From Cloud to Chorus: Nietzsche and Saussure on Pre-Linguistic Indeterminacy

Rauschberg’s portrait of Nietzsche and Saussure. AI art “In itself, thought is like a swirling cloud, where no shape is intrinsically determinate.” — Saussure ( Course in General Linguistics , 1916/1983, p. 110) “As Dionysian artist he is one with the Primordial Unity, its pain and contradiction.” — Nietzsche ( The Birth of Tragedy , 1872/1967, §5) Introduction Two philologists writing at the turn of the twentieth century reach an uncanny consonance. Ferdinand de Saussure pictures the mind before language as a vaporous continuum; Friedrich Nietzsche dramatizes artistic genesis as an ecstatic immersion in a pre-formal abyss. Although they never met, each suggests that shape, articulation, and meaning arrive only after an underlying murk is carved into segments. This essay compares their accounts, arguing that both theorists cast language as a secondary imposition on formlessness. Yet they diverge in the frameworks that guide this view: Nietzsche pursues a metaphys...