungen (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1890), 4, 7, 12–13; Michel Foucault,
Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Critical Writings, 1972–1977, trans. and
ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 92–133.
12. See Pierre Bourdieu’s “Social Sphere and Social Power” and “The Intellectual Field:
Worlds Apart,” both in Bourdieu, In Other Words, trans. Matthew Adamson (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 123–39 and 140–49, respectively; Fritz Ringer,
“The Intellectual Field, Intellectual History, and the Sociology of Knowledge,” Theory
and Society 19 (1990): 269–94. See also, in a similar vein, David F. Lindenfeld, “On
Systems and Embodiments as Categories for Intellectual History,” History and Theory 27
(1988): 30–50.
13. See Loic D. Wacquant, “Towards a Reflexive Sociology: A Workshop with Pierre
Bourdieu,” Sociological Theory 7 (1989): 26–63, quotation on 39.
Chapter 1: The Irreducibility of Language

1. A prominent example of this trend is R. J. Hollingdale, who emphasizes that Nietz-
sche’s philological writings are “something of interest to classical scholars rather than
students of Nietzsche” (Nietzsche [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973], 211).
2. For an overview of Nietzsche’s work as a classicist, see Fritz Bornmann, “Anekdota
Nietzscheana aus dem philologischen Nachlaß der Basler Jahre (1869–1878),” in “Cen-
tauren-Geburten”: Wissenschaft, Kunst und Philosophie beim jungen Nietzsche, ed. Tilman
Borsche, Federico Gerratana, and Aldo Venturelli, 67–80 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
1994); Hans Gutzwiller, “Friedrich Nietzsches Lehrtätigkeit am Basler Pädagogikum,”
Basler Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Altertumskunde 50 (1951): 148–224. On Nietzsche’s
time in Basel and the intellectual climate, see Curt Paul Janz, Friedrich Nietzsche: Eine
Biographie (Munich: Hanser, 1978–79), 1:277–849.
3. Renate Schlesier, in Kulte, Mythen und Gelehrte: Anthropologie der Antike seit 1800
Notes to Pages 10 –14 165
(Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1994), 10–11, notes that Nietzsche’s
contributions to an anthropological understanding of ancient Greece are still underesti-
mated and largely overlooked.
4. A first step toward relating Nietzsche’s philological work to his philosophical criti-
cism can be found in James I. Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000).
5. On Nietzsche’s encyclopedic introduction and the lectures on the history of Greek
literature, see Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future, 167–224; Barbara von
Reibnitz, “Vom ‘Sprachkunstwerk’ zur ‘Leselitteratur’: Nietzsches Blick auf die griechische
Literaturgeschichte als Gegenentwurf zur aristotelischen Poetik,” in “Centauren-Geburten,”
ed. Borsche, Gerratana, and Venturelli, 47–66. Other standard introductions of the time
include Friedrich August Wolf, Vorlesungen über die Alterthumswissenschaft, ed. Johann
Daniel Gürtler (Leipzig: Lehnhold, 1831–39); Gottfried Bernhardy, Grundlinien zur En-
cyklopädie der Philologie (Halle: Anton, 1832); and August Boeckh, Encyklopädie und
Methodologie der philologischen Wissenschaften, ed. Ernst Bratuschek (Leipzig: Teubner,
1877). Although Boeckh’s encyclopedia was not published until 1877, his lectures were
circulated widely among classical scholars in Germany in the form of notes and copies.
Nietzsche’s teacher, Ritschl, delivered his own introductory course on several occasions
beginning in 1834, but—although it was intended to rival Wolf ’s and Bernhardy’s ac-
counts—it was never published. See Otto Ribbeck, Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl: Ein Beitrag
zur Geschichte der Philologie (Leipzig: Teubner, 1878–81), 1:327ff.
6. See Curt Paul Janz, “Friedrich Nietzsches akademische Lehrtätigkeit in Basel,” Nietz-
sche-Studien 3 (1974): 192–203. The year 1872 is generally regarded as the beginning of
Nietzsche’s interest in rhetoric. See Fritz Bornmann, “Zur Chronologie und zum Text
der Aufzeichnungen von Nietzsches Rhetorikvorlesungen,” Nietzsche-Studien 26 (1997):
491–500.
7. That Gerber is Nietzsche’s main source is argued especially in Martin Stingelin,
“Nietzsches Wortspiel auf poet(olog)ische Verfahren,” and Anthonie Meijers, “Gustav
Gerber und Friedrich Nietzsche: Zum historischen Hintergrund der sprachphiloso-
phischen Auffassungen des frühen Nietzsche,” both in Nietzsche-Studien 17 (1988): 336–
49 and 369–90, respectively. On Gerber in general, see Clemens Knobloch, “Zeichen
und Bild bei Gustav Gerber und Ludwig Noiré: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Seman-
tiktheorie im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Geschichte und Geschichtsschreibung der Semiotik: Fall-
studien, ed. Klaus D. Dutz and Peter Schmitter, 163–80 (Münster: MAKS Publikationen,
1986); Jörg Villwock, “Gustav Gerbers Beitrag zur Sprachästhetik,” Germanisch-Ro-
manische Monatsschrift 31 (1981): 52–73.
8. On the paradigm of ancient Greece among German classical scholars in the nine-
teenth century, see Rudolf Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850 (Ox-
ford: Clarendon, 1976), 167–72.
9. See the remarks in Karl Otfried Müller, Geschichte der griechischen Literatur bis auf
das Zeitalter Alexanders, ed. Eduard Müller (Breslau: Josef Max, 1841), 1:4ff.; Gottfried
Bernhardy, Grundriss der Griechischen Literatur; mit einem vergleichenden Ueberblick der
Römischen, new ed. (Halle: Anton, 1861–72), 1:17ff. In a note from 1871/72, Nietzsche
even expresses his desire to devote a whole course to the history of Greek language in the
winter semester of 1873–74, but this course was never realized (KGW III/3, 8 [75]).
10. With regard to Nietzsche’s account of Greek literary history and its anthropologi-
cal undercurrent, I have discussed this point in more detail in “Sprache, Musik und
Rhythmus: Nietzsche über die Ursprünge von Literatur, 1869–1879,” Zeitschrift für deutsche
Philologie 121 (2002): 208–30.
11. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, X.i.16.
12. See Bernhardy, Grundriss der Griechischen Literatur, 1:417ff.
13. See also KGW III/4, 19 [313]. Nietzsche furthermore discusses barbarismus as a
rhetorical phenomenon that influences the historical development of a language by the
use of foreign words, alterations of syntactical structure, and phonetic changes (KGW
II/4, p. 429).
14. On the concept of rhetorical education, see Jacqueline de Romilly, Les grands So-
phistes dans l’Athène de Périclès (Paris: Éditions de Fallois, 1988), 91–134.
15. Thucydides, II.41. Nietzsche was fully aware of Pericles’ role (KGW II/4, pp. 370–
71; KGW II/4, p. 506).
16. See George Kennedy, The Art of Persuasion in Greece (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1963), 25ff.
17. Likewise, Nietzsche does not really examine the origin of the concept of rhetorike,
which did not truly exist before Plato’s Gorgias, even though the term rhetor refers to the
politicians of the Athenian democracy. See Edward Schiappa, Protagoras and Logos: A
Study in Greek Philosophy and Rhetoric (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,
1991), 40ff. The archaic term rheter was used long before Plato, for example, in Homer’s
Iliad (IX.443). The relatively late appearance of the term rhetoric is an astonishing fact in
the history of eloquence and oratory, although Nietzsche frequently uses the term Rheto-
rik in the context of pre-Platonic oratory. See, for instance, KGW II/1, p. 302; KGW II/3,
p. 344; KGW II/4, p. 515.
18. See George Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983), 24–41; W. C. K. Guthrie, The Sophists (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1971), 27–54. The first definition of the term can be found in Plato, Sophist,
231d.
19. GSA 41/76, pp. 7, 14–15; Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representa-
tion, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), 1:xx; Schopenhauer, Parerga und
Paralipomena, in Schopenhauer, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Wolfgang Freiherr von Löhneysen
(Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1960–65), 4:58. See also Friedrich Albert Lange, Ge-
schichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart (Iserlohn: Baede-
ker, 1866), 13.
20. See Leonhard Spengel, Ueber das Studium der Rhetorik bei den Alten, gelesen in der
öffentlichen Sitzung der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zur Feyer des 83. Stiftungs-
jahres (Munich: Weiss, 1842), 6ff.; Müller, Geschichte der griechischen Literatur, 1:459ff.,
2:313ff., 2:382ff.; Friedrich Blass, Die attische Beredsamkeit (Leipzig: Teubner, 1868–80),
Notes to Pages 17–20 167
1:13ff., 1:44ff., 1:331ff., 2:93ff.; Anton Westermann, Geschichte der Beredtsamkeit in Griech-
enland und Rom (Leipzig: Barth, 1833–35), 1:38ff., 1:132–33, 1:164; Herrmann Roller, Die
griechischen Sophisten zu Sokrates und Plato’s Zeit, und ihr Einfluß auf Beredsamkeit und
Philosophie: Eine gekrönte Preisschrift (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1832), 9ff.
21. See KGW II/4, pp. 370f., 379–85, 506. For Nietzsche’s sources, see Westermann,
Geschichte der Beredtsamkeit, 1:38ff., 77ff.; Müller, Geschichte der griechischen Literatur,
2:313ff., 382ff.; Blass, Die attische Beredsamkeit, 1:44ff.; Spengel, Ueber das Studium der
Rhetorik, 6–7, 17; idem, Isokrates und Platon (Munich: Verlag der Königlichen Akademie
der Wissenschaften, 1855). Similar accounts can be found in Roller, Die griechischen So-
phisten, 9ff.; and Albert Schwegler, Geschichte der Philosophie im Umriß: Ein Leitfaden
zur Uebersicht (Stuttgart: Verlag der Franckh’schen Buchhandlung, 1848), 21–22. Never-
theless, Nietzsche’s historical account does not rest solely on Protagoras, Gorgias, and
Isocrates. Those he discusses at length include Demosthenes (KGW II/4, pp. 372, 389–97,
513–15), Thrasymachos (KGW II/4, pp. 374–76), Lysias (KGW II/4, pp. 377–79, 507–11),
and Hyperides (KGW II/4, pp. 386–87).
22. On Zeno and Parmenides, see also KGW III/2, pp. 341–44. Nietzsche finds this
genealogy again in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, VIII.54 and 56. The
connection between Empedocles and Zeno with regard to the constitution of rhetorical
thought is reaffirmed in Nietzsche’s “Abriß der Geschichte der Beredsamkeit”: Emped-
ocles is the founder of rhetoric; Zeno, the founder of dialectics (KGW II/4, pp. 505 and
369). Nietzsche does not acknowledge his source, which is Blass, Die attische Beredsamkeit,
1:17–18.
23. Compare similar remarks in Spengel, Isokrates und Platon, 10; idem, Ueber das
Studium der Rhetorik bei den Alten, 6.
24. See Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1047a5ff.; Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philoso-
phers, IX.51; Seneca, Epistulae morales, LXXXVIII.43; Sextus Empiricus, Hypotyposes,
VII.60.
25. On this background, see Heinz Wismann, “Modus interpretandi: Analyse comparée
des études platoniciennes en France et Allemagne au 19ème siècle,” in Philologie und
Hermeneutik im 19. Jahrhundert II / Philologie et herméneutique en 19ème siècle II, ed.
Mayotte Bollack, Heinz Wismann, and Theodor Lindken, 490–512 (Göttingen: Vanden-
hoeck und Ruprecht, 1983).
26. See Richard Volkmann, Die Rhetorik der Griechen und Römer in systematischer
Übersicht (Berlin: Ebeling und Plahn, 1872), 2; Westermann, Geschichte der Beredtsamkeit,
1:133; Spengel, Isokrates und Platon, 17. Isocrates, however, had a rather ambiguous rela-
tionship to the Sophists: on the one hand, he dismissed their enterprise as “stupid” (Against
the Sophists, 9), and on the other, he regarded himself as a “Sophist” (Antidosis, 220).
Nietzsche was a well-informed reader of Spengel and discusses Plato’s relationship to
Isocrates as well as his speech against the Sophists (KGW II/4, pp. 98–99, and 380; KGW
II/5, pp. 203–4).
27. Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric, corr. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 101.
28. See Plato, Gorgias, 466b–c, 466d–7a.
29. See ibid., 460c, 465c, 463d, 500c.

30. Nietzsche could have found this view in Leonhard Spengel’s Ueber die Rhetorik des
Aristoteles (Munich: Verlag der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1851), 10; or
idem, Ueber das Studium der Rhetorik, 18.
31. See Friedrich Ast, Platon’s Leben und Schriften: Ein Versuch, im Leben wie in den
Schriften des Platon das Wahre und Aechte vom Erdichteten und Untergeschobenen zu scheiden,
und die Zeitfolge der ächten Gespräche zu bestimmen, als Einleitung in das Studium des
Platon (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1816), 133.
32. See Franz Susemihl, Die genetische Entwicklung der Platonischen Philosophie, einlei-
tend dargestellt (Leipzig: Teubner, 1855), 262ff.
33. Plato, Phaedrus, 270b.
34. Ibid., 271a, 270b.
35. See Plato, Republic, 389b–c.
36. Nietzsche’s account is probably based on Rudolf Hirzel, Ueber das Rhetorische und
seine Bedeutung bei Plato (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1871), 14, 75; and Susemihl, Die genetische
Entwicklung der Platonischen Philosophie, 312ff.
37. Plato, Gorgias, 463a; idem, Phaedrus, 271c.
38. See, similarly, Christian August Brandis, Geschichte der Entwickelungen der griechisch-
en Philosophie und ihrer Nachwirkungen im römischen Reiche (Berlin: Reimer, 1862), 207ff.;
Ast, Platon’s Leben und Schriften, 56ff.
39. Nietzsche’s detailed interest in Aristotle seems to have emerged while preparing his
lecture series on the pre-Platonic philosophers (1869–70); in his notes he refers to the
pre-Socratic source material quoted in Aristotle’s writings (KGW II/4, pp. 220, 237,
241–42, 274, 285, 339–40). In addition, Nietzsche refers to Aristotle elsewhere, especially
in his “Encyclopaedie der klassischen Philologie” (KGW II/3, pp. 342, 349, 393, 408, 409).
In 1872 he attempted a translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric that was never completed: book
2 is missing, as are chapters 14–15 of book 1 and 5–19 of book 3. With regard to the end
of book 1, chapter 2 (= Rhetoric, 1352a–58b), Nietzsche remarks that a translation would
prove too difficult for him (KGW II/4, p. 545); this also seems to apply to the other
missing chapters. For his lecture series “Einleitung zur Rhetorik des Aristoteles,” Nietz-
sche used Leonhard Spengel’s standard edition Ars rhetorica (1867), which he borrowed
several times in 1874 and 1875 from the university library in Basel.
40. See Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1355a.
41. Ibid., 1354a. Compare also the remarks at 1356b and 1357a.
42. On the question of use value and belief produced by persuasion (pisteis), see Aris-
totle, Rhetoric, 1355b. For Nietzsche’s discussion, see KGW II/4, p. 417.
43. See Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1354a, 1354b, 1414a, 1414b, as well as his Sophistic Refutations,
171b. Nietzsche could have found a more detailed discussion in Johannes Vahlen, “Rheto-
rik und Topik: Ein Beitrag zu Aristoteles’ Rhetorik,” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie
22 (1867): 101–10; Carl Prantl, Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1855–
70), 1:263ff., 1:341ff.; and Christian August Brandis, “Ueber Aristoteles’ Rhetorik und die
griechischen Ausleger derselben,” Philologus 4 (1849): 1–47, esp. 18ff.
44. Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1358a.

45. See ibid., 1357a. On this aspect, see Jacques Brunschwig, “Rhétorique et dialectique,
Rhétorique et Topiques,” in Aristotle’s Rhetoric: Philosophical Essays, ed. David J. Furley and
Alexander Nehamas, 57–96 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994).
46. Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1391b–1400b, 1402a–3b.
47. Ibid., 1354a.
48. See Wilhelm Wackernagel, Poetik, Rhetorik, und Stilistik: Academische Vorlesungen,
ed. Ludwig Sieber (Halle: Verlag der Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1873), 235; Spen-
gel, Ueber das Studium der Rhetorik, 19, 23.
49. Again, Nietzsche was aware of this through Spengel (Ueber die Rhetorik des Aris-
toteles, 8–9) and Roller (Die griechischen Sophisten, 20). Spengel underlines the concept
of “knowledge” (Wissen), whereas Roller stresses the dimension of the “understanding”
(Verstand).
50. Spengel, Ueber die Rhetorik des Aristoteles, 13.
51. For a more detailed historical discussion, see Samuel Ijsseling, Rhetoric and Phi-
losophy in Conflict, trans. Paul Dunphy (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1976).
52. Nietzsche’s typewriter has been discussed in detail. See Stephan Günzel, “Nietzsches
Schreibmaschine,” in Friedrich Nietzsche, Schreibmaschinentexte: Vollständige Edition,
Faksimiles und kritischer Kommentar, ed. Stephan Günzel and Rüdiger Schmidt-Grépály,
8–14 (Weimar: Verlag der Bauhaus-Universität, 2002); Martin Stingelin, “Kugeläußer-
ungen: Nietzsches Spiel auf der Schreibmaschine,” in Materialität der Kommunikation,
2d ed., ed. Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, 326–41 (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1995); Friedrich A. Kittler, “Nietzsche, der mechanisierte Philosoph,” kultuR-
Revolution 9 (June 1985): 25–29.
53. For facsimiles of this collection, see Nietzsche, Schreibmaschinentexte, 40–97.
54. On Nietzsche’s early work on Democritus and the atomism of language, see Porter,
Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future, 95–106. For an excellent assessment of the type-
writer in both its technological dimension and cultural effects, see Delphine Gardey,
“The Standardization of a Technical Practice: Typing, 1883–1930,” History and Technol-
ogy 15 (1999): 313–43; idem, La dactylographie et l’éxpeditionnaire: Histoire des employés de
bureau, 1890–1930 (Paris: Éditions Belin, 2001).
55. See Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer and
Chris Cullens, intro. David E. Wellbery (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
1990); idem, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael
Wutz (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999).
56. See Niklas Luhmann, “The Form of Writing,” Stanford Literary Review 9, no. 1
(Spring 1992): 25–42, esp. 26.
57. See Soraya de Chadarevian, “‘Die Methode der Kurven’ in der Physiologie zwischen
1850 und 1900,” in Die Experimentalisierung des Lebens: Experimentalsysteme in den bi-
ologischen Wissenschaften 1850/1950, ed. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger and Michael Hagner,
28–49 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993).
58. On the institutional arrangements mentioned, see David F. Lindenfeld, The Prac-
170 Notes to Pages 30 –35
tical Imagination: The German Sciences of the State in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 142–263.
59. See Gustav Theodor Fechner, “Über die mathematische Behandlung organischer
Gestalten und Processe,” Berichte über die Verhandlungen der Königlich-Sächsischen Ge-
sellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig: Mathematisch-physikalische Classe 1 (1849): 50–64;
Heymann Steinthal, “Zur Physiologie der Sprachlaute,” Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie
und Sprachwissenschaft 5 (1868): 82–95.
60. Nietzsche, however, could not have foreseen that only twenty years later handwrit-
ing itself would become embedded in the practices of standardization: techniques that
allowed the movement of the hand to be observed and traced with mechanical precision
subsequently permitted handwriting itself to be recorded in a net of coordinates that, by
implication, also seems to record the movements of mental life. See Stefan Rieger, Die
Ästhetik des Menschen: Über das Technische in Leben und Kunst (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 2002), 215–30.
Chapter 2: The Failures of Empiricism

1. See Thomas M. Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1994), 159–61, 194–98, 203–12, 231–32, 241–45.
2. Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric, corr. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 196.
3. See Wilhelm Engelmann, ed., Bibliotheca scriptorum classicorum: Achte Auflage, um-
fassend die Literatur von 1700–1878 (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1880–82), 1:8ff., 1:40ff., 2:5–6,
2:543ff. Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition, 243–44, mentions over 200 educa-
tional works on rhetoric and oratory in Germany alone.
4. See Suzanne L. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in
Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 7ff.; Anthony J.
LaVopa, “Specialists against Specialization: Hellenism as Professional Ideology in German
Classical Studies,” in German Professions, 1800–1950, ed. Geoffrey Cocks and Konrad H.
Jarausch, 27–45 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
5. See Herbert Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany, 1831–1933, trans. Eric Matthews
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 34–41.
6. See Timothy Lenoir, Politik im Tempel der Wissenschaft: Forschung und Machtausübung
im deutschen Kaiserreich (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1992).
7. See Philipp Sarasin, Reizbare Maschinen: Eine Geschichte des Körpers, 1765–1914
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001).
8. See Anna Morpurgo Davies, Nineteenth-Century Linguistics (London: Longman,
1998), 83–97, 124–225; Clemens Knobloch, Geschichte der psychologischen Sprachauffassung
in Deutschland von 1850 bis 1920 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1988).
9. On this episode in German intellectual history, see Tilman Borsche, Wilhelm von
Humboldt (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1990), 136ff.; Helmut Gipper and Peter Schmitter,
Sprachwissenschaft und Sprachphilosophie im Zeitalter der Romantik: Ein Beitrag zur His-
toriographie der Linguistik (Tübingen: Narr, 1985), 43ff., 49ff., 54ff.; Holger Pedersen, The
Discovery of Language: Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century, trans. John Webster
Spargo, 4th ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967), 254ff. Humboldt is an
interesting case, for he worked on linguistics from the beginning of the nineteenth cen-
tury without publishing anything remarkable before the 1820s.
10. See Robert E. Norton, Herder’s Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 105–18; Ulrich Gaier, Herders Sprachphilosophie und
Erkenntniskritik (Stuttgart–Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1988), 75–156, 169–
82.
11. See, for instance, the discussions of the relationship between the new linguistic
disciplines and philological scholarship in Wilhelm Clemm, Ueber Aufgabe und Stellung
der klassischen Philologie, insbesondere ihr Verhältniss zur vergleichenden Sprachwissenschaft
(Giessen: Ricker, 1872); L. Tobler, “Über das Verhältnis der Sprachwissenschaft zur Phi-
lologie und Naturwissenschaft,” Neues Schweizerisches Museum 5 (1865): 193–214; and Karl
Schenkl, Werth der Sprachvergleichung für die classische Philologie: Antrittsvorlesung gehalten
zu Gräz 1864 (Graz: Leuchner und Lubensky, 1864). See also J. E. Sandys, A History of
Classical Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903–8), 3:205–11.
12. See Georg Curtius, Philologie und Sprachwissenschaft: Antrittsvorlesung gehalten zu
Leipzig am 30. April 1862 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1862), 16.
13. See ibid., 18, 20.
14. See GSA 50/85, 51/86.
15. In addition to consulting the more philologically oriented linguistic studies of
Friedrich Ritschl or Georg Curtius, Nietzsche borrowed the following books from the
university library in Basel between November 1869 and November 1870: Theodor Benfey,
Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft und der orientalischen Philologie in Deutschland seit dem
Anfange des 19. Jahrhunderts mit einem Rückblick auf frühere Zeiten (Munich: Cotta, 1869);
Theodor Bergk, Beiträge zur lateinischen Grammatik (Halle: Mühlmann, 1870), vol. 1;
Franz Bücheler, Grundriss der lateinischen Declination (Leipzig: Teubner, 1866); Wilhelm
Corssen, Kritische Beiträge zur lateinischen Formenlehre (Leipzig: Teubner, 1863); idem,
Kritische Nachträge zur lateinischen Formenlehre (Leipzig: Teubner, 1866); Johann Philipp
Krebs, Antibarbarus der lateinische Sprache, nebst Vorbemerkungen über reine Latinität, 4th
ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Winter, 1866); Friedrich Max Müller, Vorlesungen über die Wis-
senschaft der Sprache, trans. Carl Böttger (Leipzig: Mayer, 1863–66); Friedrich Neue,
Formenlehre der lateinischen Sprache (Stuttgart: Lindemann, 1866), vol. 1; Ludwig Rams-
horn, Lateinische Grammatik, 2d ed. (Leipzig: Vogel, 1830); Karl Christian Reisig, Vor-
lesungen über lateinische Sprachwissenschaft, ed. Friedrich Haase (Leipzig: Bogel, 1839);
Wilhelm Scherer, Zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (Berlin: Duncker, 1868); Heymann
Steinthal, Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft bei den Griechen und Römern mit besonderer
Rücksicht auf die Logik (Berlin: Dümmler’s Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1863); and Ernst Win-
disch, Untersuchungen über den Ursprung des Relativpronomens in den Indogermanischen
Sprachen (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1869).
16. See Benfey, Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, 357–92, 427–556.
17. See KGW IV/1, 3 [27]; KGW III/3, 7 [75]. Nietzsche’s claim is not without reason.
In the mid-nineteenth century linguistics increasingly detached itself from philological
discourse. See John Arbuckle, “August Schleicher and the Linguistics/Philology Dichot-
omy: A Chapter in the History of Linguistics,” Word 26 (1970): 17–31.
18. Nietzsche’s well-documented reception of Schopenhauer needs no further explica-
tion. See especially Christopher Janaway, “Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s Educator,” in
Willing and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s Educator, ed. Janaway, 13–36 (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1998). On Nietzsche’s reception of Lange, see George J. Stack, Lange and
Nietzsche (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1983); Jörg Salaquarda, “Nietzsche und Lange,”
Nietzsche-Studien 7 (1978): 236–53. For his reading of Hartmann, see Federico Gerratana,
“Der Wahn jenseits des Menschen: Zur frühen E. v. Hartmann-Rezeption Friedrich
Nietzsches (1869–1874),” Nietzsche-Studien 17 (1988): 391–433.
19. GSA 41/76, pp. 56ff.
20. See, for instance, KGW I/4, 58 [46], 62 [4–55]. Nietzsche refers to Kuno Fischer,
Kant’s Leben und die Grundlagen seiner Lehre: Drei Vorträge (Mannheim: Bassermann,
1860), and to Karl Rosenkranz, Geschichte der Kant’schen Philosophie (Leipzig: Voss,
1840).
21. See Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophie des Unbewussten (Berlin: Duncker, 1869),
227–31.
22. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Historisch-kritische Einleitung in die Philosophie
der Mythologie, in Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Karl Friedrich August Schelling (Stutt-
gart: Cotta, 1856–61), 11:52. The quotation can be found in Hartmann, Philosophie des
Unbewussten, 227. Another source for Nietzsche’s knowledge of Schelling is Albert Schweg-
ler, Geschichte der Philosophie im Umriß: Ein Leitfaden zur Uebersicht (Stuttgart: Verlag
der Franckh’schen Buchhandlung, 1848), 183–86.
23. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch,
corr. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 508.
24. See Geoffrey Bennington, “The Perfect Cheat: Locke and Empiricism’s Rhetoric,”
in Legislations: The Politics of Deconstruction (London: Verso, 1994), 119–36; Paul de Man,
“The Epistemology of Metaphor,” Critical Inquiry 5 (1978): 12–30, esp. 14ff. Vickers re-
marks that Locke’s rhetorical talent “proves that his own time as a teacher of rhetoric at
Oxford had taught him some skills” (In Defence of Rhetoric, 199).
25. Locke, Essay, 493–94.
26. See Thomas Hobbes, Elements of Law, in Hobbes, The English Works, ed. William
Molesworth (London: John Bohn, 1839–45), 2:161, 3:37.
27. See Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Meditationes de cognitione, veritate et ideis,” in
Leibniz, Die philosophischen Schriften, ed. C. J. Gerhardt (Berlin: Weidmann, 1875–90),
4:423. The same point is made by Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Éditions
de Minuit, 1967), 72.
28. Leibniz, Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain, in Die philosophischen Schriften,
5:237.
29. See Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Aesthetica (Frankfurt an der Oder: Jo. Christ.
Kleyb, 1750–58), sects. 427, 440; idem, Metaphysica, 7th ed. (Halle: C. H. Hemmerde,
1779), sect. 533; idem, Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad Poema pertinentibus

(Halle: Gruneit, 1735), sects. 115–16.
30. See Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines,
précédé de “L’archéologie du frivole” par Jacques Derrida, ed. Charles Porset (Paris: Éditions
Galilée, 1973), 244, 259.
31. See ibid., 174, 175, 238, 255; quotation at 175.
32. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, foreword by Mary
J. Gregor (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1987), 190 (translation slightly modified). See also
Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, in Kant, Werkausgabe, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, 11th ed.
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 10:258–59 (A 203).
33. On the intellectual context, see Klaus Christian Köhnke, The Rise of Neo-Kantian-
ism: German Academic Philosophy between Idealism and Positivism, trans. R. J. Holling-
dale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Thomas E. Willey, Back to Kant:
The Revival of Kantianism in German Social and Historical Thought (Detroit, Mich.:
Wayne State University Press, 1978). The English translation of Köhnke’s valuable study
should be approached with caution. The German text has been abridged, and all reference
matter—from endnotes and tables to bibliographical information—has been omitted.
For more detailed information, see Klaus Christian Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg des
Neukantianismus: Die deutsche Universitätsphilosophie zwischen Idealismus und Positivismus
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986).
34. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 139–41 (B 6–10) and 147 (B 22). On this
much-debated issue, see Michael Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 21, 43–47, 136–64; Gerd Buchdahl, Metaphysics
and the Philosophy of Science: The Classical Origins Descartes to Kant (Oxford: Blackwell,
1969), 480–81, 484.
35. See Kant, “First Introduction,” Critique of Judgment, 402.
36. See Kant, Critique of Judgment, 226–27. Pluhar translates the term Anschaungen as
“intuitions” and Versinnlichung literally as “making a concept sensible.” Compare the
German edition Kritik der Urteilskraft, in Werkausgabe, 10:294–95 (B 254–55). On Kant’s
concept of hypotyposis, see John H. Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 273–74; Rudolf A. Makkreel, Imagination
and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermeneutic Import of the Critique of Judgment (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1990), 123–24.
37. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 227–28 (translation slightly modified). Compare Kant,
Kritik der Urteilskraft, in Werkausgabe, 12:296 (B 257). Kant refers to Locke, Essay, 175.
38. See Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, in Werkausgabe, 12:296 (B 256–57), where Kant
notes that the function of schemata and symbols has not yet been analyzed in much
detail, even though it clearly deserves much attention. Ironically, he immediately there-
after notes that the Critique of Judgment is not the place to do so (“allein hier ist nicht
der Ort, sich dabei aufzuhalten”). This remark is particularly peculiar, since Kant should
have been aware of the work of Johann David Michaelis, Johann Georg Sulzer, and Johann
Gottfried Herder. Pluhar’s translation (Critique of Judgment, 227) is slightly misleading
here.
39. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1979), 12.
40. For an overview of some of these contemporary positions, see Andrew Ortony, ed.,
Metaphor and Thought, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
41. Nietzsche shares this point of view with Cicero (De oratore, II.33) and Quintilian
(Institutio oratoria, II.xvii.37, II.xix.2, II.xiv.5).
42. See Hans Blumenberg, “Anthropologische Annäherungen an die Rhetorik,”
Wirklichkeiten, in denen wir leben (Stuttgart: Reclam 1981), 104–36.
43. See Plato, Cratylus, 387c6–11; Locke, Essay, 104.
44. See David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd ed.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 4, 10–13.
45. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 112 (B xx), 157–71 (B 37–66), 242–43 (A 127f.).
46. See ibid., 263 (B 164).
47. See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M.
Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 2:1000.
48. On Nietzsche’s Kantian line of argument, see Tracy B. Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche
and the Politics of Transfiguration, exp. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988),
40–49.
49. See Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, q.1, a.1; idem, Summa
theologica, I, q.16, a.2 ad 2. On the conceptual history of this notion, which goes back to
Avicenna, see Hans Blumenberg, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie, 2d ed. (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), 14. Blumenberg notes the vagueness of Aquinas’s definition,
which could mean either an adaequatio intellectus ad rem (the concept’s fit to the object)
or an adaequatio rei ad intellectum (the object’s fit to the concept). The difference is de-
cisive: the first definition is Aristotelian and epistemological, whereas the second is Scho-
lastic and theological.
50. See Giambattista Vico, De antiquissima sapientia ex linguae Latinae originibus eru-
anda, in Vico, Opera, ed. B. Croce, G. Gentile, and F. Nicolini (Bari: Laterza, 1914–53),
1:185, 1:189.
51. See Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in Werkausgabe, 3:102 (B 82). A more critical
reading might conclude that Kant simply wanted to avoid the problem of language.
Guyer and Wood’s translation (Critique of Pure Reason, 197) speaks of an “agreement of
cognition with its object.”
52. On Nietzsche’s criticism of such correspondence theories, see also Richard Schacht,
Nietzsche (London: Routledge, 1983), 61–65.
53. See Alan D. Schrift, “Language, Metaphor, Rhetoric: Nietzsche’s Deconstruction
of Epistemology,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 23 (1985): 371–95, esp. 376; Schacht,
Nietzsche, 61–62.
54. See Plato, Sophist, 263b; Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1011a–12a. Interestingly, given the
history of rhetorical thought discussed in the first chapter, the correspondence theories
proposed by both Plato and Aristotle developed against the perceived relativism of the
Sophists.
55. See J. L. Austin, “Truth,” in Austin, Philosophical Papers, ed. J. O. Urmson and G.
J. Warnock (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961), 117–33; Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Phi-
losophy, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 69–75. For a full discussion, see
Richard L. Kirkham, Theories of Truth: A Criticial Introduction (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1992), 119–39.
56. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 279–86 (B 189–202).
57. The most detailed attack on the strict distinction between analytic and synthetic
statements can be found in W. V. O. Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in Quine,
From a Logical Point of View: 9 Logico-Philosophical Essays, 2d ed., rev. (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1964), 20–46.
58. Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2002), 65.
59. See Hilary Putnam, Representation and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1988), 88.
60. Immanuel Kant, The Jäsche Logic, in Kant, Lectures on Logic, trans. J. Michael
Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 557–58. (The translation is slight-
ly modified. Young translates Übereinstimmung and übereinstimmen as “agreement” and
“to agree,” respectively. Cf. the German original Logik, in Werkausgabe, 6:476 [A 69–
70].)
61. See Kant, Logik, in Werkausgabe, 6:477 (A 71).
63. See Kant, Logik, in Werkausgabe, 6:478–80 (A 72–6).
64. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 197–98 (B 84).
65. This is an admittedly reductive account of Tarski’s theory. See Tarski, “The Concept
of Truth in Formalized Languages,” in Tarski, Logic, Semantics, and Metamathematics
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1956), 152–278. For detailed accounts, see Kirkham, Theories of
Truth, 141–73; Alan Musgrave, Common Sense, Science, and Skepticism: A Historical Intro-
duction to the Theory of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993),
256–62.
66. See Donald Davidson, “The Folly of Trying to Define Truth,” Journal of Philosophy
93 (1996): 263–78.
67. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 161–62 (B 45), 512–13 (B 522). On Kant’s discussion
of things-in-themselves, see Moltke Gram, “Things in Themselves: The Historical Les-
sons,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 18 (1980): 407–31.
68. See Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne
(New York: Dover, 1969), 1:184; Friedrich Albert Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus und
Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart (Iserlohn: Baedeker, 1866), 309; Eduard von
Hartmann, Das Ding an sich und seine Beschaffenheit (Berlin: Duncker, 1871).
69. See HA I:10–11, 16, 18; HA II:ii.11; BGE 2, 16; TI III, IV; EH 4; and several pas-
sages from KGW: III/4, 19 [28, 156]; VII/2, 26 [413]; VII/3, 38 [7, 14]; VIII/1, 1 [74, 115],
2 [85, 149, 154]; VIII/2, 9 [35, 40, 91, 106]; VIII/3, 14 [103].
70. See Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1966), 5.
71. See Quine, “Two Dogmas,” 42; Hilary Putnam, “The Question of Realism,” in
Putnam, Words and Life, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1994), 295–312, esp. 307; Jacques Derrida, “La dissémination,” La dissémination (Paris:
Éditions du Seuil), 319–407, esp. 378–79.
72. See Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche,
Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), 105.
73. Gustav Gerber, Die Sprache als Kunst, 2d ed. (Berlin: Gärtner, 1885), 1:332 (partly
emphasized in the original); see also 1:232, 1:234, 1:248, 1:255–56, 1:269.
74. For the sources of this argument, which is often attributed to Protagoras, see Dio-
genes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, IX.56; Seneca, Epistulae morales, LXXXVIII.43;
Sextus Empiricus, Hypotyposes, VII.60.
75. See Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1005b.
76. See Jean-François Lyotard, Le différend (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1983), 19–23.
See also Myles F. Burnyeat, “Protagoras and Self-Refutation in Later Greek Philosophy,”
Philosophical Review 85 (1976): 172–95.
77. See Plato, Phaedrus, 271a; idem, Gorgias, 452e; Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1355b; Cicero,
De inventione, I.6, II.20; idem, De oratore, I.5, I.138; Richard Volkmann, Die Rhetorik der
Griechen und Römer in systematischer Übersicht (Berlin: Ebeling und Plahn, 1872), 1;
Leonhard Spengel, Ueber das Studium der Rhetorik bei den Alten, gelesen in der öffentlichen
Sitzung der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zur Feyer des 83. Stiftungsjahres (Mu-
nich: Weiss, 1842), 13.
78. Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, 2:118.
79. See Martin Stingelin, “Unsere ganze Philosophie ist Berichtigung des Sprachgebrauchs:”
Friedrich Nietzsches Lichtenberg-Rezeption im Spannungsfeld zwischen Sprachkritik (Rheto-
rik) und historischer Kritik (Genealogie) (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1996).
80. See Louis Kelterborn, “Erinnerungen (1901),” in Begegnungen mit Nietzsche, ed.
Sander L. Gilman, 103–23 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1985), esp. 114.
81. See Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Vermischte Schriften, mit dem Portrait, Facsimi-
le, und einer Ansicht des Geburtshauses des Verfassers (Göttingen: Verlag der Dieterich’schen
Buchhandlung, 1867), 1:121.
82. See Ernst Behler, “Nietzsches Sprachtheorie und der Aussagecharakter seiner
Schriften,” Nietzsche-Studien 25 (1996): 64–86, esp. 77; J. Hillis Miller, “Dismembering
and Disremembering in Nietzsche’s On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense,” in Why
Nietzsche Now? ed. Daniel O’Hara, 41–54 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995),
esp. 47.
83. See, for instance, Rüdiger Bittner, “Nietzsches Begriff der Wahrheit,” Nietzsche-
Studien 16 (1987): 70–90, esp. 80.
84. Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
Notes to Pages 57– 62 177
University Press, 1990), 81–90, proposes a similar argument but concludes that, to assume
that things exist, Nietzsche had to stick to a “metaphysical correspondence theory” that
presupposes a direct and immediate link between external reality and our ideas thereof.
85. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 618–19 (B 724).
86. See UM I:7 (p. 31). See also KGW III/4, 19 [134, 236].
87. See Helmut Müller-Sievers, Self-Generation: Biology, Philosophy, and Literature
around 1800 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997).
88. Kant, “First Introduction,” Critique of Judgment, 403–4.
89. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 280 (translation slightly modified; cf. Kritik der Urteils-
kraft, in Werkausgabe, 10:349–50 [B 334]).
90. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 619 (B 724–25).
91. See Kant, Critique of Judgment, 281.
92. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 298 (B 222–23).
93. See HA I:2; KGW III/4, 29 [223]; KGW V/1, 1 [70], 4 [55], 6 [59, 254, [361]; KGW
VII/2, 25 [96].
94. See Lichtenberg, Vermischte Schriften, 1:121; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxi-
men und Reflexionen, in Goethe, Werke: Hamburger-Ausgabe, ed. Erich Trunz, 12th ed.,
rev. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1994), 11:530 (sect. 1220). Nietzsche’s edition of Lichtenberg’s
Vermischte Schriften contains underlinings and annotations of the previously cited passage
cited, and in 1870/71 Nietzsche quoted Goethe’s aphorism (KGW III/3, 5 [39]).
Chapter 3: What Is a Trope?

1. These objections can be found, for example, in Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on
Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 70, 78; Stephen
Houlgate, Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Criticism of Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986), 48; Lawrence M. Hinman, “Nietzsche, Metaphor, and Truth,”
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 43 (1982): 179–99, esp. 192; and J. P. Stern,
“Nietzsche and the Idea of Metaphor,” in Nietzsche, Imagery and Thought: A Collection
of Essays, ed. Malcolm Pasley, 64–82 (London: Methuen, 1978), 74.
2. See J. Hillis Miller, Topographies (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995),
180; Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke,
and Proust (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), 105.
3. Nietzsche’s figurative language has found considerable attention. See especially Eric
Blondel, Nietzsche, le corps et la culture: La philosophie comme généalogie critique (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1986), 24–33, 299–319.
4. See, for instance, Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 13, 37; Bernard Pautrat, Versions du soleil: Figures
et système de Nietzsche (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1971), 36–39. Nietzsche’s own emphasis
on the figurative quality of his philosophical prose is also related to his attempt to imitate
the rhythm of spoken language through punctuation, alliterations, paragraphs, syntacti-
cal structures, and so forth. See Gert Mattenklott, “Der Taktschlag des langsamen Geistes:
Tempi in der Fröhlichen Wissenschaft,” Nietzsche-Studien 26 (1997): 226–38. Nietzsche’s
178 Notes to Page 63
awareness of the rhythmic and even musical quality of language is certainly indebted to
his earlier philological interest in theories of rhythm and meter. See James I. Porter,
“Nietzsche’s Rhetoric: Theory and Strategy,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 27 (1994): 218–44,
esp. 219; Christain J. Emden, “Sprache, Musik und Rhythmus: Nietzsche über die Ur-
sprünge von Literatur, 1869–1879,” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 121 (2002): 226–
30.
5. See Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines,
précédé de “L’archéologie du frivole” par Jacques Derrida, ed. Charles Porset (Paris: Éditions
Galilée, 1973), 194–95, 227ff.; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, ed.
Angèle Kremer-Marietti (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1974), 97ff.; Thomas Blackwell, An
Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (London: n.p., 1735), 41; and Giambattista
Vico, The New Science, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1968), sect. 429.
6. See Theodor Benfey, Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft und der orientalischen Phi-
lologie in Deutschland seit dem Anfange des 19. Jahrhunderts mit einem Rückblick auf früh-
ere Zeiten (Munich: Cotta, 1869), 23–24, 283–95: Friedrich August Wolf, Vorlesungen über
die Alterthumswissenschaft, ed. Johann Daniel Gürtler (Leipzig: Lehnhold, 1831–39), 1:47ff.
In his lecture notes Nietzsche also refers to discussions in Pierre-Louis Moreau de Mau-
pertuis’s Réflexions philosophiques sur l’origine des langues et la signification des mots (1748)
and Charles de Brosses’s Traité de la formation méchanique des langages et des principes
physiques de l’étymologie (1765).
7. See Johann Gottfried Herder, Über die neuere deutsche Literatur: Erste Sammlung
von Fragmenten (Eine Beilage zu den Briefen, die neueste Literatur betreffend), in Herder,
Werke in zehn Bänden, ed. Martin Bollacher et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klas-
siker Verlag, 1985–2000), 1:181–84. For a more detailed interpretation of Herder’s evolu-
tionary model of linguistic development, see Ulrich Gaier, Herders Sprachphilosophie und
Erkenntniskritik (Stuttgart–Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1988), 47–61; Astrid
Gesche, Johann Gottfried Herder: Sprache und die Natur des Menschen (Würzburg: Königs-
hausen und Neumann, 1993), 21–104. As Ernst Robert Curtius has shown (European
Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask [London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1953], 28), this idea of a continuous evolution and degeneration of language
according to an organic model goes back to Augustine’s harmonization of human his-
tory with that of the divine creation or the different periods of human life. Such or-
ganic models are older than that, however, and as a classical philologist, Nietzsche must
have encountered them in the works of Plato (Republic, 546a), Sallust (Bellum Iugurthi-
num, II.3), Horace (Ars poetica, 60–72), and Seneca (Epistulae morales, LXXI.12–6).
8. Some of the main representatives of this new debate about the origin and the growth
of language are Lazarus Geiger, Ursprung und Entwicklung der menschlichen Sprache und
Vernunft (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1868–72); Anton Marty, Ueber den Ursprung der Sprache (Würz-
burg: Stuber, 1875); Ludwig Noiré, Der Ursprung der Sprache (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern,
1877); Heymann Steinthal, Der Ursprung der Sprache im Zusammenhang mit den letzten
Fragen alles Wissens (Berlin: Dümmler, 1851). For a more detailed examination of this
debate, see G. A. Wells, The Origin of Language: Aspects of the Discussion from Condillac
to Wundt (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1987); Martin Lang, “Ursprache und Sprachnation:
Sprachursprungsmotive in der deutschen Sprachwissenschaft des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in
Theorien vom Ursprung der Sprache, ed. Joachim Gessinger and Wolfert von Rahden,
1:52–84 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1989); Irena Schmidt-Regener, “Empirie, Psychologie,
Philosophie: Sprachursprungstheorien in der 2. Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Beiträge
zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft 1 (1991): 119–47.
9. See Wilhelm Wackernagel, Über den Ursprung und die Entwicklung der Sprache:
Academische Festrede gehalten am 8. November 1866 bei der Jahresfeier der Universität Basel
(Basel: Schweighauser Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1872), 16, 18ff., 33.
10. This also throws new light on the figurative quality of Nietzsche’s own language,
and despite his unawareness of the historical dimension at play, J. Hillis Miller rightly
points out that “Nietzsche’s task . . . is to use metaphors . . . in such a way as to reveal
clearly the functioning of metaphors” (“Dismembering and Disremembering,” 46).
11. See Joseph Mali, The Rehabilitation of Myth: Vico’s “New Science” (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1992), 4, 165; Heinz Gockel, Mythos und Poesie: Zum Mythosbe-
griff in Aufklärung und Frühromantik (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1981), 50–51.
12. See Vico, The New Science, sect. 444.
13. Recent contributions to the theory of metaphor have revived this argument to some
extent but dropped the discussion about an origin of language. For example, Mary B.
Hesse remarks that metaphor is “a fundamental form of language, and prior (histori-
cally and logically) to the literal” (“Models, Metaphors and Truth,” in Knowledge and
Language, Volume III: Metaphor and Knowledge, ed. F. R. Ankersmit and J. J. A. Mooij,
49–66 [Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993]), 54), and arguing along similar lines, David Cooper
notes a “primacy of metaphor” insofar as “metaphorical talk is temporally and logically
prior to literal talk” (Metaphor [Oxford: Blackwell, 1986], 257).
14. Jean Paul, Vorschule der Ästhetik, in Jean Paul, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Norbert Miller
(Munich: Hanser, 1959–85), vol. I/5, p. 184. Jean Paul’s expression “in Rücksicht geistiger
Beziehungen” could be translated as “with regard to the life of the mind,” but he no
doubt speaks of “relations” (Beziehungen) for a reason. On this passage, see also Hans
Esselborn, Das Universum der Bilder: Die Naturwissenschaft in den Werken Jean Pauls
(Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1989), 135–38.
15. See Eva Feder Kittay, Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Content (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1987), 89–90; Cooper, Metaphor, 118–39.
16. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 1:404.
17. See ibid., 1:306, 1:404. Carl R. Hausman, Metaphor and Art: Interactionism and
Reference in the Verbal and Nonverbal Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988),
21, describes this phenomenon in terms of the dynamic semantic relations within com-
posite words such as understanding, which is composed of under plus stand. In this sense,
a metaphor also exists when two (or more) words are combined into one expression.
Strictly speaking this could also be described as a symbol, for Greek symballein means
“throwing together.”
18. See Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, VIII.ii.5, IX.i.5.
19. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, 4th ed.
(Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1981), 80.
20. Cooper, Metaphor, 82.
21. See Hans Blumenberg, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie, 2d ed. (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), 10–13.
22. See ibid., 10. As Cooper says, “Metaphorical utterances do not at all universally
wear their metaphoricality on their sleeves” (Metaphor, 82).
23. See Miller, Topographies, 170; Gary Shapiro, Nietzschean Narratives (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1989), 51.
24. See Richard Volkmann, Die Rhetorik der Griechen und Römer in systematischer
Übersicht (Berlin: Ebeling und Plahn, 1872), 349; Wilhelm Wackernagel, Poetik, Rheto-
rik, und Stilistik: Academische Vorlesungen, ed. Ludwig Sieber (Halle: Verlag der Buch-
handlung des Waisenhauses, 1873), 381.
25. For the following, see Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, VIII.iii.24, VIII.vi.1, IX.i.4.
26. See César-Chesneau Dumarsais, “Des tropes ou des différents sens,” “Des tropes ou
des différents sens,” “Figure” et vingt autres articles de l’Encyclopédie, suivis de “L’abrégé des
tropes” de l’abbé Ducros, ed. Françoise Douay-Soublin (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), 69.
27. Consuetudo is not a fixed linguistic convention but changes over time. See Quintil-
ian, Institutio oratoria, I.v.5, I.vi.16, I.vii.30, IX.iii.1, X.ii.13.
28. See Gustav Gerber, Die Sprache als Kunst, 2d ed. (Berlin: Gärtner, 1885), 1:232, 1:309
(as well as 1:225, 1:259, 1:312, 1:332, 1:336, 1:343).
29. Gary Lee Stonum, “Surviving Figures,” in Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects,
ed. Gary Shapiro and Alan Sica (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984),
199–212, quotation on 203.
30. See Gerber, Die Sprache als Kunst, 1:288.
31. For Nietzsche’s notes of Schaarschmidt’s lecture, see GSA 41/76, pp. 49ff. See also
Albert Schwegler, Geschichte der Philosophie im Umriß: Ein Leitfaden zur Uebersicht (Stutt-
gart: Verlag der Franckh’schen Buchhandlung, 1848), 110–12; Friedrich Albert Lange,
Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart (Iserlohn:
Baedeker, 1866), 145–62.
32. For the background of the discussion of “ideas” in seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century philosophy, see John W. Yolton, Perception and Reality: A History from Descartes
to Kant (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 42–66.
33. See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch,
corr. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 104–8, 116–18.
34. See ibid., 119–20. On Locke’s concept of perception, see especially John W. Yolton,
Perceptual Acquaintance from Descartes to Reid (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 88–104.
35. Locke, Essay, 119.

36. See ibid., 364–68.
37. This has already been stressed by Jonathan Bennett in Locke, Berkeley, Hume: Cen-
tral Themes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 25–26.
38. See BGE 34, 186; KGW V/1, 2 [10]; KGW III/3, 40 [41].
40. For more detailed accounts, see Michael Losonsky, “Locke on Meaning and Sig-
nification,” in Locke’s Philosophy: Content and Context, ed. G. A. J. Rogers, 123–41 (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1994); E. J. Ashworth, “Locke on Language,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy
14 (1984): 45–73; Norman Kretzmann, “The Main Thesis of Locke’s Semantic Theory,”
Philosophical Review 77 (1968): 175–96.
41. Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, La Logique ou l’art de penser: Contenant outre
les regles communes, plusieurs observations nouvelles propres à former le jugement (Paris:
Avignart, 1662), 25.
42. See Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, La Logique: Contenant outre les Règles com-
munes, plusieurs observations nouvelles propres à former le jugement, 5th ed. (Paris: Guil-
laume Desprez, 1683), 55–56; see also 58, 74, and 130. On this definition, see Louis Marin,
Études sémiologiques: Ecartes, peintures (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971), 159–62; and Michel
Foucault, Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard,
1966), 73ff., 92ff.
43. See Arnauld and Nicole, La Logique, 5th ed., 56–57, 126ff.
44. See also A 42, 44.
46. Ibid., 479.
47. Gerber already notes a “desperation [Verzweiflung] to come to terms with language”
(Die Sprache als Kunst, 1:265) in such works as John Wilkins’s Essay Towards a Real Char-
acter and a Philosophical Language (1668) and Locke’s Essay.
48. See ibid., 1:221.
49. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1990), 210.
50. See Mary B. Hesse, “The Explanatory Function of Metaphor,” in Revolutions and
Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science (Brighton: Harvester, 1981), 111–24, esp. 111–12
and 114.
51. See Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of
Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 125–26.
52. The idea of “metaphorical redescriptions” can be found in Michael A. Arbib and
Mary B. Hesse, The Construction of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986), 156.
53. See GS 354; BGE 34; KGW VII/3, 35 [35], 40 [16]; KGW VIII/1, 2 [139], 6 [13].
54. See Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophie des Unbewussten (Berlin: Duncker, 1869),
227.
55. Johann Gottfried Herder, Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache, in his Werke
in zehn Bänden, ed. Martin Bollacher et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker
Verlag, 1985–2000), 1:762.
56. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Ueber das Entstehen der grammatischen Formen, und ihren
Einfluss auf die Ideenentwicklung, in his Gesammelte Werke (Berlin: Reimer, 1841–52), 3:299;
see also 3:278ff., 3:296ff.
57. See Benfey, Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, 515–56; Gerber, Die Sprache als Kunst,
1:219–20, 1:269–70.
58. Several commentators have noted that Nietzsche’s criticism of metaphysics is based
on a certain understanding of grammar. See, for instance, Michel Haar, Nietzsche et la
métaphysique (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 115ff.; Nehamas, Nietzsche, 86–87; Josef Simon,
“Grammatik und Wahrheit: Über das Verhältnis Nietzsches zur spekulativen Satzgram-
matik der metaphysischen Tradition,” Nietzsche-Studien 1 (1972): 1–26.
59. See also KGW VII/3, 40 [16]; KGW VIII/1, 6 [13].
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 248–49 (B 136–37).
61. See ibid., 305–4 (B 235–36).
62. See ibid., 228–29 (A 99). See also Rudolf A. Makkreel, Imagination and Interpreta-
tion in Kant: The Hermeneutic Import of the Critique of Judgment (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1990), 26–42.
63. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 273 (B 179–80).
64. See Jacques Derrida, “La mythologie blanche: La métaphore dans le texte phi-
losophique,” Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972), 247–324; Paul de
Man, “The Epistemology of Metaphor,” Critical Inquiry 5 (1978): 12–30. In contrast, see
the detailed discussion in Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, 69ff., which highlights
some of the problematic issues in the interpretations of Derrida and de Man and which
is based largely on arguments inspired by Donald Davidson, “What Metaphors Mean,”
Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 245–64.
65. See Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, 373–74.
66. See ibid., 380–81.
67. See ibid., 438.
68. Ibid., 493.
69. See Blondel, Nietzsche, le corps et la culture, 23, 183; Christof Kalb, Desintegration:
Studien zu Friedrich Nietzsches Leib- und Sprachphilosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
2000), 9, 177–232; Günter Abel, “Bewußtsein—Sprache—Natur: Nietzsches Philosophie
des Geistes,” Nietzsche-Studien 30 (2001): 1–43, esp. 33–34.
70. See Kalb, Desintegration, 61–68, 79.
71. See ibid., 235–51.
72. In a somewhat fashionable turn to the evolutionary vocabulary currently en vogue
in many quarters of German scholarship, Kalb argues that the principle of an autopoeic
self-regulation stands at the center of Nietzsche’s “philosophy of the body.” See ibid.,
84–97.
73. See also Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (London: Routledge, 1983), 292–94.
74. Johann Carl Friedrich Zöllner, Über die Natur der Cometen: Beiträge zur Geschich-
te und Theorie der Erkenntniss, 2d ed. (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1872), viii.
75. Although Zöllner’s early works, such as Grundzüge einer allgemeinen Photometrie
des Himmels (Berlin: Mitscher und Röstell, 1861) and Photometrische Untersuchungen mit
besonderer Rücksicht auf die physische Beschaffenheit der Himmelskörper (Leipzig: Engel-
mann, 1865), clearly fall within the traditional discourse of the physical sciences in the
nineteenth century, some of his later works were increasingly speculative, a quality ex-
emplified by “Thomson’s Dämonen und die Schatten Plato’s,” in Zöllner, Wissenschaftli-
che Abhandlungen (Leipzig: Staackmann, 1878), 1:710–32. After Zöllner met and experi-
mented with the spiritualists William Crookes and Henry Slade, his initial
epistemological criticism became increasingly difficult to defend, especially within the
scientific community of later nineteenth-century Germany. On the outlook of this com-
munity, see David Cahan, “Anti-Helmholtz, Anti-Dühring, Anti-Zöllner: The Politics
and Values of Science in Germany during the 1870s,” in Universalgenie Helmholtz: Rück-
blick nach 100 Jahren, ed. Lorenz Krüger, 330–44 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1994).
76. For Zöllner’s comments on Thomson, Guthrie, and Helmholtz, see Über die Na-
tur der Cometen, xlvi–liv, lxiif, 317–20. For Helmholtz’s counterattack, see William Thom-
son and Peter Guthrie Tait, Handbuch der theoretischen Physik, trans. Hermann von
Helmholtz and Georg Wertheim, 2d ed. (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1874), 350–51. On this
quarrel, see Herbert Hörz (with Marie-Luise Körner), Physiologie und Kultur in der zweiten
Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts: Briefe an Hermann von Helmholtz (Marburg: Basilisken-Pres-
se, 1994), 194ff.
77. See Zöllner, Über die Natur der Cometen, 342–77.
78. On this intertwining of science and politics, see David Cahan, An Institute for an
Empire: The Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt Braunschweig, 1871–1918 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Chapter 4: The Nervous Systems of Modern Consciousness

1. See Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1406b–7a.
2. Eva Feder Kittay, Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Content (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1987), 313; Janet M. Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Clar-
endon, 1985), 15.
3. See Aristotle, De anima, 403a9–10, 431a16, 431b2, 432a5–8.
4. Peter Carruthers, Language, Thought, and Consciousness: An Essay in Philosophical
Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 225.
5. Nietzsche’s early reading lists include, for instance, Rudolf Virchow, Gesammelte
Abhandlungen zur wissenschaftlichen Medicin (Frankfurt am Main: Meidinger, 1856);
Wilhelm Wundt, Vorlesungen über die Menschen- und Thierseele (Leipzig: Voss, 1863);
Johannes Müller, Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen, für Vorlesungen (Koblenz:
Hölscher, 1835); Lorenz Oken, Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie (Jena: Frommann, 1809–11);
Jacob Moleschott, Der Kreislauf des Lebens: Physiologische Antworten auf Liebig’s Chemische
184 Notes to Pages 90 – 93
Briefe, 2d ed. (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1855); and Carl Gustav Carus, Grundzüge der
vergleichenden Anatomie und Physiologie (Dresden: Hilscher, 1828).
6. On the historical development of psychology and physiology in late-Enlightenment
and nineteenth-century thought, see David E. Leary, “The Philosophical Development
of the Conception of Psychology in Germany, 1780–1850,” Journal of the History of the
Behavioral Sciences 14 (1978): 113–21; Brigitte Lohff, Die Suche nach der Wissenschaftlichkeit
der Physiologie in der Zeit der Romantik (Stuttgart: Fischer, 1990).
7. See Johann Friedrich Herbart, Psychologie als Wissenschaft, neu gegründet auf Erfah-
rung, Metaphysik und Mathematik (Königsberg: n.p., 1824–25), 1:185; Gustav Theodor
Fechner, Elemente der Psychophysik (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1860), 1:8. On Fech-
ner’s “psychophysics” and its philosophical implications, see Michael Heidelberger, Die
innere Seite der Natur: Gustav Theodor Fechners wissenschaftlich-philosophische Weltauffas-
sung (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1993), 217–37; and Marilyn E. Marshall, “Phys-
ics, Metaphysics, and Fechner’s Psychophysics,” in The Problematic Science: Psychology in
Nineteenth-Century Thought, ed. William R. Woodward and Mitchell G. Ash, 197–210
(New York: Praeger, 1982).
8. For his vivid interest in these fields, see, for instance, Patrick Wotling, “‘Der Weg
zu den Grundproblemen’: Statut et structure de la psychologie dans la pensée de Nietz-
sche,” Nietzsche-Studien 26 (1997): 1–33; Graham Parkes, Composing the Soul: Reaches of
Nietzsche’s Psychology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
9. See Gregory Moore, Nietzsche, Biology, and Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2002).
10. Randall Havas claims that “Nietzsche had no real interest in articulating a prop-
erly philosophical account of our relationship to the world” (Nietzsche’s Genealogy: Nihil-
ism and the Will to Knowledge [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995], 106). This
is, however, strikingly at odds with the following interpretation of Nietzsche’s understand-
ing of perception, thought, and language.
11. See Friedrich Albert Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung
in der Gegenwart (Iserlohn: Baedeker, 1866), 484, 492, 496.
12. See Gustav Gerber, Die Sprache als Kunst, 2d ed. (Berlin: Gärtner, 1885), 1:260,
1:326–27.
13. See Aristotle, De anima, 427a19–21, 432a12–14; Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus,
494; Johann Carl Friedrich Zöllner, Über die Natur der Cometen: Beiträge zur Geschichte
und Theorie der Erkenntniss, 2d ed. (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1872), 362.
14. See Zöllner, Über die Natur der Cometen, 201–11, 342–77.
15. See ibid., 378–425.
16. See also KGW III/4, 19 [107, 147].
17. See Zöllner, Über die Natur der Cometen, iv. Newton’s rules can be found in Sir
Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World,
Translated into English by Andrew Motte in 1729, ed. Florian Cajori (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1934), 398–400. Zöllner himself quotes from the Latin edition.
18. See Gerber, Die Sprache als Kunst, 1:225, 1:232, 1:259.
19. The word Übertragung is also used in Richard Volkmann, Die Rhetorik der Griechen
und Römer in systematischer Übersicht (Berlin: Ebeling und Plahn, 1872), 353, 391–92.
20. See Wilhelm Wackernagel, Poetik, Rhetorik, und Stilistik: Academische Vorlesungen,
ed. Ludwig Sieber (Halle: Verlag der Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1873), 394; Wack-
ernagel treats metaphor as the trope that fits virtually all figurative and tropical forms.
In Die Rhetorik der Griechen und Römer (355) Volkmann writes that metaphor is the most
beautiful and most often used trope, so that all other tropes are merely variations of
metaphorical expressions.
21. See Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, VIII.vi.6; Cicero, De oratore, III.155.
22. Cicero, De oratore, III.155.
23. Ibid., III.161: “Nihil est enim in rerum natura cuius nos non in aliis rebus possimus
uti vocabulo et nomine.” Cicero’s De oratore is one of the main reference texts for Nietz-
sche’s “Darstellung der antiken Rhetorik,” and Nietzsche quotes it in key passages (KGW
II/4, pp. 421–22, 435–40, 445, 457, 483, 488).
24. Nietzsche’s understanding of metaphor as Übertragung is widely noted in the sec-
ondary literature but rarely examined in detail. See Angèle Kremer-Marietti, Nietzsche et
la rhétorique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), 133, 236–37; Philippe Lacoue-
Labarthe, “Le Détour (Nietzsche et la rhétorique),” Poétique 5 (1971): 53–76, esp. 64;
Detlef Otto, Wendungen der Metapher: Zur Übertragung in poetologischer, rhetorischer und
erkenntnistheoretischer Hinsicht bei Aristoteles und Nietzsche (Munich: Wilhelm Fink,
1998).
25. See Gerber, Die Sprache als Kunst, 1:225–26, 1:259, 1:329. On Gerber’s notion of
Übertragung, see Andrea Orsucci, “Unbewußte Schlüsse, Anticipationen, Übetragungen:
Über Nietzsches Verhältnis zu Karl Friedrich Zöllner und Gustav Gerber,” in “Centauren-
Geburten”: Wissenschaft, Kunst und Philosophie beim jungen Nietzsche, ed. Tilman Borsche,
Federico Gerratana, and Aldo Venturelli, 193–207 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1994),
202–7; Anthonie Meijers, “Gustav Gerber und Friedrich Nietzsche: Zum historischen
Hintergrund der sprachphilosophischen Auffassungen des frühen Nietzsche,” Nietzsche-
Studien 17 (1988): 386.
26. See Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1406b–7a; Cicero, De oratore, III.155–70; Quintilian, Insti-
tutio oratoria, VIII.vi.4 and 8; Augustine, De doctrina Christiana, II.23–57, III.9–56.
27. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, ed. Angèle Kremer-Marietti
(Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1974), 97.
28. Nietzsche borrowed Hamann’s Schriften und Briefe in the edition of Moritz Petri
(Hannover: Meyer, 1872) from the university library in Basel.
29. See Johann Georg Hamann, Aesthetica in nuce, in Hamann, Sämtliche Werke: His-
torisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Josef Nadler (Vienna: Thomas-Morus-Presse im Verlag
Herder, 1949–57), 2:199.
30. See Aristotle, De interpretatione, 16a3ff.; Augustine, De doctrina Christiana, II.3–
4.
31. On the development of phrenology in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, see Michael Hagner, “The Soul and the Brain between Anatomy and Naturphi-
186 Notes to Pages 95– 99
losophie in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Medical History 36 (1992): 1–33; idem, Homo
cerebralis: Der Wandel vom Seelenorgan zum Gehirn (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 1997), 89–
118.
32. On this issue, see Anna Morpurgo Davies, Nineteenth-Century Linguistics (London:
Longman, 1998), 162–63.
33. On the wider relationship between the study of the brain, the study of language,
and physiology, see Hagner, Homo cerebralis, 279–93; Joachim Gessinger, Auge und Ohr:
Studien zur Erforschung der Sprache am Menschen, 1700–1850 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
1994).
34. Hermann von Helmholtz, “Ueber die Fortpflanzungsgeschwindigkeit der Nerven-
reizung,” Bericht über die Bekanntmachung geeigneter Verhandlungen der Königlichen Preus-
sischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin 14 (1850): 14–15.
35. See Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne
(New York: Dover, 1969), 2:20–21; for examples of Schopenhauer’s use of physiology, see
2:245–68.
36. Ibid., 2:285. On Schopenhauer’s materialist tendencies, see Christopher Janaway,
Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 172–87.
37. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 2:290.
38. Without referring to rhetoric, John W. Yolton (Perception and Reality: A History
from Descartes to Kant [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996], 13) argues that this
translational theory of perception emerges first in Descartes. Evidence for this point of
view can be found especially in Descartes’s Dioptrique (1637) but also in his Regulae ad
directionem ingenii, written in the mid-1620s. See Œuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam
and Paul Tannery (Paris: Cerf, 1897–1914), 10:414–15.
39. On this epistemological break, see Herbert Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany,
1831–1933, trans. Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 40–41,
49–50, 74.
40. On Roux’s and Foster’s influence on Nietzsche, see Moore, Nietzsche, Biology, and
Metaphor, 37–39; Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, Nietzsche: His Philosophy of Contradictions and
the Contradictions of His Philosophy, trans. David J. Parent, foreword by Richard Schacht
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 161–82. On their position within the life
sciences of the nineteenth century, see Lynn K. Nyhart, Biology Takes Form: Animal
Morphology and the German Universities, 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1995), 279–307; Gerald L. Geisen, Michael Foster and the Cambridge School of Physiology:
The Scientific Enterprise in Late Victorian Society (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1978).
41. See, for instance, Christoph Asendorf, Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and
Their Perception in Modernity, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley, Calif.: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1993), 153–77; Michael Hagner, “Die elektrische Erregbarkeit des Gehirns:
Zur Konjunktur eines Experiments,” in Die Experimentalisierung des Lebens: Experimen-
talsysteme in den biologischen Wissenschaften 1850/1950, ed. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger and
Michael Hagner, 97–115 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993).
42. For detailed discussions of the eighteenth-century understanding of electricity, see

John Heilbron, Electricity in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: A Study of Early
Modern Physics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 261–402.
43. See Alessandro Volta’s “Sur l’électrophore perpétuel,” Journal de physique 8 (1776):
21–44; idem, Lezioni compendiose sulla elettricità, Le Opere di Alessandro Volta: Edizione
Nazionale (Milan: U. Hoepli, 1918–29), 4:389–457.
44. On the debate between Volta and Galvani, see Marcello Pera, The Ambiguous Frog:
The Galvani-Volta Controversy on Animal Electricity, trans. Jonathan Mandelbaum (Princ-
eton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992).
45. See Johann Wilhelm Ritter, Beweis, dass ein beständiger Galvanismus den Lebenspro-
zess in dem Thierreiche begleite, nebst neuen Versuchen und Bemerkungen über den Galva-
nismus (Weimar: Verlag des Industrie-Comptoir, 1798); idem, Das elektrische System der
Körper: Ein Versuch (Leipzig: Reclam, 1805). On the influence of “Galvanism” on German
romantic Naturphilosophie, see Hagner, Homo cerebralis, 185–93.
46. See Hans Christian Oersted, “Über die Art, wie sich Electricität fortpflanzt,” Neues
allgemeines Journal der Chemie 6 (1806): 292–302; idem, “Experiments on the Effect of a
Current of Electricity on the Magnetic Needle,” Annals of Philosophy 16 (1820): 273–76;
Michael Faraday, Experimental Researches into Electricity (London: Taylor and Francis,
1839–55); and James Clerk Maxwell, Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (Oxford: Clar-
endon, 1873). On electricity in the physical sciences in nineteenth-century Germany, see
K. L. Caneva, “From Galvanism to Electrodynamics: The Transformation of German
Physics and Its Social Context,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 9 (1978): 63–159.
On the institutional background, see R. S. Turner, “The Growth of Professional Research
in Prussia, 1818 to 1848: Causes and Context,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 3
(1971): 137–82.
47. See Emil DuBois-Reymond, Untersuchungen über thierische Electricität (Berlin:
Reimer, 1848–84). Two further examples for the widespread discussion of animal electric-
ity in the nineteenth century are Carlo Matteucci’s Essai sur les phénomènes électriques des
animaux (Paris: Carilian-Goeury et Dalmont, 1840) and Gustav Fritsch’s Die elektrischen
Fische nach neuen Untersuchungen anatomisch-zoologisch dargestellt (Leipzig: Veit, 1887–
90).
48. See DuBois-Reymond, Untersuchungen über thierische Electricität, vol. 2, pt. 1, pp.
257–60; Eduard Hitzig, Untersuchungen über das Gehirn: Abhandlungen physiologischen
und pathologischen Inhalts (Berlin: Hirschwald, 1874).
49. See Pierre Flourens, Recherches expérimentales sur les propriétés et les fonctions du
système nerveux dans les animaux vertébrés, 2d ed. (Paris: Raillière, 1842), 87ff.; David
Ferrier, The Localisation of Cerebral Disease, being the Gulstonian Lectures of the Royal
College of Physicians for 1878 (London: Smith, Elder, 1878); Eduard Hitzig, “Physiolo-
gisches und Therapeutisches über einige electrische Reizmethoden,” Berliner klinische
Wochenschrift 7 (1870): 137–38. An early mapping of brain functions can be found in
Gottlob Heinrich Bergmann, Neue Untersuchungen über die innere Organisation des Ge-
hirns, als Beiträge zu einer Grundlage der Physiologie und Pathologie desselben (Hannover:
Helwing, 1831). See also Theodor Meynert, “Der Bau der Gross-Hirnrinde und seine
örtlichen Verschiedenheiten, nebst einem pathologisch-anatomischen Corollarium,”
Vierteljahresschrift für Psychiatrie 1 (1867): 77–93, 198–217, and 2 (1868): 88–113. On the
function of these topographical models, see Michael Hagner, “Lokalisation, Funktion,
Cytoarchitektonik: Wege zur Modellierung des Gehirns,” in Objekte, Differenzen, Kon-
junkturen: Experimentalsysteme im historischen Kontext, ed. Michael Hagner, Hans-Jörg
Rheinberger, and Bettina Wahrig-Schmidt, 121–50 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1994); idem,
“Hirnbilder: Cerebrale Repräsentationen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert,” in Der Entzug der
Bilder: Visuelle Realitäten, ed. Michael Wetzel and Herta Wolf, 145–60 (Munich: Wilhelm
Fink, 1994).
50. See Pierre Paul Broca, “Sur le siège de la faculté du langage articulé,” Tribune
Médicale 74 (1869): 254–56 and 75 (1869): 265–69.
51. See Stefan Rieger, Die Ästhetik des Menschen: Über das Technische in Leben und Kunst
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), 441–68.
52. See Gustav Fritsch and Eduard Hitzig, “Über die elektrische Erregbarkeit des
Großhirns,” Archiv für Anatomie, Physiologie und wissenschaftliche Medicin (1870): 300–332;
Eduard Hitzig, “Über Localisation psychischer Centren in der Hirnrinde,” Verhandlun-
gen der Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte (Berlin: Wiegand
und Hempel, 1874), 42–47. On Fritsch and Hitzig, see Hagner, Homo cerebralis, 273–
79.
53. On Nietzsche’s clinical history, see the detailed account in Pia Daniela Volz, Nietz-
sche im Labyrinth seiner Krankheit: Eine medizinisch-biographische Untersuchung (Würz-
burg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1990).
54. See Zöllner, Über die Natur der Cometen, xviii–xxi.
55. See John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, being a Con-
nected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation (London:
Longmans, Green, 1947), 364–68. On analogical reasoning, see Cicero, De Inventione,
I.49 and 51; Quintilian, Institutiones oratoriae, V.xi.2; Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1357b.
56. See Mill, System of Logic, 557–62.
57. See James Mill, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (London: Baldwin
and Cradock, 1829). Nietzsche consulted the second edition of Afrikan Spir, Denken und
Wirklichkeit: Versuch einer Erneuerung der kritischen Philosophie, 2d ed. (Leipzig: Findel,
1877).
58. Mill refers to Alexander Bain’s book The Senses and the Intellect (London: John W.
Parker, 1855) and Herbert Spencer’s text The Principles of Psychology (London: Longman,
Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1855). Nietzsche himself closely read Spencer’s Die That-
sachen der Ethik, trans. B. Vetter (Stuttgart: Schweizerbart, 1879).
59. Hall’s theory can be found in his Lectures on the Nervous System (London: Sherwood,
Gilbert, and Piper, 1836), and Büchner’s study is Beiträge zur Hall’schen Lehre von einem
excito-motorischen Nerven-System: Inaugural-Abhandlung (Giessen: Schild, 1848).
60. I draw these terms from Ludwig Büchner, Kraft und Stoff, oder Grundzüge der
natürlichen Weltordnung, nebst einer darauf gebauten Sittenlehre in allgemein verständlicher
Darstellung, 20th ed. (Leipzig: Thomas, 1902), 20, 156ff., 181. Büchner also published a
popular introduction to human physiology entitled Physiologische Bilder (Leipzig: Thom-
as, 1861–75). On Büchner, see Frederick Gregory, Scientific Materialism in Nineteenth-
Century Germany (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1977), 100–121.
61. See Rudolph Hermann Lotze, Allgemeine Physiologie des körperlichen Lebens (Leipzig:
Weidmann, 1851), 385ff.; idem, Medicinische Psychologie, oder Physiologie der Seele (Leipzig:
Weidmann, 1852), 174–232, 296–304, 337–417.
62. Lotze, Allgemeine Physiologie, 399–400; Lotze’s remarks about “organic electricity”
occur at 389–90.
63. Lotze, Medicinische Psychologie, 204; see also 197–98, 176–77, and 178, where he
speaks of Umwandlung, Umgestaltung, and Umformung, all of which mean, more or less,
“conversion” or “transformation.”
64. See ibid., 175–81. Lotze illustrates this process in more detail with regard to emo-
tions, psychological drives, and spatial sensations; see ibid., 233–86, 296–304, 353–95.
65. The quotations are from Otto Funke, Lehrbuch der Physiologie für akademische
Vorlesungen und zum Selbststudium, 6th ed., ed. A. Gruenhagen (Leipzig: Voss, 1878–79),
1:453, 1:586.
66. See Hermann von Helmholtz, Ueber das Sehen des Menschen: Ein populär-wissen-
schaftlicher Vortrag gehalten zu Königsberg i. Pr. zum Besten von Kant’s Denkmal am 27.
Februar 1855 (Leipzig, 1855), 40; Fechner, Elemente der Psychophysik, 1:15–20; Hartmann,
Philosophie des Unbewussten, 83, 89ff., 126ff. For valuable background information, see Theo
C. Meyering, Historical Roots of Cognitive Science: The Rise of a Cognitive Theory of Perception
from Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 125–48, 181–208.
67. See Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, 411, 440, 454–55, 481. On Lange’s physi-
ological background, see Stack, Lange and Nietzsche, 91–111.
68. Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, 426–27, 438. On the relationship between the
brain and the soul in the nineteenth century, see Ernst Florey and Olaf Breidbach, eds.,
Das Gehirn—Organ der Seele? Zur Ideengeschichte der Neurobiologie (Berlin: Akademie
Verlag, 1993); Andrew Peacock, “The Relationship between the Soul and the Brain,” in
Historical Aspects of the Neurosciences, ed. F. Clifford Rose and William F. Bynum, 83–98
(New York: Raven, 1982).
69. Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, 454, 457, 442.
70. Gerber, Die Sprache als Kunst, 1:240.
71. See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise: Zur Industrialisierung
von Raum und Zeit im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich: Hanser, 1977), 35–45. On the annihila-
tion of space and time through electric communication, which also furthers “cultural
homogenization,” see Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about
Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1988), 191–231.
72. See Iwan Rhys Morus, “‘The Nervous System of Britain’: Space, Time, and the
Electric Telegraph in the Victorian Age,” British Journal for the History of Science 33 (2000):
455–75.
73. See Ernst Ludwig Krause, Life of Erasmus Darwin, with a Preliminary Notice by
Charles Darwin, trans. W. S. Dallas (London: John Murray, 1879), 120. For an early report
on Faber’s work, see the article “Jos. Fabers neuerfundene Sprachmaschine,” Allgemeine
Theaterzeitung: Originalblatt für Kunst, Literatur, Musik, Mode und geselliges Leben, nos.
154–55 (1840): 652.
74. As an example, see the anonymous report in the London Times of 29 December
1876, p. 8.
75. See Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New, 79–80, 203–5; Marsha Siefert, “Aes-
thetics, Technology, and the Capitalization of Culture: How the Talking Machine Became
a Musical Instrument,” Science in Context 8 (1995): 417–49.
76. See Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology
in the Edison Era (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 145.
77. See Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer and
Chris Cullens, intro. David E. Wellbery (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
1990); Christoph Asendorf, Ströme und Strahlen: Das langsame Verschwinden der Materie
um 1900 (Giessen: Anabas-Verlag, 1989); Stefan Rieger, Die Individualität der Medien:
Eine Geschichte der Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
2001).
78. See Maudemarie Clark, “On Knowledge, Truth, and Value: Nietzsche’s Debt to
Schopenhauer and the Development of His Empiricism,” in Willing and Nothingness:
Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s Educator, ed. Christopher Janaway, 37–78 (Oxford: Clarendon,
1998), 52.
79. Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, 483.
80. See Karl H. Pribram, “From Metaphors to Models: The Use of Analogy in Neu-
ropsychology,” in Metaphors in the History of Psychology, ed. David E. Leary, 79–103
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
81. See the informative essay by Claudia Brodsky Lacour, “Architecture in the Discourse
of Modern Philosophy: Descartes to Nietzsche,” in Nietzsche and “An Architecture of Our
Minds,” ed. Alexandre Kostka and Irving Wohlfarth, 19–34 (Los Angeles: Getty Research
Institute, 1999).
82. Sarah Kofmann is one of the few to have seen the importance of Nietzsche’s de-
scription of conceptual knowledge in terms of a columbarium; see her Nietzsche et la
métaphore (Paris: Payot, 1972), 97–99.
83. See Plinius, Historia naturalis, XIX.ix.6 (sect. 51); Virtuvius, De architectura,
IV.ii.4.
84. See Otto Jahn, Die Wandgemälde des Columbarium in der Villa Pamfili, mit Er-
läuterungen (Munich: Verlag der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1857); Johann
Jakob Bachofen, Versuch über die Gräbersymbolik der Alten (Basel: Bahnmeier’s Buch-
handlung, 1859), 302–1 and table 1. Bachofen takes this picture from G. P. Campana, Di
due sepolcri Romani del secolo di Augusto, scoverti tra la Via Latina e l’Appia presso la
tomba degli Scipioni (Rome: Monaldi, 1841), but he also refers to Jahn’s earlier study. For
a contemporary account of the columbaria discovered in the first half of the nineteenth
century, see Joachim Marquardt, Das Privatleben der Römer (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1879),
359ff.
85. See Descartes, Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher la
vérité dans les sciences, in Œuvres, 6:11–13, 6:22, 6:29.
86. Ibid., 6:18–19.
87. For a contrast, see Hubert Thüring’s Geschichte des Gedächtnisses: Nietzsche und das
19. Jahrhundert (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2001), 238ff., which delivers a somewhat mean-
dering commentary on Nietzsche’s emerging “theory of memory.”
88. See, for instance, Cicero, De oratore, II.351–60; Quintilian, Institutiones oratoriae,
XI.ii.17–22; Volkmann, Die Rhetorik der Griechen und Römer, 480ff.
89. See Cicero, Tusculanae disputationes, I.62, 65–66; Quintilian, Institutiones orato-
riae, X.vi.2–4; Richard Sorabji, Aristotle on Memory (London: Duckworth, 1972).
90. See Carl Friedrich Flögel, Einleitung in die Erfindungskunst (Breslau: Meyer, 1760),
sect. 637. On the link between the discourse on memory and the psychology of associa-
tion in the eighteenth century, see Regina Freudenfeld, Gedächtniszeichen: Mnemologie
in der deutschen und französischen Aufklärung (Tübingen: Narr, 1996), 21–22, 154–55.
91. On the cultural effects of theories of memory within the modern European tradi-
tion, see Jörg Jochen Berns and Wolfgang Neuber, Ars memorativa: Zur kulturgeschicht-
lichen Bedeutung der Gedächtniskunst, 1400–1750 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993).
92. See Plato, Phaedo, 66b-7b, 79a–c.
93. See Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1036b28–30; idem, De anima, 413a.
94. See Vincent Descombes, The Mind’s Provisions: A Critique of Cognitivism, trans.
Stephen Adam Schwartz (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994).
95. See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989), 25–52; Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An
Essay in Genealogy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 205.
96. See Descartes, Meditationes de prima philosophia, in Œuvres, 7:28, 7:34.
97. See Christian Thomasius, Einleitung zu der Vernunfftlehre, ed. Werner Schmitz
(Hildesheim: Olms, 1968), 95.
98. See Descartes, Meditationes, Œuvres, 7:27–34. For a more detailed exposition of
the following, see Gordon Baker and Katherine J. Morris, Descartes’ Dualism (London:
Routledge, 1996), 18–21, 100–138.
99. See Descartes, Meditationes, Œuvres, 7:28, 7:44, 7:53.
100. See ibid., 7:71–90.
101. See ibid., 7:25, 51. The cogito qualifies as what Descartes terms an “eternal truth”:
such truths are self-evident and need no further foundation. See his letter to Marin
Mersenne from 1630 in Œuvres, 1:135–47.
102. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch,
corr. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 335. Taylor (Sources of the Self, 159–76)
describes this as Locke’s “punctual self.”
103. For Kant’s criticism of the Cartesian res cogitans, see Immanuel Kant, Critique of
Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), 418–20 (A 354–56). For a full interpretation of Kant’s position, see Henry E.
Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1983), 255–93.
104. See Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Science of Knowledge, with the First and Second Intro-
ductions, trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1982), 14.
105. Ibid., 95–96.
106. See Bernard Pautrat, Versions du soleil: Figures et système de Nietzsche (Paris: Édi-
tions du Seuil, 1971), 246–56; Mihailo Djuric, Nietzsche und die Metaphysik (Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter, 1985), 57–64.
107. See Alain Renaut, The Era of the Individual: A Contribution to a History of Sub-
jectivity, trans. M. B. DeBevoise and Franklin Philip (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1997), 130–38; Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, “‘What Must First Be Proved Is
Worth Little,’” in Why We Are Not Nietzscheans, ed. Ferry and Renaut, trans. Robert de
Loaiza, 92–109 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Ferry’s and Renaut’s remarks
in the preface suggest that their aversion to Nietzsche has less to do with Nietzsche than
with their disappointment in the “Nietzscheans” at the École Normale Supérieure and
the Collège de France in the late 1960s and 1970s: “Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Al-
thusser, Lacan” (vii). Whether Nietzsche can or should be made responsible for the in-
consistencies of Lacan or Deleuze is somewhat doubtful.
108. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2d ed. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1978), 252.
109. Ibid., 252–53.
110. See ibid., 254.
111. See ibid., 253–54. For a more detailed discussion, see Wayne Waxman, Hume’s
Theory of Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 222–37.
112. See Albert Schwegler, Geschichte der Philosophie im Umriß: Ein Leitfaden zur Ue-
bersicht (Stuttgart: Verlag der Franckh’schen Buchhandlung, 1848), 113–15.
113. On the German reception of Hume, see Günther Gawlik and Lothar Kreimendahl,
Hume in der deutschen Aufklärung: Umrisse einer Rezeptionsgeschichte (Stuttgart–Bad
Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1987).
114. On Hume as a topic of philosophy lectures at German universities, see the tables
in Klaus Christian Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus: Die deutsche
Universitätsphilosophie zwischen Idealismus und Positivismus (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1986), 382, 403.
115. Two works have pointed to the similarity between Hume’s and Nietzsche’s reflec-
tions on causality: Peter Poellner, Nietzsche and Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995), 36–46; and Tracy B. Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfigu-
ration, exp. ed. (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1988), 69–70. Others,
however, merely register the coincidence of Hume’s and Nietzsche’s respective positions;
see, for example, Mary Warnock, “Nietzsche’s Conception of Truth,” in Nietzsche, Im-
agery and Thought: A Collection of Essays, ed. Malcolm Pasley, 33–63 (London: Methuen,
1978); Clark, “On Knowledge, Truth, and Value,” 57–58, 68.
116. See Christopher Janaway, “Nietzsche, the Self, and Schopenhauer,” in Nietzsche
and Modern German Thought, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, 119–42 (London: Routledge,
1991), 124.
117. See Gustav Teichmüller, Die wirkliche und die scheinbare Welt: Neue Grundlegung
der Metaphysik (Breslau: Koebner, 1882), 106.
118. See ibid., 23, 99.
119. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 10, 332. See also Schivelbusch’s remarks on the
“industrialization of consciousness” in his Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise, 142–51; Friedrich
A. Kittler, Gramophone, File, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael
Wutz (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999).
120. See Rieger, Die Ästhetik des Menschen, 18, 31–32.
121. See Fechner, Elemente der Psychophysik, 1:134–39, 1:238–54, 1:300–304; Wilhelm
Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1874), 282–315.
122. See Zöllner, Über die Natur der Cometen, 329–34.
123. For a contemporary account of such instruments and methods, see Oskar Lan-
gendorff, Physiologische Grafik: Ein Leitfaden der in der Physiologie gebräuchlichen Regis-
trirmethoden (Leipzig: Deuticke, 1891).
Chapter 5: Interpretation and Life

1. See Aristotle, Metaphysics, 982b9, 1026a31. Aristotle links these two problems at
1003a30–31. For a clear interpretation of the emergence of the concept of metaphysics in
the ancient Greek tradition, see Hans Reiner, “Die Entstehung und ursprüngliche Be-
deutung des Namens ‘Metaphysik,’” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 8 (1954):
210–37; idem, “Die Entstehung der Lehre vom bibliothekarischen Ursprung des Namens
‘Metaphysik,’” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 9 (1955): 77–99.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 109 (B xiv), 117–20 (B xxxii–xxxvii);
idem, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Sci-
ence, trans. Gary Hatfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 81–82. See
also Peter F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
(London: Methuen, 1966), 119; Michael Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 15–24.
3. For example, Panayot Butchvarov writes: “In its most general sense, metaphysics
may seem to coincide with philosophy as a whole” (The Cambridge Dictionary of Phi-
losophy, ed. Robert Audi [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995], s.v. metaphysics).
This echoes remarks made more than thirty years earlier by W. W. Walsh in his attempt
to define metaphysics: “Almost everything in metaphysics is controversial, and it is there-
fore not surprising that there is little agreement among those who call themselves meta-
physicians about what precisely it is that they are attempting” (The Encyclopedia of Phi-
losophy, ed. Paul Edwards [New York: Macmillan, 1967], s.v. metaphysics). See also J.-M.
Muglioni et al., Encyclopédie philosophique universelle, ed. André Jacob (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1989ff.), s.v. métaphysique. In a monumental article contrasting
to these examples, Ludger Oeing-Hanhoff, Theo Kobusch, and Tilman Borsche avoid
attempting to define this overused term and instead focus on precisely reassessing its
meandering history (see the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Joachim Ritter
and Karlfried Gründer [Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980], s.v. meta-
physics).
4. See Peter Poellner, Nietzsche and Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995),
15–16, 266–305. An ontological interpretation can be found in John Richardson, Nietz-
sche’s System (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
5. See Günter Abel, Nietzsche: Die Dynamik der Willen zur Macht und die ewige Wie-
derkehr (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1984), 143.
6. I have altered this translation in one important respect: whereas Hollingdale has
translated Nietzsche’s term Ich as “ego,” I have opted for the more neutral “I,” despite its
syntactic clumsiness, to avoid any psychoanalytic connotations that Nietzsche did not
have in mind.
7. See Herbert Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany, 1831–1933, trans. Eric Matthews
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 74; Klaus Christian Köhnke, The Rise
of Neo-Kantianism: German Academic Philosophy between Idealism and Positivism, trans.
R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 108–15.
8. Nietzsche owned a German-language edition of Mill’s collected works: Mill, Gesam-
melte Werke, ed. Theodor Gomperz (Leipzig: Fues, 1869–75). The German translation of
Mill’s study can be found in volumes 2–4. For Spir’s discussion of the interdependence
of logic and knowledge, see Denken und Wirklichkeit: Versuch einer Erneuerung der kri-
tischen Philosophie, in Spir, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Helene Calaparède-Spir (Leipzig: J. A.
Barth, 1908–9), 1:72–73, 1:119ff. For Nietzsche’s reception of Spir, see Karl Schlechta and
Anni Anders, Friedrich Nietzsche: Von den verborgenen Anfängen seines Philosophierens
(Stuttgart–Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1962), 119–22; Paolo D’Iorio, “La Su-
perstition des philosophes critiques: Nietzsche et Afrikan Spir,” Nietzsche-Studien 22
(1993): 257–94; Robin Small, Nietzsche in Context (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 1–20.
9. See Günter Abel, “Logik und Ästhetik,” Nietzsche-Studien 16 (1987): 112–48.
10. See also KGW VII/3, 34 [249], 40 [27].
12. Ibid., 196 (B 79). On Kant’s concept of transcendental logic, see Strawson, The
Bounds of Sense, 74–82.
13. See HA I:155, where Nietzsche speaks of “inventing,” “rejecting,” “sifting,” “trans-
forming,” and “ordering.” See also GM III:24.
14. For accounts of Nietzsche’s “theory of interpretation” as a quasi-hermeutic model,
see James P. Cadello, “Nietzsche’s Radical Hermeneutical Epistemology,” International
Studies in Philosophy 23, no. 2 (1991): 119–28; Johann Figl, Interpretation als philosophisches
Prinzip: Friedrich Nietzsches universale Theorie der Auslegung im späten Nachlaß (Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter, 1982).
15. See Richard Volkmann, Die Rhetorik der Griechen und Römer in systematischer Über-
sicht (Berlin: Ebeling und Plahn, 1872), 158ff.; Carl Prantl, Geschichte der Logik im Abend-
lande (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1855–70), 1:341ff.
16. See also HA I:31.
17. For a detailed discussion of some aspects and consequences of this trend, see Helmut
Müller-Sievers, Self-Generation: Biology, Philosophy, and Literature around 1800 (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997). For the wider context, especially the emergence
of anthropological thought during the final decades of the eighteenth century, see John
H. Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 2002).
18. See Martin Bollacher, “‘Natur’ und ‘Vernunft’ in Herders Entwurf einer Philosophie
der Geschichte der Menschheit,” in Johann Gottfried Herder, 1744–1803, ed. Gerhard
Sauder, 114–24 (Hamburg: Meiner, 1987), 119. See also H. B. Nisbet, “Herders anthro-
pologische Anschauungen in den Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit,” in
Anthropologie und Literatur um 1800, ed. Jürgen Barkhoff and Eda Sagarra, 1–23 (Munich:
Iudicium, 1992).
19. See Johann Gottfried Herder, Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache, in his
Werke in zehn Bänden, ed. Martin Bollacher et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klas-
siker Verlag, 1985–2000), 1:711, 1:713; Wilhelm von Humboldt, Ueber das Entstehen der
grammatischen Formen, und ihren Einfluß auf die Ideenentwicklung, in his Gesammelte
Werke (Berlin: Reimer, 1841–52), 3:301.
20. For a general overview, see Gillian Beer, “Darwin and the Growth of Language
Theory,” in Nature Transfigured: Science and Literature, ed. John Christie and Sally Shut-
tleworth, 152–70 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989). For an example of
the German discussion, see August Schleicher’s Die darwinsche Theorie und die Sprachwis-
senschaft: Offenes Sendschreiben an Herrn Dr. Ernst Häckel (Weimar: Böhlau, 1863).
21. See Gustav Gerber, Die Sprache als Kunst, 2d ed. (Berlin: Gärtner, 1885), 1:256–57;
Wilhelm Wackernagel, Poetik, Rhetorik, und Stilistik: Academische Vorlesungen, ed. Ludwig
Sieber (Halle: Verlag der Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1873), 37; Friedrich Albert
Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart (Iserlohn:
Baedeker, 1866), 471.
22. See Alfred Espinas, Die thierischen Gesellschaften: Eine vergleichend-psychologische
Untersuchung, ed. W. Schlosser (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1879); Georg Heinrich Schneider,
Der thierische Wille: Systematische Darstellung und Erklärung der thierischen Triebe und
deren Entstehung, Entwickelung und Verbreitung im Thierreiche als Grundlage zu einer
vergleichenden Willenslehre (Leipzig: Abel, 1880); William H. Rolph, Biologische Probleme,
zugleich als Versuch zur Entwicklung einer rationellen Ethik, 2d ed., enlarged (Leipzig:
Engelmann, 1884).
23. See Friedrich Schiller, Ueber die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, in einer Reihe
von Briefen, in Schiller, Werke: Nationalausgabe, founded by Julius Petersen, ed. Liselotte
Blumenthal and Benno von Wiese (Weimar: Böhlau, 1943–), 20:344–60.
24. See also GS 374; GM II:12; GM III:24; TI preface; KGW VII/1, 10 [20]; KGW
VII/2, 25 [94]; KGW VII/3, 34 [247]; KGW VIII/1, 1 [115, 127], 2 [77, 108, 148, 151], 9
[91]; KGW VIII/3, 14 [136].
25. See Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laokoon, in his Werke, ed. Herbert G. Göpfert,
Karl Eibl, Helmut Göbel, Karl S. Guthke, Albert von Schirnding, and Jörg Schönert
(Munich: Carl Hanser, 1970–79), 6:11.
26. See Johann Gottfried Herder, “Begründung einer Ästhetik in der Auseinanderset-
zung mit Alexander Gottlieb Baumgartens Schriften,” in Werke, 1:657. The title is not
Herder’s but aptly describes the content of this fragmentary piece.
27. See Udo Tietz, “Das animal rationale und die Grundlagen der wissenschaftlichen
Vernunft: Zur anthropologischen Transformation der Erkenntnistheorie bei Friedrich
Nietzsche,” Nietzscheforschung 9 (2002): 47–66.
28. See ibid., 63–65. In a previous article (“Phänomenologie des Scheins: Nietzsches
sprachkritischer Perspektivismus,” Nietzschforschung 7 [2000]: 150–77) Tietz seems to be
more willing to accept Nietzsche’s epistemological criticism as a product of his reflections
on language.
29. Tietz, “Das animal rationale,” 60.
30. See Abel, Nietzsche; Alan D. Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation:
Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction (London: Routledge, 1990); Christoph Cox,
Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1999).
31. On Nietzsche’s idea that reality is interpretation, see John T. Wilcox, Truth and
Value in Nietzsche: A Study of His Metaethics and Epistemology (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1974), 127–54.
32. On the status of interpretation within the modern philosophical tradition, see
Georges Gusdorf, Les Origines de l’herméneutique (Paris: Payot, 1988), 305ff.; Peter Szon-
di, Introduction to Literary Hermeneutics, trans. Martha Woodmansee (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1995).
33. See August Boeckh, Encyklopädie und Methodologie der philologischen Wissenschaften,
2d ed., ed. Ernst Bratuschek and Rudolf Klussmann (Leipzig: Teubner, 1886), 79ff.; and
Friedrich August Wolf, Darstellung der Alterthumswissenschaft, nebst einer Auswahl seiner
kleinen Schriften und litterarischen Zugaben zu dessen Vorlesungen über die Alterthumswis-
senschaft: Als Supplementband zu dessen Vorlesungen, ed. Samuel Friedrich Wilhelm Hoff-
mann (Leipzig: Lehnhold, 1833), 23ff.
34. See Wilhelm Roux, Der Kampf der Theile im Organismus: Ein Beitrag zur Vervoll-
ständigung der mechanischen Zweckmässigkeitslehre (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1881), 212–13;
Rolph, Biologische Probleme, 97. On this aspect, see the concise discussions in Gregory
Moore, Nietzsche, Biology, and Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
46–47; and Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, Nietzsche: His Philosophy of Contradictions and the
Contradictions of His Philosophy, trans. David J. Parent, foreword by Richard Schacht

(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 168–69. In contrast to Moore and Müller-
Lauter, Greg Whitlock has suggested that Nietzsche’s early encounter with the physical
sciences, especially Roger Joseph Boscovich’s Theoria philosophiae naturalis redacta ad
unicum legem virium in natura existentium (Venice: n.p., 1763), provided the “parent
theory to . . . the theory of will to power” (“Roger Boscovich, Benedict de Spinoza and
Friedrich Nietzsche: The Untold Story,” Nietzsche-Studien 25 [1996]: 200–220, quotation
on 203).
35. See Roux, Der Kampf der Theile im Organismus, 69, 97–98, 102.
36. See, for instance, Wilhelm Roux, Gesammelte Abhandlungen über die Entwicklungs-
mechanik der Organismen (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1895).
37. Although this has already been stressed to some extent by Müller-Lauter in his
Nietzsche (147–60), the most detailed discussion of this aspect can be found in Abel,
Nietzsche, 133, 142, 157ff.
38. This remains a somewhat controversial issue in contemporary Nietzsche scholarship.
Whereas Richardson and Poellner argue that the will to power needs to be seen as a te-
leological model, Schacht and Abel point out that such an interpretation would be
counterproductive, especially if we accept the connection between the will to power and
Nietzsche’s idea of interpretation. See John Richardson, Nietzsche’s System (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1996), 21; Peter Poellner, Nietzsche and Metaphysics (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1995), 162–73; Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (London: Routledge,
1983), 242; Abel, Nietzsche, 120ff., 133ff.
39. Gustav Teichmüller, Die wirkliche und die scheinbare Welt: Neue Grundlegung der
Metaphysik (Breslau: Koebner, 1882), 17, 332. For an assessment of Teichmüller’s “perspec-
tivism,” see Small, Nietzsche in Context, 41–58.
40. See Teichmüller, Die wirkliche und die scheinbare Welt, 183–87, 223–24, 268–76,
315–19, 332–33.
41. See ibid., 13–14.
42. See Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
43. See Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
44. Donald Davidson, “Radical Interpretation,” Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 125–39, esp. 136.
45. For a similar argument, see Cox, Nietzsche, 113–18, 139–68.
46. Schacht speaks of Nietzsche’s “philosophical anthropology” (Nietzsche, 268–79).
See also “Of Morals and Menschen: Nietzsche’s Genealogy and Anthropology,” in Schacht,
Making Sense of Nietzsche: Reflections Timely and Untimely (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1995), 206–24.
47. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 108–9 (B xiif ), 112 (B xxi).
48. On the relationship between German romanticism and the natural sciences, see
Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine, eds., Romanticism and the Sciences (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 119–29; Timothy Lenoir, “The Göttingen
School and the Development of Transcendental Naturphilosophie in the Romantic Era,”
Studies in History of Biology 5 (1981): 111–205.
49. See Novalis, Das Allgemeine Brouillon (Materialien zur Enzyklopädistik), in Werke,
Tagebücher und Briefe Friedrich von Hardenbergs, ed. Hans-Joachim Mähl and Richard
Samuel (Munich: Hanser, 1978–87), 2:593–94 (sect. 528), 2:630 (sect. 657), 2:685 (sect.
911).
50. For a particularly illuminating account of these changes, see Charles E. McClelland,
State, Society, and University in Germany, 1700–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1980), 122–32, 151–89, 280–321; Timothy Lenoir, Politik im Tempel der Wissenschaft:
Forschung und Machtausübung im deutschen Kaiserreich (Frankfurt am Main: Campus,
1992).
51. See Johann Carl Friedrich Zöllner, Über die Natur der Cometen: Beiträge zur Ge-
schichte und Theorie der Erkenntniss, 2d ed. (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1872), 226–29.
52. See the discussion in Andreas Daum, “Naturwissenschaften und Öffentlichkeit in
der deutschen Gesellschaft: Zu den Anfängen einer Populärwissenschaft nach der Revo-
lution von 1848,” Historische Zeitschrift 267 (1998): 57–90.
53. On this experimental setting, see Hans-Jörg Rheinberger and Michael Hagner, eds.,
Die Experimentalisierung des Lebens: Experimentalsysteme in den biologischen Wissenschaften,
1850/1950 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993); Kurt Danziger, Constructing the Subject: His-
torical Origins of Psychological Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990),
17–33; William Coleman and Frederick L. Holmes, eds., The Investigative Enterprise:
Experimental Physiology in Nineteenth-Century Medicine (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1988). For a particularly detailed examination of the way in which models and
instruments are related to each other within such experimental settings, see Timothy
Lenoir, “Models and Instruments in the Development of Electrophysiology, 1845–1912,”
Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 17 (1986): 1–54.
54. See Joachim Gessinger, “Sprachlaut-Seher: Physiologie und Sprachwissenschaft im
19. Jahrhundert,” in Physiologie und industrielle Gesellschaft: Studien zur Verwissenschaftli-
chung des Körpers im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Philipp Sarasin and Jakob Tanner,
204–44 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998).
56. To argue that Nietzsche’s notion of experiment was inspired primarily by aes-
thetic considerations going back to the poetics of German romanticism, especially Fried-
rich Schlegel’s understanding of Poesie, would be to seriously underestimate the intel-
lectual fields and epistemic constellations within which his philosophical enterprise took
shape.
57. Emil DuBois-Reymond, “Über die Grenzen des Naturerkennens,” “Über die Gren-
zen des Naturerkennens” und “Die sieben Welträthsel,” 6th ed. (Leipzig: Veit, 1884), 11–60,
esp. 34–37 and 43. With this argument DuBois-Reymond touches on a philosophical
position well known in the twentieth century, that of “eliminative materialism”: the
project of completely reducing mental operations to physical functions. On the twenti-
eth-century debate, see Mark T. Nelson, “Eliminative Materialism and Substantive Com-
mitments,” International Philosophical Quarterly 31 (1991): 39–49; Paul M. Churchland,
“Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes,” in Mind and Cognition, ed.
William G. Lycan, 206–23 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); Richard Rorty, “In Defense of
Eliminative Materialism,” Review of Metaphysics 24 (1970): 112–21; idem, “Mind-Body
Identity, Privacy, and Categories,” Review of Metaphysics 19 (1965): 24–54.
59. For discussions of these debates’ wider philosophical aspects, see Douwe Draaisma,
Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas about the Mind, trans. Paul Vincent (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000); John Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes
to Connectionism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
60. See Carl Gustav Carus, Vorlesungen über Psychologie gehalten im Winter 1829/30 zu
Dresden (Leipzig: Fleischer, 1831), 141, 149.
61. See ibid., 143. Carus continued his arguments about the relationship between the
physical dimension of sensory perception and its mental representation in later writings,
such as Psyche: Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Seele (Pforzheim: Flammer und Hoffmann,
1846) and Vergleichende Psychologie, oder Geschichte der Seele in der Reihenfolge der Thier-
welt (Vienna: Braumüller, 1866). Nietzsche mentions the latter in a notebook entry of
1882 (KGW VII/1, 2 [2]), but he does not appear to have had any detailed knowledge of
this study.
62. See Robert M. Young, Mind, Brain, and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century:
Cerebral Localisation and Its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1990).
63. See Ewald Hering, Über das Gedächtnis als eine allgemeine Funktion der organisierten
Materie: Vortrag gehalten in der feierlichen Sitzung der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissen-
schaften in Wien am 30.5.1870 (Vienna: Staatsdruckerei, 1876), 2. On Hering, see Laura
Otis, Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth
Centuries (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 10–14.
64. Hering’s approach, which was based on earlier studies of the nervous system, was
to be formulated in more detail with regard to human memory at the beginning of the
twentieth century by Richard Semon. In his Die Mneme als erhaltendes Prinzip im Wech-
sel der organischen Geschehens (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1904), 136–37, Semon argued—much
as Hering had—that the association and combination of such engrams produce both
thinking and memory. This idea contrasts starkly to the position of Hermann Ebbinghaus
and other experimental psychologists who regarded memory as a vacuum or blank slate
to be filled with the result of perception, experience, and learning. See Ebbinghaus, Über
das Gedächtnis: Untersuchungen zur experimentellen Psychologie (Leipzig: Duncker und
Humblot, 1885); Andreas Hartmann, “Die Fiktion vom semantischen Vakuum: Zum
psychologischen Gedächtsnisexperiment der Jahrhundertwende,” in Objekte, Differenzen,
Konjunkturen: Experimentalsysteme im historischen Kontext, ed. Michael Hagner, Hans-Jörg
Rheinberger, and Bettina Wahrig-Schmidt, 107–20 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1994).
65. Zöllner, Über die Natur der Cometen, xvi.
66. See Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences
(London: Macmillan, 1869); idem, “Hereditary Talent and Character,” Macmillan’s Mag-
azine 12 (1865): 157–66, 318–27. See also Théodule Ribot, L’Hérédité: Étude psychologique
sur ses phénomènes, ses lois, ses causes, ses conséquences (Paris: Librairie Philosophique de
Ladrange, 1873); Paul Robert Schuster, Gibt es unbewusste und vererbte Vorstellungen?
Akademische Antrittsvorlesung gehalten am 5. März 1877, ed. Friedrich Zöllner (Leipzig:
Staackmann, 1879).
67. See Teichmüller, Die wirkliche und die scheinbare Welt, 338–40.
68. Nietzsche seems to have used Francis Galton, Inquiries into the Human Faculty and
Its Development (London: Macmillan, 1883). For Schirnhofer’s account, see Hans Loh-
berger, “Friedrich Nietzsche und Resa von Schirnhofer,” Zeitschrift für philosophische
Forschung 22 (1968): 250–60, esp. 256.
69. Haeckel formulated the relationship between ontogenetic and phylogenetic devel-
opments as a “biogenetic law.” See Lynn K. Nyhart, Biology Takes Form: Animal Morphol-
ogy and the German Universities, 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995),
130, 132–33.
70. Ernst Haeckel, Die Perigenesis der Plastidule, oder die Wellenerzeugung der Lebens-
theilchen: Ein Versuch zur mechanischen Erklärung der elementaren Entwickelungs-Vorgän-
ge (Berlin: Reimer, 1876).
71. Nietzsche was quite critical of Haeckel’s often speculative philosophical conclusions,
especially during 1881 (KGW V/1, 8 [68]; KGW V/2, 11 [249, 299]), and in a decisive note
of 1884 he rejects Haeckel’s idea of a cellular memory on the grounds that the organiza-
tional dimension of memory is far too complex to be reduced to specific organic phe-
nomena (KGW VII/2, 25 [403]).
72. See, for instance, KGW VII/1, 7 [89, 92–93, 95, 178, 194–98].
73. See Roux, Der Kampf der Theile im Organismus, 36ff., 61.
74. See Oscar Schmidt, Descendenzlehre und Darwinismus (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1873);
Carl Nägeli, Mechanisch-physiologische Abstammungslehre (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1884).
75. Otis, Organic Memory, 4.
76. See Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, 493.
77. See Teichmüller, Die wirkliche und die scheinbare Welt, 337–40.
78. See ibid., 340, 343–45.
79. Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, 67.
80. See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch,
corr. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 509.
81. See Plato, Politeia, 389b.
82. Consider, for instance, the relatively lax discussion of Nietzsche’s reception of
evolutionary thought in Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the
Meanings of Life (London: Penguin, 1995), 461–67.
83. Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2002), 28.
84. See, for instance, J. P. Stern, “Nietzsche and the Idea of Metaphor,” in Nietzsche,
Notes to Pages 156 – 62 201
Imagery and Thought: A Collection of Essays, ed. Malcolm Pasley, 64–82 (London: Methuen,
1978), 67.
85. See also KGW III/4, 19 [230].
86. Williams, Truth and Truthfulness, 35.
87. See, for example, TL 84–85; HA I:53, II:ii.1; GM III:24; KGW III/4, 19 [175, 248,
251], 29 [20]; KGW VII/2, 26 [334]; KGW VIII/1, 2 [108]; KGW VIII/3, 16 [30].
88. See Richardson, Nietzsche’s System, 232 and 237; Poellner, Nietzsche and Metaphysics,
108–9; Nehamas, Nietzsche, 53; Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961),
1:632ff., 2:314ff.
89. See Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, 95–125.
90. See Williams, Truth and Truthfulness, 82, 172–205.
91. See also GM II:1.
92. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1977), 93–95; idem (with the collaboration of Monique de
Saint Martin), The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power, trans. Lauretta C.
Clough (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), 272–78. On the aspect of language, see Bourdieu,
Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Peter Collier (Cambridge: Polity, 1982).
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Index
Abel, Günter, 84, 136 Black, Max, 45, 61

analytic vs. synthetic judgments, 48 Blackwell, Thomas, 63
anthropology, philosophical, 83–84 Blair, Hugh, 32
anthropology of knowledge, 1, 13, 30, 123–62 Blass, Friedrich, 12, 68
anthropomorphism, 55–60, 127 Blondel, Eric, 83
aphasia, 95, 101 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, 133
Aquinas, Thomas, 47, 94 Blumenberg, Hans, 45; on absolute meta-
Aristotle, 12, 15–16, 26–27, 45, 48, 53, 88–89, phors, 67–68
91, 113, 125, 137, 146; criticism of Sophists body, history of, 34; and interpretation, 138–
by, 24; on link between rhetoric and 39; relationship of, to mind, 31, 111, 146; and
interpretation, 24; on universality of rhetoric, 85; sciences of, 27, 82
rhetoric, 23; views of, on rhetoric, 22–25 Boeckh, August, 11, 137
Arnauld, Antoine, 72 Bonn, University of, 6, 12, 17
Ast, Friedrich, 19, 137 Boole, George, 128–29
Athenian democracy, 13 Bopp, Franz, 35
Augustine, 72, 94 Borseul, Charles, 107
Austin, J. L., 48 Bourdieu, Pierre, 6, 75, 162
Avicenna, 47 brain, electric stimulation of, 101
Brentano, Franz, 98
Bachofen, Johann Jakob, 112–13 Broca, Pierre Paul, 95, 101
Bacon, Francis, 40 Brücke, Ernst W., 95
Bain, Alexander, 101, 103 Büchner, Ludwig, 151–52; on transformation
barbaroi, 14 of forces in nature, 103
Basel, University of, 6, 9, 12, 20, 62 Burckhardt, Jacob, 85
Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 41–42, 135 Burke, Kenneth, 51
Behler, Ernst, 55
Bell, Alexander Graham, 107 Carruthers, Peter, 2
Benfey, Theodor, 37, 63, 79 Carus, Carl Gustav, 147–48
Bernhardy, Gottfried, 11, 14 Caspari, Otto, 96, 151
Bewußtseinsphilosophie, 117 catachresis, 66
Bildung, 34, 133 cerebral cortex, 101
biology, 82 Chladenius, Johann Martin, 137
218 Index
Cicero, 12, 44, 53, 93–94, 113, 130 experiment: experimental culture in
Clark, Maudemarie, 82, 111, 141, 153, 158 nineteenth-century Germany, 143–44;
columbarium, 112–13 experimental knowledge, 143–44;
Comte, Auguste, 128 experimental psychology, 96; and
Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 13, 36, 89; on philosophy, 142, 144
language, 41–42; on origin of language, 63
convention, metaphor and, 66 Faber, Joseph, 108
Cooper, David, 66 Faraday, Michael, 100
Corax, 53 Fechner, Gustav Theodor, 30, 90, 92, 121, 148
Cox, Christoph, 136 Ferrier, David, 101, 148
Crary, Jonathan, 120 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 32; on self, 117
creative drive, 134 fields of knowledge, 77
Curtius, Georg, 36 figurative language: and literal language, 61–
62, 65; and origin of language, 63–64;
Darwin, Charles, 108, 150 ubiquity of, 93–94
Darwin, Erasmus, 108 Fischer, Kuno, 38
Davidson, Donald, 61, 82, 141 Flögel, Carl Friedrich, 114
De Man, Paul, 61, 82 Flourens, Pierre, 101, 148
Democritus, 29, 38 Foster, Michael, 98
Dennett, Daniel C., 155 Foucault, Michel, 6
Derrida, Jacques, 82 Franklin, Benjamin, 99
Descartes, René, 3, 40, 128, 130, 146; res Frege, Gottlob, 128–29
cogitans, 117; on self and self-consciousness, Fritsch, Gustav, 101
116–17; use of architectural metaphors by, Funke, Otto, 91, 110; on nervous system and
113 transmission of stimuli, 103–4
Descombes, Vincent, 115
drive, biological, 133–34 Galton, Francis, 2, 149
DuBois-Reymond, Emil, 2, 85–86, 98, 143, Galvani, Luigi, 99–100
146; experiments on electricity in organic Galvanic current, 102
material by, 100–101 Galvanic stimulation, 100
Dumarsais, César-Chesneau, 32, 69 Geertz, Clifford, 4
genealogy, 160–61
Edison, Thomas A., 108 genus iudiciale, 23
ekklesia, 15 Gerber, Gustav, 27, 35, 134; on abstraction, 73–
electricity, animal, 100 74; influence of, on Nietzsche, 12–13; on
electroptherapy, Nietzsche’s treatment using, language as art, 52; on language and
101–2 perception, 105; on ordinary language, 93;
eliminative materialism, 111 on tropes, 69–70
eloquence in Greece, 12; as natural, 14; pre- Gersdorff, Carl von, 55, 83, 85
Platonic, 11 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 60
Empedocles, 18–19 Golinski, Jan, 77
Engelmann, Wilhelm, 33 Goodman, Nelson, 66
Entwicklungsmechanik, 139 Gorgias, 17–18, 52
Ernesti, Johann August, 137 Gottsched, Johann Christoph, 32
Erxleben, Johann Christian Polycarp, 99 grammar, 77–87; relationship of, to logic, 79–
Espinas, Alfred, 134 80; universality of, 80
evolution, theory of, 150–51 Greece: as foundation of European thought,
Index 219
13; linguistic culture of, 10; oral culture, 13; interpretation, 137; philosophy of, 132, 136–
rhetorical consciousness in, 15 37; and physiology, 138–39; and reality, 138–
Grimm, Jacob, 35 39
isegoria, 15
habitus, 162 Isocrates, 18
Haeckel, Ernst, 108, 149–50 isonomia, 15
Hamann, Johann Georg, 94
Hansen’s machine, 28 Jahn, Otto, 112
Harrison, Jane Ellen, 10 Jaspers, Karl, 9
Hartmann, Eduard von, 38, 79, 90, 145; on
language, 39; on things-in-themselves, 51 Kalb, Christof, 84
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 3, 19, 46, Kant, Immanuel, 3, 33, 38, 40, 128, 144, 159; on
128; on metaphor, 66–67 analogies of experience, 59; on anthropo-
Hegelianism, 34, 143 morphism, 59; on correspondence theory of
Heidegger, Martin, 9, 126, 157 truth, 49, 50; criticism of Descartes by, 117;
Heidelberg, University of, 96 on experiment, 142; on hypotyposis, 44, 67;
hellenismos, 14 on language and reality, 43–44, 47; on logic,
Helmholtz, Hermann von, 2, 85–86, 90, 92– 130; on mental schemata, 81; on metaphys-
93, 95–96, 121; measurement of nerve ics, 125; reading of Hume by, 46; on
conduction rate by, 96 rhetoric, 43; on teleology, 38–39, 58–60; on
Herbart, Johann Friedrich, definition of things-in-themselves, 51; on transcendental
psychology by, 90 aesthetics, 80–81
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 13, 33, 89, 94–95, Kaufmann, Walter, 9, 126
133; on evolution of language, 63–64 Kempelen, Wolfgang von, 108
Hering, Ewald, 148 Kennedy, George, 15
Hesiod, 11, 18 Kepler, Johannes, 93
Hesse, Mary B., 76–77 Kittay, Eva Feder, 89
Hippias, 14 Kittler, Friedrich, 29, 120
Hirzel, Rudolf, 12, 19 knowledge, biologization of, 39, 110
historicism, 128 Krause, Ernst Ludwig, 108
history, textualization of, 4 Kunstprosa, 17
Hitzig, Eduard, 101, 148
Hollingdale, R. J., 9 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 150
Homer, 11, 18 Lamy, Bernard, 32
Humboldt, Alexander von, 147 Lange, Friedrich Albert, 3, 17–18, 38–39, 43,
Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 13, 35, 133, 143 70, 91, 99, 134, 144, 151–52; on modern
Hume, David, 146; on language, 47; on self, science, 82–83; on relationship between
119; on simple ideas, 46 language and nervous stimulation, 105; on
things-in-themselves, 51
imitation, culture and, 162 Langendorff, Oskar, 143
induction, electromagnetic, 99 language: as creative drive, 134; and culture,
inductive sciences, 102–3 36; evolution of, 67, 123; indeterminacy of,
inner verbalization, 89 74; and perception, 106; as projection of
intellectual field, 3, 6–7 mental images, 73; and reality, 74–76;
interpretation: and biological evolution, relationship of, to body, 82–87; relationship
theory of, 139–40; and hermeneutics, 137; of, to logic, 80; and scientific concepts, 83;
and logical thought, 130; philological scientific study of, 33–37
220 Index
latinitas, 14 metaphysical realism, 51

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 41–42 metaphysics: decline of, in nineteenth century,
Leipzig, University of, 6, 12, 36 128–29; and language, 127; Nietzsche’s
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 135 criticism of, 125–32
Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 54–55, 60, 99, Meyer, Gottlob Wilhelm, 137
135, 142 Mill, James, 103
life, mathematization of, 30 Mill, John Stuart, 2, 128; on induction, 102–3
linguistics, 33–37; comparative, 35–36; Miller, J. Hillis, 55, 61, 68
relationship of, to philology, 36 mind: and nervous system, 57; relationship of,
Locke, John, 36, 40; on language and reality, to body, 31, 111, 146
71–72; on rhetoric, 40–42; on self and self- modern episteme, transitions of, 27
awareness, 117; on simple ideas, 70–72 modernity, Nietzsche’s experience of, 107–8
logic: and imagination, 130, Nietzsche’s Moore, Gregory, 90
understanding of, 129–32; relationship of, Morse, Samuel F. B., 107
to grammar, 79, 80; relationship of, to Müller, Adam, 32
language, 80; and rhetoric, 130 Müller, Friedrich Max, 37
Lotze, Rudolph Hermann, 2, 91, 110; on Müller, Johannes, 90
nervous system and transmission of stimuli, Müller, Karl Otfried, 14
103, 104 myth of the given, 33
lying, 154–56
Lysias, 52 Nägeli, Carl, 150
Napoleonic Wars, 33
Mach, Ernst, 85 natural laws, philosophical relativism and, 145
materialism, 128 Nehamas, Alexander, 141
materialities of communication, 27, 106–8 neo-Kantianism, 27, 43, 128
Mauthner, Fritz, 27, 35 nerve stimuli, transmission of, 98
Maxwell, James Clerk, 100 Newton, Isaac, 93
Megill, Allan, 5 Nicole, Pierre, 72
Meier, Georg Friedrich, 137 Nietzsche: anthropological turn of, 136;
memory, 114–15, 146; and memoria, 114; appreciation of Aristotle by, 24–25; and
biologization of, 148–49; and biological classical scholarship, 9–10; criticism of Plato
evolution, 150–51; and biological sciences, by, 21–22; criticism of unconscious
147; and brain, 148; Nietzsche’s understand- judgments by, 92; definition of metaphor
ing of, 147; organic, 149–52; physiological, by, 93; and intellectual history, 5; knowl-
147; rhetorical, 146; and truth, 161 edge of classical rhetorical theory of, 10–13;
mental activity, functional description of, 90 knowledge of life sciences of, 134; on
mental associations, 131 mythology and religion, 10; use of
mental functions, localization of, 101 typewriter by, 28–30; writings by: “Abriß
Merkel, Carl Ludwig, 95 der Geschichte der Beredsamkeit,” 11, 53;
metaphor: absolute, 67; and convention, 66; “Darstellung der antiken Rhetorik,” 11–12,
definition of, 88; and knowledge, 10; as 14, 20, 22, 37, 42, 45, 53, 55, 65, 88–89, 91,
master trope, 105–6; and metaphysics, 26; 93, 114, 131, 146, 155; “Einführung in das
and myth, 64; and nervous processes, 110; Studium der platonischen Dialoge,” 20;
Nietzsche’s use of, 62; and physiology, 88, “Einleitung in die lateinische Epigraphik,”
95, 110; primacy of, 62–68; in science, 76– 112; “Einleitung zur Rhetorik der Aristo-
77; and thinking, 113; and translation, 106; teles,” 11, 23; “Encyclopaedie der klassischen
as translation, 94–95; as Übertragung, 54, 94 Philologie,” 11, 37, 62; “Der Florentinische
metaphorology, 67 Traktat über Homer und Hesiod, ihr
Index 221
Geschlecht und ihren Wettkampf,” 11; Die Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt, 85–86

fröhliche Wissenschaft, 28, 75, 80, 103, 123, physiology, 27, 29, 82, 89; and language, 30,
138, 160; 500 Aufschriften auf Tisch und 34; and metaphor, 95
Wand: Für Narrn von Narrenhand, 28; Die Plato, 16, 26, 45, 48, 53, 115, 159; criticism of
Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Sophists by, 20–21; on justice and truth in
Musik, 9, 27, 51; “Geschichte der griechisch- rhetoric, 20; views on rhetoric of, 19–22
en Beredsamkeit,” 11, 17; “Geschichte der Platonic dialogues, rhetorical quality of, 19–20
griechischen Litteratur,” 37; Götzen- political economy, 30
Dämmerung, 127, 129, 153, 157, 159; Jenseits positivism, 128
von Gut und Böse, 13, 77, 118, 122, 141, 153, Prantl, Carl, 131
157; Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, 74, 129; pre-Platonic philosophy, 18
Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Priestley, Joseph, 99
Griechen, 16; “Die Teleologie seit Kant,” psychagogia, 21, 26
134; “Ueber die Zukunft unserer Bildungs- psychology, 29; mathematization of, 92
anstalten,” 143; “Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge psychophysics, 92
im aussermoralischen Sinne,” 12, 47–48, Putnam, Hilary, 49
57–65, 88, 96, 106, 110, 112, 153–54, 156;
“Vorlesungen über lateinische Grammatik,” Quintilian, 12, 14, 44, 66, 93, 130; on tropes,
36, 63, 78; Der Wanderer und sein Schatten, 69
79; Nietzsche, Wir Philologen, 38; Zur
Genealogie der Moral, 13, 85, 138–39, 153, reading machine, 109
157–58, 161 recording machine, 109
Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), 142–43 reductionism, problems of, in nineteenth
century, 146
Oersted, Hans Christian, 100 Rée, Paul, 28, 98
orality, literacy and, 10, 14 reference, 74–76
Oratores Attici, 12 Reimarus, Hermann Samuel, 133
oratory: and democracy, 15; emergence of, in Reis, Philipp, 107
Greece, 10; and philosophy in Greece, 15; relativism, 81, 140, 144–45
public role of, in Greece and Rome, 11 Remington typewriter, 28
organic physics, 87 repraesentatio Christi, 72
origin of language, 63–64 revaluation of all values, 136
orthodox vs. heterodox discourses, 6 rhetoric: and the body, 85; and classical
Otis, Laura, 151 scholarship, 33; and logic, 130; and
Overbeck, Franz, 28 philosophy, 10, 15, 20, 23, 25–26, 42; and
physiology, 85; universality of, 45–46
Pädagogium, 9 Rhetorica ad Herennium, 114
Parmenides, 18 rhetorical education in Greece, 14, 18
Paul, Jean, on figurative language, 65, 67 Ribot, Théodule, 149, 152
Pericles, 15 Richards, I. A., 45, 61
perspectivism, 140; and body, 142; philosophi- Rieger, Stefan, 121
cal interpretation of, 141; and physiology, Ringer, Fritz, 6
140–41; technological and cultural Ritschl, Friedrich, 11
influences of, in modernity, 109 Ritter, Johann Wilhelm, 100
persuasion, 51; epistemological aspects, 52–54; Rohde, Erwin, 85
and metaphor, 54 Rolph, William H., 134, 139
philhellenism, 13 Rorty, Richard, 45
phonograph, 108 Rosenkranz, Karl, 38
222 Index
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 63, 94 Sulzer, Johann Georg, 95

Roux, Wilhelm, 98, 139, 150 Susemihl, Franz, 19
Russell, Bertrand, 48 Systemphilosophie, 3, 135
Ryle, Gilbert, 4
Tait, Peter Guthrie, 86
Sarasin, Philipp, 34 talking machine, 108
Scaliger, Joseph, 137 tautology, 118
Schaarschmidt, Karl, 17, 119, 126 Taylor, Charles, 115
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 39, 142 technology: communication, 106–8; effect on
Schiller, Friedrich, 134 modern philosophy, 109–10; and electricity
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 107, 120 106–8; modern, 29; and standardization, 29
Schlegel, Friedrich, 33, 35 Teichmüller, Gustav, 2, 145, 151–52; on
Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst, 19, 33, perspectivism, 140–41; on self, 120
137 telegraph, 27, 107
Schmidt, Oscar, 150 telephone, 107
Schneider, Georg Heinrich, 134 Thales, 16
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 9, 18, 38, 90, 145; on thick description, 4
metaphysics of the will, 84; on nerves, Thomasius, Christian, 116
perception, and transmission of stimuli, 97; Thomson, William (Lord Kelvin), 86
on persuasion, 54 Thucydides, 15
Schrift, Alan D., 136 Tietz, Udo, 135–36
Schuster, Paul Robert, 149 Tisias, 53
Schwegler, Albert, 70, 119 translation, 94
scientific materialism, 152 trope, 68–70; definition of, 68–69
self: dislocation of, through modern true world, 159
technology, 120–21; and mathematization of truth, 152–60; as condition of life, 160–61;
psychology, 121; Nietzsche’s criticism of correspondence theory of, 47–51; and
unified notion of, 118–19, 121–23; as cultural values, 161; and genealogy, 160–61;
regulative fiction, 123; unified notion of, history of, 159–60; as invented, 157; and
115–17 lying, 154–56; and memory, 161; and social
self-generation, biological, 133–34 convention, 153; as tautology, 48; and
semiotics, 72 utility, 155; value of, 157–58; will to, 158–59
Shapiro, Gary, 68 typewriter, 27–30
Siemens, Werner von, 85
signification, 73–77 Übertragung in physiology and psychology, 96
Simmel, Georg, 6 unconscious judgments, 91–93, 113–14
Socrates, 20 Urgedicht, 64
Soemmering, Samuel Thomas, 95 Usener, Hermann, 10
Sophists, 15–18, 26
Soskice, Janet M., 89 verbal realism, 51
Spencer, Herbert, 2, 103 Vickers, Brian, 20, 32
Spengel, Leonhard, 17, 20, 24, 53, 68 Vico, Giambattista, 47, 63–64
Spir, Afrikan, 103, 129, 145 Virchow, Rudolf, 89, 139
Staatswissenschaften, 30 Volkmann, Richard, 12, 20, 53, 69, 114, 131
statistics, 30 Volta, Alessandro, 99–100
Steinthal, Heymann, 30, 36–37, 79 Volta-Galvani controversy, 99–100
Stingelin, Martin, 55 Vorlesemaschine, 108
subject: grammatical, 79–80; logical, 79–80 Vossius, Gerhard Johannes, 32
Index 223
Wackernagel, Wilhelm, 24, 69, 134; on Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 13, 33

evolution of language, 63–64 Wissenschaft, 34
Wagner, Richard, 6, 9 Wolf, Friedrich August, 11, 63, 137
Weatherstone, Charles, 107 Wolff, Christian, 130
Weber, Ernst Heinrich, 92, 121 Wundt, Wilhelm, 2, 85, 89, 96, 121, 146
Weber, Wilhelm, 121
Westermann, Anton, 12, 20, 68 Zeno, 18
Whewell, William, 2, 92–93, 128; on inductive Zöllner, Carl Friedrich, 90–91, 121, 143;
sciences, 102 criticism of Helmholtz by, 85; on scientific
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von, 9 culture in, 85–86; on unconscious
William, Bernard, 48, 115, 155, 157, 160 judgments, 86, 91–93
will to power, 82, 88, 139–40
Christian J. Emden is an assistant professor of German studies at Rice Uni-
versity. Educated at the University of Konstanz, Germany, and the University of
Cambridge, England, he was research fellow (2000–2003) at Sidney Sussex Col-
lege, Cambridge, and his main interests lie in the area of German intellectual
history since 1750. He coedited (with David Midgley) Cultural Memory and
Historical Consciousness in the German-Speaking World since 1500 (2004) and Ger-
man Literature, History, and the Nation (2004) and has published articles on
Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, Aby Warburg, the “classical tradition,”
German intellectual history, and the history of science.
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche Georg Simmel; translated by Helmut Loiskandl,

Deena Weinstein, and Michael Weinstein
Nietzsche’s Revaluation of Values: A Study in Strategies E. E. Sleinis
Making Sense of Nietzsche: Reflections Timely and Untimely Richard Schacht
Nietzsche and the Problem of Sovereignty Richard J. White
Nietzsche: His Philosophy of Contradictions and the Contradictions of
His Philosophy Wolfgang Müller-Lauter; translated from the German by
David J. Parent
Nietzsche’s Perspectivism Steven D. Hales and Rex Welshon
The Pre-Platonic Philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche; translated from the German
and edited by Greg Whitlock
Nietzsche and the Transcendental Tradition Michael Steven Green
Reading Nietzsche Mazzino Montinari; translated from the German and with an
introduction by Greg Whitlock
Basic Writings Paul Rée; translated from the German and edited by Robin Small
Nietzsche’s Sister and the Will to Power: A Biography of Elisabeth Förster-
Nietzsche Carol Diethe
Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body Christian J. Emden
The University of Illinois Press
is a founding member of the
Association of American University Presses.
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I N T E R -

A list of books in the series appears at the back of this book.

Nietzsche has emerged as a thinker of extraordinary importance, not only in the

University of Illinois Press

∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

KGB Briefwechsel: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino

In this book I discuss Nietzsche’s reﬂections on language, consciousness, and the

Is it really necessary, or even possible, to “historicize” his seemingly radical and

Nonetheless, inasmuch as such a contextualization must rely on the personal

were initially not located at the center of nineteenth-century intellectual history.

and, on the other, the perspective of more anthropologically and interdisciplin-

Some Historical Sources

philological perspective but by presenting an argument based on the aesthetic

The Emergence of Rhetorical Thought

Furthermore, he underlines Gorgias’s emphasis on rhetorical style as culminating

the central conceptual constellations of his philosophical enterprise, such as

cording to Nietzsche, Aristotle took the interpretive dimension of rhetorical

Language in the Age of the Typewriter

even to any speciﬁc discipline. On the contrary, the regimes of standardiza-

ingly pressing concern, so that the anthropological dimension of his philosoph-

new national linguistic consciousness, which should be understood against the

Language, Science, Philosophy

he was working on the unﬁnished Wir Philologen—he laments the increasing

assume that knowledge must be understood in terms of language. This assump-

“Things As They Are”

discourse aims at a precisely deﬁned terminology for philosophical argument,

a sort of dilettantism that lacks the theoretical sophistication to be found among

priori according to a logical system of its manifold appearances governed by

When Kant speaks in this context of an Übertragung, he means a form of trans-

“Truth” and “Mammals”

Correspondence, Kant continues, is not a sufﬁcient precondition for truth, and

self ’ . . . is impossible for even the sculptor of language [Sprachbildner] to grasp,

Metaphysics and Persuasion

the common-sense version of persuading somebody to do something but also

the context of Nietzsche’s physiological account of perception, but Lichtenberg’s

Necessary Fictions in a Human World

as linked to humankind, as the inﬁnitely refracted echo of an original sound, that

Kant bases his understanding of nature’s purposiveness on arguments he de-

aphorical processes combining different mental representations according to

Nietzsche’s views on metaphor and ﬁgurative language continue to be somewhat

The Primacy of Metaphor

fundamental metaphoricity with a historical dimension. As such, his emphatic

Sprache” in honor of Franz Bopp, one of the founders of comparative linguistics.

language and conceptual thought leads us to the historical dimension of both

acterizes them as central to most forms of knowledge and reasoning. Blumenberg

systematic discussion, and both Richard Volkmann and Wilhelm Wackernagel

study Gerber concludes that language is always tropical, so that it is therefore

Of Colors, Smells, and Simple Ideas

“The World of Signs”

concrete experience, we must rely on abstractions.48 Nietzsche notes that all

ally impossible to live without general concepts of a metaphysical quality (KGW

“In the Slings of Grammar”

cal thought, which is supposed to be governed by certain laws or rather by a

of Indo-European languages and Heymann Steinthal’s history of ancient Greek

Following up on this remark, which essentially summarizes the direction of his

for Kant—is a question of ordering, combining, and unifying incommensurable

Language and the Body

us to recognize “things” in the natural world, that is, groupings of appearances.66

Language, Translation, and the Science of Perception

By highlighting the inadequate character of abstraction, Nietzsche also indi-

process of translation from nervous stimulation to consciousness, it can be de-

of electromagnetic induction not only became central issues in physiological