Abstract

Nietzsche's importance for the development of twentieth‐century hermeneutics can be traced through Martin Heidegger, Hans‐Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur's nomination of Nietzsche, alongside Marx and Freud, as a “master of suspicion”, precisely posed in the context of Nietzsche's unmasking of the text and its truths. For Nietzsche himself, hermeneutics frames his formation as a classical philologist, an archetypically hermeneutic discipline Nietzsche shared with Gadamer. Declaring that “nature's conformity to law” is no fact, Nietzsche challenges nothing less than the very dogmatic possibility of scientific progress. Nietzsche's importance for the explicitly philosophical traditions of hermeneutics is well attested at the beginning of the twentieth century, and it turns out to include explicitly phenomenological elements. Studies of Nietzsche and metaphor and rhetoric, and Nietzsche's discussion of the same art, have the Diltheyan point of connection: Nietzsche's philosophical hermeneutics of history precisely conceived, as the philologist Nietzsche always conceived history, as a science.