Nietzsche as Stylist: Aesthetics and Philosophy

Although he had a short career, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was a prolific writer, publishing seventeen books in the span of seventeen years. Convinced that “style must live,” he focused obsessively on a wide variety of factors that could potentially affect readers’ uptake of his work, from the craft of preface writing to punctuation choices to the aesthetics of book jackets. Nietzsche as Stylist traces the emergence of the philosopher’s idiosyncratic writing style as he experimented with various rhetorical approaches. Introducing a contextual and historical sensibility to readings of Nietzsche’s published and unpublished works – as well as his correspondence, his journal entries, and other documents he interacted with, such as reviews of his work – the book highlights how Nietzsche’s style evolved in relation to his life and world. Martine Béland situates his writings within contemporaneous debates about the professionalization of academia: by resisting what he felt was an anti-philosophical climate, Nietzsche developed a synesthetic and performative style, hoping that his philosophical ideas could engage diverse readers in multiple ways. Through careful stylistic and contextual analysis, Nietzsche as Stylist explores how Nietzsche cultivated skills as a rhetorician and a writer to bring philosophy into a wider field of attention, thought, and experience.