One has to speak with thunder and heavenly fireworks to feeble and dormant senses, says Zarathustra.
If we interpret this injunction in a generous manner, it can be understood to mean that Nietzsche is interested in constructing a poetic post-metaphysical language that will enable the individual to break free from received conceptual schema and the moral-linguistic conventions of grammar and thereby find new ways of thinking and feeling.
But, I have to say, it does sound a wee bit fascistic and shouty. Or, in a word, Wagnerian. The sort of thing that Dietrich Eckart might have had in mind when he created the Nazi battle slogan Deutschland Erwache!
It also anticipates Heidegger, who claims in Being and Time that we must rediscover some form of primordial language from which to assemble a vocabulary of elementary terms that authentically speak Dasein. Philosophy's ultimate task, he says, is to preserve the force of these words and prevent them from being enfeebled and flattened within the common understanding.
I have to confess, there was a time when I found this kind of thing seductive if never entirely convincing: I wanted to believe that there was a universal (though secret) litany of magical words, letters, and phonemes that might somehow tear up the foundations of the soul and shatter eardrums and law tables alike, but I was never quite able to do so.
And what prevented me from embracing this mytho-religious idea of language was the following passage from Lawrence's Sketches of Etruscan Places:
"And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion, the nightingale will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor teaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup."
- Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, ed. Simonetta de Filippis, (CUP, 1992), p. 36.
