Nietzsche’s philosophy of communication

Abstract

While Nietzsche is well known for his writings on a variety of topics, he is not typically cited in the literature on communication, whether by those conducting research from the perspective of communication theory or by those who are more interested in the philosophy of communication. The reason for this lacuna in the scholarship might easily be that his scattered and infrequent writings do not constitute a substantial basis for any kind of critical engagement. This article will show that by bringing together these writings into a coherent and unified account, Nietzsche’s philosophy of communication provides a number of interesting and controversial insights. This will entail a reconstruction of his views on both linguistic and non-linguistic communication so as to demonstrate the continuity of his thinking on communication throughout his corpus. I will show that Nietzsche is fundamentally committed to the thesis of communication (non-verbal and verbal) as the medium for self-expression and that, given his emphasis on the expressive dimension of communication, mutual understanding can only succeed within a form of life or shared context.