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