Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T05:42:28.627Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Nietzsche's Honest Masks: From Truth to Nobility Beyond Good and Evil

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Paul E. Kirkland
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article argues that Nietzsche uses a rhetorically modern appeal to enact the self-overcoming of modernity and the aim of enlightenment. It demonstrates how Nietzsche aims to move his readers from a prejudice in favor of truthfulness, by appearing to radicalize that aim, to a new measure of nobility. In contrast to some who present Nietzsche's styles as the means to convey a dispersion of meanings, this article argues that, designs his writing to move his age. He adopts the prejudices of his time in Beyond Good and Evil, his mature “critique of modernity” in order to demonstrate the self-overcoming of those prejudices. Beyond merely questioning the value of truth, Nietzsche evaluates by the measure of psychological strength, and describes the character of nobility beyond good and evil and beyond truth and falsity.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 66 , Issue 4 , Fall 2004 , pp. 575 - 604
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2004

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Sämliche Werke, 15 vols., ed. by Colli, Giorgio and Montinari, Mazzino (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1969), VI:3.Google ScholarEcce Homo. Good Books Human, All Too Human 1.Google ScholarEcce Homo. trans. Kaufman, Walter (New York: Vintage Books, 1989.)Google Scholar

2. Nietzsche wrote new prefaces to his pre-Zarathustra books after the completion of Beyond Good and Evil in 1886.Google Scholar

3. Nietzsche, , Werke, IV: 2;Google ScholarHuman, All Too Human, 1886 Preface, p. 4.Google Scholar

4. Nietzsche, , EH Books BGE, 1, 2.Google Scholar

5. Martin Heidegger's extremely influential interpretation of Nietzsche presents it as inverted Platonism that consummates Western metaphysics in the valorization of the will, rather than overcoming metaphysics. Heidegger presents Nietzsche's overturning of Plato as remaining within traditional dichotomies while privileging being over becoming. Heidegger, Martin, Nietzsche, Volume I: The Will to Power as Art, trans. Krell, David Farrell (New York: Harper Collions, 1991), esp. haps. 20–24.Google Scholar On Heidegger's view the overturning fails to overcome metaphysics, “Nietzsche holds this overturning of metaphysics to be the overcoming of metaphysics. But, every overturning of this kind remains only self-deluding entanglement in the Same that has become unknowable” (Heidegger, Martin, “The Word of Nietzsche: God is Dead” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans, by Lovitt, William [New York: Harper and Row, 1977], p. 75).Google Scholar Heidegger thus suggests that Nietzsche does not live up to his aim of affirming life as it is that “lets Being be Being” (Heidegger, , “Word” p. 104).Google Scholar On Heidegger's view, Nietzsche's metaphysics wills becoming as being and brings Western metaphysics to a close by bringing it full circle and leaving no remaining possibilities for the guiding question, the question of Being.

6. Derrida's treatment of Nietzsche's styles point to their disruption of metaphysical enclosure. For Derrida, a statement such as, “I have forgotten my umbrella” can be lifted from all contexts to indicate the undecidable play of Nietzsche's writing. In Spurs, Derrida writes, “Because it is structurally liberated from any living meaning, it is always possible that it means nothing at all or that it has no decidable meaning. There is no end to its parodying play of meaning… But not because it withholds some secret. Its secret is rather that it might have no secret, that it might only be pretending to be simulating some hidden truth within its folds” (Derrida, Jacques, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, trans. Harlow, Barbara [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978], pp.131–33).Google Scholar In this way, Derrida sees as the indication of the inability to close the meaning of a text or the interpretation of anything. Derrida concludes “that there is no ‘totality’ to Nietzsche's text, not even a fragmentary or aphoristic one” (Derrida, , Spurs, p. 135).Google Scholar

7. Kofman, Sarah, Nietzsche and Metaphor, trans. Large, Duncan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).Google Scholar Kofman shows that the interpretative status of all claims does not leave us incapable of judging among them. She writes, “The opposition is not between nakedness and dress, but between clothing woven by instinctive evaluations, which forms a perfect marriage with the contours of the body it cloths and thus reveals it, and a badly adapted clothing which travesties the person it covers” (p. 98). She argues, contrary to the Heideggerian interpretation, that Nietzsche succeeds in avoiding metaphysical claims by writing in metaphors. Viewing will to power as a metaphysical position, on Kofman's account, is the result of forgetting its status as metaphor.

8. Deleuze, Gilles, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Tomlinson, Hugh (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).Google ScholarCf. Derrida, Jacques, “Structure, Sign, and Play” in Writing and Difference, trans. Bass, Alan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 292.Google Scholar Derrida agues that “Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of the world of signs without fault, without truth, without origin, which is offered to an active interpretation” escapes the dependence on metaphysics of which Heidegger accuses Nietzsche and allows us to move beyond “the multiplicity of destructive discourses” that allow these destroyers to destroy each other reciprocally” (pp. 281–82).

9. Nietzsche, , EH Good Books 4.Google Scholar

10. Thiele, Leslie Paul, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 62.Google Scholar

11. Nietzsche, , EH, Good Books BGE 2.Google Scholar

12. Ibid.

13. Nietzsche, , Werke, VI 2.Google ScholarNietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morals, 3.25. On the Genealogy of Monals. trans. Kaufman, Walter and Hollingdale, R.J. (New York: Vintage Press, 1989.)Google Scholar

14. Nietzsche, , Werke, VI 2.Google ScholarBeyond Good and Evil, 4.Google ScholarBeyond Good and Evil, trans. Kaufman, Walter (New York: Vintage Press, 1989.)Google Scholar

15. Nehamas, Alexander, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 194, 227.Google Scholar

16. For Derrida the absence of authoritative interpretations calls for a questioning of all Being as an ethical and political task of openness to the alterity that is excluded in every authoritative determination. Derrida, Consider, Writing and Difference, pp. 140–41.Google Scholar This procedure invites a political re-appropriation of Nietzsche's writing. Derrida, Jacques, “Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name” trans. Kamuf, Peggy in The Ear of the Other (Lincoln, NB: Bison Press, 1988), pp. 30–31.Google Scholar Here, Derrida declares his interpretations to be “political interventions in the political rewriting of the text and its destinations,” which will combat the Nazi appropriation, not by showing where it is wrong, but by putting the text in the service of other effects.

17. Consider, for example, Jacques Derrida's treatment of democracy in The Politics of Friendship. Here, he seems to explain democracy as the perpetual openness to excluded others, a process infinite in its task and thus always in the future, “even where there is democracy, it never exists” thus belying the possibility of any definition of democracy. Defending such an indefinite notion in either theory or practice must collapse as soon as it decides what it will defend. See Derrida, Jacques, The Politics of Friendship, trans. Collins, George (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 304–306.Google Scholar

18. As Nehamas has shown, Nietzsche's perspectivism is not a self-refuting paradox, for saying that an interpretation may be false is not to say that it is false; considering a view as an interpretation is not to concede that it is false. Nehamas argues that Nietzsche avoids dogmatism because perspectivism does not demand acceptance as bedrock truth, but offers itself as a possibility (Nehamas, , Nietzsche, pp. 65–69).Google Scholar

19. Sarah Kofman shows that there is room between complete pluralism and dogmatism, arguing that the multiplicity of possible interpretations is not tantamount to the equivalence of all interpretations; some are more fitting than others; the value for life will permit judgment among them. Kofman shows that the metaphoric status of claims is not merely the avoidance of metaphysical finality, but places the value for life as the crucial criterion of judgment: “So between a complete pluralism of interpretations and the dogmatism of a unique text with an unequivocal meaning, there is room for pluralism of meaning which are not all equivalent—equivalence being measured not by reference to a truth of being… but by reference to the value given to life by the one who is interpreting” (Kofman, , Nietzsche and Metaphor, p. 141).Google Scholar This insight into the status of Nietzsche's own claims demands consideration of how Nietzsche understands what values life.

20. Strong, Tracy, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), pp. 49–52.Google Scholar Where Nehamas sees self-formation on an artistic or literary mode, arguing that Nietzsche consistently draws his examples from literature (Nehamas, , Nietzsche, pp. 226–28),Google Scholar Strong demonstrates that Nietzsche sees the task as no less than transforming “the stuff of humanity.”

21. Strong, , Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, pp. 291–93.Google Scholar

22. Ibid., pp. 275–93.

23. Nietzsche, , Beyond Good and Evil, Preface.Google Scholar

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid., 232. It might be noted that the first half of the chapter “Our Virtues” takes honesty as its theme, from which Nietzsche makes the transition to a discussion of woman with the following: “After this abundant civility that I have just evidenced in relation to myself I shall perhaps be permitted more readily to state a few truths about ‘woman as such’—assuming that it is now known from the outset how very much these are after all only—my truths” (Beyond Good and Evil, 231).Google Scholar This puts all of the categorical statements Nietzsche makes about woman in the proper context of the impossibility, inadequacy, and inappropriateness of all categorical statements on the subject.

26. Derrida takes this as one indication that there are only styles, plural, no style in itself and no truth behind the style, only the infinite play of styles, indicated here by ‘woman,’ and always in the play of sexual difference and textual indeterminacy. “Maybe this is what Nietzsche was calling style, simulacrum, woman. A joyful wisdom shows it well: there has never been the style, the simulacrum, the woman. There has never been the sexual difference. If the simulacrum is ever going to occur, its writing must be in the interval between several styles. And the insinuation of the woman (of) Nietzsche is that, if there is going to be style, there can only be more than one” (Derrida, , Spurs, p. 139).Google Scholar On the relation between masks in flux in the image of woman as truth see Oliver, Kelly, “Woman as Truth in Nietzsche's Writing” in Feminist Interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Oliver, Kelly and Pearsall, Marilyn (University Park, PA: Pernn State University Press, 1998), pp. 66–80.Google Scholar Another rather far-ranging consideration of such issues is provided by Irigiray, Luce, “Veiled Lips” in Feminist Interpretations, pp. 81–118.Google ScholarKofman, Sarah, “Baubo” in Nietzsche's New Seas, ed. Gillespie, Michael Allen and Strong, Tracy B. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).Google Scholar

27. Cf. Nietzsche, , Beyond Good and Evil, 30.Google Scholar

28. Heidegger presents the will to power as Nietzsche's fundamental metaphysical doctrine, the culmination of the history of Western metaphysics. See Heidegger, , Nietzsche.Google Scholar For a concise statement of Heidegger's view of Nietzsche's overturning as culmination rather than overcoming of Western metaphysics, see Heidegger, “Word.” This view pervades Heidegger's presentation of the history of Western philosophy and his own move beyond it.

29. Nietzsche, , Beyond Good and Evil, 9.Google Scholar

30. Ibid., 13.

31. Ibid., 22.

32. Lampert, Laurence, Nietzsche's Task: An Interpretation of Beyond Good and Evil (New Haven: Yale, 2001), p. 57Google Scholar.

33. Ibid., p. 37.

34. Ibid., p. 59.

35. Nietzsche, , Beyond Good and Evil, 23Google Scholar.

36. Ibid., 22.

37. Ibid., 9.

38. Locating perspectivism as the core of Nietzsche's thought, Nehamas argues that Nietzsche employs the voice of a free spirit “narrator” in Beyond Good and Evil in order to make claims while distancing them from himself, using a literary character to assert positive claim to consistently maintain perspectivism while offering interpretations. Nehamas, Alexander “Who are ‘The Philosophers of the Future’: A Reading of Beyond Good and Evil, in Reading Nietzsche, ed. Solomon, Robert C. and Higgins, Kathleen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar. In a similar vein Sarah Kofman presents the will to power as a metaphor (Kofman, , Nietzsche and Metaphor), p. 96Google Scholar.

39. Nietzsche, , Beyond Good and Evil, 2Google Scholar.

40. Ibid., 12.

41. Ibid.

42. Klossowski, Pierre, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. Smith, Daniel W. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 66, 93Google Scholar. Klosswski wonders if Nietzsche's writing seeks to “transmit states of his own soul” (p. 7) and depicts Nietzsche's life and work as fluctuating between the attempts to transmit such states and recognition of the impossibility of doing so until the final silence of his madness (pp. 65, 73, 250). Among the purposes of this essay is to demonstrate that Nietzsche's efforts “to communicate an inner state” (EH Books 4) serve to encourage the process of self-overcoming. Recognizing the need for self-overcoming, he exhibits the self-overcoming of modernity prejudices in a manner meant to provoke his readers on their own quest.

43. Thiele, , Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul, p. 52Google Scholar.

44. Nietzsche, , Beyond Good and Evil, 19Google Scholar.

45. Ibid., 19.

46. Ibid., 23.

47. Ibid., 23

48. Ibid., 24

49. Ibid., 29.

50. Ibid.

51. See Plato, , Republic, trans. Bloom, Allan (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 519c–520a, Cf. 327c.Google Scholar The philosopher's return to the city is presented as a matter of compulsion. Consider the drama of Nietzsche's Zarathustra as his reflection on this question, Cf. Zarathustra, Prologue.

52. Nietzsche, , Beyond Good and Evil, 28,Google Scholar Cf. Machiavelli, Niccolo, The Prince, trans. Mansfield, Harvey C. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), chap. 6Google Scholar.

53. Consider the role of honesty among the Persians in Zarathustra, I.15 and Herodotus, , The History, trans. Grene, David (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 1.137CrossRefGoogle Scholar. While the Persians, known for their honesty, are the people who give Zarathustra this virtue, Machiavelli presents Cyrus's use of deception in the founding of this people. Machiavelli, Niccolo, Discourses on Livy, trans. Mansfield, Harvey C. and Tarcov, Nathan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 2.13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54. Nietzsche, , Beyond Good and Evil, 30Google Scholar.

55. Kofman acknowledges that among the effects of Nietzsche's use of metaphoric and aphoristic writing “also aims to discourage the common” and “wants to make itself understood only by those who are linked by having the same refined impressions” (Kofman, , Nietzshe and Metaphor, pp. 114–15Google Scholar). Lampert emphasizes the connection between hierarchy and esotericism rather than contrasting surfaces and depths. He argues that “Nietzsche's exoteric teaching aims to align the exoteric with the esoteric,” so that the public teaching will be in accord with the exceptional even if it does not reach their heights. For Lampert, this explains Nietzsche's dispelling prejudices as the task of philosophers becomes “to expose the exoteric lies of previous philosophers” (Lampert, , Nietzsche's Task, p. 74Google Scholar). Among the lies Nietzsche exposes is the value of truth itself, apparently demanding interpretations that do not claim truth for themselves, even as Nietzsche expects they will be accepted as truths. Cf. Nietzsche, , Beyond Good and Evil, 295Google Scholar.

56. Nietzsche, , Beyond Good and Evil, 30Google Scholar.

57. Ibid., 30.

58. Ibid., 1.

59. Ibid., 294.

60. Ibid., 28.

61. Ibid., 30.

62. Ibid., 32.

63. Ibid., 33.

64. Ibid., 34.

65. Ibid.

66. Ibid., 35 (“He seeks the true only in order to do the good.”).

67. Lampert, , Nietzsche's Task, pp. 82–84Google Scholar.

68. Nietzsche, , Beyond Good and Evil, 40Google Scholar.

69. Ibid.

70. Ibid., 30.

71. Ibid., 43.

72. Ibid., 43.

73. Ibid., 43

74. Ibid., 44.

75. Ibid., 42.

76. Ibid., 45.

77. This stands in contrast with the famous speech of “Zarathustra's Prologue,” in which Zarathustra seems to accept the prevailing Hegelian view that all human possibilities have been reached, even as he despairs at this situation. He despairs of the onset of the “last man” and presents the alternative as something altogether beyond man, an “Uebermensch.” While Zarathustra may move beyond his own eschatology, Nietzsche clearly declares there to be human possibilities to be explored.

78. Nietzsche, , Beyond Good and Evil, 45Google Scholar.

79. Ibid,. 206. Notice the gender equity of the generative image Nietzsche employs here. His procreative imagery celebrates sexual difference in a way that makes some of his claims regarding women not easily reducible to conventional sexism or misogyny. Consider Clark, Maudemarie, “Nietzsche's Misogyny,” International Studies in Philosophy 26, 3 (1992): 3–12;CrossRefGoogle ScholarIrigiray, Luce, The Marine Lover of Friendrich Nietzche, trans. Gill, Gillian C. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991);Google ScholarHiggins, Kathleen Marie, “Woman, All Too Woman,” Comic Relief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 73–89Google Scholar.

80. Nietzsche, , Beyond Good and Evil, 205Google Scholar.

81. Ibid., 211.

82. Berkowitz, Peter, Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 20Google Scholar. Berkowitz's presentation of the relation between reason and the will as the central interpretative framework for considering Nietzsche corresponds to the two types, the philosopher of the future and the free spirit in Beyond Good and Evil.

83. Ibid.

84. Nietzsche, , Beyond Good and Evil, 211Google Scholar.

85. In this light, consider The Birth of Tragedy as a work of philology.

86. Nietzsche, , Beyond Good and Evil, 49Google Scholar.

87. Ibid., 55.

88. Ibid., 56.

89. Ibid., 61.

90. Lampert, , Nietzsche's Task, pp. 84, 88, 285–86, 303Google Scholar.

91. Cf. Nietzsche, , Beyond Good and Evil, 49, 56, 295Google Scholar.

92. The more extended and more famous discussion of the two is provided in Nietzsche's, next book, Genealogy of Morals 1Google Scholar.

93. Nietzsche, , Beyond Good and Evil, 260Google Scholar.

94. Ibid., 260.

95. Ibid.

96. Ibid.

97. Ibid., 188.

98. Cf. Nietzsche, , Zarathustra, 1.15Google Scholar.

99. Cf. Nietzsche, , Beyond Good and Evil, 19Google Scholar.

100. Thiele, , Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul, cf. pp. 63–39Google Scholar.

101. Ibid., p. 209.

102. Nietzsche, , Beyond Good and Evil, 257Google Scholar.

103. Ibid., 200. Consider in this light Nehamas's contention that Nietzsche draws all of his examples from the arts, Nehamas, , Nietzsche: Life as Literature, pp. 226–27Google Scholar.

104. Nietzsche, , Beyond Good and Evil, 200Google Scholar.

105. Ibid., 272.

106. Thiele, , Politics of the Soul, p. 223Google Scholar.