Nietzsche--Review of Three Books

Teaching Philosophy 10./I, March /1987 Nietzsche, Richard Schacht Routledge & Kegan Paul, London. 1985. 546pp. $17.50 pbk. Nietzsche: Life as Literature, Alexander Nehamas Harvard University Press, 1985, 261pp. $17.50 . Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy, R. J. Hollingdale Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1985, 196pp. $8.95 pbk. RICHARD HOGAN Today, interest in Nietzsche among professional philosophers is intense. Walter Kaufmann (Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 1950) led the way by showing that Nietzsche should not be blamed for World War II, and Arthur Danto (Nietzsche As Philos­opher, 1965) showed analytic philosophers that there was much in Nietzsche that was philosophically worthwhile. American philosophers have responded to this stimulation. The North American Nietzsche Society was created in 1979 and now has over 400 members. A glance at the Review of Metaphysics resumes of doctoral dissertations for the past five years shows that many young philosophers have decided to focus their attention on Nietzsche. Books and articles on Nietzsche continue to be produced at a rapid rate.

This interest has surfaced in the classroom; there are currently many institutions that offer a course dedicated wholly or in part to Nietzsche. And there is now a wealth of high caliber material in the form of translations, books, and anthologies that can contribute to the success of such courses.

I know from experience in my own course on Nietzsche that he can be extremely effective in sparking the interest of students who might not respond to less flamboyant philosophers. One can use Nietzsche as "bait" to get students interested in a wide range of traditional philosophical issues.

Schacht's and Nehamas' books represent the very best in contemporary Nietzsche schol­arship; they resemble Danto's book in that they are the products of first-rate philosophical minds grappling with Nietzsche. Both of these books could be used by advanced under­graduates, and they will certainly prove extremely valuable in helping faculty prepare lectures.

Schacht's large book presents a systematic reconstruction of Nietzsche's philosophical views and aims at making these views intelligible and attractive to people within the English­speaking philosophical tradition. Schacht is convinced that Nietzsche can be interpreted as a basically consistent thinker who has interesting views on a number of standard philosophical topics. Schacht does not hesitate to draw heavily on the Nachlass (and in particular The Will to Power); nor does he have any qualms about "stripping away" Nietzsche's hyperbolic rhetoric when this facilitates the extraction of his philosophical position. Schacht's interpretive stance also includes virtually ignoring Zarathustra. In short, we get a very "toned down," academically respectable Nietzsche: a Nietzsche with whom contemporary American philos­ophers might converse with little feeling of strangeness.

The book is organized thematically, each chapter discussing a major strand in Nietzsche's thought and drawing on his treatment of the issue in various, widely-scattered texts. Schacht has chapters discussing Nietzsche's views on "Philosophers and Philosophy," ''Truth and Knowledge," "Metaphysical Errors," "The World and Life," "Man and Men," "Value and Values," "Morals and Morality," and "Art and Artists."

At the center of Schacht's interpretation is his reconstruction of Nietzsche's position on truth and knowledge. The interpretation of Nietzsche on this issue has been at the forefront of debate among scholars for the last 20 years or so. Schacht himself has been a major figure in the debate, having written a well-known article ("Nietzsche and Nihilism," 1973) disputing Danto's claim that Nietzsche is a nihilist (someone who claims that there is no truth).

Schacht's interpretation hinges on the claim that Nietzsche's remarks about truth and knowledge are to be taken as belonging to different levels of analysis and that if we are to see him as having a coherent position, it is imperative to keep these levels distinct. On some occasions when Nietzsche talks about truth and knowledge, his intention is to analyze these notions as they are commonly used. When so taken, truth is fundamentally a matter of correspondence against a background of coherence, and knowledge is primarily a matter of making the unfamiliar familiar. On this level of analysis, we might say, for example, that "There's a buffalo in the hall" is true because it corresponds with what we experience. However, on other occasions, Nietzsche takes up a vantage point from which he tries to assess our ordinary ways of taking truth and knowledge. It is from this point of view that Nietzsche often claims that our "truths" are really errors. What he means here is that our most fundamental concepts-our whole linguistic-conceptual scheme-But if this is indeed Nietzsche's position, is not clear that he is entitled to hold it. For presumably "aptness" must be analyzed primarily in terms of correspondence to facts, and it is not clear why Nietzsche should be allowed an exception to his denial of any independently existing structure in the world that could form the basis of such a correspondence. If Nietzsche's general position is that there are no facts independent of particular conceptual schemes, it is not clear why his own conceptual scheme should be granted epistemic superiority as an account of the real nature of the world and human life.

This is perhaps the most controversial issue in interpreting Nietzsche and could easily form the core of a course on his philosophy; students working on this issue will learn a good deal of epistemology. Students should compare Schacht's interpretation with Danto' s as well as with that of Nehamas, who denies that Nietzsche has a general theory of truth at all.

Nehamas' book derives inspiration from both Continental and American scholarship. It penetratingly discusses Nietzsche's main philosophical claims: the will to power, the eternal recurrence, the attack on morality, etc. The unifying theme is provided by two central features of Nietzsche's work: his perspectivism (the view that there are only interpretations) and his "aestheticism" (the tendency to view the world as a literary text and pcople, including himself, as literary characters.) It is the illuminating treatment of this latter theme that constitutes the book's chief novelty. And it is the emphasis on the latter theme that makes Nehamas' book such a useful complement to Schacht's. For while Schacht virtually ignores Nietzsche's style, the literary aspect of his work is at the forefront of Nehamas' interpretation. Nehamas suggests that the key to solving a number of puzzles in the interpretation of Nietzsche lies in the realization that Nietzsche thinks of thc world on the model of a literary text, something amenable to treatment from many point of view (perspectives). It is his aestheticism, Nehamas argues, that partially motivates and renders intelligible a number of Nietzschean positions. It is also by appeal to Nietzsche's aestheticism that a sympatheic interpreter might attempt to respond to the paradoxes generated by the perspectivism. For example, Nietzsche's aestheticism helps to explain the c1aim~entral to the "will to power" doctrine-that "things" are simply the sum of their effects. Just as a literary character is nothing "in itself' over and above his or her doings as depicted by the author, so a "thing" is nothing in itself over and above its effects on other things. Further-to take an example of the connection between the aestheticism and perspectivism-Nehamas argues that Nietzsche does not present a "positive" morality, a recipe for the iibermensch. What he does it to construct himself through his texts-using a number of disparate literary styles-as a literary character. Since this character is a unique "individual," Nietzsche can present positive views without succumbing to the dogmatism and claims to universality that he finds so objectionable in previous philosophers. And his use of many styles reinforces his perspecivist position by keeping the reader aware that it is Nietzsche's position that is being presented. From this basic understanding, Nehamas goes on presuasively to interpret other difficult Nietzschean doctrines. For example, when Nietzsche issues the injunction "become who you are," he is not contradicting his claim that there is no being, only becoming. Becoming who one is involves the on-going construction of a coherent self, a task-never completable­that involves the unification of diverse elements. And a coherent, unified self need not necessarily be morally praiseworthy (just a as a successful literary character need not be morally praiseworthy). Finally, the doctrine of the eternal recurrence, Nehamas claims, is not a cosmological thesis. It involves the notion that if one were to live again, one would have to live exactly the same life as one is living now. People, like literary characters, have only essential properties; if someone were to have a different property, he or she would be a different person. The eternal return is thus "a view of the ideal life. " Does one accept his or 'her life enough to be able to will its exact repetition (along with the exact repetition of the world of which this life is an inseparable part)?

Whether or not one finds Nehamas' starting point compelling, his book is full of brilliant insights and provocative readings of individual passages. Together with Schacht's book, it reflects the high level that Nietzsche studies have now attained.

Hollingdale's book in an altered re-issue of Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy, 1965. The original book presented Nietzsche's thought within the context of his life. The present version deletes a major portion of the material on Nietzsche's philosophy and is thus purely biographical. In my view, this is a pity, since it renders the book unusable as an elementary introduction to Nietzsche's thought for an undergraduate course. Richard Hogan, Philosophy, Southeastern Massachusetts University, North Dartmouth, Massachusetts 02747 USA