Is it possible that Nietzsche’s harsh language of over-the-top sexism, power, domination, deception, valuation and revaluation was an exaggeratedly ugly mask for something precious and vulnerable, and perhaps profoundly traditional?

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By “traditional” I mean: perpetually misunderstood, forgotten and buried and perpetually rediscovered, unforgotten and resuscitated… again and again.

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If you speak about a tradition in traditional language people will find you very easy to understand, though what is understood is likely to bear no essential resemblance to what is meant. This is not a pitfall of religion, but rather one of religion’s great blessings: People in disagreement so profound that they are blind to their separation can nonetheless commune under common symbols. (This is how religions die; but it is also how they live.)

On rare occasions, though, being understood becomes necessary. Then, in order to avoid the subtle derailments of false familiarity, it is expedient to invent new, unfamiliar languages as an aid to re-cover the meanings that have been released from the prejudice of well-known, whited formulas. This approach, however, confronts people with the undeniable fact that they really do not understand, and do not even understand how to understand, and this triggers intense anxiety, which arouses hope in some but hostility in others. (It’s the hostility of alien poetry.)

Once meaning is recovered, the old forms become recognizably true again – if not provably in their own original sense, at least in an original sense.