Nietzsche the Stylist
If Michel de Montaigne is often described as the “world’s first blogger”, it could be said that Nietzsche was the first social media troll.
His later books, such as the Joyous Science, Beyond Good and Evil, and the Twilight of the Idols, are stuffed with showy and bitter witticisms, musings, and tirades against perceived enemies and the general culture in loosely-connected aphorisms and maxims.
Nietzsche is undoubtably a great writer, his feat was to match the gravity and scale of his ideas with a vigour of style. His philosophy took on the ambition of demolishing the most sacred ideas of his age and is aptly presented as explosive textual rubble — fragmentary, airborne, fast, and hard.
But there’s a lot to be said about the function and origin of Nietzsche’s style. We often come across the great writers of history and we’re transfixed by the brilliance of their originality, as if the style arrived from another planet. But what we don’t see are all the influences behind the writing that fall away into the background noise of history as that one writer is hoisted up and carried along by contemporary acclaim.
Nietzsche’s writing, and by that I mean the style and structure of his delivery as much as his “mature” preoccupations, is indebted to his friend Paul Rée. Nietzsche deeply admired Rée until the two fell out over their mutual love interest, Lou Salomé. Rée’s writings, which fused philosophy with the burgeoning fields of psychology and evolutionary biology, changed the substance and style of Nietzsche’s own work profoundly. In fact, the Nietzsche we know and admire is the Nietzsche moulded in Rée’s image.
Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human (1878) marked the sea change to the fragmented, aphoristic style that he became famous for. It was a change inspired by Rée’s own Origin of the Moral Sensations, published the year previously. Rée innovated by writing the thesis in an aphoristic style of short self-contained passages, noting in the introduction that the breaks in the writing were opportunities for the reader to ponder.
Nietzsche jokingly — half-jokingly? — described himself as a “Réealist” as he wrote Human, All to Human in the same format, and covering many of the same psychological themes.
In the complimentary copy he sent to Rėe, he wrote,
“All of my friends are in agreement that my book was written by you or originated from your influence. And so I congratulate you on your new authorship! Long live Réealism!”
Rée also introduced Nietzsche to the French “moralist” writers La Rochefoucauld and Chamfort, both popular in their ages — the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries respectively, but hardly popular now. Both wrote tight and precise maxims that dazzled readers more accustomed to the long screeds encountered in a classical education. These flashes of insight were as much literary exercises in economy as they were carriers of ideas.
Here’s La Rochefoucauld on love,
“Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire.”
And morality,
“If we had no faults we should not take so much pleasure in noting those of others.”
And intelligence,
“The height of cleverness is to be able to conceal it.”
There are hundreds of these maxims and truisms, beautiful and brief provocations to ponder. They surprise in their twists and yet chime with some latent understanding of their meaning.
Inspired by Rée, who carried a La Rochefoucauld book in his pocket, Nietzsche honed his craft by imitating these writers. But where these French writers perfected intricacy in their miniatures, Nietzsche’s aphorisms feel crammed and coiled, like tigers stuffed into birdcages. La Rochefoucauld’s words are cool and dry, Nietzsche’s words are wetted with flecks of spit.
Here’s Nietzsche on the mob,
“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” (Beyond Good and Evil, 156)
On morality,
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” (BGE, 146)
On resilience,
“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” (Twilight of the Idols, Maxims and Arrows)
The style and the (absence of) structure in maxims and aphorisms was a perfect fit for Nietzsche’s destructive ideas. The philosopher who thought order was an illusion and grand narratives were a lie found his literary stride in loosely ordered but nonetheless potent fragments. It was also a style convenient to Nietzsche when his failing eyesight and ill health restricted the time he could read and write. It was easier to perfect short bursts of writing in thought for Nietzsche than it was to commit long form text to page.
While Rée’s small but innovative body of work has blended into the intellectual scenery of the Victorian age, Nietzsche’s has grown in stature. Largely ignored in his later years, Nietzsche has had a stellar posthumous run as being the all-things-to-all-people philosopher in his rejection of old values and his insistence on the need for cultural renewal. He has been hailed as a modernist, then as a postmodernist, then as a post-humanist and celebrated by Nazis, socialists, liberals, and conservatives. There’s a Nietzsche for every era, every ideology, every cause, every faith.
This fame is partly down to Nietzsche’s prescience — the writer, who died in 1900, seemed to see the upheavals of the twentieth century coming. In the void of what he diagnosed as cultural and spiritual nihilism, he saw barren but vitriolic ideologies emerging, and as power structures crumbled, he saw the rise of the masses.
But the style lends itself to timelessness because it lends Nietzsche’s work a conceptual liquidity. Like cash, it’s divisible, portable, and pliant. It’s perfect for the internet age where brevity is king, knowledge is assumed, and ideas are weaponised.
If you quoted another Victorian thinker like Bentham or Marx, you’d be transmitting a dozen or more unwritten caveats, but Nietzsche’s sentences largely stand up by themselves because they were designed to do so. They push the reader into thinking, rather than pull them through an argument.
He knew this, writing, “An aphorism that has been honestly struck cannot be deciphered simply by reading it off; this is only the beginning of the work of interpretation proper.” (Genealogy of Morals, preface, 8)
Here’s Nietzsche on Christianity, which he came to despise. He combines broad washes of colour with an acute and specific attack. This passage of writing has much in common with the social media “mic-drop”, where in the interests of brevity, all discourse is reduced to peroration (the usually emphatic and emotive concluding part of the speech).
“Christianity […] crushed and shattered man completely, and submerged him as if in deep mire. Then, all at once, into his feeling of complete confusion, it allowed the light of divine compassion to shine, so that the surprised man, stunned by mercy, let out a cry of rapture, and thought for a moment that he carried all of heaven within him. All psychological inventions of Christianity work toward this sick excess of feeling, toward the deep corruption of head and heart necessary for it. Christianity wants to destroy, shatter, stun, intoxicate: there is only one thing it does not want: moderation, and for this reason, it is in its deepest meaning barbaric, Asiatic, ignoble, un-Greek.” (Human, All Too Human, 114)
The text see-saws from assertion to assertion, compounding argument by rhythm rather than building it in layers. It’s by turns irreverent and serious. Note also the pulse of accumulation that goes beyond the “rule of three” to four — “destroy, shatter, stun, intoxicate” and “barbaric, Asiatic, ignoble, un-Greek” — to emphatic effect. The choice of words is symphonic — varying tones played out through adjectives and verbs. Of course, we’re reading the English translation here, the original German sings even more robustly.
What we can make of this passage mirrors its see-saw structure — it’s silly and profound, intelligent and stupid, precise and sloppy. Nietzsche would be scoffed at today, as he probably was in his own day. His ideas are almost always tinged with bitterness and sometimes even feeble, but the form is usually compelling. He combines beautifully crafted concepts or insights and applies them to often shallow and stupid opinions. Here’s Nietzsche on women (yes — all women),
“Women are considered deep — why? Because one can never discover any bottom to them. Women are not even shallow.” (ToI. 27)
The underlying idea, a truly Rochefoucauld-esque observation that some things that are considered deep — because you can’t find a bottom — are in actuality not even shallow, is repeated twice in Nietzsche’s body of work as if he never expected people to read more than one of his books. It appears earlier in a less refined form in The Joyous Science — “Mystical explanations are considered deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.” (126) The later maxim is more refined on a formal level, but its message is crass and asinine.
But Nietzsche has a get-out clause for being a troll, or being unoriginal, or indeed anything else, he wrote, “When we have a great aim, we are superior not only to our deeds and judges, but to justice itself.” (JS, 267) He began to think, in the 1880s as his health and reputation nose-dived, that even cruelty was justified if it was meted out by the hands of a great man — which of course he believed he was.
Such thinking seems to allow Nietzsche to license himself a petulance toward practically everybody who didn’t or wouldn’t “get” him — women, fellow Germans, the English, Russians, Christians, Socrates, Rationalists, Utilitarians, Immanuel Kant, Richard Wagner to name just a few.
It seems that “great aim”, right or wrong or anything between, carries the momentum of Nietzsche’s fame. The confidence of his conviction shines through the style like fire. His supporters, particularly his racist sister, Elizabeth, went to great lengths to achieve recognition for his work, which duly compounded.
As wretched as he could be, our culture still admires Nietzsche. That’s probably because in some way Nietzsche admires anybody who cares to read him.
His style, combining unguarded intimacy with grandiosity, mirrors the malleability of truth and the role of the beholder in creating meaning. And so it also ultimately flatters us in its generosity to our own thoughts and its blazing optimism in our own potential for renewal and redemption.
I enjoyed your commentary, more so than the subject. I also learned a lot, also very entertaining.
Thanks for butting in on a bored ole lady.
Awesome!