Nietzsche, Friedrich - Karsten Harries (essay date 1988)
Karsten Harries (essay date 1988)
[Harries is a German-born American critic and educator in philosophy. In the following essay he examines Nietzsche's frequent metaphors likening philosophy to sea exploration.]
In his preface to Nietzsche as Philosopher, Arthur Danto writes, appropriately enough given Nietzsche's understanding of himself as a seafaring discoverer, a new Columbus setting sail for uncharted seas: "His language would have been less colorful had he known what he was trying to say, but then he would not have been the original thinker he was, working through a set of problems which had hardly been charted before. Small wonder his maps are illustrated, so to speak, with all sorts of monsters and fearful indications and boastful cartographic embellishments!" This suggests that the special color of Nietzsche's discourse is inseparable from his failure to know what he was trying to say, a failure Danto links to Nietzsche's originality as...
[The entire page is 10591 words long]
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