Nietzsche As Philosopher: Expanded Edition

Columbia Classics in Philosophy

Columbia Classics in Philosophy

Columbia Classics in Philosophy celebrates the longstanding tradition of influential works from Columbia University Press.

Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, with a foreword by Jonathan Gilmore

John Rawls, Political Liberalism, Expanded Edition

Noam Chomsky, Rules and Representatives, with a foreword by Norbert Hornstein

Note on the design: The material added to this edition is set in a different typeface and with a different page design from the original pages of Nietzsche as Philosopher, thus maintaining the integrity of the first edition and distinguishing the added material.

Expanded Edition

Arthur C. Danto

Columbia University Press    New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York    Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2005 Arthur C. Danto

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-50938-1

"Beginning to Be Nietzsche: On Human, All Too Human" was originally published as an introduction to Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. Marion Faber (University of Nebraska Press, 1996), ix–xix.

"Nietzsche’s Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality was originally published as Thoughts of a Subterranean Man," a review of R. J. Hollingdale’s translation of Nietzsche’s Morgenrote, Times Literary Supplement 4148 (1 October 1982): 1074.

"Some Remarks on The Genealogy of Morals" was originally published in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, ed. Richard Schacht (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 35–48.

The preface to this volume and The Tongues of Angels and Men: Nietzsche as Semantical Nihilist first appeared in German in Arthur C. Danto, Nietzsche als Philosoph (Munich: Willhelm Fink Verlag, 1998)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Danto, Arthur Coleman, 1924–

Nietzsche as philosopher / Arthur C. Danto.—Expanded ed.

   p.  cm.—(Columbia classics in philosophy)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-13518-4 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-231-13519-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844–1900.  I. Title.  II. Series.

B3317.D3 2004

193—dc22

2004056186

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].

To the memory of my parents, Samuel B. and Sylvia Danto

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface to the Expanded Edition

Preface to the Morningside Edition

Original Preface

Nietzsche as Philosopher

1.  Philosophical Nihilism

2.  Art and Irrationality

3.  Perspectivism

4.  Philosophical Psychology

5.  Moralities

6.  Religious Psychology

7.  Übermensch and Eternal Recurrence

8.  The Will-to-Power

Nachwort

Aftertexts

1.  The Tongues of Angels and Men: Nietzsche as Semantical Nihilist

2.  A Comment on Nietzsche’s Artistic Metaphysics

3.  Beginning to be Nietzsche: On Human, All Too Human

4.  Nietzsche’s Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality

5.  Some Remarks on The Genealogy of Morals

Notes

Index

Nietzsche as Philosopher grew out of a long essay on Nietzsche, originally written as a contribution for A Critical History of Western Philosophy, edited by D. J. O’Connor, and published in 1964. The authors were not historians of philosophy so much as philosophers who, for one reason or other, had some particular interest in a figure from the past. It was a moment when analytical philosophers had begun to think of the canonical texts of our discipline as something more than nonsense, which meant that the largely iconoclastic views of philosophy, militantly espoused by logical positivism, were at last losing their charm. I was invited to contribute to the O’Connor volume by the general editor of the series in which it appeared, Paul Edwards, largely because my philosophical credentials passed muster and because I was the only one he happened to know who met that criterion and also seemed to know anything about Nietzsche. Admittedly, I did not know a lot—but I had read Nietzsche as an undergraduate at Wayne University in Detroit with Marianna Cowan, who later published a superb translation of Beyond Good and Evil. I accepted the invitation chiefly out of brashness and wrote the essay in Rome. I had moved there from the south of France, where I had completed a draft of my first major book, The Analytical Philosophy of History. As it turned out, my essay was too long, but Edwards offered me a contract for a book on Nietzsche if I would agree to shorten the article. The Analytical Philosophy of History and Nietzsche as Philosopher were published in the same year, 1965.

A recent study by the Italian scholar, Tiziana Andini—Il volto Americano di Nietzsche (The American face of Nietzsche)—addresses the singular quantity of writings on Nietzsche that American philosophers produced in the second half of the twentieth century; she speculates that Nietzsche answered to something deep in the American grain. What I can claim credit for, I think, is that my book opened Nietzsche up for young analytical philosophers, for my effort had been to show that Nietzsche had written boldly and imaginatively on the very questions that defined analytical philosophy as a movement—questions in the philosophy of science, of language, and of logic—and that he was not some marginal kook who stood for something alternative to philosophy as we understood it. My book showed that it was possible to write on Nietzsche without losing ones philosophical credibility. One could in at least this one case have one’s cake and X eat it too. And this secured an intellectual annuity for the book, which has remained part of the growing literature it helped validate at the beginning and to which I contributed from time to time with essays on this or that aspect of Nietzsche’s thought.

When my wonderful German publisher, Axel Kortendeick—alas now dead—raised the question of a German translation of Nietzsche as Philosopher, I proposed that it appear together with these supplementary writings. The result was that readers of Nietzsche als Philosoph (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1998) had access to a broader picture of my thought on Nietzsche than was easily available in English. I cannot say how grateful I am to Wendy Lochner, the philosophy editor at Columbia University Press, for welcoming the suggestion of bringing out a new edition that would incorporate this added material. There is no way in which I could rewrite a text that reflects that moment, nearly forty years ago, in the history of contemporary philosophy. But the book continues to be read and taught in the growing number of courses and seminars devoted to Nietzsche, and since it is part of the history it has helped shape, and since I still stand by its interpretation of its subject, nothing much could be gained by tweaking it to deal with the criticisms it has naturally generated: no response is a response in its own right. The added materials, meanwhile, enrich the reading of Nietzsche’s writing from the perspective the book first opened.

I would like to acknowledge here some of the philosophers who have not only contributed to the history Dr. Andini traces but have in one way or another engaged my subsequent reflections on Nietzsche. These include Maudemarie Clark, Kathleen Higgins, Robert Solomon, Alexander Nahamas, Bernd Magnus, and Richard Schacht. The short note on Nietzsche’s Artistic Metaphysics was delivered as a response to an excellent presentation by Birgit Recky, of Hamburg Universität, at a session, organized by Paul Guyer on Ethics and Aesthetics, at the 2003 meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics.

A few years before the killings at Columbine, a group of youths in Pearl River, Mississippi, embarked on a rampage of murder and brutality, inspired, according to their leader, by the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The aggressors did not describe themselves as Supermen but as thinkers, set apart from the herd who did not understand them—parents, teachers, and insufficiently responsive girls, to whom they felt themselves entitled to teach a hard lesson. As I followed the accounts in the New York Times, I thought of how dangerous Nietzsche—as the prophet of the Superman, the critic of herd morality, the self-styled Antichrist—still can be for turbulent minds who discover in him someone, finally, who understands their value, sees into their hearts, knows their hurt, tells them they are beyond good and evil, and licenses their will-to-power. Despite the effort by intellectuals of the last four decades to transform Nietzsche into a benign presence—a hermeneutician, a deconstructionist, a literary artist, a feminist—his vivid images and incendiary language can still arouse muddled youths to gun down girls who spurn them, stab their nagging mothers, or torture animals to demonstrate their unflinching strength. The fact that he is universally acknowledged a great philosopher lends a certain authority to the ferocity of his injunctions and his scary menu of permissions.

One might wonder if the spontaneous effort on the part of the learned community, to interpret Nietzsche’s writings through various systems of postmodern thought might be an artful measure of penning him, like the Minotaur, within labyrinths it is hoped he cannot escape. Alas, as Pearl River shows, the Minotaur, now and again, gores his way out for a night of blood and horror before allowing himself to be led back into the seminars, the colloquia, the commentaries, the readings, in which he seems somehow safe and even caring. And as Columbine demonstrates, the lowered threshold of adolescent rage answers to causes deeper and wider in contemporary culture than anything Nietzsche can be held responsible for.

Like the Minotaur, however, Nietzsche is a fusion of disparate parts—a subtle philosophical critic of the austere concepts to which gifted thinkers devote entire lifetimes and an intemperate prophet, the vehemence of whose voice carries over into his philosophical investigations. On the other hand, the same philosophical blood flows through the different parts, which makes it difficult to mute his characteristically strident claims. Had the Pearl River thinkers consulted a standard encyclopedia, they would have found their vision corroborated: Nietzsche is the German philosopher, who passionately rejected the ‘slave morality’ of Christianity for a new heroic morality that would affirm life. Leading this new society would be a breed of supermen whose ‘will-to-power’ would set them off from the ‘herd’ of inferior humanity. These teachings, which flooded European consciousness as the twentieth century began, seemed to many to be supported by what they knew of his philosophy, more narrowly considered: that philosophy is autobiography, that language is arbitrary, that truth is a lie, and that logic is merely the way a certain species thinks, with none of the certainty or necessity once felt to belong to it. Anton Chekhov entertained a fantasy of meeting Nietzsche by chance, on a train or a steamer, where they would discuss through the night their agreements and differences. As a scientist, Chekhov wrote, in the somewhat moralistic idiom with which evolution was discussed at the time, that Nature is doing everything in her power to rid herself of all weaklings and organisms for which she has no use. But, as a doctor, Chekhov was committed to serving the weak and hence struggled against Nature’s ruthless and indifferent pruning. So there was a certain felt inconsistency between his thought and practice, which Nietzsche might have helped him resolve. Nietzsche had an inverted reading of this Darwinist gloss on evolution and survival, holding, roughly, that morality and compassion interfered with the workings of Nature, with the result that the weaklings, united under religion, survived. The only hope for humanity accordingly lies in reversing the unnatural survival of the unfit, and he set himself the task of reversal through a destructive critique of morality that rested on a deep critique of scientific knowledge. That is the connection between the monster’s disparate parts. So one cannot, as it were, dismiss the fierce ranting of the prophet as incidental to Nietzsche’s system. It is rather, like his inverting of Darwinism, that the sharp critiques of science, the perspectivism, the invention of a novel theory of truth, the refined analyses of language, the pyschologization of logic and the trivialization of mathematics are enlisted to rewrite a universe in which the strong can come into their rightful ascendancy over the weak.

There are not therefore, two distinct Nietzsche’s—one tough and the other tender. There is not one Nietzsche who addresses graduate students of semantics and another who calls out to the rednecks who feel themselves philosophers through the mere fact that they are able to read him. But that makes it all the more urgent to expose his thought to the kind of critique he used as a weapon against so many bodies of philosophical thought—to use against him the weapons he taught us to wield. The intellectual joys of dealing with the philosophical subtleties of a great analytical thinker, as I deem Nietzsche to be, is enhanced by the sense that in doing so, one is disarming one of the most dangerous moral voices of modern times. Such was the spirit in which Nietzsche as Philosopher was written.

My strategy was to circle the enemy in two different ways. One of them was to demonstrate that Nietzsche really was a philosopher in the precise sense that he contributed, brilliantly and with the originality of genius, to the questions which define philosophical inquiry, and hence that his writings do not establish him as a counterweight to academic philosophy—or as a philosopher for those who lack the patience for philosophy. He is as much a philosopher in the received sense by which we admire the leading figures in the major departments in which the discipline is taught to aspiring professionals. My other strategy was to apply Nietzsche’s philosophy to his own philosophy, in the hope of disarming the rabid Nietzsche and neutralizing the vivid frightening images that have inspired sociopaths for over a century. Admittedly, Nietzsche’s writings will continue to be read by those who do not feel the need for commentary. Still, one does what one can. The only recourse for a philosopher is to elaborate an anti-Nietzschian philosophy from within Nietzsche’s philosophy itself. Philosophy itself, after all, is a maze. If one could engage Nietzsche in the endless disputations about truth and meaning with sharp but decorous philosophical colleagues, who would not think of using their destructive analyses to frightful purposes, what better way could there be to keep him out of harm’s way? The Nietzsche who emerged as philosopher from my book was an unfamiliar Nietzsche, addressed as contributor to the central issues of analytical philosophy. The book helped canonize him as philosopher while damping the fires of his ruthless if inspired harangues. Before Nietzsche as Philosopher appeared, it was common to read him out of the history of philosophy by saying that he was not really a philosopher—or not a real philosopher—but a metaphysician whose nonsense was redeemed by the lyricism of his language. Whatever else it did, my book gave Nietzsche philosophical credibility, admittedly in a far narrower philosophical culture than he would have recognized, that of professional philosophers in a discipline that had become technical and logical, as it had in the Anglo-American academic world, whose philosophy departments it dominated. The book introduced him as a new colleague to my admired peers.

I confess that I failed to appreciate a further mode of disempowerment when I composed this strategy and wrote the book that executes it. This would be to treat his texts as literature. Poetry, W. H. Auden wrote, makes nothing happen. If one could treat the texts as literature, broadly understood, a space within reading would open up, deflecting readers from taking his interpretations and injunctions literally and urging them to attend instead to the poetry of his expression. In part my oversight was due to the belief that his books lacked, to a far greater degree than they do, any larger unity than collections of aphorisms and short essays allow. I went so far as to claim that it scarcely mattered where in his many volumes a given passage might be located. I thought the style was in the language rather than the structure of the writings and that the minimalist structure of externally conjoined passages might have an explanation through the circumstances of his illness. At one point it occurred to me that within a few weeks, Van Gogh cut off his ear and Nietzsche went spectacularly mad in the Piazza Carlino in Turin—and I marveled that the most advanced painter and the most advanced philosopher in Europe should have trespassed into insanity at nearly the same moment. Both were infected by a form of syphilis, and I wondered whether there might be further symptomatic parallels in the way they produced their work. One such parallel, I speculated, lay in the fact that Nietzsche was able only to write in short bursts while Van Gogh, especially in the period leading up to his self-aggression, had a certain attention deficit that expressed itself in work that had to be done quickly, like drawings and oil sketches. Such a view, if sound, would support the thesis that the single aphorism would be the unit of philosophical expression for Nietzsche. But I have since come to appreciate that the books have a structure more cohesive than mere conjunctions of passages could be, with enough textual architecture to qualify as literary works. It seemed accordingly that it would be of great value to write essays on his main texts from this perspective, and I have accordingly rethought Truth and Lies for an Extra Moral Point of View, Human All-Too Human, Morgenrote, and in a much more sustained and probing way, The Geneaology of Morals in the essays here published in conjunction, for the first time, with the integral text of Nietzsche as Philosopher. These at least point the way, brilliantly taken by Alexander Nahamas, to an ideal work—Nietzsche as Poet—referring not to the actual rather lame verses he inserted into his books but to the books themselves, taken as literature. It would be wonderful to have the time and leisure to write in the same vein about The Birth of Tragedy, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and his brief masterpiece, The Twilight of the Idols. But these essays perhaps suffice to establish the claim that granting their claims as literature, the underlying philosophy remains as it is represented in Nietzsche as Philosopher.

So these essays do not quite amount to the dramatic about-face I am credited by friendly critics with having made. Robert Solomon, in a recent study of Nietzsche, declares that I have renounced the earlier book. Bernd Magnus, in Nietzsche’s Case: Philosophy as/and Literature compares two statements by me, written twenty years apart. The first was my somewhat careless claim that none of Nietzsche’s books interestingly presuppose an acquaintance with any other. [So] his writing may read in pretty much any order, without this greatly impeding the comprehension of his ideas. I still, I am afraid, believe that. None of the textual discoveries, such as they are, seem to me greatly to penetrate the system of ideas I tried to establish in Nietzsche as Philosopher. When, for a celebration of Nietzsche’s 150th birthday, I delivered a lecture on Nietzsche as what I called a semantical nihilist—meaning that the world, having no structure other than what we impose upon it, cannot underwrite the truth of our propositions so that, as he liked to say, everything is false, a literary scholar in the audience observed that I seemed not to have changed my mind about anything in the twenty five years since my book’s publication. I still have not. Certain excesses excepted, I have not changed my views on Nietzsche as philosopher at all. I still feel that in all essential respects, the literary and hermeneutical discussions of Nietzsche’s philosophy have made little difference in how his philosophy is structured. And I am enough convinced of the systematicity of philosophy to believe that the system in its entirety is visible in Nietzsche’s earliest works.

Magnus contends that "the truth as Nietzsche saw it requires a certain relation to the text, one in which Nietzsche’s polysemantic metaphors are not perceived as distractions but are instead thought to be required by the very thought itself, indeed may perhaps be said to be the thought itself." From the strategic perspective of disarming Nietzsche, I enthusiastically applaud the idea of transforming his prose into the metaphors that convey it, letting literary interpretation combine with philosophical analysis to interpose a defensive shield between it and at least his more vulnerable readers. But I am certain that Nietzsche meant what he said in the literal way the terrorists of Pearl River High School recognized. He would not have wished his thought to be relativized to a metaphor and turned from exhortations into tropes. He wrote clearly and pungently and ornamented his texts with brilliant images, the better to prepare the mind for receiving the sharp and pointed messages it was his prime intention to plant into the flesh of the soul. When one lays out the propositions, they stand on their own. The philosopher was in the employment of the prophet.

I am not quite so naive as to believe the Minotaur will never again burst out of the labyrinth he himself showed me how to build—but neither can I think of a more justified philosophical task than, by turning his arguments back against themselves, to blunt his language. How often, after all, does a philosopher, acting in the line of duty, actually help save lives?

Arthur C. Danto

NEW YORK CITY, 2004

arthurdantist, n. One who straightens the teeth of exotic dogmas. Little Friedrich used to say the most wonderful things before we took him to the arthurdantist.—Frau Nietzsche

—DANIEL DENNETT AND KAREL LAMBERT, THE PHILOSOPHICAL LEXICON

From one of the innumerable pensions in which he passed the restless years of his forced retirement from the University of Basle, and during which he composed the amazing texts which house his philosophy, Nietzsche wrote to his psychological collaborator and amatory rival Paul Rée of having met a remarkable fellow guest: the editor of what Nietzsche identified as the most prestigious philosophical journal of the anglo-saxon world. In high excitement, Nietzsche informed Rée of the great interest this personage expressed in their work, and of how anxious he was to publish something of it. The guest, by comedic happenstance, was Croom Robertson, the editor of Mind, even then a periodical of singular austerity and rigorous logical address. Nietzsche and the editor of Mind! It was one of those cruel ironic encounters of polar opposites which Max Beerbohm fantastically depicted in a delicious genre of his invention: Charles Darwin and the Archbishop of Canterbury, say, or—to underscore the absurdities of incommunication with more contemporary possibilities—Simone Weil and the editor of Gourmet, Ti-Grace Atkinson and the editor of Playboy, or Che Guevara and the editor of Forbes; caricatures of what organizers of conferences solemnize as dialogue. And I can picture poor Mr. Robertson, riveted by an Etonian politeness to the conventions of the common-table, interposing How fascinating! or Come now! as his partner, through his eccentric moustache, declaims, over the potato soup and the sauerbraten, of the Superman, the Eternal Return, the origins of tragedy in the Dionysiac orgy, slave morality, and the Blond Beast. You must by all means send us something, Mr. Nietzsche, I can hear him stammering as he makes his grateful departure after a desperate change of itinerary.

I came across this letter to Rée in the course of reading through Nietzsche’s correspondence one spring in Rome, having just finished writing Analytical Philosophy of History, and beginning to think about the present book. It was a project of highest priority for me, once returned to New York, to examine the relevant volumes of Mind to see if, by a spectacular oversight, the Nietzsche bibliographies had neglected an extraordinary item. There was, of course, nothing by him, and I lack the archival enterprise to find out whether Nietzsche indeed submitted a manuscript—though it is amusing to draft an imaginary letter of rejection in correct if stilted German. Nietzsche would hardly have been capable at the time of casting his thoughts into the regimented etiquette of the standard journal article. Yet, question de style apart, as a philosopher, his interests and those of Mr. Robertson’s sober readers were not so hilariously at odds as my cartooning implies, and in retrospect it seems to me as though my effort in this book is that of a third guest at the Gaststatte, patiently translating into one another’s idiom the seemingly incommensurate preoccupations of these two ill-matched diners thrown together by the malevolence of chance. The pages of Mind would have been one of the forums in which what we think of today as analytical philosophy took shape, with its central teaching that the problems of philosophy are au fond problems of language, however heavily disguised. But just this, I came to believe, was Nietzsche’s own view, that the structures of language determine what are the structures of reality for those whose language it is, and that the deep order of the world, so sought by philosophers of the past, is but the cast shadow of the deep order of their grammar. He went on from there, of course, to pose the startling thesis that a change in human reality cannot be expected until there is a change in language—that we shall not get rid of God, as he says in Beyond Good and Evil, until we get rid of grammar—and he polemicized in favor of that change by submitting the realities of his tradition to the most devastating criticism it had ever sustained. The demolition of idols, the moral arson, the brash defacement of sacred writ by brilliant graffiti, brought him notoriety and enthusiasm—alas too late to slake his thirst for recognition. But beneath it all, and giving it a point and basis, was a philosophy of language so novel for its time that neither his contemporaries nor he himself fully perceived it for what it was. It took an independent development of contemporary philosophy to render it logically visible. Thus Nietzsche as philosopher, as I would seek to explain him to Croom Robertson and those who came after him and worked in the spirit of his celebrated journal.

Not long after the book appeared, I had a nice discussion about it with Lionel Trilling, in one of those impromptu chats which compose the charm of street life at Columbia, the two of us carrying bags of groceries from the B & B Market. Your book, he said just as we finished, has the snottiest title I ever saw. Whole libraries of arrogant redundancies realized themselves in an instant’s fantasy: Picasso as Artist, Notre Dame as Cathedral, Lenin as Revolutionary, Trilling as Critic…. And of course he was right: the title was intended to be (mildly) offensive. But until then it had seemed to many that Nietzsche had been manhandled into the history of philosophy for want of an obvious alternative space to store him in. But his presence there was deemed anomalous and possibly wrong. Nietzsche isn’t really a philosopher, I had been assured by an esteemed senior colleague. And there were those disposed to believe that if he was a philosopher, no one before him could really have been that, since none did quite what he did—he philosophized with a hammer, went mad, barked up every wrong tree in Christendom, wrote stunning prose. Or he was thought of as almost everything except a philosopher. So I wanted to show that whatever else he was or was not, he was certainly a philosopher in just the way that everyone who is one is one: that he thought systematically and deeply about each of the closed set of questions which define what philosophy is, and that he gave serious, original, and coherent answers to them all. Whatever else he was, he was a philosopher. The title—and of course the text—was an effort to rescue this man for my own discipline from all those poets, politicians, potheads, and photographers from Princeton. There were lots of Nietzsches. He belongs to the histories of philosophy, opera, ideology, and hermeneutics; to the chronicles of loneliness, madness, and sexual torment. Mine is the philosopher.

Of course, it is an exercise in arthurdanture, and some may feel the bite is gone when straightened. My own view is that the things he says are more interesting than the things Frau Nietzsche—who was anyway not much of a philosopher—thought so much of. And they have the extra fascination of perhaps being true, in whatever way it is that philosophy is true. I have thought enough of Nietzsche’s theories to have exploited them in my own subsequent philosophical work. But further confession is unseemly in a preface and in any case, as Nietzsche wrote in another letter, this time to Jacob Burckhardt, Alles Persönliche ist eigentlich komisch.

A.C.D.

BROOKHAVEN AND NEW YORK CITY

OCTOBER, 1979

The vocabulary of philosophy is much less technical than the layman might suppose; many of its words are from the common lexicon of everyday, ordinary speech. Thus, the distances between the philosophical use of these terms and their usual employment in daily communication might seem negligible to the nonphilosopher, who had expected, perhaps, words more recondite or exotic. Accordingly, he might think to apply sentences, which make a philosophical use of a word, to situations, where the ordinary use of that word is called for. When this occurs, however, tensions always arise. The philosophical sentence sometimes seems insanely irrelevant in contexts where the mere words have an otherwise unexceptionable application; and the ordinary sentences have an almost comic impertinence when inserted in philosophical discussion. Suppose, for example, a man is pinned under a log and complains that he cannot get free. It would be absurd to reply to him that none of us can, because we live in a deterministic world. It would be just as absurd as for a dentist to direct us to seek nirvana—a general surcease from the suffering of the world—when we merely complain of a toothache. Or for an arch seducer to remind a reluctant maiden that the Bible enjoins us to love our neighbour. It is difficult to get the two sets of uses to mesh harmoniously; perhaps it is impossible.

Nietzsche’s philosophy is often expressed in sentences which sound such dissonances when taken in conjunction with ordinary language, and some of his most celebrated utterances acquire their pungency through the stresses and strains of using the same word simultaneously in a wide and a narrow context. His style of writing and philosophizing, in part, was to dilate and then suddenly to circumscribe the meaning of a word, although he likely was not always aware that he was doing so, and was at times as misled by what he wrote as his puzzled readers must have been. He would take a word, which had a restricted usage, and begin to give it a far wider application, using it now to describe things that had never been seen as falling within the meaning of that term before. Then, having immensely widened the scope of the word, he would force it back into the context from which it was originally taken. The context is then charged with an overload of conceptual energy it was not made to withstand. The effect was not always felicitous. Old words used in new ways in old contexts sometimes exploded into absurdity or silliness. But at times the sentence would attain a singular intensity and induce a creative distortion in the structure of our understanding. Because he was given to self-dramatization, Nietzsche liked to speak of himself as philosophizing with a hammer. His purpose was in part to crack the habitual grip on thought in which language holds us, to make us aware of how much our minds are dominated by the concepts from which we can hardly escape, given the rules our language follows. Then, realizing the conventional nature of our language, we might try to create fresh concepts and so whole new philosophies. The violent chemistry of subtle linguistic incongruities yielded a prose that was sparkling and explosive at its best, and a means to the liberation of the human mind. Men had to be made to understand that everything was possible if they were to be moved to try anything at all, Nietzsche felt, and his philosophy, therefore, is one of total conceptual permissiveness. The concepts he attacked had to be the most basic ones, the piers, so to speak, which supported the entire ramified networks of human ideas, piers sunk so deep in the human psychology as scarcely to be acknowledged. It is for this that he is entitled to be called a philosopher.

Nietzsche was more than a critic of concepts and a word-tormenting anarchist. He tried to construct a philosophy consistent with the extraordinary openness he felt was available to man, or at least a philosophy that would entail this openness as one of its consequences. In the course of his piecemeal elaborations he touched on most of the problems that have concerned philosophers, and he discussed them interestingly, and even profoundly. If one takes the trouble