Skip to Content

What Your Microcommentary Should Look Like

Make sure to say what passage you're commenting on, and check that your own name is on your submitted assignment:

GM.1.5: Nietzsche is claiming that the basic value words "good" and "bad" (and their translations in various languages) start out as self-descriptions by a politically dominant class. More recent examples of the phenomenon that Nietzsche is describing include "urbane" (i.e., urban, used by city dwellers) and "redneck" (a derogatory epithet used by city dwellers to describe the rural poor). What I don't understand is what's supposed to follow from this. Many very abstract notions start out as very concrete, very tangible metaphors. For instance, the future tense construction "going to" is originally a metaphor whose literal meaning has to do with change of place. But the current, flattened out metaphorical use of "is going to" retains almost nothing of the original literal meaning -- not even formal or structural properties. Why should we think we can learn anything about, say, time by considering the linguistic origins of "going to"? And likewise, why think we can learn anything about the basic values by looking at where words like "good" and "bad" came from?

Notice, first, that in a good microcommentary you try to explain, in your own words, what's going on in the passage. Don't simply repeat, with some rearranging, the author's own phrasing. If you don't understand what's going on, you have to explain why not, in a way that makes clear where your (good faith) effort broke down. Notice also that making sense of the passage (or even failing to make sense of it) requires reading it in context.

Happy microcommenting!