The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, The Cambridge Companions to Philosophy
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BERND MAGNUS AND KATHLEEN M. HIGGINS
Introduction to The Cambridge
Companion to Nietzsche
The importance to the humanities and to our culture of the
nineteenth-century German philosopher and writer Friedrich Nietz-
sche may require little motivation or discussion. He was quite
simply one of the most influential modern European thinkers. His
attempts to unmask the root motives which underlie traditional
Western philosophy, morality, and religion have deeply affected sub-
sequent generations of philosophers, theologians, psychologists, po-
ets, novelists and playwrights. Indeed, one contemporary English-
speaking philosopher, Richard Rorty, has characterized the entire
present age as "post-Nietzschean." That is because Nietzsche was
able to think through the consequences of the triumph of the En-
lightenment's secularism - captured in his observation that "God
is dead" - in a way that determined the agenda for many of Eu-
rope's most celebrated intellectuals after his death in 1900. An
ardent foe of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and power politics, his
name was later invoked by Fascists and Nazis to advance the very
things he loathed.
It might also be useful to recall that, according to Martin
Heidegger, Nietzsche is the consummation of the Western philo-
sophical tradition, the thinker who brings metaphysics to its end;
that Michel Foucault frequently regarded Nietzsche as the progenitor
of his own genealogical method and its stress on discursive practices,-
that Jacques Derrida considers Nietzsche the deconstructive thinker
par excellence.
All this serves as eloquent testimony to Nietzsche's
claim, voiced in
The Antichrist
and elsewhere, that some persons are
born posthumously,- for that observation certainly applies to his own
case. It is no accident, therefore, that the last published edition of the
International Nietzsche Bibliography,
edited by Herbert Reichert
I
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THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO NIETZSCHE
Nietzsche's virulently infectious nihilism.
1
Indeed, without endors-
ing Allan Bloom's diagnosis or thesis about Nietzsche's etiological
role in the "closing" of the American mind, it is no exaggeration to
say that Nietzsche's influence has become unavoidable in our cul-
ture. Whether one reads G. Gordon Liddy's misappropriations, goes
to a movie, or merely turns on the television, Nietzsche seems al-
ways to be already there. For example, Eddie Murphy quotes from
Nietzsche at length in a climactic moment in the movie "Coming to
America"; a rock music group names itself "The Will to Power"; and
even the teen-age "Dr. Howser" of the wretched (and now mercifully
canceled) "Doogie Howser, M.D." television show can be heard say-
ing, "As Nietzsche said: 'Whatever doesn't destroy me makes me
stronger.' " Could one cite illustrations of Nietzsche's "appropria-
tion" more banal, more crude and pervasive, than these? Nietzsche's
name and epigrams are invoked everywhere nowadays, indiscrimi-
nately selling ideas as well as products.
From the mid-1890s until today, a century later, Nietzsche's name
has been invoked and enlisted repeatedly in the service of every
conceivable political and cultural movement and agenda - from
early-twentieth-century emancipatory feminism to later fascism
and Nazism, from a Faustian modernism to recent versions of post-
modernism. Nor is it the case any longer that Nietzsche's pervasive
influence is confined primarily to continental European philoso-
phers and politics, intellectuals, and American popular culture.
Rather, his critique of traditional morality has become a force in the
reflections of some leading Anglophone philosophers, such as Ber-
nard Williams,
2
Richard Rorty,3 Martha Nussbaum/ Alasdair Macln-
tyre,5 and Philippa Foot.
6
Given this ubiquity, it is not surprising that Nietzsche commenta-
tors disagree about most aspects of his thinking, especially about
what an
Ubermensch
[superhuman being] is supposed to be, what
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and Karl Schlechta in 1968 - long before the recent explosion of inter-
est in Nietzsche- lists more than 4,500 titles in 27 languages de-
voted to Nietzsche. And it must not be forgotten that Nietzsche's
importance has not been confined to philosophy or even to humanis-
tic study. One much discussed recent critic, Allan Bloom, argued the
controversial thesis that America's very cultural life - the mis-
education of its citizens as well as its misguided public philosophy -
is to be traced to a superficial version of (what the author considered)
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Introduction
3
eternal recurrence asserts, whether he had developed or had in-
tended to formulate a full-blown theory of the will to power, as well
as what his perspectivism may be said to assert. These are disagree-
ments concerning the substance, goal, and success of Nietzsche's
attempted trans valuation of all values. On the other hand, there is
considerably less disagreement about identifying the deconstructive
aspect of his work, the sense in which he sought to disentangle
Western metaphysics, Christianity, and morality in order to display
what he took to be their reactive decadence. Put crudely and mislead-
ingly, there is considerably less disagreement concerning the nega-
tive, deconstructive side of Nietzsche's thinking than there is about
the positive, reconstructive side.
These, then, appear to be the two faces of Nietzsche that are
recognized by virtually all critics. One face looks at our past and
vivisects our common cultural heritage at its roots,- the other seems
to be turned toward the future, suggesting visions of possible new
forms of Western life. The negative, deconstructive, backward-
glancing Nietzsche is the face which seems to be more easily recog-
nized by his commentators and his critics. But when one tries to
examine in detail Nietzsche's positive, reconstructive face, one is
beset by an immediate difficulty. For this other, future-directed face
turns out to be not one profile but at least two possible ones. One
sketch of Nietzsche's positive profile portrays his remarks about
truth, knowledge, superhumanity, eternal recurrence, and will to
power as his answers to perennial, textbook philosophical problems:
his theory of knowledge, his moral philosophy, and his ontology. On
this reading of his reconstructive side, Nietzsche seems to be shatter-
ing the foundations of past theories as one demolishes false idols, in
order to erect his own, better phoenix from their ashes. In admit-
tedly quite different ways, this seems to be an orientation common
rida,
1
2
Nehamas,
1
^ Deleuze,
1
* Strong,
1
* Shapiro,
1
6
and Rorty,
1
? for ex-
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to the work of Danto,? Wilcox,
8
Clark, 9 and Schacht;
1
0
or perhaps it
is a framework toward which their work points.
The alternative profile of this reconstructive side of Nietzsche re-
jects the positive/negative dichotomy itself and depicts him instead
as attempting to liberate us precisely from the felt need to provide
theories of knowledge, or moral theories, or ontologies. Despite ad-
mitted differences, enormous ones, this seems to be a useful way of
capturing an orientation suggested by the work of Alderman,
1
1
Der-
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THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO NIETZSCHE
later Wittgenstein, late Heidegger, Derrida, Rorty, and Foucault.
1
8
What is at the bottom of these conflicting portraits, perhaps, is an
unarticulated difference scarcely recognized among Nietzsche schol-
ars, not to say philosophers generally. It is the difference between
those who believe that one is paying him a compliment by reading
Nietzsche as "a philosopher" who gives Kantian style answers to
textbook questions, and those who view that characterization as
depreciating his more broadly "therapeutic" achievement.
A nice illustration of this bifurcated state of affairs is what
seems to be occurring in discussions of Nietzsche's perspectivism.
What seems to be occurring among Nietzsche scholars is not only
a difference of detail - a difference about how to construe Nietzsche's
remarks about "knowledge," "truth," "correspondence," and "per-
spective" - but a metaphilosophical split about the
point
of Nietz-
sche's perspectivism. For many commentators, Nietzsche's per-
spectivism is, roughly, his theory of knowledge. It wants to assert
four distinguishable claims: (i) no accurate representation of the
world as it is in itself is possible,- (2) there is nothing to which our
theories stand in the required correspondence relation to enable us
to say that they are true or false; (3) no method of understanding
our world - the sciences, logic, or moral theory - enjoys a privi-
leged epistemic status; (4) human needs always help to "consti-
tute" the world for us. Nietzsche tends to run (i)-(4) together;
often he confuses them. But the most serious difficulty for Nietz-
sche's perspectivism lies elsewhere: the self-reference problem.
Are we to understand his many naturalistic and historical theses
as accurate representations of the world as it is in itself, as corre-
sponding to any facts of the matter, as privileged perspectives,
ones which are conditioned by no need whatsoever? If we are, then
Nietzsche's perspectivism is self-contradictory in all four versions
mentioned. But that is just to say either that the theories Nietz-
sche offered are not to be taken perspectivally - in which case his
perspectivism must be abandoned - or that they are only perspec-
tives, in which case they may not be true and may be superseded.
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ample. The first version of his reconstructive portrait assimilates
Nietzsche's project to the great tradition of "the metaphysics of
presence" - to the tradition epitomized by Plato, Descartes, and
Kant. The alternative portrait sees the negative, deconstructive side
of Nietzsche as already
constructive,
in the therapeutic manner of the
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Introduction
5
To say that they may not be true, however, is just to say that what
he maintains may be "false." But how can he then maintain that
there is nothing to which our theories stand in the required corre-
spondence relation to enable us to determine whether they are
true or false? Further, in saying that there is no truth did Nietz-
sche mean to say something true? If he told the truth, then what
he said was false, for there had to be a truth to be told for him to
say, truly, that there is no truth. If what he said is false, on the
other hand, then it is false to assert that there is no truth. But
then at least something is true in an unmitigated sense. Similarly,
if every great philosophy is really only "the personal confession of
its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir"
(BGE 6), then what is Nietzsche himself confessing? What is his
involuntary and unconscious memoir
really
about? Perhaps the
best way to understand his perspectivism, then, is to construe it in
a neo-Kantian way, as providing a transcendental standpoint in
which putative "facts" about human needs and human neurophys-
iology play a role not unlike that of Kant's categories and forms of
intuition.
However, there is another, second, and quite different way to
construe Nietzsche's perspectivism remarks: Nietzsche's "perspec-
tivism" is not a
theory
of anything, and it is most certainly not a
theory
of knowledge. To say that there are only interpretations (or
perspectives) is to rename all the old facts "interpretation." The point
of the renaming is to help us set aside the vocabulary of accurate
representation which still holds us in its Platonic thrall. Similarly, to
say that "truth" is "error" is not to offer a theory of truth so much as it
is to rename it. So Nietzsche's tropes concerning "truth" and "error,"
"fact" and "interpretation" are best understood as rhetorical devices
to help the reader to understand and confront the widely shared intu-
ition that there must be something like a final truth about reality as
such which it is the goal of philosophy to disclose. The reader's own
penchant for the God's-eye view is surfaced and called into question.
Indeed, a theory of knowledge is not something Nietzsche has,- the
yearning for its possession is what his tropes parody. Knowledge is the
sort of thing about which one ought to have a theory primarily when
the Platonically inspired God's-eye view has seduced us, primarily
when we construe knowledge on the analogy of vision - the mind's
eye seeing the way things really are - primarily when we see philoso-
Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006
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