Idea that instead of contrasting Nietzsche with other philosophers, especially those he speaks of most often, he is to be best contrasted with the literary figures of around his time –Joyce, Kafka, Proust, I’m thinking of (perhaps a generation after)– in being “autobiographical.”
But where Joyce, Kafka, Proust, etc. are (you could say) “autobiography plus the novel” (their lives and manners and situations are the subject, the novel is their means or form or excuse) (that is a debatable proposition yet it’s at least clear that their novels resemble their own biographies more than they do some other person’s biography and it may well be asked why should that be?), Nietzsche is –and perhaps just as explicitly as they are– “autobiography plus the philosophical treatise.”
Idea that he was giving us first and foremost a personal philosophy, a return to something more like Montaigne; a philosophy about his person; that it is his christianity he addressed; his Kant (“Kant qua Nietzsche”), his Christ, Stendhal, and so forth; — the idea that Nietzsche never actually addresses a thing outside his own thought or a person who is not himself.
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