Chapter One—
Being and Its Others:
Nietzsche's Genealogy of European Thought
We know the way, we have found the exit
out of the labyrinth of thousands of years.
Nietzsche, The Antichrist §1
1.1—
Interpreting Nietzsche
In a late text, having declared himself to be the first German master of the aphorism, Nietzsche writes, "it is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book—what everyone else does not say in a book" (TI "Skirmishes" 51). A year earlier he remarked in the preface to On the Genealogy of Morals that "an aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been 'deciphered' when it has simply been read; rather, one has then to begin its interpretation [Auslegung], for which is required an art of interpretation" (GM P: 8). He goes on to say that the third essay of the Genealogy —some seventy pages in the standard German edition—is simply commentary upon an aphorism drawn from his monumental prose-poem, Thus Spoke Zarathustra . Nietzsche thus gives his interpreters an essential role: that of unpacking his terse, rhetorically dense remarks and elaborating them into an explicit philosophical view.
This is certainly the case with Nietzsche's most famous aphorism: "God is dead" (GS 125, 343). These words will be familiar to anyone even casually acquainted with Nietzsche. Yet the meaning of this phrase is by no means transparent. It can be, and has been, taken in any number of ways. On my reading, this audacious claim condenses an entire genealogy of European thought that has profound consequences for epistemology and ontology. To see this, however, we need to take Nietz-
sche's advice and read him "slowly, deeply, looking cautiously fore and aft" (D P:5). That is, we must trace this notion through the host of passages in which it appears, allowing each passage to elucidate the others and attempting to draw out what they merely suggest.
1.2—
The "Death of God" as the Turning Point of European Thought
The notion of "the death of God" first appears in 1882, in Book Three of The Gay Science . In the following few years, it finds its way into several passages of Thus Spoke Zarathustra . But it is not until 1887, with the composition of Book Five of The Gay Science, On the Genealogy of Morals, and the Nachlaß[1] from this period, that Nietzsche makes clear the full significance of the madman's cry: "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him" (GS 125).
In Gay Science §343, which opens Book Five, we discover that Nietzsche's announcement of the "death of God" is not at all a personal confession of atheism or loss of faith; nor is it so for the various characters who make this proclamation (the madman, Zarathustra, the last pope, the ugliest man, etc.).[2] Rather, it becomes evident that, for Nietzsche, the "death of God" is a cultural and historical event ("a generally Eu-
[1] See, for example, The Will to Power, Book I, titled "European Nihilism," which collects a group of notes written primarily from late 1886-early 1888. Nietzsche refers to this set of notes in GM III: 27, where, discussing the "death of God" as "Europe's longest and bravest self-overcoming," he announces a future project that "shall probe these things more thoroughly and severely [ . . . ] (under the title 'On the History of European Nihilism' [ . . . ] contained in a work in progress: The Will To Power: Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values )." Though this project was later abandoned, it was still very much alive as the Genealogy and Book Five of the Gay Science were being composed; and the conception of "European nihilism" that Nietzsche presents in the notes from this period clearly informs these published texts. On the history of Nietzsche's Will to Power project, 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.
[2] This has been stressed by a number of Nietzsche's commentators. See, e.g., 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), 242; Martin Heidegger, "The Word of Nietzsche: 'God is Dead,'" in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 57ff.; George A. Morgan, What Nietzsche Means (New York: Harper and Row, 1941), 37ff.; Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ, 4th ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 99ff.; and Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 144–46.
ropean event," he calls it in §357). Thus the passage begins, "The greatest recent event—that 'God is dead,' that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable—is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe."
Furthermore, it becomes clear that this event concerns far more than theology and religion; that it is an intellectual event, a crucial moment in the history of European thinking in general. Thus, reiterating the madman's conclusion, Nietzsche goes on to write:
The event is far too great, too distant, too remote from the multitude's capacity for comprehension even for the tidings of it to be thought of as having arrived as yet. Much less may one suppose that many people know as yet what this event really means—and how much must collapse now that this faith has been undermined because it was built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown into it; for example, the whole of our European morality. This long plenitude and sequence of breakdown, destruction, ruin, and cataclysm that is now impending—who could guess enough of it today to be compelled to play the teacher and advance proclaimer of this monstrous logic of terror, the prophet of a gloom and an eclipse of the sun whose like has probably never yet occurred on earth?
Here, we get an inkling of what Nietzsche will later make clear: that the "death of God" involves nothing less than a dismantling of the basic structures of belief and value upon which European thought has been founded. Moreover, we soon learn that this event is not brought about from the outside, by some external cataclysm; nor is it some chance occurrence. Rather, the "monstrous logic of terror" set in motion by the "death of God" is brought about from the inside, through a critique necessitated by the very presuppositions of European thought. In short, for Nietzsche, the "death of God" marks the beginning of a self -over-coming of the foundational structures of European thought.[3]
These themes are more thoroughly elaborated in §357 of The Gay Science, where Nietzsche writes:
[T]he decline of the faith in the Christian god, the triumph of scientific atheism, is a generally European event in which all races had their share and for which all deserve credit and honor.[ . . . U]nconditional and honest atheism [ . . . is] a triumph achieved finally and with great difficulty by the European conscience, being the most fateful act of two thousand years of discipline
[3] Recall Nietzsche's description of nihilism: "what does nihilism mean?—that the highest values devaluate themselves " (WP 2). This notion of "self-overcoming" appears frequently in the texts of 1887–88. See, e.g., GS 357; GM II: 10, III: 27; EH "Destiny" 3; WP P, 3, 5, 404–5.
for truth that in the end forbids itself the lie in faith in God. . . . You see what has really triumphed over the Christian god: Christian morality itself, the concept of truthfulness that was understood ever more rigorously, the father confessor's refinement of the Christian conscience, translated and sublimated into a scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price. Looking at nature as if it were proof of the goodness and governance of a god; interpreting history in honor of some divine reason, as a continual testimony of a moral world order and ultimate moral purposes; interpreting one's own experiences as pious people have long enough interpreted theirs, as if everything were providential, a hint, designed and ordained for the sake of the salvation of the soul: that is all over now, that has man's conscience against it, that is considered indecent and dishonest by every more refined conscience—mendaciousness, feminism, weakness, and cowardice. In this severity, if anywhere, we are good Europeans and heirs of Europe's longest and most courageous self-overcoming [Selbstüberwindung ].
After quoting this passage in the penultimate section of the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche continues:
All great things bring about their own destruction through an act of self-overcoming [Selbstaufhebung ]: thus the law of life will have it, the law of the necessity of "self-overcoming" [Selbstüberwindung ] in the nature of life—the lawgiver himself eventually receives the call: "patere legem, quam ipse tulisti " [submit to the law you yourself proposed]. In this way Christianity as a dogma was destroyed by its own morality; in the same way Christianity as morality must now perish too: we stand on the threshold of this event. After Christian truthfulness has drawn one inference after another, it must end by drawing its most striking inference, its inference against itself; this will happen, however, when it poses the question, "what is the meaning of all will to truth? " . . . And here I again touch on my problem, on our problem [ . . . ]: what meaning would our whole being possess if it were not this, that in us the will to truth becomes conscious of itself as a problem? . . . As the will to truth thus gains self-consciousness, from now on—there is no doubt about it—morality will go to ruin [geht . . . zu Gründe ]: this is the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe—the most terrible, most questionable, and perhaps also the most hopeful of spectacles. . . . (GM III: 27)
Taken together, these passages present a genealogy that is of utmost importance for understanding Nietzsche's later thought. In these passages, he attempts to explain both the sequence of events leading to the "death of God" and its inevitable consequences. This account is highly condensed and elusive, to be sure. But, fortunately, these passages do not stand alone. They form part of a network of texts, written in 1887 and constantly cross-referenced by Nietzsche. Following the various strands of this network, we can piece together a genealogy that
links "God" and "morality" with "truth" and shows that a "refinement" of the "European conscience" eventually leads to the "self-overcoming" of metaphysics, theology, morality, and science and to a "revaluation" of "truth."
1.3—
From Metaphysics and Theology to Science
Like Hegel's "phenomenology of spirit," but with a very different motivation and trajectory, Nietzsche's genealogy is concerned with the quasihistorical movement of European thought.[4] Like his heirs, Heidegger and Derrida, Nietzsche considers all of Western thought—from Plato through positivism—as forming a single epoch, the closure of which is at hand. This epoch is characterized by the accordance of an absolute value to "truth" conceived as the determination of "being" apart from all "becoming" and "appearing" (or "seeming") (see, e.g., BGE P, 2, 34; GM III:24; TI "Reason" and "World").[5] Since the history of this epoch is a history of self-overcoming, this self-overcoming will have something to do with truth—more specifically, with a contradictory development of the concept of truth.
Since its inception, Nietzsche maintains, European thought has attempted rigorously to distinguish "what is" from "what merely seems or appears to be," "what is not yet," and "what is no longer."[6] Yet the earliest philosophers (e.g., the Eleatics) already noted that, within the physical world in which we have bodily existence and sensuous experience, we nowhere encounter this "truth as being." On the contrary, as physical, embodied creatures, we are continually confronted by a volatile sensory experience in which things incessantly appear and disappear. This experience repeatedly embroils us in deceptions, for what the eye sees the hand may not feel, and what the eye sees from one point of view it sees differently from another. Furthermore, every thing in this world, including our own bodies, exists only for a relative duration, in which it
[4] For further comparison of Hegel's "phenomenology" and Nietzsche's "genealogy," see §5.3.3, below.
[5] Note that der Schein (semblance) and die Erscheinung (appearance) derive from a common root and, while not identical, are often used interchangeably by Nietzsche in contrast with "truth," "being," and "essence."
[6] For a Nietzschean account of the traditional subordination of becoming and seeming to being, and the modern inversion of this hierarchy, see Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 59–69, and The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 253–66.
undergoes constant local movement and qualitative change. And within this world, each thing owes its existence to other things and to a sequence of events that stretches into an infinite past. In short, the world of which we are a part seems to be, in its entirety, a domain of temporal, spatial, contingent, and conditional particulars. If truth is being, it is not to be found within this domain. Convinced of the existence of truth and knowledge, the founders of the Western tradition thus resolved that truth resides in another, meta physical world, an eternal world of necessary, unconditioned, universal, and absolute being: for the Platonist, the world of the Forms; for the Christian, the kingdom of God.[7]
Yet Nietzsche remarks that the Platonic-Christian notion of truth subtly changes with the institutionalization of religion. With "the father confessor's refinement of the Christian conscience" (GS 357), truth comes to be formulated as the commandment not to lie, to tell the truth no matter how terrible and regardless of consequence. As such, truth is partially dislodged from its otherworldly residence. No longer strictly defined by the belief in and search for a "true world of being," the will to truth becomes the demand to tell the truth, to say, unconditionally, what is the case and what has occurred. With this development is born a key figure in Nietzsche's genealogy: what he variously calls "the European conscience," the "intellectual conscience" [Gewissen ], "intellectual integrity" [Rechtschaffenheit ], or "honesty" [Redlichkeit ].[8] For Nietzsche, this "intellectual conscience" involves a "training in truthfulness" (GM III:27), the "discipline for truth," "the concept of truthfulness [ . . . ] understood ever more rigorously" as the demand for "intellectual cleanliness at any price" (GS 357; cf. GM III: 24ff.). Further refined, the "father confessor's" demand for truth gives rise to a profound skepticism: the requirement that beliefs, convictions, and ideals
[7] Note that Nietzsche considers Platonism and Christianity to be, in their basic orientation, the same, deeming Christianity "Platonism for 'the people'" (BGE P).
[8] On "intellectual conscience," see AOM 26; GS 2, 99, 335; BGE 205, 230; GM III:24; TI "Skirmishes" 18; A P, 12. On "intellectual integrity," see A 36, 50, 53, 59; WP 460. On "honesty," see D 84, III, 370, 456, 482; GS 107, 110, 114, 319, 335; BGE 5, 227; Z: 4 "Retired"; GM III:26; A P, 12, 52; EH "Books" CW:3. One might add to this list Nietzsche's notion of "justice" [Gerechtigkeit ], discussed more fully in chapter 3. The importance for Nietzsche of these philological virtues has been discussed by Jaspers, Nietzsche, 201–11; Kaufmann, Nietzsche, 354–61 and passim; Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, 138, 145; Jean-Luc Nancy, "'Our Probity!' On Truth in the Moral Sense in Nietzsche," in Looking after Nietzsche, ed. Laurence A. Rickels (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990); Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 99ff.; and Alan D. Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction (New York: Routledge, 1990), 165–67, 188–90. In what follows, I treat these notions as more or less interchangeable.
be tested rigorously to determine whether or not they are justified and certain.[9]
In fact, this development of the "intellectual conscience" leads to a questioning of the "true world" of Christianity and Platonism. It provokes the suspicion that the existence of God, of otherworldly being, and of innate ideas cannot adequately be demonstrated. It points out, in contrast, that so much else is perfectly clear and demonstrable, particularly the regularities of nature confirmed by repeated experimental observation. And with this, "the Christian conscience" is "translated and sublimated into the scientific conscience" (GS 357). No longer concerned with the unjustifiable claims of metaphysics and theology, science turns its attention to the natural world, which it aims to master through scrupulous empirical inquiry.
1.4—
Science as Theology by Other Means
One might suppose that, with the triumph of science, Platonism and Christianity are finally overcome, that, within the scientific worldview, "God is dead" or at least forgotten. This certainly is what contemporary scientific culture believes, says Nietzsche. When the madman appears among the atheists in the marketplace crying "God is dead. [ . . . ] And we have killed him," they ridicule and taunt him. He finally leaves, muttering: "I have come too early [ . . . ], my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering: it has not yet reached the ears of men. [ . . . ] This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves " (GS 125). A similar description is found in the Genealogy of Morals . It is said, Nietzsche writes, that modern culture has finally vanquished the otherworldly, this-world-denying "ascetic ideal,"
that it has already conquered this ideal in all important respects: all of modern science is supposed to bear witness to that—modern science which, as a genuine philosophy of reality, [ . . . ] has up to now survived well enough without God, the beyond, and the virtues of denial. [ . . . T]hese hard, severe, abstinent, heroic spirits who constitute the honor of our age; all these
[9] Cf. WP 4–5 (KSA 12: 5 [71]): "in sum: morality was the great antidote against practical and theoretical nihilism . But among the forces cultivated by morality was truthfulness; this eventually turned against morality [ . . . ] and now the insight into this inveterate mendaciousness that one despairs of shedding becomes a stimulant. To nihilism"; also WP 3 (KSA 12: 10 [192]): "Radical nihilism [ . . . ] is a consequence of highly developed 'truthfulness': thus itself a consequence of the faith in morality."
pale atheists, anti-Christians, immoralists, nihilists; these skeptics, ephectics [ . . . ]; these last idealists of knowledge in whom alone the intellectual conscience dwells and is incarnate today—they certainly believe they are as completely liberated from the ascetic ideal as possible [ . . . ] (GM III: 23–24)
Yet they are mistaken, argues Nietzsche. Science does not represent the triumph over God, the otherworldly, and the ascetic ideal. Though it potentially prepares the way for that triumph, science itself represents, rather, the "kernel " of the ascetic ideal, "this ideal itself in its strictest, most spiritual formulation, esoteric through and through with all external additions abolished" (GM III:27). Nietzsche elaborates:
No! this "modern science"—let us face this fact!—is the best ally the ascetic ideal has at present, and precisely because it is the most unconscious, involuntary, hidden, and subterranean ally! [ . . . ] The ascetic ideal has decidedly not been conquered: if anything, it became stronger, which is to say, more elusive, more spiritual, more captious, as science remorselessly detached and broke off wall upon wall, external additions that had coarsened its appearance. (GM III: 25)
This seems a rather odd claim. One might well ask how it is that modern science, which explicitly rejects metaphysics and theology, represents the inner essence of "the ascetic ideal." Nietzsche explains:
[T]o disclose to them what they themselves cannot see—for they are too close to themselves: this ideal is precisely their ideal, too [ . . . ]—if I have guessed any riddles, I wish that this proposition might show it—They are far from being free spirits: for they still have faith in truth [ . . . ]; it is precisely in their faith in truth that they are more rigid and unconditional than anyone. [ . . . ] That which constrains these men, however, this unconditional will to truth, is faith in the ascetic ideal itself, even if as an unconscious imperative—don't be deceived about that—it is the faith in the metaphysical value, the value of truth in itself [einen Werth an sich der Wahrheit], sanctioned and guaranteed by this ideal alone (it stands or falls with this ideal). (GM III: 24)
Modern science, that is, represents both the essence and consummation of the ascetic ideal insofar as it strips that ideal of all external coverings and reveals what is essential to it and, indeed, to the entirety of Western thought, which has been predicated upon this ideal.[10] Having rejected the Platonic Forms, the Christian God, and other representatives, modern science retains the one conviction with which Western thought com-
[10] See GM III:24.
mences: faith in the absolute and unconditional value of truth. While it may no longer believe that "God is the truth," science nonetheless still believes that "truth is divine" (GS 344), that truth must govern every inquiry and serve as its incontestable goal. Nietzsche thus makes the striking assertion that the "death of God" has only derivatively to do with theology and Christianity, that it primarily involves what Heidegger has called a "fundamental structuring" of thought, based upon the accordance of an ultimate value to truth.[11] In this sense, according to Nietzsche, even the scientists and "godless anti-metaphysicians" (GS 344) have yet fully to comprehend the meaning of the "death of God."
It might be objected that the "truth" sought after by science is quite different from the "truth" desired by Platonism and Christianity. For this latter pair, truth is something otherworldly, not to be found within the natural world; while, for science, truth is entirely this-worldly, aiming simply at the discovery of demonstrable, empirical "facts" about the natural world. Nietzsche acknowledges this difference and, indeed, often praises science for its this-worldliness.[12] Yet he points out that science still retains the essence of the ascetic ideal insofar as it accords truth an absolute, unconditional value . This conviction, Nietzsche insists, is nothing other than a "metaphysical" faith.
Again, one might ask how this is so. Science does indeed claim truth as its ultimate goal. But the truth it demands is not metaphysical; it is, rather, physical and empirical, available for all to see. To explain his strange accusation, Nietzsche cites another passage from Book Five of The Gay Science: §344, entitled "How We, Too, Are Still Pious." This passage begins by praising science for its "intellectual conscience," for its "mistrust" of "convictions" and its decision to demote them "to the modesty of hypotheses, of a provisional experimental point of view, of a regulative fiction." Yet he notes that, while the scientific method grants admission only to such provisional, revisable hypotheses, the entire enterprise of science rests upon a prior conviction that it is unwilling to relinquish:
We see that science also rests on a faith; there is simply no "presuppositionless" science. The question whether truth is needed must not only have been affirmed in advance, but affirmed to such a degree that the principle, the
[11] Heidegger, "Word of Nietzsche," 64–65.
[12] See, especially, A 47-49, where, against the otherworldly "lies" of Christianity, Nietzsche calls science "the 'wisdom of this world.'" See also GS 293, 355, 357, and TI "Reason" 3.
faith, the conviction finds expression: "Nothing is needed more than truth, and in relation to it everything else has only second-rate value." (GS 344)
Nietzsche does not object to this conviction on the grounds that it is a "presupposition," because he denies the possibility of a "'presuppositionless' science."[13] What he does object to, however, is the dogmatic nature of this conviction, a dogmatism that proves to be metaphysical. This becomes apparent, Nietzsche argues, if we inquire into the motivations and reasons behind the conviction that truth is of ultimate value. He asks what justifies this conviction and considers two possible answers. Perhaps the justification is pragmatic: "One does not want to allow oneself to be deceived because one assumes that it is harmful, dangerous, calamitous to be deceived. In this sense, science would be a long-range prudence, a caution, a utility." Yet he argues that this explanation fails to justify the ultimacy of the will to truth, because, on pragmatic considerations, we can see that it is not unconditionally harmful to allow oneself to be deceived. While the will to truth certainly does serve the interests of life in important ways (e.g., by helping us to determine more or less accurately the conditions that obtain in the world so that we can respond accordingly), it is one of Nietzsche's recurrent insights that the opposite will, the will to ignorance, is equally beneficial for life.[14] He continually points out that human survival is predicated upon conceptual and linguistic abstractions that allow us to reify the ever-changing world and to simplify and select from our multifaceted experience. In this way, he argues, we "lie" in "an extramoral sense"; that is, we strategically, and often unconsciously, overlook and forget features of the world that are not relevant or crucial to our survival or to our particular purposes, interests, values, and goals. Furthermore, Nietzsche points out that, in art and dreams, we continually allow ourselves to be deceived and take pleasure in this deception. If not beneficial, such "lies" cannot be considered harmful, except to the most obstinate Platonist.[15] Hence, the ultimacy of the will to truth is not to be justified on pragmatic grounds.
[13] See also GM III: 24 and II: 12. This notion is discussed more fully below.
[14] For some instances of this line of thought, see TL; HL (on the "value for life" of "forgetting" and "the unhistorical"); GS 110–12, 354; BGE 1, 4, 9, II, 24; TI "Reason," "World," "Errors"; WP 466–617. See also Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), chap. 2. I discuss these issues further below (§1.5.2).
[15] On the "deception" of dreams, see TL, 80. On the "deception" of art, see BT SC: 5 and GM III: 25.
If this will does not receive a naturalistic, conditional, pragmatic justification, from where does its justification come? If it is not justified by the role it plays in the actual process of inquiry and the actual exigencies of life, what justifies it? Nietzsche argues that it must rest on the moral prescription never to deceive, not even oneself. Science, then, would represent simply a "translation and sublimation" of the Christian commandment: "thou shalt not lie" (see GS 357). Were it to be strictly enforced, however, this unconditional proscription would be extremely harmful to natural life, which, in so many ways, requires the "extramoral lie." Nietzsche thus concludes that the absolute and unconditional value accorded the will to truth by science is antinatural, otherworldly, metaphysical:
For you only have to ask yourself carefully, "Why do you not want to deceive?" especially if it should seem—and it does seem!—as if life rested upon semblance, I mean error, deception, simulation, delusion, self-delusion, and when the great sweep of life has actually always shown itself to be on the side of the most unscrupulous polytropoi . Charitably interpreted, such a resolve might perhaps be a quixotism, a minor slightly mad enthusiasm; but it might also be something more serious, namely a principle that is hostile to life and destructive. . . . "Will to truth"—that might be a concealed will to death.—Thus the question "Why science?" leads back to the moral problem: Why have morality at all when life, nature, and history are "unmoral"? No doubt, those who are truthful in that audacious and ultimate sense that is presupposed by the faith in science thus affirm another world than the world of life, nature, and history; and insofar as they affirm this "other world"—look, must they not by the same token negate its counterpart, this world, our world? . . . But you will have gathered what I am driving at, namely, that it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests—that even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith [Glaube ] that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine. . . . But what if this should become more and more incredible [unglaubwürdig ], if nothing should prove to be divine any more unless it were error, blindness, the lie—if God himself should prove to be our most enduring lie?—(GS 344; cf. WP 1011)
Briefly put, Nietzsche argues that, while the "intellectual conscience" that animates modern science demands a rejection of every unconditional faith, science itself is "still unconditional on one point," regarding its belief in "the absolute value of truth" (GM III:24). This unconditional belief is not only unconscionably dogmatic but also unconscionably metaphysical, insofar as—against the requirements of "this world,
our world," "the world of life, nature, and history"—it receives its justification solely from the otherworldly domain of Christian morality. The "intellectual conscience" thus demands that this final conviction be put into question.
Yet this final conviction is not just one among many. Nietzsche takes it to be the conviction upon which all of Western thought is based. A questioning of this conviction, then, amounts to a questioning of Western thought itself. Nietzsche makes clear that this is just what the "death of God" entails and just what the "intellectual conscience" requires. Impelled by the "intellectual conscience," science demands its own self-overcoming. Insofar as science represents the kernel and esoteric form of the ascetic ideal, this self-overcoming of science is, at the same time, a self-overcoming of the ascetic ideal:
This pair, science and the ascetic ideal, both rest on the same foundation—I have already indicated it: on the same overestimation of truth (more exactly: on the same belief that truth is in estimable and cannot be criticized). Therefore they are necessarily allies, so that if they are to be fought they can only be fought and called in question together. A depreciation of the ascetic ideal unavoidably involves a depreciation of science: one must keep one's eyes and ears open to this fact! (GM III: 25)
And this self-overcoming of the ascetic ideal points to the self-overcoming of the foundations of European thought:
Consider on this question both the earliest and most recent philosophers: they are all oblivious of how much the will to truth itself first requires justification; here there is a lacuna in every philosophy—how did this come about? Because the ascetic ideal has hitherto dominated all philosophy, because truth was posited as being, as God, as the highest court of appeal—because truth was not permitted to be a problem at all. [ . . . ]—From the moment faith in the God of the ascetic ideal is denied, a new problem arises: that of the value of truth. The will to truth requires a critique—let us thus define our own task,—the value of truth must for once be experimentally called into question . (GM III:24; cf. BGE 1; A 8)
[W]hat meaning would our whole being possess if it were not this, that in us the will to truth becomes conscious of itself as a problem? . . . As the will to truth thus gains self-consciousness, from now on—there can be no doubt about it—morality [read: the ascetic ideal and the otherworldly, generally] will go to ruin: this is the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe—the most terrible, most questionable, and perhaps the most hopeful of all spectacles. . . . (GM III: 27)
With this, the trajectory of Western thought nears its end; or rather, it nears its midpoint, because, for Nietzsche, our modernity marks not the end of history but the inauguration of a new history, "a higher history than all history hitherto" (GS 125), not the "dusk" of infinite wisdom, but the innocence of "daybreak." Even so, that dawn is as yet merely announced. At present, we remain at "midnight," between the old day and the new. This dark night is characterized by "nihilism," the general malaise brought upon European culture by its recognition that "the highest values [i.e., truth, God, being] devaluate themselves" (WP 2). This nihilism, Nietzsche argues, still essentially belongs to the old day; it remains a "shadow of God" (GS 108). For, though the nihilist acknowledges that all absolute values have devaluated themselves, he or she still laments the loss, and what remains still appears valueless. The nihilist does not yet affirm the "death of God" and its consequences.
Nietzsche, however, urges us to push what is falling (see Z: 3 "On Old and New Tablets"; A 2). Wishing to become "the first perfect nihilist of Europe who, however, has [ . . . ] lived through the whole of nihilism, to the end, leaving it behind, outside himself" (WP P:3), Nietzsche encourages an "active nihilism" (WP 22–23) that will bring the old epoch to a close. This is the momentous task toward which Nietzsche directs his energies; and the achievement of this task will bring us to the final phase of his genealogy of Western thought.
Thus far, we have seen that metaphysics and theology overcome themselves through science, and that science, too, ends in a self-overcoming. What follows this self-overcoming of science? To answer this question, and to move from science to its successor, we must first take up the task announced above, the initial phase of the revaluation of values: the revaluation of truth.
1.5—
The Revaluation of Truth I:
Being, Becoming, and Appearing
Nietzsche's genealogy of Western thought culminates in a "critique" of the "will to truth," a demand that "the value of truth [ . . . ] for once be experimentally called into question " (GM III:24). What does this critique entail? And what, for Nietzsche, remains of truth?
Nietzsche clearly considers the issue of truth to be of central philosophical and cultural importance. From the early essays through the final
notes, he constantly returns to this topic, offering remarks that are as bold as they are elusive. These texts have recently attracted much attention, and the quantity of commentary on Nietzsche's discussions of truth has grown rapidly over the past few decades.[16] For the most part, these discussions have attempted to extract from Nietzsche's elusive comments a "theory of truth." Yet no consensus has been reached. Indeed, every major theory of truth (correspondence, pragmatic, coherence, semantic) has been attributed to Nietzsche by one commentator or another,[17]
[16] See, e.g., Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), passim; Jean Granier, "Perspectivism and Interpretation," in The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, ed. David B. Allison (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977); Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, Nietzsche: Seine Philosophie der Gegensätze und die Gegensätze seiner Philosophie (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1971), chap. 5; John T. Wilcox, Truth and Value in Nietzsche: A Study of His Metaethics and Epistemology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974), and "A Note on Correspondence and Pragmatism in Nietzsche," International Studies in Philosophy 12 (1980): 77–80, and "Nietzsche's Epistemology: Recent American Discussions," International Studies in Philosophy 15 (1983): 67–77, and "Nietzsche Scholarship and 'the Correspondence Theory of Truth': The Danto Case," Nietzsche-Studien 15 (1986): 337–57; Mary Warnock, "Nietzsche's Conception of Truth," in Nietzsche's Imagery and Thought: A Collection of Essays, ed. Malcolm Pasley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Daniel Breazeale, "Introduction," in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870's, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979); Bernd Magnus, "Nietzsche's Mitigated Skepticism," Nietzsche-Studien 9 (1980): 260–67; Lawrence M. Hinman, "Nietzsche, Metaphor, and Truth," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 43 (1982): 179–99; Schacht, Nietzsche, chap. 2: Nancy, "'Our Probity!' "; Willard Mittelman, "Perspectivism, Becoming, and Truth in Nietzsche," International Studies in Philosophy 16 (1984): 3–22; Kenneth R. Westphal, "Nietzsche's Sting and the Possibility of Good Philology," International Studies in Philosophy 16 (1984): 71–89; Alexander Nehamas, "Immanent and Transcendent Perspectivism in Nietzsche," Nietzsche-Studien 12 (1983): 473–94, and Nietzsche: Life as Literature, chap. 2, and "Will to Knowledge, Will to Ignorance and Will to Power in Beyond Good and Evil, " in Nietzsche as Affirmative Thinker, ed. Yirmiyahu Yovel (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986); Steven G. Crowell, "Nietzsche's View of Truth," International Studies in Philosophy 19 (1987): 3–18; Robert Nola, "Nietzsche's Theory of Truth and Belief," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 47 (1987): 525–62; Rüdiger Bittner, "Nietzsche's Begriff der Wahrheit," Nietzsche-Studien 16 (1987): 70–90; Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, chap. 6; Ken Gemes, "Nietzsche's Critique of Truth," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (1992): 47–65; Steven D. Hales and Robert C. Welshon, "Truth, Paradox, and Nietzschean Perspectivism," History of Philosophy Quarterly 11 (1994): 101–19.
[17] The correspondence theory of truth holds that a statement or belief is true if and only if it accurately represents "reality," "the world," "states of affairs," or "the facts." Versions of the correspondence theory of truth are explicitly attributed to Nietzsche by Westphal, "Nietzsche's Sting"; Nola, "Nietzsche's Theory of Truth and Belief"; and Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, chaps. 2, 4, and passim . A "metaphysical" version of the correspondence theory of truth is implicitly attributed to Nietzsche by many writerswho argue that Nietzsche conceives of the ultimate nature of reality as "becoming," "chaos," or "will to power," whether or not we can adequately think or communicate the character of the world as such. See, e.g., Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, 80, 96–97; Granier, "Perspectivism and Interpretation"; Wilcox, Truth and Value in Nietzsche, 132–33; Rüdiger Grimm, Nietzsche's Theory of Knowledge (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1977), 30 and passim; and Mittelman, "Perspectivism, Becoming, and Truth." A version of the correspondence theory also seems implicit in many writers' emphasis upon Nietzsche's language of "honesty," "aptness," and "justice." See, e.g., Jaspers, Nietzsche, 201–11; Kaufmann, Nietzsche, 354–61; Schacht, Nietzsche, 63, 66, 95–117; and Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 155, 188ff. The pragmatic theory of truth holds that a statement or belief is true if and only if it is, in some respect, useful. This theory is attributed to Nietzsche by Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, chap. 3; Grimm, Nietzsche's Theory of Knowledge, chap. 2 and passim, and "Circularity and Self-Reference in Nietzsche," Metaphilosophy 10 (1979): 289–305; and George Stack, "Kant, Lange, and Nietzsche: Critique of Knowledge," in Nietzsche and Modern German Thought, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (London: Routledge, 1991), 36, and "Nietzsche's Evolutionary Epistemology," Dialogos 59 (1992): 77. Other commentators argue that Nietzsche affirms the pragmatic theory of truth on at least one level within a multileveled theory of truth. See Granier, "Perspectivism and Interpretation," 198–99; Warnock, "Nietzsche's Conception of Truth," 49, 51ff.; Schacht, Nietzsche, 71ff.; and Nola, "Nietzsche's Theory of Truth and Belief." The coherence theory of truth holds that a statement or belief is true if and only if it coheres or fits within the system of connected statements and beliefs that constitutes our knowledge. Schacht (Nietzsche, 63, 66ff.) and Magnus (Nietzsche's Existential Imperative [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978], 29, 201, and "Nietzsche's Mitigated Skepticism," 265) argue that Nietzsche's theory of truth is, at least in part, a coherence theory. The semantic theory of truth, formulated by Alfred Tarski decades after Nietzsche's death, holds that a sentence is true, in a given language, if it satisfies the rules by which sentences in the language and objects are picked out and correlated with one another. (It is of some debate, among Nietzsche scholars and philosophers generally, to what degree this theory is a correspondence theory). This conception of truth is attributed to Nietzsche by Nola, "Nietzsche's Theory of Truth and Belief," 538ff.; and Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, 32, 38–40, 61, 135. It should be noted that many commentators attribute to Nietzsche a hybrid or multileveled theory of truth that combines several of the theories described above.
while still others have argued that Nietzsche does not provide a theory of truth and is not interested in doing so.[18]
Oddly enough, I think each of these views is, in some respect, right; and later I will give some indication of why I think this is so (see §1.6.3). However, the debate over which theory of truth to attribute to Nietzsche seems to me improperly framed, so I will not enter into it directly here. Rather, I want to suggest that we arrive at a better sense of Nietzsche's conception of truth by examining what he himself takes to be the crucial consideration: the question of "the value of truth," or rather, how truth is to be revalued in light of his genealogy of European thought.
[18] See Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, 54–55; and Gemes, "Nietzsche's Critique of Truth," 48.
1.5.1—
Truth, Being, and Becoming
This revaluation obviously presupposes some preliminary characterization of truth. For Nietzsche, such characterization is provided by the history of metaphysics, which, he argues, retains essentially the same conception of truth from Plato through positivism: truth considered as the absolute priority of determining "what is" apart from "what becomes" and "what merely seems or appears to be."
With regard to this conception of truth, as we have seen, the advent of modern experimental science represents, for Nietzsche, a decisive step in the history of metaphysics. Science turns its attention away from the Platonic-Christian "world of being" toward the "world of becoming"—the spatiotemporal, physical, natural, and empirical world. Moreover, as it develops, science casts off its residual ties with theology, gradually rejecting the deism to which it was initially wedded.[19] The scientific revolution, then, brings us closer to an affirmation of what Nietzsche calls "a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature" (GS 109) and a restoration of what he terms the "innocence of becoming" (TI "Errors" 8).
Yet Nietzsche argues that the dominant scientific theories and methods of the nineteenth century—mechanism, evolutionism, and positivism—still harbor a residual theology that corrupts the "innocence of becoming": they still attempt to discover a "world of being" as the ground and essence of the "world of becoming." The "necessity," "law," "atomism," and "equilibrium" central to mechanistic physics, the "struggle for preservation" and inherent teleology of evolutionary theory, and the "facts" and "disinterested observation" desired by positivism—all of these, according to Nietzsche, are but further attempts to place becoming in the service of being, to claim that becoming and change are always governed by, tend toward, or are reducible to some static, enduring, and isolable thing or state.
Nietzsche's arguments against these various scientific theories are manifold and complex; and a discussion of his philosophy of science and nature would take us too far afield.[20] But his general point is fairly simple. Nietzsche does not object to these or any other scientific theo-
[19] See GS 357, quoted above on pp. 17–18. Cf. BGE 209: "science has most happily rid itself of theology, whose 'handmaid' it was too long."
[20] I discuss these theories further below (§§1.5.2, 2.3.2, 5.2.1, and 5.2.3). On mechanism, see GS 109, 373; BGE 21, 22, 36, 213; GM II:12; WP 618–19, 634–35, 689, 708, 712, 1066. On evolutionary theory, see TL; HL; GS 349; GM II:12–13; WP 647-50, 684–85, 709, 881. On positivism, see GS 347, 373; BGE 10, 204, 210; GM III:24; WP 1, 120, 481.
ries on the basis of their pragmatic aims—their desire to select, simplify, quantify, and map relative tendencies and to hierarchize appearances for the purposes of increasing our ability to cope with our environment. What he objects to is the scientific propensity to forget that these are indeed pragmatic constructions and the consequent claim simply to have sketched from reality itself this picture of a simple and stable world. Nietzsche writes:
One should not understand this compulsion to construct species, forms, purposes, laws—"a world of identical cases "—as if they enabled us to fix the true world; but as a compulsion to arrange a world for ourselves in which our existence is made possible—we thereby create a world which is calculable, simplified, comprehensible, etc., for us. (WP 521; cf. BGE 14)
What is objectionable and ultimately indemonstrable, for Nietzsche, is the idea that the world follows some grand plan that involves a resolution of becoming into being, into some terminal state or thing. Once we give up faith in the "true world" of the Platonists and Christians, we should come to see our world in a new light: as a becoming without beginning, end, origin, purpose, goal, or privileged aspect (see GS 109; BGE 22; TI "Errors" 8; WP 708, 711, 1062–67). While, within this becoming, we may be able to isolate some tendencies, regularities, and solidities, we should remember that, in doing so, we are only marking relative movements, regularities, durabilities, and phenomena that, considered within a different perspective or framework (e.g., from different points in the universe, over much larger or smaller time spans, with keener faculties of perception) would appear otherwise (i.e., as having other modes of individuation, as ongoing processes rather than stable states, as moving in contrary directions, etc.).[21] Nietzsche writes in a note from 1887:
Duration, identity with itself, being are inherent neither in that which is called subject nor in that which is called object; they are complexes of events apparently durable in comparison with other complexes—e.g., through the difference in tempo of the event (rest-movement, firm-loose: oppositions that
[21] See, e.g., D 117: "If our eyes were a hundredfold sharper, man would appear to us tremendously tall; it is possible, indeed, to imagine organs by virtue of which he would be felt as immeasurable. On the other hand, organs could be so constituted that whole solar systems were viewed contracted and packed together like a single cell: and to beings of an opposite constitution a cell of the human body could present itself, in motion, construction and harmony, as a solar system." See also GS 228, 301–2.
do not exist in themselves and that actually express only variations in degree that from a certain perspective appear to be oppositions. There are no opposites: only from those of logic do we derive the concept of opposites—and falsely transfer it to things). (WP 552; cf. GS 110–12; WP 521, 523)
In short, Nietzsche maintains that, contrary to metaphysics, being and becoming are not opposed to one another. Rather, being is a mode of becoming—becoming conceived under a particular description, which, however, will always conflict with others and can claim no ultimate priority.
This re-orientation of the relationship between being and becoming also changes the character of truth. If, for metaphysics, truth consisted in the separation of being from all becoming, the result of Nietzsche's argument is that truth must now take its place within the world of becoming—within a world that is in constant movement and alteration, and which appears differently from every point (see WP 568). In this new guise, truth is concerned not with the determination of absolute and ultimate being, but with a specification of the perspectives and interpretations relative to which the world appears as being such and such.
1.5.2—
Truth, Being, and Appearing
This reorientation of truth points toward what can be considered the central concern in Nietzsche's discussions of truth and knowledge: the attempt to reconcile truth with its traditional arch enemy—semblance (der Schein ) or appearance (die Erscheinung ). Indeed, for Nietzsche, this reconciliation is already implied in the reconciliation of truth and being with becoming. For, following Heraclitus, Nietzsche conceives of the "world of becoming" not simply as a world of "constant change" but also as a world of "changing aspects," a world that takes on different appearances when considered within different frameworks.[22] To
[22] According to Terence Irwin ("Plato's Heracleiteanism," Philosophical Quarterly 27 [1977]: 4–5), the notion of "becoming" or "flux," for Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle, involves not only "local movement" and "qualitative alteration"—what Irwin calls "selfchange"—but also "aspect change," "things with compresent opposite properties [ . . . ] resulting from dependence on different situations." John Richardson has argued that "becoming" holds this sense for Nietzsche as well, helping to account for the doctrine of perspectivism. Thus, on Richardson's reading of Nietzsche, "to say that things become is to say that they 'come to be' one way from one point of view, and another way from another, and that some at least of these opposing perspectives are equally legitimate" ("Reply to Professor Robin Small," International Studies in Philosophy 21 [1989]: 136). These two conceptions of "becoming" are discussed more fully in chapter 4.
situate truth within the world of becoming, then, is also to situate it within the world of seeming and appearance; it is to say that "the 'apparent' [»scheinbare «] world is the only one" (TI "Reason" 2; cf. BGE 34; TI "Reason" 6; WP 566–68) and that, if there is to be truth, it must take its place within this "apparent" world.
Again, Nietzsche conceives of his task as a continuation and radicalization of the project of modern science, which turned the intellect's attention away from the otherworldly claims of Platonism and Christianity toward the earthly domain of nature and becoming. Following the lead of science, and having rejected the otherworldly conception of truth and knowledge as the attempt to achieve absolute certainty and to grasp unconditional, necessary, and eternal entities, Nietzsche attempts to resituate truth and knowledge within what he calls "the world of life, nature, and history" (GS 344). Yet in this same passage, he tells us that "life aim[s] at semblance, meaning error, deception, simulation, delusion, self-delusion [Anschein, . . . Irrthum, Betrug, Verstellung, Blendung, Selbstverblendung]" (GS 344), or, as he puts it in the 1886 preface to The Birth of Tragedy, "all of life is based on semblance, art, deception, points of view, and the necessity of perspectives and error [Schein, Kunst, Täuschung, Optik, Nothwendigkeit des Perspektivischen und des Irrthums]" (BT SC: 5).[23] If so, it seems unlikely that anything akin to truth will be discovered within the realm of "life."
This certainly was Plato's conclusion, and that of metaphysics ever since. Yet Nietzsche thinks otherwise. It is his contention that, when we investigate the actual conditions and processes of human knowledge and inquiry, we find that, as with truth and becoming, truth and semblance (i.e., "art, deception, points of view, and the necessity of perspectives and error") are not at all opposed but rather are constantly and necessarily intermingled with one another (see, e.g., BGE 2, 24, 34). The impulse to reject this supposition, he argues, merely betrays a "hostility to life," a metaphysical desire to negate "the world of life, nature, and history" in favor of "another world," which, however, remains "indemonstrable" (see BT SC: 5; GS 344; TI "Reason" 6; GM III: 28; EH "Destiny" 8).
The scientific rejection of metaphysics, according to Nietzsche, allows
[23] Compare the 1886 preface to Human, All Too Human (1): "Enough, I am still living; and life is, after all, not a product of morality: it wants deception, it lives on deception . . . but there you are, I am already off again, am I not, and doing what I have always done, old immoralist and bird-catcher that I am—speaking unmorally, extramorally, 'beyond good and evil'?"
the emergence of a question that had thus far remained foreclosed: the question concerning the value of both truth and deception. Having repudiated morality as the ultimate tribunal, Nietzsche asserts that truth ought not to be determined in advance as unquestionably "good," nor ought deception to be determined in advance as unquestionably "evil." Rather, the respective values of truth and deception ought to be determined "experimentally" (see GM III:24) through investigations carried out "beyond good and evil" (BGE 4, 2). The new tribunal, according to Nietzsche, is that of "life," which concerns the actual conditions for the existence, preservation, and flourishing of natural beings, human beings included (see WP 495). This change of tribunal means that the "will to truth" is no longer to be considered a divine gift or command, and neither are the "will to semblance" or "will to deception"[24] to be considered signs of immorality. Rather, both "wills" are to be viewed as natural, physico-psychological impulses developed within a particular species of life to help it to cope with its conditions of existence.
The results of Nietzsche's "experiments" concerning truth can be summarized as follows: (1) to the degree that it is satisfiable, the "will to truth"—the desire accurately to represent the world as it really is—is not necessarily what is most useful, beneficial, or of highest value for "life"; (2) the "will to deception"—the will consciously or unconsciously to select from, simplify, embellish, or ignore features of the world—[25] is not necessarily pernicious but, indeed, can be of tremendous value; (3) the "will to truth" and the "will to deception" can both be seen to affirm and to negate the interests of "life"; and (4) the "will to truth" and the "will to deception" can be seen to require and to supplement one another in even the most rigorous intellectual inquiry.
Nietzsche consistently makes the point that, in the actual practice of our everyday and scientific inquiry, truth is not solely what we are after. For instance, we are selective with regard to what concerns us. We do not make it our task to provide an infinitely detailed description of the state of everything in the universe at every given moment. Were it pos-
[24] There is a close association between what Nietzsche calls "the will to semblance [der Wille zum Schein ]" (GS 107), "the will to deception [der Wille zur Täuschung ]" (BGE 2; GM III: 25), and "the will to ignorance [der Wille zum Nicht-wissen or Unwissen ]" (BGE 24). Nehamas discusses "the will to ignorance" in relation to "the will to knowledge [der Wille zum Wissen ]" in Nietzsche: Life as Literature, chap. 2.
[25] In the Genealogy (III: 24), Nietzsche names this "will to deception" "interpretation" (Interpretation ), which requires the "forcing, adjusting, abbreviating, omitting, padding, inventing, [and] falsifying" of particular features of the world in the service of "life."
sible, such a description would not only be too complex and full of trivia but would also be too fleeting, requiring infinitely many such descriptions every second. Therefore, we make do with vastly simplified representations of even the small portion of the universe with which we are, for the most part, concerned (see BGE 230). We describe this limited domain using a host of generalizations that smooth over myriad particularities, differences, irregularities, and anomalous cases to satisfy cognitive interests other than that of precise description (see TL 83). Weighing the demands of precision and scope against those of coherence, utility, clarity, and explanatory and predictive power, we try to achieve a balance that describes as much as possible about the world (or some part of it) with the greatest possible economy and systematicity.[26] We see the world as composed of subsistent, self-identical "beings," even though, examined closely, the world is always in flux and beings are constantly becoming-other, either through spatial, temporal, physical, chemical, and biological changes, or through reconsideration within new perspectives, modes of inquiry, and linguistic and conceptual sortings (see GS 110, 112, 121).[27] We subsume temporally diverse sensory experiences under a single name, identifying them as composing the "same" object or person (see TL 83; GS 335; WP 508ff.); and we view the world in terms of species and kinds that are sorted by classificatory schemes that determine features as "important" or "unimportant" relative to our particular purposes (see TL 83, WP 521).[28] The more successful these simplifications, selections, and classifications prove to be for us, the more entrenched they become, and the more "real" and "true" they are taken to be. In other words, rather than simply describ-
[26] On economy of method, see BGE 13, 36. This point has been repeatedly made, within the context of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy of science, by Nelson Goodman. See Goodman, Languages of Art, 2d ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), 262–65, and Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), 18, 120–21. See also Nancy Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), chap. 2, for an argument that the great explanatory power of the fundamental laws of physics is proportional to their falsehood.
[27] Note that Nietzsche joins company with more recent philosophers such as W. V. Quine, who maintains that such things as "physical objects," "forces," and "the abstract entities which are the substance of mathematics" are simply "myths," "posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer," "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," in From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 44–45.
[28] For a similar point, see Catherine Z. Elgin, "The Relativity of Fact and the Objectivity of Value," in Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation, ed. Michael Krausz (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989). Cf. Stephen Jay Gould's critique of essentialist taxonomies in The Flamingos Smile: Reflections in Natural History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 160ff., and Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin (New York: Harmony, 1996), 38–42.
ing the world as we find it, we as much fabricate it to suit our needs: we individuate, sort, select, classify, and weight features of the world so as to make it more comprehensible, calculable, predictable—in a word, more habitable for human beings (see BGE 14). "Science at its best," Nietzsche writes, "seeks most to keep us in this simplified, thoroughly artificial, suitably constructed and suitably falsified world—[ . . . ] it loves error, because, being alive, it loves life" (BGE 24).
Yet this is not to argue that truth is equivalent to utility or that Nietzsche supports a "pragmatist theory of truth." Nietzsche constantly reminds us that the demands for utility and for truth are quite often at odds with one another. He writes in The Gay Science: "We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live—by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content: without these articles of faith nobody could now endure life. But that does not prove them. Life is no argument; the conditions of life might include error" (GS 121; cf. BGE 39; EH P:3; WP 493).
Even so, he is quick to add that this is no condemnation of the will to error and deception:
The falseness of a judgment is not for us necessarily an objection to a judgment; in this respect our new language may sound strangest. The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating. And we are fundamentally inclined to claim that the falsest judgments [ . . . ] are indispensable for us; [ . . . ] that renouncing the falsest judgments would mean renouncing life and a denial of life. To recognize untruth as a condition of life—that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil. (BGE 4)
Each of these passages claims that, strictly speaking, the simplifications and categorizations taken for granted by our science and common sense are not "true," that, from some other perspective and by other criteria, they could be seen as "erroneous" or "false"; and yet these passages seem to point in opposite directions—one toward truth in spite of utility, the other toward utility in spite of truth. This is no inconsistency on Nietzsche's part. When these passages are read together, it becomes clear that Nietzsche does not want to condemn or celebrate either the "will to deception" or the "will to truth." While he aims to reveal the extent to which the "will to deception" is operative and highly useful in our everyday and scientific formulations of the world, he is also concerned to remind us that these formulations are artificial and relative to particular sets of interests and concerns.
We can see that, on both sides, Nietzsche's target is metaphysics and its kin, theology and morality, which claim that truth is of absolute value and that the will to truth leads to the disclosure of a "true world." On the one hand, Nietzsche argues that, contrary to demands of metaphysics, theology, and morality, our inquiry does not unconditionally strive for the truth—for the "plain facts"—but instead has constant recourse to useful fictions and artificial constructions. On the other hand—and this point is crucial—he argues that a recognition of this artificiality should tempt us away from the essentialist view that science (or any other discourse) discovers a "real" and "true" world. Indeed, for Nietzsche, the conviction that there exists such a "true world" is simply a metaphysical faith (see BGE 2, 3, 34; TI "Reason" 2, 6, "World"; WP 566–67). Hence, a recognition of the artificiality and contingency (what Nietzsche hyperbolically calls the "falsehood") of a particular construction of the world is simply a recognition that it could be constructed otherwise and that what resists such novel construction is not "the way the world really is" but the inertia of established conceptions of the world.[29] Thus, in a telling passage, he writes:
[W ]hat things are called is incomparably more important than what they are. The reputation, name, and appearance [Anschein ], the usual measure and weight of a thing, what it counts for—originally almost always erroneous [ein Irrthum ] and arbitrary, thrown over things like a dress and altogether foreign to their essence [Wesen ] and even their skin—all this develops from generation to generation, merely because people believe in it, until it gradually grows onto and into the thing and becomes its very body. What at first was semblance [Schein ] becomes at last, almost invariably, the essence [Wesen ], and functions [wirkt ] as essence. How foolish it would be to suppose that one only needs to point out this origin and misty shroud of delusion in order to destroy the world that counts for real, so-called "reality " [»Wirklichkeit«]. We can destroy only as creators!—But let us not forget this either: it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create in the long run new "things." (GS 58)
Initially, this passage seems to maintain an opposition between essence and appearance; yet as it proceeds, this distinction is undercut. Retrospectively, we come to see that even those "original essences" were once constructions or "semblances" that gradually established themselves and came to "count for real." Thus, Nietzsche regards the dis-
[29] See GS 110: "the strength of knowledge does not depend on its degree of truth, but on its age, on the degree to which it has been incorporated, on its character as a condition of life."
tinction between "essence" and "appearance" as one of degree, not one of kind. "What is" has become so through its articulation within an interpretation that has managed to secure itself (see GM II:12). To see things otherwise is to have created a new interpretation that individuates things differently and ascribes to them different origins, ends, and purposes. And for this new, "wrong," interpretation to become "right," for this "semblance" to become "essence," one must campaign on its behalf until it comes to be taken for granted.[30]
I will return to these issues below. For the present discussion, the important point is that we are never concerned with a world of "truth" and "being" (in the strict, metaphysical senses) but always with a world of "seeming" and "appearance": a world that seems or appears to be such and such for a particular perspective or interpretation.[31] "Let at least this much be admitted," writes Nietzsche, "there would be no life at all if not on the basis of perspective estimates and appearances; and if, with the virtuous enthusiasm and clumsiness of some philosophers, one wanted to abolish the 'apparent world' altogether—well, supposing you could do that, at least nothing would be left of your 'truth' either" (BGE 34; cf. WP 567).
Nietzsche recognizes and affirms that it is a constitutive feature of natural creatures that they construe the world from a particular perspective and cannot avoid doing so. Such creatures are always situated
[30] My reading of this passage thus differs significantly from the skeptical reading offered by Stephen Houlgate, who argues that the passage's apparent collapse of the opposition between essence and appearance actually presupposes that very opposition. Houlgate reads Nietzsche as beginning from the presupposition that there was once a legitimate distinction between essence and appearance but that this distinction is now impossible to discern, because alien appearances have veiled and, by now, fused with essences to such a degree that the latter are no longer distinguishable or knowable ("Kant, Nietzsche, and the 'Thing in itself,'" Nietzsche-Studien 22 [1993]: 118, 141–42, 145–46). I maintain, on the contrary, that Nietzsche rejects the very notion that the distinction between essence and appearance is one of kind, arguing instead that it is simply one of degree—that essences are simply established appearances. Several other passages support my antiskeptical reading, e.g., HL (3, P. 77), where Nietzsche notes that every "first nature was once a second nature and [ . . . ] every victorious second nature will become a first," and GS 290, which offers a similar conception of the interpretive construction of "first natures" out of "second natures." (See also the account of "things" and their role in "interpretations" given in GM II:12, which is discussed at length in chapter 3.) Note that the scenario in GS 58 also recalls the famous passage from "On Truth and Lies," where Nietzsche describes truth as an ever-shifting system in which the strange and new has become the familiar and taken for granted, and those passages in Nietzsche's later work where he argues that "knowledge" consists simply in the reduction of the strange to the familiar (see, e.g., GS 355; TI "Errors" 5; WP 499, 501, 551).
[31] Here, I treat these notions as more or less equivalent. The relation between these two notions in Nietzsche's work is discussed more fully in chapter 3.
at a particular time and place and relate to their environment in ways shaped by their prior development and their current capacities, habits, and skills. This is no less the case for human beings. Each of us sees from a particular point of view, defined as much by what it excludes as by what it includes. Theorists of film and photography note that the camera image is defined by a host of exclusions: by what lies outside the four sides of the frame, beyond its depth of field, and behind the position of the camera; by what has gone into the composition of the image before the shot was taken; and by one's previous training in the various semiotic codes that allow one to see the image as representing such and such.[32] The same is true of human vision itself, which not only has a spatially limited purview but also functions as part of an organism with a range of biological, cultural, and individual needs and desires that determine in advance horizons of significance.[33]
This analysis can be further extended to "perspectives" in the broader sense that Nietzsche has in mind: that is, to "disciplines," "methodologies," "styles," "worldviews," and "ideologies." Each such "perspective" marks out a field of concern on the basis of particular presuppositions, needs, desires, goals, aims, and objects of inquiry. And, while it may be relatively easy to take up different visual perspectives, it is considerably more difficult to master different "disciplines," "methodologies," and "styles" and notoriously more difficult still to take up different "worldviews" and "ideologies." Moreover, simply combining all these different perspectives will not yield a total view, because each will be in conflict with many others with regard to prominent presuppositions, methods, aims, and conclusions.[34]
"Truth" and "knowledge," then, always take their place within the world of "perspective" and "interpretation"—that is, within the world of "appearance" and "semblance." We should note that this is not a mere reversal of the metaphysical view, according to which the "will to
[32] See, e.g., Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 201–22, and Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), chap. 2 and passim .
[33] Cf. Marx's poignant comment that "[t]he development of the five senses is a labor of the whole previous history of the world" (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in Marx: Selections, ed. Allen W. Wood [New York: Macmillan, 1988], 59). Also cf. Goodman, Languages of Art, 3–19.
[34] Nehamas (Nietzsche: Life as Literature, 51) points out the impossibility of such conjunction through a poignant aesthetic example: "the understanding of everything would be like a painting that incorporates all styles or that is painted in no style at all—a true chimera, both impossible and monstrous."
truth" and the "will to deception" are, respectively, good and evil. That is, Nietzsche is not arguing for a rejection of every notion of truth in favor of semblance, error, and deception. Among other difficulties, such a move would maintain the "faith in opposite values" that Nietzsche deems "the fundamental faith of the metaphysicians" (BGE 2). On the contrary, Nietzsche's "experimental" antimetaphysical investigation, which situates itself "beyond good and evil," must renounce this faith and instead recognize that nature, life, and history countenance no "opposites" but "only degrees and many subtleties of gradation" (BGE 24; cf. HH 1; WS 67; GS 1, 375; BGE 2, 3; WP 37, 552). Thus, Nietzsche comes to reject the supposition "that there is an essential opposition of the 'true' and 'false'" and discovers instead that there are only "degrees of apparentness [Scheinbarkeit ] and, as it were, lighter and darker shadows and shades of appearance—different valeurs [values], to use the language of painters" (BGE 34). Rather than seeing them in opposition, then, Nietzsche comes to see that, at their best, the "will to truth" and the "will to deception" supplement one another, that they are not opposites but "refinement[s]" of one another (BGE 34).
Accordingly, Nietzsche does not argue for an unqualified indulgence in the "will to deception." Rather, he contends that, on the chromatic spectrum of "truth" and "deception," both extremes are to be avoided. Having noted the dangers of "the unconditional will to truth," and having reinstated "semblance," "appearance," "error," "deception," and "perspective" to their rightful place within "the general economy of life" (BGE 23), Nietzsche is also concerned to show that the "will to deception" can be put to use against the interests of "life."
The most egregious case is that of the "believers," the metaphysicians and theologians who "lie" in an objectionable, moral sense. According to Nietzsche, these "believers" have not yet made the scientific turn and are thus out of step with the "intellectual conscience" of the age. They do not adequately scrutinize their convictions and beliefs but instead claim them to be exempt from consideration by the mistrustful gaze of science, which demands a restraint of the "will to deception" and an attention to both reason and sense-evidence.[35] Thus, Nietzsche writes:
[35] Note that, while Nietzsche often criticizes the ability of sense-evidence to deliver unqualified "facts" about the world (see, e.g., GS 114; BGE 14; WP 516), he nonetheless considers its testimony an important criterion (see, e.g., BGE 134; TI "Reason" 3); and while Nietzsche often criticizes reason for its opposition to the natural world of becoming (see, e.g., TI "Reason"), he nonetheless often praises reason as that which demands "hon-esty" and "intellectual conscience" (see GS 319, cited immediately below; A 12). The notions of "honesty" and "intellectual conscience" are discussed below.
One sort of honesty [Redlichkeit ] has been alien to all founders of religions and their kind:—they have never made their experiences a matter of conscience for knowledge. "What have I actually experienced? What happened in me and around me at that time? Was my reason bright enough? Was my will opposed to all deceits [Betrügereien ] of the senses and bold in resisting the fantastic?"—none of them has asked such questions, nor do any of our dear religious people ask them even now: rather, they thirst after things that are contrary to reason, and they do not wish to make it too hard for themselves to satisfy it,—so they experience "miracles" and "rebirths" and hear the voices of little angels! But we, we others who thirst after reason, are determined to scrutinize our experiences as severely as a scientific experiment, hour after hour, day after day. We ourselves wish to be our own experiments and guinea pigs. (GS 319)
In a number of passages that resonate with this one, Nietzsche argues against taking as the only criterion of truth what he calls "the proof of strength": the notion that beliefs are to be held true solely on the basis of the strength of our belief in them or the beneficial effects of such belief (see HH 120; GS 347; BGE 210; GM III:24; TI "Errors" 5; A 12, 50; WP 171–72, 452). Nietzsche suggests that this crude pragmatist conception of truth has biblical origins[36] and easily accommodates the otherworldly agendas of metaphysics and theology. He writes:
We "knowers" [Erkennenden ] have gradually come to mistrust believers [Gläubige ] of all kinds; our mistrust has gradually brought us to make inferences the reverse of those of former days: wherever the strength of a faith [Glaubens ] is very prominently displayed, we infer a certain weakness of demonstrability [Beweisbarkeit ], even the improbability of what is believed [Geglaubten ]. We, too, do not deny that faith [Glaube ] "makes blessed": that is precisely why we deny that faith proves [beweist ] anything,—a strong faith that makes blessed raises suspicion against that which is believed; it does not establish "truth," it establishes a certain probability—of deception . (GM III:24; cf. HH 484; BGE 210; WP 456, 459)
In these and other passages, Nietzsche argues against the "deceptions" of the "believers" in favor of the "honesty" of the "intellectual con-
[36] In his note to GS 347, Walter Kaufmann writes: "the reference is to I Corinthians 2:4, where the King James Bible has 'in demonstration of the Spirit and of power' and Luther 'in Beweisung des Geistes und der Kraft .' In theological and homiletical quotations the old-fashioned Beweisung gave way to Beweis (proof—the word Nietzsche uses) during the nineteenth-century. Since Schleiermacher this passage became very popular, and the parallelism of Geist and Kraft was replaced by either Geist or, as in Nietzsche's case, Kraft ."
science." The latter refuses to accept the former, which seeks to exempt itself from rigorous scrutiny and refuses to enter the space of questions and reasons, demonstration and proofs. It is precisely this that Nietzsche finds "contemptible" and that leads him to reject all claims regarding transcendent entities.
Yet, having endorsed the "will to deception," how is Nietzsche to challenge this ignoble form of it? What differentiates this "bad" deception from the other "good" deception? If Nietzsche wants to accept the latter, must he not accept the former as well? Two related criteria distinguish these varieties of deception and justify Nietzsche's attitude toward them. Whereas moral-metaphysical deceptions are both unconditional and otherworldly, practical-vital deceptions are conditional and this-worldly. The former claim for themselves an absolute and ultimate status. As such, they plead exemption from scientific inquiry and affirm the existence of a prior science (a meta-physics) and a super-natural realm. Yet Nietzsche argues not only that the supposedly unconditional and otherworldly posits of metaphysics and morality are explicable in naturalistic terms but also that such explanation reveals these posits to be pernicious and contemptible. He diagnoses these deceptions as products of an irrational self-hatred: a hatred of "the world of nature, life, and history" (in all its sensuousness, physicality, conditionality, and contingency) on the part of a natural, living being—"fundamentally, life's nausea and disgust with life" (BT SC:5). Posits such as "God," the "Forms," and the "thing in itself," he insists, are simply ideal projections that betray a human desire to be other-than-human, a desire for self-negation or annihilation.[37] Seen in this light, moral-metaphysical deceptions turn out to be not only superfluous, because they can be given an "internal" account, but also deplorable, because they deny the most palpable features of natural life in favor of indemonstrable claims and because they rest upon psychological motives that are, by all accounts, odious.
Practical-vital deceptions, on the other hand, are both conditional and worldly. Such deceptions always justify themselves with regard to particular aims and goals that, in the final analysis, serve to increase the ability of human beings to preserve or enhance themselves as individuals, as groups, or as a species. In relation to other ends, or for other
[37] Such arguments were, of course, a central feature of nineteenth-century German thought. Forms of this argument against religion had previously been asserted by Hegel and the Young Hegelians, particularly Feuerbach, Bauer, and Marx; and such a theory of projection was later elaborated by Freud and his followers.
individuals, groups, or species, such deceptions might certainly be inadequate or counterproductive. And while, in our hubris, we sometimes forget the relative, conditional, and pragmatic origins and aims of these useful fictions, recognition of their fictional status does nothing to destroy their value. This, then, is a primary difference between the two sorts of deceptions: recognition of the fictional nature of metaphysicalmoral deceptions destroys them, since absolute being and unconditional value is of their essence. The world in which we live, however, is contingent and conditional through and through. It countenances neither absolute entities nor absolute values. On the contrary, every entity in the natural world is enmeshed in a web of contingent relations and enjoys only a temporary existence. Such entities have limited, relative, and conditional horizons and posit for themselves limited, relative, and conditional goals. Such is "life"; and only those interpretations that affirm this conditionality, contingency, and relativity will affirm life. And it is precisely on this account that metaphysical-moral deceptions are found wanting, while practical-vital deceptions pass the test.
The "will to deception," then, is justified by Nietzsche only insofar as it places itself in the service of "life." This is also the case with the "will to truth." We have seen that Nietzsche rejects the "unconditional will to truth," which desires the eradication of every form of semblance and deception and thus ends up willing the eradication of "life"—because "life rest[s] upon semblance, [ . . . ] error, deception, simulation," etc. (GS 344). Any search for "the true world" betrays this otherworldly, antiworldly desire, for it is nothing other than a desire for the absolute, the unconditional, and the genuinely certain, which are not to be found within "the world of life, nature, and history" (see GS 344, 373; GM III:23–28).
It is precisely this "unconditional will to truth" that Nietzsche still finds in science and that, despite his praise of scientific method, is the crux of his frequent criticisms of science. He argues that science has not yet broken from theology and metaphysics insofar as it retains "a metaphysical faith " (GS 344), namely, faith in the unconditional value of truth. Nietzsche's prime target here is positivism, the scientific and philosophical project that aims to discover simple, presuppositionless "facts" and to ground all knowledge on these primitives.[38] According
[38] Though Nietzsche's target is positivism in its nineteenth-century incarnation—the tradition of Comte, Mill, and Spencer—I think this critique applies equally well to its major twentieth-century manifestation, logical positivism. Nietzsche's response to nineteenth-century positivism, i.e., his development of a holistic empiricism (see chap. 2), hasmuch in common with the responses to logical positivism offered by Heidegger and Gadamer, Quine and Davidson.
to Nietzsche, this remains a metaphysical desire; for, no less than Platonism or Christianity, positivism is motivated by the demand for ultimate foundations and for a knowledge that excludes every form of semblance and deception.[39]
This attempt to eliminate all perspective and interpretation in order to get at "the facts" is, once again, not only impossible but deplorable; for, in essence, it is nothing but a rejection of nature and life, for which all knowledge is perspectival or interpretive and thus involves the kinds of "extramoral" deceptions discussed above. In a passage from the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche makes just this point. With philosophical and scientific positivism clearly in mind, he writes:
[T]hat desire to halt before the factual, the factum brutum, [ . . . ] through which French scholarship [Wissenschaft ] nowadays tries to establish a sort of moral superiority over German scholarship; that general renunciation of all interpretation (of forcing, adjusting, abbreviating, omitting, padding, inventing, falsifying, and whatever else is of the essence of interpreting)—all this expresses, broadly speaking, as much ascetic virtue as any denial of sensuality (it is at bottom only a particular mode of this denial). That which constrains these men, however, this unconditional will to truth, is faith in the ascetic ideal itself, even if as an unconscious imperative—don't be deceived about that—it is the faith in a metaphysical value, the value of truth in itself, sanctioned and guaranteed by this ideal alone (it stands or falls with this ideal). There is, strictly speaking, no such "presuppositionless" science, the thought of such a thing is unthinkable, paralogical: a philosophy, a "faith," must always first be there to give science a direction, a meaning, a limit, a method, a right to exist. (Whoever has the opposite notion, whoever tries, for example, to place philosophy "on a strictly scientific basis," first needs to stand not only philosophy but also truth on its head [ . . . ]). (GM III: 24)
In short, we must reject not only a priori but also empirical attempts to provide perspectiveless, ultimate foundations for our knowledge. Science, facts, and truth are possible only within the framework of one or another interpretation, each of which construes the world according to a set of presuppositions that receive only relative, conditional justifica-
[39] On positivism as the demand for ultimate foundations, see GS 347; on positivism as the demand for knowledge without distortion and deception, see GM III:24, cited below. For other critiques of positivism, see BGE 204, 210; WP 1 and 481.
tion.[40] There is no such thing as absolute or unconditional truth.[41] Thus, as with "the will to deception," Nietzsche sanctions "the will to truth" only insofar as it acknowledges its conditionality and contingency—only, that is, insofar as it takes its place within the actual conditions of existence and inquiry of living beings.
1.6—
The Revaluation of Truth II:
Truth and the "Intellectual Conscience"
What, then, remains of "the will to truth," and what sort of "truth" does it "will"? The answer lies in Nietzsche's conception of "honesty" and "intellectual conscience." These terms, however, are easily misunderstood, and their Nietzschean significance eludes a casual reading. Before offering an account of how these terms ought to be understood, then, I first want to indicate how they ought not to be understood.
1.6.1—
Utility, Correspondence, and the "Intellectual Conscience"
In several of the passages in which Nietzsche speaks of "intellectual conscience," "intellectual integrity," and "honesty," he tells us that these philological virtues are characterized by "the demand for certainty " (GS 2.) and the demand that everything be surrendered in the service of truth (A 50). This has led prominent commentators such as Walter Kaufmann to argue that Nietzsche's consistent calls for "intellectual integrity" and the like manifest his rejection of the notion of truth as utility and his unwillingness to give up reason's desire for truth as correspondence, despite the recognition that this desire is destructive of life.[42] On the other side, Arthur Danto has taken issue with Kaufmann's
[40] See WP 481: "Against positivism, which halts at phenomena—'There are only facts'—I would say: No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations."
[41] Through analyses of the "Preface" to Beyond Good and Evil, both Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, in "On Associating with Nietzsche," trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Journal of Nietzsche Studies 4–5 (1992–93): 28ff., and Derrida, in Spurs, make this point. Derrida more explicitly argues that truth, for Nietzsche, must take its place within the world of semblance.
[42] Kaufmann, Nietzsche, 359–61. Admittedly, Kaufmann makes no explicit reference to "the correspondence theory of truth." Yet something like it is clearly what he has in mind. For, according to Kaufmann, Nietzsche conceives of truth as a heroic resistance to every illusion and all considerations of utility or pleasure so as to be able to state simply what is the case. This is corroborated by Mary Warnock ("Nietzsche's Conception ofTruth," 57–58 and passim ), who both expresses agreement with Kaufmann's interpretation of Nietzsche's view of truth and argues that the conception of truth ultimately presupposed by Nietzsche is a correspondence theory. Also see n. 47, below.
view. Without offering an alternative account of the notions of "honesty" and "intellectual conscience," Danto argues that Nietzsche's discussions of the life-negating results of "the will to truth" provide sufficient evidence that Nietzsche does indeed relinquish the desire for truth as correspondence and instead sanctions useful fictions insofar as they are life-promoting.[43]
This debate has become a centerpiece in the literature on Nietzsche, and each side has attracted a number of advocates.[44] Indeed, it has been suggested that, with regard to Nietzsche, "the distinction between correspondence truth and pragmatic truth. [ . . . ] deserves to be called The Official Distinction."[45] Yet, again, I think the debate is improperly framed and that, contrary to both sides, Nietzsche identifies truth neither with utility nor with correspondence. A reconsideration of the passages concerning "honesty" and "intellectual conscience" bears this out.
Kaufmann is certainly right to point out that, in these and other passages, Nietzsche argues against the notion that truth is equivalent to utility of belief. Indeed, Nietzsche seems to argue that "intellectual integrity" consists precisely in a constant "doubt," "mistrust," and "skepticism" with regard to convictions, faiths, and beliefs, especially those one holds dearest (see BGE 34, 39; GM I: 1, III:24; A P, 12–13, 54). Yet Nietzsche does not reject pragmatic criteria altogether. He simply claims that utility of belief is insufficient for the determination of truth and that, unchecked by other criteria, the pragmatic criterion of truth quickly becomes dogmatic and deceptive (see GS 113; GM III: 24; A 50; WP 456). We have seen that, taken as the sole criterion of truth, the pragmatic conception can support even the wildest metaphysical beliefs. By establishing a domain that in principle excludes every other criterion, metaphysics and morality come to sanction beliefs solely because of the strength that accrues to them due to their benefit for the believer.
[43] Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher, 72, 99, 191ff.
[44] See n. 16 above. An interesting variant of this debate can be seen in the exchange between Jean Granier, Le problème de la vérité dans la philosophie de Nietzsche (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966), 303–36, and Sarah Kofman, "Appendix: Genealogy, Interpretation, Text," in Nietzsche and Metaphor, trans. Duncan Large (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), discussed by David C. Hoy in "Philosophy as Rigorous Philology? Nietzsche and Poststructuralism," New York Literary Forum 8–9 (1981): 178–80, and Schrift in Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 166–68.
[45] John T. Wilcox, "Nietzsche's Epistemology: Recent American Discussions," International Studies in Philosophy 15 (1983): 67–77, 72.
Thus, in several passages that take up this issue, Nietzsche inveighs against Christianity and Kantianism, both of which maintain that, ultimately, reason must yield to faith (see D P:3; GS 335; GM III:12; TI "World" 2–3; A 10, 12, 50, 54). It is this that the "intellectual conscience" finds contemptible:
All these great enthusiasts and prodigies behave like our little females: they consider "beautiful sentiments" adequate arguments, regard a heaving bosom as the bellows of the deity, and conviction a criterion of truth. In the end, Kant tried, with "German" innocence, to give this corruption, this lack of any intellectual conscience, scientific status with his notion of "practical reason": he invented a special kind of reason for cases in which one need not bother with reason—that is, when morality, when the sublime command "thou shalt," raises its voice. (A 12)
What does it mean, after all, to have integrity in matters of the spirit? That one is severe against one's heart, that one despises "beautiful sentiments," that one makes of every Yes and No a matter of conscience. Faith makes blessed: consequently it lies. (A 50)
The strength and utility of a belief, then, cannot be the only criterion of its truth. "Making unhappy and evil are no counterarguments," Nietzsche writes. "Something might be true, while being harmful and dangerous in the highest degree" (BGE 39). Those who accept the pragmatic criterion of truth, he concludes, show themselves to be "unaware of the most basic requirements of intellectual honesty" (A 12).[46]
But this is not to argue for a notion of truth as "correspondence with the way the world really is." In fact, Nietzsche argues that the correspondence conception of truth bears a fundamental affinity with the pragmatic conception—that, like the latter, the former achieves its force by a "proof of strength." In §347 of The Gay Science, having ridiculed the pragmatic "proof of strength," Nietzsche goes on to argue that—no less than pragmatist "believers," who deem their dearest beliefs "true"—the "scientific-positivistic" "demand for certainty" is simply the strong belief "that something should be firm [ . . . ] the demand for a support, a prop [ . . . ] the need for a faith, a support, a backbone, something to fall back on," which is then deemed "actual," "real," and "true." That is, for Nietzsche, the conviction that there is some absolute foundation—that there are indisputable "facts," or
[46] Cf. WP 172: "That it does not matter whether a thing is true, but only what effect it produces—absolute lack of intellectual integrity . Everything is justified, lies, slander, the most shameless forgery."
some final "way that the world really is"—is nothing but a need that has been transformed into a belief or faith, which, because of its necessity and strength, comes to be considered truth itself:
Here, the sudden feeling of power that an idea arouses in its originator is everywhere counted proof of its value: —and since one knows no way of honoring an idea other than by calling it true, the first predicate with which it is honored is the predicate true . . . . How otherwise could it be so effective? [ . . . ] [I]f it were not real it could not be effective. [ . . . ] An idea that such a decadent is unable to resist, to which he completely succumbs, is thus "proved" to be true !!! (WP 171)
Of course, nowhere in these or any other passages does Nietzsche directly mention the correspondence theory of truth.[47] Yet this realist con-
[47] In a number of articles, John Wilcox ("Note on Correspondence and Pragmatism in Nietzsche"; "Nietzsche's Epistemology," 72–74; "Nietzsche Scholarship and 'the Correspondence Theory of Truth'") takes issue with the notion of the "correspondence theory of truth" in general and in Nietzsche. Wilcox argues, first, that there does not seem to be any such thing as "the correspondence theory of truth." "Too many philosophers have used the word 'correspondence,'" he writes ("Nietzsche's Epistemology," 73 ), and each of them has "construed that relation in different ways—indeed, to some extent they had to, since the relata were so different" ("Nietzsche Scholarship and 'the Correspondence Theory of Truth,'" 340). Second, he argues that "there is not much in Nietzsche's writings that might plausibly be translated as 'correspond' or 'correspondence'" ("Nietzsche Scholarship and 'the Correspondence Theory of Truth,'" 339). With regard to the first issue, I grant that there is no single, canonical, and unequivocal formulation of "the correspondence theory of truth." Nevertheless, I think the phrase is still a useful label for realist theories that hold that a statement or belief is true if and only if it matches up with some antecedent, extralinguistic, extraconceptual reality or a piece thereof. While I believe that such a view is incoherent, one can still find philosophers who hold it; and so the phrase allows one to distinguish such philosophers from those who hold other theories of truth, e.g., those according to which the criterion of truth lies in the consistency or coherence of beliefs or statements with one another or in the utility of beliefs. (Of course, such theories can themselves be realist and thus, in the final analysis, "correspondence," theories if they argue that coherence or utility is ultimately only an index of a belief's correspondence with a pregiven world.) With regard to the second issue, I note that Nietzsche does, at times, refer disparagingly to a canonical form of the "correspondence" theory of truth, namely the Scholastic notion of truth as an "adequation" between things and thought: Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus (see A. N. Prior, "Correspondence Theory of Truth," in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 2, ed. Paul Edwards [New York: Macmillan, 1967], 224). So, for instance, in "On Truth and Lies," Nietzsche asks: "Are designations congruent with things? Is language the adequate expression of reality? [decken sich die Bezeichnungen und die Dinge? Ist die Sprache der adäquate Ausdruck aller Realitäten?]" (p. 81, cf. p. 82) and concludes that "what would be called the adequate expression of the object in the subject [ . . . ] is a contradictory absurdity [das würde heissen der adäquate Ausdruck eines Objekts im Subjekt [ . . . ] ein widerspruchsvolles Unding]" (p. 86). Similarly, in a note from 1887–88, he writes: "That a sort of adequate relationship subsists between subject and object [ . . . ] is a well-meant invention which, I think, has had its day [Daß zwischen Subjekt und Objekt eine Art adäquater Relation stattfinde [ . . . ] ist eine gutmüthige Erfindung, die, wie ich denke, ihre Zeit gehabt hat]" (WP 474). This notion is somewhat more obliquely criticized in The Gay Science (373), where Nietzsche ridicules the scientific realist's "faith in a world that is supposed to have its equiv-alent and measure [Äquivalent und Maass ] in human thought and human valuations—a 'world of truth' that can be mastered completely and forever with the aid of our square little reason." See also WP 4, 625. Of course, Nietzsche never explicitly speaks of "the correspondence theory of truth" or, for that matter, of "the pragmatic theory," "the coherence theory," or any other theory of truth. But that does not mean that such theories cannot be attributed to him. Nietzsche characterizes truth in many different ways and on many different levels; and the attempt to sort out those ways and levels in terms of presentday terminology is, I think, of real value.
ception of truth is clearly one of his targets. For he is arguing against the very notion that truth could be found, that the "true world" is there somewhere awaiting adequate representation by thought or language. It is this belief that motivates both the metaphysician and the positivistic scientist. But this belief betrays an "instinct of weakness, " a "disease of the will "(GS 347), because, for Nietzsche, truth is not something given that might be found but something that must be perpetually constructed and reconstructed .[48]
Will to truth is a making -firm, a making -true and -durable [ . . . ]. Truth is therefore not something there, that might be found or discovered—but something that is to be created and that gives a name to a process, or rather to a will to overcome that has no end—introducing truth, as a processus in infinitum, an active determining—not a becoming-conscious of something that is "in itself" firm and determined. (WP 552)
Those who hold that truth is "already there" waiting to be discovered simply prove to be not up for this creative task. Instead of undertaking the difficult and endless job of constructing interpretations and campaigning for their truth, such realists put their faith in an established construction, which they take to be given in the nature of things:
Faith is always coveted most and needed most urgently where will is lacking; for will, as the affect of command, is the decisive sign of sovereignty and strength. In other words, the less one knows how to command, the more urgently one covets someone who commands—a god, prince, class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience. [ . . . ] Once a human being reaches the fundamental conviction that he must be commanded, he becomes "a believer." (GS 347)
The affect of laziness now takes the side of "truth" [ . . . ] it is more comfortable to obey than to examine . . . it is more flattering to think "I possess the truth" than to see darkness all around one—above all: it is reassuring, it gives confidence, it alleviates life—it improves the character, to the extent that it lessens mistrust . "Peace of soul," "a quiet conscience": all inventions made possible by the presupposition that truth has been found [or: that
[48] See GS 58 and the discussion of it above. See also BGE 210. This notion is discussed further below.
truth is there (daß die Wahrheit da ist )].—[ . . . ] This is the proof of strength. (WP 452; cf. WP 279)
The scientific realist, then, is just as much a "believer" as the pragmatist: both elevate their most strongly held beliefs and desires to the status of "truth." Indeed, lacking the self-consciousness of a more enlightened pragmatism, scientific realism shows itself to be the mirror image of metaphysics and theology. It, too, is inspired by a need for foundations, for what is ultimately real; and it, too, claims to have found this true world. In a section entitled "'Science' as Prejudice," Nietzsche writes:
It is no different with the faith with which so many materialistic investigators of nature rest content nowadays, the faith in a world that is supposed to have its equivalent and its measure in human thought and human valuations—a "world of truth" that can be mastered completely and forever with the aid of our square little reason. [ . . . ] That the only justifiable interpretation of the world should be one in which you are justified because one can continue to work and do research scientifically in your sense [ . . . ]—an interpretation that permits counting, calculating, weighing, seeing, and touching, and nothing more—that is a crudity and a naiveté, assuming that it is not a mental illness, an idiocy. (GS 373)
Here, we see that what is objectionable about scientific realism, for Nietzsche, is precisely what is objectionable about unchecked pragmatism, metaphysics, and theology: namely, its dogmatism .[49] And what is objectionable about dogmatism, Nietzsche argues, is that it "castrates the intellect" (GM III:12).
The claim that truth is found [or: that truth is there (daß die Wahrheit da sei)] and that ignorance and error are at an end is one of the most potent seductions there is. Supposing it is believed, then the will to examination, investigation, caution, experiment [der Wille zur Prüfung, Forschung, Vorsicht, Versuchung] is paralyzed: it can even count as sinful, namely as doubt concerning truth. . . . "Truth" is therefore more fateful than error and ignorance, because it cuts off the forces that work toward enlightenment and knowledge [Aufklärung und Erkenntnis ]. (WP 452)[50]
[49] On the dogmatism of metaphysics and morality, see, e.g., A 9, 54.
[50] Cf. WP 457: "The words 'conviction, ' 'faith, ' the pride of martyrdom—these are the least favorable states for the advancement of knowledge." On the "sinfulness," "wickedness," and "evil" of doubt, see also GS 4; BGE 212, 229–30; A 52; WP 459. Cf. also HH 630: "Conviction is the belief that on some particular point of knowledge one is in possession of the absolute [unbedingten ] truth. This belief presupposes that absolute truths exist; likewise that perfect methods of attaining to them have been discovered; finally, that everyone who possesses convictions avails himself of these perfect methods. Allthree assertions demonstrate at once that the man of convictions is not the man of scientific thought"; and HH 483: "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Dogmatism cuts off all further inquiry and questioning—and this the "intellectual conscience" cannot tolerate:
[T]o stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and interpretive multiplicity of existence [der ganzen wundervollen Ungewissheit und Vieldeutigkeit des Daseins][51]and not question, not tremble with the craving and the rapture of such questioning [ . . . ]—that is what I feel to be contemptible . (GS 2)
Here Nietzsche hints at the most important reason why dogmatism is intolerable and why further inquiry must always be promoted: that "the interpretive multiplicity of existence" cannot be successfully captured within a single interpretive framework. Dogmatism is reductionist; and this reductionism, according to Nietzsche, is ascetic and antinatural, because it denies the multiplicity, struggle, and change that are constantly manifested in the world of our experience (see WP 470, 600, 655, 881, 933). ("Everything simple [einfach ] is merely imaginary, is not 'true,'" Nietzsche writes. "But whatever is real, whatever is true, is neither one [Eins ] nor even reducible to one [Eins ]" [WP 536]).[52] One ceases to be a genuine inquirer when one becomes a "fanatic," whose inquiry is limited by "a sort of hypnotism of the whole system of the senses and the intellect for the benefit of an excessive nourishment (hypertrophy) of a single point of view" (GS 347).[53] Again referring to the dogmatism of the natural scientists, Nietzsche writes:
What? Do we really want to permit existence to be degraded for us like this—reduced to a mere exercise for a calculator and an indoor diversion for mathematicians? Above all, one should not wish to divest existence of its
[51] Here Nietzsche uses the term Vieldeutigkeit and, in GS 373, the term vieldeutigen, both of which Kaufmann renders as "rich ambiguity" and which I render, respectively, as "interpretive multiplicity" and "multiply interpretable." Whereas, in both English and German, "ambiguity" often means "unclear" or "having a double meaning" (zweideutig, doppeldeutig ), my translations serve to emphasize that Nietzsche speaks not of two (zwei -, doppel -) but of many (viel -), that, unlike "ambiguity," this sort of multiplicity does not seem to call for a resolution or clarification, and that this "multiplicity" has to do with interpretation: deuten . The point, then, is that existence, for Nietzsche, is not unclear or equivocal but rather capable of supporting many different interpretations.
[52] This text appears in the Nachlaß within a series of aphorisms titled "Maxims of a Hyperborean." It is immediately preceded by an aphorism that also appears in the "Maxims and Arrows" section that begins Twilight of the Idols: "'All truth is simple [einfach ].'—Is that not doubly [zwiefach ] a lie?" (TI "Maxims" 4; cf. KSA 13: 15 [118]).
[53] For more on this dogmatic reduction to a single perspective, see BGE P; A 9, 54. See also the discussion of "inverse cripples" in Z: 2 "On Redemption."
multiply interpretable character [seines vieldeutigen Charakters ]: that is a dictate of good taste, gentlemen, the taste of reverence for everything that lies beyond your horizon. (GS 373)
He then continues, offering a simple case in point: "Assuming that one estimated the value of a piece of music according to how much of it could be counted, calculated, and expressed in formulas: how absurd would such a 'scientific' estimation of music be! What would one have comprehended, understood, grasped of it? Nothing, really nothing of what is 'music' in it!" (GS 373).
That the "exact sciences" are plainly irrelevant for an understanding of the aesthetic, historical, cultural, and social aspects of music, Nietzsche suggests, should make it clear that the world of our experience cannot be suitably explained through a single interpretive framework. Indeed, a consideration of such examples, Nietzsche feels, should even tempt us in the opposite direction: toward a recognition of the endless variety of interpretive possibilities: "I should think that today we are at least far from the ridiculous immodesty that would be involved in decreeing from our corner that perspectives are permitted only from this corner. Rather has the world become 'infinite' for us all over again, inasmuch as we cannot reject the possibility that it may include infinite interpretations" (GS 374).[54]
Nietzsche thus pledges "to take leave of all faith and every wish for certainty" (GS 347), to have done with "a will to truth [ . . . ] that ultimately prefer[s] even a handful of 'certainty' to a whole carload of beautiful possibilities" (BGE 10). Leaving the land behind, he sets out
[54] Nehamas, "Immanent and Transcendent Perspectivism," 475ff., and David Hoy, "Nietzsche, Hume, and the Genealogical Method," in Nietzsche as Affirmative Thinker, ed. Yirmiyahu Yovel (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986), 24ff., have raised legitimate concerns about the claims of this section of The Gay Science . Nehamas focuses on the ways in which this section seems to sanction a sort of "species solipsism," insofar as "our corner" is meant to refer to "the human intellect" and the possibility of "infinite interpretations" to the possibility of "other kinds of intellects and perspectives" to which "the world" would appear fundamentally different. Hoy focuses on the ways in which this section seems to commit Nietzsche to a problematic metaphysical ontology about which Nietzsche claims knowledge while at the same time arguing that it is unavailable to us. These readings are persuasive and point to real problems in Nietzsche's language, if not his conception. However, as both Nehamas and Hoy go on to argue, Nietzsche elsewhere sanctions a different view of perspectivism, according to which there exist multiple, equally legitimate interpretive frameworks, to each of which we have access in principle and none of which is reducible to another. While acknowledging the aforementioned problems with the language of this section, I cite a portion of it above in support of this latter version of perspectivism.
onto the dangerous, open seas of interpretation in search of a new kind of knowledge (see GS 124, 283, 289, 343; BGE 23).
1.6.2—
Dogmatism, Pluralism, Certainty, and "Intellectual Conscience"
The "intellectual conscience" thus consists neither in the will to truth as utility nor in the will to truth as correspondence. How, then, are we to characterize this elusive kernel of Nietzschean inquiry? We have already gone some way toward answering this question. We have discovered, for instance, that the "intellectual conscience" is relentlessly antidogmatic, antireductionist, antifoundationalist, and ever in search of new interpretations. Given such a characterization, however, the "intellectual conscience" appears to endorse a relativism that bears little resemblance to what we would usually consider "intellectual integrity" or concern for "truth." Yet Nietzsche aims to show that the actual conditions of our existence and the actual process of our inquiry necessitate such a view and that such inquiry results in "truths" that, though never absolute or ultimate, deliver all that we actually need from truth and, in any case, all we can ever have of it.
In the famous preface to Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche likens truth to a woman who will not allow herself to be won by any dogmatic suitor. This assessment of the dogmatist is reiterated in The Antichrist, where Nietzsche writes: "Not to see many things, to be impartial at no point, to be party through and through, to have a strict and necessary perspective in all questions of value—this alone makes it possible for this kind of being to exist at all. But with this they are the opposite, the antagonists, of truthfulness—of truth" (A 54).[55]
Thus, it is precisely a concern for "truth" that inspires the vigilant antidogmatism and antireductionism of the "intellectual conscience." An examination of these negative traits will perhaps give us a clearer sense of both the "intellectual conscience" and its "truth."
Indeed, Nietzsche primarily characterizes the "intellectual conscience" in such oppositional terms. Wherever the notion appears, we
[55] Cf. BGE 43: "Are these coming philosophers new friends of truth? That is probable enough, for all philosophers so far have loved their truths. But they will certainly not be dogmatists." See also BT SC: 1, SC: 5, for an argument to the effect that the dogmatism of science and morality is contrary to "truth" and "life."
are told that it involves "mistrust," "skepticism," "suspicion," "severity," "hardness," "evil," "scrutiny," "caution," and "questioning" with regard to all "faiths," "convictions," and "presuppositions" (see HH 631, 633, 635; GS 2, 4, 113, 293, 319, 344, 346, 357; Z: 3 "On Old and New Tablets"; BGE 25, 34, 39, 209–10, 212, 230; GM III:24; A 12–13, 47, 50, 54; WP 452). Yet we should be clear that this is not a call for "presuppositionless" inquiry; because, as we have seen, Nietzsche denies that any such thing is possible. "There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as science 'without presuppositions,'" he writes; "the thought of such a thing is unthinkable"; because "a philosophy, a 'faith,' must always first be there to give science a direction, a meaning, a limit, a method, a right to exist" (GM III: 24; cf. GS 344). Elsewhere he writes that "'contemplation without interest'" is "a nonsensical absurdity," because it demands "that we should think of an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking" (GM III: 12). He then concludes, "There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective 'knowing'; and the more affects we allow to speak about a thing [eine Sache ], the more eyes, different eyes we can use to observe a thing, the more complete will our 'concept' of this thing, our 'objectivity,' be" (GM III: 12).
Here we witness an interesting transformation. Instead of the skeptical relativism that might seem to result from such a perspectival thesis, Nietzsche tells us that "knowledge" and "objectivity" are still possible, provided that we understand them differently. Rather than conceiving of "knowledge" and "objectivity" as "contemplation without interest," Nietzsche proposes that we understand them as "the ability to have one's For and Against under control and to engage and disengage them, so that one knows how to employ a variety of perspectives and affective interpretations in the service of knowledge" (GM III:12).
With this, we begin to see the cognitive value of Nietzsche's interpretive pluralism.[56] It is the role of the "intellectual conscience" relentlessly to question the "faiths," "convictions," and "presuppositions" of any particular evaluative or interpretive framework. Such questioning of presuppositions surely presupposes something against which to measure individual interpretations. Having rejected the notion of a presup-
[56] See also Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 181–94, for a valuable discussion of Nietzsche's "interpretive pluralism."
positionless standpoint, Nietzsche maintains that interpretations can only be measured against other interpretations and perspectives.[57] A proliferation of such interpretations, he suggests, will not only provide us with many different ways to construe the world but will also give us multiple criteria against which to measure any given interpretation. In Nietzsche's usage, then, "honesty," "intellectual conscience," and "intellectual integrity" are not only compatible with the necessarily perspectival character of all knowledge; they even require such a condition.[58] For they involve relationships among perspectives, namely the constant weighing and measuring of interpretations against one another—of existing interpretations against other existing interpretations, of new interpretations against old interpretations, and old interpretations against new interpretations. Refusing unquestioningly to endorse the dominant interpretations, no matter how "useful" or "necessary" they appear to be, the "intellectual conscience" constantly affirms the "evil" instincts that question existing frameworks and experiment with new or forgotten ones:
The strongest and most evil spirits have so far done the most to advance humanity: again and again they have rekindled the passions that were going to sleep—all ordered society puts the passions to sleep—and they reawakened again and again the sense of comparison, of contradiction, of the pleasure in what is new, daring, untried; they compelled man to pit opinion against opinion, model against model . (GS 4, my emphasis; cf. GS 34)
This weighing and measuring of interpretations against one another serves a number of critical and heuristic purposes. First, it demonstrates the partiality of any one interpretation or perspective. It thus prevents
[57] A similar sort of epistemological relativism has more recently been articulated by W. V. Quine ("Ontological Relativity," in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays [New York: Columbia University Press, 1969], 50), who writes, "The relativistic thesis to which we have come is this, to repeat: it makes no sense to say what the objects of a theory are, beyond saying how to interpret or reinterpret that theory in another."This position has also been developed by Nelson Goodman, e.g., "The Way the World Is," in Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), and Ways of Worldmaking; Hilary Putnam, e.g., "Realism and Reason," Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 50 (1977): 483–98, and Reason, Truth, and History (London: Cambridge University Press, 1981), chap. 3; and Rorty, e.g., "Inquiry as Recontextualization: An Anti-Dualist Account of Interpretation," in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), differences between these philosophers notwithstanding.
[58] Thus, the "antinomy" Jean Granier sees in Nietzsche's commitment to both perspectivism and philological probity turns out to be no antinomy at all. See Granier, "Perspectivism and Interpretation," 197–99.
any interpretation from taking itself to be uniquely correct and opens it up to critique and scrutiny from without. Second, this procedure calls attention to the rules of formation of interpretations and the different sets of these that govern different interpretations, thus highlighting the decisions in favor of one or more of the many criteria that compete for satisfaction in the composition of any interpretation. Thus, entrenchment is weighed against innovation; habit against novelty; simplicity, coherence, utility, and explanatory power against comprehensiveness and precise description, and so on. Third—and highly important for Nietzsche—a consideration of the dominant interpretations of an individual or group produces a whole symptomatology and genealogy of the dispositions and values that motivate these choices, revealing the affirmative or negative, healthy or sickly, active or reactive, noble or base states of being that underlie decisions in favor of a particular interpretation or set of interpretations.[59] Last, such recognition of the plurality of interpretations and their irreducibility to a single base reveals what Nietzsche calls "the whole marvelous uncertainty and interpretive multiplicity of existence" (GS 2) and thus affirms the world of becoming, change, and semblance (see GS 373; WP 600).
This construal of the "intellectual conscience" as a reciprocal calibration of interpretations also allows us to account for Nietzsche's apparently contradictory remarks concerning "the demand for certainty." In Gay Science §2, Nietzsche writes that one who has intellectual integrity will "account the desire for certainty [Verlangen nach Gewissheit] as his inmost craving and deepest distress—as that which separates the higher human beings from the lower." Yet in §347 of the same text, he argues that "that impetuous desire for certainty [Verlangen nach Gewissheit] that today discharges itself in scientific-positivistic form" betrays an "instinct of weakness " and "disease of the will ." There are
[59] It should be noted that this procedure is not, for Nietzsche, a simple calculus but a complex symptomatology. Thus, for instance, while Plato is criticized for his hatred of becoming and semblance, he is praised for his "sharpened senses" and his "noble resistance to obvious sense evidence"; while Christianity is criticized for its repression of the active impulses, it is praised for its development of subtlety, depth, and cunning; while science is criticized for its residual metaphysics, it is praised for its development of skepticism, mistrust, and critical acumen; and while art and artists generally receive the highest praise from Nietzsche, he also argues that—in the case of Wagner, for instance—the artistic enterprise can be motivated by and can harbor the most objectionable metaphysical-moral dispositions and values. On this symptomatology, see Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), chap. 2; Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, 127ff.; and Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 171ff.
clearly two different conceptions of "certainty" at work here. The latter type, as we have seen, consists in the desire for an indubitable ground, for a final determination of "the way the world is." Such a desire is reprehensible to Nietzsche in that it wishes to deny the necessarily perspectival character of all knowledge and the "interpretive multiplicity of existence" in favor of some otherworldly standpoint and some simple, unchanging world. The "desire for certainty" affirmed in §2, however, is something else entirely. There Nietzsche makes clear that he has in mind simply the requirement that, in coming to rest on a particular interpretation, one has taken alternatives into account and has made explicit to oneself the reasons for, and the consequences of, one's decision. In this sense, the will to "certainty" is directed against those who tolerate "slack feelings in [their] faith and judgments," those who do not "consider it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without first having given themselves an account of the most certain reasons for and against" (GS 2; cf. BGE 5). Against the blind acceptance of one's judgments and values, it asks that one scrutinize them to determine precisely why one holds on to them (see GS 33 5; HH 630).[60] And such scrutiny, as we have seen, can only come from serious consideration of counterinterpretations. Rather than sanctioning the desire for truth as correspondence, then, the "desire for certainty" that Nietzsche considers so central to the "intellectual conscience" achieves its force only within an interpretive pluralism that refuses to grant the ultimacy of any particular world-picture. It is not a demand that the world be rendered "the way it really is" but rather a demand for "honesty" regarding the presuppositions, inclusions, exclusions, aims, and goals that motivate any given perspective.[61]
[60] In his note to GS 347, Walter Kaufmann makes a similar point.
[61] Both Hoy, "Philosophy as Rigorous Philology?" 180, and Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation, 222, have rightly noted that Nietzsche's interpretive pluralism bears a certain resemblance to the "principle of proliferation" and "pluralistic methodology" more recently advocated by Paul Feyerabend in Against Method (London: Verso, 1978). Yet both Hoy and Schrift go on to criticize Feyerabend's slogan, "anything goes," as endorsing a problematic relativism. But I think Feyerabend is close to Nietzsche here, too. First, the relativism or pluralism advocated by both Nietzsche and Feyerabend is primarily methodological rather than substantive . (Feyerabend explicitly advocates the adoption of "a pluralistic methodology " [Against Method, 30].) That is, it does not claim that every individual interpretation is as good as any other but rather that no interpretation is final and that every interpretation must be rigorously tested from the point of view of other interpretations (p. 30). While both Nietzsche and Feyerabend grant that there will always be more than one valid interpretation (i.e., in different domains, given different interests and goals, etc.), neither argues that every interpretation is valid. (Both, for instance, reject theological interpretations; and, while Feyerabend rejects antidemo-cratic interpretations, Nietzsche rejects democratic ones). Second, neither Nietzsche nor Feyerabend advocates relativism or antidogmatism for its own sake. Rather, for both, relativism and pluralism is endorsed because of its heuristic and critical value. (Feyerabend, for instance, puts interpretive pluralism in the service of "progress" [23 and passim] and "objective knowledge" [46]). I have argued above (and continue to argue below) that Nietzsche advocates a perspectival pluralism "in the service of knowledge" and "objectivity" (GM III:12, my emphasis). Such too is the aim of Feyerabend's pluralism. "Knowledge so conceived," he writes, "is not a series of self-consistent theories that converges towards an ideal view; it is not a gradual approach to the truth. It is rather an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible (and perhaps even incommensurable) alternatives, each single theory, each fairy tale, each myth that is part of the collection forcing the others into greater articulation [my emphasis] and all of them contributing via this process of competition, to the development of our consciousness [my emphasis] [ . . . ] Variety of opinion is necessary for objective knowledge " (Against Method, 30, 46).
1.6.3—
"Intellectual Conscience," Truth, and Method
We now have a better sense of what the "intellectual conscience" is, for Nietzsche. One important issue, however, remains outstanding. We know that the "intellectual conscience" is concerned with truth; but we still do not know precisely what truth is, for Nietzsche. To answer this question, I want to return to a remark made above. At the outset of this discussion, I noted that every major theory of truth has been attributed to Nietzsche by one commentator or another, while some commentators have argued that Nietzsche neither provides nor is interested in providing any theory of truth at all. I went on to suggest that each of these views is, in some respect, correct. We are now in a position to see why this is so.
We have seen that Nietzsche rejects the notion that truth is simply utility of belief. Yet, clearly, he does not reject pragmatic criteria entirely. There is no such thing as "contemplation without interest," he claims; and "to eliminate the will altogether" would be "to castrate the intellect" (GM III:12). That is to say, truth is relative to our interests and goals—not, perhaps, to any particular interest, but certainly to the interests of inquiry in general. Truth is the answer to our questions; it is what fulfills our epistemological projects and satisfies our will to know. The truth matters to us; it makes a difference . At least in part, it is what allows us to predict or manage the world in which we find ourselves. That said, it is still not the case that every expedient belief must be counted as true. There remain truths that are useless, trivial, inexpedient, or even dangerous and beliefs that might be useful but are nevertheless false.
Nietzsche's attitude toward the criterion of coherence is similarly
equivocal. While the coherence theory of truth does not figure explicitly in his texts, the criterion of coherence is nevertheless at work in Nietzsche's discussions of epistemological issues. He notoriously rejects the notions of "facts in themselves" and "things in themselves," arguing that there are "facts" and "things" only within the context of an interpretation or from the point of view of a particular perspective (see GM II:12, III:12, III:24; WP 481, 553–69). That is to say, what is known is so only insofar as it is part of a system or epistemological framework; and what is true is so only insofar as it "coheres" with the other terms of that system or framework. Furthermore, Nietzsche often remarks that new discoveries necessarily take place against the background of our previous knowledge and that they are accorded a place within our system of beliefs only once they have accommodated themselves to that system or once that system has modified itself to accommodate them (see GS 57, 114, 355; BGE 230; TI "Errors" 5; WP 499–501). Nonetheless, Nietzsche argues that some interpretations (e.g., moral and metaphysical ones) are false regardless of their coherence or systematicity while other highly systematic interpretations (e.g., those of logic and mathematics) are too skeletal and abstract to be considered unequivocally true. Moreover, he argues that the previous knowledge that grounds our current system of beliefs is no final guarantor of truth, because systems of belief often include central tenets that are later shown to be false or founded on narrow prejudice.
Even with regard to the correspondence theory of truth Nietzsche's attitude is not unequivocal. He frequently rejects the notion that truth consists in the correspondence between thought or language and a pregiven world. There are no "bare facts" or "pre-given things," he argues; there are "facts" only within the context of some interpretation. Nevertheless, one might justly say that, within a given interpretation, or relative to a particular description, one speaks truly when one speaks of the things and facts countenanced by that interpretation or description and falsely when one speaks otherwise.[62] Thus, from the viewpoint of everyday, practical discourse, we have no trouble judging the truth or falsity of statements like "it is raining" by observing whether or not it is, "in
[62] Thus Nietzsche writes, in "On Truth and Lies," (p. 81) that, within the context of a system of valid designations, "the liar" is one "who misuses fixed conventions by means of arbitrary substitutions or even reversals of names." Schacht, Nietzsche . 60–71, discusses in further detail how Nietzsche seems to sanction this sort of internal, or "discourse-relative," correspondence conception of truth.
fact," raining.[63] Nevertheless, on a broader and more theoretical level, Nietzsche follows many contemporary philosophers in rejecting the correspondence theory of truth.
Nietzsche's ambivalent relationship to each of these major theories of truth is just the reason why I think some commentators have been right to argue that "Nietzsche is not ultimately interested in (theories of) truth."[64] In the end, neither utility, coherence, correspondence, nor any other single criterion serves, for Nietzsche, as the determinant of truth. Rather, the truth of a statement or belief is the more or less stable result of its having been relativized to a particular theory or interpretation that itself has been found viable according to at least some of the most rigorous criteria of justification available.[65] There are many such criteria, and no interpretation will fulfill all of them. Different criteria will be considered appropriate to different domains of knowledge and inquiry; and competing interpretations within a particular domain will take different criteria as dominant. But neither these domains and interpretations nor these rules of inclusion and exclusion are fixed and final. Like everything else, for Nietzsche, interpretations and their "truths" become,[66] and this becoming is a matter of struggle and power—not, as some have argued, a matter of what the strongest decree, or of what gives a particular individual the greatest feeling of power,[67] but of what
[63] This conception of correspondence seems similar to that delineated within the semantic theory of truth and perhaps accounts for some commentators' attribution of that theory to Nietzsche. See n. 17, above.
[64] Gemes, "Nietzsche's Critique of Truth," 48. Cf. Nehamas: "Nietzsche . . . is not interested in providing a theory of truth" (Nietzsche: Life as Literature, 55).
[65] Here, Nietzsche is in agreement with Richard Rorty ("Solidarity or Objectivity?" in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 23), who writes that "there is nothing to be said about either truth or rationality apart from descriptions of the familiar procedures of justification which a given society—ours —uses in one or another area of inquiry." Note that, while Rorty is perhaps the most prominent heir to the pragmatist tradition, he does not accept the pragmatic theory of truth. Rather, following Donald Davidson, he endorses a conception of truth that makes use of various aspects of the pragmatic, coherence, and correspondence theories, but that, ultimately, endorses none of these, preferring to consider truth the result of successful inquiry and interpretation rather than something that might be measured according to a single criterion. For a discussion of Rorty and Davidson on truth, see Donald Davidson, "Afterthoughts, 1987," in Reading Rorty, ed. Alan R. Malachowski (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). Cf. also Samuel C. Wheeler, "True Figures: Metaphor, Social Relations, and the Sorites," in The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture, ed. David R. Hiley et al. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).
[66] See HH 2: "But everything has become: there are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths. Consequently what is needed from now on is historical philosophizing, and with it the virtue of modesty."
[67] See Grimm, Nietzsche's Theory of Knowledge, 17ff.
rules of formation and criteria of justification prevail or hold sway in a particular discourse at a specific cultural and historical moment.[68]
Nietzsche is not interested in providing a theory of truth, then, because truth is not something that admits of final determination by a fixed set of criteria. Truth is the fleeting calm between battles within a war that has no preordained or final victor. What does interest Nietzsche, however, is ensuring that the struggle continue and that inquiry not come to an end with the enforced peace of dogmatism. Toward that end, he seeks to proliferate and sharpen the weapons to be used in this battle. Those weapons, Nietzsche tells us, are "methods."[69] He writes:
Truth, that is to say, the scientific method, was grasped and promoted by those who divined in it a weapon of war—an instrument of destruction . (WP 457)[70]
[W ]e ourselves, we free spirits, are nothing less than a "revaluation of all values," an incarnate declaration of war and triumph over all the old conceptions of "true" and "untrue." The most valuable insights are developed last; but the most valuable insights are the methods. All the methods, all the presuppositions of our current scientificity, were opposed for thousands of years with the most profound contempt. [ . . . ] We have had the whole pathos of mankind against us—their conception of what truth ought to be, of what the service of the truth ought to be: every "thou shalt" has hitherto been aimed against us. Our objectives, our practice, our quiet, cautious, mistrustful manner—all these were considered utterly unworthy and contemptible. (A 13; cf. WP 469)
All the presuppositions for a scholarly culture, all the scientific methods, were already there [in the ancient world]; the great, the incomparable art of reading well had already been established—that presupposition for the tradition of culture, for the unity of science. [ . . . ] Everything essential had been found, so that the work could be begun: the methods, one must say it ten times, are what is essential, also what is most difficult, also what is for the
[68] In BGE 211, Nietzsche speaks of "former positings of value, creations of value which have become dominant and are for a time called 'truths'." See also WP 552, cited above, and BGE 210.
[69] For more on this, see Jaspers, Nietzsche, 172ff.
[70] Cf. WP 455: "The methods of truth were not invented from motives of truth, but from motives of power, of wanting to be superior." It should be said that Nietzsche goes on to say, "But that is a prejudice: a sign that truth is not involved at all." He thus seems to endorse a pure will to truth against the notion of truth as motivated by considerations of power. Yet this contradicts so many of his texts on truth (from TL to GS 344 and GM III:23–28), which generally argue that the notion of "disinterested truth" is absurd and impossible. I suggest that what Nietzsche condemns is not the notion that the will to truth is a will to power but that the obsession with power can make one a "fanatic" and thus can "prolong [ . . . ] the dominion of antiscientific methods." See HH 629–38 for Nietzsche's affirmation of the "struggle" and "conflict" that drive the will to truth.
longest time opposed by habits and laziness. What we today have again conquered with immeasurable self-mastery [ . . . ]—the free eye before reality, the cautious hand, patience and seriousness in the smallest matters, the whole integrity in knowledge—that had already been there once before! (A 59)
In these passages, Nietzsche lauds "scientific methods" and argues that they constitute a "declaration of war and triumph" against the faiths and convictions of metaphysics, theology, and morality (see also HH 629–38). This triumph, however, does not lie in securing some truth that was covered over by the adversaries of scientific method; rather, it lies in the latter's "integrity in knowledge," its attempt to satisfy all our cognitive demands. What is "essential" is not the result of scientific inquiry but its methods, which are praised for their "quiet, cautious, mistrustful manner," for their scrutiny of faiths and convictions in the service of knowledge. Indeed, in Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche writes: "[T]he pathos that one has the truth now counts for very little in comparison with that other, gentler and less noisy pathos of seeking truth that never wearies of learning and examining anew . . . for the scientific spirit rests upon an insight into method, and if every method were lost all the results of science together would not suffice to prevent a restoration of superstition and nonsense" (633, 635, my emphasis).
But this praise of "method," then, is nothing but a reiteration of Nietzsche's praise of the "intellectual conscience." Here as well as there, Nietzsche advocates the creation of a multiplicity of tests to determine the value of values and systems of belief.[71] Against the "habits and laziness" manifested in the dogmatic notion that truth is simply to be found, Nietzsche argues that "the spirit of all severe, of all profoundly inclined, spirits teaches the reverse . At every step one has to wrestle for truth" (A 50, latter emphasis mine). Recalling his discussion of the Greek agon, which never allows or admits a final victor (HC ), Nietzsche encourages a notion of inquiry as perpetual struggle, in which truth exists only while the victor is uncontested.[72] Thus, in a section from Daybreak entitled
[71] See HH 637: "Opinions grow out of passions; inertia of the spirit lets them stiffen into convictions .—He, however, whose spirit is free and restlessly alive can prevent this stiffening through continual change. [ . . . W]e advance from opinion to opinion, through one party after another, as noble traitors to all things that can in any way be betrayed—and yet we feel no sense of guilt." Cf. GS 295.
[72] Or, as another writer has recently put it: "truth is the momentary balance of power in a many-sided war among various guerrilla bands" (Wheeler, "True Figures," 217). This Nietzschean conception of truth and inquiry as a perpetual "agonistics" has been advocated by Michel Foucault, "Truth and Power," trans. Colin Gordon, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. by Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 144 and passim; and Jean-François Lyotard, ThePostmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 10 and passim . Without reference to martial metaphors, Jean-Luc Nancy offers another characterization of the point I want to make here. He writes ("'Our Probity!'" 72) that Nietzsche "turns this Redlichkeit into a strange probity that would in some way precede the truth of which it ought to be the guarantor or the witness, and which would precede or defer indefinitely the reference of its truthfulness."
"To What Extent the Thinker Loves His Enemy," Nietzsche writes: "Never keep back or bury in silence that which can be thought against your thoughts! Give it praise! It is among the foremost requirements of honesty of thought. Every day you must conduct your campaign also against yourself. A victory and a conquered fortress are no longer your concern, your concern is truth—but your defeat is no longer your concern, either!" (370).[73]
Finally, with this, we have perhaps also unraveled the aphorism that heads Nietzsche's examination of truth and the ascetic ideal in the Genealogy of Morals: "Unconcerned, mocking, violent—thus wisdom wants us: she is a woman and always loves only a warrior." Having spurned the dogmatist, truth and wisdom find their proper suitors in the warrior, who despises peace and settles for no final victory (see also Z:1 "On War and Warriors").
1.7—
Art as Successor to Science
We can now return to and complete Nietzsche's genealogy of European thought. Where we left off, Nietzsche had described the self-overcoming of metaphysics and theology in science and then the self-overcoming of science itself. This last event finally accomplished "the death of God," for it signaled the end of the metaphysical-theological conception of truth as an otherworldly ideal—as "divine"—and ushered in a "revaluation of truth." Yet, as I remarked above, if Nietzsche's genealogy is a story of sunrise and sunset, it is one that covers more than a single day. At the end of the metaphysical day, Nietzsche offers a forecast of the day to come. Having outlined the rudiments of Nietzsche's "revaluation
[73] Cf. GS 283, in which Nietzsche looks forward to an "age that will carry heroism into the search for knowledge and that will wage wars for the sake of ideas and their consequences"; and GS 285, in which Nietzsche tells the postmetaphysical thinker: "You will never pray again, never adore again, never again rest in endless trust; you do not permit yourself to stop before any ultimate wisdom [ . . . ]; no resting place is open any longer to your heart, where it needs to find and no longer seek; you resist any ultimate peace; you will the eternal recurrence of war and peace." Cf. also HH 638: "He who has attained only some degree of freedom of mind cannot feel other than as a wanderer on the earth—though not as a wanderer to a final destination: for this destination does not exist."
of truth," we are now in a position to present that forecast, with which his genealogy ends.
Again, this genealogy is impelled by a constant process of self-over-coming, the gradual accumulation and exacerbation of tensions that eventually lead to a takeover by an element that had thus far been subordinate. The changes it describes are not radical breaks but significant reconfigurations that nonetheless maintain much of the old order in the new.[74] Thus science comes into existence through a "translation and sublimation" of the father confessor's demand for truth at any price (see GS 357; GM III:27); and thus, too, does science's successor retain something of science itself.
Metaphysics and theology are overcome through an internal tension (the demand for faith vs. the requirement of truth-telling); and such, too, is the fate of science. As we have seen, Nietzsche criticizes science for its residual metaphysics—its refusal to question the absolute value of truth and its attempt to discover a "true world" of "facts" that disregards all becoming, seeming, perspective, and interpretation. Yet he also praises science for its development of a contrary drive that ultimately clashes with and overwhelms the desire for unconditional truth. This triumphant drive manifests itself in science's relentless "mistrust," "suspicion," "scrutiny," and "questioning" of all faiths, convictions, and presuppositions—a tendency that leads not to the valorization of presuppositionless inquiry but to the proliferation of interpretations and "methods" with which to test any given interpretation. This movement is succinctly summarized in two texts from 1888. In an unpublished note, Nietzsche writes, "It is not the victory of science that distinguishes our nineteenth century, but the victory of scientific method over science" (WP 466); and, in The Antichrist, "The most valuable insights are discovered last; but the most valuable insights are the methods " (13). That is, the greatest legacy of science is not its ends or results, its discovery of truths, but its means or methods, its questioning of all truths and its construction of alternative frameworks within which the world can be viewed differently.
Yet science is not ultimately the discourse that most fully affirms this
[74] As Gilles Deleuze (Nietzsche and Philosophy, 5) puts it, "a new force can only appear and appropriate an object by first of all putting on the mask of the forces which are already in possession of the object." Deleuze refers to Nietzsche's discussion, in GM III: 10, of the way in which philosophy established itself only by taking into itself central features of religious asceticism.
project. Indeed, according to Nietzsche, a thoroughgoing movement in this direction would lead to the self-overcoming of science and its passage into another discourse—that of art . Hence, in the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche writes:
Art —to say it in advance, for I shall some day return to this subject at greater length—art, in which precisely the lie is sanctified and the will to deception has a good conscience, is much more fundamentally opposed to the ascetic ideal than is science: this was instinctively sensed by Plato, the greatest enemy of art Europe has yet produced. Plato versus Homer: that is the complete, the genuine antagonism—there the sincerest advocate of the "beyond," the great slanderer of life; here the instinctive deifier, the golden nature. (III:25)
Taken in the broadest sense, art (or, the aesthetic)[75] affirms everything to which Nietzsche's genealogy has directed us. Against the otherworldly claims of metaphysics and theology, art affirms this-worldly sensuousness and materiality. It counteracts the ascetic demand for desensualization and extirpation of the passions by indulging the senses and passions and encouraging their multiplication and cultivation.[76] Yet, contrary to the scientific hypertrophy of the receptive faculties, art also affirms the active powers of creation and transformation. Within the aesthetic, discovery and creation go hand in hand: every act of sensation is also a construction of the world according to a particular perspective and interpretation (see GS 57, 114; WP 500, 505, 520). Indeed, Nietzsche maintains that a denial of perspective and interpretation would mean the denial of sensuality itself and, by extension, an ascetic denial of life (see GM III:24).
[75] Mark Warren, Nietzsche and Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 179, rightly states that "Nietzsche understands art not as a set of artifacts and works, but rather as an archetype of practice; he is interested in the process more than the products." To this one might add: more than the products and works of the artist, Nietzsche is interested in the artist's values and affirmations, specifically, the affirmation of appearance, perspective, and interpretation. This is what I focus on here.
[76] Nietzsche's notion of the aesthetic no doubt draws upon the original Greek sense of aisthesis (sense perception). See WP 820: "In the main, I agree more with the artists than with any philosopher hitherto: they have not lost the scent of life, they have loved the things of 'this world'—they have loved their senses. To strive for 'desensualization': that seems to me a misunderstanding or an illness or a cure, where it is not merely a hypocrisy or self-deception. I desire for myself and for all who live, may live, without being tormented by a puritanical conscience, an ever-greater spiritualization and multiplication of the senses; indeed, we should be grateful to the senses for their subtlety, plenitude and power and offer them in return the best we have in the way of spirit [ . . . ]: it is a sign that one has turned out well when, like Goethe, one clings with ever-greater pleasure and warmth to the 'things of this world.'" See also WP 800, 809–10.
This brings us to what is perhaps most important about art for Nietzsche: its affirmation of appearance, semblance, perspective, and interpretation and, consequently, its affirmation of life—"for all of life rests upon semblance, art, deception, points of view, and the necessity of perspectives and error" (BT SC: 5; cf. GS 54; BGE 2, 34). Once again, this is not an unqualified rejection of truth and reality in favor of falsehood and lies. Nietzsche's use of the terms "lie," "deception," and "error" is clearly polemical, directed against Platonists and positivists who search for absolute truth and for whom art is at best a diversion and at worst a seduction to untruth. Against this view, Nietzsche asserts that
there would be no life at all if not on the basis of perspective estimates and appearances; and if, with the virtuous enthusiasm and clumsiness of some philosophers, one wanted to abolish the "apparent world" altogether—well, supposing you could do that, at least nothing would be left of your "truth" either. Indeed, what forces us at all to suppose that there is an essential opposition of "true" and "false"? Is it not sufficient to assume degrees of appearentness and, as it were, lighter and darker shadows and shades of appearance—different valeurs [values], to use the language of painters? (BGE 34)
The aesthetic analogy is important, here (as is the move from a moral to an aesthetic conception of "value"). Nietzsche points out that we are inextricably bound to perspective and interpretation and that the world presents itself to us as a kaleidoscopic array of appearances. This is instinctively realized and affirmed by the artist, who acknowledges the impossibility of capturing the "interpretive multiplicity of existence" within a single work and is content to construct reality from within a particular perspective and style, which inevitably requires a focus or emphasis on certain aspects and a deemphasis or omission of others.[77] Such limitation, Nietzsche remarks, is necessary for any sort of creative activity (see BGE 188). Yet, while the artist acknowledges the necessity of limitation, he or she also recognizes it as a limitation; and this recognition serves as a further impetus to activity, spurring the artist to further creation. Indeed, more so than any other discourse, the aesthetic prizes experimentation and innovation and thus affirms change and becoming. In this way, too, art affirms life as an endless process of destruction and creation, becoming and overcoming. Moreover, though it is in some sense cumulative, this becoming is not teleological. The
[77] This and related aesthetic themes are nicely formulated by Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, chap. 2.
aesthetic shows little tolerance for absolute standards of style or interpretation and does not seem to sanction the notion of progress as convergence toward a final or totalizing viewpoint.[78] The history of art countenances a multiplicity of different styles and interpretations, a few of which may be dominant at a particular moment, but none of which forever reigns supreme. It thus grants that there are "truths" but denies that there is any "Truth": "There are many kinds of eyes [ . . . ] and consequently there are many kinds of 'truths,' and consequently there is no Truth" (WP 540).
But Nietzsche is not interested in art for art's sake (see WP 298). His principle interest in art is philosophical. More specifically, he wants to encourage the development of a new type of philosopher: the artist-philosopher, an "artistic Socrates" (BT 14) who says "yes" to becoming, semblance, perspective, and interpretation and sees these as an incitement, rather than an impediment, to inquiry.[79] Such a philosopher will find in "art [ . . . ] a necessary correlative of, and supplement for science" (BT 14) and will combine the scientist's relentless questioning and search for knowledge with the artist's affirmation of appearance and search for ever-new perspectives and interpretations. Of course, this requires a new conception of truth and knowledge; and the philosopher-artist will be able to appear only after the "revaluation of truth," which, we have seen, results in a conception of truth as relative to particular interpretive frameworks and a conception of knowledge as the accumulation of a plurality of such interpretations under the administration of a practical wisdom that dispenses them appropriately.[80]
The new philosopher's goal, then, is not the discovery of absolute truth but the cultivation of a broad-based and flexible understanding through the incorporation and integration of a number of natural drives, some of them "scientific," others "aesthetic." The development of this
[78] Of course, Nietzsche himself does not hold back from asserting bold aesthetic standards. His repeated criticisms of Romanticism are a case in point. Yet those judgments are based upon how fully an artist, artistic attitude, or work affirms its aesthetic nature, that is, affirms becoming, semblance, appearance, perspective, and interpretation. Just as, for Nietzsche, the ascetic ideal constitutes a paradoxical "life against life itself," "nature against something that is also nature," "will against all willing," he sees Romantic art as a sort of "art against art." See GS 370 and GM III: 2–4.
[79] This point was tirelessly advocated by Walter Kaufmann. See, e.g., BT "Translator's Introduction," 3; Nietzsche, 395; and Kaufmann's comments in Paul de Man, "Nietzsche's Theory of Rhetoric," Symposium (Spring 1974): 48.
[80] This seems to me to be the main point of the highly important passage GM III: 12, discussed briefly above and more fully in chapter 3. Cf. BGE 212; WP 259 and 928.
scientific-aesthetic synthesis is nicely summarized in a passage from The Gay Science entitled "On the Doctrine of Poisons." Nietzsche writes:
So many things have to come together for scientific thinking to originate; and all these necessary strengths had to be invented, practiced, and cultivated separately. As long as they were still separate, however, they frequently had an altogether different effect than they do now that they are integrated into scientific thinking and hold each other in check. Their effect was that of poisons; for example, that of the impulse to doubt, to negate, to wait, to collect, to dissolve. Many hecatombs of human beings were sacrificed before these impulses learned to comprehend their coexistence and to feel that they were all functions of one organizing force within one human being. And even now the time seems remote when artistic energies and the practical wisdom of life will join with scientific thinking to form a higher organic system in relation to which scholars, physicians, artists, and legislators—as we know them at present—would have to look like paltry relics of ancient times. (113)
The development of this "synthetic human being" (WP 881, 883), Nietzsche suggests, is slow, and its realization still a long way off. Despite the fact that "God is dead," there remain many "shadows of God" (GS 108) that must still be "vanquished" before such a being and such a worldview can take root and flourish. This preparatory task Nietzsche makes his own; and it is to this that I turn in the following chapter.