Nietzsche, Truth and Transformation

Abstract

Katrina Mitcheson’s Nietzsche, Truth and Transformation is a significant contribution to Nietzsche scholarship that focuses on explicating the influence of embodied and cultural practice on Nietzsche’s conception of truth. The book’s principal question is how Nietzsche’s call for an overcoming of the ascetic ideal that permeates contemporary European cultural and moral habits is possible. Mitcheson argues that this overcoming involves a deliberate transformation of our conception of truth into a more practical understanding, and traces the possibility for this transformation through the importance of perspectivism and “will to power” for Nietzsche’s conception of truth. The core aim of the book is to show how, through Nietzsche’s philosophical analyses, the philosophical conception of truth is influenced not only by theoretical consideration, but also by culture and habit, and that these in turn are influenced by it.The book is divided into six chapters, the first three of which are devoted to an overview of Nietzsche’s conception of truth as it develops in his philosophy, along with an account of perspectivism and the drive to truth. The final three chapters expand Mitcheson’s proposed reading of truth in Nietzsche’s philosophy, providing an interpretation of will to power and the process of becoming a free spirit built on the insights of this reading.The first chapter tracks Nietzsche’s conception of truth as it changes through his early and middle work. Mitcheson’s interpretation is relatively conventional: Nietzsche’s position on truth significantly shifts from the impossibility of correspondence in the period of The Birth of Tragedy, to an insistence on the necessity of illusion and error for life in On Truth and Lies in an Extra-moral Sense, and to an emphasis on the importance of drives for truth and their influence on the subject’s habits and behaviors in Human, All Too Human and Daybreak. Mitcheson concludes that this development leads Nietzsche to an embodied understanding of truth in terms of the subject’s situated contribution to experience based on the interpretation of drives. Mitcheson’s account here is comprehensive, especially in highlighting Nietzsche’s mistrust and criticisms of metaphysical theories. However, while she traces the influence of Kant, Schopenhauer, and Lange on Nietzsche’s epistemology, similar influences are not considered for Nietzsche’s understanding of drives, where a discussion of figures like Herder or Schiller would also be warranted.Mitcheson addresses perspectivism and its implications for Nietzsche’s conception of truth in the second chapter. There she examines both the epistemological claim that truth is perspectival and the extension of this type of perspectivism to ontology, through conceiving of the world as a multiplicity of perspectives. She rejects a radical relativism about perspectival truth, pragmatist-type positions, and the idea that Nietzsche’s conception of truth is determined by power. Although otherwise cogent in criticizing these stances, her argument against the latter idea seems unconvincing. She cites both Rüdiger Grimm and Wolfgang Müller-Lauter as two commentators who defend this idea, and writes that to take such a position “is to confuse Nietzsche’s analysis of what has often been taken to be true, which is that which has maximized power for a particular perspective, or provided the only outlet of the expression of power for a weak perspective, with his own criterion for truth” (49). This criticism is persuasive if we consider power only in terms of its feeling or emotive aspects, but a more general characterization is less susceptible to this criticism. An objector might respond that if Nietzsche’s criterion of truth is power, then it is specifically the power of the greatest, fullest perspective that he advocates, contrasted with the power of weaker perspectives that Mitcheson highlights. Mitcheson does not address a response like this, but she draws on a similar intuition in arguing for her own interpretation: Nietzsche’s perspectival truth is a modest form of correspondence theory “in which what truth corresponds to is the world as it is viewed from various perspectives” (50), rather than correspondence to things in themselves. Given that perspectives will contradict each other, properly understanding the world in its totality of perspectives as truth “requires the right art of interpretation” (50)—that is, having the best, fullest interpretation, through which apparent contradictions might be resolved.The third chapter focuses on a conception of the drive to truth that is inextricably related to our practical lives, since “being a perspective itself, truth has an existence as a cultural practice and habit within us” (59). Mitcheson likewise stresses that the idea of a “real world” exists in us and our culture foremost as an ingrained habit and practice. It is not enough—but neither is it irrelevant—to theoretically recognize the incoherence of this distinction. Mitcheson here criticizes Maudemarie Clark’s treatment of the distinction in Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 112–14) as insufficient, claiming that “overcoming the idea of the ‘real world’ is not a simple question of denying its coherence” (70). The habits and prejudices associated with this distinction and the ascetic will to truth must also be overcome. However, Mitcheson also rejects the Heideggerian position that claims that the will to art “comes to be dominant in the place of the will to truth” (70). The will to truth is not to be subordinated, but overcome in its existing form through the concrete development of a new practice “that allows for the possibility of a transformation of the will to truth and its relationship to other drives” (72). Mitcheson’s approach here is admirable for how it consistently combines the theoretical considerations in Nietzsche’s philosophy with their practical conclusions, and her own reading resides in the middle of the interpretive spectrum, encompassing both existential and theoretical considerations of the conception of truth in Nietzsche’s philosophy.Chapter 4 provides a comparison between the Platonic practice of truth and Nietzsche’s alternative practice. Mitcheson argues that truth, for Plato, is a rational, dialectic activity that minimizes the role of the body. The method of dialectic involved is conducive to a form of truth practice that “assumes a fixed essence of things” (85) and “requires terms to have determinate meanings … and thus requires that the things these terms represent are themselves fully determinate” (85). For Nietzsche, Mitcheson claims, there is rather “a continuous state of becoming in which interpretations are formed and destroyed” (89). The practice of his conception of truth does not aim at an end point or ultimate closure. Rather, the aim of the practice is only to “hope to understand the process of interpretations that are subject to reinterpretation over time” (90). Fittingly, the primary methodological tool used in this understanding is genealogy, which allows us to trace the origin and operation of an interpretation throughout this process. According to Mitcheson, where once a belief or position was rejected on the grounds of, for example, theoretical contradiction, it now properly comes to be “destabilized through an appropriate use of genealogy, and more importantly, it is challenged by a new awareness of the variety of perspectives” (91). What is particularly effective in this chapter, and exemplifies her methodology, is Mitcheson’s explicit linking of an embodied practice like music with truth. Indeed, she even writes, “the warm music of the south is the music of the body and the senses and the multiple perspectives of the living world. It is required in Nietzsche’s practice of truth” (98). An analysis of truth through these direct practical examples is a particular strength of Mitcheson’s approach. Indeed, it could have been developed further, especially as it might clarify the degree to which Nietzsche’s aesthetics influences his conception of truth.The fifth chapter offers an extended interpretation of “will to power” in Nietzsche’s philosophy. Mitcheson rejects readings of will to power as a reductive psychological principle, and is more sympathetic to a nonreductive interpretation of it as an explanation of psychology, “explaining the activity of drives, without reducing them to a desire for power” (108). But her own reading is epistemologically grounded, treating will to power as a “regulative principle” (106) that must be applied to an understanding of the world. Instead of establishing will to power directly as a metaphysical thesis, Mitcheson thinks that Nietzsche offers will to power as the best holistic perspectival interpretation by applying it “case by case” (127). Although most of the cases he considers are psychological analyses of human beliefs, customs, and actions, the scope of the principle extends to life itself. Mitcheson’s interpretation is therefore structured epistemologically in its establishment and proof, but its implications tend toward the ontological. Although she maintains that will to power is an epistemological theory, her reading of will to power nonetheless resembles the structure of John Richardson’s ontological interpretation in Nietzsche’s System (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) by citing several structural features of an ontological will to power: will to power is to be considered not as singular, but as “multiple wills to power” (121), and although to treat “the character of life’s manifold perspectives as all aiming towards or intending power” (118) is to ascribe it with intentionality, will to power is not to be considered a subject, or a doer apart from its activity. Mitcheson’s interpretation of will to power is commendable because it synthesizes the fundamental intuitions of limited and extended interpretations of will to power while avoiding the criticisms of both: it combines the broad explanatory power of ontological readings like Richardson’s, or that of Richard Schacht in Nietzsche (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), with the perspectival self-awareness and criticisms of metaphysics of more limited epistemological or psychological interpretations like Clark’s.The last chapter describes the development of the “free spirit” through Nietzsche’s practice of truth. Here, Mitcheson deals with a number of issues relating to the self in Nietzsche’s conception of the free spirit. If we understand the self as a changing multiplicity of drives, then what determines that change, and how is a well-developed, coherent self possible? Mitcheson’s answer emphasizes the role of change at all points in shaping the self: “a practice is not isolated but influences a nexus of habits and drives. Hence, through the gradual alteration of some wills to power, the interrelation of these wills to power, and thus the self they make up, is altered. The locus of change is thus itself multiple and changing” (135). Later in this chapter, Mitcheson again shows how interwoven truth is with bodily practices in her description of its relation to the drives: “[t]he truths of the free spirit are the truths of a new sensualism, which they discover themselves through knowing their own body” (149). Truths are therefore not, foremost, epistemological doctrines. Rather, they are lived, embodied experiences of the perspectives or drives constituting the subject. But if there are to be free spirits, must they explicitly follow Nietzsche’s doctrines? Mitcheson denies this on the grounds that the process is much more organic: “It is not by accepting Nietzsche’s teaching that the world is will to power that a spirit becomes free, but by finding this out for themselves, understanding this and its radical implications in relation to themselves” (157). Thus, through advocating a genealogical, bodily truthfulness with oneself, Mitcheson’s reading remains consistent through to its conclusion.Mitcheson’s book is an exercise in productively combining disparate ends of the spectrum of interpretations on truth, perspectivism, and will to power in Nietzsche’s philosophy. Mitcheson excels in bringing to the forefront the direct practical and cultural consequences of Nietzsche’s conception of truth, and her argument will be rewarding for any scholar concerned with joining theory and practice. Although some of these practical and cultural consequences may not be as thoroughly developed in the book as one might have hoped, it surely highlights a task that will be an important part of future scholarship.