The Journal of Nietzsche Studies

Nietzsche’s critique of the will to truth, and, more specifically, the metaphysical tradition, is inextricable from both his philosophy of language and his turn to physiology. Though the way in which Nietzsche conceived of the intertwinement of language, reason, and the body developed through the course of his philosophical maturation, it is nonetheless a recurrent motif spanning the breadth of his oeuvre. As the editors state in their introduction to Nietzsche on Instinct and Language (NIL), the volume aims at being a “fresh look” at Nietzsche’s repeated attempts to bridge these domains (xv). Beyond this singular and broad explicit aim, however, the volume intimates a number of other more specific aspirations. Indeed, first, this fresh look seems principally concerned with comprehensively mapping this very interrelation across its various formulations.

Another of Nietzsche’s critiques that is of key interest to NIL is his confrontation with the modern habit of preaching the authority and higher worth of reason over and against the compulsions of the body. As is well known, Nietzsche took it on himself to subvert the diremption and hierarchicization of these “antipodes”; hence, another topographical aspect of NIL is its charting of the precise way reason and the body are more properly understood as continuous with one another. Language becomes of prime importance to the volume since, being both a function of the body and the medium of dialectical thought, it represents the connective tissue weaving together mind and body beyond clear distinction.

In addition to these themes, the editors’ introduction implies another, corollary objective of the volume––namely, to interrogate the self-reflexive issues raised by Nietzsche’s linguistics. Certainly, if Nietzsche accepts language as instinctual and therefore as incapable of expressing a purely rational or transcendent form of truth, then one must ask how this affects the truth value of his own texts. Or, more to the point, how is Nietzsche’s own use of language alive to, and, indeed, how does it embrace, [End Page 115] the linguistic limitations of which it speaks? This is described in terms of his struggle to forge a new, critical-philosophical language. Though this is a recurrent theme throughout the eleven articles comprising the volume (which is divided into four sections), it is most prominent in the latter half of the book, and one therefore finds the first two sections laying foundations toward this end. The essays that constitute the first section, entitled “Nietzschean Beginnings and Developments,” therefore focus on Nietzsche’s early thoughts concerning language. Andrea Bertino, for example, pens a series of comparative “notes” on Nietzsche and Herder; subsequently, section 2, “Dissolving an Opposition,” tries to explicate the way in which Nietzsche contests the traditional opposition between language and instinct. Chiara Piazzesi’s paper from this cluster performs a close reading of GS 14 in order to demonstrate how Nietzsche breaks down the opposition between love and greed and thereby illustrates the more general point that such bipolar oppositions originate as linguistic phenomena that are then projected onto the objective world; it is then in the third section, “Instinct, Language and Philosophy,” that, in their respective essays, Werner Stegmaier and Scarlett Marton examine in greater depth the broader philosophical consequences of this dissolution of opposites. Finally, the fourth section, “The Critique of Morality and the Affirmation of Life,” groups together four articles that survey the connection between Nietzsche’s critique of language and, as its title suggests, the life-affirming aspects of his philosophy. Of most interest in this section is Marta Faustino’s paper on the elusive meaning of health in Nietzsche’s work.

NIL thus examines a series of fertile and pressing questions regarding Nietzsche’s thoughts on language and the body. Although it is not possible here to provide an overview and analysis of how each of the volume’s eleven papers approaches these questions, by examining a small...