Nietzsche Claims Research Articles

On Putting the Active Back into Activism

INTRODUCTION This paper addresses a paradox: how to engage in affirmative politics, which entails the production of social horizons of hope, while at the same time doing critical theory, which means resisting the present. This is one of the issues Deleuze and Guattari discuss at length, notably in What is Philosophy?: (1) the relationship between creativity and critique. It is however a problem that has confronted all activists and critical theorists, namely how to balance the creative potential of critical thought with the necessary dose of negative criticism and oppositional consciousness. Central to this debate is the question of how to resist the present, more specifically the nastiness, violence and vulgarity of the times, while being worthy of our times, so as to engage with the present in a productively oppositional and affirmative manner. I shall return to this in the final section of my essay. There is a conceptual and a contextual side to this problem and I want to start by discussing each one, before addressing my central concern. I. THE CONTEXT The public debate today shows a decline of interest in politics, whereas discourses about ethics, religious norms and values triumph. Some master-narratives circulate, which reiterate familiar themes: one is the inevitability of capitalist market economies as the historically dominant form of human progress. (2) Another is a contemporary brand of biological essentialism, under the cover of 'the selfish gene' (3) and new evolutionary psychology. Another resonant refrain is that God is not dead. Nietzsche's claim rings hollow across the spectrum of contemporary global politics, dominated by the clash of civilizations and widespread Islam phobia. The bio-political concerns that fuel our necro-politics and the perennial warfare of our times also introduce a political economy of negative passions in our social context. Thus the affective economy expresses our actual condition: we now live in a militarised social space, under the pressure of increased enforcement of security and escalating states of emergency. The binary oppositions of the Cold War era have been replaced by the all-pervasive paranoia: the constant threat of the imminent disaster. From the environmental catastrophe to the terrorist attack, accidents are imminent and certain to materialise: it is only a question of time. In this context, mass political activism has been replaced by rituals of public collective mourning. Melancholia has become a dominant mood and a mode of relation. There is, of course, much to be mournful about, given the pathos of our global politics: our social horizon is war-ridden and death-bound. We live in a culture where religious-minded people kill in the name of 'the Right to Life' and wage war for 'Humanitarian' reasons. Depression and burn-out are major features of our societies. Psych-pharmaceutical management of the population results in widespread use of legal and illegal drugs. The narcotic sub-text of our societies is under-studied and mostly denied. Bodily vulnerability is increased by the great epidemics: some new ones, like HIV, Ebola, SARS or the bird flu; others more traditional, like TB and malaria. Health has become more than a public policy issue: it is a human rights and a national defence concern. While new age remedies and life-long coaching of all sorts proliferate, our political sensibility has taken a forensic shift: 'bare life', as Agamben argues, (4) marks the liminal grounds of probable destitution--infinite degrees of dying. At the same time European culture is obsessed with youth and longevity, as testified by the popularity of anti-ageing treatments and plastic surgery. Hal Foster (5) describes our schizoid cultural politics as 'traumatic realism'--an obsession with wounds, pain and suffering. Proliferating medical panopticons produce a global patho-graphy: (6) we go on television talk-shows to scream our pain. …

UMWERTUNG: NIETZSCHE’S “WAR-PRAXIS” AND THE PROBLEM OF YES-SAYING AND NO-SAYING IN ECCE HOMO

The concept of (Umwertung, central to Ecce bomo, is marked by discrepancies and incongruities that seem to defy philosophical comprehension. This paper focuses on the problem of Yes-saying and No-saying at the core of Umwertung. How can total affirmation be combined with radical critique, as Nietzsche claims? Nietzsche's favoured idiom of warfare (Krieg, Kampf) exhibits the incommensurability of these positions, but it also points to a deeper problem: in waging war against idealism, Nietzsche risks repeating idealism, conceived as a war to the death (Todkrieg) against other forms of life and thought. In § 2 idealist warfare is analysed more closely, and in § 3 it is contrasted with Nietzschean warfare, conceived as an agonal form of oppositional thinking that avoids repeating idealism. This model of warfare is, however, undermined by the affirmative and destructive excesses of Nietzsche's text, and §4 proposes a different approach to the problem of Yes- and No-saying. On this approach, the affirmation of reality as war or conflictual multiplicity demands 1. the adoption of antagonistic positions with destructive intent against life-negating positions (idealism), but also 2. the overcoming of every antagonistic position in favour of an 'impossible' or fictional standpoint in the relations between antagonists; this alone allows all antagonistic positions to be affirmed. This approach is proposed as a general way to make sense of the fictional qualities of Ecce bomo, its excesses and incongruities, and in §5 it is is applied as a corrective to the account of Umwertung as a comparative practice proposed by Gerd Schank (1993).

Transcendental Aspects, Ontological Commitments and Naturalistic Elements in Nietzsche's Thought

Nietzsche's views on knowledge have been interpreted in at least three incompatible ways – as transcendental, naturalistic or proto‐deconstructionist. While the first two share a commitment to the possibility of objective truth, the third reading denies this by highlighting Nietzsche's claims about the necessarily falsifying character of human knowledge (his so‐called error theory). This paper examines the ways in which his work can be construed as seeking ways of overcoming the strict opposition between naturalism and transcendental philosophy whilst fully taking into account the error theory (interpreted non‐literally, as a hyperbolic warning against uncritical forms of realism). In doing so, it clarifies the nature of Nietzsche's ontological commitments, both in the early and the later work, and shows that his relation to transcendental idealism is more subtle than is allowed by naturalistic interpreters while conversely accounting for the impossibility of conceiving the conditions of the possibility of knowledge as genuinely a priori.

Nietzsche, competition and athletic ability

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between Friedrich Nietzsche's notion of the agon (Greek for contest) and the construction of athletic ability. In ‘Homer's contest’, Nietzsche claims that the ancient Greek agon was a contest that included only the most qualified competitors battling each other for honour and victory. Nietzsche seeks to restore the agon in contemporary society. Nietzsche believes that contests have lost this agonistic meaning since they are no more than contrived competitions between underqualified opponents. I am extending the discussion to the domain of sport. If we stage an agon reminiscent of Greek antiquity, we could have a genuine competition between the most qualified athletes.

Nietzsche's Metaphysics in the Birth of Tragedy

It is often assumed that the main assertions of the Birth of Tragedy about the Apollonian, the Dionysian, and more generally the function of art, rest on an implicit core of Schopenhauerian metaphysics, which Nietzsche would later have criticised and rejected. As stated by J. Young, there is ‘fairly wide agreement that the Birth incorporates without modification Schopenhauer’s metaphysics’ (Young 2001: 26). According to him, the real core of dispute among commentators is whether Nietzsche adopts Schopenhauer’s pessimistic conclusions about the value of life, Young’s own controversial stance on this being that ‘on the crucial question of pessimism, the Schopenhauerian assessment of the worth of human existence is (. . .) endorsed’. In this paper, I shall argue that this conclusion, based on the assumption that the Birth’s metaphysics is thoroughly Schopenhauerian, must be rejected because the premise itself is unwarranted. I am aware that this is a paradoxical claim: there are many Schopenhauerian elements in the Birth, in particular the idea that the Grundstimmung of the will is pain, or that individuation is illusory. However, if one tries to read them as supporting Nietzsche’s claims about art and its redemptive power, then many difficulties and even contradictions appear. For example, if the primal affect of the world is purely pain, as in the World as Will and Representation, how can the Dionysian, which mimics it, be both painful and pleasurable? If individuation is, as in Schopenhauer’s thought, an illusion due to the principle of sufficient reason, how can the Dionysian, which lifts this illusion and reunites us with the will, be also defined as ‘an illusion spread over things’ (BT: 109)? Along the same lines, if individuation is, again in Schopenhauerian fashion, the ‘primary cause of evil’ (BT: 74), or a ‘curse’ (BT: 71), how can the Apollonian, which glorifies it, be a desirable illusion? And if human existence is absurd suffering, how can art, which tells us, both in its Apollonian and Dionysian forms, that life is worth living ‘eternally’, be truthful, as Nietzsche claims? I shall argue that the main reason for these difficulties is not really that Nietzsche’s allegedly Schopenhauerian assumptions do not support his own conclusions about art: it is that his metaphysical assumptions are extremely complex and, in fact, often of a very unschopenhauerian nature. Indeed, if we focus on the metaphysical core of the Birth, leaving temporarily aside the question of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, more tensions and contradictions appear. These are centred mostly around three issues: the nature of the will (one or divided), the status of individuation (illusory or real) and the possibility of

Editorial Foreword

Editorial Foreword Paul S. Loeb "[The Übermensch] has fallen on hard times in the recent literature," reports Alan Schrift, the editor of the proceedings of the North American Nietzsche Society. Not only have leading commentators been downgrading the importance of the Übermensch, but "a survey of the recent secondary literature would find discussions of the Übermensch lagging far behind accounts of such themes as, for example, eternal recurrence or nihilism."1 It is ironic that this should be the case, since many influential observers outside the world of Nietzsche commentary think it likely that we are now entering an era that will fulfill his famous prophecy of a posthuman future. Most prominently, the Nietzsche-phile Francis Fukuyama has declared "the recommencement of history" and argued that the contemporary biotechnology revolution may "alter human nature and thereby move us into a 'posthuman' stage of history."2 Although Fukuyama decries such a prospect (and has even served on the President's Council on Bioethics to help write its official critique),3 others such as Andy Clark, Jonathan Glover, and Gregory Stock have defended and advocated the rapidly evolving technologies of human enhancement.4 As Keith Ansell Pearson remarks in his pioneering work, Viroid Life, "The 'superman' of Nietzsche legend has become the emblem of this brave new world": Shorn of its fatal association with Nazi eugenics . . . the figure of the Übermensch is once again prominent within techno-discourses on the fate and future of evolution. These discourses speak of a new emerging "biotechnological" civilization in which technology becomes more and more biological, while biology becomes more and more technological . . .5 This seems like the right time, then, for Nietzsche scholars to revisit his concept of the Übermensch and to think about what this concept means today, especially in light of these truly twenty-first-century developments and debates. In the last thirty years, we have seen the Nietzsche community vigorously interrogate the relation of his thought to wider trends, such as the culture wars, or postmodernism, or, most recently, philosophical naturalism. But none of these trends seem as closely related to Nietzsche's distinctive philosophical contribution as the current widespread and growing conversation about our potentially posthuman future. This special issue on Nietzsche's concept of the Übermensch aims to remedy some of the neglect or outright dismissal it has suffered in the recent literature [End Page v] and thereby to take a significant step toward connecting our scholarly conversation with the outside conversation about the posthuman. Although none of the essays gathered in this issue were written with this outside conversation specifically in mind, they are all inspired by the conviction that Nietzsche did regard his concept of the Übermensch as one of his chief accomplishments, and they all proceed to ask how we should best interpret this concept today. It is no coincidence, I think, that each essay does in the end focus on one or more of the various issues that are currently at the heart of the posthuman controversy. To begin, Ansell Pearson unpacks Nietzsche's suggestion that our movement beyond the hitherto-evolved human will be enabled, as well as required, by our now-dominant passion for truth and scientific knowledge. Although this power-enhancing knowledge will of course have to concern us and our bodies, Ansell Pearson, Claudia Crawford, and I emphasize Nietzsche's lesser-known claim that this knowledge will also have to include a new physics. Both Ansell Pearson and Michael Gillespie explore Nietzsche's conviction that the human is still in flux, as well as Nietzsche's claim that the precondition of our moving beyond the human is our loss of faith in the Christian God and all the attendant metaphysics, values, and meanings. The Übermensch may thus become our new collective supergoal, but Gillespie warns that Nietzsche himself thought this would require our accepting troubling new values and political turmoil on a global scale. Jill Marsden asks the profound question whether we humans can ever truly conceptualize the übermenschlich. And she emphasizes a puzzle that Ansell Pearson, Gillespie, and I also note: however novel and transcendent and futuristic the Übermensch may seem, Nietzsche worries that it will always be haunted by our...

Kierkegaard's Seductions: The Ethics of Authorship

Kierkegaard’s Seductions:The Ethics of Authorship Daniel Berthold A man who cannot seduce men cannot save them either. Kierkegaard, Journals2 I am convinced that seldom has any author employed so much cunning, intrigue, and shrewdness to win honor and reputation in the world with a view to deceiving it, as I displayed in order to deceive it inversely in the interest of truth. Kierkegaard, PV 493 In 1843, at the age of twenty-nine, Søren Kierkegaard published Either/Or, a nearly eight-hundred page book (the first of six published in 1843) written largely during a several month visit to Berlin where Kierkegaard had ensconced himself to escape the complications of an impossible love affair. The work was published pseudonymously, "edited" by Victor Eremita, and consists of two volumes of papers discovered accidentally by Victor in the secret drawer of a desk he had bought at auction, the first volume by an aesthete ('A'), the second by an ethicist ('B,' Judge William). My concern in this article is with the last (and longest) entry of volume one, the transcription of the diary of a "Seducer." I will argue that the account of the exploits of Johannes the Seducer is in part only the pretext of the text of Either/Or, as much a disguised commentary on Kierkegaard's early experimentation with a style of "indirect communication" and the nature of [End Page 1044] seduction as a strategy of authorship as it is about the strange, troubling, and fascinating diary of a master eroticist. Faithful to Deception If, as Nietzsche claims in Beyond Good and Evil, "Every profound thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood" (Nietzsche 419), then surely Søren Kierkegaard was a truly profound thinker, for a fundamental commitment of Kierkegaard's authorship was to develop an experimental art of communication in which misunderstanding and deception play a central role. "I give you advance notice," he tells an imaginary reader in his private journal, "that there will come moments . . . when I . . . must set between ourselves the awakening of misunderstanding" (JP 1: 662). Another journal entry puts it even more bluntly: "To deceive belongs essentially to [my method of] communication; . . . and the art consists in . . . remaining faithful to . . . the deception [throughout]" (JP 1: 653). Kierkegaard's most usual explanation of his inclination toward indirection and deception is his resolve to distance himself as author from the authority of the teacher. He explains in his journal that one reason "all direct communication" makes him "uncomfortable" is that "what I have to say may not be taught" (JP 1: 646). So he remains "silent," and writes "as if I would keep the truth to myself" (JP 1: 646). This is one of the motives for his adoption of the method of pseudonymous authorship, as an aid in this project of self-removal. By being scrupulous in "never ventur[ing] to use quite directly my own 'I'" (JP 1: 656), and rather producing a whole world of "poetic 'I's" (JP 1: 650) and "poetized personalities"—his many pseudonyms (chronologically, Victor Eremita, Constantin Constantius, Johannes de Silentio, Johannes Climacus, Vigilius Haufniensis, Nicolaus Notabene, Hilarius Bookbinder, Inter et Inter, and Anti-Climacus), along with the entire cast of imaginary characters the pseudonyms themselves create—he denies the reader the comfort of locating an author who will take responsibility for their education. Kierkegaard, after all, insists that he is "only a reader" of his own works, a relationship he suggests ought to be true of all authors: we should beware of behaving "as if an author were . . . the best interpreter of his own words, or as if it could help a reader [to know] that an author had intended this or that" (CUP 225). The importance of revoking the authority of the author is one of [End Page 1045] many things Kierkegaard expresses his debt to Socrates for, "the man to whom I have been inexplicably related from my earliest years" (JSK 1291). Of course, there are differences between Socrates's and Kierkegaard's practices of the maieutic method. Most importantly, Kierkegaard says that indirect communication in the age of Christendom requires certain considerations that Socrates, living...

Sensing the Overhuman

his intriguing reflections on why he writes such good books, Nietzsche claims that one can hear (heraush?ren) in thi gs no more than what one already knows: What one has no access to through experience, one has no ears (EH Books 1). this context, he invites his readers to consider exceptional case in which a book speaks of nothing but encounters which lie outside possibility of common or even of rare experience, claiming that this is the first language for a new range of experiences: In this case simply noth ing will be heard, with acoustic allusion that where nothing is heard there is nothing_This is, in end, my average experience, and, if you like, orig inality of my experience. Nietzsche goes on to assert that failing to hear what is at stake in his work can manifest itself in two ways: either nothing is under stood and his ideas simply go unregistered or they are commuted to existing models that are wholly inappropriate. By way of illustration of latter, Nietzsche adds that word overhuman has frequently been interpreted as an idealistic type of a higher kind of human being:

Somaesthetics and Burke's Sublime

Burke is an important exception to Nietzsche's claim that philosophical aesthetics ignores physiology and the role of practical interest. Grounded on the powerful interest of survival, Burke's theory of the sublime also offers a physiological explanation of our feelings of sublimity that explicitly defines certain conditions of our nerves as the ‘efficient cause’ of such feelings. While his general account of sublimity is widely appreciated, its somatic dimension has been dismissed as hopelessly misguided. In examining Burke's views in relation to contemporary somaesthetics, cognitive psychology, and physiology, this paper shows that though Burke's somatic arguments can be criticized as overly simplistic and mechanistic, his recognition of the crucial bodily dimensions of aesthetic experience should be taken more seriously. In refining Burke's insight that bodily factors can help explain our aesthetic reactions, somaesthetics further urges that improved somatic understanding and performance can provide valuable means for enhancing our aesthetic response.

Zen After Zarathustra: The Problem of the Will in the Confrontation Between Nietzsche and Buddhism

Zen After Zarathustra:The Problem of the Will in the Confrontation Between Nietzsche and Buddhism Bret W. Davis Is Nietzsche's affirmation of the world and oneself as "the will to power—and nothing besides"1 the path to a self-overcoming of nihilism; or is it, as Heidegger contends, the "ultimate entanglement in nihilism"?2 Is Buddhism the purest expression of a "passive nihilism," as Nietzsche claims; or does it teach a radical "middle path" that twists free of both the life of the will to power and a pessimistic negation of the will to live? Does the Buddhist path go so far as to intimate a great affirmation of living otherwise than willing? From the outset, one thing does seem certain: venturing out to sail on the "open sea" (GS 343) of Nietzsche's thought, we confront Buddhism as one of the most interesting and challenging "foreign perspectives" from which to "question one's own."3 And yet, rather than let his exposure to this other tradition call into question his own philosophy of the will to power, Nietzsche himself more often used his interpretation of Buddhism as a "rhetorical instrument"4 for his critique of Christianity, crediting the former religion in the end only with the dubious honor of representing a more honest expression of a more advanced stage of nihilism. Recent studies on this theme often begin by emphasizing Nietzsche's limited knowledge, his misunderstanding, and the distortions involved in his appropriation of Buddhism. Many then go on to develop what Robert Morrison has called the "ironic affinities" between Nietzsche and a Buddhism correctly understood.5 Although Morrison and others have pursued these affinities with respect to the Theravada tradition, profounder resonances may in fact be found with the Mahayana tradition, of which Nietzsche remained unfortunately ignorant.6 Nishitani Keiji, deeply versed in and influenced by both Nietzsche's philosophy and Zen Buddhist thought, has been the major precursor in sounding out such resonances. In a book that focuses on the "self-overcoming of nihilism" in Nietzsche's thought, Nishitani writes: "Ironically, it was not in his nihilistic view of Buddhism but in such ideas as amor fati and the Dionysian as the overcoming of nihilism that Nietzsche came closest to Buddhism, and especially to Mahayana."7 Nishitani, however, in the end goes beyond marking ironic affinities and develops a "sympathetic critique" of Nietzsche from the standpoint of Zen. A few lines down from the above passage, he writes: "What is clear, [End Page 89] however, is that there is in Mahayana a standpoint that cannot yet be reached even by a [i.e., Nietzsche's] nihilism that overcomes nihilism, even though the latter may reach in that direction" (SN 185/180 tm). In pursuing both this proximity and this difference, in this essay I shall repeatedly return to Nishitani's interpretation of Nietzsche as well as to his own development of a philosophy of Zen. Nishitani's style, however, is to go with a thinker as far as he can in order to finally pass through and beyond him. When he runs up against the limits of a sympathetic interpretation, he marks these limits and then moves on. Hence, Nishitani is scarcely concerned with critically working through the details of Nietzsche's own evaluation of Buddhism; nor does he pay much attention to the cruder formulations of the will to power in Nietzsche's thought.8 If we, for our part, are to cultivate a more explicit Auseinandersetzung between Nietzsche and Buddhism, we need to step back and work through both of these challenging aspects of Nietzsche's thought more patiently. There are indeed profound points of resonance between Nietzsche and Buddhism, Zen in particular; but there are also points of genuine confrontation that call for careful elucidation and reflection.9 I shall begin to develop this Auseinandersetzung by explicating and then critically responding to Nietzsche's critique of Buddhism. Later, I shall back up and begin again by developing and then responding to a Buddhist critique of Nietzsche. Only in this manner, by working from both sides, can we flush out and pursue the more difficult questions regarding irreducible differences and ironic affinities. One...

Can there be a Nietzschean sociology?

The article explores the implications of Nietzsche's view of human history and psychology for a sociology formulated in Nietzschean terms, and argues that although the ‘will to power’ cannot explain all that Nietzsche claims for it, his sociology of sociology does pass his own test of validity. It is suggested in conclusion that on the relation of sociology to the rank ordering of values, Nietzsche is consistent where Weber is not, and vice versa.

Nietzsche on Ressentiment and Valuation

The paper examines Nietzsche's claim that valuations born out of a psychological condition he calls are objectionable. It argues for a philosophically sound construal of this type of criticism, according to which the criticism is directed at the agent who holds values out of ressentiment, rather than at those values themselves. After presenting an analysis of ressentiment, the paper examines its impact on valuation and concludes with an inquiry into Nietzsche's reasons for claiming that ressentiment valuation is corrupt. Specifically, the paper proposes that ressentiment valuation involves a form of self-deception, that such self-deception is objectionable because it undermines the integrity of the self, and that the lack of such integrity ensnares the agent in a peculiar kind of practical inconsistency. The paper ends with a brief review of the problems and prospects of this interpretation.

Is Nietzsche a political thinker?

Nietzsche claimed to be a political thinker in Ecce Homo and elsewhere. He constantly compared his thought with other political theorists, chiefly Rousseau, Kant and Mill, and he claimed to offer an alternative to the bankruptcy of Enlightenment liberalism. It is worthwhile re‐examining Nietzsche's claim to offer serious criticisms of liberal political philosophy. I shall proceed by setting out seven criteria for serious political thought: understanding of material need; procedural justification; liberty and its worth; racial, ethnic and religious difference; gender and family; justice between nations; and moral psychology. I shall argue polemically that on the first six issues Nietzsche has nothing to offer, but that on the seventh, moral psychology, he makes a profound contribution. Serious political theory, however, needs to forget about Nietzsche and turn to those thinkers he found so boring ‐ the liberal Enlightenment thinkers.

Nietzsche's Case: Philosophy as/and Literature (review)

378Philosophy and Literature Nietzsche's Case: Philosophy as/and Literature, by Bernd Magnus, Stanley Stewart, and Jean-Pierre Mileur; 284 pp. NewYork: Routledge, 1993, $52.50 cloth, $16.95 paper. This book sets out to tackle the formidable corpus of Friedrich Nietzsche from the points ofview ofboth literature and philosophy, to "bring conventionally marked 'philosophic' and 'literary' texts into conversation with one another in a way never done before" (p. 2) . I am not sure the authors are as innovative as they claim—after all, poststructural literary critics are continually straying into the textual territory once clearly marked "philosophic"—but it certainly proves to be a most fruitful enterprise with regard to Nietzsche. The authors' collaboration (Magnus is a philosopher, Stewart and Mileur are teachers of English) offers numerous insights into the vexed relationship of these disciplines, and most substantially, a provocative re-viewing of Nietzsche's eclectic work as—in effect—a complex, even tortuous allegory of writing. With this view in mind, the authors work hard to represent Nietzsche's seminal constructs—Eternal Recurrence, Will to Power, the Übermensch et al.— as so many textual strategies, occasions for the reader, in Roland Barthes's terms, to write herself into the experience of reading. This argument is elaborated through a series of provocative, detailed readings of Towards the Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of tL· Idols, and—most exhaustively—Thus Spake Zarathustra. The authors consider a number of pressing Nietzschean issues, including the narrator/speaker's relationship with his readers—"Some are born posthumously," observes Nietzsche modestly in Ecce Homo—the rhetorical tropes and ploys of his writing (chiefly, say the authors, the device of hyperbole) and—in sum—the radical kind of narrative that Nietzsche is writing. For example: in Twilight of the Idols, assert the authors, Nietzsche frustrates our deep-seated desire for narrative closure, creating instead "an alternative definition of the protagonist's place in an unfinished story which no one is writing, about characters with no specifiable or necessary traits, whose destiny cannot be known" (p. 74). In particular, the relation of reader to writing is marked, the authors tell us, by Nietzsche's own implicated sense of the world-as-text: "For Nietzsche seems to look on the world, not securely from without (as if it were a sort of artwork) , but ... as if from within an unfolding text whose alienness we must find a way to make our own" (p. 134). Accordingly, the constructs which Nietzsche "embodies" rather than "expresses" (in the author's terms) are spurs to the imagination of the (attentive, perhaps unborn) reader: "Rhetorically, the questions propounded [in TL· Gay Science or Thus Spake Zarathustra] insinuate that a bland or neutral response ('So who cares?') is impossible. Both fictive representations exclude apathy as an option" (p. 114). One of the most interesting aspects of the book, from the point of view of both philosophic and literary readers, is the "conversation" initiated between Reviews379 Nietzsche and various seminal figures in the English literary tradition. This is not to say that Magnus, Stewart, and Mileur assert "influences" on Nietzsche: they demonstrate, most effectively in some cases, that great literature embodies the complex constructs that Nietzsche is after—that Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence," say, or Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," reveal Eternal Recurrence, or an authorial Will to Power, to be the complex writerly strategies they are. And yet, there are problems with this cheerfully postmodern mode of exegesis. Try and textualize as one might, there are awkward problems for conduct contained in Nietzsche's writings—for example, his characterization of women is more (ethically) disturbing than our authors' rather blithe rhetorical concerns allow—and these problems remain after reading this study. To represent epistemology as literary epiphany reduces Nietzsche's claims to being a philosopher, in the sense of one who engages in serious, sustained attention to the problems of living—outside the text. Magnus, Steward, and Mileur may have given us a Nietzsche who is a marvelous writer—the only begetter of, say, Foucault and Derrida—but they may just have lost us a powerful agent who ventures beyond writing. And that would be a pity. University...

Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul: A Study of Heroic Individualism (review)

408Philosophy and Literature metaphysics or metapsychology. Relatedly, the claim made by White, and others, that Nietzsche is the extravagandy gifted stylist he believed himself to be, is, to a more constant reader ofliterature, difficult to maintain. Ultimately, ofcourse, it is impossible to prove that Nietzsche is a better or worse stylist than, say, Hume or Schopenhauer, though technical discussions ofstyle are often quite revealing. As White wishes to place Nietzsche in a literary context, particularly one made up by such figures as Calvino, Kundera, and Proust (this last a predictable but not especially illuminating contrast), issues such as style—and irony and characterization and tone—become significant, as these figure so centrally in stories and novels, poems and plays. If the questions White puts to Nietzsche in this book seem, as indicated, at times almost child-like, that is because, as asserted in the final pages, he is writing for his own children. There is subsequently a moving but wrong-headed attempt to transform this most unassimilable inverter of moral evaluations into a proponent of family, democracy, and liberal humanism. One understands White's need, but a more useful volume exposing Nietzsche in all his genuine idiosyncrasy and difficult moral individualism, qualities Nietzsche does share with the literary figures White summons, remains to be written. University of PennsylvaniaMark Stein Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul: A Study of Heroic Individualism, by Leslie Paul Thiele; xiv 8c 233 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990, $35.00 cloth, $9.95 paper. A professor of political science, writing a volume in a series entitled "Studies in Moral, Political, and Legal Philosophy," might be expected, particularly in our current moment, to find in Nietzsche either the harbinger of the ghastly fascism he is sometimes linked with, or the prophet of a radical historicism, often connected with the intellectual left, which also occasionally adopts him. But Leslie Paul Thiele has written a persuasive and elegant book that eschews both of these possibilities, arguing instead that Nietzsche's political interest was circumscribed to—or delved as deep as—the politics of the individual psyche. Thiele also suggests, however, that the struggle to order conflicting internal impulses is not without political import, for the agon within mirrors the agon without, and, were we astute enough, to our political improvement. Critics of Thiele will complain that his is essentially a conservative—some might say re- Reviews409 actionary—analysis, and, having done so, dismiss him to the academic trashheap . Thiswill be unfortunate, for he has written one ofthe most knowledgeable and acute books on Nietzsche yet published, a book courageous in its insistence on giving us the most Nietzschean Nietzsche to be seen in a long time, and one that flies in the face of many fashionable interpretations of its subject. Future historians may understand better than we can just why the self was so frequently thought a dubious fiction in the latter halfofthe twentieth century. Nietzsche has been enlisted as one of the central theorists for this movement, and he did speak frequently of the "multiplicity of the soul," the "vast confusion of contradictory valuations" within a single individual. But he also insisted that while our aspects changed, our essence did not, and that his writings, inscribed with his own blood, spoke only of himself. Thiele, adopting the view that Nietzsche "rejected the assumption that there was something called 'the individual ' which had a certain fixity, continuity, and duration" (p. 37), nonetheless argues as well that the goal of life, its highest achievement, is the ordering, under the great stress of competing forces, of a single self, composed of the philosopher, artist, saint, educator, and solitary. This contradiction—that, on the one hand, the self is at best a sort of whirl of mirrors, at worst, a nullity, and, on the other, that the very purpose of life is to achieve a coherent, unified self—is not direcdy addressed. But if one takes with all seriousness Nietzsche's claim for the soul's emptiness, one cannot, it would seem, simultaneously argue for such an inner hierarchy. Moreover, Thiele does not push the contradiction far enough; had he, we might know more about the final cause of...

Nietzsche's Theory of Truth and Belief

The thesis of this paper is that, on the whole, Nietzsche operated with two theories of truth, a correspondence and a pragmatic theory, the pragmatic theory of being derivative from a more fundamental pragmatic theory of belief. A version of the correspondence theory is presupposed in Nietzsche's claim that his conception of the world as a matrix of forces and powers is a true account of how the world really is. It is also presupposed in his claim that our quite ordinary beliefs that there are enduring things, objects or bits of matter or material is an illusion or i.e., these ordinary beliefs are false. Since the world is just a matrix of forces and powers there can be no such items. However Nietzsche alleges that since we are creatures that have evolved with certain sensory organs and intellectual capacities that enable us to form beliefs, then there must have been some life-preserving utility in having beliefs that such items exist (despite the alleged falsity of such beliefs). Beliefs in such items, Nietzsche claims, can have pragmatic value but they are no guide to how the world really is. Since most pragmatists do not openly admit that pragmatically held beliefs are false, Nietzsche is not so much a pragmatist about as a pragmatist about belief. Nietzsche does not normally tell us which theory of he is using when he employs words such as true, (and their cognates) or such words as error, and illusion. In particular, he talks of in the context of his pragmatic theory of and/or belief when these truths are often regarded by him as false claims (in the correspondence sense of the theory of truth). This can lead to much ambiguity and paradox. Consider the remark: Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live. The value for life is ultimately decisive (WP ?493).' The first word truth occurs with reference to the pragmatic theory and means something like those beliefs we normally

Nietzsche's Theory of Tragedy in the Plays of T. S. Eliot

Nietzsche-a nineteenth-century philosopher passionately concerned with culture, myth, ritual, and Greek tragedy; Eliot-a twentieth-century philosophy student likewise devoted throughout his career to culture, myth, ritual, and Greek tragedy; yet Eliot hardly ever refers to in his published work. In one rare instance when he does so, in a review of a book about Nietzsche, rather than acknowledge indebtedness, he censures: Nietzsche is one of those writers whose philosophy evaporates when detached from its literary qualities, and whose literature owes its charm not alone to personality and wisdom of man, but to a claim to scientific truth. Then after pointedly dismissing Nietzsche's theories of war, knowledge, universe, and ethics, Eliot nevertheless concludes his review by regretting the omission of any account of Nietzsche's views on art,' suggesting at least some interest in Nietzsche's aesthetic theories. Most scholars would agree with Eliot that is far from scientific in his method, especially in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche's first book, but in spite of its lack of evidence, hypothesis of The Birth of Tragedy proved so provocative that certain anthropologists, notably Frazer, Harrison, and Cornford, tried to substantiate it scientifically by documenting myths and rituals of various cultures. However much Eliot may discount Nietzsche's claim to scientific truth, he was clearly impressed by anthropologists who tried to prove that claim. That Eliot was stimulated by Frazer's The Golden Bough we know from notes to The Waste Land; that he was aware of Harrison's and Cornford's works on ritual and origins of tragedy we know from his reference in A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry to the (extremely in-

Nietzsche, Metaphor, and Truth

ions are indeed metonymies, but this not end of story, for at least in some instances i.e., in cases in which we come to believe in reality of our own tropes we give them a causal efficacy which they originally did not possess. Indeed, Nietzsche suggests that this what sets us apart from animals: we are able to place our behavior under the mastery of abstractions . . . to volatilize perceptual metaphors into a schema.3' This not only allows a much greater degree of organization of our perceptual metaphors than would otherwise have been possible, but also promotes eventual development of a world of concepts juxtaposed to immediately given sensations. It a firmer, more general, better known, more human world and thus seen as regulative and imperative, even though it only composed of concepts which are residues of metaphors.32 Thus we forget 28 111/4, 194(04), p. 69. 29 R, p. 319; cf.111/4, 19(415), p. 74 and 19(236), pp. 8i-8z. 30 UWL, III/z, p. 374 = PN, p. 46. 3' Ibid., p. 375. 32 Ibid., pp. 375-76. I90 LAWRENCE M. HINMAN This content downloaded from 157.55.39.181 on Thu, 29 Sep 2016 06:01:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms metaphorical origins of our own concepts, imbue them with an independence and causal efficacy which they did not originally possess, order them in accordance with schemata which are themselves of metaphorical origins, and then place ourselves under domination of that world which was originally of our own construction. Our metaphors thereby acquire an independence and power insofar as they are no longer taken as metaphors but rather as measure of reality itself; in becoming dead metaphors, they come to rule us. A language, as one recent writer on metaphor has suggested, is nothing but a necropolis for dead metaphors.33 Thus we see full scope of Nietzsche's claim that language fundamentally metaphorical and that truth but a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms. If we think of metaphor as a from one sphere to another, we see metaphor permeating process of knowing. Starting from immediate data of sensation (the nerve stimulus, according to Nietzsche), there a in two directions. On one hand, a metonymical carrying over from those data to an imagined external cause of them, a thing-in-itself which imputed cause of our sensations of it; on other hand, a metaphorical carrying over of those nerve stimuli into images. The process continues in both directions. As we then make another metaphorical transition from images to words, so we organize external world into particular kinds of objects which are put into pigeonholes fashioned by our own vocabulary. Finally, as we move from words to concepts, we see these individual external objects as manifestations of a world of essences. In treating each of these transitions as metaphorical, Nietzsche wants to underscore fact that these involve movements between radically different spheres of reality and that it meaningless to talk about a literal translation from one level to another. Yet there a second sense in which this entire process involves a over. Insofar as we carry over some aspects of an experience (and omit others) and thereby come to treat similar experiences as though they were equal, we order our experiences metaphorically; in other words, categories and concepts in terms of which we order experience have no more epistemic justification than other metaphors, except for fact that we have forgotten their metaphorical origins and let them harden into normative measures of reality itself. 33 'As,' or The Limits of Metaphor, New Literary History, VI, i (Autumn, 1974), p.

Heidegger's Metahistory of Philosophy: Amor Fati, Being and Truth (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 567 explicitly denounced. Finally, the temptation to be universal, which Ledeen describes excellently, added farce to tragedy. HERBERT W. SCHNEIDER Claremont, California Heidegger's Metahistory of Philosophy: Amor Fail, Being and Truth. By Bernd Magnus. (The Hague: Marilnus Nijhoff, 1970, pp. xiv -t- 145) The title as well as the subtitle are misleading. One can hardly guess that Magnus is concerned with Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence (Ewige Wiederkun#). Magnus is Professor at the University of California, Riverside. The first part of the book contains a short survey of Nietzsche's literary remains; it is followed by a discussion of the cosmological proof for the eternal recurrence and the Existential Imperative implied by the latter. The second part is devoted to Heidegger and comprises chapters on Heidegger and the tradition; Nietzsche as Metaphysician and Heidegger's Nietzsche in Critical Perspective. The question of the meaning of the eternal recurrence of the Same has caused and still causes considerable difficulty to Nietzsche scholars. Magnus makes some valid contributions to a thorny problem. He begins his investigations with the cosmological proof for the eternal recurrence. Magnus' argument is based on statements Nietzsche made in his posthumously published notes which Magnus quotes in German and his own English translation. Magnus' summary of Nietzsche's position is to the point: Energy, according to Nietzsche, is finite but time is infinite. From this it follows that a finite number of configurations of energy must recur eternally. The change involved in this process leads back to the past and forward to the future in a circular movement (p. 13). Unfortunately, two mistakes in the English translation of the German text may lead to some misunderstanding of the cosmological proof. Magnus translates "Das Mass der All-Kra/t" with "the amount of total energy" (p. 11). However, All in German is not alle (total) but means die Welt (the world) or das Universum (the universe). Correctly translated the phrase should read: The measure of the world's energy. Thus the world being defined by finite energy is finite too. The author's translation of die vorhandene Welt with "'the external world" should also be corrected: Vorhanden is "extant." These errors may lead to the wrong assumption that Nietzsche's cosmological proof refers only to the outside world as distinct from the human world. Magnus' major interest lies in an analysis of the term Gesamtlage (configuration) in relation to states. We have already heard that Nietzsche claims that the configuration of all forces returns eternally. He further holds the view that it is impossible to prove whether identical states have occurred, and continues: "It seems that the configuration forms the qualities anew down to the smallest details so that two different configurations cannot contain anything identical. Whether anything identical can exist within a configuration, for example, two leaves--I doubt it." (My translation differs somewhat from Magnus'.) I would like to address myself to the second of the author's two explanations of these sentences. Magnus argues that Gesamtlage (configuration) does not refer to a state rather to "the total ensemble of states" (p. 16). However, considering how Nietzsche uses the terms "state" and Gesamtlage this conclusion is impossible. "Gesaratlage" may be translated in different ways. It could be rendered as configuration , combination or complete state of energy. State, in German "Lage" or "Zustand," can be exchanged for "Gesamtlage" in the context these terms occur in the text. At some point Magnus puts before configuration the word "total" which amounts to a tautology since configuration means already the grouping of all energy. Magnus also 568 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY refers to states as "parts" and configuration as the "whole" (p. 17). Since he puts parts and the whole in quotation marks I am not quite sure what exactly he had in mind with them. In any event, the distinction between parts and the whole does not fit the way Nietzsche envisioned the change in the configuration of all energy. He says: "This world, a monster of energy without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself.., a sea of forces flowing...

O'Neill's Lazarus: Dionysus and Christ

TN The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche claims that there is an essenI tial similarity between protagonist of Greek tragedy and the Dionysus of mysteries; former, he argues, is but a mask for latter, Dionysus being original hero, and dismemberment-the truly Dionysiac suffering being stuff tragedy is made of.' In Lazarus Laughed, written in I925-I926, O'Neill, as Oscar Cargill notes, has made his protagonist Dionysiac in a more literal sense than did Greeks.2 Yet he has not done so in accordance with Nietzsche's formula, for Lazarus-unlike Prometheus, Oedipus, and indeed Dion Anthony in The Great God Brown, who all fulfill philosopher's demands-is beyond suffering, a fact which, as Cyrus Day points out,3 makes him both unique and unsatisfactory as a tragic protagonist. That Lazarus resembles Dionysus is plain from play itself; that he is a spokesman for Zarathustrian ideas has long been recognized.4 It has also been claimed that he resembles two other saviors: Christ and Buddha.5 But except for last-mentioned, there has been no detailed discussion of Lazarus's kinship with any of these religious paragons.