A Language of One’s Own: Nietzsche’s Self-Critique and the Saussurean Logic of Philosophical Semantics

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Introduction: Regretting the Borrowed Concepts

In 1886, more than a decade after the publication of The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche returned to his early work with a sharply self-aware preface titled An Attempt at Self-Criticism. In §6 of this retrospective, he reflects:

“I now regret the fact that at the time I did not yet have the courage (or the presumptuousness?) to allow myself in every respect a personal language (eine eigne Sprache) for such an individual point of view and such daring exploits — that I sought laboriously to express strange and new evaluations with formulas from Schopenhauer and Kant, something which basically went quite against the spirit of Kant and Schopenhauer, as well as against their tastes!”¹

This is not a mere admission of youthful hesitance or rhetorical failure. Nietzsche articulates a deeper insight: that inherited conceptual languages are not neutral instruments but structured systems with internal constraints. By attempting to voice novel ideas using the philosophical terminology of Kant and Schopenhauer, he unwittingly betrayed both their frameworks and his own emerging thought. His regret points to a semiotic principle with wide-ranging implications: philosophical meaning is system-bound, much like linguistic meaning.

Nietzsche’s Semantic Alienation

Nietzsche’s frustration lies not only in having borrowed terms from thinkers with whom he disagreed, but in realizing that these terms could not carry the weight of his new intuitions. What he laments is a kind of semantic alienation: the experience of being conceptually exiled within one's own project. Kant’s Ding an sich and Schopenhauer’s will were not philosophically inert; they were saturated with commitments, values, and metaphysical assumptions alien to Nietzsche’s developing worldview.

This is not simply a lexical mismatch. The failure he describes concerns the structural inability of a conceptual framework to accommodate insights formed outside its native logic. Nietzsche's regret is thus the recognition that speaking the language of a philosophical ancestor inevitably drags in that system's underlying architecture — its rules, its exclusions, its implicit metaphysics.

Saussure and the System-Dependence of Meaning

To better understand the significance of Nietzsche’s complaint, we can turn to a thinker he never read: Ferdinand de Saussure. In his Course in General Linguistics, Saussure argued that meaning in language does not arise from a direct connection between word and object. Instead, linguistic signs acquire value through difference: what a word is not. Each term has meaning only within the totality of a system — what Saussure calls la langue, the structured network of relations that makes speech intelligible.²

For instance, the word “tree” does not signify because of some natural tie to the object it names, but because it differs from “bush,” “flower,” and “plant.” Its identity is relational, not absolute.

The analogy to philosophy is compelling. Each philosophical school operates as a structured semantic universe, where concepts gain meaning from their interdependence. Terms like “substance,” “appearance,” “freedom,” or “will” are never neutral tools; they are historically and systematically embedded. As in language, their intelligibility depends on the internal oppositions and values of the system to which they belong.

Philosophical Language as Structural Invention

Nietzsche’s insight anticipates this structuralist logic. In recognizing that borrowed terminology stifled rather than served his thought, he points to the necessity of building one's own philosophical vocabulary — a conceptual idiom whose internal relations reflect and enable the ideas it seeks to express.

Nietzsche’s later works exemplify this. Terms like will to power, eternal recurrence, perspectivism, and the revaluation of all values are not isolated slogans. They form an interconnected web — a new philosophical grammar — in which each notion redefines and is redefined by the others. In this sense, Nietzsche did not merely invent new answers to old questions; he created a new space of questioning altogether.

This is akin to what Saussure had to do when devising the terms signifiant (signifier) and signifié (signified). These neologisms were necessary because older philological vocabularies could not articulate his theory of language as a relational system. Nietzsche’s later concepts perform a similar function: they carve out a conceptual terrain in which previously inexpressible intuitions can take shape.

Semantic Systems and the Problem of Translation

Understanding philosophy as a system of interrelated terms rather than a loose aggregate of ideas changes how we read, interpret, and critique it. Many philosophical misunderstandings arise from the naive transfer of terms across incompatible conceptual frameworks — an anachronistic transplantation that flattens meaning. This is not unlike translating idioms between languages with different cultural and structural assumptions. Just as “kicking the bucket” cannot be translated literally into most languages without loss, terms like “will,” “freedom,” or “truth” do not travel cleanly across philosophical borders.

Nietzsche’s early failure, in his own eyes, was to have spoken too soon in a tongue not yet his own. The deeper error was epistemological: believing one could express novel values using the semiotic scaffolding of alien systems. His later work corrects this by constructing a new langue, one whose internal logic mirrors the values he sought to affirm.

Conclusion: The Ethics of Philosophical Expression

Nietzsche’s self-critique underscores a broader methodological point: to understand a philosopher is not merely to decode their terms, but to inhabit their conceptual world. Philosophical revolutions are not simply shifts in opinion, but reorganizations of semantic space. Each new system demands not just new answers, but a reconfiguration of what counts as a question, a distinction, or a value.

This realization has profound implications. It challenges the notion that philosophical concepts are universally applicable across contexts. Instead, it calls for a kind of hermeneutic attentiveness to the internal grammar of each thinker’s system. To think philosophically, in this view, is not merely to argue — it is to craft, to dwell within, and to remain faithful to the unique semiotic structures that make thought possible.

Notes

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, “An Attempt at Self-Criticism,” §6.
2. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris (London: Duckworth, 1983).