Nietzsche's Lack of System

Whereas Hegel's readers are immediately confronted with the systematic character of his works, Nietzsche's readers encounter a corpus that is decidedly unsystematic. And as is the case with Hegel, the character of the whole of Nietzsche's corpus is not without consequences for those who would attempt to extract from it an account of any particular topic.

On the one hand, Nietzsche's lack of systematicity makes it difficult to locate the appropriate texts and passages that treat the topic in which one is interested. Although Nietzsche clearly has much to say about art, for example, unlike Hegel he does not provide us with a set of lectures on aesthetics. Locating Nietzsche's remarks on a particular topic therefore requires trolling through his many texts, and reading much material that seems irrelevant to one's concerns. On the other hand, the lack of systematic ordering makes it tempting to think that once Nietzsche's remarks on a topic have been located they can be neatly extracted from his larger body of work. Since that body does not form a system, so the tempting thought goes, it must instead be a collection of insights, loosely connected if at all, that suffer no loss of meaning when removed from the context in which they happen to have been placed.