Kaufmann warned his readers that “Nietzsche’s books are easier to read but harder to understand than those of almost any other thinker.” But he insisted that Nietz-sche was more than a great stylist. In fact, Nietzsche admonished writers who let style trump substance. He criticized what he called “literary decadence,” where meaning resides in flashes of insight but not in the text as a whole. If the dots do not connect, then all we have got—as Nietzsche put it—is an “anarchy of atoms.”48 Indeed, critics had long charged that Nietzsche wrote in aphorisms because he could not think straight.
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