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 diatribes 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…