Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Nietzsche: A Terrible Writer?

During the last discussion, there were some people who believed Nietzsche to be a terrible writer, simply due to the fact that his arguments were less than completely clear and concise or, in other words, idiot-proof. However, I believe this notion regarding Nietzsche's writing prowess to be less than valid. Nietzsche writes like this, in my opinion, because he doesn't care whether or not most people understand him. He believes most of the world to be stupid, and it is unimportant that that demographic the one composed of the mentally indisposed to the normal barbarian understands his paper at all. His relatively complicated and convoluted way of explaining his argument is his way of subtly insulting those who do not and cannot understand him, and at the same time this is his tool to weed out those from whom he would not derive appropriate reactions from, anyways. Those who understand his way of writing, or the "intelligent" people, are the individuals closest to the "truth", or what we regard to be the truth. When these people begin to question "truth", a concept they all believe themselves to be well-versed in, due to their own supposed intelligence, it's quite a spectacle to an amused Nietzsche.

My two cents. I might as well kick off this discussion.

1 comment:

  1. Hmm. Sure, but that's still my definition of bad writing. A writer can understand his own writing easily enough, because the concept he is trying to explain is already stuck in his own head. I think that it's rediculous to try to "weed out" stupid readers by writing in a overly complicated fashion. If a reader truly could not understand the (simplistic) concepts Nietzsche put forth, then upon reading a well written description of those concepts, the reader wouldn't get it. A smart ass peasant, though, might completely understand a "well" written version, but not know what the hell is going on in Nietzsche's version. If you're correct, then Nietzsche was a silly billy for equating conceptual intelligence with vocabulary/reading comprehension.

    That being said, perhaps the way Nietzsche wrote was normal for that era.

    Cheers yo.

    - H

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