Rorty on Nietzsche: v. Dorky.

"[Nietzsche] saw self-knowledge as self-creation. The process of coming to know oneself, confronting one's contingency, tracking one's causes home, is identical with the process of inventing a new language--that is, of thinking up some n metaphors. For any literal description of one's individuality, which is to say any use of an inherited language-game for this purpose, will necessarily fail. One will not have traced that idiosyncrasy home but will merely have managed to see it as not idiosyncratic after all, as a specimen reiterating a type, a copy or replica of soemthing which has already been identified. To fail as a poet--and thus, for Nietzsche, to fail as a human being--is to accept somebody else's description of oneself, to execute a previously prepared program, to write, at most, elegant variations on previously written poems. So the only way to trace home the causes of one's being as one is would be to tell a story about one's causes in a new language."

from Richard Rorty's Contingency, irony, and solidarity.


Express Yourself: Lou Salomè lets Nietzsche have it.