[Appeared in Literature
and Theology, vol. 8, no. 1, March 1994,
Blondel,
Eric, Nietzsche: The Body as Culture: Philosophy as a Philological Genealogy,
translated by Sen Hand, (
Del
Caro, Adrian, Nietzsche Contra Nietzsche: Creativity and the Anti-Romantic,
(
Hunt,
Lester H., Nietzsche and the Origin of Virtue, (
Schrift,
Alan D., Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation: Between Hermeneutics
and Deconstruction, (
Staten,
Henry, Nietzsche's Voice, (
White,
Alan, Within Nietzsche's Labyrinth, (
A
special challenge in understanding Nietzsche is that after settling what his
views are on various issues, we must confront apparent contradictions between
what he endorses and his criticisms of others. Of these six recent books on
Nietzsche, two attempt the first level of interpretation, and four concern
efforts to prevent Nietzsche's hammer from breaking itself.
One
aim of Hunt's book is to examine the normative views of Nietzsche on their own,
separate from their metaphysical import. Hunt succeeds in this, which helps to
integrate the study of Nietzsche into the academic specialty of ethics. Hunt
also believes that Nietzsche was not inimical to philosophical argumentation, but chose to omit such argumentation in order to force readers to come up with their own
arguments for or against Nietzsche's views. Although this approach makes
Nietzsche more traditional than he really is (Nietzsche frequently supports his
views, but most commonly with his innovative ad hominem psychologizing
about the motivations for accepting alternative positions), it has the
interpretive benefit of keeping us from dismissing difficulties in Nietzsche as
unanalyzable due to him existing beyond logic.
Hunt
helpfully builds toward discussing the compatibility of exploitation with
Nietzsche's account of virtue. He argues affirmatively, but construes this as
the strong pursuing virtue while living on a welfare system funded by the
economic activity of the many. Hunt seems to think that what is wrong with
fascist terror is primarily economic exploitation.
Hunt
proposes that we import to Nietzsche a "liberalism with teeth" which
would allow us to accept most of Nietzsche's views about virtue. This is
similar to Alan White's suggestion, although White approaches the problem of
exploitation less from the issue of virtue than from meaningfulness, the key to
which White finds in the doctrine of the eternal recurrence interpreted as a
psychological, not cosmological, hypothesis. White interestingly reads
Nietzsche's doctrine as describing a transcending of the self in each moment
(not a transcending of one's past). What is recurring and non-linear about this
is that since I cannot lose my past, what is created each moment is, in part, a
resurrection of my past.
White
believes that exploitation is incompatible with the real Nietzsche, because the
despot is a dogmatist who sets down one life for all to live, and that this
violates the open-endedness essential to Nietzsche's view of meaningfulness. He
is clearly right about some despots. I am not optimistic, however, that White's
Nietzsche could condemn a despot who thinks that he is choosing only for
himself, and who fully accepts that if others choose differently, they are free
to overpower him. White justifiably worries that he makes Nietzsche into a
"bland combination of individualism and tolerance" (p.137), and thus
White claims to find in Nietzsche a liberalism much like that which Hunt feels
the need to import into Nietzsche's views.
Blondel
and Del Caro set out in their books to solve apparent inconsistencies which
arise when Nietzsche's theory is applied to itself. Blondel wants to explain
how Nietzsche can insist that language is metaphor and illusion and yet
continue to use language. Del Caro discusses how Nietzsche can criticize
romanticism and yet endorse a view which can be fairly called romantic.
Blondel's
is the larger question, and requires broader brushstrokes. Yet his treatment is
meticulously tied to Nietzsche's texts with numerous endnotes. Blondel
documents well Nietzsche's alternating praise and disdain for philology, and
postulates that these apparent vacillations are explainable by Nietzsche's view
that philology is a good destructive tool but lacks strength to build anew.
Although this would be a tidy explanation, it ignores the first essay of On
the Genealogy of Morals, where Nietzsche uses philology to propose both the
diagnosis and the cure. Blondel emphasizes what Nietzsche says about
philology, at the expense of how he sometimes uses it.
Blondel
ultimately proposes that Nietzsche envisions philosophy as a genealogy
"that consists in relating cultural phenomena back to the body..."
(p.258), and especially back to the senses of smell and hearing, as opposed to
the less visceral and more remote vision preferred by other philosophers.
Blondel is not clear, however, about what this "relating back"
consists in: are some genealogies better than others? What are the implications
of this for the illusoriness of language?
Del
Caro's explanandum is really not such a problem. It is true that Nietzsche
advocates using creativity (as opposed to a conceptual or linguistic system) to
achieve humanity's potential. It is also true that Nietzsche has some
blistering attacks on romanticism as a symptom both of needing tranquility to
dull suffering and of viewing nature as a ready-made vestment of value into
which we must slip. But there is really no tension between these positions, and
any apparent tension arises only when we work at the level of the label
"romantic" instead of trying to look deeper.
But
Del Caro's book is better than this. He has produced a rich intellectual
history of the connections between Nietzsche and romanticism, idealism,
classicism, and realism, and his relation to such thinkers as Rousseau, Goethe,
Novalis, Schlegel, and Wagner. His excellent discussion of Nietzsche's views on
nature provides an important corrective to those thinkers who try to read into
Nietzsche some environmental love for the natural world.
Staten's
book asks the general question of how to treat contradictions into which
Nietzsche gets himself. He resists waving them aside by appeal to Nietzsche's
perspectivism, and instead proposes a "psycho-dialectical" approach,
by which, it turns out, he means nothing more than noting Nietzsche's
ambivalence on many issues. For example, Staten notes the structural similarity
between the resentment of the weak and the masters' enjoyment of inflicting
suffering on the weak for debts unpaid. He places this in a larger pattern of
"transcendental ressentiment," in which Nietzsche is saying no to
something (namely, the Platonic and Christian world-view) for which he has an
involuntary admiration (p.50). This approach may satisfy some, but strikes me as
providing raw material to be explained by those with temperaments of the first
four authors discussed here.
Schrift's
book attempts to navigate the Scylla of dogmatic systemization of Nietzsche
(personified by Heidegger) and the Charbydis of
relativistic license (Derrida). Schrift succeeds in making Heidegger and
Derrida accessible to the uninitiated, and he has some good arguments against
their interpretations of Nietzsche. But why take his arguments against
Heidegger's attempt to systematize Nietzsche as an argument against all such
attempts? Against deconstruction Schrift argues that any plausible interpretation
of Nietzsche must affirm life. He thinks there is a plurality of possible
interpretations which meet this standard, none of which can be better than any
other. This pluralism is his safe route between hermeneutics and
deconstruction.
Does
Schrift envision this as a general interpretive strategy for all thinkers, even
Augustine and Schopenhauer (like the deconstruction that he admittedly comes
close to)? We do not know. If we restrict it to Nietzsche, there are still
problems with Schrift's standard. Is the sine qua non of each
interpretation that all life is to be affirmed, or is it sufficient that
some life be affirmed at the expense of others? Can it be said that Oehler and
the Nazis misinterpreted Nietzsche?
Whether
one is primarily interested in Nietzsche for what he has to say about morality
or meaningfulness, or for his implications about what it is to interpret a
text, he is a thinker we all have in common, and yet he allows us in our
readings of him to differentiate ourselves from each other, as these six books
indicate.
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