10 - Nietzsche, Language, Community

Summary

This chapter focuses on Nietzsche's stance toward community by examining his treatment of 'the common'. The individual's complex interaction with the common and community takes place especially in his or her relation to language. Nietzsche thinks of language chiefly in terms of words, with grammar as the rules for saying and combining them. Nietzsche has an idea about the chief origin and function of language: it is for sharing. Nietzsche thinks of two kinds of factors, two quasi-agents that are really responsible for what a person says, and that settle what the person means. Nietzsche opens up a gap between what the drives try to say and what they actually do say. Nietzsche believes in the heritability of acquired traits: when habits are ingrained deeply enough, they are incorporated and become instinctual, and as such can be passed along "in the blood".