[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.
Send me mail: mstaber at smcm dot edu
Return to my handouts
page.
Go to Michael Taber's home page.
Go to SMCM's home page.