Nietzsche on Language

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright Introduction In times of dissolution, when the structures that sustain life crumble, the question of how to act resurfaces with force. Julius Evola, in Ride the Tiger , proposes a figure drawn from Eastern tradition: to ride the tiger—neither to dominate it nor to flee from it, but to remain steady on its back. This image, rich in philosophical connotations, contains a paradoxical ethic: to pass through collapse without being carried away by it. This article proposes to read that figure as a starting point for exploring two modes of resistance to collapse: Evola’s, anchored in a traditional and cyclical vision of time, and Nietzsche’s, which confronts modernity through a tragic affirmation of meaninglessness. By examining their diagnoses, images, and conceptions of time, we will see how both thinkers conceive an ethics without guarantees—one that can sustain itself in the open air of desolation. In what follows, we will first examine the symbol of...

  Introduction Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay   The Hedgehog and the Fox   (1953) proposes a simple yet fertile metaphor for classifying intellectual temperaments. Drawing on a fragment by the Greek poet Archilochus — “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” — Berlin distinguishes between those who, like foxes, pursue many separate ends, and those who, like hedgehogs, interpret everything through a single unifying vision. This distinction, while not absolute or evaluative, sheds light on how certain thinkers transform their fields: by reinterpreting the world through one powerful, generative principle. Among such figures stand two philologists who never met but whose intellectual revolutions still shape modern thought — Friedrich Nietzsche and Ferdinand de Saussure. Each, in his own way, exemplifies the hedgehog’s temperament: Nietzsche through his radical revaluation of all values, and Saussure through his discovery that language is a system of dif...

dunamis  and   energeia. AI image Introduction “Man is something that shall be overcome,”   declares Zarathustra ( Prologue , §3). In another passage Nietzsche writes:   “Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Übermensch—a rope over an abyss.”   ( The Will to Power , §868). These two lines, brief yet immense, contain the essence of Nietzsche’s anthropology: humanity is not an accomplished being but a transition. Man is not an endpoint, but a bridge, a perilous crossing suspended between what he was and what he could become. To explore what this means, it is helpful to borrow the vocabulary of Aristotle’s   Metaphysics : potentiality ( dunamis ) and actuality ( energeia ). In these terms, man appears as a potentiality—a being capable of transformation—whose realization may proceed in radically different directions. Nietzsche offers two possible outcomes: the   last man , who renounces the struggle of becoming, and the   Übermensch , who...