We Nietzscheans
John Verdi
Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844. He went to good schools, studied hard and by the time he was 24 had been appointed professor of philology at the University of Basel. He abandoned the academic world after about ten years, and began to live here and there in France, Switzerland, and Italy, never remaining in any one place for more than a few months. His life was solitary, but not unhappy. In 1889 he suffered a complete mental collapse from which he never recovered. He died in 1900. While he flourished and was writing the books for which we remember him, virtually no one paid any attention to his work. Now it seems that everybody has something to say about Nietzsche. What Martin Heidegger wrote of him a few decades ago might still be true today, that Nietzsche is “either celebrated and imitated or reviled and exploited.”1
Nietzsche has excited and polarized people throughout the twentieth century. Even now he remains as enigmatic as Plato: we are forever uncertain what he believes and what he intends. Consequently everybody has something to say about Nietzsche, even Nietzsche. He calls himself a “godless anti-metaphysician,” a “very free spirit,” an “immoralist,” an “artist,” “one of the “more spiritual beings of this age,” “homeless,” “fearless,” “pious,” “incomprehensible.” And in Ecce Homo, his last book, he says: “I am not a man, I am dynamite…I contradict as has never been contradicted and am nonetheless the opposite of a negative spirit. I am a bringer of good tidings such as there has never been.”2
I have kept in mind while preparing this essay that some of you may have never read any Nietzsche, others may have been introduced to him only recently or haphazardly, and still others may know him all- too-well. What I have to say about Nietzsche shall focus on one of his books, his most comprehensive, coherent, and accessible book, Beyond Good and Evil, in particular on the Preface, because I believe that here at St. Johns our best public conversations usually focus on books, not on people or “issues”. The essay comes in five parts. Each of the first four parts begins with, and subsequently comments on, some of the Preface, so that by the time I have finished the last of these, you will have heard the entire Preface. In the last section of the lecture I shall suggest that Nietzsche aims in part to re-establish, re-vivify, and transmogrify an ancient tradition of spiritual exercises, going back at least to Socrates, exercises which Pierre Hadot says had as their goal “a transformation of the world,” and “a metamorphosis of our personality.”3
Part One
Supposing truth is a woman — what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have understood women badly? That the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been inept and improper methods for winning a female? What is certain is that she has not allowed herself to be won — and today every kind of dogmatism stands sad and discouraged. If it is left standing at all! For there are scoffers who assert that it has fallen, that all dogmatism lies on the ground — even more, that all dogmatism is breathing its last.4
In the first line Nietzsche alludes to Machiavelli’s remark in The Prince about fortune. Machiavelli writes:
Fortune is a woman…and one sees that she lets herself be won more by the impetuous than by those who proceed coldly. And so always, like a woman, she is a friend of the young because they are less cautious, more ferocious, and command her with more audacity.5
Machiavelli also says that “fortune shows her power where virtue (virtu) has not been put in order [so as] to resist her,” and that the prince is “prosperous who adapts his mode of proceeding to the qualities of the times” (ch. 25). Later, Nietzsche says that Machiavelli
cannot help presenting the most serious matters in a boisterous allegrissimo, perhaps not without a malicious artistic sense of the contrast he risks — long, difficult, hard, dangerous thoughts and the tempo of the gallop and the very best, most capricious humor.6
Nietzsche’s own style, which is inextricably interwoven with his thought, can often be described in just such terms. “[T]here is art in every good sentence — art that must be figured out if the sentence is to be understood!”7 Nietzsche wants us to recognize from the opening of the book a certain kinship he has with Machiavelli in both content and style.
Nietzsche continues the questioning by asking if all philosophers, at least to the extent that they have been dogmatists, have not been clumsy in courting truth and winning her heart. He implies that truth cannot be discovered by some method, as Descartes had hoped, but only won by someone able to command her. Nietzsche doesn’t tell us if all philosophers heretofore have been tactless dogmatists. He hints that they have usually taken a fruitless approach to truth, but the allusion to Machiavelli, and the description of his style, suggests that he at least was hardly a gruesome and awkward suitor. Most philosophers, however, have been too grave in their search for truth, not gay and playful enough to have gotten very far with her.
But what does Nietzsche understand by dogmatism anyway? Recall that Kant had set himself the task of criticizing dogmatism in The Critique of Pure Reason, where he characterizes it as
the presumption that it is possible to make progress with pure knowledge, according to principles, from concepts alone..,and that it is possible to do this without having first investigated in what way and by what right reason has come into possession of these concepts.8
Kant believes that when we employ concepts dogmatically — that is, to “yield strict proof from some principles a priori” — without first having made them give an account of their origin and a justification of their use, they lack the power to yield truth, but create illusion in its place. Kant and Nietzsche both challenge dogmatism as that mode of thinking which sets arbitrary limits to the questions philosophy may ask.
Nietzsche disagrees with Kant in at least two important ways. Kant believes in a class of truths which are both necessarily so and about the empirical world of experience, not merely about logic or the relationship of pure concepts to one another. These synthetic a priori truths constitute the substance of arithmetic and geometry, and also the foundations of classical mechanics, namely, Newton’s three laws of motion. The examples Kant gives are that seven plus five equals twelve, that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, and that in every transfer of motion between bodies, action and reaction must always be equal. For Nietzsche the central question of Kant’s Critique — how are synthetic judgments a priori possible? — leaves at least one “truth” unassailable and immune from question, namely, that there exist synthetic judgments which are true a priori. For Nietzsche the prior question is, Why is belief in such judgments necessary? Why must man believe them to be true? In fact, Nietzsche believes that dogmatism exists whenever a philosopher needs to resort to any kind of “given,” any truth he claims is “evident,” whether it be Descartes’s “I think,” Hume’s “impressions and ideas,” or Socrates’ belief that the search for truth will make us better people. He says,
There are still harmless self-observers who believe that there are “immediate certainties”; for example, “I think,”…as though knowledge here got hold of its object pure and naked, as “the thing in itself” without any falsification on the part of the subject or the object. But that “immediate certainty,” as well as “absolute knowledge” and the “thing in itself,” involve a contradiction in terms; we really ought to free ourselves from the seduction of words!9
The second way Nietzsche differs from Kant — and perhaps from all other philosophers before him — lies in the very value each attributes to the kind of truths dogmatists seek. For “the secret wish and hidden meaning of all dogmatic aspirations” has been that their truth is supposed to be a truth for everyone. Yet, “whatever can be common,” Nietzsche says, “always has little value.”10 And with this Nietzsche catches all of us up short, for what else can truth be if not something universal? Of course “my truth” and “your truth” can differ in trivial ways, in the sense that “my experience” can differ from yours. But Nietzsche is talking about the truths of philosophers, that is, truths about being and becoming, knowledge and ignorance, good and evil. In fact, Nietzsche worries deeply about truth, and expresses this at the beginning of Part One of Beyond Good and Evil, when he raises two astounding questions: what is the source of our will to truth? And what is the value of this will? The first question, Nietzsche says, brought him to a long halt; but it was the second question that brought him to a complete stop. “Why not rather untruth? and uncertainty? even ignorance?” These are the questions the Sphinx really put to Oedipus, the questions behind the riddle. For Socrates, the answer to both questions suggested in the Symposium and elsewhere, is that truth is intelligible and that everything intelligible is beautiful. Nietzsche, however, believes that our intellectual conscience demands that we consider other possibilities. The truth as such about life may be unintelligible; it may be ugly. He says:
Something might be true while being harmful and dangerous in the highest degree. Indeed, it might be a basic characteristic of existence that those who would know it completely would perish…The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating.11
The dogmatist’s belief in the value of truth, “truth for its own sake,” must itself be scrutinized, in order to uncover its origins, which may lie deep in the cave of human instincts and drives.
[F]or all the value that the true, the truthful, the selfless may deserve, it would still be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life might have to be ascribed to deception, selfishness and lust, [and that the] good and revered things [might be] insidiously related, tied to, and involved with these wicked, seemingly opposite things — maybe even one with them in essence.12
Having thus challenged dogmatic philosophers in the first three sentences of the Preface, Nietzsche then suggests that perhaps dogmatism has already been knocked down, that it may even be dying. So why the hoopla of the opening sentences? Well, not Nietzsche but certain “scoffers” or “ridiculers” claim that the end of dogmatism has arrived. I suspect that Nietzsche does not believe this himself for one minute. The myriad forms dogmatism takes can become clear to us only after we recognize the scope and implications of Nietzsche’s questions about the value of truth. Any activity based on a search for truth “for its own sake” is dogmatic, because it precludes raising the question, “Why seek truth?” And where questions are forbidden, dogmatism rules. In The Gay Science he puts it this way:
[w]ill to truth” does not mean “I will not allow myself to be deceived” but — [and] there is no alternative — “I will not deceive, not even myself”; and with that we stand on moral ground.,..Thus the question “Why science?” leads back to the moral problem: Why have morality at all when life, nature, history are “not moral”?13
The scoffers who think they see all dogmatism in the throes of death do not recognize what it really is or the extent of its presence. These are perhaps the skeptics Nietzsche later criticizes, who believe that their newly won “objectivity” demands that they refuse to affirm or deny. “They no longer know independence of decisions and the intrepid sense of pleasure in willing — they doubt the ‘freedom of the will’ even in their dreams.”14 Nietzsche is not one of the scoffers, and skepticism is not an adequate response to dogmatism. “[T]he worst of harbors is better than to go reeling back into a hopeless infinity of skepticism.”15
Part Two
Speaking seriously, there are good grounds for the hope that all dogmatizing in philosophy, however solemn and definitive its airs used to be, may nevertheless have been no more than a noble childishness and tyronism; and perhaps the time is very near when it will be comprehended in case after case what really has been sufficient to furnish the cornerstone for such sublime and unconditional philosophers’edifices as the dogmatists have built so far: any old popular superstition from time immemorial (like the soul superstition which, in the form of the subject and ego superstition, has not even yet ceased to do mischief); some play on words perhaps, a seduction by grammar, or an audacious generalization of very narrow, very personal, very human, all too human facts. (Preface)
Once Nietzsche rejects those critics of philosophy who have ingested the “gentle, gracious lulling poppy of skepticism,” he suggests that dogmatism might manifest merely the growing pains of philosophy, the naive attempts of a youthful beginner, full of ardor and noble ambition. When Nietzsche tells us there are grounds for this hope, he has in mind such signs as the decline of belief in Christian dogma, which he announced in The Gay Science with the pronouncement, “God is dead.”16 This decline has come about through the ever-increasing severity of the Christian demand for truthfulness, and along with it has come a growth in pessimism, that is, in the possibility of raising the very question of the value of existence. To Nietzsche these are signs that philosophy is beginning to shed its worn out dogmatic skin, one which had been needed, and had served a useful purpose, but may have outlived its time.
Nietzsche views these events as full of hope for philosophy’s future. He cares about philosophy, and it means a great deal to him that the so-called death of dogmatism not signal a death of philosophy itself, but a coming to maturity after the necessary naivete of its youth. Nietzsche’s philosopher is
the man of the most comprehensive responsibility who has the conscience for the complete development of man.17
Unlike the scholar and the scientist,
a philosopher demands of himself a judgment, a Yes or a No,…about life and the value of life.18
Nietzsche then holds out to us the further hope that soon we shall be able to see on exactly what kinds of foundations “unconditional philosophers’ edifices” have up to now been built. He first mentions “any old popular superstition,” from which he singles out what he calls “the soul superstition,” one form of which is “the subject and ego superstition.” For Nietzsche, “superstition” is not necessarily a bad word. At certain times during the development of a people, superstition is “actually a symptom of enlightenment,” a “delight in individuality,” and a “sign that the intellect is becoming more independent.”19 At those times superstitions can give rise to “individuals” who mark the “highest and most fruitful stage” of a culture. But once a superstition has outlived its usefulness, its remains, deeply embedded in the beliefs of a society, can function as a basis for the erection of colossal fictions, which Nietzsche believes need to be exposed, weakened, and dismantled.
Nietzsche’s criticism of the soul and ego superstition begins with a characteristically brief critique of “materialistic atomism” in Part One of Beyond Good and Evil, an argument which rests ostensibly on the suggestion made in the eighteenth century by Boscovich that atoms might be understood not as particles or substances, but as centers of force or fields of influence. Nietzsche compares him favorably with Copernicus, when he says that
[w]hile Copernicus has persuaded us to believe, contrary to all the senses, that the earth does not stand fast, Boscovich has taught us to abjure the belief in the last part of the earth that “stood fast” — the belief in “substance,” in “matter,” in the earth-residuum and particle-atom.
Then he goes on.
One must, however, go still further and also declare war, a remorseless war to the knife, against the “atomistic need” which still lives a dangerous afterlife where no one suspects it…[0]ne must also, first of all, give the finishing stroke to that other and more calamitous atomism which Christianity has taught best and longest, the soul atomism,
by which Nietzsche means “the belief which regards the soul as something indestructible, eternal, indivisible.” He leaves the way open to a new version of the soul-hypothesis, such as “ ‘mortal soul’ and ‘soul as subjective multiplicity’ and ‘soul as social structure of the drives and affects’.” Nietzsche then goes on to question the belief that we possess “immediate certainty” of the existence of the “self” or the “I.”
When I analyze the process that is expressed in the sentence, “I think,” I find a whole series of daring assertions that would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to prove; for example, that it is I who think, that there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being thought of as a cause, that there is an “ego,” and finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking.
It was pretty much according to the same schema that the older atomism sought, besides the operating “power,” that lump of matter in which it resides.
Nietzsche even suggests that the soul superstition supports the false distinction between “free will” and “unfree will,” or between that which is a cause of its own motion and that which is not.
When we project and mix this symbol world [of cause and effect] into things as if it existed “in itself” we act once more as we have always acted — mythologically. The “unfree will” is mythology; in real life it is only a matter of strong and weak wills.
The second kind of foundation for dogmatism which Nietzsche uncovers is language. He returns repeatedly throughout Beyond Good and Evil to the theme of the power of language to falsify, mislead, and seduce. In fact the book has begun with a joking bit of grammatical metaphysics, for part of the significance of the opening question — “Supposing truth is a woman — what then?” — turns on the fact that in German, as in the Romance languages and in Greek, the noun for “truth” is feminine. Nietzsche seems to be saying, lets see what we can do with grammar, what we can spin out from an accident of language. English provides no simple way of capturing this subtlety, an example of Nietzsche’s own “capricious humor.”
But grammatical jokes are deep, as Wittgenstein said. The falsifying power of language, and the philosophers responsibility to recognize it and make use of it, lie near the heart of Nietzsche’s concerns in Beyond Good and Evil. In section 20 he writes:
The strange family resemblance of all Indian, Greek, and German philosophizing is explained easily enough. Where there is affinity of languages, it cannot fail, owing to the common philosophy of grammar — I mean, owing to the unconscious domination and guidance by similar grammatical functions — that everything is prepared at the outset for a similar development and sequence of philosophical systems.
Later, in section 34, he asks even more trenchantly:
What forces us at all to suppose that there is an essential opposition of “true” and “false”?…Why couldn’t the world that concerns us — be a fiction? And if somebody asked, “but to a fiction there surely belongs an author?” — couldn’t one answer simply: why? Doesn’t this “belongs” perhaps belong to the fiction, too? Is it not permitted to be a bit ironical about the subject no less than the predicate and object? Shouldn’t philosophers be permitted to rise above faith in grammar?
Even what he refers to as the “fundamental faith of the metaphysicians in opposite values” rests on the awkwardness of language which “will continue to talk of opposites where there are only degrees and many subtleties of gradation.”
In a short and unfinished early essay, entitled On Truth and Lying in a Nonmoral Sense, Nietzsche argues that not only does language not adequately represent reality, but also that only through our collective forgetfulness of the origin of truth and falsehood are we led to imagine that language does have this power. Nietzsche suggests that the concept of truth originated in a social agreement to end the “war of each against all,” which established “the first laws of truth.” The fact is that “the creator of language…only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors.”20 Language, therefore, is rhetoric, because it “conveys an attitude or opinion, a partial view rather than an essential knowledge of the thing” (R, xiii). Concepts are formed through equating what is essentially unequal, through seeing the individual as a representative of a kind rather than in its full particularity, which would be closer to our actual experience. Concepts simplify experience and therefore falsify it.
This seems to me to be a complete reversal of what Hegel says in the section in The Phenomenology on Sense-Certainty, which is
a view of our awareness of the world according to which it is at its fullest and richest when we simply open our sense…to the world and receive whatever impressions come our way, prior to any…conceptual activity.21
Hegel argues that when the subject of sense-certainty is asked to say what he experiences, he finds his attempts to be empty. If he tries to speak of the “here” and “now” which he is experiencing, not even he himself can know what he means by “here” and “now,” and “I,” unless he means something universal, beyond the immediate place, moment, and person. For Hegel the particular is nothing other than the irrational and the untrue. Nietzsche, however, believes that the initial effort to verbalize experience and thereby bring it to consciousness constitutes the first falsification of experience, the first lie, the original sin of language. “Fundamentally, all our actions are altogether incomparably personal, unique, and infinitely individual….But as soon as we translate them into consciousness they no longer seem to be!” 21
Thus, Nietzsche does not mean to say that language “falls short” of reality, or that it could perhaps be improved to reflect reality better. No,
even our contrast between individual and species is something anthropomorphic and does not originate in the essence of things; although we should not presume to claim that this contrast does not correspond to the essence of things; that would of course be a dogmatic assertion and, as such, would be just as indemonstrable as its opposite.
What then is truth?
A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. 23
Nietzsche does not suggest that truth could be anything but a kind of agreement about words, and therefore a falsification. He himself uses every manner of grammatical and rhetorical device in his writing. But we can become less forgetful of the origin of truth, perhaps to our benefit. What he says in section 24 of Beyond Good and Evil might now seem less paradoxical than it usually does on first reading. There he writes that
only on this now solid, granite foundation of ignorance could knowledge rise so far — the will to knowledge on the foundation of a far more powerful will: the will to ignorance, to the uncertain, to the untrue! Not as its opposite, but — as its refinement!
This account of language poses serious problems for Nietzsche’s own writing. He knows that he cannot remove himself from the “nets of language” 24 except by remaining silent, which he might have done by employing a different medium for his art. But the tradition he intends to call into question has itself been established and nourished through language, and so he believes his critique must also be accomplished through words.
The third cornerstone for the grand edifices of the dogmatists has been laid by bold extensions of narrow, limited, personal human experiences. The naivete of the dogmatist allows him to create facts for all mankind from a parochialist perspective. Nietzsche writes in a section six:
Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy has been so far: namely the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir; also that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constituted the real germ of life from which the whole plant had grown.
“There are moralities,” he says in section 187,
which are meant to justify their creator before others. Other moralities are meant to calm him and lead him to be satisfied with himself….With others he wants to wreak revenge, with others conceal himself….
Of Kant in particular Nietzsche says:
Even apart from the value of such claims as “there is a categorical imperative in us,” one can still always ask: what does such a claim tell us about the man who makes it?
The answer Nietzsche puts in Kant’s mouth is, “What deserves respect in me is that I can obey — and you ought not to be different from me.”
Part Three
The philosophy of the dogmatists was, let us hope, only a promise across millennia — as astrology was in still earlier times when perhaps more labor, money, ingenuity, and patience were lavished in its service than for any real science hitherto: to astrology and its “supra-terrestrial” claims we owe the grand style of architecture in Asia and Egypt. It seems that all great things first have to bestride the earth in monstrous and frightening masks in order to inscribe themselves in the hearts of humanity with eternal demands: dogmatic philosophy was such a mask, for example, the Vedanta doctrine in Asia and Platonism in Europe. Let us not be ungrateful to it, although it must certainly be conceded that the worst, most lingering, and most dangerous of all errors so far was a dogmatists error — namely, Plato’s invention of the pure spirit and the good in itself. But now that it is overcome, now that Europe is breathing freely again after this nightmare and at least can enjoy a healthier — sleep, we, whose task is wakefulness itself, are the heirs of all that strength which has been fostered by the fight against this error. To be sure, to speak of spirit and the good as Plato did meant standing truth on her head and denying perspective, the basic condition of all life. Indeed, as a physician one might ask: “How could the most beautiful growth of antiquity, Plato, contract such a disease? Did the wicked Socrates corrupt him after ail? Could Socrates have been the corrupter of youth after all? And did he deserve his hemlock?” (Preface)
Nietzsche does not deny the greatness of dogmatic philosophy, a greatness at least as powerful as astrology, to which we owe the magnificence of the pyramids and other grand edifices throughout Asia. He implies that astrology is a mask, perhaps a mask which had to be worn by what he calls “real science,” before it could expect human beings to be equal to its demands. Dogmatic philosophy, too, he hopes, has been simply the shocking and terrifying mask philosophy has been required to wear, to allow it to make its way into the hearts of men. The teaching of the Veda in Hinduism is an example from Asia of such a disguise, while Platonism has been the European version of the mask.
Nietzsche singles Plato out from among the many dogmatic thinkers of European philosophy, because his error has been the worst and most dangerous, that is, his invention of the pure spirit and the good in itself. One might even be tempted to suggest that the sum and substance of Nietzsche’s negative teaching is that there is no pure spirit and there is no good in itself.
Is Nietzsche’s disagreement with Plato on these two important matters enough to explain why he calls Plato’s error the worst and most dangerous? Other dogmatists have held similar views: Lucretius comes to mind as a materialist who seems not to have believed in pure spirit, and as for not accepting the good in itself, I can suggest Hegel. Nietzsche says that Plato’s influence through Christianity has been enormous; this might be good reason to take aim at him. But even this seems not to be enough, especially considering with what great respect Nietzsche always viewed Plato, who possessed, he says, “the greatest strength any philosopher so far has had at his disposal” (191). Besides, Nietzsche goes on in the Preface to say that the specific form of dogmatism Plato represents has been overcome, and that Europe is once again breathing freely. But this release from the so-called Platonic nightmare only allows us a more comfortable sleep. For the heart of Nietzsche’s struggle with Plato is that in order to speak of the spirit and the good as Plato did, he had to deny perspective, which Nietzsche calls “the basic condition of all life,” and which he often couples with its correlative concept, interpretation.
Perspective, as Nietzsche understands it, is not equivalent to “point of view” in the sense that one might be able to adopt other points of view, positions from which to look at something — -say, a sculpture — but from which we might shift, to get a new take on things. All ordinary seeing through the eyes is perspective seeing in this sense, but is not what Nietzsche means by perspective.
Another more subtle view of perspective could be the experiences of Leibnizian monads. Leibniz writes in the Monadology that
because of the infinite multitude of simple substances there are, as it were, just as many different universes, which are, nevertheless, only perspectives on a single one, corresponding to the different points of of view of each monad.25
[E]ach simple substance is a perpetual, living mirror of the universe.
A monad differs from a body in that space and time are both qualities of the monad, and not extrinsic to it. That is, a monad is not in space in any usual sense,
Nietzsche sometimes sounds like Leibniz, as when he says that
[i]nsofar as the word “knowledge” has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings…. It is our needs that interpret the world. 26
Just as each monad reflects God from a unique perspective, so, too, we might think, we interpret the world each from our own unique perspective. Nietzsche’s “will to power” might be one such perspective. Perhaps some perspectives are better than others, just as some monads reflect God more fully. And maybe Nietzsche believes “will to power” is one of those better perspectives, perhaps the best one.
On either account — perspectivism as analogous to visual optics or to the spiritual optics of Leibnizian monads — perspective would itself be understood from a vantage point outside perspective. In the case of the eye, one admits the existence of objects to be seen and space in which both we and the objects co-exist. In monadic perspective, the reflections are not essentially spatial but spiritual: God is the object which the monads “view” or “reflect,” And so on this account, too, perspective in the end requires at least a viewer and a viewed. When we turn to “interpretation,” there, too, we would require a text, a scene, a clue to be interpreted by an interpreter. The number of possible perspectives and interpretations need not be limited in either account, and it is imaginable many will exist alongside one another.
Nietzsche, however, for whom perspective is “the basic condition of all life,” holds a different understanding of it, one which seems to teeter on the brink of conceptual incoherence.
It is no more than a moral prejudice that truth is worth more than mere appearance; it is even the worst proved assumption there is in the world. Let at least this much be admitted: there would be no life at all if not on the basis of perspective evaluations and appearances. 27
And in The Gay Science, he says:
How far the perspective character of existence extends or indeed whether existence has any other character than this; whether existence without interpretation, without “sense,” does not become “nonsense”; whether, on the other hand, all existence is not essentially actively engaged in interpretation — that cannot be decided even by the most industrious and most scrupulous conscientious analysis and self-examination of the intellect; for in the course of this analysis the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself in its own perspectives, and only in these. 28
The paradox that haunts this account of Nietzsche’s perspectivism can be stated thus: Nietzsche seems to be suggesting that all understanding, all knowledge, is perspectival and interpretive. But if it is, how could we know this, since the intellect would always possess only a perspectival view of its own working, not the God’s-eye or objective view that it would seem to require? That is, if the intellect creates its own world, it can never discover this, because any experience it has is one which it creates. Kant side-steps this problem by accepting as given the existence of necessary truths about experience, that is, synthetic a priori truths. These serve to remove him from the total immersion in perspective Nietzsche proposes, Kant achieves his perspectival success along the same lines as does Leibniz, that is, by a conceptual dualism which permits him to entertain the hypothesis that we create experience while not at the same time committing him to the belief that that hypothesis, too, is a product of perspective, Nietzsche’s thoroughgoing monism, if such we may call it, will not permit this because it does not admit that there is anywhere to stand — or even to imagine — outside perspectival knowledge. “Facts are precisely what there are not, only interpretations.” 29 Truth always belongs to a perspective, much as all language consists of metaphor and anthropomorphism. There can no more be a final interpretation or ultimate perspective than there can be a last style of painting or a last school of music. And just as there cannot be a painting done in all styles, or a piece of music written in all schools, there can be no perspective or interpretation which encompasses all perspectives, all interpretations. Nor can one adopt a perspective at will, for perspectives represent forms of life, and it is only through a new perspective that an old one can be seen as the simplification it was.
This truth — that truth is creative — is essentially life-giving, according to Nietzsche, because it is itself a manifestation of the will to power of all things. An interpretation imposes an order on what is essentially without order. “Interpretation is itself a means of becoming master of something.” 30 This doctrine of perspective as will to power is neither relativistic nor nihilistic: not relativistic because it does not claim that every perspective represents merely an incomplete or inadequate view of the world, as Leibniz attributes to his monads; not nihilistic because it does not claim that all interpretations are of equal value, that all are equally life-promoting. Nietzsche’s perspectivism has its roots in Heraclitus’s aphorism, panta rei, ouden menei, everything changes, nothing remains the same. The world as such possesses no character to be discovered, but only characters to be created. 31
To return to Plato: he is not alone among dogmatists in denying the perspectival nature of truth, but he is the classic case. In fact all dogmatism denies perspective. All dogmatism reserves at least one truth as untouchable, one which may not be called into question and which must therefore be considered binding on all people. The danger Nietzsche sees facing modern man is that he shall continue to sleep — peacefully now, but sleep nonetheless. Modern man is characterized especially by his belief that his freedom from Platonism and Christianity implies that he is now objective and impartial, or can be whenever he should so choose. The success of science and scholarship, and the rise of the historical sense, only serve to encourage modern man’s conviction that he is on the right track to arrive at truths about nature and man’s place in it, even without the support of pure mind, the good itself, and God. Nietzsche considers this “good conscience’’ of modern man to be merely another period of sleep, because the dogmatic center of the scientist’s and scholars pursuits has not yet been honestly confronted. Even the anti-Platonism of empirical science has at its core mathematical physics, and “mathematics has very much to do with the pure mind of Plato.’’32 In The Gay Science Nietzsche says:
it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests... 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, if nothing should prove to be divine any more unless it were error, blindness, the lie?
For Nietzsche the belief that truth has been found poses a threatening seduction, threatening because the denial of perspectivism can hinder the future development and enhancement of mankind, which, he believes, requires perpetual experimentation of the most radical and dangerous kinds, including the continual overcoming of old beliefs and ways of seeing by new ones. In The Gay Science he says that “the secret of harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is — to live dangerously!” His concern is strikingly similar to Socrates’ concern in the Phaedo. There Socrates wants to lure his friends away from the seductive nihilism of misology, the hatred of the logos, of discussion, because of its repeated failure to arrive once and for all at the truth concerning the most important things. For Nietzsche the belief that one has arrived at the truth, or at a method for finding the truth, threatens mankind as much as the misologist’s depressing belief that the truth can never be found. Both Socrates and Nietzsche, while perhaps inhabiting opposite poles with respect to what they consider the highest values for man, nevertheless stand remarkably close in their fear that discussion and exploration about the value of life might eventually die.
Part Four
But the fight against Plato or, to speak more clearly and for “the people,” the fight against the Christian- ecclesiastical pressure of millennia — for Christianity is Platonism for “the people,” — has created in Europe a magnificent tension of the spirit the like of which had never yet existed on earth: with so tense a bow we can now shoot for the most distant goals. To be sure, European man experiences this tension as need and distress; and twice already attempts have been made in the grand style to relax the bow — once by means of Jesuitism, the second time by means of the democratic enlightenment which, with the aid of freedom of the press and newspaper-reading, might indeed bring it about that the spirit would no longer experience itself so easily as a “need.” (The Germans invented gunpowder — all due respect for that! — but then they made up for it: they invented the press.) But we who are neither Jesuits nor democrats, nor even German enough, we good Europeans and free, very free spirits — we still feel it, the whole need of the spirit and the whole tension of its bow. And perhaps also the arrow, the task, and, who knows?, the goal… (Preface)
With the image of the tense bow in the first sentence Nietzsche alludes to Heraclitus, one of his heroes, and perhaps his model for Zarathustra. Heraclitus says:
They do not apprehend how being brought apart it is brought together with itself: there is a connection working in both directions, as in the bow and the lyre. 33
Nietzsche admires Heraclitus for four reasons: Heraclitus does not distinguish a physical world from a metaphysical one; he denies being for becoming; he teaches the productive power of strife and rebukes those who would seek to eliminate it; and he rejects any cardinal distinction between man and animal. 34
From the spiritual tension produced by the struggle between Christian dogmatism and its opponents has now arisen in Europe the possibility of shooting for “the most distant goals.” Christianity, unlike Platonism proper, exists for the masses. For Nietzsche this means that the struggle with it is one of noble men against “men not noble enough to see the abysmally different order of rank, chasm of rank, between man and man.” As a religion for sufferers, Christianity has “preserved too much of what ought to perish.”35
Europeans have for a long time felt this tension as a discomfort, something they would rather be without, so that they might sleep even better. Nietzsche pinpoints two attempts to slacken the bow. The first is the militant reformation of Catholicism by the Jesuits after the Council of Trent in 1563. It “focused on the priestly magic of the Eucharist…and the education of an elite loyal to throne and altar.” Nietzsche calls Jesuitism “the conscious holding on to illusion and forcibly incorporating that illusion as the basis of culture.” 36 The great opponent of this movement, not mentioned by name in the Preface, but to whom Nietzsche refers elsewhere as “the most instructive of all sacrifices to Christianity” (EH, II, 3), was Pascal.
Jesuitism has been vanquished, but the second attempt to loosen the bow continues still, and that is the democratic enlightenment, which Nietzsche calls the heir to the Christian movement. Modern democracy is
not only a form of the decay of political organization but a form of the decay, namely the diminution, of man, making him mediocre and lowering his value. 37
The Germans, who are responsible for the invention of gunpowder (according to Nietzsche) and are to be praised for this, perhaps because it is a means of enforcing orders of rank, are nonetheless to be condemned for their invention of the press, which has been perhaps the single greatest cause of the spread of the democratic movement through the dissemination of newspapers.
The danger democracy poses for the future of man, the danger of the mediocritization of man, is, as Zarathustra says, that once the last man has become dominant, “man will no longer shoot the arrow of his longing beyond man, and the string of his bow will have forgotten how to whir!… Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same.” 38 Nietzsche worries about the leveling effect of democracy because he considers man’s nature to be changeable, and that it is only through culture that man’s nature can be enhanced or diminished. The emergence of a higher humanity requires the flourishing of culture, which, he says,
has so far been the work of an aristocratic society…a society that believes in the long ladder of an order of rank and differences in value between man and man, and that needs slavery in some sense or other. 39
Democracy seeks to obliterate these distinctions and thereby to promote weakening of culture and consequently of the human species. Life simply is will to power, that is, according to 259,
essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own forms…
Nietzsche is no democrat, but rather a good European and a very free spirit. As a European he disavows nationalism. But while Europe’s democratic movement is making Europeans more similar to each other, the conditions it creates “are [also] likely in the highest degree to give birth to exceptional human beings of the most dangerous and attractive quality,” individuals whom he describes as “an essentially supra-national type of man… a type that possesses, physiologically speaking, a maximum of the art and power of adaptation as its typical distinction.” As a good European it is “the European problem” that he takes seriously, that is, the cultivation, perhaps from this group of highly adaptable individuals, “of a new caste that will rule Europe.” 40
Nietzsche also calls himself a free spirit. Not yet a new philosopher, a philosopher of the future, but nonetheless living “beyond good and evil,” the free spirit recognizes that “everything evil... serves the enhancement of the species ‘man’ as much as its opposite does.” Free spirits are
[a]t home, or at least hav[e] been guests, in many countries of the spirit; having escaped again and again from the musty agreeable nooks into which preference and prejudice, youth, origin, the accidents of people and books… have banished us. 41
The free spirit distrusts thought, is free of the prejudices of past dogmatism, and is left with only one virtue, honesty. The free spirit, Nietzsche himself, still feels the whole tension in the bow, and perhaps more than that. He may also have the arrow in his hand, the will for the task, and the vision for the goal.
This goal is the philosopher of the future. These new philosophers Nietzsche calls “attempters.” He goes on:
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. It must offend their pride, also their taste, if their truth is supposed to be a truth for every man.
The task of these philosophers is to create values.
With a creative hand they reach for the future, and all that is and has been becomes a means for them, an instrument, a hammer. Their “knowing” is creating, their creating is a legislation, their will to truth is will to power. 42
These thinkers, writers, preachers apply “the knife vivisectionally to the very virtues of their time…to know a new greatness of man.” They will be men of action and the makers of events, but only because “the greatest thoughts are the greatest events.”43 Their work will be with the creation of new interpretations, new perspectives on man, and their tool will primarily be language. Perhaps there have already been philosophers of the future, philosophers concerned with the future of man. Nietzsche seems to imply that Socrates was one, when he says that Socrates “cut ruthlessly into his own flesh, as he did into the flesh and heart of the ‘noble.’ ” Perhaps Machiavelli was another. I am very uncertain about both of these. But Nietzsche I think is one, and Beyond Good and Evil is an example in nuce of the work the new philosophers will be required to do. The subtitle of Beyond Good and Evil, “Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future,” means to remind us of Wagner, whose music was called Zukunftsmusik, future music, and whose preludes contain the motifs of the operas they introduce.
The next philosophy of the future will be post-Platonic and post-Christian, since it has been Platonism and Christianity which have provided the tension for the bowshot away from themselves. It will also be post-modern in that it will have recognized the contradiction inherent in modern man’s belief in detached objectivity. Finally, the philosophy of the future will be post-scientific, not in the sense that it will demand the abandonment of science as a human activity, but rather in that it will recognize that man cannot be advanced through science as long as science seeks primarily his ease and comfort.
In Nietzsche’s eyes the responsibility of philosophers for the future of man is enormous. The possibility exists that they will not appear, or will fail, or turn out badly. Nietzsche believes that as a species we are “still unexhausted for the greatest possibilities,” but there is no guarantee that we shall realize them.
Part Five: Spiritual Exercises
Nietzsche believes that all concepts, types, and species are fluid, continually subject to shifting and displacement. This radically Heracleitean stance, that everything changes, nothing remains the same, leads him to take another step with Heraclitus, that all of nature lies in its acts, and that there exists a perpetual interconnectedness of things. “If we affirm one single moment, we… affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things.” “To say to an individual… ‘change yourself’ means to demand that everything should change, even the past” 44
Nietzsche also believes that all knowledge requires self-knowledge first of all. In Beyond Good and Evil, 80, he writes:
A thing explained is a thing we have no further concern with. — What was on the mind of that god who counseled: “Know thyself!” Did he mean: “Cease to concern yourself! Become objective!”
Later, in 23I, he says:
One sometimes comes upon certain solutions to problems which inspire strong belief in us; perhaps one thenceforth calls them one’s “convictions.” Later — we see them only as steps to self-knowledge, sign-posts to the problem we are — rather, to the great stupidity we are, to our spiritual fate, to what is unteachable very “deep down.”
Nietzsche believes that knowledge is a creative act, and that self-knowledge is the act of becoming who we are,
human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves. To this end we must become the best learners and discoverers of everything that is lawful and necessary in the world. 45
It seems paradoxical that Nietzsche should speak of the self at all in the light of his criticism of soul-atomism and his sweeping Heracleiteanism. The resolution lies in his notion of the eternal return of the same, that is, the belief that all events and things have occurred countless times before just as they are occurring now, and shall occur again countless times to come. When he first introduces this uncanny thought in The Gay Science, in a section entitled The greatest weight, he asks how we would respond to the proposal that
“[t]his life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence”…How well-disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal? 46
And in Beyond Good and Evil, 56, he represents “the most high-spirited, alive, and world-affirming human being” as one “who wants to have what was and is repeated into all eternity, shouting insatiably da capo..to him…who makes it necessary because again and again he needs himself — and makes himself necessary.”
Nietzsche considers the eternal return his most incisive thought, but not because it is a novel or startling hypothesis about the universe. Nietzsche knew that it had been proposed before; he himself attributes it to the Pythagoreans, and a form of it can be found in Empedocles. As a proposal about the universe, it cannot be proved: by hypothesis there can be no evidence for it, since any evidence would require that there be a way to distinguish one occurrence of an event from an earlier or later one, which would violate the condition that every recurrence be exactly like every other. According to Leibniz’s principle of the identity of indiscernables, any purported recurrence identical in every respect to the initial event could not be a recurrence at all, but would be the selfsame event.
But Nietzsche asks not simply, could you believe this eternal return?, but rather, can you want it, desire it, will it? The possibility or impossibility of the eternal return as a “fact” seems less important to Nietzsche than the act of will it would take to embrace the very concept that all things might recur endlessly. But if all things are interconnected, then what I am now requires that the world have been just as it has been, with nothing out of place. For I am a peculiar confluence of events, an intersection of the activities which make up nature. To will that all might be just as it is is to affirm myself just as I am. To say “Yes” to the entire past and future is to say “Yes” to I who am in the present. This act of willing the eternal return is the act of willing myself, of becoming who I am. It is not something I achieve once and for all, but is a continuing process, a self- and world-affirmation that constitutes the continuing creation of myself and incorporation of the world.
The self which is thus ever becoming itself is then not the atomic self Nietzsche rejects early in Beyond Good and Evil. It is instead an ongoing act of will, and specifically of will to power, which in forever making the self takes into itself the past, present and future. This creation is what Nietzsche means by knowledge.
If this account of the eternal return and its connection with the self is not entirely wrong, then we now find ourselves in a position to suggest that Nietzsche is engaged in a new form of spiritual exercise. According to Pierre Hadot, spiritual exercises constituted part of an ancient tradition which considered philosophy to be a way of life, an effort at learning how to live, and not merely a search for truths or construction of systems. These exercises “correspond to a transformation of our vision of the world, and to a metamorphosis of our personality.” Stoic exercises involved investigating, reading, listening, paying attention, meditation, self-mastery, and indifference to indifferent things. Meditation, for example, attempts to control inner discourse by rendering it coherent. Epicurus, too, emphasized spiritual exercises, such as the assimilation of brief aphorisms upon which one might meditate, and the study of physics. Philosophy seen in this light is a therapeutic activity, the purpose of which is to produce and maintain health in the soul.
Hadot believes that Socratic dialogues are a kind of communal spiritual exercise, because at stake in them is not “what is being talked about, but who is doing the talking.” Socrates invites the interlocutor to “an examination of conscience,” and this requires that at every moment the interlocutor give his explicit consent. “The subject matter of the dialogue counts less than the method applied in it, and the solution of a problem has less value than the road traveled in common in order to resolve it.” For the ancients, according to Hadot, the goal of spiritual exercises is
a kind of self-formation, or paideia, which is to teach us to live, not in conformity with human prejudices and social conventions… but in conformity with the nature of man. 47
In Nietzsche’s hands spiritual exercises become the ceaseless activity of self-examination in order to create ourselves and thereby become “the poets of our lives,”
One thing is needful. — To “give style” to one’s character — a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. 48
Nietzsche says that
[t]he Greeks gradually learned to organize the chaos by following the Delphic teaching and thinking back to themselves, that is, to their real needs, and letting their pseudo-needs die out,.„This is a parable for each one of us: he must organize the chaos within him by thinking back to his real needs. 49
This activity of thought and inner discourse can have the effect of “[imposing] upon becoming the character of being,” which Nietzsche says is the “supreme will to power.”
In Nietzsche s hands spiritual exercises again assume the character of a way of life. Philosophy, “the most spiritual will to power,” thus also becomes a way to live, a continual making and re-making of the self and the world, an imposition of forms and unities on the essentially formless and chaotic. Our intellectual conscience also requires that we recognize and acknowledge the values that ground our beliefs, for every belief is determined by some value. Nietzsche believes that “the only critique of a philosophy that is possible and that proves something…[is] trying to live in accordance with it.”
The aims of philosophy thus conceived parallel those of education.
How can man know himself?…Let the youthful soul look back on life with the question: what have you truly loved up to now, what has drawn your soul aloft, what has mastered it and at the same time blessed it?… [T]hey constitute a stepladder upon which you have clambered up to yourself as you are now; for your true nature lies, not concealed deep within you, but immeasurably high above you… Your true educators…reveal to you what the true basic material of your being is. 50
The best educator offers the student no more, but no less, than the opportunity to acquire insight into his own nature.
However great the greed of my desire for knowledge may be, I still cannot take anything out of things that did not belong to me before; what belongs to others remains behind. 51
We Nietzscheans believe that no educator, not even Nietzsche, is in a position to prescribe to us how we are to make our lives unique. Zarathustra warns his followers:
go away from me and resist Zarathustra! And even better: be ashamed of of him! Perhaps he deceived you.
In the last section of Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche once again recalls Plato, perhaps his greatest teacher and deceiver. Nietzsche says:
Alas, what are you after all, my written and painted thoughts!…What things do we write and paint.,.we immortalizers of things which let themselves be written — what are the only things we are able to paint? Alas, always only what is on the verge of withering and losing its fragrance!…[O]nly birds that grew weary of flying and flew astray and now can be caught by hand — by our hand!
This reminds us of Plato’s own warning in his Seventh Letter, in which he says about what he himself has taken most seriously that
I certainly have composed no work in regard to it, nor shall I ever do so in future, for there is no way of putting it in words like other studies. Acquaintance with it must come rather after a long period of attendance on instruction in the subject itself and of close companionship, when, suddenly, like a blaze kindled by a leaping spark, it is generated in the soul and at once becomes self-sustaining.
The “weakness of the logos,” that is, the inability of language to capture the philosophical insight, is no more for Nietzsche than it is for Plato a reason to abandon the activity of philosophizing. Still, profound differences separate Plato and Nietzsche, a separation made forcefully evident by Nietzsche’s introduction of Dionysos in the penultimate section of Beyond Good and Evil, for Dionysos is a philosopher. “Gods, too, then philosophize” contrary to what Diotima tells Socrates in the Symposium (202C-D).
In closing I would like to cite a passage from Emerson, whom Nietzsche discovered while a teenager and continued to read and admire throughout his life. It comes from his essay “Circles,” and the description is one I would not hesitate to apply to Nietzsche and which, I believe, Nietzsche would not refuse Plato. Emerson writes:
The key to every man is his thoughts,…Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe or where it will end. There is not a piece of science but its flank may be turned tomorrow; there is not any literary reputation, not the so- called eternal names of fame, that may not be revised and condemned. The very hopes of man, the thoughts of his heart, the religion of nations, the manners and morals of mankind are all at [his] mercy. 52
Notes
1. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. D.F. Krell. (San Francisco: Harper, 1979) I-II, 4.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. R, J. Hollingdale. (London: Penguin Books, 1992) 16, I.
3. Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995) 82.
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1990) Preface.
5. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, trans, Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985) ch. 15.
6. Nietzsche, p, 28.
7. Ibid., p. 246.
8. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans, Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martins Press, 1965) B, xxxv.
9. Nietzsche, p. 16,
10. Ibid., p. 43.
11. Ibid., p. 39; 4.
12. Ibid., p. 2.
13. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Press, 1974) 344.
14. Ibid., p. 208,
15. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” Untimely Meditations, trans, R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) 10.
16. The Gay Science, p, 108.
17. Beyond Good and Evil, 61.
18. Ibid., 205.
19. The Gay Science, 23.
20. “On Truth and Lying in a Nonmoral Sense,” Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s, trans, Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979) 82.
21. Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975) 140–1.
22. The Gay Science, p. 354.
23. “Truth and Lie,” p. 84.
24. “The Philosopher,” in Breazeale, p. 118.
25. G.W. Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1989) 57.
26. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R, J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Press, 1968) 481.
27. Ibid., 34.
28. The Gay Science, p, 374.
29. The Will to Power, p. 481,
30. Ibid., p. 643.
31. See Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985),
32. Leo Strauss, Unpublished lecture notes for a class on Beyond Good and Evil.
33. The Presocratic Philosophers rev. ed. G.S. Kirk and J.E. Raven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957) 212.
34. Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Marianne Cowan (Chicago: Henry Regnery Press, 1962) 5–8; See also, “Uses and Disadvantages,” ix.
35. Beyond Good and Evil, 62.
36. See Lawrence Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) 33.
37. Beyond Good and Evil, 203.
38. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1966) Prologue, 5.
39. Beyond Good and Evil, 258.
40. Ibid., 242, 251.
41. Ibid, 44.
42. Ibid., 211.
43. Ibid,, 285.
44. Will to Power, 1032; Twilight of the Idols, trans, R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Books, 1990).
45. The Gay Science, 335.
46. Ibid., 341.
47. Hadot, 93, 102,
48. Gay Science, 290.
49. “Uses and Disadvantages,” 2, 10.
50. Ibid., 3.I
51. Gay Science, 242.
52. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Essays, ed. Larzer Ziff (New York: Penguin, 1982), 229–30
I would like to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities and St. John’s for having given me the opportunity to spend much of the last two academic years (1997–1999) studying Nietzsche. I’d also like to thank the members of last semester’s study group on The Gay Science for their insight, enthusiasm and good spirits, and for helping me learn how to read Nietzsche more carefully and more critically.
