In the last section of the final main chapter of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes about the journey of a thought. When it is young, a thought is “many-coloured” and “malicious”; these new thoughts surprise him and make him laugh. But a thought immediately begins to grow old, lose its novelty, and harden into a truth.

Writing down a thought he compares to painting a still life: you capture it only once the flowers have begun to wither. A truth is a thought that has faded and lost that youth and energy it had when it was merely a thought. Thoughts are like people: they expect to be taken more seriously as they get older.

Nietzsche writes poignantly about how fresh a thought seems when it first appears to him, and how stale it looks once he’s found the words to express it. He writes it down, the book is published, readers read his words and perhaps nod their heads in agreement… But Nietzsche is not looking for people to agree with him. He wants us to feel excitement as we read; he wants his words to elicit the same thoughts in our minds as were in his, for the thought to strike us as it did him when he was out for a walk; what we do with those thoughts is up to us, and whether we agree with them or not is only of secondary importance, if any at all. He doesn’t want followers; he wants readers.

Nietzsche scholarship can be exhausting because scholars are usually trying to pin down precisely what Nietzsche believed, while Nietzsche himself seems to have had the soul of a poet; he enjoyed the play of thoughts rather than their truth-value. A thought is a phenomenon and he wants to share the excitement he first felt when he experienced it, just as a poet wants to share the feeling associated with a passing shadow on the grass or a breeze through the leaves of a tree. What makes Nietzsche a philosopher, in at least the loose sense of being someone interested in the question of thinking, is that he hopes that these thoughts, once you have experienced them, will lead you on to new thoughts of your own.

(I’ve been reading R.J. Hollingdale’s translation of Beyond Good and Evil.)