The Challenge of Nietzsche

How to Approach His Thought

Jeremy Fortier

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780226679426
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most widely read authors in the world, from the time of his death to the present—as well as one of the most controversial. He has been celebrated as a theorist of individual creativity and self-care but also condemned as an advocate of antimodern politics and hierarchical communalism. Rather than treating these approaches as mutually exclusive, Jeremy Fortier contends that we ought instead to understand Nietzsche's complex legacy as the consequence of a self-conscious and artful tension woven into the fabric of his books. The Challenge of Nietzsche uses Nietzsche as a guide to Nietzsche, highlighting the fact that Nietzsche equipped his writings with retrospective self-commentaries and an autobiographical apparatus that clarify how he understood his development as an author, thinker, and human being. Fortier shows that Nietzsche used his writings to establish two major character types, the Free Spirit and Zarathustra, who represent two different approaches to the conduct and understanding of life: one that strives to be as independent and critical of the world as possible, and one that engages with, cares for, and aims to change the world. Nietzsche developed these characters at different moments of his life, in order to confront from contrasting perspectives such elemental experiences as the drive to independence, the feeling of love, and the assessment of one's overall health or well-being. Understanding the tension between the Free Spirit and Zarathustra takes readers to the heart of what Nietzsche identified as the tensions central to his life, and to all human life.

· 1 ·

Independence

CHAPTER ONE

The Path to Philosophy in On the Genealogy of Morality and Human, All Too Human

On the Genealogy of Morality provides an obvious point of entry into Nietzsche’s thought. The text is commonly assigned in university courses designed to introduce students to the subjects of philosophy, or political theory, or ethics. In that context, the Genealogy offers a number of concepts, formulas, or doctrines for the student to digest: the contrast between “master morality” and “slave morality”; the problem of “ressentiment”; the notion of “perspectivism”; the method of “genealogy,” and so forth. All these theories can be summarized and memorized by a student, and then compared with the theories of other philosophers. At more advanced levels of scholarship, the theories can be analyzed with greater precision, refined or modified in certain respects, and applied to a variety of puzzles that occupy the scholar’s interest.1

The Genealogy is, therefore, Nietzsche’s most user-friendly book: it is accessible to the student, while offering grist for the scholarly mill. And Nietzsche would surely have approved of his book being put to use for diverse purposes, given that the work was conceived as part of a broader effort to make his thought more accessible to the public. It is part of a sequence of writings that he characterized as “fish-hooks” designed to draw readers to his thought, and he advertised the Genealogy in particular as “[a] sequel to my last book, Beyond Good and Evil, which it is meant to supplement and clarify.”2 The Genealogy’s comparatively straightforward, easily digestible appearance is no accident, but it is also, in its way, as partial and misleading as the bait offered on a hook proves to be to a fish. For the Genealogy does something more than present the reader with Nietzsche’s thoughts on morality (for example, the contrast between “master morality” and “slave morality”); it also provokes the reader to reflect on the conditions that produced those thoughts, and which play an important role in shaping all philosophic reflection. This self-reflexive aspect of the Genealogy will be my focus in what follows.

On the reading that I propose, the Genealogy presents what has been aptly characterized as an “autobiography of philosophy”:3 it commences with a preface stressing personal, seemingly idiosyncratic details about the process through which Nietzsche came to write the book, and uses those details to point toward generalizable features of the activity of philosophy as such. It thereby exemplifies a movement from the “particular” to the “universal,” only the universal features of philosophy that Nietzsche stresses here are not those to be found in the book’s famous theories, but in the process that produced them. It is this “theory” of philosophy—a theory of how philosophy attempts, and often fails, to ground itself—whose importance is impressed on the reader by the preface to the work. And the preface also shows the reader how to interpret the Genealogy (along with the rest of Nietzsche’s oeuvre) within the context of that problem—the point here being not that the inquiry into morality is replaced by autobiography, but that the autobiographical turn, the turn to self-knowledge, is necessary to complete any inquiry into morality.

Nietzsche’s preface to the Genealogy is, then, something much more significant than simply an introduction to the three essays that make up the main part of the text. The preface also clarifies how Nietzsche understood the development of his thought over the course of his career, and it ties that development to a series of broader (universal) claims about the nature of (and the obstacles to) philosophic inquiry. For all these reasons, the preface to the Genealogy serves as an introduction to the whole of Nietzsche’s thought.

THE GENEALOGY’S BEGINNING: THE PROBLEM OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE

Nietzsche broaches the problem of the ability of philosophy to adequately ground itself (to show that it is not an arbitrary or perverse activity) with the very first words of the Genealogy: “We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers.” The last words of section 1 of the preface reiterate the point: “with respect to ourselves we are not ‘knowers.’” The category of “we knowers” is a broad one, but surely includes potential philosophers.4 Indeed, these remarks echo and extend a theme that is emphasized in Beyond Good and Evil (especially in its preface and its first chapter, “On the Prejudices of the Philosophers”): namely, that the quest for knowledge (and a life dedicated to it) will appear discreditable if it is not accompanied by self-knowledge. Thus, at the outset of both the Genealogy of Morality and Beyond Good and Evil, the reader is presented with the possibility that philosophy is basically pretentious: a sophisticated gloss distracting from the philosopher’s fundamental state of self-confusion.5

But at the conclusion of section 1 of the preface of the Genealogy, Nietzsche indicates that he holds a key to this problem: “We remain strange to ourselves out of necessity, we do not understand ourselves, we must mistake ourselves, for us the maxim reads for all eternity, ‘everyone is furthest from himself’—with respect to ourselves we are not ‘knowers.’” This stress on “necessity”—on the fact that “we” (that is, all would-be knowers) must, now and forever, begin by failing to know what is closest to us, namely, ourselves—suggests that there is a structure or logic inherent to the lack of self-knowledge that can be observed in so many would-be knowers. In that case, a would-be knower’s self-misunderstanding might not reflect the futility and vanity of the quest for knowledge, but could, instead, represent a stage within that quest, which Nietzsche will help the reader to comprehend, and thereby to move beyond.

The phrasing of the first sentence of the preface supports that thought: “We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers, we ourselves to ourselves: and with good ground [or “good reason,” guten Grund].” By proclaiming that would-be knowers lack self-knowledge, but adding that this is a matter of “necessity,” of “eternity,” of mistakes that we “must” make, and for which there exists “good ground” or “good reason,” Nietzsche entices the reader with the prospect of learning what those grounds are—the reasons why would-be knowers necessarily fail to know themselves.

In this way, the opening of the Genealogy directs the reader to consider what the permanent, unavoidable, natural obstacles to philosophy are, particularly with regard to the challenge of acquiring self-knowledge.

THE GENEALOGY’S SECOND BEGINNING: THE PROBLEM OF MORALITY

Having opened his preface to the Genealogy with a strong statement on the problem of self-knowledge, Nietzsche abruptly, and without any explanation, shifts course in section 2 of the preface, which begins this way:

My thoughts on the origins of our moral prejudices—for that is what this polemic is about—found their first, economical, and preliminary expression in the collection of aphorisms that bears the title Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits.

The remainder of the preface elaborates on this remark, explaining how Nietzsche’s thoughts on morality were developed in the earlier tome.6

Nietzsche’s “genealogy of the Genealogy”7 runs through many details: he dates the composition of the Genealogy’s predecessor (Human All Too Human) to “the winter of 1876–7” (that is, ten years before the present volume, as Nietzsche makes plain for the reader by dating the end of the preface “July, 1887”); he lists a series of passages from that earlier text for the reader to compare with the present volume; he notes that the earlier text was developed in response to a book by his friend Paul Rée (which he notes had been published in 1877); he gives a brief account of his first essay on morality written “as a thirteen-year-old boy”; and he stresses a major turning point of his adult years, when he “confronted” his “great teacher” Schopenhauer with regard to the morality of compassion. With each anecdote Nietzsche adds a few self-critical remarks about these earlier stages in the development of his thought.

At first glance, then, the opening section of the preface could easily seem to be disconnected from everything that follows, with section 2 serving as a proper introduction, outlining the question of morality as the subject of the text without any further reference to the problem of self-knowledge.8 But section 2 of the preface implicitly bears on the problem of self-knowledge, because it maps out the path of Nietzsche’s own evolving self-awareness—pinpointing names, dates, texts, and epiphanies that stand out as landmarks along that path. Nietzsche thereby leaves one to wonder if the problem of why “we must mistake ourselves” and the question of “the origins of our moral prejudices” are somehow meant to be connected. Although Nietzsche will not explicitly connect the problems of self-knowledge and moral knowledge, I believe that a nexus between them lies at the heart of the preface.9 Let us see how that works.

THE GENEALOGY OF THE GENEALOGY: ITS ORIGINS IN HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN

Although the preface to the Genealogy does not explicitly connect the problem of self-knowledge to the problem of moral knowledge, Nietzsche does embed within the preface clues about the nature of the connection.

I have already quoted the first of those clues: namely, Nietzsche’s statement that with the Genealogy he is returning to thoughts that were initially expressed a decade prior, in Human, All Too Human. But in the context Nietzsche makes clear that this is not only a return, but also a reconsideration: first, by characterizing his earlier effort as “preliminary,” and then by adding the “hope” that his thoughts will have improved in the meantime (“let us hope that the long period in between has done them good, that they have become more mature, brighter, stronger, more perfect!”). Next he indicates that his thoughts on morality have improved, and in a specific respect.

Regarding the evolution of his thoughts on morality between Human, All Too Human and the Genealogy, Nietzsche has this to say: “in the meantime” (that is, in the decade between the two publications) he has acquired a “cheerful confidence” that his thoughts “came about not singly, not arbitrarily, not sporadically, but rather from the beginning arose from a common root, out of a basic will of knowledge from deep within, speaking ever more precisely, demanding something ever more precise.” Nietzsche’s language here is revealing. He does not say that the basic content of his thoughts on morality has changed (he possesses the same “data,” so to speak). Rather, he suggests that he has come to understand the ground of those thoughts more clearly—their necessary, and necessarily interconnected, nature (how “from the beginning” they arose “not singly, not arbitrarily,” but “from a common root”). And it was this feature of his thought that at first was not so clear to him. In this way, Nietzsche indicates that his initial investigation of morality was lacking in some measure of self-knowledge.10

Section 3 of the preface drives home the point that Nietzsche’s thought has evolved in crucial ways. Here Nietzsche states what “I almost have the right to call my a priori”: namely, a characteristic skepticism directed at morality, and which inspired his first philosophic exercise, an essay about the origin of good and evil written as a young boy. But he stresses that his youthful essay made a basic mistake: it “sought the origin of evil behind the world.” Nietzsche says that he now knows better. But when did he learn better, exactly? The argument of the Genealogy as a whole will suggest that the answer is much later than one might think: it was not until after Human, All Too Human that his thought fully matured in this respect. In other words, it took him until well into his adult career to fully understand the desires that could lead one to look beyond the world (since Free Spirits will turn out to be subject to a kind of crypto-otherworldly asceticism born of a lack of self-knowledge).

Nietzsche extends his self-criticism in section 4 of the preface, where he observes that his early efforts at treating morality in Human, All Too Human (efforts that he here describes as “clumsy”) were accompanied by “backsliding and wavering”—a characterization that contrasts with the “ever more precise” standard that he says (in section 2) he has arrived at more recently.

To tie all these points together: Nietzsche’s thoughts on morality have gone from “backsliding and wavering” (around the period of Human, All Too Human) to “ever more precision” (culminating in the Genealogy), and that precision has involved discovering their “common root” (their grounds, their necessity, their interrelationship), and thereby enhancing his self-knowledge.

That said, in section 4 of the preface Nietzsche makes his self-criticism in a manner simultaneously emphatic and elliptical: after declaring his efforts in Human, All Too Human to have been “clumsy” and full of “backsliding and wavering,” rather than elaborate the point any further, he suddenly presents a series of references to the earlier writing, which the reader is invited to compare with the present treatise.

The sequence of references that Nietzsche presents runs as follows: HH 45, 136, 96, 99; AOM 8...