Simply Nietzsche, page 9
Part IV of Z sees Zarathustra meeting characters and creatures that represent various things. There is a magician who seems to be Nietzsche’s idealization of Wagner, a man who is attaching leeches to his arm to suck away all his prejudice, two kings who are disillusioned with ordinary society, the last pope who is mourning God’s death, the man who killed God (the “ugliest” man), and a beggar who voluntarily gave up all his riches. At the same time, Zarathustra is pursued by his own shadow. He invites all whom he meets to his cave. In one way, the people he met and gathered in his cave have understood part of Zarathustra’s teaching, like, for example, the death of God. But they are not yet overmen, partly because they are followers, in this case, followers of Zarathustra himself. They are “higher” types because they are capable of breaking free of Christian meanings of human existence, but have not yet “overcome” themselves, for their valuations are still linked to the old ideal.
Various other things occur in the subsequent text, but there is an air of mockery, lightness, and expressions of joy. Zarathustra’s guests are encouraged to dance, and there is a drunken song, wherein the Eternal Return is celebrated and affirmed. Zarathustra orchestrates an “ass festival,” a Christian appropriation of a medieval pagan feast, but where the buffoonish nature of humanity is celebrated. These antics and the general levity of Part IV sets it apart from the rest of the work and can seem jarring. Some commentators, quite plausibly, see it as Nietzsche’s attempt to express the Dionysiac in his philosophy—the wild, celebratory side of life. But, at least to my taste, the whole thing reads somewhat false and falls flat; fortunately, Nietzsche’s subsequent writings are more serious in tone.
Truth, Selves and the Truth about Selves
Beyond Good and Evil
I mentioned in Chapter 3 that the fifth book of The Gay Science seems to fit in best with the two works published after Thus Spoke Zarathustra, namely Beyond Good and Evil (BGE) and On the Genealogy of Morality (GM). This is true in a pedestrian sense, namely, that the fifth book was published a year after BGE and in the same year as GM. But, more importantly, some of its key content fits well with BGE and GM. It opens with a restatement of the Death of God, but one that is redolent with possibility and optimism. The next section of the book—to which we shall return in the context of discussing the GM—examines the relationship between the high value placed on truth on the one hand, and Christian morality on the other, a key theme inGM’s third essay. The following section takes morality as a problem and, among other things, suggests that a history of morality is required to reassess the value of morality. This is precisely what GM offers. This list of themes from GS book 5 could continue, though I would not like the reader to go away with the impression that there is nothing in the fifth book of GS that isn’t in either BGE or GM: there is plenty that is unique to it. But I shall occasionally refer to some materials in this book in this and the next chapter.
Beyond Good and Evil
Like many of Nietzsche’s works, BGE touches on many subjects. Part 8, “Peoples and fatherlands,” discusses various conceptions about national character in insightful, and often very funny, ways (he is particularly amusing about the English). Part 4, “Epigrams and entr’actes,” is Nietzsche at his most “aphoristic” (the French “entr’actes” or “between the acts” is not, therefore, surprising). This part comprises many, often single-sentence, observations. Some, unfortunately, reflect his nastiness about women—animosity that was born of his disappointment with Lou Salomé (“Where neither love nor hate are in play, woman is a mediocre player” (BGE 115)). Some express philosophical theses: BGE 117 states that the “will to overcome an affect is, in the end, itself only the will of another, of several other, affects.” Others seem to embody practical wisdom: “Sensuality often hurries the growth of love so that the root stays weak and is easy to tear up” (BGE 120). Part 6, “We scholars,” discusses philosophy and philosophers—old, present and those of the future capable of creating values.
There is much more information in the BGE, which we do not have space to mention, let alone discuss. It is a book, as I said, that touches on almost everything. But what lies behind the title Beyond Good and Evil? As is usual with Nietzsche, things are not immediately evident from the work’s preface, its opening sections, or, indeed, from his own account of BGE in Ecce Homo. It is not really until the final part of the work—Part 9, “What is noble?”—that an answer is forthcoming to what it might mean to go “beyond good and evil.” Now, Nietzsche described himself as an “immoralist” in BGE, and because he did so, it would be easy to form the superficial impression that going “beyond good and evil” means the abandonment of morality, leaving a world without values. But it would be a total mistake to interpret going “beyond good and evil” and “immoralism” in that way. One reason for this error is the assumption that morality is a single thing (or that there is a single morality), either to be embraced or abandoned. A key motif of the central Part 5 of BGE, “On the natural history of morals,” is that we—philosophers and ordinary people—are blind to the fact that there are many types of morality, and that the one which predominates today is only one of many, even though it seems to present itself as the only possible option. As Nietzsche put in BGE 202, modern morality “stubbornly and ruthlessly declares ‘I am morality itself and nothing else is moral!’” In GM, Nietzsche will try to show that our present morality both differs from, and emerges from, another morality. Our present morality turns on a contrast between good and evil (böse), which differs from an earlier morality, which turns on a contrast between good and bad (schlecht). To go “beyond good and evil” is to go beyond the morality we now inhabit.
The good/evil and good/bad moralities are discussed in BGE 260, which will form the basis of his subsequent discussion in GM. The distinction between this contrast is closely related to another important distinction in Nietzsche, namely the distinction between “master” and “slave” moralities. Very roughly, Nietzsche argued that the morality marked by the good and bad contrast was—and is—viable. What is good is marked by fortune. A noble birth, confidence, independence, a person full of power and strength, and a set of honor relations that hold only between equals. Actions are called “good” only secondarily, things that are done by noble people. Those who live in accordance with “master” morality resemble the Overman mentioned in the previous chapter in the sense that they express a unity of purpose and relative indifference to others. They set their own goals and pursue them single-mindedly, expressing a unitary direction to their drives. The contrasting term “bad” applies to the masses of persons who are not so fortunate. The German word “schlecht” here means base or lowborn. These people are the sick, the timid, the poor, the ugly, the conquered, and the dispossessed. They cannot acquire what they want, they are weak, and not merely in the physical sense, but in the psychological one as well: they are timid, self-doubting, needing the comfort of others. The elites are the superior types, and the lowly ones are those who fail to have all the naturally good things on earth, like power, health, etc. This, to Nietzsche, was the “rank order of values” of the ancient world of the Greeks and Romans. But this morality has been displaced by a morality marked by a contrast between good and evil. What is previously thought of as bad—weakness, poverty, and so forth—is somehow interpreted as morally praiseworthy. The key concept here is that the morally good person is one who is essentially selfless—giving of himself or herself to others, not taking one’s self to be better or more valuable than others, which is the opposite of the noble who pursues goals with at the very least an indifference toward other human beings. Furthermore, the fiction of free will as being able to do otherwise is added. The “masters” are not only terrible at what they do but also terrible because they could have chosen to do otherwise. To “go beyond good and evil” is to go beyond this morality, but not to go beyond a contrast between good and bad. Human beings are essentially evaluating creatures and cannot live without values.
We shall return to this when we get to GM, where Nietzsche gave his best articulation of this contrast between two moralities. Now let us turn instead to the very beginning of BGE. The preface begins strangely: “Suppose that truth is a woman—and why not?” The first section of Part 1 asks two questions about truth, namely, why pursue the truth in the way that we do, and what is the value of this will. “Granted we will truth: why not untruth instead?” These questions open the discussion of Part 1, entitled “Of the prejudices of philosophers,” which comprises 23 sections critiquing various philosophical positions. This is the densest and most complicated sequence of writings in Nietzsche’s entire corpus. It is followed by Part 2, “The free spirit,” but the division between the two parts seem somewhat artificial because many of the topics of Part 1 are revisited in Part 2. It is impossible to convey much sense of the complications that lurk below the surface here, so I can only provide a tiny taste of its themes.
Nietzsche’s claimed that most philosophy doesn’t know how to approach the truth. When truth is supposed to be a woman, it should be understood as the idea that philosophy’s approach is dogmatic. Its investigations start with some stubborn preconceived conceptions of what the world must be like and fail to question those presuppositions. Philosophy’s advances are “clumsy” and have been “spurned,” he posited. These presuppositions are not, as philosophers pretend to themselves, timeless insights into the nature of reality, but instead a “seduction of grammar or an over-eager generalization from facts that are really very local, very personal, very human all too human.” Indeed, Nietzsche believed that philosophical systems are not the result of a disinterested pursuit of the truth, but expressions of the particular drives that the philosopher possesses. Every “great philosophy so far has been: a confession of faith on the part of its author, and a type of involuntary and unself-conscious memoir” (BGE 6). The great philosophical systems, those of Plato or Kant to choose two very famous examples, are, Nietzsche suggested, expressions of the kinds of drives and interests that constitute those individuals, and particularly the sets of drives comprising their moral outlooks. Their philosophical systems, which are purportedly objective descriptions of reality, are, in fact, conceptions of the world that best suit the moral inclinations of their inventors. Kant, for example, believed in a morality where ultimate responsibility rests on the spontaneous free choices of individuals, and his metaphysics reflected this moral belief: there is a second world where our will is free and unconstrained.
But what makes Nietzsche’s philosophy different? Why is his philosophy not merely a reflection of the “order of the rank the innermost drives of his nature are placed relative to each other” (BGE 6)? Isn’t Nietzsche’s philosophy just an expression of his own drives? Nietzsche himself was aware of this danger, and attempted to guard against it by pointing to a difference between his philosophy and the other philosophies encapsulated in the final sentence of Part 1. “[F]rom now on, psychology is again the path to the fundamental problems” (BGE 23). His approach to philosophy was not to try to build a metaphysical system, but instead to understand human beliefs and behavior, including those of philosophical system builders. This is an aspect of what I referred to in Chapter 2 as Nietzsche’s “naturalistic” philosophy. His approach is oriented around a theory of the nature of human beings, a theory built on empirical observation informed by the sciences of the day. It is part and parcel of his project to “translate humanity back into nature” (BGE 230). The metaphysical pictures of nature, and our place in nature need to be replaced. We need to “gain control of the many vain and fanciful interpretations and incidental meanings that have been scribbled and drawn over that eternal basic text of homo natura so far.” Humans have false conceptions about just what kinds of things they are, false conceptions that both philosophy and Christianity have invented and perpetuated.
Truth and Perspectives
As we have noted, Nietzsche opened the preface with a question about truth, also mentioning something he referred to as “perspectivism.” This is a term that has become strongly associated with Nietzsche, so it is an appropriate place to discuss it.
One—thoroughly mistaken—view is to say that when Nietzsche talked about “perspectives,” he meant to suggest that there is no such thing as truth. This idea has some textual backing. As I mentioned in the Preface, in an early unpublished essay, Nietzsche wrote that truth is a “mobile army of metaphors, metonyms … illusions that are no longer remembered as being illusions.” During the early part of his career, he thought our beliefs are “falsifications”—beliefs that somehow involve distortions, and so are false. He did eventually abandon this claim, and I will explain why. Nietzsche insisted that knowing is from “a perspective.” Knowing something is not the same as something being true, since there can be lots of truths we don’t know—for instance, nobody knows whether there is an odd or even number of blades of grass in the world, but there is a fact of the matter—though what we do know must be true. But what does it mean to say that all-knowing is from a perspective?
Let us begin by thinking of a visual perspective. Anything we see is seen from a particular point of view, and, because of this, one’s view of anything is only ever partial. I am sitting at my laptop, but I only see part of it. If I change my position, I adopt another perspective and see a different part of the computer. I then move again, and again, until I have a total view of it. All that seems straightforward, but Nietzsche believed everything is known or viewed from a perspective. Why? This is a little complicated, but I hope the following sketch will bring some clarity. When we know something, we are correctly representing the world to be a certain way.1 Consider a map: it is a representation of a certain area. But what do we include in that map? Well, it depends on what one’s interests or needs might be. If one is interested in camping, such a map will depict flat areas, footpaths, water features, etc. Other things that are not germane to hiking, like the location of guitar shops, for example, will be left out. If one’s interests lie in architecture, then the map would show architectural landmarks, leaving out hiking features. Thus, a map can be an accurate representation but a partial or selective one. It is a representation of something from the perspective of certain kinds of interests. If we included every interest, the map would be complete, but such a representation is impossible.
Maps are, of course, human inventions. But all creatures operate with representations. A frog, for example, can represent a fly in its environment, so it can catch it. But its set of representations—its map—will be a very limited or partial one, one geared solely to its environment. The difference between quartz and granite makes no difference to the frog, and so it is not something that is represented from the frog’s perspective. Instead, and to simplify somewhat, the frog carves up the world into “flies” and “not flies.” Human beings, too, are natural creatures—that is, of course, a central plank of Nietzsche’s naturalism—and so our representations are geared to our environment. We form a concept of fruit, for example, partly because doing so crucially contributes to our survival. That, though, is not a concept that the frog forms. All the ways in which we “carve up the world”—that is to say, organize what we experience and represent it—are from the perspective of our needs and interests.
Such thoughts are articulated in The Gay Science, and with them, the claim that our beliefs—our representations of how the world is—“falsify.” Why did Nietzsche think that they do so? Well, one might suppose that carving up the world into categories like “fruit” or “fly” doesn’t show us how the world “really is.” This will either be revealed by science or remain hidden from experience. But it is highly unlikely that how creatures geared to their local environment organize experience reflect the world as it really is. If the world is “really” a collection of atoms, then even though it is useful for us to think in terms of trees and fruit because those beliefs are helpful in survival, they are really “falsifications” because “really” there are no trees or pieces of fruit. That is just the way we organize experience. “Life is no argument,” as Nietzsche wrote in GS 121. And it is not only beliefs about fruit and trees that Nietzsche thought of as products of evolution and therefore likely to falsify. He held that this was the case even with our very fundamental concepts that figure in that vast majority of our beliefs:
Through immense periods of time, the intellect produced nothing but errors; some of them turned out to be useful and species-preserving … such erroneous articles of faith, which we passed on by inheritance, further and further, and finally became part of the basic endowment of the species, are for example: that there are enduring things; that there are identical things; that there are things, kinds of material bodies, that a thing is what it appears to be (GS 110)
Notice that this claim even spills into science. I mentioned above that we might think there are only atoms, but Nietzsche was skeptical of that claim, believing that even the concept of a “thing” is just a human construct. It is likely that none of our representations fits the world. The world is completely unknowable, and everything we think or say is a “falsification.”
Nietzsche’s later works do not, however, contain the claim that our beliefs falsify the world. He wrote straightforwardly about things being true and things being false. The most plausible reason for this as follows: Nietzsche, when he thought most of our beliefs were false, was thinking that our evolved beliefs falsify reality because of an assumed contrast with one true representation of the world, one that is free from perspective. But he came to realize that the idea of a representation of a world from no perspective (a “view from nowhere,” to use the American philosopher Thomas Nagel’s expression) is simply impossible. All representation is from a point of view. So, the “true world”—the one supposedly revealed from the view from nowhere—is a myth because there can be no such view from nowhere. Where does that leave our ordinary beliefs? Well, there is no reason to suppose they are false. It is a fact that there are trees and there is fruit. Sometimes we are wrong in a perfectly ordinary sense—I thought there was an apple, but it is really a wax replica—but there is no sense in saying that there is really no such thing as fruit, or indeed there is really no such thing as “things.” Our daily perspective reveals a world containing fruit and trees, whereas a different perspective, say one of physics, reveals a world containing atoms. These two worlds are not in conflict with each other, and both reveal truths about the very same world. In the Twilight of the Idols, in a section entitled “How the true world became a fable” Nietzsche expressed a “history of an error,” a sequence of views on the “true world.” The earlier views describe a gap between the “true world”—how it really is—and a merely “apparent” one. His Gay Science view that we falsify reality certainly counts a philosophy that embodies such a contrast. There is a “true world,” but our beliefs and thoughts, because they are perspectival, are false, and so the world we live in is just appearance. But in eliminating the idea that there is a view from nowhere revealing the “true world,” we also get rid of the idea that the world which we experience is mere appearance. Thus, if we “have abolished the real world, what world is left? The apparent world perhaps … But no! with the real world, we have also abolished the apparent one!”
