Art and Ordinary Language

Abstract Nietzsche’s thoughts about language are Janus-faced. Things go very well when he’s celebrating the art of reading and writing, but very badly when he focusses on language itself. This essay asks how he could have been simultaneously so good and so bad on what is, after all, the same topic. The answer is that, despite remarks that have been mistaken for premonitions of Wittgenstein, Nietzsche is strongly committed to the possibility of a private language (i.e. to the claim that words can stand for inner objects) and that it is this, ultimately, that blinds him to the very art that, in other places, he celebrates so eloquently.