Nietzsche, Friedrich - Clayton Koelb (essay date 1990)
Clayton Koelb (essay date 1990)
[Koelb is an American critic and educator. His works include Inventions of Reading: Rhetoric and the Literary Imagination (1988) and Kafka's Rhetoric: The Passion of Reading (1989). In the following essay Koelb asserts that Nietzsche's insistence on the figurative origin of language reveals his basic philosophical method, whereby ideas are apprehended through a rhetorical manipulation of metaphors and double meanings rather than a purely conceptual logic "beyond" language.]
There is a prima facie case to be made for Nietzsche's early and abiding interest in the rhetorical aspect of all discourse. Much of that case has already been made by Paul de Man in Allegories of Reading and has become widely known and frequently discussed. Because of de Man and others associated with the "new Nietzsche," who come mainly from France, many readers are now familiar with the formerly obscure little fragment "On...
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