Nietzsche as Philosopher

Arthur Danto

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780231509381
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Hermeneutics

Few philosophers are as widely read or as widely misunderstood as Friedrich Nietzsche. When Danto's classic study was first published in 1965, many regarded Nietzsche as a brilliant but somewhat erratic thinker. Danto, however, presented a radically different picture, arguing that Nietzsche offered a systematic and coherent philosophy that anticipated many of the questions that define contemporary philosophy. Danto's clear and insightful commentaries helped canonize Nietzsche as a philosopher and continue to illuminate subtleties in Nietzsche's work as well as his immense contributions to the philosophies of science, language, and logic.

This new edition, which includes five additional essays, not only further enhances our understanding of Nietzsche's philosophy; it responds to the misunderstandings that continue to muddy his intellectual reputation. Even today, Nietzsche is seen as everything from a precursor of feminism and deconstruction to a prophetic writer and spokesperson for disgruntled teenage boys. As Danto points out in his preface, Nietzsche's writings have purportedly inspired recent acts of violence and school shootings. Danto counters these misreadings by elaborating an anti-Nietzschian philosophy from within Nietzsche's own philosophy "in the hope of disarming the rabid Nietzsche and neutralizing the vivid frightening images that have inspired sociopaths for over a century."

The essays also consider specific works by Nietzsche, including Human, All Too Human and The Genealogy of Morals, as well as the philosopher's artistic metaphysics and semantical nihilism.

Nietzsche as Philosopher

Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,

Will not stay still.*

—T.S. ELIOT

BURNT NORTON, V.

Neue Wege gehe ich, ein neue Rede kommt mir;

müde wurde ich, gleich allen Schaffenden, der alten Zungen.

Nicht will mein Geist mehr auf abgelaufnen Sohlen wandeln.

—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

ALSO SPRACH ZARATHUSTRA, II, i.

* From “Burnt Norton” in Four Quartets, copyright, 1943, by T.S. Eliot.

Reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.

ONE

Philosophical Nihilism

I

NIETZSCHE’S books give the appearance of having been assembled rather than composed. They are made up, in the main, of short, pointed aphorisms, and of essays seldom more than a few pages long; each volume is more like a treasury of the author’s selections than like a book in its own right. Any given aphorism or essay might as easily have been placed in one volume as in another without much affecting the unity or structure of either. And the books themselves, except for their chronological ordering, do not exhibit any special structure as a corpus. No one of them presupposes an acquaintance with any other. Although there undoubtedly was a development in Nietzsche’s thought and in his style, his writings may be read in pretty much any order, without this greatly impeding the comprehension of his ideas. The vast, disordered mass of his posthumous writings was shaped into volumes, and given a name, by his sister Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who was the self-appointed executrix of his literary estate. Yet there is little, if any, internal evidence that they were put together by hands other than his, and it would be difficult even for a close reader to tell the difference between those works he saw through the press and those pieced together by his editors. Exceptions must be made in the case of The Birth of Tragedy, perhaps, and of Thus Spake Zarathustra, for the former exhibits a conventional unity and develops a main thesis, while the latter acquires a certain external structure by having each segment pose as a homiletic uttered by Zarathustra. In neither book is there an ordered development, however, or a direction of argument or presentation. They may be entered at any point.

The thoughts expressed in these essays and aphorisms have the same disjointed appearance as do their literary embodiments. Taken individually, they are bright and penetrating—“full of thorns and secret spices”¹—but read in any number, they tend to cloy and to repeat one another, with much the same barbs being flung, over and over, at much the same targets. The first glimpse of the sea, the first sound of the surf, can intoxicate and quicken the spirits, but this feeling dissipates when the experience is prolonged; and waves, which after all resemble one another to a striking degree, soon became indistinguishable, and lose their identity to us in some general flux and monotonous roar. One soon becomes fatigued with Nietzsche as a writer, as one might with a landscape of diamonds which end by dimming one another’s brilliance. With no structure to sustain and direct the reader’s mind, the books, once entered, must soon be set down, and one’s experience with them is either of isolated illuminations that do not connect with one another or of a blur of light and noise.

The aphorisms first impress the reader as commentaries upon and jibes against contemporary morality, politics, culture, religion, and literature by a jaundiced, irritated, destructive, and unforgiving person—a clever crank with a certain abused literary gift and a long list of private peeves, more the sort of person who writes letters to the editor than a constructive thinker. They would strike the casual reader as infused with a certain conventional profundity and an amateur, erratic kind of learning: philosophers, religious figures, historical episodes, literary works, musical compositions are mentioned, a few words are said about them, and the subject quickly changes. One has the sense of dealing with a self-taught eccentric, hardly a college professor, or a scholar trained in the exacting discipline of German philology, or, for that matter, a philosopher in any save the most perfunctory sense of the term. Those fine and subtle distinctions, the circumspect marshaling of argument, the cautious and qualified inferences which are the hallmarks of professional philosophical writing are conspicuously absent. Nor does one hear that dispassionate, austere tone that philosophers affect. There is, instead, the shrill, carping, at times almost hysterical, voice of the chronic malcontent and pamphleteer.

Nietzsche’s writings, for the most part, make no heavy demands on his readers’ intelligence or learning. The points appear clear and direct, the targets large and obvious, and the language is lucid if inflamed. They have been taken up joyfully by an audience led to believe that philosophy is difficult, but who find, through Nietzsche’s accessibility, that either philosophy is easier than they had thought or they are cleverer than they had believed. It is perhaps for the same reason that philosophers have been reluctant to count Nietzsche as one of themselves. Reference is made, here and there, to darker and more puzzling doctrines: the doctrine of Eternal Recurrence, of Amor Fati, of the Superman, the Will-to-Power, the Apollinian and Dionysiac phases of art. Here, perhaps, Nietzsche speaks as a philosopher in a somewhat narrower sense. But these doctrines do not give the sense of fitting together in any systematic and coherent way, nor do they, either individually or as a group, fall readily under one or another of the convenient and unavoidable headings with which we identify philosophical ideas. They do not seem to be solutions to what we would acknowledge as philosophical problems. If, indeed, Nietzsche’s philosophy is to be found here, then that philosophy appears as a conjunction of disparate teachings, once again an assembly rather than a construction, composed of idiosyncratic speculations, unsupported, ill-digested, and unfit for location within that context of philosophical analyzing in which the philosophical critic or historian feels at home. His corpus seems an odd, incongruous page in the history of official philosophy, a non sequitur inserted into the standard histories of the subject almost as a result of belonging even less obviously in other histories. Even here it is an obstacle to be gotten round rather than part of the flow of thought or a stage on a narrative way from Thales to the present. He seems to belong to philosophy faute de mieux. But then Nietzsche felt that he had made a clean break with official philosophy; if it is true that he hardly fits with the subject he so often impugned, so much the worse, he would have said, for philosophy. If there is an irony, it is that he is considered part of the history of what he hoped to destroy.

For his philosophy there seems, not surprisingly, to be no ready name like Idealism or Realism or even Existentialism. At times he spoke of his philosophy as Nihilism, a title which, in view of what I have said about his books and style and thought, seems almost bitterly suitable, suggesting negativity and emptiness. If, however, we have any wish to understand him, we must divest his Nihilism of both these connotations and come to see it as a positive and, after all, a respectable philosophical teaching. I shall take Nihilism as the central concept in his philosophy, and through it I shall try to show the connections, altogether systematic, among those exotic doctrines that otherwise loom so blankly out of the surrounding aphorisms and frantic obiter dicta. I shall even endeavor to show that these obiter dicta are neither the surface nor the substance of what he had to say, but rather illustrations and applications of certain general principles to particular cases. Finally, I hope to locate these general principles in the main philosophical tradition, as proposed answers to the same problems that have occupied the best attention of philosophers throughout the ages.

II

There exists no place in which this system—as I shall prematurely regard it—appears in Nietzsche’s writings. This is due, in part, to his singular lack of architectonic talent, a failing shown not only in his philosophical writings but also in his musical compositions. Nietzsche had a certain flair for improvisation at the piano and he had a high regard for himself as a composer. He shares with Rousseau the distinction of having a place in the history of both philosophy and musical composition. But, according to one critic, his musical works show, as a chief defect, “the lack of any real harmonic definition or melodic continuity despite the recurring motifs.”^* His fugues “after brave beginnings … soon degenerate into simpler textures, and there are numerous violations of the canons of part writing without compelling reason.”† Even in a late and ambitious work, “short motifs dominate, and with the total absence of a more spacious melody or a compelling logical structure, the pieces never gain sufficient momentum to become convincing.”^* These critical judgments on his music might apostrophize his literary productions as well. There is nothing in them of that organizing intellect, that architectonic feeling for structure which Kant’s writings, for example, exhibit to an almost supererogatory degree. They are, indeed, like improvisations on marginal philosophical themes, abrupt impromptus.

Quite apart from this incapacity, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the system itself was never fully explicit even in his own awareness; or, if it was so, this would have been toward the end of his productive period when he was engaged in other projects, not knowing that he would not have the time and clarity to write it down. In a late letter to Georg Brandes—the first scholar to lecture on Nietzsche’s thought—written in what seems to have been an exceptionally sunny period in his life, Nietzsche says that he has enjoyed, for an entire week, a few hours of energy each day which enabled him

to see my entire conception from top to bottom, with the immense complex of problems lying, as it were, spread out beneath me, in clear outline and relief. This demands a maximum of power which I scarcely any longer hoped were mine. It all hangs together, for years it had all been on the right track, one builds one’s philosophy like a beaver, one is necessary without knowing it.²

Few writers in philosophy, and certainly few great ones, built up their systems scrap by scrap, as Nietzsche’s metaphor perhaps correctly suggests that he did. A philosophical system does not ordinarily grow by accretion. Yet it may be possible for a philosophical thinker to analyze topically, and in a piecemeal fashion, for a period of time without realizing that the topics are connected and the solutions, without his knowing it, support and even require one another. He will then have eked out a system undeclared to himself, unless, as Nietzsche suggests, a synoptic moment is granted him during which the unity of his thought becomes revealed. He might then discover, as though spectator to his own activities, what he had been up to all along, there having been an unrecognized systematic necessity between statement and statement which he had not heretofore discerned. It does not follow, of course, from the fact that he was unconscious of creating a system that he was creating a system unconsciously, that the system itself lay, as we have come sometimes to think of these matters, in the writer’s unconsciousness, hidden in the subterranean recesses of the creative mind, revealing itself only at the last. Rather, I believe, we can account for these achievements by appealing to two distinct facts.

The first is the systematic nature of philosophy itself. In the character of the philosophical discipline, there is no such thing as an isolated solution to an isolated problem. The problems of philosophy are so interconnected that the philosopher cannot solve, or start to solve, one of them without implicitly committing himself to solutions for all the rest. In a genuine sense, every philosophical problem must be solved at once. He may work piecemeal at isolated problems only insofar as he accepts, if only tacitly, a system within which to conduct his inquiries. However, if from the beginning he offers what proves to be a novel answer in philosophy, this will introduce, as it were, distortions throughout his conceptual scheme, and these tensions must sooner or later be felt by any sensitive mind. Nietzsche’s writings were taken up with philosophical problems. It is difficult to determine the order in which he addressed these problems. And his structural incapacities made it difficult for him to think protractedly or to hold a problem in his mind until it yielded to a solution. The fact remains however, that philosophy as such is architectonic, and imposes an external regimen upon its least systematic practitioners, so philosophers are systematic through the nature of their enterprise. One finds this exemplified repeatedly in pre-Socratic philosophy.

The reader who is familiar with the grand outlines of an author’s thought may turn to his juvenilia and discover there an amazing portentousness. He will encounter phrases and ideas anticipating themes in the mature works which, had they never been written, would have left these juvenilia without any interest whatsoever. Indeed, we should perhaps never have found in them what, having the later corpus, we are so impressed to learn were already present in the youthful mind. This is no less so with Nietzsche. In his writings from the early 1870s we come upon ideas which echo throughout his later work, almost as though they were all contained here. In fact, it is the late works which echo in these earlier ones. There is doubtless a continuity in any writer’s thought, but in part the continuity is to be attributed to his readers, who look back to the early writings with the late ones in mind. They see them as the author could not have seen them when he wrote them, for he could not have known his own unwritten volumes. There is a unity in a man’s life if only in the sense that we cannot think of a life as other than unified.

This brings us to the second fact. We are apt to attribute to an author’s unconscious what is in fact our own knowledge, which he could not have been conscious of because it has to do with facts which lay not in the depths of his mind but in the future. Had his later writings been different, we should perhaps have been...