Introduction

Summary

Whether or not we accept these absolute comparisons – and they are probably best taken as one more index of their author’s provocative “danc[ing] with the pen,” which is to say, as part of his choreographed self-presentation – there is no denying that Nietzsche was and remains a phenomenon in the history of the German language and its literature. And yet, as bold as his claims in this letter to Rohde may be, they are perhaps too modest. Looking around the globe and across the centuries, one would be hard-pressed to find a philosopher who could match Nietzsche in sheer virtuosity and in world standing, apart from Plato, as Nietzsche was keenly aware, and from an early age at that.¹ But whereas Plato set philosophy on a collision course with literature, naming their famous and insurmountable “quarrel” or “difference” (diaphora) in the Republic, Nietzsche went in the opposite direction and brought these two categories as close together as he could, often to the point of erasing their distinctiveness altogether.