Excursus

Joan Acocella’s review of the Iron Whim, a history of the typewriter that I discussed in an earlier post, has apparently prompted a minor dispute in Nietzsche scholarship.

Nigel Warbuton of the Open University reports Accocela’s claim that Nietzsche used a typewriter. Indeed he owned the Hansen writing ball:

The writing ball was developed by the Danish pastor Hans Rasmus Johan Malling Hansen who taught the hearing impaired. Arthur Krystal, in Harper’s Magazine (December 2002), describes Hansen’s inspiration thus:

Impressed by the speed with which his students signed, Hansen figured that they could also write faster if all their fingers were engaged; and inside of two years he produced a strangely elegant, convex-shaped writing machine that worked from top to bottom.

An interesting feature of the Hansen writing ball is that the typist could not see what was being typed. Nietzsche, his eyesight failing, was given one by his sister. The first working typewriter made by Pelligrino Turri was designed as a prosthetic writing device for his blind friend Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzono. Apparently Nietzsche’s sister recognized that the Hansen writing ball had a similar application.

Brian Leiter, however, is skeptical whether Nietzsche actually used it:

I’m pretty sure it’s inaccurate—I know of no type-written Nietzsche manuscripts

While none of the major manuscripts are typed, Nietzschean typescripts do exist (click on the thumbnail for a larger view):

Nietzsche was initially thrilled by his new “schreibkugel”:

THE WRITING BALL IS A THING LIKE ME: MADE OF / IRON / YET EASILY TWISTED ON JOURNEYS

but he eventually abandoned it. (Note the use of markup for italics, a convention that resurfaced with plain text email. Not only is Nietzsche potentially the first philosopher to use a typewriter, he is also potentially the first philosopher to use markup.) According to some reports, he broke the Hansen writing ball, according to others, he grew to dislike it. Whatever is the case, in a letter to Paul Gast, he does make an interesting claim about the effects of the technology of writing:

Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts.

I am inclined to believe him. Here are two pieces of evidence, one from the history of philosophy, and the other from personal experience.

One interesting regularity in the history of philosophy is that metaphors for the mind tend to be based on the then current writing technology. Thus Plato describes the soul as a wax tablet upon which the Forms are inscribed, and Locke expresses his nativism by describing the mind as a blank slate. With the advent of computers, functionalists described the mind as the software of the brain.

As for my own experience, I have now undergone three paradigm shifts in writing technology: typing, word-processing, and text-editing with structural markup. And each left its effects on my prose.

How are your writing tools working on your thoughts?