the play on the wordBild, which refers on the one hand to the "picture" stamped on the coin and on the other to the character of the trope as "image." Nietzsche tells us that these "coins" (worn-out metaphors) have "lost their quality as image," or in other words that they function no longer as representations but as things.

The rhetorical quality of this discourse about rhetoric is not merely witty and clever; it is a way of coming to terms with the consequences of the argument Nietzsche is making. Supposing that Nietzsche accepts his own conclusion that all discourse is metaphorical and that all truth is simply an unacknowledged catachresis, two principal reactions seem possible for the philosopher determined to pursue the truth. On the one hand, one might try to develop ways to circumvent language altogether and thus avoid its contaminating metaphoricity, or on the other hand, one might decide to join the forces one cannot beat and look to the resources of language itself for strategies by which one might subvert our tendency to accept as truth "the obligation to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie gregariously in a style binding for all." Nietzsche's reaction is never the former; often it is recognizably the latter; at other times, however, he appears to act as if he did not accept the conclusion of "On Truth and Lie," to write as if language were a perfectly transparent medium, and to assume the pose of an authority untroubled by the rhetorical nature of his own discourse. Even the essay "On Truth and Lie" itself adopts this pose and even in the passage under discussion. It appears to be telling us the real truth about the truth (that it is a mobile army of metaphors) from a perspective that is somehow privileged. But that perspective undermines itself by relying so overtly on the process of figuration to make its point. Self-deconstructing propositions of this type are to be found relatively frequently in Nietzsche's writing and contribute importantly to his reputation as a literary writer.

The self-deconstructing Nietzsche is a figure that has already become familiar in one form or another over the past decade, and it is not my intention to paint that portrait again. While self-deconstruction is an important feature of Nietzsche's rhetorical style, it is not the aspect on which I want to focus attention now. I prefer to draw out a slightly different implication of the position taken in the lecture notes on rhetoric and in "On Truth and Lie" that focuses attention on its inventive rather than its subversive function in Nietzsche's philosophical project. That is what one might call, following Gregory Ulmer's extension of Derrida's term, the "grammatological" rather than the deconstructive turn in Nietzsche. If indeed all language (and thus all truth) is figurative and therefore subject to deconstruction, it offers the possibility of becoming an almost endlessly fertile source for philosophical thinking. If there is no distinction to be made between the figurative nature of even the most ordinary language and truth, then one way to think about "truth" in fresh ways would be to "let language do some thinking for us" by interrogating the figures themselves.

Interrogating them, however, would not mean attempting to discriminate between their "true" and "false" significations. Since all significations are the result of troping, according to "On Truth and Lie," there is no way to carry out such a discrimination. It would have to mean accepting both the literal and figurative meanings as belonging to the same order—both, of course, figurative. While one point of view would see this leveling as destroying the value of both, Nietzsche often works on the assumption that all available meanings are equally useful. From this assumption comes a strategy for writing (in this case, writing a kind of philosophy) that derives from reading. The writer reads an already deconstructed language and from that reading forms a new discourse that actualizes both the literal and the figurative, both the assertion and its subversion. The discovery that all truth is nothing but figuration ceases to be an alarming or paralyzing problem for the philosopher; on the contrary, it opens up new space for investigation. Rhetoric, since Plato the thing that philosophy has sought to purge from its midst, becomes the well-spring of philosophy.

Before pursuing this line any farther, I have to grant that Nietzsche seems to retain no small dose of ambivalence about a philosophy founded on rhetoric. This is evident enough in the direction taken by the argument in "On Truth and Lie," where words like "dissimulation" (Verstellung) and "deception" (Tduschung) figure prominently. He even asks, rhetorically, whether language is "the adequate expression of all realities." The implication of such a vocabulary is that there exists some bedrock of reality which the metaphorical nature of speech hides from us. But does this bedrock of reality actually exist? There is no consistent answer to this question to be found in Nietzsche's writings. In the following sentence from "On Truth and Lie," for example, it is impossible to determine the author's opinion on the subject under discussion: "The 'Thing-in-itself' (it is just this which would be the pure ineffective truth) is also quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and not worth making any great endeavor to obtain." We simply cannot tell whether the "creator of language" (Sprachbildner) has taken a proper or improper perspective in Nietzsche's eyes. Is the Ding-an-sich incomprehensible to the creator of language because of the shallowness of his own perception or because of the inconsequence of the notion of a Ding-an-sich, a truth which is "ineffective" (folgenlos)? There are explicit statements scattered through Nietzsche's works to support both views.

I do not propose to try to settle this perhaps unsettlable question. My interest in any case lies less with the issue of Nietzsche's "realism," if that is how one would want to put it, than with the way in which his assumptions about the pervasive and unavoidable metaphoricity of language, ambivalent though they were, became fruitful in his philosophical praxis. One thing we can say for certain is that the notions advanced in "On Truth and Lie" did not precipitate a paralyzing crisis in Nietzsche's own project of writing. He did not feel that his discourse was so contaminated by dissimulation and deception that there was no point in engaging in it. On the contrary, he wrote away with considerable zeal and with an apparent faith that writing was still very worthwhile, even at times "truthful." In aphorism 381 of The Gay Science, for example, Nietzsche excuses the brevity of his aphoristic style by claiming that "there are truths that are singularly shy and ticklish and cannot be caught except suddenly—that must be surprised or left alone." The implication is that Nietzsche has indeed surprised some of these shy "truths" (Wahrheiten) in the lightning flash of his writing.

It is fair enough, then, to say that Nietzsche's reaction to the conclusions reached through his study of rhetoric was not to shun rhetoric but to immerse himself in it. Nowhere is that decision more evident than in The Gay Science (1882), a work which in several ways announces itself as the marriage of philosophy and poetry. The epigraph to the first edition, slightly misquoted from Emerson, emphasizes the close relationship between the poet (Dichter) and the philosopher (Weiser). Emerson had included the saint in this brotherhood, but Nietzsche quietly deletes him. The confrontation of gaiety with science in the title not only suggests the importation of a lighter tone into philosophy but also refers quite directly to the "gaya scienza" of poetry itself. Nietzsche's book is to be both a work of Wissenschaft, [science, knowledge] as philosophy was supposed to be, and an example of the art of poetry. The book begins with a section in rhymes and, in the second edition, ends with another. It is an enterprise in which both joy and science are founded upon serious attention to language.

Nietzsche thought paying attention to language was worthwhile as part of the process of thinking. In the notes from the fall of 1881, for example, he writes down a number of wordplays or puns (Wortspiele) for possible use later. It is characteristic of Nietzsche that he would do so, but certainly not characteristic for the mainstream of philosophy in the nineteenth century (or—with the exception of those following in the Nietzschean tradition, such as Heidegger and Derrida—of the twentieth century either). Nietzsche has the kind of verbal imagination that sees, in the accidental, the interplay of signifiers, the impetus for thought. The shared syllable of ridiculosus and cultura suggests to him a shared quality, and he notes the possibility of the "Ridicultur eines Menschen." He might have seen in this portmanteau word the occasion for satire directed against those whose notion of culture is so philistine as to be ridiculous, or he might have been thinking more positively of the potential for culture to emerge out of things that are laughable (such as the word Ridicultur itself). Whichever way Nietzsche might have thought to use the joke, it clearly belongs to the same project as the set of notes in which it is embedded.

The rhymes which open The Gay Science show Nietzsche attempting publicly to demonstrate the integration of a form of rhetorical or poetic invention into his philosophical discourse. He starts right off by using wordplay to explain the nature of his enterprise. The first piece of verse, "Invitation" ("Einladung"), plays on the two possible readings of sieben, one as the number "seven," the other as a deprecatory prefix:

Wagt's mit meiner Kost, ihr Esser!
Morgen schmeckt sie euch schon besser
Und schon iubermorgen gut!
Wollt ihr dann noch mehr,—so machen
Meine alten sieben Sachen
Mir zu sieben neuen Muth.

Take a chance and try my fare:
It will grow on you, I swear;
Soon it will taste good to you.
If by then you should want more,
All the things I've done before
Will inspire things quite new.

Interestingly enough, this wordplay seems to repeat the sense of the Ridicultur joke in the notes. The locution Siebensachen refers to one's belongings in a belittling fashion: they are "odds and ends" or "trifles," as for example in Goethe's little poem comparing the "works of the masters" with his own poor Siebensachen. The sieben barely hangs onto its character as a number in this locution; the issue is not, after all, how many Sachen there are but rather the perception that they are of no account. Sieben acts to put these things in their place by suggesting that they are few and paltry. The very same word, though, when used in the next line, works in just the opposite direction. It refers to an operation that adds rather than reduces value. By looking again at those Siebensachen, the reader (even when the reader is the author) can rediscover the augmentative power of the number seven embedded in the old text. Seven, after all, is a number of mystical power often associated with increase in the Bible and other canonical texts. The reader's stock of ideas increases in the very recognition of this possibility, and like Nietzsche, he or she is quickly in possession of fresh Muth (that is, "spirit" or "courage") for generating more and more ideas. One might even get "culture" out of this ridiculous stuff.

The notion of adding acts here as a metaphor for the results of reading (and rereading), as does eating or tasting earlier in the verse. The point of the poem is that what at first seems valueless can become valuable upon rereading. That is what the reader of The Gay Science is supposed to discover about this book, just as Nietzsche has discovered it about the word sieben. Nietzsche, though by no means a great poet, is an extremely skillful rhetorician. He not only preaches his point; he practices it in such a way as to drive home the doctrine being preached. We are not simply told that creative acts of interpretation can turn trifles into treasures; we are shown how the German language encourages just such a transformation of sieben. Even if the reader at first considers the book before him to be "indigestible" (one of Nietzsche's favorite metaphors), repeated reading will be able to make something of it. But the obligation and the responsibility rest, as they have since Plato, with the reader. The author cannot do the job for him.

This point is stressed in the twenty-third poem in the group, "Interpretation":

Leg ich mich aus, so leg ich mich hinein:
Ich kann nicht selbst mein Interprete sein.
Doch wer nun steigt auf seiner eignen Bahn,
Trägt auch mein Bild zu hellerm Licht hinan.

Interpreting myself, I always read
Myself into my books. I clearly need
Some help. But all who climb on their own way
Carry my image, too, into the breaking day.

The equation between "sich auslegen" (interpret oneself) and "sich hineinlegen" (get oneself into trouble) is another paradoxical word-play. Since ein ("in") and aus ("out") are semantic opposites, the assertion that "sich hineinlegen" and "sich auslegen" are parts of the same process might come as a surprise, but since the locutions are so similar phonologically (the parallel structure "Leg ich mich … leg ich mich" emphasizes this point), the author's surprising conclusion seems justified. If self-interpretation on the part of the author can only get him into trouble, then, he must count on the reader to do the work of interpreting, even if that reader has no particular interest in advancing Nietzsche's project. It is interesting to compare this text with a slightly earlier version written in February 1882 and found in the Nachlass. The first line is the same, but the last three go in a somewhat different direction: "So mög ein Freund mein Interprete sein. / Und wenn er steigt auf seiner eignen Bahn, / Trägt er dès Freundes Bild mit sich hinan." [So may a friend be my interpreter. / And should he climb on his own way, / He'll carry his friend's image onward with him.] In this version, written with a specific person in mind, Nietzsche presupposes that the interpreting other will be well disposed toward him. The relation between reader and author is that of friend and friend. This supposition is dropped from the published version. The context of the other poems of "Scherz, List, und Rache" makes clear that Nietzsche does not expect an audience necessarily friendly to him or to his project, especially since the material presented is not always easy to take. Poem 54, for example, admits that The Gay Science will need a reader with strong teeth and a strong stomach ("ein gut Gebiss und einen guten Magen") to consume what Nietzsche has to offer.

Even the unsympathetic reader, the one whom Nietzsche himself has put off with his "hardness" (Härte) and willingness to step on others to reach the heights, will be a better interpreter of Nietzsche than Nietzsche himself. There is a certain charming modesty about this, but we quickly realize that there is in fact not the slightest trace of self-deprecation in what Nietzsche is proposing. The protagonist of the poem may not be the author himself, but it does turn out to be his image (Bild). The goal of interpretation is to place the author's image (in both senses of "picture" and "trope") in a clearer light, and it is proposed that the reader is better equipped for that task than the author—even indeed when the reader is climbing along "his own way" and not necessarily Nietzsche's. Read my metaphors in whatever way you will, Nietzsche seems to be saying, as long as you keep reading them. That which is closest to me, my image, will emerge clearly in the process.

This notion that the reader can do the author's business while in fact attending strictly to his own is a particularly postmodern concept that goes somewhat, but not entirely, against the grain of the traditional imagery of reading invoked by Nietzsche himself in his "Invitation." The idea is traditional in that it still assumes that the reader's role is to take over from the author a burden the author is no longer in a position to assume, but it departs from the tradition in supposing that readerly independence, not subservience, will facilitate the transfer of the burden. In the Platonic formulation of the principal Western orthodoxy of reading, the author is understood as the parent of the text ("pater logou"), both progenitor of and absolute authority over his offspring; the reader is a kind of foster parent responsible to the wishes and intentions of the "father of the discourse," subservient to him in all matters pertaining to the welfare of the precious child. The goal of this fostering care could properly be described by Nietzsche's words, to carry the "image" of the author into the clear light of productive interpretation. This very traditional goal, however, is paradoxically alleged by Nietzsche to be most likely of attainment when the reader steadfastly pursues his own path without worrying about what path the author might have chosen.

This same idea is presented in the seventh poem, "Vademecum—Vadetecum":

Es lockt dich meine Art und Sprach,
Du folgest mir, du gehst mir nach?
Geh nur dir selber treulich nach:—
So folgst du mir—gemach! gemach!

Lured by my style and tendency,
you follow and come after me?
Follow your self faithfully—
take time—and thus you follow me.

The poem is concerned with folgen and nachgehen in their figurative senses of "comply with" and "inquire into" and thus once again with the issue of interpretation. Again the assertion is made that the proper method of inquiry into Nietzsche's writing is faithful investigation of the reader's self and that this act of self-examination will be the best way to imitate and obey (folgen) Nietzsche himself. This advice is at once both surprising and expected. It is very traditional in that it takes the Socratic position that the beginning of wisdom is self-knowledge, that to "follow" the philosopher is not so much to learn his doctrines as to obey the Delphic injunction to "know thyself." It is unexpected—and deliberately so—at the beginning of a volume so full of advice, warnings, precepts, and other forms of guidance. Nietzsche acknowledges that he is offering here a kind of guidebook, a vademecum for the philosophically inclined, but in the moment of acknowledging it he turns it against itself. The advice he gives here is that the best way of taking his advice is not to take anyone's advice but your own. Nietzsche evidently loved the logical involution implied by this game.

The gesture made by the text's rhetoric once again authorizes radical reinterpretation as the most valid mode of reading. We can read "vademecum" as "vadetecum" and vice versa, just as we could read "sich auslegen" as "sich hineinlegen" in poem 25. Nietzsche is showing us a method for rhetorical reading but at the same time is urging that we must ourselves take up this tool and not simply wait for Nietzsche to do it for us. It is Nietzsche's version of the traditional invitation "Tolle, lege" but with the notion of "reading" substantially revised.

Nietzsche is prepared to defend the value of incessant rereading even in the extreme case of rereading his own earlier readings. The thirty-sixth poem, "Juvenalia" ("Jugendschriften') exemplifies the process:

Meiner Weisheit A und o
Klang mir hier: was hört' ich doch!
Jetzo klingt mir's nicht mehr so,
Nur das ew'ge Ah! und Oh!
Meiner Jugend hör ich noch.

My youthful wisdom's A and O
I heard again. What did I hear?
Words
not of wisdom but of woe:
Only the endless Ah and Oh
Of youth lies heavy in
my ear.

The commonplace German expression "das A und das O" ("the alpha and the omega") is regularly used to mean the sum total of something, even the "be-all and end-all." The clear implication of the poem is that the author did at one time think the sum total of his wisdom to be something grand, all-inclusive, and definitive. That interpretation comes under scrutiny when a now somewhat older Nietzsche looks back at his early writing and finds it "nicht mehr so," no longer what he once thought it was. The text is the same, but its meaning has radically changed. That change is cleverly exemplified in the rereading of the poem's own initial text, the phrase "A und O," now revealed as the semi-articulate cries of one whose feelings are more powerful than his means to express them. The transformation of "A und O" into "Ah! und Oh!" involves a dramatic change of signification with no change at all in the (oral) signifier. The change in the graphic signifier (the addition of-h.) is the mark of an alteration in perspective that both does and does not change the nature of the material interpreted. One could argue equally persuasively that there is no difference between the signifiers A and Ahl, O and Ohl, and that there is a huge difference; that is, one could take the point of view of a phonologically oriented linguist such as Saussure, or a graphically oriented grammatologist such as Derrida. The crucial thing here—which a Saussurian would be as quick to see as a Derridean—is the interplay of sameness and difference, in which the phonological samesness stands as a figure for a persisting, invariable text and graphic difference for the highly mutable act of reading.

The referential malleability of particular instances of discourse stands everywhere in these poems as a figure for the metaphoricity, and thus infinite interpretability, of all language, even of the whole world. Aphorism 374 in the body of the book (Our new "infinite') makes explicit the presupposition inherent in the poems of "Scherz, List, und Rache":

How far the perspective character of existence extends or indeed whether existence has any other character than this; whether existence without interpretation, without "sense," does not become "nonsense"; whether, on the other hand, all existence is not essentially actively engaged in interpretation—that cannot be decided even by the most industrious and most scrupulously conscientious analysis and self-examination of the intellect… Rather has the world become "infinite" for us all over again, inasmuch as we cannot reject the possibility that it may include infinite interpretations.

The world (Nietzsche uses Welt and Dasein interchangeably here) is analogized to a text of a certain sort. This is not the "book of the world" of the church fathers, a text whose form and meaning are ordained by God and whose legibility is guaranteed by God's perfection; this book is constantly reading itself and in that self-reading is making interpretive changes such as that from A to Ahl. The world, moreover, often reads itself in ways that testify to the absence of any guiding divine perfection: "Alas, too many ungodly possibilities of interpretation are included in the unknown, too much deviltry, stupidity, and foolishness of interpretation—even our own human, all too human folly, which we know."

But the poems of "Scherz, List, und Rache" demonstrate in their own way that even interpretation that is devilish or foolish has its uses. Nietzsche warns of his own deviltry in poem 9, "My Roses," in which he observes that, while his "happiness" (presumably the happiness of engaging in the gay science) wants to bring happiness to others ("es will beglucken"), it also has a special fondness for teasing (Necken) and malicious tricks (Tiicken). Those who want to pick the roses of this philosopher will often prick their fingers on his thorns. Teasing and trickery are part of a method which retains the traditional aim of philosophy, to get to the bottom of things ("den Grund") but does not suppose that it can achieve that aim by means of research (Forschung):

Ein Forscher ich? Oh spart diess Wort!—
Ich bin nur schwer—so manche Pfund'!
Ich Falle, falle immerfort
Und endlich auf den Grund!

A seeker, I? Oh, please be still!
I'm merely heavy—weigh
many a pound.
I fall, and I keep falling till
At last I reach the ground.

Walter Kaufmann makes a noble try at translating Nietzsche's wordplay by rendering the title "Der Gründliche" as "The Thorough Who Get to the Bottom of Things," but even this laudable effort actually obscures the rhetoric of the original. The point of the poem is that one can be gründlich in the sense of getting to the bottom of things without being gründlich in the sense of thorough or rigorous—without, that is, being a Forscher. The title is revealed by the poem to be readable as both ironic and not ironic, since the denial of Grundlichkeit as a method is shown to in no way to prevent achievement of the Grund, the bottom of things.

The method proposed as Nietzsche's alternative to Forschung is cast in terms which will become very familiar to readers of The Gay Science and Zarathustra but is presented here with an almost dismissive comic casualness. The author proclaims that he is not thorough, he is merely schwer ("heavy" or "difficult" or "indigestible") and therefore keeps falling (or declining) until he reaches the ground. What makes him heavy and difficult is that he is full of Pfunde, but these "pounds" are things that add rhetorical weight, rhetorical Pfunde that are barely distinguishable from Funde ("discoveries"). The paronomasia Pfund'/Fund' is called for by the figurative context, since discoveries are far more likely than pounds to make a philosopher schwer. It is certainly this sort of intellectual "weightiness" that is at issue when the same vocabulary returns in a more sober guise much later in the book. Aphorism 341, the famous passage which Nietzsche considered the first announcement of the basic idea ofZarathustra, eternal recurrence, bears the title "Das griisste Schwergewicht," again stressing the importance of being "weighty." And Aphorism 342, a passage almost identical to the opening section ofZarathustra, plays repeatedly on the term untergehen, a synonym of fallen. We can be sure that Nietzsche was very serious about Schwergewicht and untergehen, even if we harbor doubts about the seriousness of schwer and fallen in the poem "Der Griindliche." This is the devilish, foolish, unthorough method in operation, of course. That which is introduced as a teasing joke opens the way to something important: one falls, as it were, to the bottom of things by making jokes that are heavy and difficult. The process of falling to the philosophical ground is illustiated with particular consistency in the poems of "Scherz, List, und Rache" but is an important strategy in all of Nietzsche's writing. It is essentially a strategy of rhetorical reading, and it is plainly visible in a number of aphorisms in the main body of The Gay Science. Here the prose format makes no special pretension to literariness, but what we might regard as literary methods (because they are rhetorical) can be found as readily as in the rhymes. Nietzsche proceeds as if everyday language were a joyous Wissenschaft the power of which can be unlocked by an innovative act of reading. That is his method in The Genealogy of Morals, where he discovers in language the repressed relation between concepts of good and evil and facts of power, and this is his method in numerous aphorisms in The Gay Science, where wordplay and other forms of rhetorical reading play a significant role. His rumination on the role of deception in art, a passage that could have served as a program for Thomas Mann's entire literary career, concludes with a typically rhetorical, if somewhat misogynistic, discussion of the artistic nature of women. Women are actresses even in the act of love, he claims. One discovers "that they pretend even when they—give themselves" ("dass sie 'sich geben,' selbst noch, wenn sie—sich geben"). Nietzsche finds a way to actualize both the figurative and literal meanings of "sich geben" at once and to make that actualization the basis for an earnest discussion of a problem he considers to be philosophically important. The very same procedure is at work in no. 383, the last aphorism of the volume, in which he plays on the two senses of the word Grillen ("moping" and "crickets"): "Who will sing a song for us, a morning song, so sunny, so light, so fledged that it will not chase away the blues [Grillen] but invite them instead to join in the singing and dancing?" The blues are also a form of singing, as Kaufmann's translation cleverly reminds us.

This pun on Grillen appears in the context of a discussion of "the virtues of the right reader ['des rechten Lesens']—what forgotten and unknown virtues they are!" Right reading turns out to be exactly what our discussion of Nietzsche's rhetorical practice would lead us to think it is: a playful but radical rereading of the familiar. Nietzsche puts it as directly as could be at the end of number 382.:

Another ideal runs ahead of us …: the ideal of a spirit who plays naively—that is, not deliberately but from overflowing power and abundance—with all that was hitherto called holy, good, untouchable, divine …; the ideal of a human, superhuman well-being and benevolence that will often appear inhuman—for example, when it confronts all earthly seriousness so far, all solemnity in gesture, word, tone, eye, morality, and task so far, as if it were their most incarnate and involuntary parody—and in spite of all this, it is perhaps only with him that great seriousness really begins, that the real question mark is posed for the first time.

The fundamental Nietzschean project that he came to call the "transvaluation" or "revaluation of all values" ("Umwertung aller Werte") has as its other name "das rechte Lesen," right reading, and it is less a doctrine than a practice. While orthodox thinkers—or even some unorthodox ones such as Harold Bloom—might want to label this practice misreading, Nietzsche is explicit in calling it right, correct, proper. It is a right and proper practice particularly because it refuses to exclude the naively playful as a necessary part of seriousness. The playful and the serious, the sad and the joyful, the blues and the crickets, all belong together. The kind of philosophy Nietzsche seeks is one which "die Grillen nicht verscheucht," that is, does not banish the blues, nor the crickets, nor caprices and whims (another figurative meaning of Grillen). These Grillen, one imagines, are most likely to be found among the roses mentioned in "Scherz, List, und Rache," those plants so full of tricks and teases, songs and caprices—the roses that stand as a figure for the aphorisms of The Gay Science.

Nietzsche's practice in The Gay Science has been very much in accord with the advice given in number 383 by the "spirits of my own book," as he calls them. He frequently calls upon the "Grillen" of the verbal imagination to stimulate his philosophical invention. He is not embarrassed to resort openly to some of the least revered forms of rhetorical whimsy, such as paronomasia. The pun on "Pfund'/Fund' "in "Der Griindliche" is a taste of things to come, as for example in number 310, which explicitly takes off from the phonological similarity of "Wille und Welle" ("will and wave"). Though not in verse, this aphorism is really in many ways more of a poem than any of the rhymes of "Scherz, List, und Rache." (One might recall also no. 22, "L'ordre du jour pour le roi," which is also essentially poetic in its mode of presentation.) It has a poetic quality because it presents and elaborates an image asking for interpretation rather than proposing a set of observations or opinions. But the image it presents—this elaborate personification of breakers on a beach—is given as a reading of the equation suggested by the paronomasia, the similarity of will and wave, and thus defines sharply the parameters of permissible interpretation. Everything that is said about the waves is to be understood as somehow applicable to the will: "Thus live waves—thus live we who will—more I shall not say."

Exactly this same paronomastic fancy shows itself elsewhere, as in number 371 ("We incomprehensible ones"), which depends on the interplay of verwechseln, wechseln, and wachsen: those who are incomprehensible are "misidentified" (verwechselt) precisely because "we ourselves keep growing [wachsen], keep changing [wechseln], we shed our old bark, we shed our skins every spring." The phonological relationship between the German words for "misidentify," and "change," and "grow" is not exploited here because of any supposedly genuine connection between language and something we might want to call reality; it is on the contrary an explicitly rhetorical device, a trick, a caprice. It is a way of acknowledging that Nietzsche's "truth" is no more exempt from contamination by metaphor than anyone else's. Furthermore, it announces that Nietzsche's method of philosophical discovery is a form of rhetorical inventio that is quite content to plunder the storehouse of available signifiers for all the ideas it will yield up.

The authorial persona reads the mother tongue as if he were a Cratylist and believed in some deep and essential connection between signifier and signified; as if, that is, the phonological similarity between Wille and Welle or wachsen and wechseln reflected a similarity existing at some "deeper" level. But the Cratylism of such passages must be understood as nothing more than a heuristic device, since we know from numerous declarations on the subject ("On Truth and Lie" among them) that Nietzsche was as skeptical as could be about language as a repository of truth. The truth that Nietzsche proposes to have found here is one of his own manufacture, reached by attending scrupulously to the surface of the linguistic sign. He embraces the relationships among signifiers, not because he believes they reflect the relationships obtaining among things-in-themselves, but because that is all he has to work with. Nietzsche is filled with what he calls the "consciousness of appearance":

Appearance is for me that which lives and is effective and goes so far in its self-mocking that it makes me feel that this is appearance and willo'-the-wisp and a dance of spirits and nothing more—that among all these dreamers, I, too, who "know," am dancing my dance; that the knower is a means for prolonging the earthly dance and thus belongs to the masters of ceremony of existence; and that the sublime consistence and interrelatedness of all knowledge perhaps is and will be the highest means to preserve the universality of dreaming and the mutual comprehension of all dreamers and thus also the continuation of the dream.

Fancies like the elaborate discourse on Wille/Welle can only be understood as belonging to the dance of a "knower" engaged in preserving the universality of dreaming. It is one of Nietzsche's ways to be, like the Greeks, "superficial—out of profundity" ("oberflachlich—aus Tiefe").

Nietzsche's inclination toward superficiality, his interest in exploiting the resources of language understood as surface, is matched by an equally strong urge toward depth. Being one of the "masters of ceremony of existence" requires something other than the kind of thoughtless assurance that goes with superficiality as we normally understand it. To be superficial out of profundity means to engage with the great sea of signifiers and to read it actively. You cannot be superficial in Nietzsche's sense by letting others read for you, by quietly accepting conventional interpretations as self-evidently correct. To let convention stand as truth—that is the surest way to be superficial out of superficiality. The great virtue of the artist/philosopher Nietzsche values so highly is that he is always active, always making his own readings, even rereading in a different way that which he had read before.

"Right reading" is thus an art whereby a particular human will engages the great, endlessly figurative body of language and makes his own sense of it. "The will to power interprets," and as Stanley Cormgold observes, the Nietzschean self is nowhere more clearly in evidence than in its efforts at reading, including especially its attempts to read the self. The interaction between language, a system of tropes received essentially fully formed and belonging to the community, and the will, the individual human self that is for Nietzsche not only a "generative concept" but the generative concept par excellence. Everything of intellectual value arises out of this interaction, including that most fundamental of philosophical goods, knowledge. We see Nietzsche working on precisely this problem—in a typically rhetorical way—in aphorism number 355 of TheGayScience, where he seeks to explain "the origin of our concept of 'knowledge' ":

I take this explanation from the street. I heard one of the common people say, "he knew me right away." Then I asked myself: What is it that the common people take for knowledge? What do they want when they want "knowledge"? Nothing more than this: Something strange is reduced to something familiar. And we philosophers—have we really meant more than this when we have spoken of knowledge?

How much this passage depends on the process of reading the German language is in part revealed by the text's lack of any point in the English translation. Kaufmann was forced to employ a series of footnotes to alert the reader to the play on various expressions formed out of the verb kennen, but to a reader with no German the crux of the matter would still remain mysterious. That crux is of course that what is known (Erkenntnis) is, for a Germanspeaker, only a variation on what is familiar ("das Bekannte"). In English, the relationship between knowledge and familiarity is entirely semantic, but in German it is phonological and morphological as well, suggesting a stronger and deeper affiliation. The verb erkennen, from which is formed the term German philosophers use for "knowledge" (Erkenntnis), has in its everyday usage the sense of "recognize." The sentence Kaufmann translates as "he knew me right away" can also be rendered as "he recognized me," with the attendant connotation of perceived familiarity (recognize is re-cognize, that is, know again). Nietzsche analyzes the sentence "er hat mich erkannt" as meaning the equivalent of something like "er hat das Bekannte an mir gesehen," an analysis that is perfectly reasonable for such a sentence spoken on the street. From there Nietzsche reasons that the people of the "Volk" understand knowledge to be the rediscovery of something already known rather than the discovery of "new" facts or relationships.

In his commentary on this passage, Kaufmann suggests that Nietzsche may have been thinking primarily of Hegel in suggesting that philosophers have often considered knowledge in this same way. It is just as likely, though, that he was thinking of Plato and the very ancient tradition that all knowledge is in fact nothing more than a recognition or remembering (as in the famous geometry lesson in the Meno). The truth (Greek aletheia) is that which is "un-forgotten." Nietzsche goes on to level a critique at such philosophers for thinking that the discovery of the familiar is the acquisition of knowledge ("was bekannt ist, ist erkannt"). The critique goes in a peculiarly Neitzschean direction, however, because Nietzsche is not entirely sure that "knowledge," in the sense of a fundamental grasping of something, really exists. The error of philosophers might not lie so much in taking up the common people's notion of knowledge-as-familiarity as in reformulating it in the high-sounding terms of epistemology.

Nietzsche understands "knowing" (erkennen) in a rather different way: for him it means "to see as a problem" ("als Problem zu sehen"), an approach that is hardest to take with something that is familiar. Erkennen would thus be most difficult in the case of "das Bekannte," the familiar. Nietzsche implies, though he does not explicitly say, that the philosopher's task must in part be to take what is familiar and to see it as a problem. How does one do that? How does one "defamiliarize" the familiar? I borrow the language of Russian Formalism here, not to imply any kinship between that movement and Nietzsche's work, but to suggest the fundamentally literary and rhetorical dimensions of the issue. The process of making the familiar problematic is precisely the process we have seen again and again in Nietzsche's practice of rhetorical rereading. What could be more familiar to us than the language of daily life, expressions like "er hat mich erkannt" or "Siebensachen" or "das A und das 0"? It takes a special sort of imagination to see these commonplaces as problematic, an imagination that Nietzsche understands as belonging to both the poet and the philosopher. The mainstream of the Western intellectual tradition has tended to view this verbal mode of imagination as exclusively literary, however, and to regard as unorthodox those philosophers like Heidegger (particularly of the post-Kehre years), Derrida, and Nietzsche himself who embrace it openly. But philosophy, like literature, may not be in a position to free itself from the verbal imagination without suffering a crippling impoverishment. Nietzsche indicates exactly what form that impoverishment can take: the limitation of philosophical knowledge to a set of transformations of the unfamiliar into the familiar. Such a limitation, were it successful, would leave entirely to literature the most difficult and perhaps the most important intellectual task, that of seeing the familiar as a problem.

Clayton Koelb, "Reading as a Philosophical Strategy: Nietzsche's 'The Gay Science'" in Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Contra, edited by Clayton Koelb, The State University of New York Press, 1990, pp. 143-60.