Nietzsche in nuce

A note on the philologist’s 'Crux, nux, lux'

Abstract

In Zur Genealogie der Moral, Nietzsche says that the ascetic ideal serves at once as “Crux, nux, lux” (“Cross, nut, light”). Scholars have been divided on the nux here, with a surprising number neglecting the obvious translation, and either glossing it as “kernel” or “core” (of an ascetic’s existence?), or deciding that Nietzsche must have intended to write nox (“night”) or a transliterated Greek νύξ (“night”) instead; but a few accept “nut” and seem to imply that it is the proverbial “tough nut to crack,” a riddle or problem. The purposes of this paper are: to establish more securely than before that Nietzsche’s nux must be the metaphorical “nut” as riddle; and then to explore further evidence for Nietzsche’s motivations in writing “Crux, nux, lux.” While the triad smacks of mediaeval mysticism and is thus appropriate in its context, it seems to belong most immediately to more recent patterns of such wordplay, and Nietzsche’s letters and notebooks reveal that the rhyming words were originally conceived as a sort of motto for his own life and work. This exercise in Nietzsche-philology is presented as a study, in nuce, of what Nietzsche was often willing to do with his philological training: something obscure, riddling, and idiosyncratic.