In recent years, there has been a quiet proliferation of essays, books, and manuals urging readers to approach texts, particularly non-fiction, with greater care, attention, and scepticism. From rapid-reading techniques to manifestos in praise of slowness, the question of how we ought to read has become a preoccupation in an age of universal distraction. It is only fitting then that any reflection on reading today should begin with the act itself. Long before this contemporary revival, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) had already made the act of reading central to his thought.

It is often claimed, not altogether without reason, that philosophers have tended to overlook Nietzsche’s philological work, while classical scholars for their part have seldom seen him as one of their own. In the decades following his death, those aspects of his output most closely aligned with classical scholarship remained neglected. When, for example, Walter Kaufmann sought to rehabilitate Nietzsche’s reputation in the Anglophone world in the 1950s, disentangling his thought from the shadow of National Socialism, his early scholarly writings received scant attention.

In recent decades, however, Nietzsche the philologist has been steadily reclaimed, due in large measure to the editorial labours of two Italian scholars, Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, who produced authoritative editions of his corpus, including his correspondence and posthumous fragments. Today, the classicist Nietzsche stands on firmer footing beside his more widely philosophical alter ego.

Nietzsche’s initiation into classical scholarship began at Schulpforta, a humanistic boarding school near Naumburg in Saxony, founded in the 16th century as a monastic academy. The school produced a notable lineage of alumni, including the poets Novalis, Fichte, and the Schlegel brothers. Nietzsche would be followed there by Wilamowitz, his future critic. From Schulpforta, Nietzsche proceeded to the University of Bonn, where he studied under Otto Jahn and Friedrich Ritschl. The latter, a rigorous exponent of the philological tradition of Richard Bentley, profoundly influenced Nietzsche’s approach to linguistic analysis (Wortphilologie) and textual criticism (Textkritik). When Ritschl transferred to Leipzig, Nietzsche followed, spending four formative years there between 1865 and 1869.

Within this tradition, Nietzsche began his career as a conventional philologist: systematic, meticulous, and firmly grounded in the scholarly methods of his mentors. In 1869, widely regarded as a prodigy and armed with a glowing reference from Ritschl, he was appointed to the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel, without having completed a doctoral dissertation.

The transformation had, however, already begun before Nietzsche formally assumed his chair. These were years of swift scientific and philosophical upheaval, marked by the publication of Darwin’s theory of evolution and Friedrich Albert Lange’s History of Materialism (1866). Around the same time, Nietzsche encountered Wagner and discovered Schopenhauer. Together, these influences reshaped his intellectual horizon and began to draw him away from the philological orthodoxy in which he had been formed. By 1875, he had laid philology aside entirely.

Little wonder then that the same man who declared in Twilight of the Idols his distrust of systems never sought to formalise his thinking on philology. Yet a close reading of his letters, fragments, and scattered reflections reveals a lifelong preoccupation with the art of reading.

‘To be a philologist’, Nietzsche writes in Daybreak, ‘is to be a teacher of slow reading. In the end I also learned to write slowly. It is only from this that I have developed my style.’ In this view, philology comes to signify attentive, deliberate reading. It affords the reader a measure of distance from the text, a space for effort, reflection, and return. At times, it requires silence, like that cultivated by medieval monks, to foster slowness of spirit. Nietzsche continues with a vivid analogy: ‘This art of writing, like the art of reading, is an art of goldsmiths, an art that requires much precision and patience, and an eye for detail.’

From this arises a second axiom: proper reading stands in quiet defiance of the prevailing spirit of modern work and culture, which prizes speed, efficiency, and superficial grasp. The essence of philology lies not merely in resisting the times, but in seeking to shape them, to insist upon the value of reflection and precision for the sake of an age yet to come. It was this ambition that Wilamowitz described as Nietzsche’s ‘philology of the future’: the belief that, above all, to read properly is to read slowly.

Yet, slowness alone does not suffice. Nietzsche also insisted on the quality of engagement. To read well, one must be active rather than passive: reading is not consumption but confrontation. He draws a sharp contract between those who savour and wrestle with a text, and those he derides as ‘reading idlers’: plunderers who strip works for slogans, then abandon the rest in confusion. In Human, All Too Human, he likens such readers to looting soldiers. By contract, the disciplined reader is likened to a kind of spiritual goldsmith, patiently refining insight through the crucible of difficulty.

In this respect, Nietzsche was writing for the few. He made clear, again and again, that his books were not intended for every reader, but for the ‘perfect reader’: one who combined curiosity, courage, and patience.  ‘A monster of courage and curiosity,’ he calls such a person in Ecce Homo. This is not a democratic ideal of reading, but a rather aristocratic one, a summons to those willing not merely to agree with Nietzsche, but to wrestle with him, and perhaps to be changed in the process.

In Human, All Too Human Nietzsche returns to the theme of reading as a craft, die Kunst zu lesen, and traces its emergence as a slow, arduous achievement. ‘The production and preservation of texts, along with their interpretation’, he writes, ‘remained for centuries the work of a guild, and only gradually led to the discovery of proper methods. The entire Middle Ages was incapable of establishing a sound philological approach, that is, a basic desire to understand what the author meant.’ The judgement is characteristically polemical. Still, it would be remiss to overlook the fact that medieval learning, for all its apparent limitations, preserved and transmitted many of the very texts that later nourished the Renaissance and early modern science.

Nietzsche returned repeatedly to the act, and the art, of reading throughout his life. In The Antichrist, he describes the ideal reader as one who ‘discerns actual facts without distorting them through the lens of interpretation, without sacrificing critical thinking, patience, or finesse, in the attempt to comprehend and understand’. This forms Nietzsche’s third axiom: philology, echoing the Greek ephexis (restraint) and skepsis (inquiry), stands in opposition to the impulse to interpret hastily. It resists the temptation to impose meaning prematurely, whether in the reading of books, the consumption of news, or the judgment of contemporary events.

In this, Nietzsche anticipates a problem that would later preoccupy modern linguistics: the slipperiness of meaning. Like Ferdinand de Saussure, he recognised that words do not carry fixed value, but exist relationally, within systems of difference. Reading demands therefore an acute sensitivity not only to what is said, but to how and why it is said.

Reading, according to Nietzsche’s writings, is not inherently or unconditionally ennobling. Some books, he believed, could poison as readily as they could strengthen. ‘There are books which have an immense value for the soul and health.’ The reader must bring discernment as well as patience. Books are no universal remedy; many are actively corrosive. They sap originality, flatter mediocrity, or drown the self in slogans. The true Nietzschean reader approaches books not to flee from, though, but to grow through them and at times to think more dangerously.

In his view, careful and deliberate reading served as an antidote to modernity and the restless spirit of the industrial age. To read well demands a range of intellectual virtues: sustained focus, openness of mind, critical acuity, sensitivity, and reflective judgement. Above all, one must learn to read before rushing to analyse or interpret. This emphasis reflects Nietzsche’s broader philosophical commitment to Perspectivism, the principle that animates his entire corpus. In our world, increasingly governed by algorithmic speed and the impulse to judge, Nietzsche’s call for slow reading is not merely a scholarly habit but a philosophical act of resistance.

The final lesson in Nietzsche’s view of reading is stark: true reading should wound us. The best books are not those that soothe or confirm, but those that demand something of us. ‘Of all that is written’, he said, ‘I love only what someone has written in his blood.’ Such writing is not to be skimmed, but endured, survived even. In Nietzsche’s eyes, the true reader is an adventurer: one willing to be marked by meaning and perhaps transformed by it.

Nietzsche did not write for the distracted, the hurried, or the comfortable. He believed that a book should demand effort, provoke resistance, and leave a mark. To read in this spirit is not to escape the world but to prepare oneself to meet it more alert, more exacting, and perhaps, more honest.