0.4—
Questions of Method
It has become obligatory, in works on Nietzsche, to make explicit and to justify one's methodological decisions regarding which of his texts one has chosen to take into account. There are two such decisions, one concerning periodization (how one divides up Nietzsche's corpus and which texts one takes to represent the "mature" Nietzsche), the other concerning use of the Nachlaß (whether or not to make use of those texts and notes that Nietzsche left unpublished). With regard to periodization, I generally restrict myself to the later texts, by which I mean the texts from The Gay Science onward.[11] I do so for several reasons,
[10] Most influential has been Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature .
[11] The Gay Science is often considered a "middle period" work, though, for the reasons given below, I think it can be considered the entry way into the "later" Nietzsche, a
most important of which is that in The Gay Science Nietzsche first proclaims the "death of God" and begins a concerted inquiry into issues of truth, knowledge, and being that results in the doctrines of perspectivism, becoming, and will to power. This is not to say that Nietzsche is unconcerned with these issues in earlier works, nor that his position on these matters is markedly different in those earlier works. In the earlier texts—particularly in "Homer's Contest," "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense," Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Human, All Too Human, and Daybreak —one can find a host of claims, arguments, and analyses dealing with epistemological and ontological topics that resonate richly with those found in the later texts. Because of this, I occasionally quote or refer to these earlier texts in relation to issues raised in the later texts. But there is also another reason I choose to concentrate on the later texts. While I think there are significant problems with the standard tripartite periodization of Nietzsche's corpus—a schema first proposed by Hans Vaihinger and prevalent ever since—and with the more elaborate periodization of Nietzsche's epistemological and ontological writings more recently proposed by Maudemarie Clark, my view on this issue is heterodox, and substantiation of it would require a separate study.[12] Therefore, I opt for a fairly uncontroversial restriction to the texts beginning with The Gay Science, which provide sufficient material for the development and elaboration of my reading. Only in chapter 4 do I undertake an extended reading of an early text, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks . I think the reasons for this are made clear and that I have given sufficient indication of how fully this text accords with the view of Heraclitus, becoming, and metaphysics Nietzsche articulates in his later work.
Among these later works, I refer to, but rarely quote or discuss at length, Nietzsche's long prose-poem, Thus Spoke Zarathustra . This text has much to offer on the issues that concern me. Yet the profusion of voices, styles, and narrative situations one finds in that text makes it especially difficult to quote and explicate in the sort of expository essay I offer here. I also believe that the philosophical themes explored in
[12] See Hans Vaihinger, Nietzsche als Philosoph (Berlin: Reuther und Reichard, 1902), 44ff., and Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), chap. 4.
Zarathustra are presented elsewhere in a style more amenable to my expository aims.
An explanation is also in order concerning my use of the Nachlaß, and especially The Will to Power . It can no longer be supposed that the set of notes compiled by Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, under the title The Will to Power represents what Heidegger called "the preliminary drafts and fragmentary elaborations" of "Nietzsche's chief philosophical work," "his planned magnum opus ."[13] This view has been effectively discredited by the publication, under the editorship of Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, of the new critical edition of Nietzsche's works and correspondence. On the basis of this edition, several scholars have shown that neither the selection nor the arrangement of notes that appear as The Will to Power is Nietzsche's own and that, before composing his final books, Nietzsche had, in fact, abandoned the project of writing a book to be called The Will to Power .[14]
For decades, Nietzsche scholarship has been divided over whether or not the Nachlaß constitutes a legitimate source from which to draw in developing an interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy.[15] And the recent discoveries concerning the construction of The Will to Power have sharpened the debate, leading some scholars to consider suspect any interpretation that makes substantial use of this collection.[16] Yet some of
[13] Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 1, The Will to Power as Art, trans. David F. Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1979), 3, 7. In all fairness, however, it should be recalled that Heidegger himself expressed some reservations about the status of "Nietzsche's so-called major work." See Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 3, The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, trans. Joan Stambaugh et al. (San Francisco: Harper, 1987), §2.
[14] See Mazzino Montinari, "Nietzsche's Nachlaß 1885–1888 und der 'Wille zur Macht,'" KSA 14:383–400; Bernd Magnus, "Nietzsche's Philosophy in 1888: The Will to Power and the Übermensch," Journal of the History of Philosophy 24 (1986): 85–93; and Wayne Klein, Nietzsche and the Promise of Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 181–99. Earlier worries about the status of The Will to Power were expressed by Karl Schlechta, who, in his 1954–56 edition of Nietzsche's works, scrambled The Will to Power into a series of notes arranged neither thematically nor chronologically. In his presentation of Nietzsche to an Anglophone audience, Walter Kaufmann also issued warnings about the inauthenticity of The Will to Power . See his Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ, 4th ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 6–9, and "Editor's Introduction" to Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1967).
[15] On this issue, see Magnus, "Nietzsche's Philosophy in 1888," 82–83, where Magnus divides Nietzsche scholars into two groups, "lumpers," "who regard the use of Nietzsche's Nachlaß as unproblematic," and "splitters," who "distinguish sharply between the published and unpublished writings."
[16] See, e.g., Magnus, "Nietzsche's Philosophy in 1888," and Klein, Nietzsche and the Promise of Philosophy, 181–99.
the most influential and respected accounts of Nietzsche's philosophy have been offered by those who draw freely from the Nachlaß and, especially, The Will to Power: for example, Jaspers, Heidegger, Kaufmann, Deleuze, Danto, Müller-Lauter, Schacht, and Nehamas. These interpreters have provided a variety of justifications for continuing to make use of this material.[17] On my view, the most persuasive of these was offered recently by Richard Schacht, whose hermeneutical principles I most fully share.[18] Schacht grants the general interpretive rule that priority should be given to what an author published or intended for publication. Yet, he argues, Nietzsche's case is unusual and presents special considerations that warrant consultation of his unpublished material. Nietzsche's collapse was abrupt and untimely, coming upon him at a moment in his career when he had begun to publish with increasing frequency. The notebooks were always the workshop for Nietzsche's published writings; and the Nachlaß no doubt contains the seeds of what would have been Nietzsche's future projects. Moreover, Nietzsche's published works do not differ significantly in form from the material left in the notebooks. Like the notebooks, the published works contain relatively brief discussions and remarks that rarely, if ever, exhaust or provide Nietzsche's definitive view on any given issue. Instead, as in his notebooks, Nietzsche's published work continually revisits earlier themes, issues, and problems, adding new insights and perspectives
[17] Despite his reservations, Walter Kaufmann decided to publish an English translation of The Will to Power, arguing that it allows us "to look, as it were, into the workshop of a great thinker" and that it presents some of Nietzsche's most sustained treatments of, among other things, epistemological issues ("Editor's Introduction" to The Will to Power, xvi, xiv–xv, and Nietzsche, 204–5). Though generally a "splitter" (see n. 15, above), R. J. Hollingdale, co-translator of The Will to Power, concurs with Kaufmann on this point in his Nietzsche (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 131. In similar fashion, Richard Schacht (Nietzsche, xii) justifies his heavy reliance on The Will to Power by stating that the "unpublished writings [ . . . ] contain much more of [Nietzsche's] expressed thinking on certain important matters than do his finished works" and that The Will to Power is "sufficiently representative" of this unpublished material. Karl Jaspers (Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity, trans. Charles F. Walraff and Frederick J. Schmitz [South Bend, Ind.: Regnery Gateway, 1979], xii) contends that Nietzsche's posthumous notes are legitimate sources, because "none of Nietzsche's forms of communication has a privileged character" and because "Nietzsche himself is intelligible only when we gather everything together." According to Alexander Nehamas (Nietzsche: Life as Literature [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985], 9), The Will to Power "has become, for better or worse, an integral part of Nietzsche's literary and philosophical work, and it has been instrumental in forming our reactions to him over the past eighty years."
[18] Richard Schacht, "Beyond Scholasticism: On Dealing with Nietzsche and His Nachlaß, " in Making Sense of Nietzsche (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 117–25.
in piecemeal fashion. The large mass of material left in the notebooks provides a wealth of such insights and perspectives on which we can draw in constructing our interpretations of Nietzsche. And, while we can never be sure just how much or what parts of this material Nietzsche fully endorsed or intended for publication, responsible use of the notebooks as a supplement to Nietzsche's published work gives us a much broader and deeper view of his philosophical thinking than a purist restriction to the published texts alone could provide.
The same considerations support use of the material in The Will to Power . It is certainly true that, unlike The Gay Science or Beyond Good and Evil, The Will to Power cannot be read as a book, let alone as Nietzsche's Hauptwerk . But it is nevertheless a collection of notes that Nietzsche himself wrote and, moreover, the only such collection available in English translation. It is true that the editors of The Will to Power occasionally cut and splice Nietzsche's notes, instead of leaving them whole. But this occurs less frequently or egregiously than is claimed by critics of The Will to Power .[19] It is true that The Will to Power severs Nietzsche's notes from their original contexts and that a reconsideration of them in these contexts can be revealing. But we must remember that Nietzsche's notebooks are just that, books of notes rather than continuous works; that is, they are fragmentary and, hence, their original context is of somewhat less importance than it is in his fully composed books. Furthermore, just as in the treatment of Nietzsche's published works (which, after all, are composed of semiautonomous sections or aphorisms), it is often equally or even more revealing to consider these notes in other contexts, to consider them, for example, in relation to other notes or published passages that take up similar themes and issues. Because I aim to construct a general interpretation of Nietzsche's epistemological and ontological position rather than to present a reading of one or another of his books, this has been my interpretive practice: to read Nietzsche across his oeuvre[*] , "looking cautiously fore and aft" (D P:5).
For these reasons, I consider it not only legitimate but wise to draw on the Nachlaß and The Will to Power as supplements to Nietzsche's published work. Where I quote the published texts, I often refer the reader to notes in The Will to Power or the Nachlaß that correspond to or develop the issues under discussion in the quoted passage. And,
[19] See, e.g., Klein, Nietzsche and the Promise of Philosophy, 187–98.
where I quote The Will to Power or the Nachlaß, I try to note passages in the published work that, I think, corroborate or significantly connect with the views presented in the notebook entry. For readers who wish to consult Nietzsche's original, or who want to consider the original context for any of these notes, I have provided, as an appendix, a concordance between The Will to Power notes to which I refer and corresponding entries in Kritische Studienausgabe .