NIETZSCHE'S POSTMORALISM This important collection of new essays, published on the centenary of Nietzsche's death, offers an extensive reassessment

of his contributions to philosophy and represents a helpful guide to an important part of the current landscape of Nietzsche studies. In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche calls on "new philosophers" to carry on the process of reinterpretation and revaluation that will characterize the "philosophy of the future." This reconsideration is to be pursued in a "postmoral" manner, "beyond good and evil." The nine prominent interpreters in this collection examine different aspects of this postmoral agenda and show the importance of Nietzsche's efforts to reorient philosophical thinking about the way we understand ourselves, our values, and morality today. Nietzsche emerges here as a provocatively reconstructive rather than a merely deconstructive thinker. Richard Schacht is Professor of Philosophy and Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign.

Nietzsche's Postmoralism Essays on Nietzsche's Prelude to Philosophy's Future

Edited by RICHARD SCHACHT University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, VIC 3166, Australia Ruiz de Alarcon 13,28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Water Front, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 2001 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2001 Printed in the United States of America Typeface Times Roman 10/12 pt. System QuarkXPress [BTS]

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Nietzche's postmoralism : essays on Nietzche's prelude to philosophy's future / edited by Richard Schacht. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-521-64085-7 1. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900 - Ethics - Congresses. I. Schacht, Richard, 1941B3318.E9 N54 2000 193 - dc21 99-056851 ISBN 0 52164085 7 hardback

To the memory of Jorg Salaquarda 1938-1999 who made a difference

Contents

Contributors Preface A Note on References Introduction

RICHARD SCHACHT

page ix xi xiii 1 7 34

Nietzsche on the Illusions of Everyday Experience

IVAN SOLL

Masters without Substance

RUDIGER BITTNER

Rethinking the Subject: Or, How One Becomes-Other Than What One Is
ALAN D. SCHRIFT

47 63

The Youngest Virtue

ALAN WHITE

Morality as Psychology, Psychology as Morality: Nietzsche, Eros, and Clumsy Lovers

ROBERT B. PIPPIN

79

On the Rejection of Morality: Bernard Williams's Debt to Nietzsche

MAUDEMARIE CLARK

100 123 149

Nietzsche's Virtues: A Personal Inquiry

ROBERT C. SOLOMON

Nietzschean Normativity
RICHARD SCHACHT

Vlll

CONTENTS

Nietzsche's Perfectionism: A Reading of Schopenhauer as Educator

JAMES CONANT

181 258

Bibliography

Contributors

RUDIGER BITTNER has taught at the universities of Heidelberg, Princeton, Hildesheim, and Yale. He is now Professor of Philosophy in the University of Bielefeld, Germany. He is the author of What Reason Demands and articles on Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, moral philosophy, and theory of action.

is Professor of Philosophy at Colgate University. She is author of Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, co-editor of Nietzsche's Daybreak, and co-translator of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality. She is working on a book on nature, culture, and politics in Beyond Good and Evil.
MAUDEMARIE CLARK JAMES CONANT is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. He is the author of essays on Kant, Frege, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, William James, and Wittgenstein and is editing the volume of the Norton Anthology of Western Philosophy covering the post-Kantian analytic tradition. ROBERT B. PIPPIN is the Raymond W. and Martha Hilpert Gruner Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and in the Department of Philosophy and the College at the University of Chicago. His most recent book is Henry James and Modern Moral Life. In addition to his work on Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, he has published on theories of self-consciousness, the nature of conceptual change, and the problem of freedom.

is Professor of Philosophy and Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. His interests center upon issues relating to human nature and value. His books include Nietzsche and Making Sense of Nietzsche. He also has edited Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality and Nietzsche: Selections and is General Editor of the forthcoming Norton Anthology of Western Philosophy.
RICHARD SCHACHT

x
ALAN

Contributors

D. SCHRIFT is Professor of Philosophy at Grinnell College. He is the author of Nietzsche's French Legacy: A Genealogy of Poststructuralism and Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation and editor of The Logic of the Gift, The Hermeneutic Tradition: From Ast to Ricoeur, Transforming the Hermeneutic Context: From Nietzsche to Nancy, and Why Nietzsche Still? Reflections on Drama, Culture, Politics.
IVAN SOLL is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He is author of An Introduction to Hegel's Metaphysics and essays on such European thinkers as Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Sartre, and on such topics as self-deception, desire, death, pessimism, asceticism, cruelty, hedonism, and aesthetic experience. ROBERT C. SOLOMON is Quincy Lee Centennial Professor and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of thirty books, including From Rationalism to Existentialism, In the Spirit of Hegel, The Passions, Ethics and Excellence, and most recently (both with Kathleen M. Higgins) A Short History of Philosophy and What Nietzsche Really Said.

is Professor of Philosophy at Williams College. He is the author of Absolute Knowledge: Hegel and the Problem of Metaphysics, Schelling: An Introduction to the System of Freedom, Within Nietzsche's Labyrinth, and two as yet unpublished novels {Nothing Matters and Revenge). He is now engaged in reconstructing Kojeve's reconstruction of Hegel's system.
ALAN WHITE

Preface

This volume is dedicated to the memory of Jorg Salaquarda, who at the time of his most untimely death was Universitatsprofessor fur Philosophie, Religionsphilosophie, und Religionskritik in the EvangelischTheologischen Fakultat at the University of Vienna. Salaquarda had long been very well known to all of us in the international community of Nietzsche scholarship and was one of the participants in the conference at the University of Illinois in 1994 from which most of the essays in this volume derive (as is explained in the Introduction). He was a leading light in Nietzsche scholarship and will be greatly missed on that account; but he will be missed at least as much for the decency, integrity, and cosmopolitanism that he brought to his work and to his interactions with his colleagues in this international community he did so much to foster. Salaquarda exemplified the kind of philosophical temperament and sensibility that many of us feel will best serve both the Nietzsche studies and (in Nietzsche's phrase) "the philosophy of the future": at once intellectually conscientious and independently minded, with respect to the reinterpretation and reevaluation of both Nietzsche's thinking and the things he was trying to think about. This temperament - which was modeled in exemplary fashion by Nietzsche himself at his best - characterized the 1994 conference more generally; and it is reflected in the spirit of the essays in this volume, even if the mix of these traits may vary among them. They all deal in one way or another with the basic theme of the conference, which remains today and will continue to be an important theme: the significance for philosophy's future of the kinds of thinking Nietzsche called for and sought to pursue, as that future might best be realized. The conference and this volume would not have been possible without the generous support of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences of my home institution, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The conference would not have been the delightful experience it was if it had not been able to be held in the sylvan setting of the University's Allerton House, which belies the image of this part of the country. The

xii

Preface

volume would not have been possible without the patience of a number of the contributors. Its preparation was aided considerably at several stages by two research assistants, both "philosophers of the future" in my department's graduate program: Paul Hendrickson and Craig Matarrese. My sincere appreciation for all of the above. Richard Schacht Urbana, June 1999

A Note on References

Throughout this volume the standard practice in the English-language Nietzsche literature is followed of identifying Nietzsche's texts by using the acronyms of their most commonly used English-language titles (see below for a listing). These acronyms are also used in place of the full (English) titles of texts mentioned frequently in the various essays, to avoid their "eternal recurrence," although full titles appear when appropriate for reasons of first use, meaning, or emphasis. The practice also is followed of identifying passages from these texts by using the section numbers Nietzsche generally provides (in arabic numerals), and, when the section numbering is not consecutive throughout an entire text, the part numbers either provided by Nietzsche himself or assignable in obvious ways to parts that are not already numbered in the texts (in roman numerals) (again, see below for a listing of the latter). The great advantage of this practice, as opposed to using page numbers in specific editions, is that it enables one to find the passages cited in any edition, whether English or German. The letter "P" is used to denote Nietzsche's prefaces (or, in the case of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the Prelude to the First Part). Most readers will already be familiar with these practices, and those who are not should be able easily to accustom themselves to them. A listing of the most commonly used editions and translations of these texts appears in the Bibliography. The Antichrist/Der Antichrist A BGE Beyond Good and EviUJenseits von Gut und Bose BT The Birth of Tragedy/Geburt der Tragodie CW The Case of Wagner/Der Fall Wagner D Daybreak/Morgenrothe EH Ecce Homo/Ecce Homo I Why I Am So Wise II Why I Am So Clever III Why I Write Such Good Books (subsections identified by acronyms)

xiv

Note on References

IV Why I Am a Destiny GM On the Genealogy of Morals/Zur Genealogie der Moral GS The Gay Science/Die frohliche Wissenschaft HC Homer's Contest/Homers Wettkampf HH Human, All Too Human/Menschliches, Allzumenschliches I First Volume (original version) 11:1 Assorted Opinions and Maxims (Second Volume, First Part) II:II The Wanderer and His Shadow (Second Volume, Second Part) HL On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life/Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie fur das Leben (second Untimely Meditation) KGB Kritische Gesamtausga.be: Briefwechsel KGW Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke KSA Sdmtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe SE Schopenhauer as Educator/Schopenhauer als Erzieher (third Untimely Meditation) TI Twilight of the Idols/Gotzen-Dammerung I Maxims and Arrows II The Problem of Socrates III "Reason" in Philosophy IV How the "True World" Finally Became a Fable V Morality as Anti-Nature VI The Four Great Errors VII The "Improvers" of Mankind VIII What the Germans Lack IX Skirmishes of an Untimely Man X What I Owe to the Ancients XI The Hammer Speaks TL On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense/Uber Wahrheit und Luge im aussermoralischen Sinn UM Untimely Meditations/Unzeitgemdsse Betrachtungen WP The Will to Power/Der Wille zur Macht WS The Wanderer and His Shadow/Der Wanderer und sein Schatten (incorporated into Human, All Too Human as the second part of Volume 2) Z Thus Spoke Zarathustra/Also Sprach Zarathustra

Introduction
R I C H A R D SCHACHT

"The time for me hasn't come yet," Friedrich Nietzsche observed in Ecce Homo, near the end of his all-too-brief productive life. "Some are born posthumously." That certainly was true enough when he wrote it, in 1888, years before his writings began to attract any real attention. But attract it they eventually did, on a scale few other philosophical writers have ever even imagined. No other figure in the history of philosophy surpasses Nietzsche in the attention now being accorded to him, not only by scholarly specialists, but also by those engaged in many areas of ongoing inquiry in philosophy and kindred disciplines. Moreover, no previous figure in the history of modern philosophy has attracted as much attention as Nietzsche has in intellectual circles beyond the bounds of academia, in which cultural analysis and criticism are pursued by many writers concerned with the current problems and future prospects of our society and culture. For some, he is the philosopher they love to hate, who called into question everything they hold dear, and was the sower of many of the ill winds whose whirlwind progeny now threaten us. For others, he is the welcome scourge, liberator, and herald who broke the grip of moribund traditions and stultifying institutions and pointed the way toward a radically new and different future not only for philosophy but also for humanity. During the century since his death Nietzsche might thus be said to have been born again and again, in one guise after another. Few other philosophers have been as widely and vehemently reviled; but few also have been embraced and claimed by adherents of as many philosophical (and other) developments and orientations of such astonishing diversity. Even if one sets aside the political, ideological, artistic, and literary enthusiasms that have drawn inspiration from him or claimed affinity with him, the list is still a remarkable one, ranging from Lebensphilosophie, Existenzphilosophie, and French-style existentialism to deconstructionism, poststructuralism, and several strands of AngloAmerican philosophy, both pragmatic and analytic. Indeed, he has even inspired intense interest in some quarters - positivist, feminist,

RICHARD SCHACHT

theological - in which one might think there would be only implacable opposition. Yet it is arguable that, all of this attention and all of these rebirths notwithstanding, his time has not yet truly come (let alone come and gone), but rather is still only on its way, or perhaps is only now arriving. These previous rebirths, in retrospect, seem themselves to have been premature, often issuing in strange and sometimes even grotesque progeny bearing his name but owing at least as much to those engendering them. It remains to be seen whether the future of Nietzsche's reception and philosophical career will be anything other than more of the same. The jury is still out on the matter. It is undeniable that Nietzsche has emerged from the margins and shadows of respectable philosophical and more broadly intellectual endeavor and has come to occupy stage front and center. For many, however, both within and beyond the philosophical community, it is harder than ever today to know what to make of this most unconventional thinker, and of his relevance to contemporary inquiry. There is a growing and now fairly widespread recognition that his thought matters to many different areas of inquiry, and in any event deserves and indeed requires to be taken seriously - either for its potentially positive contributions or owing to the severity and possible consequences of its challenge. The long-deferred day of reckoning with Nietzsche is thus at last at hand. It is not yet clear, however, just what that reckoning is to be with. The dominant interpretations of a half-century ago - Nietzsche the proto-Nazi (Russell), Nietzsche the humanistic existentialist (Kaufmann), Nietzsche the last metaphysician (Heidegger) - no longer prevail; but nothing approaching a consensus concerning the character and significance (let alone content) of Nietzsche's thought has emerged in their place in the interval. Indeed, while English-language Nietzsche studies may well be said to have come of age during the past twenty years, they have been more divergent than convergent in the interpretive directions they have taken. Yet there is a strong and widespread sense that the future of philosophy itself is far from clear and is genuinely open to a far greater extent than appeared to be the case not so very long ago - and that Nietzsche's efforts in the direction of what he called "new philosophers" and a "philosophy of the future" may turn out to be both instructive and helpful in this connection. Philosophy today is no longer dominated by the profoundly differing orientations - one might almost say ideologies - that competed so fiercely for dominance and allegiance for much of this century, with such unfortunate consequences for the discipline, the

Introduction

profession, and generations of philosophers and students who were caught up in the conflict. Positivism and existentialism have long since joined idealism and pragmatism in the chronicle of episodes in the recent history of philosophy, followed more recently by the enthusiasms inspired by the early and later Marx, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Foucault, and others who for a time held the limelight; and although the linguisticanalytic and deconstructionist tendencies that have been so influential in recent decades are still discernible, the philosophical community is well on its way to outgrowing both of their preoccupations and limitations. The same is true of Nietzsche studies today. The divisions that have beset philosophy more generally have been vividly evident among Nietzsche interpreters on both sides of the English Channel. Yet even those who have been caught up in the "Nietzsche wars" that have been going on ever since it became apparent that his thought is worth arguing about are for the most part finding their way to less partisan and more fruitful forms of engagement, both with each other and with others in and beyond philosophical circles. These developments are very much in the spirit of Nietzsche himself, and they hold the promise of a new maturity and vitality in discussion of his thought that should also earn increasing attention and respect among many who do not conceive of themselves as being concerned specifically with Nietzsche but who have interests similar to his. One sign that this is already happening is that the Nietzsche literature to a considerable and growing extent features work not only of those who are primarily Nietzsche scholars but also of a diverse array of others who find it worth their philosophical and intellectual while to take Nietzsche seriously. Another such sign may readily be seen in the ways in which the lines between the Nietzsche literature and inquiry into a wide range of matters of contemporary interest are increasingly indistinct, with the consequence that contributions to the former may with equal justice be regarded as contributions to the latter. This was one of the most striking and encouraging features of an international conference on "Nietzsche's Philosophical Thought and Its Contemporary Significance" held at the University of Illinois Allerton Conference Center in October 1994, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his birth, from which this volume largely derives. Versions of all but one of the essays in this volume were presented at that conference. (The single exception is my own contribution, which had been conceived and intended for the conference but was delayed in completion - for quite some time, as things turned out - and so only here joins the rest.) All have to do in one way or another with reconsiderations of

RICHARD SCHACHT

Nietzsche's thinking and efforts relating to the two undeniably central tasks of his "philosophy of the future" as he both preached and sought to practice it: (re-)interpretation and (re-)valuation. Nietzsche may or may not appropriately be associated with such subsequent intellectual-historical developments as poststructuralism and postmodernism. His repeated emphasis upon the theme that this "philosophy of the future" would be "beyond good and evil," however, in the sense of being emancipated from the dominance of conventionally and traditionally "moral" modes of interpretation and evaluation and their shadows and echoes in various other, seemingly unrelated areas of inquiry, suggests the greater aptness of thinking of him rather as a "postmoralist." His postmoralism (or "immoralism," as he sometimes more incautiously and misleadingly calls it) is by no means hostile to all forms and conceptions of morality and value. Moreover, it has as much to do with the rethinking of other matters of philosophical interest as it does with their reconsideration. Its character and upshot are far from evident, however, and are all too easily (and commonly) misunderstood. A step in the right direction is taken when one recalls his adoption of the expression frohliche Wissenschaft to characterize his kind of philosophy. The essays in this volume attempt to take others, and to reflect upon points of juncture between his "prelude" and ongoing inquiry. The essays in the first part of the volume deal with issues relating to Nietzsche's reconsideration of what our experience amounts to and what we can aspire to in our thinking, and of what we ourselves amount to and might do well to aspire to become. Ivan Soil begins where Nietzsche began, in The Birth of Tragedy, discussing his efforts to disentangle himself from the metaphysics and epistemology of the "appearance/ reality" distinction, and attempting to shed light upon the problem of what to make of a thesis Nietzsche at times seems to espouse, to the effect that our everyday experience of the world is fundamentally distorted. Riidiger Bittner's essay follows with a provocative critical examination of another problem, relating to Nietzsche's attempt to understand ourselves, and calling attention to the apparent tension between his denial of substance and his "doctrine" of the will to power. Alan Schrift then offers a postdeconstructionist reconsideration of Nietzsche's thinking with respect to the "subject" and his notion of the Ubermensch, suggesting that both relate to the problem of agency, and to the question of what it does and can amount to in human life. "Rethinking thinking" is a task no less necessary than Schrift's topic, "Rethinking the Subject." Nietzsche's efforts in this connection have inspired even stronger reactions among philosophers in recent years than his professed "immoralism," for he has been taken to repudiate the very

Introduction

idea of truth, the very possibility of knowledge, and the very enterprise of philosophy itself conceived as a cognitive affair. This characterization of his thinking with respect to these matters oversimplifies it to the point of distortion, however; and when one looks more closely at his texts that bear upon them, one finds much more in them than this caricature would lead one to expect. Thus, Alan White next takes up the question of how to understand Nietzsche's cardinal intellectual virtue, Redlichkeit, which is crucial to the issue of the sort of thinking that Nietzsche considers to be humanly possible and wants the would-be philosopher and knower to cultivate. Robert Pippin then suggests that Nietzsche draws upon the idea of love to develop an alternative to traditional and conventional modes of acceptance where both knowledge and values are concerned. Schrift's, White's, and Pippin's essays obviously deal in various ways with issues not only of meaning but also of "mattering," upon which the remaining essays all focus more directly and extensively. Talk about morals, virtues, values, and normativity has to do with things that are taken to matter, and with the ways in which they matter. This is a cluster of problems that was central to Nietzsche's concerns, and that is of growing interest today both within and beyond the bounds of philosophy. Many of Nietzsche's most celebrated notions - such as the "death of God," the "advent of nihilism," the need for going "beyond good and evil," the project of a "revaluation of values," the possibility of an "enhancement of life" (and likewise of its stultification and decline), and the idea of "higher" and "herd" types of humanity - relate directly to it. We are still only just beginning to learn how to think and talk about the whole matter of mattering in postreligious and postmoralistic ways. This is something with which Nietzsche can help -just as this development is creating a context in which his efforts along these lines can be better appreciated. The issues at stake could hardly be more important; and Nietzsche's attempts to deal with them in a radically "de-deified" and (as it were) "de-moralized" manner are not only provocative but also instructive, regardless of whether they are deemed successful or even on the right track. The last four essays illuminate these attempts in complementary ways. Maudemarie Clark explores the connections between Nietzsche's and Bernard Williams's efforts to break the grip of moralistic thinking upon our understanding of normative and evaluative matters, and to move beyond it. Robert Solomon begins his essay with a reflection on Nietzsche's attempt to move a rich conception of virtue to the fore in his revised scheme of what matters, and he goes on to offer a sketch of Nietzsche's array of revalued virtues as a prologue to a Nietzschean "virtue ethics." In my own essay I undertake to work out the general

RICHARD SCHACHT

approach to normativity in human life toward which I believe Nietzsche to have been moving, descriptively and in commonplace contexts as well, as when he is thinking in a more hortatory manner and with humanity at its best in mind. Finally, James Conant offers an extended (and revisionist) discussion of the "perfectionist" character of Nietzsche's ethical thinking, with particular reference to Nietzsche's important early essay Schopenhauer as Educator. Conant challenges the "elitist" interpretation of Nietzsche and proposes a fundamental reconsideration of his thinking with respect to human value and an ethics appropriate to it. The immediate occasion of these essays - the sesquicentennial of Nietzsche's birth (in 1844) - is well behind us, and the centenary of his final demise (in 1900) is at hand. The Nietzsche literature is burgeoning, and the wider philosophical community's interest in him is growing. By the time his bicentennial arrives, it is conceivable that both will be on the wane. It is a good bet, however, that both will continue to wax, and that Nietzsche will loom larger and figure even more importantly on the philosophical scene in the future than he does today. The sense that we still have only scratched the surface of his thought, and have only begun to get out of it what it has to offer to those who dig in, is likely to persist for a good while. But so is the growing sense that we are getting somewhere, and that doing so is philosophically well worthwhile.

Nietzsche on the Illusions of Everyday Experience

IVAN SOLL

Appearance and Reality

Nietzsche, in maintaining that all of our ordinary, everyday experience is illusory, is propounding a view that had long been championed in philosophy. Since Parmenides, philosophers have repeatedly drawn a distinction between appearance and reality and repeatedly claimed that all ordinary experience is illusory. But they have also often offered advice about how one could transcend or evade the illusions of ordinary experience and achieve an awareness of reality that does not involve distortion. One repeatedly offered strategy, the "rationalistic" one, is to ignore the misleading evidence of the senses and instead nonsensuously think one's way to the truth about things as they really are. Among Nietzsche's predecessors it was Kant who rendered the distinction between reality and its illusory appearance particularly problematic by arguing that there is no way to evade or transcend these illusions.1 Kant's epistemological strictures dismayed the German philosophers who directly followed him and stimulated them to develop strategies and methods that might enable us to reach that undistorted knowledge of reality that Kant had deemed forever out of reach. Much of the philosophical activity that took place in Germany in the nineteenth century was devoted to this task. At the beginning of the century the great interest in a special capacity for "intellectual intuition" or a special "dialectical method" arose in large part from an interest in finding ways to escape from the severe limitations Kant had placed upon human knowledge. Figures like Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, in the heyday of German Idealism, focused the debate upon two questions: (1) whether or not ordinary experience is illusory, and (2) how such illusion, if it does exist, could be circumvented, if at all. To frame these questions using the metaphor from eastern thought, "the veil of Maya," introduced to western philosophy primarily by Schopenhauer, and adopted from him by Nietzsche: (1) Is the world indeed covered by a "veil of Maya"?

IVAN SOLL

and, if so, (2) How might it be possible, if at all, to remove it or peep through or under it? What Draws Us to Draw on the Veil of Maya? Because of these overriding concerns, which quickly came to dominate the debate and continue to do so, the question concerning the origin of this supposed general veiling, concealment, or distortion of reality almost vanished from the field of consideration. This question becomes particularly puzzling when it is conceived as involving not simply a given condition, but a deed - not simply a limitation that confronts us, but one that we somehow bring upon ourselves. According to Kant, the world of our experience arises through some sort of human activity. On earlier conceptions, such as those of the Eleatics and of the Rationalists, the general distortion of reality in ordinary experience is treated simply as a condition that we encounter. Kant argues, however, that the world of experience is systematically illusory because we human beings constitute and continually reconstitute its illusions, through our own activity - although this activity, being thoroughly habitual and unvarying, is normally performed without any deliberation or reflection. Kant's view creates a special mystery. Why should we do anything that would veil, conceal, or distort this world from ourselves, since we presumably want to know it as perfectly as possible? What draws us to draw on the veil of Maya? What is gained in bringing upon ourselves such a loss of knowledge? To what end do we sacrifice our desire to perfect our knowledge of the world? Sacrificing Knowledge for the Sake of Knowledge Kant's answer, put very simply and in the form of a conundrum, is that we sacrifice knowledge in order to have knowledge - that is, we sacrifice knowledge of things as they really are in themselves in order to be able to know them at all. According to Kant, our experience is distorted by the process of bringing order to what is given to us in experience, and this ordering of what we encounter is necessary if we are to experience or know it at all. The distortion of our experience is thus the price of having any experience or knowledge whatsoever. On his view, since it is only by imposing upon our experience a universal temporal and spatial framework in which things interact causally that we can have a coherent experience at all, we are willing to sacrifice our ability to experience or know things as they are "in themselves." Kant's resolution of this problem is particularly elegant in that it appeals to the very assumption

Illusions of Everyday Experience

that engenders the problem - namely, that one of the basic, irreducible, drives motivating human beings is a drive for knowledge. This way of accounting for our motives in veiling or distorting from ourselves the reality we want to know, as a faut de mieux strategy of our cognitive interests, is abandoned by Schopenhauer and subsequently by Nietzsche, but by each in his own way. Sacrificing Knowledge for the Sake of Action Schopenhauer, who accepted Kant's argument that we create an orderly but illusory world by imposing the structures of space, time, and causality upon our experience, argued that these structures, particularly space and time, were the source of another basic feature of the world of our experience: namely, that it is composed of a plurality of individual things, more specifically by a number of pluralities - each a plurality of individuals of the same kind. He argued that individuals can be distinguished from other instances of the same kind only by locating them in space and time.2 Schopenhauer's arguments anticipate by over a century some of those offered by Peter Strawson in his important book Individuals? But there is an important difference between Schopenhauer's approach and that of Kant, and of neo-Kantians like Strawson. Kant and Strawson primarily investigate the question of the basic or "a priori" structures of experience needed for a coherent cognitive life. But Schopenhauer, in seeking to explain why we are willing to use these structures even though they inevitably conceal reality from us, does not limit himself to exclusively cognitive considerations. He considers these structures to be primarily enablers of action rather than of knowledge. This shift should not be surprising. It is natural to view the purportedly universal activity of structuring and distorting our own experience as serving our fundamental needs. And what one takes these needs to be depends upon one's view of the fundamental nature of human beings. Schopenhauer, who identified our fundamental nature as will, suggested that we impose distorting structures upon experience - and thereby create a world of identifiable particulars - not primarily because this is a necessary condition of being able to comprehend the world rationally, but rather because only such distortion enables us to act:
Thus, originally and by its nature, knowledge is completely the servant of the will. . . . And so all knowledge which follows the principle of sufficient reason remains in a nearer or remoter relation to the will. For the individual finds his body as an object among objects, to all of which it has many different relations and connexions according to the principle of sufficient r e a s o n . . . . As it is the principle

10

IVAN SOLL

of sufficient reason that places the object in relation to the body and so to the will, the sole endeavor of knowledge, serving this will, will be to get to know concerning objects just those relations that are laid down by the principle of sufficient reason, and thus to follow their many different connexions in space, time and causality. For only through these is the object interesting to the individual, in other words has it a relation to the will.4 Schopenhauer's line of argumentation, unpacked and somewhat elaborated, would be something like this: First, human beings need to be able to be conscious of particular individual things not primarily in order to have knowable objects, but rather to have determinate objectives for their actions. The objectives of action, the states of affairs and events that we seek to bring about, must be constituted by individual things; for without individuals there would be nothing that could serve as an objective of action, as an objective toward which the will could strive. And without objectives there could be no action. Individuation, that is, the distinguishing and picking out of individuals, is thus a condition of the possibility of human agency and of the goal-oriented striving of the will. Thus, individuals and the spatiotemporal structure that makes their identification possible is required by the will, inasmuch as the will must express itself in action, and this entails that it have determinate, that is, individual, goals for which it strives. Second, this framework allows each one of us to appear as an individual body in a world of individuals, and thus as the necessary locus of agency, the center from which desires and action can originate. Third, without the efficacy of action that causality brings to the world, it would be impossible to undertake to do anything, to accomplish a task or act upon the world. What would it mean even to attempt to bring something about in a world in which one's efforts had no efficacy, that is, in which they were not causally connected with the realization of the states or events desired?5 According to this account, the fundamental structures of our experience primarily serve the most basic need of the will, which is to be able actively to will something. Since Schopenhauer holds that "will" is what we really are, the essence of our true being, the most basic need of the will is our most basic need. Thus, it becomes plausible that we would be ready to subordinate and even sacrifice all other human needs and desires - such as our longing for knowledge of the world as it is in itself - to its requirements for active agency. Schopenhauer's account of why we veil the world from ourselves, in its appeal to the idea of noncognitive interests that might lie deeper than our cognitive concerns and override them, opened the way for other variants of this strategy. Nietzsche's account is one such variant.

Illusions of Everyday Experience Sacrificing Knowledge for the Sake of Life

11

In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, which despite Nietzsche's later disclaimers is very much influenced by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche presents his fullest account of why we systematically distort a reality we presumably want to know.6 Nietzsche had taken over from Kant - more directly from Schopenhauer's adaptation of Kant's ideas - the idea that we human beings universally distort reality in the process of experiencing it. From Schopenhauer he also took the metaphor of "the veil of Maya," which he uses repeatedly to refer to the distortion of the world through the structures of space, time, and causality.7 Following Schopenhauer's version of Kantianism, he emphasizes the individuation of single beings that results from these structures.8 He again follows Schopenhauer, in contrast to Kant, in giving an account of the genesis of these structures that transcends the context of purely cognitive considerations. According to Nietzsche, we construct the everyday empirical world for the sake of "life" - that is, to render what is intrinsically an awful and intolerable world beautiful and tolerable. We create the illusory world of our everyday experience so that we can continue to want to live. Nietzsche alludes with some approval to the Greek myth of "the wise Silenus," who reveals to mankind that "What is best for you is not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is to die soon" (BT 3). Nietzsche maintains that "The Greek knew and felt the terror and horror of existence," and that the Greeks "must have triumphed over an abysmal and terrifying view of the world and the keenest susceptibility to suffering through recourse to the most forceful and pleasurable illusions." He speaks of their "ardent longing for illusion, for redemption through illusion" (BT 4). Nietzsche's conception of the world as really being a "primal unity" (em Ureines), "an eternal primal pain" (ein ewiger Urschmerz) and "an eternal contradiction" (ein ewiger Widerspruch) that need "a constant redemption" (eine stete Erlb'sung) through a beautifying illusion, is clearly based upon Schopenhauer's conception of the world as an atemporal, a-spatial, nonindividuatable, unsatisfiable, and therefore eternally suffering will (BT 4). While Schopenhauer more or less accepted the pessimistic consequences of this conception (although with a few tentative deviations), Nietzsche sought, beginning with his first book, to struggle against any sort of life-rejecting pessimism, seeking instead a way to redeem the horror and suffering inherent in reality. And he claimed to have found such a redemption in the illusions of art and, to some extent, even in the systematic illusion that pervades the everyday world of experience.

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Because Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy is engaged for the most part in constructing a theory of the art and culture of the ancient Greeks, and, by projection, of art and culture in general, it has been easy to overlook that he is also offering an important and novel theory about the origins of the illusion-engendering veiling of the everyday world. The duality of the Apollonian and Dionysian, which he introduces at the beginning of the work, is presented principally as a key to understanding "the development of art" (BT 1). The Apollonian and Dionysian are said to be "art drives of nature," which manifest themselves not in concepts, but in the "intensely clear figures of their gods," as "art-divinities." They are not directly discussed with respect to ordinary, everyday sense experience, but rather with respect to their manifestations in nocturnal dreams (in the case of the Apollonian) and in unusual states of ecstasy and exaltation (in the case of the Dionysian). Thus, Nietzsche's theory of the Apollonian and Dionysian may seem at first to have little or nothing to do with the veiling of the everyday world. The Apollonian, we are told, is the drive that redeems and makes tolerable a nature that is intrinsically undifferentiated, self-contradictory, cruel, and suffering by transforming it into the beautiful illusion of clearly individuated forms. To exemplify the beautifying and redeeming function of the Apollonian, Nietzsche begins by calling attention to the beauty, clarity, clear individuation of figures, organic unity, and coherent integration that predominate in our dreams and in the visual arts, which he claims are closely related to them. He also considers the Homeric epic and the pantheon of well-differentiated Olympian deities, which exhibit the same basic characteristics of clarity and individuation, to be manifestations of the Apollonian drive. But if the visual arts, the dream, the epic, and the Olympian gods are all products of a beautifying, and thus redeeming, Apollonian "art-drive," how are they related to the pervasive illusions of everyday experience and the activity that universally produces it? Indeed, at one place Nietzsche clearly contrasts the "art-world of the dream" with the everyday world. The "joyful necessity of the dream," in which "there is nothing indifferent and nothing unnecessary," that is, the organic unity typical of dreams and works of art, is contrasted to the lack of such unity and coherence in ordinary experience: "The higher truth, the perfection of these states in contrast to the fragmentary intelligibility of everyday reality, this deep consciousness of nature, healing and helping in sleep and dreams, is at the same time the symbolical analogue of the soothsaying faculty of the arts in general, which make life possible and worth living" (BT 1). At this juncture Nietzsche simply opposes the everyday world to the

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"beautiful illusion" of the Apollonian "dream-" and "art-worlds." But it would be wrong to take simple opposition as constituting Nietzsche's overall conception of the relationship between the world of everyday reality and that of dreams and art. For he must, to be consistent, also consider everyday reality to be a product of the Apollonian drive. Nietzsche's analysis of the Apollonian realms of the dream, the visual arts, and epic literature emphasizes just those structures of space, time, and causality that Kant and Schopenhauer had argued to be the universal, necessary, and distinctive characteristics of everyday experience. What Nietzsche had found to be essential and distinctive to the Apollonian worlds of art, dreams, and the Homeric divinities was "a logical causality of lines and contours, colors and groupings," a clear differentiation of colors and shapes and a thoroughgoing differentiation of individual beings, in contrast to the undifferentiated "primordial oneness" (Ur-einen) of the world as it is in-itself. This differentiation and individuation has its source, according to Schopenhauer's analysis, which Nietzsche has obviously here adopted, in the spatiotemporal and causal structure that also characterizes and constitutes the everyday world. The language and conceptual content of Nietzsche's description of the "Apollonian" are clearly taken without substantial change from Schopenhauer's description of the fundamental, a priori structure of the world of our everyday experience. In both cases the experiencing subject is presented as drawing over an undifferentiated, unindividuated, endlessly striving and suffering primordial oneness a veil of Maya, which is composed of space, time, and causality, and which makes the differentiation of individuals possible. That Nietzsche derives his concept of the Apollonian from the Kantian and Schopenhauerian account of the essential structure of our ordinary experience is obvious. Schopenhauerian shibboleths, such as "the veil of Maya," "principium individuationis" and "individuation" repeatedly appear in Nietzsche's text.9 Moreover, Nietzsche claims that "the truly existent primal unity, eternally suffering and contradictory, needs" not only "the rapturous vision," but "the pleasurable illusion, for its continuous redemption" (BT 4, my emphasis). What might supply such a "continuous redemption" cannot be the occasional rapturous vision achieved by art, but the constant transformation of the awful reality of the world into the abiding illusion of everyday empirical reality. And, indeed, Nietzsche goes on to say, "And we, completely wrapped up in this illusion and composed of it, are compelled to consider this illusion as what is true despite its having no being - i.e., as a perpetual becoming in time, space and causality - in other words, as empirical reality."10

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When Nietzsche goes on immediately to discuss dreams and art as "der Schein des Scheins" as "the mere appearance of a mere appearance" and "thus as a still higher appeasement of the primordial desire for mere appearance," he is clearly committed to the view that the construction of the empirical world of our everyday experience is already an appeasement of this Apollonian drive. How could he have nevertheless opposed the Apollonian and everyday worlds? He was able to contrast them, despite their obvious and essential similarity, because he contrasts them only in a limited way. He conceives of the Apollonian world of art and dreams not really as the opposite of the everyday world, but rather as the heightened expression and further development of tendencies already present in it. Both the everyday world and the Apollonian realms of dream and art are, according to Nietzsche, illusory constructions that we create in order to beautify and redeem a reality that is intrinsically intolerable. What distinguishes the Apollonian world of art from the everyday world is only that "joyous necessity" in which "there is nothing indifferent and unnecessary." It is just this organic unity that is supposed to lend the Apollonian world its appearance of "higher truth" and "perfection" and place it "in contrast to the merely fragmentary intelligibility of everyday reality," which does not possess such organic unity (BT I).11 The relation between these two sorts of veiling, the one that produces empirical reality and the one that produces art and dreams, could possibly be conceived in other ways: One could follow Nietzsche in attributing to the construction of art and dreams the motive of beautifying and redeeming reality, but still follow Kant or Schopenhauer in accounting for the construction of everyday experience in terms of furnishing the structures necessary for the possibility of knowledge or practice. If Nietzsche had done that, his aesthetic and existential conception of the motivation of the Apollonian realms of art would not necessarily apply also to the veiling of everyday reality. But Nietzsche seems to have considered the further veiling or construction that produces the worlds of dreams and art, the work in the "dreamwork" and in the "work of art," to be an extension and potentiation of the same process that brings forth the everyday world. His view is that reality as it is in-itself, as something that is eternally beset by suffering, unintelligibility, and incoherence, is redeemed not only through the joyfully necessary and perfect worlds of the dream and of art, but also, if to a lesser degree, through the construction of the everyday world, which, although imperfect and fragmentary, still possesses considerable logical and causal coherence, definition, and beauty.12 Both supply a "joyful illusion" that makes life tolerable and even attractive. The illu-

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sions of dreams and art are, on his view, actually only further distortions of an empirical reality already distorted by the structures of space, time, and causality. This further distortion consists in the addition of the further illusion of the perfection and necessity that flow from an apparent organic unity. When Nietzsche refers to the dream and the work of art, using the famous Platonic formula "the mere appearance of a mere appearance," echoing Plato's claim that it is "a copy of a copy," he does not only assert that we create dreams and art by a further extension of the same process by which we create the empirical world. He also asserts that it is "thus as a higher satisfaction of the primordial desire for illusion" and thereby provocatively reverses Plato's well-entrenched preference for reality over illusion (of Sein over Schein) (BT 4). But this startling reversal is not meant to be only provocative. Although a preference for illusion over reality makes no sense in a purely cognitive context, it signals here Nietzsche's refusal to remain within such a context in accounting for our construction of the illusions of everyday experience. In the light of this integration of the worlds of everyday experience and of dreams, Nietzsche's Apollo emerges not just as the god of the dream, the visual arts, epic literature, and the full panoply of the Olympian deities, but also as the god of the entire empirical world.13 This Apollo, like the Indian Maya, is the god who causes the illusion of the everyday world to appear by veiling and distorting reality. What Drives the Dionysian: Rejecting the Primacy of Cognitive Concerns Because I have been examining Nietzsche's ideas about the origins of the purported general veiling of the world, I have focused until now upon the Apollonian drive rather than the Dionysian. The Dionysian is supposedly a drive that "presses for . . . the annihilation of the veil of Maya" (BT 2). The Dionysian strives to remove the veil rather than put it on, to transcend illusion rather than create it. Although Nietzsche insisted that the two art-drives are only to be understood in their reciprocal relationship, in their competition and conflict, he tended to emphasize the Dionysian over the Apollonian, particularly in his later works.14 "The Dionysian" has drawn more attention and discussion than "the Apollonian," in part because of Nietzsche's own emphasis, in part because of the intrinsic magnetism of the idea of a wild, destructive, unmanageable drive with erotic connotations. It would be natural to think that the motive for the Dionysian ripping away of the veil of Maya supposedly consists in the undistorted knowl-

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edge that is attained thereby. But the motive Nietzsche proposes for the Dionysian drive as well as for the Apollonian is not epistemic.The attraction of the Dionysian state, he argues, consists not primarily in any gain of knowledge, but rather in its overcoming of the separation - and thus alienation - of one human being from another and of the division between human beings and the rest of nature. An Apollonian individuation of persons and the world, as much as it helps to redeem the world and reconcile us with life, also brings with it divisive and alienating separations from which we suffer.15 Since such alienation depends upon individuation, and individuation upon the structures of space and time that we impose upon our experience, removing the structures we place upon the world not only brings us closer to reality as it really is, it also removes alienation. The attraction of the Dionysian state, like that of the Apollonian, is conceived in terms of what makes life tolerable or intolerable, satisfying or unsatisfactory, beautiful or ugly. Nietzsche's account of the attractions of the Dionysian state is consistent with his general subordination of epistemic motives to nonepistemic ones.16 Still, while the insight supposedly attained in the Dionysian state does not constitute the allure of such a state, it could be used to give crucial support to Nietzsche's claim that the everyday world is an illusion. One can assert that normal experience is covered by a veil of Maya, and thus distorted, on the basis of being able occasionally to look behind the veil.
Further Developments in Nietzsche: The Inaccessibility of Reality

Soon after writing The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche seems to have given up the idea that we can ever have access to reality as it is in-itself. The posthumously published essay Truth and Lie in an Extra-moral Sense, written in 1873 just after BT, contains a variety of arguments, some of them concerned with the way reality is inevitably warped in experience, others concerned with the distortion of experience in language.17 These arguments have been celebrated, particularly by those who are inclined to hail Nietzsche as a forerunner of "postmodern" or "poststructuralist" insights concerning the purported impossibility of attaining any objective knowledge or truth about the world, and the purported inability of language to refer successfully to a reality independent of it or to offer a literal, as opposed to a merely metaphorical, description of anything.18 Despite their uncritical celebration, Nietzsche's arguments in this essay leave much to be desired. Leaving aside the question of the cogency of his arguments, his conclusion seems clear: The world as it is in-itself can never be experienced or given linguistic expression. He

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argues that reality is ineluctably distorted in all experience and language, because of (1) the changes brought about by a priori structures we inevitably impose upon experience, (2) the radical transformations of the objects of experience that inevitably take place in the processes of sense perception and conceptualization, and (3) the inevitable distortion of experience (and reality) in language. To the extent that Nietzsche comes to reject the possibility that we can have access to things as they are "in-themselves," he forecloses upon the possibility of supporting the thesis that everyday experience is distorted, by contrasting it to the occasional and exceptional experiences that are not distorted in the same way. In BT, on the contrary, he had allowed for the possibility of establishing that there is distortion in normal experience by contrasting it to the undistorted (or at least less distorted) view of the world one supposedly achieves in a state of Dionysian ecstasy. But while removing the possibility of undistorted experience also removes one powerful way of proving that our normal experience is distorted, it does not directly undermine the coherence of the thesis. Moreover, even though such a "distortion thesis" would be supported by an occasional and exceptional experience of the world without distortion, the thesis that our experience is distorted can be and has been argued in other ways, and so it does not require this sort of support.19 Let us not forget that the philosophers from whose work Nietzsche had most probably derived the distortion thesis, Kant and Schopenhauer, had not relied upon a contrast to some privileged, undistorted (or less distorted) experience in arguing for it. Kant had not allowed for any privileged access to reality with all or most of the usual distortion removed. His version of the distortion thesis - that our experience is distorted without exception - cannot, therefore, be based upon a contrast between normal, distorted experience and epistemically privileged, undistorted exceptions. It rests instead upon the argument that we cannot account for the apparent necessity of certain universal structures in our experience, such as space, time, and causality, unless we conceive of them as necessarily imposed by the experiencing subject upon whatever is presented to it, as the principle aspects of the way in which all subjects must structure and consequently distort what they experience. Schopenhauer, on the contrary, had allowed for an undistorted, or at least less distorted, experience of reality in one's experience of oneself as will, that is, in the experience of one's own agency.20 Still, it is interesting that even he does not establish or support his thesis that all other experience is distorted as he might have, by appealing to the contrast between ordinary and epistemically privileged experience. He relies

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rather upon Kant's previous establishment of the distortion thesis, which, of course, does not utilize this contrast. In terms of his historical antecedents, Nietzsche moves in TL from a Schopenhauerian back to a Kantian position. Both of these philosophers had maintained versions of a distortion thesis, yet neither of them had relied upon a contrast between distorted and undistorted experience to argue for the distortion thesis. Given his sources and models, there is no reason to think that Nietzsche saw the possibility of an undistorted or even relatively undistorted experience as required for the distortion thesis. The Incoherence of the Thing-in-Itself There are some indications, however, that Nietzsche came to believe, with growing clarity and conviction, not only that reality as it is in-itself, apart from the distortions it undergoes in our experience of it, is totally inaccessible, but also that the very notion of reality as it is apart from any experience of it is not coherent. A tension clearly exists between the two beliefs, the second superceding the first. If the notion of a thingin-itself, or of a reality independent of human interests and modes of perception (and conception), were nonsense, it would be misleading, even if true, to assert its inaccessibility. It would be like saying something is hard to find, when we know that it does not and cannot exist. More importantly, it has appeared to some that, if the notion of a reality independent of our experience of it is incoherent, then so is the notion that our experience is distorted. To make sense of the claim that our normal experience is distorted, it may not be necessary to compare experiences of the world as it normally appears to us with exceptional experiences of it as it really is; but we must arguably be able at least to contrast coherently the ideas of appearance and reality in our thought. When Nietzsche claims in TL that '"the correct perception' - which means 'the adequate expression of an object in the subject' - is a contradictory impossibility," he does not actually deny the coherence of the idea that there is a transcendent reality, but only the idea that we could ever experience or express it.21 But when he claims, some dozen years later in Beyond Good and Evil (1886), that the '"thing-in-itself involves a contradicto in adjecto," it seems that he may be denying the coherence of any contrast between the way we experience the world and the way it really is. But a closer consideration of the section in which this statement appears and a broader consideration of Nietzsche's comments elsewhere on this issue do not clearly support this reading. The section in which this claim appears is generally concerned with showing the

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impossibility of various kinds of consciousness that have been proposed as epistemically privileged, such as "immediate certainty" and "absolute knowledge," and with casting doubt on the indubitability claimed for the self-awareness involved in Descartes's cogito (BGE 16). Since Nietzsche does not say anything here to explain or justify the claim that the notion of the "thing-in-itself" is self-contradictory, it seems likely that he is really attacking the coherence only of the idea that we could have a consciousness of anything as it is "in-itself." Other texts dealing with this issue suggest, however, that he probably has more in mind: namely, that the notion of a "thing" is a phenomenal notion and therefore should not be used to refer to reality as it is "initself" - that whatever transcendent reality might be, it cannot be composed of "things" of any sort. A "thing," conceived as a unity of its various qualities and of its changing temporal states, constitutes one of those unities appearing in our normal experience that Nietzsche repeatedly attacks as spurious.22 It is not the case, however, that, in propounding either point, he would be rejecting the coherence of a notion of a reality that might be different from our experience of it.23 What Are the Consequences of the "'True World' Becoming a Fable?" Even if Nietzsche, in this passage or elsewhere, had come to the conclusion that the notion of a reality completely independent of, different from, and inaccessible to our experience is incoherent, what consequences would follow from this conclusion? If this passage contains a rejection of the very coherence of the notion of a reality that is other than reality as we experience it, the passage would seem to undermine the distortion thesis. If it does undermine it, the question arises as to whether Nietzsche realized that it does, and, if so, when he came to this realization. It is natural to try to locate it at the time he came to criticize the coherence of the "thing-in-itself" in BGE. This is the position that Clark defends. In support of the thesis that Nietzsche also came at this time to reject the coherence of the notion of a reality that is different from the one we experience and, consequently, the distortion thesis that supposedly depends upon this notion, she argues that the distortion thesis does not appear in Nietzsche's published works after BGE.24 But this argument is unconvincing for at least three reasons: First, given that most of the works he produced in the last couple of years of his writing life were not primarily concerned with epistemological and metaphysical issues, his failure to repeat his distortion thesis in them is not a strong indication that he had rejected it. Why should he have

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reiterated a position that he still held, when discussing issues to which it is not crucially relevant? What is notable in the published writings of this later period is not so much the absence of the statement of the distortion thesis itself, but, with a few exceptions, the absence of substantial discussions of those issues to which it is relevant.25 Second, the argument rests upon a consideration of only Nietzsche's published writings. There is no good reason not to include a consideration of his unpublished writings of this later period, in which there is much more discussion of the relevant issues and ample evidence that Nietzsche still adhered to, or least had not rejected, the distortion thesis.26 Third, one should not forget that in addition to the six books that Nietzsche wrote in their entirety after BGE, he wrote a substantial fifth part for the second edition of The Gay Science in which he clearly and emphatically asserts the distortion thesis:
Owing to the nature of animal consciousness, the world of which we can become conscious is only a surface- and sign-world, a world that is made common and meaner, whatever becomes conscious becomes by the same token shallow, thin, relatively stupid, general, sign, herd signal; all becoming conscious involves a great and thorough corruption, falsification, reduction to superficialities, and generalization. (GS 354)27

Even if Nietzsche continued to espouse the distortion thesis in much of his later work, there is, nevertheless, a passage in Twilight of the Idols (1889), which is part of one of Nietzsche's most substantial and nuanced discussions of these issues, and which might seem to be a direct renunciation of the distortion thesis. In the section titled "How 'the True World' Finally Became a Fable," he says about the notion of a "true world" in contradistinction to the world of our experience that it is "an idea which is no longer any good for anything, an idea which has become useless and superfluous - consequently a refuted idea, let us abolish it!" He follows this with a crucial passage that has been taken as a direct rejection of the distortion thesis: "What has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one." Maudemarie Clark interprets this "as the realization that denying the 'true' world destroys all basis for characterizing the remaining world as merely apparent or illusory."28 In claiming that Nietzsche "realized" this, she is of course making two claims: that Nietzsche came to believe this, and that what he came to believe is true. I want to suggest rather that what Nietzsche is supposed to have realized is, first of all, not true - and that he did not, to his credit, come to believe it. Clark's reading ignores an ambiguity that remains. Is Nietzsche really

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denying that the world of our experience can be meaningfully considered to be distorted? Or is he arguing only the more limited thesis that, although there is reason to believe that the world of our experience is distorted, this distortion can no longer be conceived in contrast to a true world, which lies completely beyond our experience!29 Reading Nietzsche as propounding only the latter, more limited thesis, which does not reject the idea that our experience is distorted, receives support from an apparently clear statement of the distortion thesis in the chapter of The Twilight of the Idols directly preceding "How the 'True World' Became a Fable," which is titled "Reason in Philosophy." Here Nietzsche locates the distortion not in the sensations we receive, but in the way we process them to form a structured empirical world: "They [the senses] do not lie at all. What we make of their testimony, that alone introduces lies; for example, "the lie of unity, the lie of thinghood, of substance, of permanence" (TI III:2).30 When Nietzsche argues in this section that these structures are not present in sensation but introduced by our "reason," he seems to use "reason" to refer to all of the processes by which we turn the chaos of sensations into the ordered, but distorted, empirical world of our experience, that is, to what Kant had referred to as the "understanding." For Kant, this ordering of our experience involved the application categories, one of which is the substance or thinghood here discussed. Nietzsche is not using "reason," contrary to what Clark argues (p. 106), in the narrow Kantian sense to refer just to the misapplication of such categories beyond experience that occurs in metaphysical speculation, but also to their legitimate, but nevertheless distorting application to experience. In,addition to the question of what Nietzsche came to believe about this matter, there is the related philosophical question of whether the distortion thesis is, in fact, completely undermined by the rejection of the very idea of a true world that is beyond all experience. Does the coherence of the idea that experience distorts reality depend upon the coherence of the idea of a reality that undergoes the distortion, which exists independently of all experience? The questions are not entirely independent, for if the distortion thesis turns out not to depend upon the idea of a 'true world,' it becomes easier to deny that Nietzsche thought it did. There is less reason to impute the espousal of this purported dependence to Nietzsche, if it turns out not to be a realization, but an error. Closer consideration reveals it to be an error, and not one that Nietzsche committed. The sorts of distortion in our experience and language to which Nietzsche repeatedly called our attention have to do in large part with spurious unities, stabilities, and equalities.31 The British empiricists had

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made similar claims before him. Think of Berkeley's assertion that we tend to treat as a unified, single thing what is really a "congeries," that is, a group, of sense impressions. This claim is not based upon an appeal to a reality beyond experience, but only to a more careful consideration of experience itself. Think of Hume's similar claim that we tend to treat ourselves as enduring identities, when a closer consideration of our experience reveals that this enduring identity is not to be found there. Or Hume's claim that we tend to treat the cause as tied to its effect, when a closer consideration of our experience reveals only a regularity of succession and no connecting link. Nietzsche is making similar points (in fact, a number of the points he makes are exactly the same as those made by Berkeley and Hume); and he thinks that they can be grounded, as the empiricists had grounded theirs, in a careful reconsideration of experience. He thus has no reason to think that they are dependent upon the coherence of a notion of a reality that transcends our experience. Like his empiricist predecessors, he argues against the spurious unity of things and of the self, and against common notions of causal connection by appeal to experience, not to metaphysical positions. His arguments make no more appeal to an experience-transcending reality than do theirs. Nietzsche follows his statement of the distortion thesis in GS 354 by commenting: "You will guess it is not the opposition of subject and object It is even less the opposition of'thing-in-itself that concerns me here and appearance, for we do not 'know' nearly enough to be entitled to any such distinction." This clearly shows that Nietzsche does not think the distortion thesis is based upon the distinction between the "thing-initself" and appearance. In WP 569 (1887) Nietzsche replaces the notion of a "true world" (or thing-in-itself) as the "antithesis of this phenomenal world" with that of "the formless and unformulable world of the chaos of sensations another kind of phenomenal world, a kind 'unknowable' for us." He claims that (1) "the fuzziness and chaos of sense impressions are, as it were logicized"; (2) "the material of the senses [is] adapted to the understanding, reduced to rough outlines, made similar, reduced to related matters"; and (3) this chaos of sensations is "phenomenal." These claims all suggest that what is distorted in experience is what is initially presented to us in experience and not something that is totally beyond it. But the caveat that this chaos is "unknowable" for us seems to contradict this suggestion; and the notion that it is both phenomenal and unknowable seems flatly self-contradictory. One can render this seemingly oxymoronic notion coherent, however,

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if one distinguishes between (a) "knowing" or being fully conscious of something (in a way that allows it to be conceptualized and expressed), and (b) achieving some sort of occasional, perhaps even fleeting, awareness or experience of it. One would then not be forced to interpret Nietzsche's caveat, that we cannot "know" this chaos of sensations, to entail that it completely transcends our experience, that is, that it is something that we can in no way be aware of or confront. Since, for Nietzsche, "knowledge" can arise only with the ordering (and consequently the distortion) of what is initially given to us in experience, any awareness of this that might be occasionally achieved by suspending or squinting away those structures that result from our normal processing of experience cannot count as "knowledge." Nor can we, according to him, express or describe the chaos that we initially confront in experience unless we order it, because linguistic expression and communication require such an ordering. Nor can we become fully "conscious" of anything unless it has been processed for linguistic expression. For Nietzsche, the same processing of experience required for it to be known is also required for it to be expressed in language and come into consciousness (in the fullest sense). But this does not mean that we cannot occasionally confront the unordered (or not fully ordered) chaos in experience. Nietzsche leaves open the possibility of occasionally paying a kind of special, philosophically motivated attention to our experience, particularly to the way we process it, and hence to the given chaos of sensations that we process. The possibility of this awareness is not precluded, even though it is not possible to express it adequately in language (even to oneself), and it therefore is not something we can know or of which we become fully conscious.32 The possibility of paying this sort of attention to our experience is only what is implicitly assumed in the analyses of the classical British empiricists, where, interestingly enough, it has not generally given rise to the same sorts of worries and criticisms that Nietzsche's almost identical analyses have drawn. Nietzsche's distinction between the sort of experience in which we achieve knowledge of something and experience in general, and between those aspects of our experience that are expressible in language and thus knowable from those that are not, is neither unprecedented nor implausible. However, his distinction between experience and consciousness, between being conscious of something and being aware but unconscious of it, may initially strike some as incoherent, because of a wellentrenched tendency to treat the notions of being conscious of something and experiencing something as roughly synonymous. But

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Nietzsche was well aware of this tendency and deliberately set out to oppose it. In writing about "the problem of consciousness (more precisely, of becoming conscious of something)," he argues that consciousness is inessential to human life, even to mental life. He asks us to consider the unusual question of "how we could dispense with it": "For we could think, feel, will, and remember, and we could 'act' in every sense of that word, and yet none of all of this would have to "enter our consciousness. . . . The whole of life would be possible without, as it were seeing itself in a mirror. Even now, for that matter, by far the greatest part of our life takes place without this mirror effect; and this is true even of our thinking, feeling and willing life, however offensive this may seem to older philosophers." (GS 354) If Nietzsche believes that thinking, feeling, and willing do not require consciousness, he clearly does not understand "consciousness" as synonymous with awareness in general, for these processes clearly require some sort of awareness. He argues that consciousness is a common, but nevertheless special, sort of awareness - a kind of self-awareness that often, but not inevitably or even optimally, accompanies the basic awareness that is required for the process of thinking, feeling, or willing to occur. He suggests that this special awareness has a form that allows it to be communicated: It mirrors and is limited by the structure of language. He asserts that "consciousness has developed only under the pressure of the need of communication" and that therefore "conscious thinking takes the form of words" (GS 354). In proposing, in this and other passages, that we could conduct the activities that make up our lives, including such mental operations as feeling, thinking, and willing, wholly or in great part without consciousness, and that we would often be better off if we did, Nietzsche is not recommending that we would be better off if we had no awareness at all - that is, if we lived in a comatose state. He is proposing instead that it would be possible, and even preferable, to function, at least more of the time, without the need for scenarios, recipes, instructions, and conceptualizations, which can be given verbal expression and communicated to others, or even to oneself at another time. He is also implicitly holding out the possibility of an awareness that transcends the limitations of "consciousness" - that is, of an awareness not characterized by the common ordering that allows communication and "knowledge" but that entails oversimplification, the stripping of what is unique of its uniqueness, and the suppression of the constant and ubiquitous dynamism of the world. In addition to such direct evidence, there is also another reason for

Illusions of Everyday Experience

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reading Nietzsche in the way I have just suggested. If we do not, we are faced with the prospect of having to interpret him as if it he had flatly and blindly contradicted himself, in proposing that the chaos of sensations is both "phenomenal," that is, experienceable, and not at all experienceable. (Clark does just this.) Nietzsche did not produce destructive analyses of only those distorting processes that occur in normal experience, which had been similarly treated by the classical British empiricists, such as thinghood and causal connection. He also applied this method to other aspects of experience, notably to what he considered the imposition of the appearance of stability upon material that was in constant and ubiquitous change and the appearance of similarity or equality upon entities that are intrinsically different and unique. In these further investigations of the way experience distorts its material, he continues to appeal to a careful reconsideration of experience rather than to transcendent metaphysical hypotheses. Nietzsche's repeated claim, for whatever it is worth, that perceiving distinct and in some ways differing individuals as instances of the same kind and subsuming them under generic concepts is to ignore their differences, which for him is a basic and constant distortion that takes place in our experience and language, makes no appeal to a reality beyond experience but to a careful reconsideration of it.33 The same is true of Nietzsche's Herakleitean claims about the world. He repeatedly asserts that everything is in constant flux, and that therefore all ideas and locutions that imply permanence or stability - such as, the conception of anything as some kind of thing, the idea that the world is made up of anything that remains self-identical through processes of change, and the linguistic correlate of this idea, the use of nouns, whose presence is a feature of all languages - are distortions. Since these notions, locutions, and practices are fundamental and universal features of the way in which we normally encounter and present the world, our normal experience, thought, and expression are systematically distorted. But these Herakleitean claims, whatever their ultimate validity, are not grounded in some metaphysical and transcendent notion of a totally dynamic 'true world,' so they do not have to be given up when the notion of a 'true world' becomes a fable. They are meant to be based upon a consideration of how, in the way we normally attend to the world and describe it, we suppress and ignore the flux that is to be found in our experience of everything. How are we supposed to come to agree that, contrary to what we commonly think, we cannot step into the same river twice? Just think a bit more carefully about the rivers you have known.34

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NOTES 1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781,1787). 2. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (1819, 2d expanded edition 1844), trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York, 1969) (henceforth WWR). "For it is only by means of time and space that something that is one and the same according to its nature and the concept appears as different, as a plurality of coextensive and successive things. Consequently time and space are the principium individuationis" (V.I, 23, p. 113). 3. P. F. Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London, 1959). 4. WWR, V.I, 33. 5. The first part of this argument posits a pragmatic or volitional correlate to Husserl's well-known thesis of the "intentionality" of all consciousness. Just as Husserl argues that all consciousness must have an object, Schopenhauer argues (much earlier) that all willing must have an objective. Just as Husserl holds that one cannot be conscious without being conscious of something, Schopenhauer holds that one cannot want or desire without desiring something, and that entails desiring something particular. It may seem that this claim is inconsistent with Schopenhauer's description of the will as being a blind striving "without aim or end." He maintains that "In fact the absence of all aim, of all limits, belongs to the essential nature of the will in itself" (WWR, V.I, 29). But this absence of any aim or goal (Ziel) of the essential nature of the will as it is "in itself" does not rule out the necessity of every act of the phenomenal will to have a goal: "Every individual act has a purpose or end; willing as a whole has no end in view" (ibid.). His position seems to be that the will, by its very nature, must always strive for something or other, but also that, no matter what it achieves, it must always find something else to strive for. Thus, although it always must have a proximate goal, it has no goal that would bring it to rest, no end whose achievement would end the striving, no ultimate end. These claims about the insatiability of the will are not at all inconsistent with the notion that the will must always have a goal, and indeed a particular one. Even if there is no particular goal whose fulfillment would bring an end to the further striving of the will, the will may still always need to have some particular goal or other, in order to engage in its essential activity of striving. The second part of the argument is a volitional correlate of another more recent idea about consciousness: Just as others have argued that there cannot be "a view from nowhere," Schopenhauer suggests that there cannot be a desire or action from no one in particular. 6. Kaufmann translation (see Bibliography). Nietzsche tries later to deny or minimize the obvious and important influence of Schopenhauer upon BT, and upon his philosophy in general, through a series of disclaimers that are complexly motivated and not very credible. In a preface to a second edition of BT (1886) titled "Attempt at a Self-criticism," he claims that he "regretted" having "spoiled Dionysian premonitions with Schopenhauerian formulations" (BT P:6). And in the retrospective assessment of this hisfirstbook in his last, Ecce Homo (written in 1888), he again attempts to minimize his considerable debt to Schopenhauer, by asserting that "the cadaverous perfume of Schopenhauer

Illusions of Everyday Experience

27

7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

sticks only to a few formulas" (EH III:BT:1). In grotesque hyperbole he maintains that with respect to the understanding of tragedy, "Schopenhauer went wrong at this point, as he went wrong everywhere" (ibid., my emphasis). I have discussed the problematic nature of Nietzsche's relationship to Schopenhauer, the dubiousness of his later denials of the importance and continuance of Schopenhauer's influence upon him, the motivation for this attempt to distance himself from Schopenhauer, and the uncritical credence it has gained among commentators in two essays: (1) "The Hopelessness of Hedonism and the Will to Power," International Studies in Philosophy XVIII, no. 2 (1986); (2) "Pessimism and the Tragic View of Life: Nietzsche's Overcoming of Schopenhauer," in Reading Nietzsche, ed. R. Solomon and K. Higgins (Oxford University Press, 1988). See BT 1,2, and 18. Nietzsche even uses the expression principium individuationis, which Schopenhauer had used regularly in his discussion. See BT 1,2,4,16,21, and 22. In BT "the veil of Maya" is mentioned in 1,2, and 18; "the principium individuationis" in 1, 2, 4,16,21, and 22; "individuation" in 9,10,16,22,24, and 25. I have departed from Kaufmann's translation of Nietzsche's somewhat murky and potentially misleading expression "das Wahrhaft-Nichtseiende" as "the truly nonexistent," replacing it with "what is true despite its having no being," to capture what I take to be its intent. Nietzsche's point here is that we are "compelled to consider" as true the world of our ordinary experience, which is "perpetually becoming," and thus does not have that immutable constancy that Plato, among others, took to be a criterion of "being." To see that this reading is not at all far-fetched, one need only note that Nietzsche goes on in the next sentence to refer to Plato's doctrine that art is only a "mere appearance of a mere appearance," and to attack Plato's notorious devaluation of art, by arguing for the value of illusion and mere appearance in human life. Nietzsche is suggesting here not only that we all must experience the world according to this common illusory scheme, but we must also take it to be true, in some sense. Similar positions are to be found in Nietzsche's immediate predecessors. Kant had argued that the basic structure of our experience is "transcendentally ideal," that is, did not apply to reality as it really is "in-itself," but nevertheless "empirically real," that is, universally valid for our experience. Schopenhauer had pointed out that the illusions of experience persist even when we understand that they are illusions (WWR, V.I, 6). It should be noted that what lends the world of art a "higher truth and perfection" than the everyday world is a further distortion of reality, a greater degree of illusion. Thus, this "higher truth" is not closer to but further removed from reality as it is in itself. Nietzsche obviously does not hold the truth of the work of art to be "higher" because of its greater correspondence with the reality that both it and the everyday experience represent, but because of the greater degree of internal coherence it possesses. Although Nietzsche does not make the point in BT, one might argue in this context that through its causal structure the everyday world already fur-

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13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

nishes us with one kind of necessity. It could be argued that the necessity that accrues to our world through organic unity is a heightening of the necessity already brought about by causality. Through organic unity (or the illusion of it) things and events that already have causes acquire reasons for their existence, raisons d'etre, in that they are required by a larger whole to which they make an essential and irreplaceable contribution. Schopenhauer had already paved the way to this position in characterizing everyday experience as a dream. In this connection he mentions with approval Shakespeare's "We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep," Calderon's title La Vida es Sueno (Life is a Dream), and the comparison of the veil of Maya to a dream that often appears in the writings of Indian philosophy (WWR, V.I, 5). Nietzsche's tendency to emphasize "the Dionysian" is manifested in his later tendency to use this term to refer to the ideal dialectical synthesis of the two drives - a synthesis that constitutes for him the essence of tragedy and is the most admirable of all states that a human being can attain. "Under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the union between man and man reaffirmed, but nature which has become alienated, hostile, or subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her lost son, man.... Now, with the gospel of universal harmony, each one feels himself not only united, reconciled, and fused with his neighbor, but as one with him, as if the veil of Maya had been torn aside and were now merely fluttering in tatters before the mysterious primordial oneness" (BT 1). For a statement of Nietzsche's rejection of the primacy of cognitive concerns, from BGE (Kaufmann translation): "I do not believe that a drive to knowledge is the father of philosophy; but rather another drive has, here as elsewhere, employed understanding (and misunderstanding) as a mere instrument" (BGE 6). 1873. English translation by Daniel Breazeale in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870's, ed. D. Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979). For example, Paul de Man, in Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). What I have decided to call "the distortion thesis," that reality is distorted in our experience, concerns the nature of our experience and its relationship to reality. Maudemarie Clark, in Nietzsche on Philosophy and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), discusses some of the same issues, using a similar, but wider, notion of a "falsification thesis," "the thesis that human knowledge falsifies reality" (p. 95). While Nietzsche arguably held "the falsification thesis" as well as the "distortion thesis," I shall argue that it is important to distinguish knowledge from experience, and to separate the question of whether experience entails a distortion of reality from that of whether knowledge does. The notion of a "falsification thesis" is too encompassing to foster a close analysis of the issues, as it includes both the idea of the distortion of reality in experience and the distortion of experience (and reality) in language. Although Clark's notion mirrors Nietzsche's own tendency to run these two issues together, I think it helpful not to follow Nietzsche in this matter. The issue of the way in which language distorts experience should be kept distinct from that of the way experience distorts reality, even if, as Nietzsche argues, each of these distortions contributes to

Illusions of Everyday Experience

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the other and mirrors it. In this essay I am focusing upon the distortion of reality in experience. The notion of falsification is clearest and least ambiguous with respect to beliefs and statements that have propositional content, not when applied to experience and reality that do not. The notion of a "falsification of reality" is either nothing more than its distortion in experience and language, or it also involves false beliefs that arise from such distortion. To avoid this ambiguity, I believe that it is better to use the notion of the distortion, rather than falsification, of reality or experience and to reserve notion of falsification for beliefs and statements. If the "falsification of reality" is used to mean nothing more than its distortion, it is clearer to talk about distortion. If the single notion of the falsification of reality is used so as to include both its distortion and the false beliefs that purportedly follow from this distortion, it tends to gloss over the crucial issue of the relation between distortion and the false beliefs based upon it. Do distortions of reality in experience and of experience in language inevitably, or even generally, tend to lead to false beliefs? With what regularity and necessity do illusions actually deceive? Who believes that the railroad tracks actually converge at the horizon, or that the stick half-submerged in water is really bent? If distortions do not always lead us into holding false beliefs, and some distortions hardly ever do so, in what sense are they deceptive? If distortion does not generally entail false belief, to establish that distortion has occurred is not to establish that falsification, at least in a nontrivial sense, has also occurred. Although Nietzsche himself glossed over such issues, which are crucial to the plausibility of his claims concerning the impossibility of attaining truth and knowledge, those who would both understand and assess his ideas should avoid adopting interpretive notions that that obscure the lapses in his thinking by mirroring them. Although I am in disagreement with Clark on a number of substantial points, I find her interpretations of Nietzsche's ideas on epistemology, language, and metaphysics to be impressively detailed and tenaciously argued, and thus valuable even as foils to the sometimes quite disparate positions I want to defend. 20. WWR, V.I, Book 2, "The World as Will." "Phenomenon means representation and nothing more. All representation, be it of whatever kind it may be, all object, is phenomenon. But only the will is thing-in-itself, as such it is not representation at all, but toto genere different therefrom" (21). For further statements that experiences of the self as will is totally different from that of the self as phenomenon, see 17,23, and 29. For further statements that the self as will is the self as it really is in-itself, see 24,29, and 31. Schopenhauer later felt obliged to retreat a bit from his initial position, admitting that one's experience of oneself as will, since it is still an experience of oneself in time, cannot be completely undistorted by the structures of normal experience (V.2, 17). It is not crucial, however, whether the epistemically privileged experience used to establish that ordinary experience is distorted is itself totally undistorted, or only less distorted. In either case such privileged experience could serve to reveal some of the distortions of ordinary experience, at least those distortions from which it did not suffer; and the differences that did exist would be enough to establish that ordinary experience is, at least to some extent, distorted.

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21. Breazeale, ed., p. 86. 22. See The Will to Power (Kaufmann and Hollingdale translation), 473 (1886-7): "But the psychological derivation of the belief in things forbids us to speak of 'things-in-themselves'"; and WP 569 (1887): "[The question,] what 'things-in themselves' may be like, apart from the activity of our understanding, must be rebutted with the question: how could we know that things exist? 'Thingness' was first created by us." 23. This reading receives some indirect support from the fact that in BGE, just a few sections after 16, Nietzsche criticizes the treatment of certain structures in our experience, which he takes to be our constructions (such as causal connections, necessity, freedom, motive, and purpose), as if they existed independently of us: "In the 'in-itself there is nothing of 'causal connections,' of 'necessity'.... It is we alone who have devised cause..., freedom, motive, and purpose and when we project and this symbol world into things as if it existed 'in itself ,' we act once more as we have always acted - mythologically" (BGE 21). Even though Nietzsche in this passage flags the notion of the "in-itself by putting the expression in quotation marks, he also flags an number of other notions, such as, "cause," "effect," "causal connection," "necessity," "free will," and "unfree will." While he holds that the origins and nature of all of them have generally been misunderstood, and that this misunderstanding has been in some significant way misleading, he also holds at least some of them to have a legitimate use and even necessary function in our thought and discourse. Although Nietzsche attacks the notion of a "thing-in-itself' as a "contradicto in adjecto," it is far from clear that he feels, or should feel, the same way about the notion of reality as it is "in-itself," that is, apart from the way we normally perceive, conceive, and describe it. The contradiction arises only when the adjective "in-itself" is applied to the notion of a "thing," for which it is an intrinsically inappropriate modifier. If, in considering how reality apart from the distorting structures of experience might be, we avoid the natural mistake of assuming that it is must be composed of some sort of nonphenomenal "things," we would have avoided the contradiction Nietzsche attacks, without renouncing all consideration of a reality that might contrast with our experience. It is significant that in this passage Nietzsche does continue to use the locution "in-itself to refer to world as it is apart from the way it appears in our normal perception, conception, and description of it. But his use of this particular term, with or without cautionary quotation marks, is not essential to his continued use of the distinction between appearance and reality. He clearly and clear-sightedly did not view the incoherence of the notion of "thing-in-itself as undermining the contrast between the world as it appears in our experience and language and the world as it really is, or the distortion thesis, which seems to depend upon such a distinction. Nietzsche's criticisms in both BGE 16 and 21 concern the treatment of certain structures of experience (thinghood, causality, freedom, and so on) that are human constructions as if they are not. Far from undermining the idea of a reality not constructed by us, his criticism actually appeals to it. Moreover, to claim that some of the structures of our experience are our

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constructions, as Nietzsche does, is not to claim that all elements of our experience are, that is, that nothing in our experience corresponds to a reality independent of us. 24. "In the six books that follow [BGE], there is no evidence of Nietzsche's denial of truth: no claim that the human world is a falsification, no claim that science, logic, or mathematics falsify reality" (Clark, p. 103). 25. With the exception of some sections in Twilight of the Idols (1889), the books Nietzsche wrote and published after BGE (1886) are primarily concerned with topics other than epistemological and metaphysical ones: On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) with questions of ethics, psychological motivation, cultural development, and related matters; The Antichrist with a reinterpretation of the figure of Jesus and with religion in general; The Case of Wagner (1888) and Nietzsche contra Wagner (written in 1888) with his relation to Wagner and what Wagner represented; Ecce Homo (written in 1888) with an autobiographical analysis of his own intellectual achievement and development. While Nietzsche's books typically contain many digressions, they nevertheless focus upon sets of related questions, which are pursued with some tenacity. And while he often detours to treat issues whose relation to his main themes of the moment are sometimes distant and obscure, he clearly does not, despite the common misconception of his works as being completely scattershot, deal with all of his concerns in each of his books. 26. In WP 521 (1887), for example, Nietzsche asserts: "It is we who created the 'thing,' the 'identical thing,' subject, activity, object, substance, form after we had long pursued the process of making identical, coarse and simple." He begins the note by claiming that "The concepts 'individual' and 'species' [are] equally false and merely apparent" (my emphasis). But he makes it clear that the same forces lead us to conceptualize the world as consisting of groups of individuals that are of the same types (or belong to the same species) also lead us to perceive the world in this "false and merely apparent" (that is, distorted) manner: "This same compulsion exists in the sense activities that support reason - by simplification, coarsening, emphasizing, and elaborating, upon which all 'recognition,' all ability to make oneself intelligible, rests. Our needs have made our senses so precise that the 'same apparent world' always reappears and has thus acquired the semblance of reality." In his repeated assertions that the basic, organizing structures of our thought and discourse are constructed by us to facilitate life and not to furnish an accurate picture of reality, Nietzsche generally suggests that this is also the case with respect to those structures of perception that reflect the conceptual and linguistic ones. For example, see WP 474 (1887-88): "The measure of that which we are conscious is totally dependent upon the coarse utility of its becoming-conscious: how could this nook-perspective of consciousness permit us to assert anything of'subject' and 'object' that touched reality." Nietzsche's explicit charge that the structures of consciousness "do not touch reality" is typical of his continued use of idioms that appeal to a distinction between reality and appearance. In the section numbered 479 (from 1888) in the collection published under the title The Will to Power, he refers to these structures as errors: "Our 'outer world' as we project it at every

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27. 28. 29.

30.

moment is indissolubly tied to the old error of the ground: we interpret it by means of a schematism of 'things,' etc." (my emphasis). And in WP 477 (1887-8) he refers to them as "fictions." Kaufmann translation. Clark does not seem to acknowledge that the Fifth Book of GS is part of Nietzsche's work written after BGE. Clark, p. 113. The German word Schein, and the corresponding adjective, scheinbar, have an even more pronounced and persistent sense of something that is spurious, feigned, and illusory than the corresponding English appearance and apparent, which have better developed, epistemologically neutral (more cautious) uses as well. This is seen perhaps most clearly in substantives, which are compounded from Schein. For example, a Scheinangriff is not something that appears to be an attack, but may possibly not be, like the English "apparent attack," but rather a feint; a Scheinbliite is not an apparentflowering,but an illusory one; a Scheinehe is a sham marriage. The German Schein and scheinbar are often better captured by "mere appearance" and "merely apparent" than by "appearance" and "apparent." Even more importantly, it is difficult not only to use these terms neutrally, but free of an implicit, negative contrast to a reality that is its opposite in every way. The much used, rhyming, and catchy contrast between Sein und Schein" ("being and appearance") and its variants, such as "Das ist mehr Schein als Sein" ("that is more appearance than reality"), echo loudly and tenaciously in the minds of German speakers. Given this greater difficulty in German to separate the notion of appearance from that of that of mere appearance in contrast to a reality that never appears, it is more plausible to understand Nietzsche's rejection of the "apparent world" not as a rejection of the idea that our experience is in some sense distorted, but of the idea that this is to be understood as a the distortion of a reality that completely transcends all possible experience. To defend her hypothesis that Nietzsche had already rejected the distortion thesis by the time he wrote Twilight of the Idols, Clark is forced to claim, rather implausibly, that Nietzsche's attack upon these structures, which he repeatedly discusses as structures of human experience, is not an attack upon them as such: "We therefore have no reason to suppose that TI presents our ordinary concept of a thing as a 'lie.' A thing in this ordinary sense remains the 'same thing' when we can attribute to it spatio-temporal continuity under the same concept, even though the thing itself will have changed. It seems highly implausible that 'everything empirical plainly contradicted' the assumption that this concept of a thing has application.... To avoid attributing to Nietzsche such an implausible position, we can take the concept of a thing he calls a 'lie' to be the metaphysical concept of a substance, the concept of an unchanging substrate that underlies all change" (p. 107). Nietzsche never denies that the concept of a thing (and other concepts we use to structure our experience) "have application." On the contrary, he argues that they have an important and necessary application, but that in applying them we distort the chaos of sensations that we are initially presented with in experience. The distinction Clark relies upon, between the ordinary and metaphysical concept of a thing, seems murky and even spurious, since she describes them both in pretty much the same way, as allowing us to view what changes as remaining the same. If Nietzsche is here critically

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31.

32.

33.

34.

analyzing metaphysics at all, it is not metaphysical speculation about realms that transcend experience, but a metaphysics that is manifested in experience itself. Nietzsche's attack on spurious unities and stabilities is exemplified by the passage from TI 111:2, just cited and discussed above. For his critique of what he considers to be false equalities and groupings based upon them, see note 33 below. Clark argues that Nietzsche's notion of a chaos of sensations, since we cannot know it, is nothing other than the notion of the thing-in-itself reintroduced in a falsely phenomenal guise, in a vain and confused attempt to salvage the distortion thesis, by introducing what only seems to be a needed point of comparison to the distortion within experience. She is constrained to this interpretation because she is committed to the thesis that Nietzsche, in his later work, gave up the idea that our experience involves distortion or falsification because it involves the notion of a "true world." She holds that Nietzsche ultimately recognized the chaos of sensation for what it actually is and consequently rejected it (pp. 120-5). Clark's position rests upon a failure to pay attention to Nietzsche's distinction, just discussed, between what can be experienced and what can be known, expressed in language, or enter consciousness. Since Clark confuses Nietzsche's thesis that the chaos of sensations was not knowable or expressible with the idea that we cannot be aware of it at all, she argues Nietzsche must have justified his thesis that reality is constituted by the chaos of sensations by appeal to physiological theories of perception, which she claims he came to reject in 15 of BGE. If this were true, why would Nietzsche have continued to use the notion of a chaos of sensations in his later work? In WP 515 (1887) Nietzsche refers to the distortion that occurs whenever individual things, all of which, he argues, must be unique, are grouped together, in both conception and perception, as being of the same kind: "The development of reason is adjustment, invention, with the aim of making similar, equal - the same process that every sense impression goes through!" This idea is propounded by Nietzsche throughout his works, starting with TL: "Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things" (Breazeale ed., p. 83). Although this is a position that Nietzsche repeatedly advocates throughout his writings, it seems plainly wrong. Does one's conception and perception of New York and Paris as cities, or of Nietzsche and Spinoza as philosophers, or of any two entities as being of the same sort, in any way suppress one's awareness of their differences? To consider two individuals as being of the same kind is, despite what Nietzsche suggests, clearly not necessarily to consider them only as individuals of the same kind. A preliminary version of this essay was presented at the "Nietzsche at 150" Conference held at the University of Illinois in October 1994. It has been considerably revised and expanded.

Masters without Substance

R U D I G E R BITTNER

Nietzsche has a problem: reconciling his denial of substance with his doctrine of the will to power. I shall first explain in more detail what the problem is and then propose a way out. I Nietzsche's denial of substance is put forward in the following passage from GM 1:13:
Ein Quantum Kraft ist ein eben solches Quantum Trieb, Wille, Wirken - vielmehr, es ist gar nichts anderes als eben dieses Treiben, Wollen, Wirken selbst, und nur unter der Verfiihrung der Sprache (und der in ihr versteinerten Grundirrthtimer der Vernunft), welche alles Wirken als bedingt durch ein Wirkendes, durch ein "Subjekt" versteht und missversteht, kann es anders erscheinen. Ebenso ndmlich, wie das Volk den Blitz von seinem Leuchten trennt und letzteres als Thun, als Wirkung eines Subjekts nimmt, das Blitz heisst, so trennt die Volks-Moral auch die Stdrke von den Ausserungen der Stdrke ab, wie als ob es hinter dem Starken ein indifferentes Substrat ga'be, dem es freistiinde, Stdrke zu dussern oder auch nicht. Aber es giebt kein solches Substrat; es giebt kein "Sein" hinter dem Thun, Wirken, Werden; "der Thdter" ist zum Thun bloss hinzugedichtet, - das Thun ist Alles.

In Kaufmann and Hollingdale's translation:

A quantum of force is equivalent to a quantum of drive, will, effect - more, it is nothing other than this very driving, willing, effecting, and only owing to the seduction of language (and of the fundamental errors of reason that are petrified in it) which conceives and misconceives all effects as conditioned by something that causes effects, by a "subject," can it appear otherwise. For just as the popular mind separates the lightning from its flash and takes the latter for an action, for the operation of a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum behind the strong man, which was free to express strength or not to do so. But there is no such substratum; there is no "being" behind doing, effecting, becoming; "the doer" is merely a fiction added to the deed - the deed is everything.

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There are really two contrasts involved here: that between a force and its manifestations (Ausserungen), and that between an agent and the action. Nietzsche rejects both of these contrasts. He holds that a force is nothing but what are supposed to be its manifestations ("em Quantum Kraft ist nichts anderes als eben dieses Treiben, Wollen, Wirken selbst"); and he holds that there are no agents, only actions (der Tater ist hinzugedichtet, das Thun ist alles). Eager to deny anything that lies behind the phenomena, Nietzsche does not notice that a force and an agent are related in different ways to events, so that he is really claiming two things here. In any event, for present purposes it is only the second of these claims, namely, that there are no agents, only actions, that will be of interest. This claim is a metaphysical, and in particular an ontological, one: It states what sorts of things there are and what sorts of things there are not. It says something about what there is and what there isn't in this world. It is a broad claim, since "agent" here replaces Nietzsche's expression "Wirkendes" and so refers both to human and to other originators of change, the way one can speak in English of the natural agents of erosion. Similarly, "action" here replaces Nietzsche's "Wirken," and so it covers all sorts of effects, which may or may not involve humans, as one can speak in English of the action of the brakes. So Nietzsche's claim amounts to this: Changes occur, but there are no persons or even things that give rise to them. Presumably changes occur because of other changes (although at times Nietzsche seems to deny that as well). Thus, there is something that gives rise to a change, namely, another change. There is just no thing that does. The point here, then, is not a denial of causality. It is a denial that there are any such things as things. This claim may be surprising, but it is perfectly intelligible. It may be surprising, for many people think that among the entities in this world there are both myself and my preparing lunch, both this house at 23 Firle Crescent and its keeping off the winds, and so on. Nietzsche is saying, by contrast, that I do not exist, but the preparing of lunch does; the house does not exist, but the keeping off of the winds does; and so on. The example of the lightning puts the point well. In German certainly one would be ready to say something like "Ein Blitz leuchtete," a lightning bolt flashed, thus suggesting that there is the lightning bolt and additionally the flash. Nietzsche holds, by contrast, that there is just the flash here, and that it is only the habit of phrasing statements as we do that misleads one into thinking otherwise. In this sense Nietzsche denies substance. On Aristotle's view, substance is not a hidden stuff of being that lies within or even behind things. Substance is simply what individual things - above all natural things -

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are. So I, as an object of nature, am an exemplary case of substance. Thus, Nietzsche, denying that I and individual things like me exist, is denying substance. If such a denial is surprising, it is by no means unheard of. An ontology of events1 rather than things has been considered by a number of people.2 Nor is it evident that such an ontology would leave us gasping. The full story about me could perhaps be told without ever being about me, only about doings and happenings. Descartes to the contrary, I may not be needed for this thinking - let alone for this life - to be going on. II On the other hand, the doctrine of the will to power, or one version of this doctrine, is stated in GM 11:12: "dafi alles Geschehen in der organischen Welt ein Uberwaltigen, Herr-werden . . . ist" (Kaufmann and Hollingdale: "all events in the organic world are a subduing, a becoming master"). This is, strictly, not a metaphysical thesis, since it does not concern what there is in general. It is a statement about just one kind of entity: events in the organic world, a piece of regional ontology, as the phenomenological tradition would have called it. All events in the organic world are, according to the present thesis, cases of subduing and becoming master, with these two expressions apparently meaning the same thing here. Presumably this is meant to say not merely that events in the organic world happen to be cases of subduing and becoming master, but further that this is what events in the organic world essentially amount to. Consequently the conceptual framework of things mastering one another should replace the idea of laws of nature in guiding science.3 The text gives reason to call this thesis "the doctrine of the will to power" in that Nietzsche, one page further on, speaks of "the essence of life, its will to power." After all, it is very natural to suppose that the essence of life he has in mind here is just that general character of events in the organic world. Actually, though, it is somewhat misleading to call this thesis the doctrine of the will to power. All events in the organic world, according to the thesis, are cases of overpowering, all result in manifesting a superiority of power. Yet it is only if you assume that their ending in a display of power differences must be explained by their being aimed at displaying them, that you may conclude that a will to power that is, a will to exert and to manifest power - is the driving force in all events in the organic world. So the thesis that every event in the organic world is a subduing can rightly be called a "will to power doctrine" only

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if that assumption may be taken for granted. It may not. Not only is the assumption in fact dubious, but Nietzsche himself did his part to discredit it. Indeed, he does so right here in GM 11:12, when he insists on the separation of end state and purpose. His own insight notwithstanding, however, he kept referring to the thesis of overpowering as the doctrine of the will to power, even though the "will to" part of this doctrine is owed to that dubious assumption. The statement that every event in the organic world is a subduing should be understood with one restriction. The phrase "event in the organic world" here presumably does not refer to any event involving a living creature.4 An avalanche killing an animal does not thereby manifest its superior power. Only those events should be meant which are brought about through the specific functions of living creatures.5 Even so restricted, the thesis may appear ludicrous. I am just coming from lunch, where I had rice with mushrooms. My lunch should certainly count as an event in the organic world, but where is the subduing? Nietzsche's answer must be: I did subdue rice and mushrooms by eating them. I forced them into serving me, which left to themselves they would not have done. Similarly, in whistling I make myself master of the air, which would otherwise have stayed silent, and when trying in vain to solve the Guardian crossword puzzle I am being subdued by whoever constructed it. Even the beating of my heart and the growing of my nails show me in power over the inert matter of these parts, which but for me would not produce such an effect. Likewise for everything else people do, and for everything any living creature does: It all manifests superior, or inferior, power. It is natural to think that it is a childish idea to have every living creature constantly seek to prove its strength against other things. However, such an objection would show a misunderstanding. The point is not that I went to lunch eager to show my power over rice and mushrooms. The point is simply that I showed it. The difference mentioned above between claiming that everything in the organic world manifests power differences, and claiming that everything in the organic world is driven by a will to manifest power differences - thus helps to save Nietzsche's thesis from absurdity. Ill Nietzsche's problem, then, is as follows. For some event to be a subduing, some individual thing is needed to be a subduer, and some individual thing is needed to be subdued. Given the denial of substance, however, there are no individual things; there are only actions. Hence, if

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the denial of substance is true, the doctrine of the will to power is not true, and conversely. For a subduing it takes a subduer and a subdued. The reason is not the grammatical one that "to subdue" is ordinarily construed as a two-place predicate. If substance is denied and there are held to be no agents but only actions, terms referring to actions could still - as far as grammatical correctness is in question - fill the two places. The reason rather is that we simply have no idea what talk of an action subduing or an action subdued could mean. Actions are not masters, actions are not slaves. People are masters and slaves, and they form the primary domain of this relation. You can perhaps also become master over an animal, even over a plant. In any case, the world without agents envisioned by Nietzsche in GM 1:13 offers no footing for concepts of subduing and mastery. To be sure, we also speak of mastering the crawl and of mastering the violin. Actually, though, even in these cases it is precisely not the actions of which we are said to be in command. The crawler is not master over her swimming, nor is the violinist over his playing. The crawler is master over the crawl, the player over the violin, and the crawl and the violin are here metaphorically taken as something like things, power over which permits the activity in question to succeed. ("The violin," in this sense, does not refer to the instrument on which somebody is playing. To acquire power over that may be expensive, but need not be difficult.) Mastering the crawl or the violin are metaphorical analogues to, say, mastering a horse: Having mastered a horse you ride well; having mastered the crawl you swim well. Charles Taylor not long ago made a similar point in a discussion of Foucault:" 'Power' in the way Foucault sees it, closely linked to 'domination,' does not require a clearly demarcated perpetrator, but it requires a victim. It cannot be a 'victimless crime,' so to speak.... Something must be being imposed on someone, if there is to be domination."6 This is a bit puzzling; for one might have thought that holders of power are, in this respect, in the same position as those over whom power is held. One might have thought, that is, that just as something must be imposed on someone for there to be domination, so it must be imposed by someone, while our occasional inability "clearly to demarcate" who is doing what is irrelevant here. But however that may be, Taylor's main point stands: Power talk makes no sense in a world without agents. Nietzsche himself does not avoid an occasional reference to substances subdued, in stating the doctrine of the will to power in GM II: 12. True, the phrasing quoted above dodges the problem by using the verbs "subduing" and "becoming master" without an indication as to who is becom-

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ing master over what. That is grammatically correct, to be sure, but philosophically it is unsatisfactory. A few lines later we find:
Aber alle Zwecke, alle Niitzlichkeiten sind nur Anzeichen davon, dass ein Wille zur Macht iiber etwas weniger Mdchtiges Herr geworden ist und ihm von sich aus den Sinn einer Funktion aufgeprdgt hat; (Kaufmann and Hollingdale: But purposes and utilities are only signs that a will to power has become master of something less powerful and imposed it upon the character of a function.)

"Etwas weniger Mdchtiges," "something less powerful" - this is substance-talk. In GM 1:13 there is no such thing as "something less powerful." There is only such and such action, with no agent behind it. As for the side of the more powerful, Nietzsche speaks of "a will to power" that has become master. That, however, makes no sense, strictly speaking. If will to power is an affect, and BGE 36 among many other passages provides strong support for this assumption, then a will to power cannot become master. Somebody with a will to power can. Thus, Nietzsche's talk of a will to power becoming master has to be understood as pars pro toto and comes down to saying that somebody more powerful, or at any rate something more powerful, has subdued something less powerful. This takes us right back to substance. Hence, contradiction. IV How can Nietzsche respond, other than by surrendering either the doctrine of the will to power or the denial of substance? There are those who think that there is no need for him to respond, a contradiction being the sign of a fertile mind. In fact, it is rather the sign of an opaque mind: There is no figuring out what was actually asserted. However, it won't help to broach a discussion of that disagreement here. It will be better to rephrase the question: Supposing that Nietzsche will not acquiesce in a contradiction, how can he respond to the difficulty other than by giving up one or both of the two statements? He can deny the assumption mentioned above that will to power is an affect and thus needs an agent as its bearer. He can go for a straightforward metaphysics of will to power, claiming that wills to power are whatever there is and denying that they are a kind of substance.7 In this way he can maintain that every event in the organic world is a subduing, as this claim is now clarified by indicating that wills to power are what is subduing and subdued, and he can maintain as well that there is no such thing as substance, as wills to power neither are, nor need to be supported by, substances. It matters little that this course involves him in a positive ontology, in spite of his railings against metaphysical philosophy; for the

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denial of substance is a metaphysical thesis, if a negative one, and it is always open to read his critique of metaphysics as being just a critique of any other metaphysics than that of will to power. We should want to learn from Nietzsche, if he were to take this line, what a will to power is, given that it is not an affect of agents. It must be such as to be capable of being subduer or subdued, or else nothing would be done to rescue the thesis that every event in the organic world is a subduing. Thus, a will to power must be such as to compare in power to other wills to power. Moreover, their power relation may change through what happens, for an event in the organic world makes one will to power become master, and so that one need not previously have been master. This stretches to the breaking point the credibility of the suggestion that such a will to power is not an agent and thus not a substance. If there is a story of one will to power getting the better of another, that will to power must be something re-identifiable, and it cannot be identified by its power over others, since that is what changes. So it is not power, it has power. That means it is substance. Something that stays the same while undergoing a change in its properties is precisely what the philosophical tradition called a substance. The wills to power that Nietzsche, taking this line, would invoke turn out to be just those agents he rejected in GM I: 13. The proposed metaphysics of will to power does not lead Nietzsche out of the impasse. Alternatively, he might play down the denial of substance. When he writes, in GM 1:13, " 'the agent' is a mere fiction added to the action the action is everything," this may be meant to deny, not that there are agents different from actions, but only that there are agents who also have free choice over actions. And since traditionally agents have been conceived to be free agents, it would be easy to understand why Nietzsche gave rise to the misunderstanding. In this way no contradiction arises. As argued above, the will to power doctrine of GM 11:12 requires agents to fill the roles of subduer and subdued. By no means does it require free agents for the purpose. Unlike the denial of substance, then, the denial of free agents that takes its place is compatible with the doctrine of the will to power. It is true, if it is not agents in general that are being denied in GM 1:13, but only free agents, the problem disappears. The denial of free agents certainly is a constant theme elsewhere in Nietzsche's writings; and so it could well be appearing here in the Genealogy passage as well. The trouble is that the denial of substance likewise is a constant theme in Nietzsche's writings.8 So whether GM 1:13 denies substance or only free agents, Nietzsche does deny substance - and so, with regard to other passages even if not to this one, the contradiction arises. Thus, the present

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strategy of replacing the denial of substance by the denial of free agency succeeds in solving Nietzsche's problem only locally, as well as at the cost of cutting, so to speak, into Nietzschean substance.

Yet as there seems to be no way for Nietzsche to respond to the problem other than by giving up one of the conflicting statements, some cutting into Nietzschean substance is unavoidable. The only question is which cut to prefer. The strategy just discussed comes down to recommending that the denial of substance should be renounced and the doctrine of the will to power be kept. What follows is an argument for the opposite choice. The doctrine of the will to power and the denial of substance are both part of the same project: a philosophical understanding of life and the living. Evidence for this claim, as regards the doctrine of the will to power, is the fact that this thesis is restricted again and again to the realm of living things (see "On Self-Overcoming," Z 11:12), and the fact that what Nietzsche finds objectionable about "misarchism" (or "hatred of ruling") in GM 11:12 is its impact upon the doctrine of life, "to that doctrine's detriment, needless to say." Nietzsche's reason for preferring a doctrine of life cast in terms of will to power rather than in terms of laws of nature, the "misarchistic" conception prevalent among scientists (BGE 22), is indicated by the alleged consequence of misarchism in this context: We can understand activity in terms of will to power, whereas we cannot do so in terms of laws of nature; and understanding activity is crucial for understanding life. The denial of substance on the other hand serves to accord the concept of activity its proper domain. Understanding activity is not only crucial for understanding life ("em Grundbegriff" GM 11:12). It is to understand life: in the organic realm "there is no 'being' behind the activity, the activity is everything." Nietzsche's opponent here is traditional metaphysics - and more precisely, Aristotelian metaphysics. Nietzsche constantly rails against the Platonic separation of what really exists from what surrounds us; but his more important point is that, even if this separation is rejected, it remains a mistake to describe the world in terms of existing things. His point is that substance is an unnecessary duplication of activity. Aristotle held, precisely to the contrary, that substance is indispensable for an understanding of activity. Nietzsche has the initial advantage in this dispute, for he assumes less than his opponent.9 Nietzsche, to be sure, is at one with Aristotle in saying that activity is a basic concept for understanding life. He disagrees with Aristotle's idea that activity is incom-

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prehensible without agents. Nietzsche thinks that "activity" is not only a necessary but a sufficient conceptual basis for understanding life. If so, introducing substance is not just superfluous, but positively harmful, because it restricts to a subordinate position the activity of which life consists. So the doctrine of the will to power and the denial of substance are linked in the attempt to envisage a world of life. "Will to power" is needed, according to Nietzsche, to understand what life is, for it is needed to understand activity, and that is the fundament for understanding life. The denial of substance is needed to recognize that the activity of which life consists is all there is to what is living, rather than that there should still be being in which the activity of life would only inhere. However, if the argument above is correct, at least one of the two doctrines does not actually serve that purpose. It may be that the denial of substance does not. It may be that the argument just sketched is not effective, and that life needs to be understood in terms of substance, as Aristotle held. However that may be, it seems clear that the doctrine of the will to power does not serve its purpose. Will to power is meant to make sense of activity, which is the basic character of life. In fact, will to power does not make sense of activity. Will to power replaces the concept of activity with a narrower one. The distinction that is at work here comes out in GS 301. There Nietzsche contrasts the superior human beings (us, in short), who are both contemplative and creative, with the inferior ones (them), who are "so-called active." In terms of Nietzsche's metaphor, we are the poets of life's drama, they are mere actors in it. The important distinction here is that between creativity and so-called activity; and the telling phrase is "so-called" (repeated a few lines further down, where Nietzsche refers to the "so-called practical man"). With this phrase Nietzsche is suggesting that what ordinary people do in their daily lives - things like preparing lunch or buying a railway ticket - are not actions, properly speaking. It is only the creators who are genuinely active. The phrase "genuine activity" (eigentliche Aktivitat) in GM 11:12 is to be understood in this sense, and in opposition to the "so-called action" of GS 301. Yet common though it is, creativity talk is difficult to understand in the case of anyone other than God. In God's case creation is to make something exist where there was nothing.10 However, this is a feat at which we are no good. We make something out of something. The playwright, Nietzsche's image of human creativity, does not after all start from absolute scratch as God is said to have done. He uses language, not to mention paper and ink. And if you insist that the play is something new after all, this won't give you the right contrast, either, for in that

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sense the lunch I made is something new as well, and so everybody will be constantly creative, contrary to what Nietzsche suggests. Nietzsche's implicit response is that the creativity of the superior humans is the same as God's: "It is only we who created the world which matters to man." So we made a world, as God is said to have done. We did not merely reshuffle things, for then it would not have been a whole world we created. Like God, we started from scratch. Different are the worlds he and we came up with. God's world is one that does not matter to us. It is nature. The world we created is the humanly interesting world. So it is not true on Nietzsche's view that we only make something out of something. Rather, "We are really all the time making something which has not yet been there." What we are making is "the whole evergrowing world of valuations, colors, emphases, perspectives, scales, affirmations and negations" (GS 301). So this is how we set up a world. We find one thing valuable, another thing is colored for us by some affect, some feature of a third thing carries an emphasis for us, we consider a fourth thing under a certain perspective, and so on. However, the value, color, emphasis, aspect, etc. of a thing is owed to us, and only to us. We find things valuable because we granted them value, things are colored for us because we did the coloring, a certain feature carries an emphasis because we emphasized it, things show a certain aspect because we subjected them to a certain perspective, and so on. We are masters over values, colors, emphases, perspectives, etc., and we are exclusive masters over them. In this way we actually give things qualities, namely, their values, colors, etc. As we are interested in these qualities when we are dealing with things, the sum of things having such qualities can be called the world that matters to man. Of that world we are the creators. This reasoning is confused, and no less so for being widely shared among contemporary writers. Even assuming that things have value if and only if we grant them value, we are not therefore, in the full sense of the word, creative in valuing things. After all, we need some given thing for what our valuing is to be a valuing of, and so we do not start from scratch, as God is supposed to have done. If it is replied that at least the qualities that matter to us, if not the things, are of our making, the reasoning ends up on the other horn of the dilemma. Once the conferring of new qualities on things is deemed sufficient for creativity, everybody will be creative all the time, contrary to Nietzsche's assertion: You certainly give the railway ticket you buy a new quality. However, what is decisive in the present context is the assumption on which the reasoning is based: that the value of things is owed, and owed entirely, to our giving them value. Nietzsche's idea of creative humanity,

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or at any rate of a creative part of humanity, depends on things being mere material for our valuations, colorings, emphases, perspectives, etc. That is to say, valuing something must be a matter of imposing a value on it; to see something in the light of some affect must be a matter of setting it in that light; to consider a feature important must be a matter of putting an emphasis on it; to notice a certain aspect in something must be a matter of subjecting it to that perspective; and so on. In short, we force values, emphases, and perspectives onto things. Thus, what we encounter we master; otherwise we would not be creative. That is why genuine activity involves a will to power. Genuine activity requires creativity; and creativity, if it is not God's, requires subjecting things to alien valuations, emphases, perspectives, and the like. Hence, any genuine activity is a subduing. The assumption on which Nietzsche's reasoning is based is false. It is false that things have value if and only if they are given value. Nietzsche in GS 301 makes this assumption because he recognizes only two possibilities: Either a thing has value "in itself, by its nature," or it was given value. Rightly rejecting the former, he is bound to embrace the latter. However, this is too narrow a choice. Things also, and indeed primarily, acquire value in the course of our dealings with them. Things are not born valuable, but neither need value be thrust upon them if they are to have it at all. They may simply achieve it: They come handy in a situation, they turn out to be useful. As the old joke has it, cork trees were not destined by their nature to be suitable for closing bottles of wine but neither did anyone bestow this value upon them. They just turned out to be valuable in this respect. It may be replied here that to use something is implicitly to confer value on it. This reply begs the question. Everybody agrees that things sometimes prove valuable in one way or another. At issue is whether the value they then have must be a value conferred on them, as Nietzsche's argument assumes. At issue is therefore precisely whether it is true to say that to use something is implicitly to confer value on it. From what was just said it appears that this is not true. The same holds for the parallel cases Nietzsche mentions. An object does not come with certain of its features standing out as salient; nor does anyone, explicitly or otherwise, have to put an emphasis on them. These features just become the important ones in the course of one's dealings with this object. Again, a thing neither brings with it the perspective from which it needs to be seen, nor do I impose a perspective on it. Rather, an aspect dawns on me. Above all, the people I like do not come with likeability, or likeability-by-me, inscribed in them as a natural character. Nor did I grant them likeability. I just came to like them.

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This is a Nietzschean point after all. "A thought comes when 'it' wants, not when I want" (BGE 17). To be sure, not always: Sometimes thoughts do come when called. Still, the normal case is the one Nietzsche describes: Most of the time we are not in control over our thinking. Given that for Nietzsche there is no difference in principle between thinking and other affects, this should hold as well for liking people, valuing things, seeing aspects, and the rest. We are not master over these things. Nor do we suffer them, to be sure: We are not, literally, overcome by thoughts, likings, appreciations, perspectives. We are not on top of them, and we are not under them; we are right in the middle of them. That is to say, the distinction of active and passive is out of place here. The colors, aspects, emphases emerge in the course of our lives. They grow on us. Nietzsche failed to appreciate his own insight here: Insisting on "genuine activity," he did not see in our lives anything but the constant pressure to become master over things. Here lies the material reason for rejecting the will to power doctrine. It does not leave a place for likings, appreciations, colors, aspects, etc., to come when "they" want, rather than when we want. So it does not actually provide an understanding of life. Nietzsche failed to appreciate his own insight, because the myth of creativity obscured his vision. Values, aspects, and desirability had to be imposed on things rather than arising from a life with them,11 to make sure that valuing, seeing under a perspective, desiring, and the like would be instances of genuine activity; and imposing them was taken to be required for such activity, because it was conceived as involving creativity. This, however, is the myth of creativity. It is a myth because there is no such thing: Nobody ever created anything.12 Moreover, even if it should be true that "in the beginning God created heaven and earth," there is no reason why human activity should be understood and assessed on that model. Nietzsche never stopped doing so.13 Nietzsche was good at sweepingly denouncing in general the grip of myths on thought and imagination. Few things he wrote match the power of GS 108, on God's shadows. He was less good at denouncing and eradicating particular myths. Nor did he succeed in the end in liberating himself from them. The myth of creativity, one of God's longer shadows, he never left behind.14

NOTES
I was in error when, in "Nietzsches Begriff der Wahrheit," Nietzsche-Studien 16 (1987), p. 82,1 denied (against Giinter Abel, Nietzsche [Berlin: de Gruyter, 1984], p. 175) that Nietzsche proposes an event ontology. Sometimes, it is true, Nietzsche rejects any kind of ontology, as I insisted there. Passages like the

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2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

present one from GM, however, must be understood in the way suggested by Abel. See the treatment and the references in Jonathan Bennett, Events and Their Names (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), 46. See BGE 36, GM 11:12. The transition from "organic world" to "living creature" is supported by Z II, "On Self-overcoming": "Where I found a living thing, there I found will to power." See also BGE 13. The phrase "organische Funktionen," as used in BGE 36, supports this interpretation. Charles Taylor, "Foucault on Freedom and Truth," Political Theory 12 (1984): 152-83, reprinted in D. Hoy, ed., Foucault: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 69-102. The quoted passage comes from pp. 90-1 in Hoy's volume. This is the interpretation advanced by W. Muller-Lauter, Nietzsche (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1971, and Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). See HH 1:19, TIVI:3. For Nietzsche's adherence to the idea of parsimony of principles see BGE P and 13. This understanding of creation is disputed (e.g., by Harry Frankfurt, in Necessity, Volition, and Love [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], pp. 117-28); but it is the orthodox view. Z 1:22, "On the Gift-Giving Virtue," describes love of such an "imposing" kind in memorable language. It seems to me that in our languages, given their history and the history of things expressed in them, it is a requirement on any explanation of the word "creation" that it also fit Genesis 1:1. That is why in my view there is no getting by with distinguishing between ordinary creativity and radical creativity. If there is any creativity at all, the event reported at the beginning of Genesis must be an instance. As that event, to the best of my knowledge, did not occur, it is inevitable to ban the word from the language entirely. While it may not count for a great deal, it is nonetheless remarkable how large the idea of creativity looms in Nietzsche's last letters of early January 1889. See KGB nos. 1245,1246, and 1256. Again, it may not count for a great deal, but it is striking to see Nietzsche quite frequently sign the letters to his mother with "Dein altes Geschopf ("Your old creature"; see, for example, nos. 791 and 1096), which is definitely an unusual way of referring to his being her son. I thank Marco Iorio and Ralf Stoecker for helpful comments.

Rethinking the Subject: Or, How One Becomes-Other Than What One Is
ALAN D. SCHRIFT

/ teach you the Ubermensch. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra In truth, what is the tjbermenschl We do not know and, properly speaking, Nietzsche does not know. We know only that the thought of the Obermensch signifies: man disappears; an affirmation that is pushed furthest when it doubles into a question: does man disappear? Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation As Foucault would say, the Ubermensch is much less than the disappearance of living men, and much more than a change of concept: it is the advent of a new form that is neither God nor man and which, it is hoped, will not prove worse than its two previous forms. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault

The subject has been experiencing something of a comeback, philosophically speaking, in the past decade or so. After being banished by the structuralists in the 1960s to the dustbin of history, one now sees frequent references, even within the most current Continental literature, to the need to recuperate a workable and meaningful notion of the subject. The subject's rise and fall is not unrelated to the position Nietzsche occupies within this Continental literature; and so it is somewhat ironic that the Ubermensch, which is generally regarded to be Nietzsche's positive notion of a subject, has fallen on hard times in the recent Nietzsche literature.1 Until the mid-1980s I think we could find references to the Ubermensch to be roughly equal in number to references to the other major Nietzschean themes; in contrast, I suspect a survey of the recent secondary literature would find discussions of the Ubermensch lagging far behind accounts of such themes as, for example, eternal recurrence or nihilism. In this essay I want to suggest why this might be the case;

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and, more importantly, I would like to suggest why further reflection on the Ubermensch might be in order. I said a moment ago that the position of the subject within recent Continental thought is not unrelated to the place Nietzsche holds within that thought. Let me make a somewhat stronger claim: The complementary positions of the subject and Nietzsche are themselves framed by the work of Michel Foucault. That is to say, the association of Nietzsche's thought with the so-called "death of the subject" was a direct consequence of Foucault's linking, in Les Mots et les choses, the end of man with Nietzsche's "death of God."2 And, as I have argued elsewhere,3 the recuperation of the subject in contemporary Continental thought was itself a project first announced by Foucault in his works following the first volume of The History of Sexuality. While Foucault himself did not link Nietzsche in a particularly strong way with this recovery of the subject, others have credited Nietzsche with fracturing the classical notion of the subject in a way that opens alternative possibilities for understanding agency. In this essay, I will begin by briefly examining Nietzsche's critique of the classical notion of the subject, especially as this critique was framed by Foucault. I will then suggest an interpretation of the Ubermensch that, drawing upon the work of Foucault and his fellow French Nietzschean Gilles Deleuze, adds to our understanding of what Nietzsche means by "Ubermensch" and advances the project of rethinking the notion of the subject.
Changing the Subject

Foucault initially raised the question of the subject in the context of his critique of the project of philosophical anthropology, a project whose origins he located in Kant. Noting that Kant, in his Introduction to Logic, referred the three perennial philosophical questions ("What can I know? What must I do? What am I permitted to hope?") to a fourth ("What is man?"), Foucault closed his 1960 these complementaire "Introduction a /'Anthropologie de Kant" with the following observation: "The trajectory of the question 'Was ist der Mensch?' in the field of philosophy culminates in the challenging and disarming response: lder
Ubermensch.' " 4

In The Order of Things Foucault went on to work out this trajectory, guided by the insight that insofar as man in his finitude is not separable from the infinite that he both announces and negates, the Ubermensch functions as the "other" to both man and God - and, as such, "Ubermensch" heralds both of their ends.5 The details of Foucault's account are well known: He raises the question of the subject in terms of what

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he refers to as the Nietzschean question, "Who is speaking?"6 This question appears in the context of Foucault's crediting Nietzsche for opening up language as "an enigmatic multiplicity that must be mastered." For Nietzsche, according to Foucault, "it was not a matter of knowing what good and evil were in themselves, but of who was being designated, or rather who was speaking when one said Agathos to designate oneself or Deilos to designate others."7 When Nietzsche drew the genealogical distinction between the noble's "good," operating as it does within the couplet "good/bad," and the slave's "good," which functions within the very different couplet "good/evil," Foucault remarks that Nietzsche was perhaps the first to notice that words had "ceased to intersect with representations and to provide a spontaneous grid for the knowledge of things."8 His recognition that faith in the representational accuracy of language had been eclipsed led Nietzsche instead to focus critical attention not on what was said but on who said what was said, and on what the reasons were which had given rise to what was said. Foucault had already made this point in the under-appreciated essay "Nietzsche, Freud, Marx," his contribution to the 1964 colloquium on Nietzsche held at Royaumont. In his concluding remarks on the obligation of interpretation to interpret itself to infinity, Foucault noted that interpretation will be henceforth always interpretation by the "who?": one does not interpret what there is in the signified, but one interprets, fundamentally, who has posed the interpretation. The origin [principe] of interpretation is nothing other than the interpreter, and this is perhaps the sense that Nietzsche gave to the word "psychology."9 To ask "who interprets?" or "who speaks?" however, does not produce an answer taking the form of a subject's name, as Foucault indicates when he inscribes the question "who?" within "psychology" - understood by Nietzsche as "morphology and the doctrine of the development of the will to power" (BGE 23: "Morphologie und Entwicklungslehre des Willens zur Macht"). " 'The subject' itself," Nietzsche writes, is an interpretation, "something created," a "simplification with the object of defining the force that posits, invents, thinks" (KSA 12:2[152]; WP 556: "Selbst 'das Subjekt' is ein solches Geschaffenes, ein 'Ding,' wie alle Andern: eine Vereinfachung, um die Kraft, welche setzt, erfindet, denkt"). For this reason, Nietzsche concludes that it is the will to power that speaks and interprets, not a subject, as we see when we look to his own answer to the question concerning "who speaks?" Nietzsche writes: "Now suppose that belief in God has vanished: the question presents itself anew: 'who speaks?' - My answer, taken not from metaphysics but

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from animal physiology: the herd instinct speaks. It wants to be master: hence its 'thou shalt!'" (KSA, 12:7[6]; WP 275: "Gesetzt nun, der Glaube an Gott ist dahin: so stellt sich die Frage von Neuem: 'wer redet?' - Meine Antwort, nicht aus der Metaphysik, sondern der Thier-Psychologie genommen: der Heerden-Instinkt redet. Er will Herr sein: daher sein 'du sollst!'"). Elsewhere Nietzsche remarks that, because "The will to power interprets" (KSA, 12: 2[148]; WP 643: "Der Wille zur Macht interpretiert"), "one may not ask 'who then interprets' for the interpretation itself is a form of will to power" (KSA, 12: 2[151]; WP 556: "Man darf nicht fragen: 'wer interpretirt denn?' sondern das Interpretiren selbst, als eine Form des Willens zur Macht, hat Dasein"). Rather than eliciting the name of a subject, for Nietzsche the question "who?" calls for a genealogical inquiry into the type of will to power (life-affirming or lifenegating) that manifests itself in speech or interpretation. On the basis of this Nietzschean insight, Foucault formulated his earliest position on the question of the subject: The subject appears as an ideological product, a functional principle of discourse rather than its privileged origin. This was not to say that the subject was to be entirely abandoned, however. Instead, it is for Foucault a matter of depriving the subject of its role as originator and analyzing the subject as a variable and complex function of discourse and power. To do so means that we must give up the questions: "How can a free subject penetrate the substance of things and give it meaning? How can it activate the rules of a language from within and thus give rise to the designs which are properly its own?" And it further means replacing them with the following questions: "How, under what conditions and in what forms can something like a subject appear in the order of discourse? What place can it occupy in each type of discourse, what functions can it assume, and by obeying what rules?"10 This was not to be Foucault's final position on this matter, however. Nor was it to mark his final appeal to Nietzsche in grounding this issue. In displacing the question of the "free subject's" endowing things with meaning, it is clear that Foucault was distancing himself from the phenomenological-existential - and, in particular, the Sartrean subject.11 By returning to a Nietzschean account, Foucault replaces the Sartrean project of an authentic self with the Nietzschean project of creatively constructing oneself.12 In so doing he both displaces the valorized free existential subject and retrieves a more ambivalent subject, whose constitution takes place within the constraints of institutional forces that exceed its grasp and even, at times, its recognition. This is the subject whose genealogy Nietzsche traced in On the Genealogy of Morals (1:13). In an analysis that exhibits the traits Foucault

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himself noted in his early essay "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," Nietzsche focuses not on the valorization of origins (Ursprung) but on a critical analysis of the conditions of emergence (Entstehung) and descent (Herkunft).13 Pursuing the task of what he called earlier history as a "curative science" (WS 188: "Heilmittellehre"), Nietzsche locates the subject not as a metaphysical "given" but as a historical construct - a construct, moreover, whose conditions of emergence are far from innocent. The belief in this construct is exploited by "vengefulness and hatred" to convince the strong that they are free to be weak and, therefore, accountable for their failure to be weak. Prompted by the instinct for self-preservation and self-affirmation in which every lie is sanctified, Nietzsche writes:
The subject (or, to use a more popular expression, the soul) has perhaps been believed in hitherto more firmly than anything else on earth because it makes possible to the majority of mortals, the weak and oppressed of every kind, the sublime self-deception that interprets weakness as freedom, and their being thusand-thus as a merit. (GM 1:13: "Das Subjekt (oder, dass wir populdrer reden, die Seelej ist vielleicht deshalb bis jetzt auf Erden der beste Glaubenssatz gewesen, well er der Vberzahl der Sterblichen, den Schwachen und Niedergedriickten jeder Art, jene sublime Selbstbetriigerei ermoglichte, die Schwiiche selbst als Freiheit, ihr So- und So-sein als Verdienst auslegen.")

In this remark we see that it is not simply the subject's ignoble origin that comes under genealogical scrutiny. In addition, in a further effort to challenge the subject's privileged status, Nietzsche directs his genealogical gaze toward the life-negating uses to which the idea of the subject has been put. Foucault comments that a genealogy of Herkunft "is not the erecting of foundations: On the contrary, it disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself."14 This is precisely what Nietzsche does, as his genealogy of the subject demonstrates the oppressive use made of the principle of subjectivity as a principle of domination in the service of a "hangman's metaphysics" (TI VI:7: "eine Metaphysik des Henkers"). And it is this account of the subject that leads Foucault to link the modern form of power with subjects and subjection.15 This view, which we might call Nietzsche's "political" critique of the notion of the subject, appears primarily in the works following Beyond Good and Evil, and it supplements his more metaphysical critique of the "subject" as a superfluous postulation of a " 'being' behind doing." This postulation, grounded in metaphysical need, is often traced to what Nietzsche calls a linguistic illusion or "crude fetishism" (TI 111:5: "grobes Fetischweseri") that results from our "grammatical custom" of positing a doer in addition to the deed: "Owing to

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the seduction of language (and of the fundamental errors of reason that are petrified in it) which conceives and misconceives all effects as conditioned by something that causes effects, by a 'subject' [Unter der Verfilhrung der Sprache (und der in ihr versteinerten Grundirrthiimer der Vernunft), welche alles Wirken als bedingt durch ein Wirkendes, durch ein 'Subjekt' versteht und missversteht]," we are lead to posit a neutral substratum underlying our actions. Nietzsche continues: "But there is no such substratum; there is no 'being' behind doing, effecting, becoming; 'the doer' is merely a fiction added to the deed - the deed is everything" (GM 1:13: "Aber es giebt kein solches Substrat; es giebt kein 'Sein' hinter dem Thun, Wirken, Werden; 'der Thater' ist zum Thun bloss hinzugedichtet - das Thun ist Alles"). What are these "fundamental errors of reason" that have become petrified in language? They are the errors that privilege "being" and permanence over becoming and change; that assume that, having once been named, a thing will remain constant; that believe in the logician's law of identity, which posits the necessity of believing in "identical things" (HH 1:18: "gleiche Dinge"; cf. HH 1:19). These are the errors that Nietzsche in Human, All Too Human calls the "family failing of all philosophers": "their lack of historical sense" (HH 1:2: "Mangel an historischem Sinn ist der Erbfehler alter Philosophen"). Language in fact depends upon this lack of historical sense in order to function at all. Nietzsche further notes that language plays a significant role in the evolution of culture insofar as "humanity set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place so firmly set that, standing upon it, humanity could make itself master of that world" (HH 1:11: "der Mensch eine eigene Welt neben die andere stellte, ein Ort, welchen er filr so jest hielt, um von ihm aus die ubrige Welt aus den Angeln zu heben und sich zum Herrn derselben zu macheri"). Nietzsche, however, claims to have a sense for history that allows him to avoid the congenital philosophical disease that blinds one to the insight that "everything has become: [that] there are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths" (HH 1:2: "Alles aber ist geworden; es giebt keine ewigen Thatsachen; sowie es keine absoluten Wahrheiten giebt"). In their stead, Nietzsche claims a place within the Dionysian legacy whose features he lists in Ecce Homo: "the affirmation of passing away and destroying . . . ; saying Yes to opposition and war; becoming, along with a radical repudiation of the very concept 'being'." (EH III:BT:3: "Die Bejahung des Vergehens und Vernichtens . . . , das Jasagen zu Gegensatz und Krieg, das Werden, mit radikaler Ablehnung auch selbst des Begriffs 'Sein'"). We will return to this question of the philosopher's lack of historical sense in the concluding section of this essay. Before we move to the next

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section, however, one further comment is in order. I have focused on these passages, and have attended to the specificity of Nietzsche's language, because I want to make clear that much of what has emerged in the recent rethinking on the subject is prefigured in explicit ways within Nietzsche's texts. Let me close this section, then, by citing one final example that strikes me as particularly prophetic of much twentiethcentury experimentation in response to the question of agency. In BGE 12, in the context of a critique of atomism, Nietzsche "declares war" on the atomistic need that gives rise to what he calls "soul atomism" - by which he means "the belief which regards the soul as something indestructible, eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as an atomon \jene Glauben zu bezeichnen, der die Seele als etwas Unvertilgbares, Ewiges, Untheilbares, als ein Monade, als ein Atomon nimmt]." But rather than simply eliminate the soul, Nietzsche suggests as an alternative that the critique of the atomistic soul opens the way for "new versions and refinements of the soul-hypothesis," including "such conceptions as 'mortal soul' [sterbliche Seele], and 'soul as subjective multiplicity' [Seele als Subjekts-Vielheit], and 'soul as social structure of the drives and affects' [Seele als Gesellschaftsbau der Triebe und Affekte]." In this brief list we find Nietzsche characterizing the soul in terms of finitude, multiplicity, and social constructivism, three of the dominant motifs around which much of the philosophical reflection on agency in the twentieth century has centered. As I will suggest below, by linking these motifs to an active notion of becoming, we can arrive at a more fruitful interpretation of the Obermensch that can contribute to furthering this reflection on the question of agency. Much Ado about Nothing? In turning to the Obermensch, let me begin by recalling the Prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which tells us much of what we are to learn about the Obermensch and the function it will serve in Zarathustra's pedagogy. The Obermensch is introduced initially as the "other" to both man and God. This is to say: while man is the other of God and God the other of man, the Obermensch is each other's other.The Obermensch can appear only after the death of God (cf. "On the Gift-Giving Virtue" and "On the Blessed Isles"); and the Obermensch is that which man will become if he overcomes and becomes-of/zer than himself (Z I:P:4).Then, following an acknowledgement that overcoming or creating something beyond themselves is the task of all living beings, we learn finally what it means to become Obermensch: It means to become the meaning of the earth. God's death left empty the transcendent world beyond, the world in terms of which humanity had given the earth what little

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value it had. As a consequence, God's absence now leaves the earth meaningless. This meaningless void will be filled - if it is to be filled at all - by the creation of the Ubermensch, whose existence we are told, will itself be the meaning of human existence (Z I:P:7). I say if it is to befilled,because we are given no assurance that the void will actually befilled.In fact, we are given an account of what awaits us in the event that the void is not filled when we are introduced not only to the Ubermensch but also to the letzten Menschen - to the "last men," whose future will be to perish in the nihilistic void that awaits those who do not or cannot create beyond themselves (Z I:P:5).16 On the basis of these limited remarks (for we are told little else about the Ubermensch), we are left to identify those attributes discussed in the remaining pages of Zarathustra as either belonging to the Ubermensch or not. There are, to be sure, some specific claims made - for example, that "where the state ends" will be seen the "rainbow and the bridges of the Ubermensch" (Z 1:11, "On the New Idol"), or that despisers of the body will be no bridge to the Ubermensch (Z 1:4, "On the Despisers of the Body"), or that the friend will be an anticipation of the Ubermensch (Z 1:16, "On Love of the Neighbor"), or that the "highest men" would call the Ubermensch "devil" (Z 11:21, "On Human Prudence"). But aside from these and a few other random remarks like them, we are told precious little about the specific character traits of the Ubermensch. And it is surely not insignificant that, of the little we are told about the two figures who might serve as models of the Ubermensch (the child in "On the Three Metamorphoses" and the shepherd in "On the Vision and the Riddle"), no specific link is made by Zarathustra, in either case, of their description being a description of an Ubermensch}1 For this reason, I think we have good grounds for accepting Bernd Magnus's observation that, if one distinguishes between two basic styles of interpreting the Ubermensch - as an ideal type or model of human perfection or as a representation of a particular attitude toward life there is very little textual evidence - either in Zarathustra in particular or the published works in general - on which to hang an interpretation of the Ubermensch as an ideal model of human perfection.18 Without filling in the attributes of the Ubermensch with others drawn from Nietzsche's descriptions of (for example) the Dionysian, or the "masters," or the "nobles," or even the "free spirits," our list of specifically ilbermenschliche attributes will be very short indeed. This leaves us with the attitudinal or diagnostic interpretation that Magnus, Nehamas, and others put forward in terms of reading Ubermenschlichkeit as entailing some attitude about eternal recurrence. I am sym-

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pathetic to much that Magnus and Nehamas each suggests in terms of ways of understanding the attitude toward life necessary for showing an ubermenschliche attitude with respect to the affirmation of eternal return. Yet I wonder if some attitude of enthusiastic and fervent affirmation with respect to the entirety of one's past (a la Nehamas) or the entirety of world history (a la Magnus) is the only attitude that Nietzsche's account of ubermenschliche self-overcoming can commend to us. For if we accept Magnus's suggestion that we restrict our interpretation to what Nietzsche says in the published works, I'm not sure that there is all that much textual material available to support joining an ubermenschliche attitude with the affirmation of the eternal recurrence in the first place. In other words, just how many times are we told - in a clear and unambiguous way, in Zarathustra or the other published works - that the ability to affirm the eternal recurrence of all things is an essential property of an Ubermenschl19 To be sure, one can (and many commentators do) suggest that to be able to affirm and or love all things eternally would be a distinguishing attitude to have with respect to the totality of events in one's own life. And admittedly there is ample evidence from which to construct an interpretation that infers - from things Zarathustra says about what is required for affirming the eternal recurrence or from things Nietzsche says about the Dionysian attitude - that a supposedly superhuman being like an Ubermensch would be the sort of being who would be able to affirm such a belief. But is there such a clear and obvious link between the few remarks concerning the Ubermensch and the few remarks concerning the eternal recurrence to support the almost canonical status of their linkage? I'm not at all sure that there is. And rather than focus on the attitude toward the passage of time,20 as is implied primarily by the affirmation of eternal recurrence, I wonder whether one might profitably focus on the attitude toward the future transformations that become possible with an attitude that affirms "becoming and the radical repudiation of 'being,'" that is, that affirms self-overcoming, transformation, and change rather than conservation, repetition, and stability. With this in mind, let me suggest that we look to the idea of becoming, and see how an alternative reading of an alternative ubermenschliche attitude might proceed. Becoming- Ubermensch We have examined already what Nietzsche referred to as "the family failing of philosophers" - their "Egyptianism" or lack of historical sense (HH 1:2; TI 111:1). We must now return to this issue and see whether we

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can develop an interpretation of the Ubermensch that can further our rethinking of the subject. Gilles Deleuze, perhaps the most significant "philosopher of becoming" since Nietzsche, has noted that the central feature that distinguishes "becoming" from other transformative processes with which it can be confused - most notably, evolution is the absence of fixed terms: "What is real," Deleuze writes, "is the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomes passes.... Becoming produces nothing other than itself.... [A] becoming lacks a subject distinct from itself.... Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its own; it does not reduce to, or lead back to, 'appearing,' 'being,' 'equaling,' or 'producing.' "21 What Deleuze finds missing in all of these apparent synonyms for "becoming" is the focus on process itself. Evolutionary language focuses our attention on the beginning and endpoint of a process in a way that obscures the passage between them. The language of compound becoming, in contrast, draws our attention to what happens between these everreceding endpoints. Becomings take place between poles; they are the in-betweens that pass only and always along a middle without origin or destination.22 I would like to suggest that attention to becoming can be put to use in experimenting with Nietzsche's Obermensch. In fact, many of the interpretive paradoxes that result from interpreting Ubermensch as Nietzsche's model of the ideal subject or perfect human being can thereby be avoided. Unfortunately, as Magnus and others have noted,23 many of Nietzsche's most influential interpreters have viewed the Obermensch in just this way. Caricaturist images from the left and right thus portray Nietzsche's Ubermensch alternatively as a model of the Maslowian self-actualized individual or a fascist moral monster. We thus find, on the one hand, Arthur Danto writing: The Obermensch, accordingly, is not the blond giant dominating his lesser fellows. He is merely a joyous, guiltless, free human being, in possession of instinctual drives which do not overpower him. He is the master and not the slave of his drives, and so he is in a position to make something of himself rather than being the product of instinctual discharge and external obstacle.24 On the other hand, we have the less appealing example of J. P. Stern, who writes: [Nietzsche] seems unaware that he is giving us nothing to distinguish the fanaticism that goes with bad faith from his own belief in the unconditioned value of self-realization and self-becoming - that is, from his own belief in the

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Superman. We for our part are bound to look askance at this questionable doctrine. We can hardly forget that the solemn avowal of this reduplicated self - the pathos of personal authenticity - was the chief tenet of fascism and national socialism. No man came closer to the full realization of self-created "values" than A. Hitler.25

Nietzsche himself warned against interpreting the word Obermensch either as "a higher kind of man" or in a Darwinistic evolutionary fashion. "The last thing / should promise," Nietzsche writes in the preface to Ecce Homo, "would be to 'improve' mankind. No new idols are erected by me" (EH P:2: "Das Letzte, was ich versprechen wiirde, ware die Menschheit zu 'verbessern'. Von mir werden keine neuen Gotten aufgerichtet"). Later in Ecce Homo, he takes note of the fact that
The word " Obermensch," as the designation of a type of supreme achievement . . . has been understood almost everywhere with the utmost innocence in the sense of those very values whose opposite Zarathustra was meant to represent - that is, as an "idealistic" type of a higher kind of man, half "saint," half "genius." Other scholarly oxen have suspected me of Darwinism on that account." (EH 111:1: Das Wort "Ubermensch" zur Bezeichnung eines Typus hochster Wohlgerathenheit... 1st fast uberall mit voller Unschuld im Sinn derjenigen Werthe verstanden worden, deren Gegensatz in der Figur Zarathustras zur Erscheinung gebracht worden ist, will sagen als "idealistischer" Typus einer hoheren Art Mensch, halb "Heiliger," halb "Genie" .. .Andres gelehrtes Hornvieh hat mich seinethalben des Darwinismus verdachdgt.)

Remarks like these make clear that it is a mistake to read Nietzsche as a philosopher of the Superman, or as someone who seeks to exalt Man as that being who will serve as God's replacement in terms of some new anthropo-theology following the death of God. As Deleuze notes in the appendix to his book on Foucault, it is not Nietzsche but Feuerbach who is the thinker of the death of God and who seeks to install Man in the space vacated by God's absence.26 For Nietzsche, on the other hand, God's death is an old story, of interest only to the last pope (see Z IV:6, "Retired"), a story told in several ways, more often as comedy than tragedy. Rather than trying to understand what Nietzsche means by "Obermensch" in terms of some model of ideal humanity, a Deleuzian approach would experiment with how the Ubermensch functions in the Nietzschean text. As was noted earlier, we are told very little about what an Obermensch is like; and Nietzsche nowhere gives us as detailed a picture of the Obermensch as we have of the last man, the higher men,

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the free spirit, or the slave and master moralists. As Deleuze remarks, "we have to content ourselves with very tentative indications if we are not to descend to the level of cartoons."27 Unfortunately, too often the discourse descends to this level as Nietzsche's "novice" readers and "expert" commentators alike feel compelled to provide an answer to the question "Who is Nietzsche's Ubermensch?" If we look to how "Ubermensch" functions in the Nietzschean text, however, we find it functioning not as the name of a particular being or type of being. "Ubermensch'" rather is the name given by Nietzsche to an idealized conglomeration of forces that he refers to as an "achievement (Wohlgerathenheit)" (EH 111:1). Nietzsche does not provide, in Zarathustra or anywhere else, a philosophical guidebook for Ubermenschen; he provides instead suggestions for steps to take in order to become-Ubermensch. Following Deleuze, I would suggest we construe "becoming-Ubermensch" with a hyphen as a compound verb marking a compound assemblage. In so doing, we draw attention to the active process of assembling rather than hypostatizing or reifying the endpoint to be assembled. We can only speak of the becoming- Ubermensch of human beings - of the process of accumulating strength and exerting mastery outside the limits of external authoritarian impositions. Nietzsche called this process of becoming-Ubermensch "life-enhancement"; and he indicated by this a process of self-overcoming and increasing of will to power rather than an ideal form of subjectivity. Nietzsche's failure - or, more accurately, his refusal - in Zarathustra to present an Ubermensch thus suggests that the answer to the question "Is S an Ubermensch?" will always be "No," insofar as "Ubermensch" does not designate an ontological state or way of being that a subject could instantiate.28 By experimenting with the different possibilities of becoming-Ubermensch, we can read Zarathustra not as providing the blueprint for constructing a centered super-subject called "Overman," as was tragically the case in several readings of Nietzsche offered earlier this century. Instead, we may observe that an experimental approach attends to Zarathustra's own experimentalism, noting as he does that one must find one's own way: "for the way - that does not exist!" (Z 111:11:2: "Den Weg namlich - den giebt es nicht!"). This approach will emphasize not a way of Being but the affirmation of self-overcoming and transvaluation that makes possible the infinite processes of becoming that I am here suggesting we call becoming-Ubermensch. The outcome of this approach will be to reformulate the notion of the subject itself - not as a fixed and full substance or completed project, but always as a work in progress. I do not want to make too much of this aesthetic analogy however, for the important idea here is not to create

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one's life as a work of art. Rather, the central idea is that, as a work in progress, one's life is never complete. One is always unterwegs, on the way - and the emphasis is always on the process of going rather than the destination reached. This, I would suggest, is what is at issue in the discussion, at the opening of the Second Essay of GM, on the active forgetting of the "sovereign individual" (souveraine Individuum) who has earned the right to make promises: It is only in the case of this "emancipated individual" (Freigewordne) - this "master of a free will" (GM 11:2: "Herr des freien Willens"), who is capable of becoming other than he was by forgetting what he was - that promising becomes a praiseworthy act of a responsible agent. This idea also animates the "great health" that Nietzsche alludes to at the conclusion of the Second Essay of GM - the health that knows that growth requires destruction, and that knows that to "become who we are" requires that we in some sense destroy what we presently are (GM 11:24). With this in mind, I think we must refigure the subtitle of Nietzsche's Ecce Homo; for "How one becomes what one is" (Wie man wird, was man ist) implies that the final destination - the "what one is" - is the goal toward which one's becoming is directed. Instead, focusing on the antecedent clause, I would suggest we emphasize the process - the "how" - of becoming. And, noting that Nietzsche says here "what one is (was man ist)" and not "who one is (wer man ist)," I would suggest further that the goal of this process of becoming is not to be understood in terms of some fully formed and completed subject or self. Instead, the central insight in Nietzsche's account is that the process of becoming never comes to an end. Life, as Zarathustra learns, is that which must always overcome itself (cf. Z, 11:12, "On Self-overcoming"). The greatest obstacle to self-overcoming is thus not to be found in others. Instead, it is the self that one already is that stands as the greatest obstacle to future overcomings (cf. Z, 1:17, "On the Way of the Creator"). Which is to say, in conclusion, that the lesson Zarathustra teaches, in the teaching of the Ubermensch, is that to become what will become means becoming-of/ier than what one is.
NOTES Among the commentators who have argued that the importance or significance of the Ubermensch should be discounted are Lawrence Lampert, Nietzsche's Teaching (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Robert B. Pippin, "Irony and Affirmation in Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra," in Nietzsche's New Seas, ed. Michael A. Gillespie and Tracy B. Strong (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 45-71; Daniel W. Conway, "Overcoming the Ubermensch: Nietzsche's Revaluation of Values," Journal of the British Society for

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Phenomenology 20, no. 3 (October 1989): 211-24; and Bernd Magnus, Stanley Stewart, and Jean-Pierre Mileur, Nietzsche's Case: Philosophy as/and Literature (New York: Routledge, 1993). One of the few commentators who has argued recently in a persuasive way for the continuing significance of the Vbermensch is Keith Ansell-Pearson; see his "Who is the Vbermenschl Time, Truth, and Woman in Nietzsche," Journal of the History of Ideas (AprilJune 1992): 309-33; "Toward the Vbermensch: Reflections on the Year of Nietzsche's Daybreak," Nietzsche-Studien 23 (1994): 123-45. 2. This is to say, if for Heidegger the key to interpreting Nietzsche is to understand the belonging-together - the Zusammenhang - of will to power and eternal recurrence, Foucault in his early works sees the central thought in Nietzsche to be the belonging-together of the death of God and the end of man. 3. See my "Reconfiguring the Subject: Foucault's Analytics of Power," in Reconstructing Foucault: Essays in the Wake of the 80s, ed. Ricardo MiguelAlfonso and Silvia Caporale-Bizzini (Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 1995), pp. 185-99, and chapter 2 of my Nietzsche's French Legacy: A Genealogy of Poststructuralism (New York: Routledge, 1995). 4. Michel Foucault, "Introduction a /'Anthropologie de Kant" these complementaire for the doctorate of letters, Universite de Paris, Faculte des Lettres, 1960, photocopy of typescript, Centre Michel Foucault, p. 128; quoted in James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), p. 142. 5. See ibid. 6. Foucault addresses this question in The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1973), p. 305; see also the conclusion of Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?" trans. Josu6 V. Harari in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 119-20. 7. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 305. 8. Ibid, p. 304. 9. Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Freud, Marx," trans. Alan D. Schrift in Transforming the Hermeneutic Context: From Nietzsche to Nancy, ed. Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), p. 66. 10. Foucault, "What Is an Author?" p. 118. 11. See, for example, Michel Foucault, "The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom," trans. J. D. Gauthier, S. J, Philosophy and Social Criticism, special issue "The Final Foucault," 12, no. 2-3 (summer 1987), p. 121. 12. See Michel Foucault, "On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress," in The Foucault Reader, p. 351. 13. See Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon in The Foucault Reader, pp. 76-100. 14. Ibid, p. 82. 15. Cf. the following remark: "It is a form of power that makes individuals subjects. There are two meanings of the word subject: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to" (Michel Foucault, "Why Study Power: The Question of the Subject," in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault:

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16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982], p. 212). "The antithesis of the Obermensch is the last man: I created him conjointly with the former" (KSA 10:4[171]: "Der Gegensatz des Ubermenschen ist der letzte Mensch: ich schuf ihn zugleich mit jenem"). The same can be said for the description of the sovereign individual in GM 11:2. For an excellent review of the literature concerning the "ideal type" interpretation of the Obermensch, see Bernd Magnus, "Perfectibility and Attitude in Nietzsche's Obermensch," Review of Metaphysics 36 (March 1983): 633-59, and "Nietzsche's Philosophy in 1888: The Will to Power and the Vbermensch," Journal of the History of Philosophy 24, no. 1 (January 1986): 79-98. Perhaps the most significant conjunction of an iibermenschliche attitude and the ability to affirm recurrence appears in BGE 56. The most significant example of this focussing is to be found in Heidegger's interpretation of the Obermensch in his essay "Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra?" Gilles Deleuze and F61ix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 238-39. Cf. ibid., p. 293. See Magnus's discussion in Nietzsche's Case, pp. 261-2, note 51. Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 199-200. J. P. Stern, A Study of Nietzsche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 117. Gilles Deleuze, "On the Death of Man and Superman" in Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 130. Deleuze, Foucault, p. 130. And by implication, this also provides an answer to the interpretive question "Is Zarathustra an ObermenschV While I am arguing here that a real instantiation of an Obermensch is not possible, note must be taken of at least one passage where Nietzsche seems to say the opposite. In AC 4 he writes:
In another sense there are cases of individual success constantly appearing in the most various parts of the earth and from the most various cultures in which a higher type does manifest itself: something which in relation to collective mankind is a sort of Obermensch. Such chance occurrences of great success have always been possible and perhaps always will be possible. And even entire races, tribes, nations can under certain circumstances represent such a lucky hit. [In einem andren Sinne giebt es ein fortwdhrendes Gelingen einzelner Fa'lle an den verschiedensten Stellen der Erde und aus den verschiedensten Culturen heraus, mit denen in der That sich ein hoherer Typus darstellt: Etwas, das im Verhaltniss zur Gesammt-Menschheit eine Art Obermensch ist. Solche Gluckfalle des grossen Gelingens waren immer moglich und werden vielleicht immer moglich sein. Ond selbst game Geschlecter, Sta'mme, Volker konnen unter Omsta'nden einen solchen Treffer darstellen.]

It is worth noting that, insofar as Nietzsche's Obermensch is supposed to provide a definite description of a certain type of higher humanity, the fact

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that he here says "a sort of Ubermensch" (eine Art Ubermensch) is significant; for it leaves open the possibility that Nietzsche is simply referring to some type of being that has overcome its Menschlichkeit, rather than to the specific being whose task it was Zarathustra's to "teach."

The Youngest Virtue

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Redlichkeit, Nietzsche tells us, is the youngest virtue (Z 1:3).' Not recognized by either Socrates or Christianity, it is still developing in 1881 (D 456), although it has by then already become one of Nietzsche's four cardinal virtues, requiring that we be "redlich with ourselves and with whatever else is friend to us" (D 556). By the following year, when he raises a toast to the gay science of physics, Nietzsche emphasizes the dependence of that science on the Redlichkeit that makes joyous physicists of those of us who "want to become who we are" (GS 335). Finally, after another three years have passed, Redlichkeit has become the only virtue that is left to those of us who are "free spirits" (BGE 227). These references lead me to the confident conclusion that Redlichkeit is something whose value Nietzsche thinks at least some of us should recognize; but they also lead me to a question: What does this Redlichkeit involve? In response, most (and perhaps all) English translations of Nietzsche suggest an apparently simple answer: To be redlich is to be honest. But this serves only to complicate the question: Is being honest indeed the same as being redlich? And even if it is, what is involved in being honest? Beyond Honesty Is Redlichkeit honesty? So it is generally translated, but so too is "Ehrlichkeit,"2 so, at times, is "Rechtschaffenheit,"3 and so could be, not unreasonably, "Anstandigkeit"4 and "Probitdt." "Ehrlichkeit" like "honesty," derives from a root suggesting what is honorable or respectable. "Rechtschaffenheit," like "rectitude," is linked to what is straight or upright, "Anstandigkeit" like "upstanding," refers back to what stands erect; and both "Probitat" and "probity" derive from terms denoting general goodness or serviceability.5 "Redlichkeit," however unlike any potentially correspondent term in English - derives from a root suggesting speaking or talking (reden) and, although less apparently to the modern speaker of German, counting or calculating (rechnen).

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Red-lich-keit.... One who has good luck [Gliick] is thereby made lucky or happy [gliicklich], and one blessed [selig] with sufficient luck and thus happiness [Gliicklichkeit] attains blissfulness [Gluckseligkeit]. In sharp contrast, simply being able to talk [reden] does not make one "honest" [redlich], and one who is blessed [selig] in terms of speaking acquires or exhibits not the perfection of "honesty" [Redlichkeit] but the defect of garrulousness or loquacity [Redseligkeit] - the gift of gab. If we consider solely its etymology, then, it is not obvious that "Redlichkeit" would name a virtue at all, but we might reasonably conclude from that etymology that if it did, it would name the virtue of one who speaks well or appropriately - the virtue, perhaps, of the rhetorician, who is adept at fitting speech to audience and occasion.6 That, of course, would be at odds with what is often suggested by the term "honesty": "Honest" speakers, we might think, are those who do not fit their speeches to specific audiences and occasions, but who, instead, simply tell the truth. Those who tell the truth In everyday English, telling the truth is indeed one way of being honest, but it is far from the only way. Depending on one's job, one may well be able to give one's employer an honest day's work without saying anything at all, and we understand that when a male is said, in an idiom fast becoming archaic, to have "made an honest woman" of a female, what is meant is that he has married her, not that he has forced her to speak the truth. Very well: "Honest," like "redlich," is polysemic. At the same time, one way of being both "redlich" and "honest" is being "truthful" in the sense of telling the truth, and, as is appropriate to the German term's root, telling the truth is one way of speaking or talking. For reasons like these, many careful and sensitive commentators have either assumed or concluded that what Nietzsche means by Redlichkeit is honesty in the sense of telling the truth, being truthful, or being motivated by the will to truth.7 But this, I think, cannot be right. The obvious objection to the identification of Nietzschean Redlichkeit with truth-telling or truthfulness would be that Nietzsche denies truth altogether, and thus the possibility that the truth be told.8 This, however, is not my objection. I agree with Maudemarie Clark that Nietzsche's views on truth underwent significant development, and that although some early works seem to reject the notion of truth altogether, Nietzsche had wholly abandoned that rejection at least by the time of Genealogy of Morals and had been moving in the direction of that rejection for years before that.9 My objection, then, is not that I think Nietzsche deems truth-telling impossible. On the contrary, I attribute to him the belief that there are truths that can be told. Nor do I take him to believe truth-telling always to be undesirable. But I do not think that truth-telling can be what he

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advocates when he advocates Redlichkeit, chiefly because truth-telling does not qualify as the "youngest" virtue. Nor do I think that "honesty," in some sense other than "telling the truth," can adequately render Redlichkeit, because in a number of important passages dealing with Redlichkeit the substitution of "honesty" is at best unhelpful and at worst misleading.10 First, then, concerning the age of Redlichkeit: Telling the truth, far from being the youngest virtue, appears - in Nietzsche's view - to be among the very oldest. The "Persian virtue" of the historical Zarathustra requires that he be adept with bow and arrow, but also that he "tell the truth" (EH IV:3). Centuries after Zarathustra, Nietzsche reports, the noble Greeks referred to themselves as "we truthful ones" ("Mr Wahrhaftigen") (BGE 260, GM 1:5). Chronologically, then, truth-telling is an ancient virtue. This might leave open the possibility that it is nonetheless "young" in some other sense ("always fresh," for example); but Nietzsche rules this out as well. In the wake of the Greeks, he tells us, all philosophers have exhibited both truthfulness and the will to truth (BGE 1). Yet this truthfulness of the philosophers, this will to truth, has not prevented them from failing to be sufficiently redlich: "dass es bei ihnen nicht redlich genug zugeht" (BGE 5). The trait of truthfulness is not merely grizzled, then, it is simply inconsistent with Redlichkeit. It cannot be Nietzsche's youngest virtue.11 Redlichkeit, I conclude from these passages, must be something more or other than truthfulness. Should we then think of other sorts of "honesty"? In GS 329, objecting to the replacement of the ancient ethic of leisure with the modern valorization of constant busy-ness, Nietzsche associates Redlichkeit with the former. We see evidence that it has vanished, at least in America,
in the universal demand for gross obviousness, in all those situations in which human beings wish to be redlich with one another for once - in their associations with friends, women, relatives, children, teachers, pupils, leaders, and princes: One no longer has time or energy for ceremonies, for being obliging in any indirect way, for esprit in conversation, and for any otium at all.... Hours in which Redlichkeit is permitted have become rare, and when they arrive one is tired and does not only want to "let oneself go" but actually wishes to stretch out as long and wide and ungainly as one happens to be.

Here Nietzsche first contrasts Redlichkeit with "gross obviousness." But is not "obviousness," as the straightforward announcement of one's concerns, a form of honesty? Nietzsche tells us that "being obliging in an indirect way" is redlich. Yet wouldn't it be more "honest" to be directly or openly obliging? Finally, stretching out and letting oneself go would

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appear to be an honest expression of exhaustion. Yet Nietzsche insists that it is utterly inconsistent with Redlichkeit. Can we understand Redlichkeit as honesty? In BGE 227 (in a sentence absent from Kaufmann's translation), Nietzsche anticipates the reaction of the many to his young virtue: "They will say: 'your "Redlichkeit" - that is your devilment [Teufelei], and nothing at all more" (KSA 5:163.5-6). The only way base or common souls get an inkling of his Redlichkeit, he announces in BGE 26, is through cynicism (KSA 5:44.27-29). What then is Redlichkeit - a ceremonious courtesy that can appear to the many only as devilish cynicism? We will not get at Redlichkeit, I think, by reflecting upon honesty. The Genealogy of Redlichkeit I have argued that the Redlichkeit Nietzsche presents as the youngest virtue is neither honesty nor truth-telling. This might appear to leave me with the question: What then is it? But that question is clearly misformulated, for in the Nietzschean universe, Redlichkeit cannot simply be anything; it can only have become. To see what it has become (to the extent that that is possible), it is necessary to see how it has become that is, to retrace the steps in its becoming. I now attempt to extract Nietzsche's story of its development, starting before its emergence by focusing, at the outset, on two sections in GS 110,"The Origin [Ursprung] of Erkenntnis," and GS 111, "The Ancestry [Herkunft] of Logic." Stage 1: Dominance of the Will to Life; Erkenntnis Prevails as Successful Acquaintance GS 110 begins with the assertion that throughout human prehistory, "the intellect produced nothing but errors," such as, among others, a belief "that there are equal things." GS 111 stresses that this foundational belief, though erroneous, proved beneficial: "Innumerable beings who made inferences in a way different from ours perished; for all that, their ways might have been truer." Other ways might have been "truer" in being more precisely accurate, that is, more cognizant of differences between items our ancestors (perhaps thoughtlessly) lumped together. Yet those whose inferences were "truer" in this fashion - those who were more discriminating - paid a heavy price: "Those, for example, who did not know how to find often enough what is 'equal' as regards both nourishment and hostile animals - those, in other words, who subsumed things too slowly and cautiously - were favored with a lesser probability of survival than those who guessed immediately upon encountering similar

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instances that they must be equal" (cf. KSA 3:471.26-31). Those too slow to leap to the conclusion that because the first berry from a bush had been safely ingested a second - no doubt subtly different in size, shape, and color - could be eaten as well might die of hunger. Of course, those fared no better whose inferences were less true in that they were less accurate, less precise - those who were too quick to assume that if the blueberry is nutritious, so too must be the in various ways similar berry now known as "Deadly Nightshade." Our predecessors leapt to conclusions - some too slowly and some too quickly, some with luck and some without. Gradually, according to Nietzsche's reconstruction (which I find persuasive), life-preserving conclusions - although certainly not "true" in his strictest sense - were calcified into accepted propositions, into articles of faith. As he suggests, natural selection would have eliminated those with overly heretical beliefs. "Only very late," he continues, did "deniers and doubters" of such propositions begin to appear - and only with them did there arise a concern with truth, "as the weakest [unkra'ftigste] form of cognition [Erkenntnis]" (KSA 3:469.18-19) - that is, the form of cognition that does the least to enhance the strength of those who depend upon it. The stronger form of Erkenntnis is suggested by the etymologically more accurate translation "successful acquaintance." It is an alternative to "cognition" because there is not yet, at this earliest stage of development, an exclusive connection between Erkenntnis and truth. Successful acquaintance fosters the assumption that all blueberries are equal, and all are safe - whereas all Deadly Nightshade berries are equal, and all are deadly. No doubt, the gourmet will notice that some blueberries are sweeter than others, and the artist, that the fruits come in a pleasing variety of sizes and colors. Yet insistence that such differences be carefully noted - insistence that one should strive for truth - is so much weaker than grouping by kind that reliance upon it would prove fatal. It is weaker not because it is less exact than successful acquaintance; on the contrary, it is more exact in the sense that it acknowledges more fully the specific features of whatever it may happen to encounter. Its impotence results not from any inaccuracy, but from the fact that it has not been and cannot be - incorporated [einverleibt] (KSA 3:469.23). It cannot be bred in the bone; it cannot be lived by (KSA 3:469.19). Stage 2: Emergence of the Will to Truth; Successful Acquaintance Challenged by Precise Cognition The first of the "deniers and doubters" - the first of the advocates of truth - listed by Nietzsche are the Eleatics, who accurately unmasked

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numerous common articles of faith as "natural errors," but then mistakenly "believed that it was possible to live their alternative" (KSA 3:469.31-470.1). "They had the faith that their cognition" - the result of their insistence on deriving contradictions from differences, rather than simply ignoring those differences for the sake of successful acquaintance - "was also the principle of life" (KSA 3:470.5-6), that is, was also something they could incorporate or live by. Because of this faith, they succeeded only in reversing the error they had opposed: "they had to deceive themselves about their own state: they had to attribute to themselves, fictitiously, impersonality and changeless duration" (KSA 3:470.7-9). They were forced to commit the very error they were among the first to have exposed: In unmasking apparent contradictions in the belief that there are multiple and changing things, they masked the fact that their own intellects had to be both multiple and changing. More concretely, whereas the Eleatic Zeno, scrupulously attentive to his geometry of space and time, proved that even wind-swift Achilles could never overtake a fleeing tortoise, those of his contemporaries and predecessors who were successfully acquainted with phenomena of acceleration and pursuit had no doubt that if they were not careful, they could be caught and harmed or even destroyed by pursuing adversaries. Zeno sought to persuade them that they were mistaken, but failed to notice that his demonstration can be successful only if it unfolds within the very time whose reality it denies. If I cannot think of Achilles as closing first half the distance that separates him from the tortoise, then half the remaining distance, and so on, then I cannot follow the argument. In presenting his position, then, Zeno unavoidably relies on precisely those aspects of experience that he seeks to undermine. And no matter how much intellectual force his paradoxes may have, their "truths" are not ones human beings could incorporate into their lives.12 Stage 3: Coexistence of the Will to Life and the Will to Truth What undermined the Eleatics' position, according to Nietzsche, was "the subtler \feiner] development of Redlichkeit and skepticism" that revealed that "their ways of living and judging were . . . also dependent upon the primitive impulses and basic errors of all sentient existence." To take the example most relevant to the genealogy of Redlichkeit: The Eleatics argued that if we attempt rigorously to defend our belief in "equal beings" (for example, our belief that all blueberries are the same), then we will ultimately contradict ourselves. The Eleatics' critics noted that the Eleatics themselves failed to avoid self-contradiction and ultimately relied on beliefs of the sort that they had been seeking to banish. From

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this, the critics concluded that the Eleatics were wrong to have rejected the notion that distinct beings can be identical. In one sense, skeptical Redlichkeit moved a step beyond the Eleatic position: It recognized that human beings relied on the belief that there are equal beings. Yet in moving beyond the Eleatics, the critics failed to raise the deepest question posed by the Eleatics' failure: What is the relationship between the will to life and the will to truth, or the demand for successful acquaintance and the demand for precise accuracy? Following its defeat of the Eleatic position, the subtler Redlichkeit and skepticism continued to be moved by both wills, and developing along two lines, one serious and one playful. There was a serious human need for successful acquaintance "wherever two contradictory propositions appeared to be applicable to life because both were compatible with the basic errors, and it was therefore possible to argue about the higher or lower degree of utility for life" (Still GS 110). We humans can believe that the complex of discrete factors (posited as identical in all cases) that causes a particular disease (posited as identical in all cases) may be counteracted either by the application of leeches or by the ingestion of antibiotics. We require a subtle Redlichkeit and skepticism to determine which of these beliefs is based on the identification of relevant differences, and thereby which is more useful for us as living beings. When the disease has been cured in a given case, acquaintance with its causes has proved successful, and Erkenntnis as successful acquaintance has served the will to life. The treatment of disease is often a life-and-death matter, and thus one where the practice of subtlety may be necessary. In addition to vital cases, however, there have been cases where "new propositions showed themselves to be, although not useful for life, also not harmful to life; in such cases there was room for the expression of intellectual playfulness, and Redlichkeit and skepticism were innocent and happy like all play." We humans can believe that all stones (all taken to be the same) fall to earth either because that is their natural abode, or because they are pulled there by the force of gravity; we may also believe that as far as our lives are concerned, which of these beliefs we hold makes no difference. But our belief in the irrelevance, for life, of the conflict between Aristotelian and Newtonian physics may not prevent us from pursuing and developing that conflict, with an eye to declaring a victor. Our belief in this irrelevance may even allow us the freedom to pursue precise accuracy, undeterred by the demands of successful acquaintance. This playful exercising of subtlety could develop, then, not with the goal of survival, but instead with the goal of truth: In revealing essential differences, it can take itself, as well, to discover true identities. When one hypothesis or

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theory has defeated another, essential differences are believed to have been noted, and Erkenntnis as accuracy to specifics has served the will to truth. Stage 4: Coalesence of the Two Wills The twin employments of our subtler Redlichkeit, once they began, developed strength through use, with the result that "successful acquaintance and the striving for the true insinuated themselves as need alongside the other needs" (KSA 3:470.32^t). Crucial here is not so much the development of new needs as the internal instability of those needs. We have two forces: On the one hand, the apparently objective or disinterested demand for truth as precise accuracy, and on the other, the practical and indeed vital need for acquaintance that is successful, even if inaccurate in that it masks demonstrable differences. But the two forces can come to appear as a single force. As based on a single force, the object of the new need could appropriate the single name Erkenntnis, now understood neither simply as successful acquaintance, nor simply as unmasking of differences, but instead, I suggest, as necessarily beneficial accuracy. Truth demands accuracy; practical acquaintance demands success. Yet as Nietzsche's consideration of our prehistory suggests, accuracy and success are often inconsistent. How then could these two forces coalesce into a single need? Only, it seems, if the two can be guaranteed in advance to coincide. Such a guarantee is available only within a universe governed by a providential good or God. Thus, science can have developed as it has, according to Nietzsche's genealogical reconstruction, only under the aegis of Platonism, or of Platonism for the people.13 Only under this protection - only as accuracy guaranteed by good or God to be beneficial - could Erkenntnis as cognition of truth attain the position to which Eleatic skepticism aspired in vain: It could be incorporated [einverleibt], it could become "a piece of life itself" (KSA 3:471.6-7). "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:32): Only from the Christian-moral perspective can this admonition appear as at once moral, religious, pragmatic, and scientific. For centuries, according to Nietzsche, the word Erkenntnis - or its various counterparts in other European languages - could continue to serve successfully to mask the differences between its two constitutive forces, the will to truth and the will to life. Ultimately, however, and only long after the cataloging of Socratic and Christian virtues, "the fruits of knowledge [die Erkenntnisse] and those primeval [uralten] fundamental

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errors [Grundirrthumer] collided with each other, both as life, both as power, both within the same human being." Stage 5: Divergence of the Two Wills; the Will to Truth Defeats the Will to Life In the genealogy of Redlichkeit sketched in GS 110, Nietzsche does not specify just how the collision between the will to truth and the will to life comes about. But this genealogy is wholly consistent with a story Nietzsche frequently tells about the death of God: "You see what it was that really triumphed over the Christian God: Christian morality itself, the concept of truthfulness that was understood ever more rigorously, the father confessor's refinement of the Christian conscience, translated and sublimated into a scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price. Looking at nature as if it were proof of the goodness and governance of a god" - ignoring the evidence that could undermine that proof - "interpreting history in honor of some divine reason, as a continual testimony of a moral world order and ultimate moral purposes; interpreting one's own experiences as pious people have long enough interpreted theirs, as if everything were providential, a hint, designed and ordained for the sake of the salvation of the soul" - and ignoring whatever did not fit into such interpretations - "that is all over now, that has the human conscience [Gewissen] against it." We are certain [gewiss], following the death of God, that it cannot be so: "that is considered by every refined conscience as indecent [unanstdndig], dishonest [unehrlich], as mendacity [Liignerei], femininity,14 weakness, cowardice" (GS 357). Awareness of the death of God initiates the last pre-Nietzschean step in the development of Redlichkeit. That step was made, according to Nietzsche, by Schopenhauer: "unconditional redliche atheism is simply the presupposition of the way he poses his problem." Nevertheless, "What Schopenhauer himself said in answer to this question was . . . a way of remaining stuck . . . in precisely those Christian-ascetic moral perspectives in which one had renounced faith along with the faith in God" (GS 357). Schopenhauer, like Nietzsche's Christians and Platonists, looks beyond the world of our experience to another world and finds, in that other world, not only a unifying force, but pure identities - Platonic ideas - that make possible truth as accuracy. Schopenhauer, in effect, revives the Eleatic insight and the Eleatic drive, but he also repeats the Eleatic error. Schopenhauer diverges in that, whereas the Eleatics inadvertently look away from life, he explicitly condemns it.

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Stage 6: Emergence of the Youngest Virtue; Potential Triumph of the Will to Life Nietzsche aspires to preserve the Eleatic/Schopenhauerian insight (that there are no pure identities in a world of multiplicity and change), and the Eleatic/Schopenhauerian drive (to incorporate or live by the insight), but without repeating the Eleatic/Schopenhauerian error: that is, without unwittingly relying on pure identities that one either has created in order to satisfy a metaphysical need (as Schopenhauer did), or simply fails to recognize (as the Eleatics had). He is thus the thinker "within whom the drive to truth and those life-preserving errors fight their first fight." "In relation to the importance of thisfighteverything else is insignificant; the ultimate question concerning the conditions of life is here posed, and here" - here, in The Gay Science - "is made the first attempt to answer this question experimentally. To what extent can truth endure incorporation? - that is the question, that is the experiment" (GS 110). "To what extent can truth endure incorporation?" What truth? Not the truth sought by the "unconditional will to truth," because that "truth" is grounded in the erroneous belief that knowledge is providentially guaranteed accuracy. The truth in question is, instead, the truth that life cannot be trusted to produce perfect replicas.15 The question whether this truth can be incorporated - whether it can be embodied, whether it can be lived - is the question whether life, although it cannot be trusted, can nevertheless be loved.16 Schopenhauer's answer is No, but he retains the Parmenidean longing for utter reliability. Nietzsche, having abandoned that longing, attempts to determine whether his answer can be Yes.
The Youngest Virtue

To name the virtue he deems the youngest, the virtue that is perhaps the last to remain, Nietzsche chooses the word Redlichkeit. This word has various near-synonyms that, we might think, he could equally well have appropriated. If there is a reason for his choice of Redlichkeit, it must lie in one of that word's distinguishing features. The most obvious of those distinguishing features - the most obvious, particularly, one might suspect, to a philologist - is its rootedness in reden. That this feature was crucial to Nietzsche is strongly suggested by a passage from Zarathustra in which he uses the two terms in untranslatable conjunction:
Believe me, my brothers! It was the body that despaired of the body, - that touched the ultimate wall with the fingers of deluded spirit. Believe me, my brothers! It was the body that despaired of the earth, - that heard the belly of being speak [reden] to it(self) [zu sich].

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And then it wanted to break through the ultimate wall with its head, and not only with its head, - to get over to "that world." But "that world" is well concealed from the human [vor dem Menschen], that dehumanized inhuman world that is a heavenly nothing; and the belly of being speaks [redet] not at all to the human [zum Menschen], except as human [es sei denn als Mensch]. Truly, all being is hard to prove and hard to bring to speech [zum Reden]. Tell me, you brothers, is not the most wondrous [Wunderlichste, most miraculous] of all things still that which is best proved? Yes, this I [Ich] and the I's contradiction and confusion still speak most honestly [redet noch am redlichsten] of its being, this creating, willing, evaluating I that is the measure and the value of things. And this most honest [redlichsten] being, the I - it speaks [redet] of the body, and what it still wills is the body, even when it poetizes [dichtet] and enthuses [schwdrmt] and flutters with broken wings. It learns to speak [reden] ever more honestly [redlicher], the I: and the more it learns, the more it finds words and honors for body and earth (Z 1:3, "Of the Hinterworldly"; KSA 36.12-33).

The I's speaking with superlative Redlichkeit - its speaking am redlichsten - is not hindered by its "contradiction and confusion" and is fostered by its "poetizing" and "enthusing"; what the I must do, to increase the Redlichkeit of its speech, is "find words and honors for body and earth." As long as there have been human beings, there have been words for body and earth, but throughout the Christian-moral epoch - indeed, ever since Parmenides - these words have not been honors. To increase its Redlichkeit, the I must find new words for what might appear to be familiar things. In Schopenhauer's view such Redlichkeit is futile. Just as wenches (Weiber) want to be known as "women" (Frauen),"Jews want to be called 'Israelites,' and tailors 'dressmakers.'... But when an intrinsically innocuous name is discredited" - "Jew" or "wench," "earth" or "body" "this is not due to the name but to what is named. Hence the new name will soon share the fate of the old one."17 Flunkies, defectives, and degenerates, according to Schopenhauer, areflunkies,defectives, and degenerates; and no change in language - no matter how politically correct - can disguise their essential natures. Here Nietzsche disagrees, while stressing that it has not been easy for him to come to do so: "This has given me the greatest trouble and still does: to see [einzusehen] that what things are called is incomparably more important than what they are.... [I]t is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create in the long run new 'things'" (GS 58). For Schopenhauer, "what things are" will continue to be clear no matter what they are called. For Nietzsche, what they

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are called is more important than what they are - but that is so, in significant part, because there is no way simply to "call" a thing what it "is." What any thing is is unique: No matter what class it is placed into - no matter what universal term is used to name it - it will exhibit, to the discerning eye, features that distinguish it from the others with which it will have been grouped. Hence, Nietzsche insists, "Seeing things as similar and making things the same is the sign of weak eyes" (GS 228). "What is originality? To see something that has no name as yet and hence cannot be mentioned although it stares us all in the face. The way humans beings usually are, it takes a name to make something visible for them. - Those with originality have for the most part also assigned names" (GS 261). Seeing and naming and making Prior to Nietzsche, these had been taken to be distinct activities; Nietzsche sees them as inextricably intertwined. Naming things differently makes different things, but so too does seeing things differently: "I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful" (GS 343). Seeing things differently and naming things differently.... Understood in one way, these can be seen as practices demanded by the will to truth: We must overcome old errors. What distinguishes Nietzsche's joyous scientific project from its grim or gloomy predecessors, however, is its insistence that we can only see and name things differently, that we can never see or name them definitively. We can never see or name them definitively because, both in seeing and in naming, we unavoidably group any specific thing with other things - including itself, at other times or from other angles - from which, nevertheless, it remains different. We can always see or name any unique thing differently precisely because we can never see or name it definitively; and we cannot do this precisely because any seeing or naming entails a masking of differences that, from another perspective, might become visible as interesting or important. Aristotle defines human beings as animals possessing logos, the linguistic ability to come to agree or disagree concerning right and justice. If, with Aristotle, we take essence to determine telos or goal, we might take the most perfect human being to be the one who had reached logically compelling conclusions concerning right and justice and thereby had, perhaps, moved beyond agreement and disagreement to definitive - and thus finished - truth.18 As European philosophy begins to speak Latin rather than Greek, Heidegger has noted, we come to be viewed no longer as linguistic animals but instead as rational ones: Logos becomes ratio, the book of the world is seen as having been written in the language of mathematics, and the perfect human being can appear as the one who makes no incorrect calculations. When philosophy speaks Nietzsche's German, we are neither rational

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animals nor logical/linguistic ones; instead, perhaps, we are animals that are redlich, animals whose telos or perfection is Redlichkeit.19 But whereas we as logical/linguistic animals might aspire to conclusive truth about what is right and just for all human beings in all situations, and whereas we as rational animals might aspire to the mathematical physics that would allow us to become masters and possessors of nature, we as redliche animals, in Nietzsche's sense, must - if we are to exhibit the Redlichkeit that follows from what we are as redlich - forsake such final conclusions and ultimate solutions. The I, when it speaks am redlichsten, remains cognizant of the perpetual possibility of seeing differently and of naming differently; but its cognizance of that possibility does not dissuade it from looking and talking, or from taking delight in its looking and talking. Those who remain blind to that possibility - those who believe that there can be only one ultimately defensible way of seeing and naming - are nihilists of one sort, because they take their bearings by something that does not exist. Those who recognize the possibility of seeing and naming differently, but are reduced by it to silence and blindness, are nihilists of another sort, because they have nothing by which to take their bearings. Those however who are redlich those who, aware of the perpetual possibility of seeing and naming differently, continue to see and to speak - move, with Nietzsche, beyond nihilism.20 In recognizing ourselves as redlich rather than as logically linguistic or as rational, are we losing or gaining? To the many (GS 343), it will appear that we are doing neither, it will appear that we are merely philosophizing - merely engaging in an effete activity that, as Freud notes, "is of interest to only a small number even of the top layer of intellectuals and is scarcely intelligible to anyone else."21 To the few who consider the redetermination to be significant, it will appear that we have obliterated the horizon that gives us the bearings by which alone we can live (GS 125), and that we have given up the only dreams that could ever have made life worth living. To revert to terms introduced earlier: To the few it will appear that life can be lived only if life can be trusted. To these few, Nietzsche answers suggestively but incompletely with a poem (GS Prelude:13):
Glattes Eis Ein Paradeis . Fur den der gut zu tanzen weiss. Smooth ice Is paradise For those who dance with expertise.

In a Nietzschean universe we dance (or slip, or fall) on ice that is slick but on ice that is also thin; and some of the thinner patches may become visible as they are approached, but some can be discovered only when

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they give way. Is life lovable - is life even possible - for one who is redlich in the sense of remaining always cognizant that every thing and every situation we encounter is somehow different (and perhaps fatally different) from the predecessors from which they are so nearly indistinguishable? That the apparently innocuous ingestion of a tablet apparently identical to those taken many times before, under circumstances not obviously significantly different from those of the moment, might lead, this time, to the birth of a child with flippers and paddles instead of arms and legs? That the apparently innocuous repetition of a sexual encounter essentially indistinguishable from numerous previous encounters might lead, this time, to infection with a fatal virus no one yet knows to exist? That the familiar and comforting ritual of sending one's child off to school in the morning might be repeated, any given time, for the last time? That, in short, because life cannot be trusted, to live is to live dangerously, whether we are aware of this or not? "If underlying everything there were only a wild, fermenting power that writhing in dark passions produced everything, be it significant or insignificant, if a vast, never appeased emptiness hid beneath everything, what would life be then but despair?" So asks Johannes de Silentio, the pseudonymous narrator of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, before responding, "But precisely for that reason it is not so." In the terms I have been using, Johannes's question is "If we acknowledge that there are no stabilities, no utterly reliable identities, could we continue to live?" His answer, in effect: "Because we could not then live, we must not make this admission." Nietzsche, on the other hand, deems the admission to be intellectually unavoidable. Redlichkeit requires insisting on the absence of utterly reliable stabilities or identities. But it requires as well denial that life in a world without instabilities must be horrible. To the few, the death of God appears as the obliteration of the horizon (GS 125). To Nietzsche and his fellow "philosophers and 'free spirits'" (GS 343), it appears at least potentially - although not, Redlichkeit demands that we add, necessarily - as the opening of the horizons of a host of fascinating ways of thinking and of living. Redlichkeit. Must we appropriate the German term? Of course not. We can name things differently - and, in naming them differently, help ourselves to see them differently, and to make them different. But we have no English terms appropriately rooted in terms having to do with speaking; and Redlichkeit is above all, as I understand it, the virtue that emerges from awareness both that we speak, and of what speaking entails.22 Such awareness undermines the putative virtue, often praised of late in the United States - of "telling it like it is," that is, in no more

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than a sound bite. In Nietzsche's view, and in mine, almost any "it" worth talking about will be too complicated to allow itself to be told, purely and simply, "like it is." Simply "telling it like it is," like telling "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," is something we cannot do, because that is not the way telling - reden - works. Redlichkeit demands that we recognize this.23
NOTES 1. Throughout this essay references are to section numbers within Z (77iws Spoke Zarathustra), D (Dawn or Daybreak), GS (Gay Science) and FW for the German original (Die frohliche Wissenschaft), BGE (Beyond Good and Evil),T\ (Twilight of the Idols), and EH (Ecce Homo). Numbers incorporating periods indicate volume and page from the Kritische Studienausgabe of Nietzsche's works (KSA). 2. See, for example, Kaufmann, GS 99 and 638. Kaufmann regularly uses "honest" for both redlich and ehrlich, and in GS 357 he uses it for both. 3. For instance, GS 3,TI IX:42, EH 1:7. 4. For Anstdndigkeit, Kaufmann prefers "decency"; "honesty" strikes me as preferable for EH IV: 1: "Mein Loos will, dass ich der erste anstdndige Mensch sein muss, dass ich mich gegen die Verlogenheit von Jahrtausenden im Gegensatz weiss." 5. In " 'Our Probity!' On Truth and Lie in the Moral Sense in Nietzsche," JeanLuc Nancy uses probite for Redlichkeit, despite Nietzsche's occasional use of the cognate Probitdt (for example, GS/FW 366). An English translation of Nancy's essay, first published in French in 1983, is included in Looking After Nietzsche, ed. Laurence Rickel (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), pp. 67-88. 6. Nancy takes the etymology of Redlichkeit to determine its original or primary signfications more definitively, stamping the word's meaning as requiring "scrupulous conformity to the law" and reliance on "statements] which conform perfectly with what [they] say" (" 'Our Probity!'" p. 75). I do not find his evidence persuasive, but even if this were known to be the original meaning, that would not, of course, determine the sense it develops for Nietzsche. 7. I use as examples two whose work on Nietzsche I greatly admire, Laurence Lampert and Maudemarie Clark. Lampert identifies honesty as the highest virtue, for Nietzsche, and equates it with the will to truth (Nietzsche's Teaching [NT], p. 3), with truthfulness (NT, p. 205), and with "intellectual probity" (Nietzsche and Modern Times [NMT], pp. 9,277,293). Redlichkeit, he tells us, opposes the Platonic practice of the noble lie (ibid.). Finally, he presents this youngest virtue as the basis of the pious "conviction about science as inquiry into truth" (NMT, p. 319). Clark is careful to distinguish "honesty" from the will to truth, but continues to associate it closely with truth-telling in the traditional sense; she wonders whether it might be "the last view we share with traditional morality" (Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy [NTP], p. 241). Despite these terminological reservations, I take the conclusions I reach concerning Redlichkeit to be consistent with positions attributed to Nietzsche by Lampert and Clark.

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8. This position is taken by Nancy, who accepts the unpublished 1873 essay "On Truth and Lie in the Extramoral Sense" as presenting views Nietzsche never essentially alters; see " 'Our Probity!'" p. 70. 9. For Clark's arguments against the position taken by Nancy, see NTP, esp. chs. 3 and 4. 10. I argue below that Redlichkeit is a matter of a specific sort of "truthfulness," but that this truthfulness is distinct both from the will to truth and from what is usually understood by telling the truth. 11. Nietzsche most carefully undermines the dominance of the will to truth, as opposed to a less rigid commitment to truthfulness, in GS/FW 344, "The extent to which we, too, are still pious," and Z 11:12, "Of Self-overcoming." 12. For my purposes the defensibility of Nietzsche's attribution of precisely this hypocritical position to the Eleatics is irrelevant. Important, instead, is the structure of the position he describes: The first of those to object that others had masked differences believed it possible to live without masking any differences, but remained unaware that they had masked differences themselves. 13. See, for example, GS 344: "that Christian faith that was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that the truth is divine." 14. Kaufmann has "feminism" for Nietzsche's Femininismus, perhaps following Schlechta, who - if Colli and Montinari may be relied on (KSA 3:600.24-5) - either misreads or corrects Femininismus as Feminismus. 15. GS/FW P:3 (350.26-7); cf. GS/FW 1 (372.23^). 16. GS/FW P:3 (350.29-30). 17. Quoted by Kaufmann, GS, p. 128, n. 7. 18. This telic conclusion is more Platonic than Aristotelian, but Nietzsche argues regularly that it was the Platonic influence rather than the Aristotelian that became dominant. 19. According to Nancy, "Meister Eckhardt translated ratio [as 'human reason'] by Redlichkeit, in the sense of 'the faculty of speaking, of judging'" (" 'Our Probity!'" p. 75). Nietzsche's notebooks reveal him as an admirer of Eckhardt (see KSA 11:151.11-12), and it seems probable that he was aware of this translation choice. Be that as it may, the philologist Nietzsche would have been aware of the various relevant etymologies. 20. In terms I have used elsewhere, these three types would be religious nihilists, radical nihilists, and those who, by completing nihilism, transcend nihilism; see Within Nietzsche's Labyrinth (New York: Routledge, 1990), ch. 2. 21. New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), p. 199. 22. Will Dudley has pointed out to me, too late for me to incorporate the insight into this essay, that Nietzsche also connects Redlichkeit to justice (Gerechtigkeit). Relevant references include D 84 and KSA 9.229, 11.181, and 12.493. 23. Who are "we" here? We who have ceased to be metaphysicians and have become free spirits, anyway. Whether philosophical development ends with the stage of the free spirit is another question, to be pursued in a different context. My thanks to Will Dudley and Jon Foreman, whose comments and suggestions led to significant improvements in this essay.

Morality as Psychology, Psychology as Morality: Nietzsche, Eros, and Clumsy Lovers1

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das Thun ist Alles Zur Genealogie der Moral, 1:13 Der Glaube 'so und so ist es' zu verwandeln in den Willen 'so und so soil es werden.' Der Wille zur Macht, 324

I In 23 of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche encourages us to "clench our teeth," "open our eyes," and "keep our hand firm on the helm." We are to make a voyage that will entitle us to demand that "psychology be recognized again as the queen of the sciences, for whose service and preparation the other sciences exist. For psychology is now again the path to the fundamental problems." The claim for the priority of psychology leads in many directions. It leads first to the familiar view of Nietzsche as a deflationary critic, exposing "human all too human" origins, or the low origins of the high.2 This enterprise, if aetiological, appears to be about real, if somehow hidden, unacknowledged psychological motives; if hermeneutical, about real, if somehow hidden, unacknowledged psychological meaning. Whether writing in the style of earlier French psychologists (as if radicalizing Montaigne, Voltaire, La Rochefoucauld) or anticipating modern reductionist claims about religion or mores, Nietzsche clearly means to explain the motivations behind, and the meaning of, philosophical, religious, and moral phenomena in nonphilosophic, nonreligious, and nonmoral terms. His summary label for such an account is "psychology"; and that suggests something that looks right at home in the "left Hegelian" or "postFeuerbachean" or "pre-Freudean" side of things in the late nineteenth century, especially when the themes are religious or moral.

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But one can follow this direction only so far before it begins to turn back on itself. For one thing, Nietzsche regarded familiar forms of deflationary psychologizing (like those cited above) as themselves aspects of Christian egalitarianism, a leveling and self-abasement inspired by ressentiment, and he wanted no part of it. This suggests a still deeper complexity, one that arises when we try to take into account his critique of dogmatism, or his affirmation of perspective in claims to know or in evaluations. At his most radical Nietzsche seems to suggest that psychology, or any view of motivation and action, is already itself a kind of moral or normative affirmation, an assessment or evaluation of ourselves, some project of self-transformation rather than self-disco very. He certainly thinks this is true of Platonic and Christian psychology, with its invention of the divided soul. He does not treat the basic modern assumption that individually owned intentions explain action as simply a theory, even a bad theory. For him, to frame the problem of explaining action by reference to individually owned intentions is originally linked to what we want to be able to expect of each other, to the problems of guilt and the gods, not facts about the causal roles of beliefs and desires. But the point is also made very broadly, in all sorts of contexts. The English genealogists who are discussed at the beginning of On the Genealogy of Morals believe that a certain utilitarian calculation has been behind the evolution of moral institutions. But Nietzsche does not proceed to ask if what they said is true, or to counter with his own theory. He asks about them first: "What do they want?" as if to ask: How would they have us live, regard ourselves?3 Contrary to any appearance of psychological reduction, then, Nietzsche's enterprise, even when expressed as psychology, or even physiology, affirms some priority of the practical, where "the practical" is understood as the evaluative and purposive. (What ideal is at stake in proposing to view ourselves in a certain way?)4 Somehow the task of Nietzschean psychology (contra all other psychologies) is to see everything in the light of the prior authority of this sort of "queen." The rough idea seems to be that only some sort of original attachment to some end or ideal or purpose would account for why we would come to regard our motivational and intentional lives as we do (that is, to propose to ourselves that we live out such a self-conception). Such an attachment must be original in some way, since any traditionally psychological explanation of it would, so such an account would go, itself evince another such attachment, or as he says, some "evaluation" of life. The attack on any putative autonomy for philosophy or morality in the name of psychology can then get quickly complicated, since the nature of any appeal to psychological factors is itself characterized as a

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strategy of sorts, a contestation over kinds of lives and evaluations of such kinds. This can make for very compressed passages and confusing implications. In BGE the "conscious thinking" of a philosopher is said to be "guided and forced into certain channels by his instincts"; but the psychological reductionism suggested is then undercut by the fact that these instincts are identified not with impulses or passions but with "valuations," "Wertschatzungen" - a qualification itself complicated when these valuations themselves are then redescribed as "physiological," although, to complete the circle again, not physiological forces, but demands (Forderungen) for the "maintenance of a certain type of life" (BGE 3). But this direction too can quickly become quite unsettling. When Nietzsche, in The Gay Science, criticizes the possibility of contemplation as a "delusion," he denies that we are ever "spectators" and "listeners" of the "great visual and acoustic spectacle that is life"; the contemplative type "overlooks that he himself is really the poet who keeps creating this life." By contrast, "we who think and feel at the same time are those who really continually fashion something that had not been there before" (GS 301). This appears to run together those considerations relevant to, motivating (reasons for, norms regulating) actions (including makings), and considerations relevant to (constraining or reasons for) beliefs about what is the case. Considerations relevant to a course of action are relevant because actions are for the sake of goals, are teleological. In acting we believe we ought to influence the world in a certain way, often no matter how the world actually is. If the world (or we ourselves) doesn't match up to the way we have determined it ought to be, we just act more vigorously. But in pursuing the truth, we want, as much as possible, for our beliefs to match the way of the world. So, most simply put, what we have a reason to believe is true - as opposed to what we have reason to believe we should do, what goals we should seek - cannot be any sort of function of what we would like to believe, of the goals we want to realize. In other words, on the one hand, Nietzsche's psychologism could just be telling us the facts about the motives behind human doings and sufferings and projects and aspirations. He would then look like an eccentric species of the genus introduced by Shaftesbury, or Hume, or even, eventually, Freud - someone who extends psychological explanations (in his case, with a particular emphasis on power) far beyond traditional bounds, into morality, politics, religion, intellectual life. On the other hand, his attack on the value of truth and his tendency to treat all account-giving as a manifestation of some deeper pursuit (the affirmation of life itself or the "will to power") force one to confront the charge that Nietzsche is engaged in quite a confused and wrong-headed defense

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of wishful thinking, as if we could want or will to believe what will count as true. I do not think that Nietzsche is guilty of such confusions. Explaining this will eventually require attention to an oddly neglected topic in Nietzsche: his account of desire, especially love, and more especially love of one's ideals - and so why he thinks cognitive inquiry, the authorization of criteria for inquiry, experiment and resolution of problems, and so on, all express a love and striving for an ideal, that they are in fact constituted by such attachments and are practically possible only under such conditions.
II

The large question at issue is, in Eric BlondePs formulation, the meaning of Nietzsche's second "Copernican revolution." What does it mean to see "life" as the condition of the possibility of experience, of science (here even psychology), and morality, traditionally understood? Isn't life the object of psychology, and what is judged by morality, rather than the subject of such activities (whatever that could mean)? The way Nietzsche talks about this life (in its evaluative, practical aspects) as some sort of condition for the possibility of anything else is both a factor in his claim for the perspectival character of all human projects (conditioned everywhere by a pre-reflective attachment to some sort of possible life) and itself, as a claim or a kind of sense-making, presumably an instance of such a view of horizons. To get to the question of life and psychology, then, we need to go through the daunting question of perspectivism. That is not my main interest here, but since esteemings, evaluatings, or erotic attachments are, for Nietzsche, necessarily perspectival, it is an unavoidable theme. So I shall try simply to summarize a few of the central claims. Perspectivism is treated in BGE more as a kind of metaphor than a claim, heavily indebted to the familiar visual image: the idea that how things look - or even, in the metaphorical extension, what might appear valuable - depends essentially on a limited point of view, how things look from a certain angle or point of view at a time, with a history or disposition or expectation behind it. With this in mind, I shall skip many details in order to get to the following. Seeing things from a point of view (or any rendering intelligible, asserting truthfully, evaluating) inevitably promotes a "forgetting" of the perspectival character of such approaches. "Untruth," as Nietzsche says in a famous phrase - the untruth, partiality, and contingency of any perspective - is a "condition of life." We simply "go on as we do," but it inevitably

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recedes from prominence that it is only our way of going on - or must, if our way is to survive and flourish. But this forgetting can mean two things. First, a certain narrowing of focus and relatively "unjust" self-asserting must go on, without constant skeptical undermining, for there to be a human practice at all. In the language of his 1874 essay On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,
Every living thing can become healthy, strong, fruitful only within a horizon; if it is incapable of drawing a horizon around itself or, on the other hand, too selfish to restrict its vision to the limits of a horizon drawn by another, it will wither away feebly or overhastily to its early demise. Cheerfulness, clear conscience, the carefree deed, faith in the future, all this depends, in the case of the individual as well as of a people, on there being a line which distinguishes what is clear and in full view from the dark and unilluminable; it depends on one's being able to forget at the right time as well as remember at the right time. (HL 1; Preuss translation, p. 10)

Nietzsche goes on to admit that this is in a certain sense "unjust," but he tries to show that the question, on the one hand, of simply being just, or remembering everything, always attentive to the partiality and contingency of one's practices, and, on the other hand, being "just to life" (and so also "unjust") is considerably more complicated that an abstract opposition will allow. As we shall see, those complications are really at the heart of the problem of Nietzschean psychology - the problem of seeing everything in the light of "the possibility of life." (Life itself is here given one of its few direct characterizations: "that dark, driving, insatiably selfdesiring power [sich selbst begehrende Macht]" [HL 4; ibid., p. 22].) This prefigures the summary in BGE: that life is "estimating, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different" (BGE 9).5 (I should note, as an aside, that this point - Nietzsche's resistance to the idea of any complete historical "justice" as, in effect, anti-erotic, debilitating and the earlier point about his objections to deflationary or reductionist psychologizing both make his adoption as source by Foucauldian "archeologists" and other such deconstructors and genealogists quite problematic.) But, second, Nietzsche also means to point out that another sort of simplifying and forgetting occurs that promotes an absolutizing of such a perspective, or the dogmatism he inveighs against so famously. (This appears to be something like a completely successful forgetting, not an experimental or perspectivally self-conscious, tentative forgetting.) As the point just made should demonstrate, Nietzsche's perspectivism is not meant to invite some playful shifting of perspectival points of view - as

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if one can, suitably enlightened, treat one's participation in some practice ironically, a game of masks. Nietzsche's frequent insistence on what is necessarily involved in the possibility of such a practice or perspective (the necessary discipline, sacrifice, obedience) naturally invites, however, the dogmatic solution, as if the authority of any way of life could not be secured without traditional, realist notions of truth or moral objectivity, and some success in meeting such criteria. His denial that this is so - or his denial both that there could be such a form of social authority, and that there needs to be (or at the very least, can be now) - returns us again to the kind of problem the problem of life (requiring an injustice that is not dogmatic) will turn out to be. There are some particularly beautiful, if very elusive, passages in BGE where Nietzsche tries to explain what it means to be attached to - to love - one's way of life nondogmatically. It means first of all something apparently skeptical, not "to be stuck," not to be stuck to some person, or to a fatherland, or to a science, but also: not to remain stuck to one's detachment, to that voluptuous remoteness and strangeness of the bird whofleesever higher to see more below him - the danger
of the flier. Not to remain stuck to our own virtues and become as a whole the victim of some detail in us, such as our hospitality, which is the danger for superior and rich souls who spend themselves lavishly, almost indifferently, and exaggerate the virtue of generosity into a vice. One must know how to conserve oneself: the hardest test of independence. (BGE 41) Later in the book the same point is made differently: We immoralists! - This world that concerns us, in which we fear and love, this almost invisible and inaudible world of subtle commanding and subtle obeying, in every way a world of the 'almost', involved, captious, peaked, and tender - indeed it is defended well against clumsy spectators and familiar curiosity. We have been spun into a severe yarn and shirt of duties and cannot get out of that - in this we are "men of duty," we, too. Occasionally, that is true, we dance in our 'chains' and between our 'swords'; more often, that is no less true, we gnash our teeth and feel impatient with all the secret hardness of our destiny. (BGE 226)

However elusive, such passages at least begin to make clear the sort of question Nietzschean psychology will address. Remarks like these turn the basic question away from the problem of truth and do not simply answer it, negatively or positively. The point of his insistence on perspective is not so much to counsel humility or skepticism. It is intended to prepare for the question in which he is most interested: not that of the possibility of truth, but rather that of the extent of the social function of the "will to truth," and of our collective hopes for the "value of truth."

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(And all of this by eventual contrast with a way of being attached to our practices that does not rely on realist or dogmatist hopes.) We have convinced ourselves that success in understanding how things really are will be in some sense redemptive, will change everything; that virtue is knowledge; that knowledge is the power we most need. As a matter of emphasis, Nietzsche's counterclaim of perspective is much more concerned with this optimism about the value of knowing the truth, about what we have believed the truth will make possible and help promote, than it is primarily a matter of epistemology. Now, of course, the questions of the possibility and the value of truth are not wholly distinct, since one of the chief reasons for questioning the value of truth has to do with the impossibility of securing any such truth. Nietzsche clearly believes that a sense of such an impossibility has become widely established after Kant and is beginning to have devastating consequences. But it is precisely the (inevitably perspectival and so unsecured and unreassured) estimate of value of truth that traditional philosophy and science must - naively, without admitting it, and in a self-deceived way - assume. This topic reintroduces the main theme of my discussion, which can now be formulated as follows: How we should understand why some such way of thinking comes to have the authority and significance it does, given that any appeal to discoveries, real success in coping with nature, the truth, and so on, are not available as answers to this practical, possibility-of-life question. This is the question that introduces Nietzsche's moral-psychological language ("what we want"). And further: How does he think that his own proposals for a new way, and so his own understanding of the conditions now pertaining, psychological and historical conditions, must be understood? (What are we supposed to "remember" and "forget"? How?) Philosophy has been an authoritative answer to such a question, establishing such authority against objections; and Nietzsche considers it in detail. Ill There is no theory of, or extended essay about, such possible authority and its connection to philosophy. For the most part, there is a famous image:
Assumed: truth is a woman - what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? That the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman's heart? (BGE Pref.)

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So - philosophers are like lovers, suitors; better, in other passages, like seducers. More to the point, philosophers should be understood as inexpert, clumsy lovers. Philosophers - or those committed to truth and some hope of moral objectivity - want something out of existence, something like a life worth loving, but they go about satisfying this desire inexpertly and clumsily. Presumably, if we understand this, we can also understand something of Nietzsche's own account of what it means to be "attached" to one's perspective or way of life, to limit and discipline oneself (or one's culture) in the service of some loved end, all without such overly optimistic, ultimately self-defeating, philosophic hopes. The psychology of love is a useful window onto Nietzsche's psychology of the philosophical type. This is so because most of us do not think of romantic attachments to other people as simply caused by psychological impulses; we think of such attachments as expressive, revelations of the more important and worthy aspects of ourselves - and so as also partly evaluative, at least in this expressive sense. (Those whom we love must be loveable in some sense.) But we also do not think of such attachments as the product of deliberation and normative evaluation, as if consequent upon some mere list of worthy and unworthy qualities. The suggestion here seems to be: Think of our attachment to some sort of ideal, some goal of satisfaction, in a complexly psychological way (neither naturally caused nor reflectively deduced) - and then think of that attachment as a condition of life, a condition of practical sense. To emphasize how important the image is, we can also briefly note how GM opens, again with an image:
It has rightly been said: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also"; our treasure is where the beehives of our knowledge are. We are constantly making for them, being by nature winged creatures and honey-gatherers of the spirit; there is one thing alone we really care about from the heart - "bringing something home." (GM P:l)

The quotation is from the passage in St. Matthew (6:21) where Jesus is claiming that we misguidedly store up the treasures of Mammon, believing from the heart in a this-worldly salvation that is both unjustifiably fearful and anxious, and unfulfillable. In the way in which Jesus contrasts the illusory hope for a secular salvation with a heavenly one, so Nietzsche contrasts our misguided hopes for and love of knowledge with a truer salvation - a kind of "self-evaluation" wholly absent from our lives. In a brilliant piece of irony (given that this book is one of the most famous and often vicious attacks on Christendom on record), he also is invoking Jesus's soothing advice not to rush to secular things out of so much fear and self-doubt. ("See the birds of the air, they neither sow nor

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reap nor store in barns, yet my father feeds them;" etc.) Our attempt to store up knowledge, to secure truth, he suggests, is similarly driven by a self-induced, slavish anxiety and fear. By contrast, apparently a wholly different sort of knowledge or self-evaluation is what we might want, in answer to the simple question: "Who are we really?" These beginning images of eros and the heart, to which Nietzsche returns again and again throughout his works, are not novel or revolutionary, as he - the "old philologist" - no doubt realized. He clearly would have recalled that it was Plato who first characterized philosophy as essentially a kind of love, as erotic, even divinely, insanely erotic. Philosophy is the condition of any worthwhile life - but philosophy is not a body of knowledge. It is a kind of eros, a way of desiring. And Nietzsche is no doubt trying to invoke that memory ironically by suggesting that traditional philosophers, as conceived Platonically, are actually clumsy, amateurish lovers. However ironic, though, the image aligns Nietzsche with Plato in an important sense. He does not treat the desire to know, or the emotional and affective aspects of interest in knowledge, in a more familiar, modern sense, as provoked negatively, just by the pain of ignorance. We could consider human beings as motivated by the usual assortment of passions and fears produced by a functioning body, experiencing the kind of resistance to the satisfaction of such passions human beings naturally encounter, not to mention the anxieties produced by a functioning imagination, the anticipation of suffering, the fear of death. And so we could imagine these creatures as suffering, provoked to understand the great nature-machine in order to master it, provoked to look beyond the satisfaction of their immediate interests to a more rational, long-term strategy in predicting and dealing with others. Even speculative philosophy might be understood as a similar kind of reaction to the pain of ignorance and uncertainty, the same sort of quest for security and reassurance. At least to some extent like Plato, however, Nietzsche treats philosophical desire as originally erotic, rather than merely reactive, or passion driven. There is something that philosophers (or lovers of wisdom) want, which they want independently of any attempt to lessen pain or ignorance.6 Of course, all unfulfilled desire is painful in some sense, and so all striving seeks the pleasures of satisfaction. But by beginning BGE with the image of philosophical lovers, and GM with the problem of where one's heart ought to be, Nietzsche is pointing to a striving that is not satisfied merely in the absence of pain and the establishment of security, but one that always anticipates the satisfactions of a possibly better life, not the one that one happens to be leading.

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Nietzsche's question, in other words, remains Socratic, even if his answers don't: "Wozu das LebenV Or even, "Warum das LebenT'7 The stress on eros in Plato suggests that the natural (unaided, untutored) human situation is lack, a fundamental insufficiency.8 We cannot live "naturally," not because nature is threatening and insecure but because our nature - at least in its most familiar, immediate manifestations for humans - does not clearly tell us what is worth securing and defending. In Nietzsche's rather different terms, nature is "indifferent," and living is "wanting to be other than this nature" (BGE 9). In the Platonic presentation, though, such a lack can, at least in principle, be satisfied, and there is a structure to its possible satisfactions. There are natural objects of human desire, and a sort of coherence among the kinds of human wantings and satisfactions. Indeed, for Plato, many of the most important manifestations of human desire already reflect this coherence and intimate the proper satisfaction. Most famously (and controversially), the love of a beautiful body - sexual excitement at the sight of another human being - is already an instance of the desire for the eternal possession of the idea of the good. In the Symposium, Diotima establishes this striking claim by getting Socrates to agree that everyone who loves anything wants the possession of that thing, and does so in the belief that the possession will be good. In her famous ascent, she concludes that contemplating beauty itself is really that for the sake of which all other desires really desire.9 Philosophers may begin their careers as lovers in the standard sense, but they come to experience the instability and flightiness of human experience, and the good they admire in the beloved is only a relative and uncertain good. To love the beauty of a beautiful body is want to possess that beauty - something that cannot be achieved if we remain attached to the swiftly degenerating body in which it appears. What anyone wants in the beloved can better be found in the beauty of all bodies, the beauty of souls, or good laws; finally, in beauty itself. The completion of this philosophical quest is not, however, some sort of passive contemplation; it really is, in many famous Platonic accounts, itself an erotic fulfillment. In the Republic the "lover of learning" always strives for "what is,"
and he does not tarry by each of the many things opined to be but goes forward and does not lose the keenness of his passionate love nor cease from it before he grasps the nature itself of each thing which is with the part of the soul fit to grasp a thing of that sort; and it is the part akin to it that is fit. And once near it and coupled with what really is, having begotten intelligence and truth, he knows and lives truly, is nourished and so ceases from his labor pains, but not before.10

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The descriptions in the Phaedrus, of how the student of wisdom "throbs with ferment in every part" when he begins to feel his "wings grow" and the "flood of passion" when joined with that which is beheld, make the same point even more dramatically.11 Now Nietzsche's point against Plato can be made more economically. In the Symposium, Diotima virtually treats the desire for a beautiful body as an instance, an example of the philosophical desire for the ideas. This is part of the importance of the topic of beauty. Our appreciation of the beautiful is an initial manifestation of the reality of the Forms in the sensible world. All erotic striving is thus also noetic, and intimates the contentment and fulfillment that comes from the full philosophical contemplation of the beautiful in itself. Diotima's defense of such a claim rests on something that Nietzsche is most concerned to attack: the assumption that no one could find sexual satisfaction in such a body, or anyfinite,limited delight in the beautiful, ultimately satisfying. Such a desired object cannot be possessed over time; and the necessary question of its goodness provokes a different sort of attachment, to more universal, less corporeal objects. The whole possibility of a continuous ascent in Diotima's famous account requires some explanation of our dissatisfaction at the lower levels, the provocation that inspires the continuous ascent of eros. Once she had Socrates say12 that the love of good things must be a love for their possession; shortly thereafter, that "love loves the good to be one's own forever";13 and then, that love is really always of immortality, then the ground is laid for the claims of an ascent.14 Our attempts to understand the world and ourselves are not provoked merely by the pain of ignorance or the need to satisfy wants and passions. The beautiful, for example, draws us to it, promising a greater good, not a means to avoid the bad or satisfy the necessary. But, under Diotima's assumption, we also see many instances of the beautiful in changing and degenerating bodies15 - and so, by being excited by such beauty, come to love the beauty of souls, just laws, and the form of beauty itself. This assumption is what Nietzsche is disagreeing with, what he is calling clumsy and obtrusive. There is no reason to believe, he is implying, that such an original eros would be experienced as dissatisfying if it could not be redeemed by the kind of security and reassurance promised by Diotima. It is in this sense that philosophers look like amateurish or insecure lovers, as if they demand guarantees, rest, a final respite from insecurity, eternal possession. (They can seem like young lovers who must constantly demand from each other pledges of eternal love; as opposed to more experienced lovers, who can love passionately, and not cynically, without such delusory hopes.) The so-called ascent described

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by Diotima is not an ascent but a diversion of eros, away from what can only be enjoyed with great risk and uncertainty, toward what will satisfy souls already so fearful, even contemptuous of time and finitude. Only under a certain evaluation of life itself - essentially a negative or ascetic one - would they come to experience desire as they do. (All of this, as an instance of Nietzsche's inversion of the usual psychologizing, is why his remarks about the Platonic account are not false or unsupported, but clumsy, amateurish, inexpert, and so on.) Likewise the erotic anticipation of wholeness or completeness, so crucial to the Platonic account, would be similarly read in such an account, as a hope for the end of instability and unavoidable transitoriness of human desire - in the famous phrase, as "revenge against time." At this point several extended qualifications would have to be made in any fuller assessment of the Platonic position and Nietzsche's treatment. For one thing, Nietzsche's account of Socraticism and Platonism is always resistant (to use what seems the appropriate psychological word) to the manifestly aporetic character of Platonic thought, to the insistence throughout the dialogues that the satisfactions spoken of by Diotima are forever impossible, that whatever slight ascents there might be are always followed by descents, but that eros is sustainable anyway. For another, at the end of the ascent passage, Diotima claims that whoever beholds beauty itself "breeds eidola," images of excellence.16 As in the Republic and Phaedrus, the satisfaction of eros is pregnancy and birth. She is, of course, here and in other passages, thinking of beautiful speeches; but the image still stands in marked contrast to Nietzsche's insistence on possession and security. Nothing could contrast more with the hope for eternal security than having children, even if for the sake of immortality. But these points would lead us quickly into many issues in Plato. I mean only to show here that Nietzsche, by contrast, takes himself to be inverting Plato and is treating the desire for the eternal possession of the truth as itself an instance or an example of a different sort of original erotic attachment - already expressive of an evaluation and perspective, not the natural situation of human beings, objectively dissatisfied by corporeal eros. Although there are no footnotes or references, I am sure Nietzsche must be returning to this way of expressing his disagreement with Plato in BGE 194, when he remarks that "the difference among men becomes manifest not only in the difference between their tablets of goods.... It becomes manifest even more in what they take for really having and possessing something good." He goes one to re-introduce his original image: Regarding a woman, for example, those men who are more modest consider the mere use of the body and sexual gratification a sufficient and satisfying sign of

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having, of possession. Another type . . . wants subtler tests.... A third type does not reach the end of his mistrust and desire for having even so; he asks himself whether the woman, when she gives up everything for him, does not possibly do this for a phantom of him. He wants to be known deep down, abysmally deep down, before he is capable of being loved at all; he dares to let himself be fathomed. He feels that his beloved is fully in his possession only when she no longer deceives himself about him, when she loves him just as much for his devilry and hidden insatiability as for his graciousness, patience and spirituality. (BGE 194)

If "truth is a woman," then this last, more sophisticated, unclumsy love at least gives us some sort of trope, a figure, with which to pursue the question of how Nietzsche's philosophers will continue to "love their truths" (BGE 43). Not on the condition that some sort of security and stability can be achieved, based on the eternal possession of truth. But not as if a mere lust for power, or domination or a brute exercise of will, or even in the way an artist loves what he makes. (We can recall too the language of BGE 226 about how we love "our world": "involved, captious, peaked, tender.") Here the attachment to one's way of going on, one's perspective, while not based on truth, is always "truthfully" (or without security, "insatiably") lived.17 The question posed for Nietzsche earlier was: How we should understand why some perspective or other comes to have the authority and significance it does, given that any appeal to discoveries, real success in coping with nature, the truth, and so on, are excluded. The answer now appears to be: Such attachments are reflections of what we could love; but such a love can be satisfied, we now find, only under certain conditions - and neither by willing it,18 nor by the realization of some amateurish, clumsy hope that what one loves can be confirmed (by everyone) as objectively, universally loveable and eternally desirable. IV Nietzsche obviously invites metaphorical flights like this. Can the points just made be brought to bear on a more prosaic, accessible issue? I will conclude with a brief look at his psychological exposure of a famous perspective, in the hope that the journey just taken through some of his many figures and images might now be helpful. The issue is the Nietzschean psychology of morality itself, understood not as valuation or estimation in general, but as the Christian institution so dominant in Western thought - the morality of good and evil. Nietzsche proposes his own version of a psychological account of why we became attached to such an institution, why we love it: Famously (and simply), it is expressive of ressentiment against masters (a resentiment we needed to

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express at some point, a need that made morality look attractive), and so morality helps complete the "slave revolt in morality." And he thereby begins also to intimate what else we might be capable of being attached to, of loving, now. Nietzsche understands the institution of morality as presuming, among other things, (1) a central normative opposition, between the good, understood as selflessness, or at least some sort of suspension of the priority of one's interests, and evil understood as egoism, the absolute assertion of such a priority; and (2) the morally responsible, individual subject - the agent whose individual decision or will, and whose will alone, produced or caused the deed to occur. According to such precepts, one acts well if one acts with the right intention. The worthiness of the action is to be assessed by considering the real motive that caused the deed (whether selfless or egoistic), something that also gives us a way to understand what elements of what occurs in the world as a result of one's act for which one is to be held responsible. One is only responsible (roughly) for what one intended to have happen, given reasonable expectations. And under these assumptions, only one sort of intention gets you moral credit: unegoistic or disinterested motives. The most worthy acts are those in which you do not prefer your own stake, and where you prefer to sacrifice such a stake for the welfare or happiness of others, or in acknowledgement of the claims of moral equality as a principle. Nietzsche is particularly interested in how important, within this picture, proving your own selflessness is - to the point of self-sacrifice, to the point of "that ghastly paradox, the God on the Cross." As the last rhetorical flourish indicates, Nietzsche presents such an institution as inherently mysterious or paradoxical, since its central icon and core moral ideal promote self-denial and self-sacrifice, something prima facie strange. Even in its more secular, Kantian form, the moral ideal still involves a striving to act "as any rational agent would act," and not to act for myself, unless I am lucky enough to desire what any rational agent would want. And this is still paradoxical; why would a moral project come to be so taken with the ideal of selflessness, so oriented from a suspicion of the singular, desiring, affective self? Why would his moral ideal come to have so dominated the West? Nietzsche tries to understand such an institution as a reactive phenomenon: a revolt within a Jewish community dominated and oppressed by Roman conquerors - the epitome of singular, indifferent, selfpromoting subjects (although the ground for such a revolt had already been laid by Socrates and Plato, in their own reaction against and fear of "the tragic point of view"). Reformulating the moral agenda as an

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opposition between egoism and selflessness is a strategy, a way of opposing an agenda already firmly fixed by an opposition between nobility, indifference, and strength against baseness, commonness, and weakness. Moreover, he goes on to argue, for this revolt to be a revolt, and not merely a reformulation of where things happen to stand, the masters must be held accountable in some way for their evil; and the slaves must have achieved, must be responsible for, the qualities that make them slavish (or, in their terms, paragons of the virtues of equality and brotherhood). Hence the invention of the moral subject and the notion of responsibility. It was this sort of strategy that made possible further refinements of the slave revolt, such as the moral view that all human beings are perpetually and inescapably guilty, in bad conscience. While such a view of what Kant called "radical evil," and others called "original sin," helped further suggest the radical equality of humankind (all dependent on a super Master, all equally unworthy, and so on), it also helped account for and made more acceptable human suffering - something otherwise intolerable to the slavish type. We know we should not act simply for ourselves, but we also know we always do and so are guilty. Our own suffering, though, is thus intelligible and tolerable; it is divinely just, we deserve it; and those who seem now not to suffer for their injustice, like Masters, will suffer eternally. The details of this narrative are quite interesting, but the point now is to understand the kind of account Nietzsche is trying to give of such an institution, since he is still asking of its participants his "psychological" question: What do they want? And that question is still elusive. Consider how he contrasts a nonmoral evaluation and assessment of human deeds. In GM 1:13 he portrays the slave revolt as the sort of morality that "lambs" would create in their struggle with "beasts of prey," and much of what he says restates the summary above. But here he explicitly attacks the "seduction of language" that "conceives and misconceives all effects as conditioned by something that causes effects, by a 'subject.'" This is like what the "popular mind" does when it separates the "lightning from its flash and takes the latter for an action, for the operation of a subject called lightning." But, he says, "there is no such substratum, there is no 'being' behind doing, effecting, becoming; the 'doer' is merely a fiction added to the deed - the deed is everything." The central assumption in this contrasting picture is strength or a strong character "expressing itself (sich aiifiern) in an action, rather than some intention or motive causing the deed. This also, as in many classical tragedies, means that you cannot be said to be some sort of wholly self-originating source of agency. What principles or motives seem

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consciously of great moment to you are not "up to you," but reflect or express who you have become, given the family, community, and tradition within which you "got to be you." This introduces such notions as fate, that you cannot avoid whom you have become, what as a family member you incur as debt just by being you, and it introduces a much different notion of what can be tied to you, your responsibility. (For both issues, the key example would obviously be Oedipus, although Agamemnon's dilemma would do as well.) It changes the notion of guilt or any self-recrimination based on a regret that one did not act as one could have, into something Nietzsche associates with Spinoza's theory - a sadness that one was not as one expected oneself to be: " 'here something has gone unexpectedly gone wrong,' not: 'I ought not to have done that'" (GM 11:15). With at least this much of Nietzsche's depiction of the moral point of view and a contrasting one now on the table, we can return one last time to the question of Nietzschean psychology. As we have seen, to see such options psychologically is to understand what would be at stake in evaluating oneself one way rather than another. Seeing this is far more difficult than would be suggested by an understanding life simply in terms of interests, problems, or mere survival. Seeing life in any such terms is already to have proposed one possibility among others, not to have reached bedrock. Nietzsche's proposal requires understanding both options above in terms of "the way of life" as a whole suggested by such views of action and responsibility, and, at least minimally, in terms of whether such a way of life would be possible, could sustain itself. Indeed, while such a criterion - what would make life, the affirmation of some course of action as meaningful, possible - appears minimal, it is a constant, deeply sounded note throughout his mature work. And it appears to involve a very great deal: conditions for affirmation, sacrifice, sustenance over time, honesty, courage - conditions that turn out to be harder to meet than might be anticipated. Or so we have found out. (For one thing, Nietzsche thinks it extremely probable that no such project or way of life will be possible under egalitarian assumptions, or without a few willing to discipline and form the desires of the many. Betting otherwise is likely to lead a fatal, perhaps permanent "sleep," as the "last men" nod off.) Both "tragic" and a "moral-ascetic" ideals thus represent something like a gamble, a bet, or experiment. Each concerns what will make a selfsustaining and affirmable civilizational project possible. What will make "willing" possible over time - a way of life that does not degenerate, undermine itself, or, in Nietzsche's apocalyptic word, end in nihilism? Each option has implications and possible permutations impossible to

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foresee; and each will lead to unexpected consequences in radically altered, future circumstances. One's uncertain situation in the gamble is thus exactly as Nietzsche describes for his "new species of philosopher," baptized with "a name not free of danger": "these philosophers of the future may have a right - it might also be called a wrong - to be called attempters [Versucher].This name itself is in the end a mere attempt and, if you will [as Nietzsche returns to the romantic image], a temptation [Versuchung]" (BGE 42). My suggestion here is that the above sketch is the way Nietzsche understands his "psychologizing." That this is so is evident from a number of unusual aspects of his treatment. For one thing, he does not treat the pre-moral - that is, the tragic or noble - point of view either as a possible option now or, more strikingly, as a glorious option that just ran out of historical luck. The tragic point of view turned out not to have been such a good bet after all. Indeed, Nietzsche tells us, "Greek tragedy met an end different from that of her older sister-arts: she died by suicide, in consequence of an irreconcilable conflict; she died tragically, while all the others passed away calmly and beautifully at a ripe old age" (BT11). And, aside from his many references to the impossibility of "going back" (BGE 10), he does not hesitate to point out that in the noble mode of evaluation "there is indeed too much carelessness, too much taking lightly, too much looking away and impatience involved in contempt, even too much joyfulness, for it to be able to transform its object into a real caricature and monster" (GM 1:10). By contrast, the moral-ascetic point of view certainly does not lack such seriousness, and because of that was, comparatively, a better bet. The "Christian schema . . . , however forced, capricious, hard, gruesome, and anti-rational, has shown itself to be the means through which the European spirit has been trained to strength, ruthless curiosity, and subtle mobility" (BGE 188).19 He is even more straightforward in GM:
For with the priests everything becomes more dangerous, not only cures and remedies but also arrogance, revenge, acuteness, profligacy, love, lust to rule, virtue, disease - but it is only fair to add that it was on the soil of this essentially dangerous form of human existence, the priestly form, that man first became an interesting animal, that only here did the human soul in a higher sense acquire depth and become evil - and these are two basic respects in which man has hitherto been superior to other beasts. (GM 1:6)

Finally, this sort of question forces a great deal of emphasis on a certain use of history. For the question is: What is possible, possibly affirmed, loved, now! Contrary to many readings of Nietzsche - as epistemologist, pragmatist, truth theorist, or aesthete - but consistent with his constant

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emphasis on the history of Christianity, morality, modernity, and so forth, there can be no possible answer to, or wager about, the issue of what sort of way of life could attract allegiance now, unless we are able to put together some story of what fell apart and why. To some extent this narrative too will be an "attempt," a kind of story that itself might make possible some sort of life now. But it cannot be wishful thinking, any more than one can make oneself believe anything one wishes about a loved one. There may be no perspective-free account of the history of philosophy, Christianity, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and so on; but no perspective that tries to pretend that constraints of memory don't operate at all could possibly promote some form of life. It should be stressed one last time that this complex question - what makes life possible - does not simply trump or render irrelevant all questions about truth or truth/assertability conditions (as if defending the value of wishful thinking). Nietzsche, in the general reading I am presenting, is not at all denying that we must find some way of constraining what can count as an acceptable claim about what there is, and that such constraints must actually work in some way that can be counted on, reliably and predictably in regulating our dealings with nature and each other. But there are a variety of such possible constraints; nature underdetermines ways in which we might comport ourselves reliably toward it. We are then turned toward Nietzsche's psychological inquiries into the appeal of some such constraints over others - but not as an account of matter-of-fact motivations, and not as if in preparation for our simply picking one. The question he is asking is about the way attachments to ideals - ideals that orient our inquiry, make possible everything else are themselves possible. They are not possible as results of reflection and deliberation, since any mode of reflection already evinces some ideal or other. Hence his questions about what is required for us to love our ideals, especially now. "What might be possible now" depends essentially on what we take to have happened - on being able to produce a history that will show us where we are and what might be appealed to now if we are to continue to live. Coming to understand this, without ressentiment, is summed up in another famous Nietzschean reference to the problem of love: amor fati. These questions - What is possible now? What sort of ideal could command allegiance, sacrifice? - are finally Zarathustra's, in Nietzsche's magnum opus. (It is important to observe, though, that all three of Nietzsche's major books - Thus Spoke Zarathustra, BGE, and GM - begin directly with the problem of love, and so of attachment to ideals: Zarathustra's "going down" for the sake of mankind, BGE's account of

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"clumsy lovers," and GM's musings on where your "heart" should be.) The great problem with that difficult work is that what Zarathustra seems to believe possible (without any hope for a practical reliance on truth or universality or objectivity) is itself extremely unstable. It changes and is expressed (eventually) with great self-doubt and anxiety. Even the one clear and unavoidable premise of the work - the only assumption that would explain why Zarathustra goes down from his mountain, perhaps why Nietzsche himself wrote books in conditions of such pain and loneliness - has found almost no place in the long and complex reception of Nietzsche and now seems an incongruous, impossible, even sentimental assumption. I refer to Zarathustra's answer, when the hermit asks him the Nietzschean question: Why go down? "What do you want among the sleepers?" "Zarathustra answered: 'I love man'" (Z I:P:2).20 NOTES 1. A somewhat different version of this paper was included in my Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Besides the University of Illinois conference at which it was originally presented, I have had the opportunity to present it several more times, and I am grateful to several people and several audiences for fruitful discussions that led to many changes in the original version. I am especially indebted to Nathan Tarcov, Tracy Strong, and the audience at the conference on Love and Friendship at the University of Chicago in 1993, sponsored by the Olin Center; to David Roochnik and the students and faculty at Iowa State University; to Rebecca Comay, David Krell, Judith Butler, and the audience at a Freud and Nietzsche conference at the Univeristy of Toronto; to Lorraine Dason, Robert Richards, and the History and Philosophy of Science discussion group at the University of Chicago; to Jay Bernstein and his colleagues at the philosophy department at the University of Essex; and to Volker Gerhardt, Rolf-Peter Horstmann, and the philosophy community at the Humboldt University in Berlin, where a German version was presented in October 1996. 2. Especially in the books of the late 1870s and early 1880s, like Human All Too Human (1878), where a "History of the Moral Sensations" is proposed as "psychology" (1:2), and Daybreak (1881), especially the Preface's opening line: "In this book, you will discover a 'subterranean man' at work, one who tunnels and mines and undermines" (P:l). 3. This sentiment is everywhere in Nietzsche. In an early essay: "The drive toward knowledge has a moral origin" (TL, Breazeale translation, p. 35); in a late note the distinction between "theoretical" and "practical" is "dangerous," since there really is no difference between "judging the value of a way of life," and the "value of a theory" (WP 458). 4. It would require a major study to set out the various things Nietzsche means by the "practical" ("das Thun ist alles") and its "priority." As a general summary, it can at least be said that Nietzsche is trying to show that evaluation and explanation always express some prior attachment to an ideal,

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5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

requiring as a central question something like the conditions (historical and social, as well as general or comprehensive) for the possibility of such attachment. The key term in almost all the accounts of the problem of life is "esteeming" (schdtzen). See Z, "On the Thousand and One Goals": "No people could first live without esteeming," and "therefore he calls himself 'man', which means 'esteemer'" (Z 1:15). The same point is made more dramatically in BGE in Nietzsche's attack on any ''laisser aller" ("letting go") and affirmation of a kind of tyranny: "Consider any morality with this is mind: what there is of it in 'nature' teaches hatred of the laisser aller, of any all-too-great freedom and implants the need for limited horizons and the nearest tasks teaching the narrowing of our perspectives, and thus in a certain sense stupidity, as a condition of life and growth" (BGE 188). In this sense "philosophers" here do duty for any of the types who have bet so heavily that a common life could be made possible, self-sustaining, and vital, by a faith in truth. Nietzsche is so often treated as if interested in reduction and deflation, even as a "pragmatist," that it is important to stress this point. In the 1872 essay "On the Pathos of Truth," he speaks quite movingly about those whose "love of life" does not depend on a mundane attachment to existence, and whose eros does not depend on the hope for some redemption, some "solution to a problem." The higher types all "bequeathed one lesson: that the person who lived life most beautifully is the person who does not esteem it. Whereas the common man takes this span of being with such gloomy seriousness, those on their journey to immortality knew how to treat it with Olympian laughter, or at least with lofty disdain. Often they went to their graves ironically - for what was there in them to bury?" (in Philosophy and Truth, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale [Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979], p. 62). As is often the case, Nietzsche's only substantive discussions of such issues occur in very stylized images and metaphors, impossible to discuss economically. In Z, in Part IPs "Dancing Song," Zarathustra engages in a kind of lover's triangle with two "women" - his "life" and his "wisdom" - each obviously jealous of the other, with Zarathustra unwilling to break with either. What this means about how one could (or could not) be said simply to "love life" is not clear from this passage alone and would require an extensive interpretation of the work as a whole. Plato: Lysis, Symposium, Gorgias (P:LSG), trans. W. R. M. Lamb. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975. Symposium, 211d. (References to Platonic texts are identified by citing the standardly used page and line indications.) The Republic of Plato, trans. Allen Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1968, 490b. Plato: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus, trans. Harold North Fowler. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995. Phaedrus, 251c. Symposium (P:LSG), 204d. Ibid., 206a. Ibid., 207a. Ibid., 207d and e. Ibid., 212a.

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17. Like this issue of Nietzschean "practicality," this topic, "living without the reassurance of the truth," is obviously at the heart of much of what Nietzsche wants to say and is difficult to discuss briefly. The passage just quoted, for example, despite its talk of the "grundlich" does not seem to promise, as a "test" of love, some "real" revelation, or deep honesty, as if there were such hidden, unpleasant "truths," but some acceptance of "Unersattlichkeit" (BGE 194). 18. In fact, an implication of the interpretation I am suggesting would be that it is a mistake to regard Nietzsche as a "philosopher of the will," despite the influence of Heidegger and attention to the Nachlass. He is, in an appropriately qualified sense, a "philosopher of eros." 19. Nietzsche's famous praise of the Jews in Human, All Too Human could also be cited - that people who "have had the most grief-laden history of any people," and yet whom "we have to thank for the noblest human being (Christ), the purest sage (Spinoza), the mightiest book and the most efficacious moral code in the world" (HH 1:475). 20. See also the grand claim in BGE: "the philosopher as we understand him, we free spirits, is the man of the most comprehensive responsibility who has the conscience for the overall development of man" (BGE 61).

On the Rejection of Morality: Bernard Williams's Debt to Nietzsche

M A U D E M A R I E CLARK That there is some connection between Bernard Williams's views on morality and Nietzsche's has long seemed clear. The most obvious point of comparison is that both thinkers are opponents of morality. Nietzsche presents himself as an "immoralist" - a term he claims for himself as a "symbol and badge of honor," one that "distinguishes [him] from the whole of humanity" (EH IV:6). Although Williams makes no comparable claim for himself, his abolitionist stance toward morality is suggested by the title of the final chapter of his 1985 Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy - "Morality, the Peculiar Institution" which applies to morality the epithet given to slavery in the antebellum South.1 What has not been so clear is whether Williams's reasons for advocating the abolition of morality are indebted to Nietzsche's, or even very similar to them. The debt and similarity may seem minimal at best. After all, Williams's tone and vocabulary for talking about morality and his focus on moral obligation place him squarely in the tradition of English moral philosophy, which seems far removed from Nietzsche's concerns. And the most obvious debt of his critique of morality is to Elizabeth Anscombe.2 This suggests that, far from drawing his objections to morality from Nietzschean sources, Williams may not even be using "morality" to refer to the same thing that Nietzsche's immoralism rejects. Yet, despite the continuing and obvious differences in philosophical style, Williams's more recent work makes Nietzsche's influence evident. This is especially true of his 1993 Shame and Necessity - not only in its relatively frequent references to Nietzsche, but also in its content. In this book Williams's understanding of the ancient Greeks and his account of shame and guilt seem so much in Nietzsche's spirit that readers might suspect that Williams had been working under Nietzsche's influence all along, and that much of his earlier work in ethics was (among other things, of course) an attempt to figure out what Nietzsche was on to in his critique of morality.3 My aim in this essay is to support this suspicion

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by showing that the understanding and critique of morality found in the final chapter of Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (henceforth ELP) is deeply Nietzschean. I will also argue that it is not quite Nietzschean enough, that Williams moves closer to Nietzsche's account of morality in Shame and Necessity (henceforth SN), and that doing so helps to answer important objections to the critique of morality found in the earlier book.
Morality and Ethics

A distinction between morality and ethics is a crucial aspect of Williams's opposition to morality. Although he is an abolitionist regarding morality, he does not think we should or can abolish ethics, which he treats as the wider category into which morality falls. What counts as "ethical" is "any scheme for regulating the relations between people that works through informal sanctions and internalized dispositions."4 Morality, on the other hand, is a particular ethical orientation or better, a "range of ethical outlooks." "Morality is so much with us," Williams writes, "that moral philosophy spends much of its time discussing the differences between these outlooks, rather than the difference between all of them and everything else" (ELP p. 174). Yet, all of these different moral outlooks are variations on a particular kind of ethical orientation that he thinks we would be "better off without." Williams's distinction parallels one that is crucial for understanding Nietzsche's immoralism - the distinction between a narrower and a wider sense of "morality." When he calls himself an "immoralist," and, in fact, "the first immoralist," he seems to mean that he is the first philosopher to consider morality something bad, something we would be better off without. Yet he sometimes uses "morality" for what he seems to favor - for instance, "noble morality" (GM I) and "higher moralities," which he insists ought to be possible (BGE 202). This has led to significant disagreement among interpreters as to whether Nietzsche is really claiming to reject all morality.To be most faithful to his own usage and clear about his position, I believe we should say that he is.5 Use of "morality" for what he favors is relatively rare in his writings, whereas an expression of skepticism toward morality is quite common, as is the demand for a liberation from all moral values, from all that has been honored under the name "morality." His occasional use of "morality" for what he himself embraces or promotes can be explained if we recognize that he uses the word in two different senses. BGE 32 explicitly connects immoralism with a demand for the overcoming of morality in what he calls "the nar-

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rower sense," which he also identifies as the sense morality has had until now {"das Moral, im bisherigen Sinne"). This implies, of course, that we could use "morality" in a new and wider sense - one that is equivalent, I believe, to what Williams calls "ethics." If so (and this whole essay should be seen as an argument that it is), Nietzsche's immoralism is a rejection of what Williams calls "morality" (and of what Nietzsche thinks his readers largely understand as "morality") but not of ethical life or of morality construed more broadly. It is only in the broader sense that an ethical orientation Nietzsche embraces or urges us towards counts as an instance of "morality." The same can be said of the pre-moral form of ethical life he calls "noble morality." The historical version of it that he describes in the first treatise of On the Genealogy of Morality is certainly a form of ethical life. The ancient nobles who shared it had ideas of goodness or virtue and of behavior that is prohibited and deserving of blame. They also recognized obligations, experienced a version of guilt and had a form of conscience. They thereby participated in what Williams characterizes as the "ethical" (a "scheme for regulating the relations between people that works through informal sanctions and internalized dispositions"), but not in what Nietzsche normally counts as "morality" - that is, "morality in the narrower sense." That he believes this seems clear, in any case, from the fact that he attacks morality in the narrower sense but not noble morality, and that he explicitly portrays the former as the "unconscious aftereffect" of the rule of the latter (BGE 32). We thus have an easy way of dissolving the apparent inconsistency in Nietzsche's claims about morality.6 When he attacks it, he uses "morality" in the narrower sense, which is equivalent to what Williams means by "morality"; when he embraces or promotes it, he uses "morality" in the wider sense, which makes it equivalent to what Williams calls the "ethical." But we do not yet have an explanation of the point of making this distinction. To most people a scheme embodying or employing the concepts I have attributed to the noble form of ethical life - virtue, obligation, blame, guilt, conscience - is clearly an instance of "morality." What is the point of insisting that it is an instance of the "ethical" but not the "moral"? And what exactly does the latter amount to? As to the point of making the distinction, something can be said in advance. Consider Nietzsche's claim that current European morality is merely one type of human morality beside which, before which, and after which many other types, above all higher moralities are, or ought to be, possible. But this morality resists such a "possibility," such an "ought" with all its power: it says stubbornly and inexorably, "I am morality itself, and nothing besides is morality." (BGE 202)

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The point here is not that the term "morality" has come to name one particular form of ethical life so that other forms have to be called something else. It is rather that the term "morality" has been monopolized for a particular form of ethical life in such a way that we fail to recognize the possibility of other forms.7 Or, as the passage I have already quoted from Williams suggests, morality in the narrow sense is "so much with us" that we have no sense of morality in the wider sense, which means that we take morality in the narrow sense to be the only possible ethical orientation. The point of distinguishing two senses of "morality," or ethics" from "morality" - distinctions that do not conform exactly to existing linguistic practice - is precisely to help us to recognize possibilities for ethical life that are hidden from view by current linguistic practice. In fact, linguistic practice has changed among Anglo-American philosophers, who are now much more likely to recognize a distinction between the "ethical" and the "moral," or between a broad and a narrow construal of morality, than they were prior to the influence of Williams's work. When I began trying to understand Nietzsche's immoralism in the 1970s, no such distinction even seemed to be on the horizon: Morality was morality, and "ethics" was used as an equivalent term. The only opponent of morality most philosophers could conceive of was one who refused to accept it unless it could be given an egoistic justification. Although this demand for an egoistic foundation for morality was usually dismissed as misguided, at least philosophers could make sense of amoralism. Immoralism was a different story, for it does not merely reject the authority of morality but opposes it as something bad, which makes sense only if it presupposes an alternative set of values. But philosophers had difficulty seeing how it could make sense, for morality either monopolized their understanding of value or was assumed to be by definition supreme (moral values being the set of values that override all others). Nietzsche's immoralism was therefore usually interpreted by sympathetic commentators as a rejection of a particular kind of morality, for instance, Christian or Kantian morality. Philippa Foot's well-known paper on the topic made a significant contribution by showing that Nietzsche's immoralism could be interpreted both as a rejection of all morality and as a coherent position.8 The way she found to do this, however, was to construe Nietzsche's criticism of morality as coming from an aesthetic or quasi-aesthetic perspective. She was able to interpret Nietzsche as an immoralist rather than a "special kind of moralist" by taking him to be rejecting something that she believed was conceptually tied to morality - namely, a concern for justice and the common good - for the sake of something that is not the concern

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of morality: namely, producing splendid human beings.9 Therefore, she did not seem to fully appreciate the possibility that his opposition to morality was coming from the viewpoint of an alternative ethical orientation - one that had room for an alternative vision of justice, for instance. Although she expanded the normative realm that moral philosophers needed to take into account (at least for understanding Nietzsche), she still basically equated "ethics" and "morality." Things have now changed, at least as far as terminology goes. A distinction between ethics and morality, and even between "morality" in a broad and narrower sense, is now widely accepted among philosophers. However, even though Williams's influence is largely responsible for this change, the way in which the distinction is drawn does not seem to yet be fully in line with Williams's way of drawing it. Consider the entry "Ethics and Morality" in the 1998 Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Its author, John Skorupski, takes ethics to be "the whole domain" of "normative thinking about action and feeling," whereas morality is a "distinct sphere within [that] domain."10 How should we characterize the moral sphere? Skorupski rejects two of the most influential suggestions for doing so: to characterize moral norms in terms of their function or content, or in terms of their supremacy or ability to override other kinds of norms. He accepts instead a third suggestion, derived from Hume and Mill and recently developed with great sophistication by Allan Gibbard: that the moral should be characterized in terms of the appropriateness of certain sentiments - namely, those involved in blame, including self-blame or guilt. The morally wrong is essentially the blameworthy. If norms of permitted and prohibited behavior are moral norms - norms of moral right and wrong - it would be appropriate for violators to feel guilt for violating them, and for others to feel blame toward those who violate them.11 Likewise, a moral obligation is one it would be appropriate or justified to blame a person for not fulfilling. Moral reasons are reasons it would be blameworthy not to have or act on; and moral virtues are ones it would be blameworthy not to have. Skorupski explicitly recognizes that critics of morality, of which Nietzsche and Williams are his two examples, must level their critique "from a conception of ethical value, and assume that there is an [ethical] alternative to morality." This shows, I believe, that Williams's influence has brought moral philosophers much closer to the possibility of understanding Nietzsche's immoralism than they were when Foot first made her attempt. That they still have some distance to go is shown by Skorupski's further comment that if critics of morality do not accept the completely unrealistic "possibility of a communal life unmediated by any

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disciplinary forces at all," their assumption "must be that there could be a discipline that was better, ethically speaking, than the discipline of guilt and blame." Skorupski suggests that a nonmoral version of ethical life would need to employ shame or disdain in the place of guilt and blame, failing to see that (as I shall argue later in this essay) Nietzsche and Williams believe that there can be nonmoral versions of the latter, and thus that a nonmoral version of ethical life need not have to do without blame and guilt. This misunderstanding reflects an important way in which Skorupski's distinction between morality and ethics differs from the distinction as it is drawn by Williams and Nietzsche. He thinks of morality as a particular part of the domain of the ethical (or normative), and so naturally thinks of nonmoral versions of ethical life as lacking certain concepts or emotions that belong to morality. But this is not how Nietzsche and Williams see the situation. Williams clearly presents morality as an instance rather than a part of the ethical, and therefore need not think that it lacks any of the components of morality. Using Nietzsche to understand Williams, I shall argue, can help us to see morality as a particular interpretation of ethical life, and to see how there could be a nonmoral version of ethical life that involves all the central components and concepts of morality but relates them to each other differently than does morality. Blame and the "Deep" Notion of the Voluntary Although Williams cites blame as the "characteristic reaction of the morality system" (ELP p. 177), this does not mean that he takes blame to be an essentially moral notion, one that has a place only within the "morality system." As I understand Williams, what places blame within the morality system - the system or interrelation of concepts that constitutes morality - is that it can only be directed toward what is voluntary and what in fact fits a particular idea of the voluntary. He writes, "there is pressure within [morality] to require a voluntariness that will be total and will cut through psychological or social determination, and allocate blame and responsibility on the ultimately fair basis of the agent's own contribution, no more and no less. "So the specifically moral idea of responsibility is the idea of a responsibility that goes "all the way down." If I am morally culpable for some action, it must be the case not only that I could have acted otherwise if I had chosen to, but also that I could have chosen to - and thus that I could, if I had chosen, have had the kind of character or been the kind of person who would have chosen differently than I did. Blame belongs to the morality system by being

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coupled with this notion of the voluntary - that is, when there is pressure to consider it justified only in relation to what satisfies this "deep" notion of the voluntary. One of Williams's objections to morality is that it is illusory to think that there is any responsibility of the type it requires. "This fact," he says, "is known to almost everyone, and it is hard to see a long future for a system committed to denying it" (ELP p. 194): To the extent that the institution of blame works coherently, it does so because it attempts less than morality would like it to do. When we ask whether someone acted voluntarily, we are asking roughly, whether he really acted, whether he knew what he was doing, and whether he intended this or that aspect of what happened. The practice takes the agent together with his character, and does not raise the question about his freedom to have chosen some other character. Within the morality system, on the other hand, blaming does raise this question. So moral blame - blame as it exists within the morality system - depends upon a defunct notion of the voluntary. This is the aspect of Williams's critique of morality that is most obviously like Nietzsche's. The first treatise of GM tells the story of the genesis of a specifically moral notion of goodness or virtue through the transformation of a previously existing aristocratic notion. The latter "good" is a nonmoral notion, for its contrasting term is "bad" (the equivalent of "common") and not "evil" (the equivalent of "immoral"). The big difference between "bad" and "evil," as Nietzsche uses these terms, is that "bad" has no accusatory or blaming connotation. The bad are bad, which is to say inferior, but they are not blamed or held responsible for being so. Nietzsche's suggestion is thus that the moralization of goodness took place through the acceptance of the "deep" notion of the voluntary - one that "goes all the way down" to a "being behind doing," to a characterless self who, according to one of Nietzsche's infamous passages, freely chooses to be a bird of prey or a lamb (GM 1:13). Nietzsche's reaction to the demand of morality for this kind of freedom is the same as Williams's: that almost everyone knows there is no such thing - and not because determinism is the case, but because such freedom would require an act of self-creation, creation ex nihilo, which Nietzsche calls "the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far . . . , a sort of rape and perversion of logic" (BGE 21). If the morality system does require the voluntary to go all the way down to such a free will, it is difficult not to agree with Williams (and Nietzsche) that there is not much future for it. But why should we think that morality itself requires that our actions

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be voluntary in a way that requires an old-fashioned free will? Let's grant that morality has been bound up with such a notion in some major part of its history. But why tie morality itself to such a notion? Why not say simply that Nietzsche attacks an illusion about freedom and responsibility that Hume and many others had already attacked, and that morality gets on quite well without it - indeed, as Hume argued, much better without it? The dominant tradition within Anglo-American moral philosophy since Hume is certainly to deny that freedom and moral responsibility require anything very much like self-creation ex nihilo. Williams is forced to count Utilitarianism as a marginal member of the morality system because of its commitment to allocating credit and blame without relying on the "deep" notion of responsibility. But then why isn't the existence of Utilitarianism evidence precisely of the ability of morality to outlive the notion of responsibility that Nietzsche and Williams both reject? Perhaps they are simply quibbling about names: about whether to use the name "morality" for a system that gives up the deep notion of the voluntary. I do not think so, but I need to examine the rest of Williams's account of morality to explain why.
Moral Obligation

The main focus of Williams's account and critique of morality is his analysis of moral obligation. The morality system is distinguished from other ethical outlooks, Williams claims, by "the special notion of obligation it uses," the notion of a specifically moral obligation. He argues that this special notion involves the transformation of a more ordinary (and, in effect, nonmoral) notion of obligation, which is only one ethical consideration among others, into the central ethical notion. On the surface, this may appear to have little connection to Nietzsche's concerns. If so, appearances are deceiving in this case. I will argue that Williams's analysis of moral obligation is importantly connected to Nietzsche's account of morality, and that elucidating this connection helps answer some important objections to Williams's critique. Williams's account of the transformation of the ordinary idea of obligation into moral obligation (about which more later) seems very similar to what Nietzsche attempts in the second treatise of GM. According to Nietzsche's account, the idea of specifically moral obligation develops from the realm of legal rights and obligations (GM 11:6). If we concentrate on GM's account of how legal obligations were enforced through sometimes gruesome punishments, it may not seem concerned with ethical obligations. Yes, punishment certainly instills a disposition to give certain considerations high deliberative priority, but this is not the kind

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of "internalized disposition" that Williams sees as central to ethical life. But Nietzsche agrees that the recognition of ethical obligations requires more than a disposition to avoid punishment. He contrasts the person who obeys rules simply out of fear of punishment with the person of conscience: a person who keeps his word - and who, more generally, can be relied on to do what his obligations require of him - not out of fear of punishment, but because his identity as a person of responsibility (a person who is permitted to make promises) requires this of him (GM 11:2). And this identity can only be understood in relation to an ethical community with whose aims he identifies. Nietzsche thus makes room for an ethical realm that grows from, but also can grow beyond, the legal. His person of conscience recognizes obligations in an ethical sense even though obligation has not yet undergone the process of moralization he describes later in GM II (a process I discuss in the next section of this essay). For both Williams and Nietzsche the special notion of moral obligation results from the moralization of the ordinary and quite unmysterious notion of obligation, which is already an ethical notion. The upshot of this moralization for both is that different components of ethical life are woven together in such a way that they become almost impossible to sort out, so that we have great difficulty gaining clarity about ethical life, and in getting a handle on the factors operating on us through it. To show us this is one of the main aims of Nietzsche's genealogical treatment of the concept of morality. It also is one of the main lessons we should learn from Williams's account of the construction of moral obligation. This connection between the two accounts is not obvious, however, because Williams's is presented as, and seems to be, an old-fashioned logical analysis. His strategy is to isolate a core or essence that distinguishes specifically moral obligation from ordinary obligations - obligation is moral obligation if it is the central ethical notion, so that an obligation can be overridden only by another obligation - and then to argue that the other features we attribute to the "moral" can be derived logically from this core. Nietzsche, however, denies that concepts that need analysis have a core or essence in terms of which they can be defined or analyzed. They need analysis precisely because they are products of complicated histories that have synthesized originally quite disparate elements into a unity that is difficult to untangle. Instead of isolating a core from which other characteristics can be derived, a Nietzschean analysis of a concept offers a genealogy of the concept's construction, the point of which is to sort out its different strands so that we can see what is actually involved in the concept and operating on us through it.12 But I believe that Williams's analysis of moral

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obligation can be recast in genealogical terms, and that this would be to its advantage. Williams's ordinary notion of obligation is that of a consideration given deliberative priority in order to secure reliability, that is, so that people can reasonably expect others to behave in certain ways (ELP p. 187). The most familiar type of obligation is based on a promise, and here the connection between obligation and reliability is readily apparent. Although what I have promised to do may have little importance in itself, I am expected to give it a high deliberative importance - that is, I am obliged to do it - because the point of my promise is to give others reason to rely on my doing it. Because a similar connection between obligation and reliability is present in other cases, Williams thinks we also have ethical obligations that we have not taken on voluntarily. To lead a recognizably human life, we might say, people have to have reason to expect certain treatment by others: for instance, "not being killed or used as a resource." One way people are given reason to count on such treatment is through the establishment of ethical life, which (among other things) instills a disposition to give the relevant considerations a high deliberative priority, and sometimes even a "virtually absolute priority, so that certain courses of action must come first, while others are ruled out from the beginning" (ELP p. 185). A community thus instills in its members a disposition to recognize certain obligations. But, according to Williams, there need be no implication that one simply must do whatever one is obliged to do, or that only another more important obligation gives one a reason for not doing so. However brutal the means for getting individuals to remember their obligations - and Nietzsche details some of these at the beginning of the second treatise of GM - being obligated or bound to do something is a matter simply of what others have reason to expect of me and to count on me for, not of what I must do. According to Williams, the morality system takes over this ordinary ethical notion of obligation and blows it up both in extent and importance, to the point that obligation becomes all-pervasive and inescapable. If I am morally obliged to do something, then I must do it. If I do not, I am subject to moral blame. The only excuse for not keeping a promise I have made is that I have another more stringent obligation, in which case I am not morally obliged to do as I promised. But since we can imagine all sorts of situations in which ethical concerns would justify breaking a promise, Williams thinks morality is under pressure to turn all such concerns into obligations. Because only an obligation can override an obligation, morality is forced to the idea of very general obligations, and thus to the idea that particular obligations are always instances of general

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obligations that apply to everyone. But these general obligations will now be "willing to provide work for idle hands, and the thought can gain a footing . . . that I could be better employed than in doing something I am under no obligation to do." In other words, the moralization of obligation, its transformation into the central ethical notion, leads to the idea that "I am under an obligation not to waste time doing things I am under no obligation to do." Obligation thus becomes an "intimidating structure" that threatens to "dominate life altogether" (ELP p. 182). It is widely assumed that Williams's major objection to morality is that it is overly demanding. As Darwall puts it, Williams believes that the moralist is committed to holding there to be almost no cases where general obligation does not apply," so that we are "always bound by morality." The moral life is thus a life of bondage (Darwall, pp. 75-7).'3 Darwall responds by arguing that while some moralists may have had such a picture of morality, there is "nothing in the notion of moral obligation to require, or even encourage" it. Moral common sense, he claims, rejects Williams's principle that an obligation can be overridden only by another obligation, for it "it is widely assumed that one is not obliged to do many things one would otherwise be morally obliged to do, if doing them would require personal sacrifice, or even sacrifice to loved ones, beyond a certain threshold, even though it would not be wrong to do what would otherwise be obligatory and incur the sacrifice" (ibid., p. 78). Further, an ordinary or prima facie obligation can be overridden by something nonobligatory that is of more moral importance than the obligation, as when one is not obliged to keep a promise if one chooses to undertake a nonobligatory but morally more important action that makes keeping the promise impossible.14 So it seems "that it can frequently happen that a moral obligation to do something can be canceled by further features of the situation other than an overriding obligation to act otherwise" (ibid., p. 79). Darwall grants that nothing overrides what one is morally obliged to do, if that means what one should do (what it would be wrong not to do) all things considered. But, as we have already seen (from the considerations of personal sacrifice, for instance), morality can permit us to do what we are not obliged to do in this sense (what it would not be wrong not to do), and it allows obligations in the ordinary sense to be canceled by features of the situation other than obligation in the ordinary or the all-things-considered sense. Darwall suggests that Williams is confusing the two senses of "obligation" he himself distinguishes, taking the fact that obligation in the sense of an all-things-considered conclusion (our actual moral obligation) cannot be overridden as evidence that ordinary or prima facie obligations cannot be overridden by anything that is not

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conceived of as obligatory. Otherwise he cannot see how Williams could have found it plausible that only an obligation can override an obligation, and therefore that morality pushes us toward an overly demanding life of ubiquitous obligation (ibid., p. 81). I believe that Williams's best chance of answering these criticisms is to give up his emphasis on the logic of moral obligation - and with it the principle that only an obligation can override an obligation - and go over to Nietzsche's more genealogical and psychological account of the concept. But wouldn't this undermine his criticism that morality is overly demanding by depriving him of any basis for claiming that morality must give rise to a series of general obligations and that it thus threatens to "dominate life altogether"? (ELP p. 182). Perhaps, but I do not consider that a loss. Although Williams certainly stresses the demanding character of morality, this is not his objection to it. He formulates his objection to morality in very different terms: namely, that "many philosophical mistakes are woven into it" (ELP p. 196). The first mistake, he says, is the misunderstanding of obligation, which is not recognized as "just one type of ethical consideration." It is hardly surprising that the discussion of Williams's opposition to morality has not focused on this claim, for it is difficult to make sense of. As I understand Williams, the "morality system" is constituted by a specific interrelation of the ethical concepts found within it. Obligation becomes part of the morality system precisely when it is no longer just one type of ethical consideration but has become the central one (and when other concepts figure in this system by existing in certain logical relations to the supremacy of obligation - such as following from it). That is presumably how it can come to "dominate life altogether." I can understand why this would be a bad thing. But why is it a "philosophical mistake"? I began to make sense of this only when I remembered Nietzsche's line: "Morality is merely an interpretation of certain phenomena, more precisely, a misinterpretation" (TI VI:1).15 Williams's objection to morality, I began to see, is that it involves a misinterpretation of ethical life. Williams in effect offers a genealogical account of moral obligation, arguing that the special notion of moral obligation was constructed by taking the ordinary idea of obligation and re-interpreting it as the central ethical consideration, thereby arriving at the all-things-considered judgment of morality. Obligations in the ordinary sense are still in play, but now we also apparently have obligation in a new sense: the all-thingsconsidered judgment of what one morally ought to do. And we have conferred on this all-things-considered judgment all of the characteristics and expectations that belong to obligations in the ordinary sense - espe-

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cially the blame, reproach, or guilt that attaches to nonfulfillment of the latter. The problem is to understand why Williams thinks this involves a philosophical mistake. What "mistake" is involved in modeling the allthings-considered judgment of morality after obligations in the ordinary sense? I suggest that Williams believes it involves a conflation that keeps us from seeing the truth about ethical life. The conflation is between obligation in the ordinary sense and conclusions of practical necessity, judgments about what one categorically must do. Williams agrees with moralists that there are for human beings matters of unconditioned practical necessity, categorical imperatives in Kant's terms, but he denies that any imperatives are independent of desire. He thinks, in opposition to Kant, that an imperative can be unconditioned without being independent of desire, if the desire it depends on is essential to the agent and must be satisfied (ELP p. 189). Which desires are essential is presumably determined by the individual's identity. Christine Korsgaard has recently argued that obligations spring from what one's identity forbids.16 Williams's point, in contrast, is that one's obligations spring from what other people have reason to expect of you, to rely on you for. What binds me, even in the case of a promise, is something outside of me, what another person has reason to expect from me. What my identity determines is what I categorically must do (as well as what it would be good or nice for me to do).17 Obligation comes from without, practical necessity comes from within. Williams's claim, as I am now understanding it under Nietzsche's influence, is that morality runs these two together, thereby giving rise to the illusion of a moral law above or outside of the agent. The illusion involved here is a misperception of the voice of practical necessity as coming from without, when it actually comes from within. This is the first philosophical mistake that Williams finds woven into the moral interpretation of ethical life. The second mistake is the misunderstanding of practical necessity, which is taken to be "peculiar to the ethical." In this case, Williams's claim is more obviously that morality is a misinterpretation of the ethical - a mistaken interpretation of the practical necessity found in ethical life as peculiar to the ethical sphere. That this is a mistake follows once we recognize the differing sources of obligation and conclusions of unconditioned practical necessity, of what one categorically must do. To the extent that my identity includes involvement in an ethical community, some conclusions of practical necessity will undoubtedly concern my obligations to others. There will be some obligations I simply must fulfill to be able to live with myself, that is, to be the person I take myself to

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be. Other conclusions of practical necessity will be ethical in character without being obligations: These concern what my identity requires of me in relation to others, even though others do not have a right to expect it from me. However, a person's identity - the description under which she considers her life worth living18 - can also be tied up with concerns that do not, or at least need not, count as ethical: for example, art or philosophy or sports. Once we accept that conclusions of practical necessity follow from one's identity, it becomes obvious that they cannot be confined to ethical conclusions. It is then difficult to uphold the thesis that ethical concerns are overriding, for nothing seems to prevent the possibility of what I must do, all things considered, being in conflict with my obligations and ethical commitments. That is precisely the case of Gauguin as presented in Williams's essay "Moral Luck." If my Nietzschean-inspired interpretation is correct, Williams's case against morality does not rest (contrary to Darwall) on a conflation of the two types of obligation he himself distinguishes. It depends instead on being able to make it plausible that the moral interpretation of ethical experience (and in particular the idea of moral obligation as an allthings-considered conclusion) conflates and hides from view a distinction we ought to accept: between obligations, on the one hand, and conclusions of practical necessity, on the other. What is principally hidden from view by the idea of moral obligation is the fact that obligations are rooted outside of us, in other people's expectations and the conditions of ethical life, whereas conclusions of unconditional practical necessity are rooted in one's own identity. Williams needs to make it plausible that these two distinct notions are run together to produce the notion of specifically moral obligation, and that this results in a loss of clarity about the factors operating on us by means of our ethical consciousness. The importance of our own identity eludes us; we take our own voice as a command that comes from outside or "on high." Serious problems still stand in Williams's way. For it seems likely that morality can survive the demystification that comes from realizing that the commanding voice of practical reason comes, as Williams puts it, from "deep within." Why can't moral commands be understood as ethical demands made by our identity - or our essential desires - against desires that we would merely like to act on? The existence of internal conflict would explain both the command aspect and the fact that the command seems to come from above. Nor is it clear that morality must cover over the role played by ordinary obligations in ethical life. As Darwall puts this point:

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Williams himself believes we should recognize obligations (he refuses to call them "moral") and correlative rights that one "cannot ignore without blame." Like almost any moralist, he says that obligation "is grounded in the basic issue of what people should be able to rely on." And he includes under this rubric the traditional negative obligations and obligations to aid when the need is "immediate." How does this differ in substance from the status that moral obligations are ordinarily thought to have ...? The differences one might have expected are simply not there.19 Thus, as in the case of his critique of the deep notion of the voluntary, it is not clear that the points used here to support WiUiams's claim about the first mistake woven into morality - the conflation of obligation and conclusions of practical necessity - say anything of substance about ethical life with which those committed to morality must disagree. The same problem emerges in relation to the second philosophical mistake that Williams finds in morality: the misinterpretation of practical necessity as peculiar to the ethical, which yields the conclusion that morality is overriding. Although many moral theorists defend the overridingness of moral concerns, others now seem willing to dispense with such privilege. For instance, Scheffler argues in Human Morality that the loss of overridingness is a problem for moralists only if they assume that morality must have a special source in order to have authority. He then argues that morality has sufficient authority in our lives even if it does not have a special source that makes it superior to all else. This follows in large part from the widely accepted view that moral beliefs and concerns are woven throughout the fabric of human life, that they are "implicated in a wide range of human emotions and attitudes" - guilt, remorse, indignation, resentment, conscientiousness, and a sense of indebtedness, for instance - and that "a liability to experience these emotions and attitudes is in turn a prerequisite for participation in important human relations of various kinds."20 Even if we cannot deny that it is ever rational to act against moral concerns - for Gauguin to leave his family and take off for Tahiti - morality plays a large enough part in our lives that moral concerns often enough attain what Scheffler calls "authoritative status," the status of WiUiams's categorical "must." Scheffler thinks the Freudian theory of the superego is a good example of a theory that finds enough motivational authority for conscience in the natural world that we do not need Kantian metaphysics or any other special source for moral obligation. Williams, who writes as if some fairly deep changes are needed if we are to move beyond the illusions of morality, clearly cannot accept Scheffler's answer to his criticisms, for it implies that we need at most to make some fairly small changes in how we think about morality - in particu-

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lar, changes that make it more forgiving and less demanding than it is when interpreted by (for instance) the more extreme Utilitarians. However, it is difficult to see what basis he has for substantive disagreement with Scheffler. Williams clearly thinks ethical concerns are woven into the fabric of human life, that they are essential to human emotions and relations, and that they have authority (if not overridingness) in human life. He does not want to call these ethical concerns "moral." But since he seems to say about the ethical everything Scheffler says about the moral, it looks as if, as in the case of Williams's claims about the connection between moral blame and the deep notion of the voluntary, what is at stake is merely a verbal matter - a dispute about how to use the word "moral."
Guilt and Shame

I suggest that this objection can be answered by a more Nietzschean interpretation of Williams's critique of morality than I have so far offered. My thought is that Williams is moving toward this account in ELP, but fully reaches it only in SN. Nietzsche's account of the moralization of obligation is found in GM's story of the origins of guilt, which begins with the "morality of custom" (die Sittlichkeit der Sitte). The customs that belonged to the ancient morality (in the broad sense) that Nietzsche has in mind here become primitive versions of moral rules insofar as punishment is attached to violations. They function as societal standards of forbidden and acceptable behavior but lack certain features we associate with morality - for instance, a connection to guilt. These rules do not constitute standards of specifically moral right and wrong, we might say, because violators were not blamed or considered guilty - at least not in the moral sense. According to Nietzsche's account, the most primitive version of guilt is debt. The relationship between the community and its members was thought of on the model of the creditor/debtor relationship, so that obedience to the rules was conceived of as something one owes the community, an obligation or debt one incurs in exchange for the advantages of community life. The community naturally reacts to the violation of its rules with anger, as "a deceived creditor [who will] exact payment as best it can":
Here it is least of all a matter of the direct injury inflicted by the injuring party; quite apart from this, the criminal is above all a "breaker," one who breaks his contract with the whole, in relation to all the goods and conveniences of communal life in which he has until this point had his share. The criminal is a debtor who not only fails to pay back his creditor, but also even lays a hand on his cred-

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itor; he therefore not only forfeits all of these goods and advantages from now on, as is fair, - he is now also reminded how much there is to these goods. The anger of the injured creditor, of the community, gives him back again to the wild and outlawed condition from which he was previously protected: it expels him from itself, and now every kind of hostility may vent itself on him. At this level of civilization "punishment" is simply the copy, the mimus of normal behavior towards the hated, disarmed, defeated enemy, who has forfeited not only every right and protection, but also every mercy; in other words, the law of war and the victory celebration of vae victis! [woe to the vanquished!] in all their ruthlessness and cruelty. (GM 11:9)

When the community grows stronger and more secure, violations of its rules are no longer as dangerous to the "continued existence of the whole as they once were." The creditor now becomes "more humane" and finds a way to allow the debtor to pay off his debt and remain within the community, namely, through his own suffering. "Punishment" is no longer a mere venting of hostility on a defenseless "enemy of the people," but is a way in which one works off one's guilt, pays one's debt to society.21 Nietzsche clearly denies that the obligations or debts so far involved in his story have yet been moralized. Obligation is moral obligation only if the debt one owes for failure is moral guilt. The debt one pays off through punishment is only a primitive version of guilt, which is here a "material" concept rather than a moral one. But how exactly does moral guilt differ from primitive guilt - that is, from mere debt? Nietzsche's answer is complicated, but he makes clear that moralization of guilt and duty is a process of "their being pushed back into conscience, more precisely the entanglement of bad conscience with the concept of God" (GM 11:21). Nietzsche analyzes bad conscience, the sense of oneself as guilty, as the internalization of aggression. When community rules and the attached punishments prevented individuals from expressing aggressive and hostile impulses externally, they turned these same impulses back against themselves. I do not think this should be taken to mean that all internalization of hostile or aggressive impulses involves a sense of guilt. It is only when one internalizes the hostile attitude of one who thinks you owe him - in particular, that you deserve to suffer for what you have done - that it seems to be guilt. What does the concept of God have to do with this? I think the point is that the moralization of debt into guilt takes place when the concept God becomes an instrument for the turning back of hostility against the self. The concept of God or the divine is a concept of value. The Greek gods, on the one hand, according to Nietzsche, were reflections of what

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the Greeks valued in themselves (combined with a lot more power than they themselves had).The Judeo-Christian God, on the other hand, is the projection of a value human beings can never come close to attaining, a being who is the opposite of their "ineluctable animal nature." This God is a product of the involvement of the concept of God with the bad conscience, the use of the concept of the divine as an instrument of self-torture. The debt humans are thought to owe this God is also an instrument of self-torture. What makes the debt one owes this God moral rather than material, I believe, is that it is taken to reflect one's worth as a person. This is not true in the case of primitive guilt. There I owe a debt, I pay it off. People may be angry at me for violating the rules, they may enjoy inflicting punishment to collect the debt I owe, and maybe they even think less of me for one reason or another because I owe this debt; or maybe they do not. The point is: My guilt is merely a debt I owe; it is not itself a matter of my worth as a person. I may deserve to be punished that is the debt I owe society - but the judgment that I deserve punishment need not carry with it a judgment of my worth as a person. In the moral case, however, guilt does carry with it a judgment of the person. I may be guilty because of something I did to you, but my guilt is a condition of my soul - a black mark upon it, as it were, something that should affect my sense of my own worth. This fits with one of the central claims of Nietzsche's Genealogy, that standards of right or wrong and standards of personal worth (goodness in the sense of virtue) have quite different sources, and hence constitute distinct strands in the concept of morality. Moral guilt, as I have tried to understand it, is the site of the intertwining of the right and the good within what Williams calls the "morality system." And, as I will try to show, the intertwining that gives rise to specifically moral guilt, according to Nietzsche, hides the structure of ethical life from view in a way that is structurally similar to what Williams thinks goes on in the genealogy of specifically moral obligation. In Nietzsche's account of moral guilt, there are two different relations: the relation of the individual to someone she has injured or failed in some way, and then the self's relation to the standards she accepts for a good person. Realizing - under the influence of Williams's SN - that moral guilt makes it easy to conflate these two relations finally allowed me to understand one of the sayings of Nietzsche's fictional character and alter-ego Zarathustra: "And if a friend does you evil, then say: 'I forgive you what you did to me; but that you have done that to yourself - how could I forgive that?' Thus speaks all great love: it overcomes even forgiveness and compassion" (Z 11:3).

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This had always struck me as arrogant. After all, who asked Zarathustra to forgive what his friend did to himself? I now realize Zarathustra's point to his friend is: I can forgive you your debt to me (let you off the hook, no longer hold it against you), but that is no solution to the problem moral guilt gives you with yourself. If what you did to me shows you are less than you thought you were, my forgiveness will not help with that, although seeking it may help to distract you from the issue. The moral interpretation of guilt makes it easy to distract oneself from one's problem with oneself by concentrating on one's anxiety or need for forgiveness in relation to another. But it can work the other way too: We are distracted from what we did to another person - and also from what we can do to help that person deal with what we did - because we are too involved in feeling bad about our own unworthiness; and what we really want from the one we have injured is a canceling of that unworthiness. The moralized version of guilt makes it very difficult to sort out these two relations. Nietzsche's account suggests that if they are sorted out, then if I regret what I did to another, it will be natural for me to consider myself in some version of indebtedness to that person - to want to make amends, for instance. But I will see the issue of what my action means about me and my worth to be a separate matter. And if it means that I have not lived up to what I expect of myself, then I will feel some version of disappointment or shame rather than guilt.22 I believe that Williams had a grip on this Nietzschean point all along, but he makes it explicit only in SN. Here he considers cases in which a person feels guilt when there is no question of wrong to others or reparation: "Robbed of these implications, guilt narrows down suspectly to a desire for punishment. It might then be helpfully replaced by what it should have been in the first place, shame" (SN p. 93). Williams thus suggests that if we were not confused by the moral interpretation of ethical life, this is what we would have when we regret having caused harm to another person: some attempt at reparation in relation to the other, and a quite separate coming to terms with what that means about oneself. If it means that one has not lived up to what one expects of oneself, he thinks some version of shame is called for, not guilt. In ELP Williams located morality's conflation between relations to others and one's relation to one's own standards of goodness or worth in the conflation between obligations to others and the all-thingsconsidered judgment of practical necessity that he finds in the idea of specifically moral obligation. I have suggested that to answer the criticism that his critique of morality comes down to a merely verbal matter, he needs to give plausibility to the idea that the naturalistic accounts of

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morality offered by, for instance, Scheffler and Korsgaard still cover over something about ethical life. I have tried to show that he is able to do this with the help of the more Nietzschean analysis of this conflation in terms of guilt that he offers in SN. The latter's Nietzschean analysis of moral guilt completes the analysis of morality given in ELP in a way that supports that claim that the moral interpretation covers over something about ethical life. Williams can argue that Scheffler, for instance, continues this coverup when he takes for granted that the natural response to violating one's own internalized standards is guilt, not shame.
Morality's Purity and the Ascetic Ideal

In this concluding section I turn, very briefly, to what I consider the most deeply Nietzschean element in Williams's critique of morality, and one that is fully present in ELP. Neither Williams nor Nietzsche believes that the mistakes or illusions of morality - its commitment to the deep notion of the voluntary and lack of clarity it induces concerning ethical life - constitute its ultimate problem. Although Williams spends most of his analysis on these philosophical mistakes, his ultimate charge against morality is that these mistakes are the most abstract expression of a nihilistic ideal. That is not Williams's own formulation, but my Nietzschean rendition of it. Williams actually says that the philosophical mistakes in question reflect a "deeply rooted and still powerful misconception of life," but it is clear that the vision of life he has in mind is the expression of an ideal or value. He explains that morality
emphasizes a series of contrasts, between force and reason, persuasion and rational conviction, shame and guilt, dislike and disapproval, mere rejection and blame. The attitude that leads it to emphasize all these contrasts can be labeled its purity, [which is] its insistence on abstracting the moral consciousness from other kinds of emotional reaction or social influence. (ELP p. 195)

What does morality's insistence on purity amount to? Williams says that the purity of morality expresses an ideal, the ideal that human existence can be ultimately just: "The ideal of morality is a value, moral value, that transcends luck." Insofar as it is to transcend luck, moral value must be pure in the sense that it must, as Williams puts it, "lie beyond any empirical determination." To hold purity as one's ideal, I take it, is to think that true value attaches only to what is separated out from the normal "muck" of human life. Moral (truly valuable) versions of worth, motivation, and emotions must therefore be separated from the non-moral as much as possible by virtue of the former's pure or nonempirical source.

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The upshot is what Nietzsche calls "nihilism," because in this way, according to Williams, morality "makes people think that without its very special obligation, there is only inclination; without its utter voluntariness, there is only force; without its ultimately pure justice, there is no justice" (ELP p. 196). In other words, the moral interpretation of ethical existence has been rooted in illusions, such as the deep notion of the voluntary, that are more and more exposed as illusions. It cannot therefore continue to serve our ethical needs. But as long as it remains in its remnant form, it serves to devalue any other alternative. Its ideal of purity has deprived the resources such an alternative could use of all value. This is Nietzsche's ultimate problem with morality. Nietzsche calls the ideal he finds behind morality the ascetic ideal, and he considers this a nihilistic ideal because it devalues everything that is merely natural (as opposed to supernatural). But it also leads, through its encouragement to the will to truth, to the realization that there is nothing but the natural, that all belief in the supernatural or the nonempirical is a lie, on the same order as the lie involved in belief in God. The upshot is that the illusions on which morality is based are exposed by its own ideal. Although many people hold on to the illusions, there is a great weakening of confidence in morality. On Nietzsche's account, morality is dead in the same sense and to about the same extent that God is dead. The deed has already been done, and its effects will become more and more apparent as time goes on. But why did Nietzsche devote so much of his life to fighting what was already dead anyway? I believe it was an attempt to show us where morality and its nihilistic ideal are still strong: in preventing the development of new ideals. The nihilism of the moral tradition leads to the death of morality, but also to the view that nothing else is good enough to replace it. And this part of Nietzsche's thought is what I believe Williams is on to in his critique of morality's purity.
NOTES 1. As Stephen Darwall points out in "Abolishing Morality," Synthese 72 (1987), p. 73. 2. That is, to "Modern Moral Philosophy." See G. E. M. Anscombe, Collected Philosophical Papers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), vol. 3, pp. 26-42. 3. When I suggested this to Williams, he said that my suspicion might be right, that he had actually been under contract to write a book on Nietzsche (during the 1970s, I believe), and that he had arranged time away from teaching to do so. He did not write it, however, because he was unable to solve "the problem of Nietzsche's style." He added that he now believes that Alexander

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4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

Nehamas's account of Nietzsche's use of hyperbole in Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985) would have helped him solve the problem. This suggests that Williams was very sympathetic from early on to what he took to be the content of Nietzsche's thought, but not to what he perceived as its rhetorical excesses. It also explains why we do not find frequent references to Nietzsche in Williams's earlier work even if, as I believe, he was a major influence on it. This is Williams's formulation in "Moral Luck: A Postscript," in Making Sense of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 241; and I believe this is also what he means by the "ethical" in ELP. I argue for this claim and discuss some other interpretations in "Nietzsche's Immoralism and the Concept of Morality," Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality, ed. Richard Schacht (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 15-34. For a more extended treatment of other interpretations and an important view that differs from the one I defend, see Brian Leiter, "Morality in the Pejorative Sense: On the Logic of Nietzsche's Critique of Morality," British Journal for the History of Philosophy 3 (1995): 113-45. For an alternative and much more complex way of dissolving the apparent inconsistency, see the paper by B. Leiter cited in the previous note. For a more detailed account, see my comments on BGE 202 in "Nietzsche's Immoralism and the Concept of Morality," p. 32, n.6. I refer to her "Nietzsche: The Revaluation of Values," Nietzsche: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert Solomon (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1973). The paper entitled "Nietzsche's Immoralism," which is reprinted in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality, is much later (it was originally published in 1991) and adds little to the earlier paper. Foot claims, for instance, that Nietzsche was willing "to throw out justice in the interests of producing a stronger and more splendid type of man" ("The Revaluation of Values," p. 166). For a more detailed account, see John Skorupski, "The Definition of Morality," in Ethics (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 35), ed. A. Philip Griffiths. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. According to Gibbard's analysis, we should add here something to the effect of "in the absence of extenuating circumstances." Otherwise we have no room to say that someone did something wrong, even though we do not think we would be justified in blaming them for this because of any of a number of special circumstances. See Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices and Apt Feelings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 43-5. For a more detailed account, see "Nietzsche's Immoralism and the Concept of Morality," p. 20 ff. Numbers in this paragraph and the next all refer to Darwall's "Abolishing Morality" (see note 1 above). Darwall cites Frances Kamm's example of a clear case where something of more moral importance overrides an obligation. Suppose I am morally obliged to do something because of a promise I have made, but en route to keeping my promise I am confronted with a situation in which I could save a stranger's life by doing something no one could reasonably think I was obligated to do: for example, giving up one of my kidneys. Moralists surely need not say that it is morally permissible to give up my kidney only if I am obligated to do so, because I am otherwise morally obliged to keep my promise.

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15. I must admit that, as Brian Leiter has pointed out to me, I have taken this sentence out of context. In context the sentence seems to mean that morality is a misinterpretation not of ethical life, as I go on to suggest, but of certain natural phenomena, such as of causality. However, the sentence worked on me with a suggestiveness that transcended its meaning in context, and it allowed me to recognize something in GM for which there is plenty of evidence, but which I might otherwise not have been brought to see in it: that Nietzsche is there analyzing morality as an interpretation, specifically an ascetic interpretation, of ethical life. 16. Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp. pp. 100-3. 17. Williams pointed out the addition in parentheses to me in conversation after hearing an earlier version of this paper. 18. This is borrowed from Korsgaard's The Sources of Normativity, p. 101. 19. Darwall, p. 82. 20. Scheffler, Human Morality, p. 69. 21. I leave to the side here the issue of what Nietzsche thinks it shows about human psychology that suffering constitutes a typical way in which criminals are expected to pay off their debts to society. 22. However, this does not mean that the ideal situation for Nietzsche is that we simply feel shame rather than guilt. In fact, it is clear that Nietzsche's ideal involves the overcoming of shame. Consider the ending lines of part three of The Gay Science: "Whom do you call bad! Those who always want to put to shame." " What do you consider most humane"] To spare someone shame." "What is the seal of liberation? No longer being ashamed in front of oneself" (GS 273-5). Nietzsche's problem with the moralized version of guilt is that shame is hidden in it, and it must be exposed to be overcome. See John Kekes, "Shame and Moral Progress," Midwest Studies in Philosophy XIII (1988): 282-96, for an argument to the effect that "whatever value there is in shame can be achieved in less self-destructive ways."

Nietzsche's Virtues: A Personal Inquiry

ROBERT C. SOLOMON

Give style to your character, a great and rare art.

Nietzsche, The Gay Science

What are we to make of Nietzsche? There has been an explosion of scholarship over the past twenty years, much of it revealing and insightful, a good deal of it controversial if not polemical. The controversy and polemics are for the most part straight from Nietzsche, of course, and the scholarly disputes over what he "really" meant are rather innocuous and often academic compared with what Nietzsche meant (or might have meant) with his conscientiously inflammatory rhetoric and hyperbole. We have been treated to extended debates about Nietzsche's politics, his attacks on Christianity and morality, his famed notion of the Ubermensch, and his less lampooned (but more edifying) doctrine of the "eternal recurrence." We have recently heard Nietzsche reinterpreted as an analytic philosopher, as a deconstructionist, as a feminist, even as a closest Christian and a liberal. Stephen Aschheim suggests in his recent book1 that Nietzsche provides us with something like a Rorschach test, inviting readers with amazingly different commitments and ideologies to "make their own Nietzsche" (as a TLS review bluntly put it). But there is another approach to Nietzsche, quite different from interpreting him in terms of his various "theses" and positions, unpacking his "system" or repeating unhelpfully that he displayed no such coherence and consistency - something more than finding out "who" Nietzsche is as opposed to what we have made out of him. The simplest way of getting at this alternative approach might be to ask: What would Nietzsche make of us? I grant that this is a bit cryptic, and it invites a variety of unflattering answers. But I think it is very much in the spirit of what he (and his spokesman Zarathustra) are all about. It is an intimately personal approach to Nietzsche - an approach that will, no doubt, be somewhat different for each and every one of us. But that, too, of course, is just what Nietzsche (and Zarathustra) would have demanded.

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Friedrich Nietzsche: Moral Adviser

If philosophy is to have a future, it must be something more than academic analysis and hermetically sealed social criticism. Nietzsche isn't just an analyst or diagnostician. Nietzsche changes lives. Let me give you a very personal example. It has to do with Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal recurrence - the thesis that whatever happens, whatever we do, whatever we suffer, has and will repeat itself (in sequence) an innumerable number of times. Despite the few passages and short shrift Nietzsche gives to this thesis, an enormous amount of ink has been spilled or jetted out of computer printers concerning its meaning. As a physical hypothesis, I am rather willing to dismiss the thesis out of hand as a combination of outdated physics and too-casual calculation. (After all, those were only "notes.")2 As a serious ethical proposal - say, along the lines of Kant's "Categorical Imperative" - it is readily obvious that Nietzsche's "test" is too subjective and personal, whereas Kant intends his ethics to be thoroughly objective (that is, rational and impersonal). Moreover, it says nothing whatever about the content of one's life, its ambitions, pleasures and pains, achievements and failures, much less about the person except, of course, for his or her (momentary) attitude toward that content. As a subjective or psychological thought-experiment, there may be much to be said and debated (for instance, the scope of the "moments" to be affirmed in the light of the thesis), but I find little reason to lean toward one or another such interpretation on the basis of the bare-bones sketch in Nietzsche's texts. And yet, when I first read and heard about the doctrine of eternal recurrence, while auditing Frithjof Bergmann's "Philosophy in Literature" class at the University of Michigan several decades ago, it provided me with the philosophical resolve to take a close look at my life (I was an unhappy first-year medical student at the time), apply what I then clearly conceived to be the personal "test" of the idea of recurrence and fifteen minutes later (more or less) I resigned from the medical school and entered into a life of philosophy. It was a decision I have never regretted. Now, it might be the case that my life has been based on a misunderstanding of Nietzsche - a somewhat cruel suggestion, perhaps, but one to which my response would certainly be the Vonnegutian "So it goes." I do not know exactly what Nietzsche had in mind by what Bernd Magnus has nicely called his "existential imperative," but the idea of eternal recurrence certainly had a dramatic affect on me, at least. I actually tend to doubt that Nietzsche had anything very precise in mind by it, despite his occasional enthusiasm and now the precision of several recent, excellent commentaries on the idea.3 I certainly doubt that he

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ever conceived of it as a device to precipitate an end to wrong-headed professional career ambitions. I am confident, however, that what did interest him was (in some very qualified sense) the transformation of his readers by way of his writings, through intensive self-scrutiny, the pun-ful "going under" (undergoing) that pervades the early fragments of Zarathustra. In that case - in my case - he certainly succeeded. If this essay is to be something more than a not very interesting piece of my own autobiography, however, much more must be said about the nature of the suggestiveness of Nietzsche's philosophy, and the kinds of prescriptions and instructions he dispenses. Without speculating about his real intentions, and quite apart from the actual results that readings of Nietzsche have produced (not all of which have been as harmless as my conversion to philosophy), there is a substantial body of writing in his many books that can only be understood, I would argue, as what might be called moral advice. To be sure, it is often oracular advise, as mischievously equivocal and ironic as those ancient voices that sent kings (and philosophers) to their deaths (and worse). But it has been strongly suggested, by Bernd Magnus and Alexander Nehamas, for example, that Nietzsche had nothing of the sort to offer. Indeed, it can readily be shown on the basis of any number of his texts that he rejected the very idea of moral advice on the ground that one must "find one's own way." Such an insistence permeates Zarathustra: "If you would go high, use your own legs" (Z IV:10), for example. One might say that Nietzsche, like Socrates, did not believe that "virtue could be taught." Any view to the contrary - that philosophy can not only stimulate but in some sense teach virtue - is to make Nietzsche out to be "some sort of sublime philosophical Ann Landers," as Magnus has rather unkindly put it." But that is precisely the Nietzsche I want to explore here. The above quote from Zarathustra, for instance, "If you would go high, use your own legs," can be interpreted as a rejection of advice; but it can also be construed as itself a piece of advice - indeed, one of many versions of Nietzsche most pervasive word of advice, "Become who you are."5 It is my contention that Nietzsche's works are filled with such advice - not along the lines of "don't lie" and "change your underwear daily," perhaps, but rather by way of being purposively provocative, provoking self-scrutiny in specific directions and along certain dimensions, not to mention his many little lessons and suggestions about such Ann Landerish matters as love, friendship, diet, and weightier matters such as war and gossip. A quick glance at Daybreak or Human, All Too Human, for instance, reveals hundreds of such tidbits as "The best means of coming to the aid of people who suffer greatly from embarrassment and of calming them down is to single them out for praise" (HH 1:301). That

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is advice, plain and simple, although perhaps more appropriate to Judith Martin ("Miss Manners") than Ann Landers. We should hardly call it "sublime." Often Nietzsche's advice has to be scooped out of a context in which it is not clearly asserted. For example, in the first two books of Zarathustra, Nietzsche's (Zarathustra's) views are often posed in the form of questions, quotations or by way of his reactions to the usually odd or grotesque characters he meets along the way. For instance: Yet Zarathustra did not come to say to all these liars and fools: "What do you know of virtue? What could you know of virtue?" Rather, that you, my friends, might grow weary of the old words you have learned from the fools and liars. Weary of the words: reward, retribution, punishment, and revenge in justice. Weary of saying: what makes an act good is that it is unselfish. Oh, my friends, that your self be in your deed as the mother is in her child let that be your word concerning virtue! (Z 11:5) This is a rich condensation of a number of central Nietzschean themes, and it is hard to see how they could be construed as other than the giving of (profound) moral advice. But there is no simple imperative to be found here. It is not at all clear who is being addressed. (Who are the "friends" - the same liars and fools, or are we the friends - or the liars and fools?) Indeed, it is not at all clear what sort of utterance follows the "rather." This much is clear: Much of the message is negative, "words to be weary of," although the point is not just about "words," to be sure. And yet the imagery is undeniably positive. It is an incitement to virtue. (And one might note here, as elsewhere, Nietzsche's use of an unusually saccharine philosophical metaphor, the maternal metaphor.)6 Nietzsche's advice is often embedded in sarcasm, encased in the words of an imaginary or projected speaker ("You will be quick to insist that..."). It is often expressed in exaggerated or opaque metaphors ("that your self be in your deed as the mother is in her child"). It is sometimes hidden in a long historical or sociological description. (I would read virtually the whole of On the Genealogy of Morals this way, for example.) Some postmodern readers, like those earlier twentieth-century readers who declared Nietzsche "the great destroyer," insist that Nietzsche "has nothing to say" - that is, nothing instructive, much less imperative, nothing remotely by way of advice, much less a "moral [normative] theory." Indeed, it is now a matter of routine for philosophers to compare Nietzsche's strident criticism with "deconstruction," suggesting that neither he nor deconstruction presents (or can, by its own lights, present) any such thesis. I would say this is wrong on at least two counts, since both deconstructionists and Nietzsche are capable of making and make

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many moral commitments.71 will not defend the former here, nor would I encourage the already tired comparison between them. But to say that Nietzsche's writing is descriptive, purely destructive, or merely nonassertive "play" is surely indefensible. Nietzsche (like Socrates) gave "moral advice." It was what he was all about. His whole philosophy, too, is aimed at provoking self-examination and self-"undergoing," to "know thyself," to cultivate the virtues and, ultimately, to "become who you are." Nevertheless, like Socrates, Nietzsche's criticisms are far more trenchant than the concrete implications of his moral advice. (Socrates' constant reminders - as he devastates his interlocutors' arguments - that we should always cultivate our virtues and care for our souls hardly entails any specific behavior, including his own.) To make matter more difficult, any account of Nietzsche's philosophy, even a "personal" one, must make allowances for the multiple inconsistencies in his texts, including his inconsistencies in giving advice and refusing to do so. (Again, the comparison with Socrates, or rather with Plato's various dialogues, is obvious, but this is already wearing a bit thin.)8 But this does not mean that Nietzsche had nothing of the sort to say. Rather, he had too much of the sort to say - or rather, he didn't have it all straight in his own mind; or at least, he changed his mind, sometimes within the frame of a single work. There's lots of advice - too much advice, too many different hints, winks, suggestions, and arguments, often competing and allowing very different interpretations. Perhaps it is true, as Aschheim's sobering study of Nietzsche's reception reminds us, that we all "make our own Nietzsche," whether by design or by mistake, no matter how good and careful the scholarship, no matter how thorough the reading. Perhaps there is no "real Nietzsche." And, of course, one can always add the now standard Nietzschean disclaimer, "This too is only an interpretation." But isn't that often just another bit of postmodern hypocrisy, a deflection of any possible disagreement and a disavowal of any responsibility? And in any event, the Nietzschean question that should follow and then be pursued is "But what, then, does that interpretation do for you? What will it make of you?" That is a personal, even intrusive question that is too rarely approached in the voluminous and too often impersonal Nietzsche literature. Nietzsche's Ethical Imperative: "Become Who You Are!" "Man's character is his fate." - Heraclitus "Become who you are!" Nietzsche says to us, again and again. What does that mean? It seems to presume a theory (or, at any rate, a conception)

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of the self - a self that is (in some sense) already present, as potential, as not only a possibility but something of an obligation. It presents itself as an ethics, a series of "oughts," even if those oughts are in everyone's case individually determined. It is also, despite its tautology-like appearance, an aggressive attack on a multitude of popular ethical pretensions. Nietzsche's targets include "the improvers of mankind," those who would ignore or deny actual human natures in pursuit of (usually impossible) ideals or models, moralists who would oppose "principles of practical reason" to the natural inclinations, educators who would straightjacket children and young people into the banal, conformist images of "the good citizen," and Christians of the sort who insist on the importance of a future "other-worldly" existence at the expense of our "this-worldly" one, and on the importance of one's inner soul-pellet as opposed to the rich wholeness of one's life. But "Become who you are!" also implies and demands an "examined life," a life subjected to scrutiny and reflection along with the rejection of many of the values accepted unthinkingly by hoi poloi, and their replacement with new ones. It thus becomes, despite its seeming banality, a radical imperative. In what follows, I might seem to be trying to contribute to that pretentious Nietzschean effort called "the revaluation of values.'" I am not sure, especially in Nietzschean terms, what this would mean. The attempt sounds as if it aspires to step outside of all values - outside of every "perspective" - to value all values, or to value "value" itself. This is nonsense, and it is doubly nonsense on a Nietzschean reading. Indeed, I have often questioned even Nietzsche's seemingly more perspectival (but no more modest) insistence that we "create new values," invent a new perspective. But it is by no means clear that what Nietzsche encourages is anything "new." Indeed, the values he defends are in general very old pre-Christian, pagan, often heroic virtues (although these were deeply woven into the fabric of nineteenth-century Romantic culture as well). He defends courage, honesty, courtesy. Hardly "new values!" (And if he did invent a new value, how would we recognize it? How would we evaluate it?)10 Nietzsche is not interested in ethics. To be disgusted, after all, is much more than merely "disapproving," and, from a rational point of view, much less." Perhaps it is because of the playful prevalence of more disgusting visceral (especially genital and excretory) imagery in recent postmodernist writing12 that Nietzsche's current readers are dulled to those far from playful responses in Nietzsche. Nietzsche called himself an "immoralist" (although it is doubtful that he ever did anything truly immoral in his life), and his rejection of what was typically called "morality" was certainly caustic and contemptuous. Judeo-Christian morality

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and even the ethics of Socrates he declared "decadent" at best. Kant's second Critique and Metaphysics of Morals were to him something of a subtle "joke," while utilitarianism was simply "vulgar." But, today, the direction of ethics has shifted away from the Kantian rational willing subject (which Nietzsche clearly rejected) and the utilitarian attention to hedonistic consequences ("Man does not live for pleasure, only the Englishman does" - TI 1:12). What has taken their place is renewed attention to the character and integrity of the individual, his or her virtues. What is ultimately good, according to this viewpoint, is a good person, a person with good character, a person with the right virtues. (Even Kant and Mill have been brought into the act.)13 Thus, the central questions of ethics become: What kind of character? Which virtues? How, in other words, would Nietzsche have wanted us? (Let's skip over the unflattering reply that we are merely Nietzschean clowns - precisely the pupils that horrified Zarathustra - and that Nietzsche wouldn't have "wanted us" in any sense at all.) That is the question that I want to approach here: "How would Nietzsche want us?" The answer, as I have indicated, should be couched in terms of the virtues - those traits of personal character that are particularly admirable. But admirable to whom? And according to what standard? It is not as if Nietzsche gave us a simple prescription or "list" of virtues; nor does there seem to be any single pattern to the multitude of virtues he praises (getting a good night's sleep, keeping our friends, being strong, refraining from universalizing but "legislating values"). And then there are the familiar dead-ends: I do not expect much of anything from Zarathutra's attention-getting concept of the Ubermensch, nor will I try to squeeze more meaning than I have already suggested from the also much-discussed idea of "eternal recurrence" or the rather unfortunate and greatly overplayed notion of "the will to power." But between those much-talked about phantoms in Nietzsche's philosophy, there is a great deal of material to be drawn in particular from what I would consider the more "morally absorbed" books of Nietzsche's "middle" creative period - that is, from Human, All Too Human and Daybreak to BGE and GM. The theses I will be employing are rarely so exciting as the (empty) promise of the Ubermensch; but they constitute, taken together, a recognizable if not entirely consistent philosophy of life, a philosophy of virtue that might best be summarized in the good advice "to give style to one's character." Quite the contrary of viewing Nietzsche as an iconoclastic immoralist, I think that we would be well advised to see him as part of a long ethical tradition. Aristotle, in particular, developed what is now called a "virtue ethics" twenty-five hundred years ago, before the antithetical views of

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Christianity, Kant, and the Utilitarians were around to provide a dramatic contrast. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is essentially a theory of virtue - a theory of just those traits and habits that must be cultivated to make one a "flourishing [eudaimon] person" and have a good character. As everyone knows, Aristotle denned the virtues as state of character that were "the mean between the extremes." Aristotle further offered us a neat little list of virtues as well as this supposedly precise criterion (never mind that the list and the criterion don't fit together, giving the whole project an overtone of the ad hoc). But the entire Ethics is essentially the fleshing out of this list: courage, temperance, liberality, magnificence, pride, good temperament, friendliness, truthfulness, wittiness, shame (a "quasi-virtue"), justice, and the various virtues of practical reasoning and intellectual life. Aquinas, too, gave us a series of formulaic neo-Aristotelean lists (in particular the lists of Cardinal Sins and Virtues, for instance, prudence, fortitude, temperance, justice). And just to make sure we don't get overly ethnocentric, Confucius and the Upanishads, on the other side of the world, had their more or less concise conceptions of the virtues as well. There was a time, it seems, when virtue ethics was about the only game in town. (The ancient Hebrews were a qualified exception. Their tribal ethics was a fascinating combination of virtue and The Law, thus setting up the scenario that Nietzsche so polemically exploits in GM.) Nietzsche himself offers us two short lists: one in Daybreak 556 (honesty, courage, generosity, politeness), the other in BGE 284 (courage, insight, sympathy, solitude). We should not be surprised that they are not consistent (either with each other or with what he says elsewhere); and it is hardly clear how serious he may have been in offering them. He further insists that the virtues should not be "named" (for that would make them "common"); and he several times insists that each of us has "unique" virtues, which would make any discussion of the "right" or "best" virtues seemingly impossible. Nevertheless, there is more than enough in Nietzsche's various musings, polemics, pronouncements, and attacks on the character of others to convince me that the project has significance, both practical and philosophical. Nietzsche provokes in us an image of ourselves, often a most unflattering image, in order to prompt us to reconsider ourselves. Or, sometimes it is an image for which we have been searching (as in the adolescent fascination with the Ubermensch), perhaps without knowing it. As Nietzsche often points out, our ignorance of our own ideals may well be based on the fact that we so often seek others' virtues and not our own.

Nietzsche's Virtues Philosophy Ad Hominem: Exemplary Virtues (and Vices) '

A person of superior de [virtue] does not get de, That is why he has de. A person of inferior de cannot get de, That is why he has no de. Tao Te Ching

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Each of us has his or her own virtues. That claim is evident in Nietzsche, although the sense of "own-ness" (as unique, as individuating, or as merely "had" by that person) is not altogether clear. Much of what we are looking for, nevertheless, may be found in Nietzsche's critical and sometimes scathing portrayals of other philosophers. I think that it is a mistake to assume that virtues and vices are opposites (as all of those neat lists made by tea-shop moralists might imply); but, nevertheless, Nietzsche's condemnations of others (or of whole cultures or schools of thought) can give us considerable insight into what he found valued and what he did not. It is not unimportant that much of Nietzsche's philosophy consists of attacks on others, attacks on them personally, ad hominem, so to speak, rather than critical comments on their works or ideas as such. Nietzsche famously insisted that a philosopher should be, above all, an example. This already marks a return to ancient "heroic" ethics, which is exemplary rather than rule-governed or action-guiding. Ethics, on this archaic model, might be simply summarized as "be like him!"14 Examples, accordingly, provide the basis of much of Nietzsche's moral philosophy. The positive examples are comparatively few and far between. The most prominent is Goethe, who is lavishly praised for "creating himself" and making himself "into a whole man." Even Goethe, however, is subject to Nietzsche's sharp pen. There are some positive words about Schopenhauer, Wagner, Socrates, even Jesus, but they are often drowned out in a chorus of subsequent criticism. Even heroes turn out to be "human, all-too-human." There are occasional good words about Emerson, Heine, and Dostoevsky, to name a few, but the personal details are scant at best. Perhaps such writers - for they are virtually all writers - enjoyed the anonymity and safety of distance because Nietzsche never knew (or never bothered to know) much about them. Nietzsche often praises himself (more on that later); but regarding himself too, that praise is typically undermined by ridicule. The negative examples, however, are to be found throughout the Nietzschean corpus. "In his relation to the state," writes Nietzsche, "Kant was not great." He adds, "German decadence as philosophy," "the final

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exhaustion of life," representing "the Chinese phase of Konigsberg" (A 11). Socrates, of course, is a continuous target for ridicule, from the fact that he was "ugly" (for a Greek, already a "refutation") to the fact that he (personally) "turned reason into a tyrant" (TI 11:3). Euripides gets a drubbing early on; the Church Fathers get theirs later. The English are a favorite butt for Nietzsche's wisecracks, second, perhaps, only to the Germans. "There is too much beer in the German intellect," he observes (TI VIIL2). Morality was the product of servile and herdlike thinking, the morality of slaves, an expression of ressentiment (GM 1:10). Priests betray a spectrum of vices, from hypocrisy to cruelty, and philosophers (in general) seem to suffer from a variety of personal infirmities, self-deception, and self-denial. (A few years later, Freud would diagnose his own view of the neuroses of philosophers. Taking the German Romantics as his examples, he diagnosed a form of Weltschmerz. Today, given the methods in favor, he would probably render a diagnosis of anal compulsiveness.) One can only imagine what harsh words Nietzsche would add to the contemporary "Heidegger Crisis," concerning Heidegger's hardly heroic stance vis-a-vis National Socialism.15 Indeed, one would like to hear his views on some of the movers and shakers of the American Philosophical Association. In any event, the point is that Nietzsche is readily willing to find fault with his fellows, and from these faults we can infer (with caution) some virtues.16 Philosophy is not just a realm of ideas detached from and only contingently connected to their promulgators, their world, their culture, their context, and their character. The character of a philosopher, although certainly not the whole story, is certainly part of what is to be understood, indeed, much more influential than most philosophers are willing to believe. Ideas may have a life of their own, but the impact and influence of ideas has a great deal to do with the position and personality of the promulgator. To be sure, biography can be overdone, but tales and gossip about some still-living Oxbridge philosophers, for example, still circulate freely, long after their actual works have become all but irrelevant. We should not be surprised that the biography of, say, Ludwig Wittgenstein has virtually eclipsed his philosophy. The philosophy may, indeed, still invite scrutiny; but the character - that tortured, overheated personality, those gestures, the Betty Grable compulsion, those hang-ups - now, that is a real example of a philosopher! (How much time does Ray Monk, the most illustrious of Wittgenstein's biographers, spend on his actual ideas?)17 Recent biographies of Jean-Paul Sartre have all but fled in terror from the task of trying to comprehend or even summarize his ideas in their description of the long flow of fights and friendships, alliances

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and dalliances that now constitute the being of "Jean-Paul Sartre." Contemporary academic theorists have already become classic comedy, even if the names have been changed to protect from lawsuits, thanks to novelists like David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury. Long after "deconstruction" has been packed away in the mausoleum of worn-out philosophical jargon, the pretensions of its protagonists will live on as illustrative personal foibles. Nietzsche took ad hominem arguments very seriously - which is why, one might argue, he is fair game for them in return. He placed both Socrates and Jesus under such intense scrutiny not so much because of their teachings as such, but because of their spectacular roles as characters in the development of Western thought - roles that, we can say with some confidence, Nietzsche greatly emulated and envied.18 Thus, he peppered his works with a heavy dose of ad hominem arguments that, in his hands at least, were not a species of "informal fallacy" but a sharp diagnostic tool. (How many of the "informal fallacies" are, at least sometimes, perfectly proper as well as persuasive arguments - for example, the fallacy of "appeals to emotion"?) An ad hominem question asks: "Who was this person (or who were these people), and why did they believe and insist on that? Yes, they say such-and-so, but what were their virtues and what were their vices?" For all of the emphasis Nietzsche seems to put on "values," we should at least ask whether values are rather secondary in his philosophy - secondary, that is, to the virtues of the characters who have them. Thus, Socrates can be understood. Kant was found out. The Germans are fair game. "Every great philosophy," Nietzsche concludes (in Beyond Good and Evil), is nothing but "the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir" (BGE 6). So considered, what philosophers could possibly live up to their own ideas as a living exemplar of the philosophy they preach? Socrates? (A mixed evaluation at best.)19 David Hume? (Depends on your politics.)20 Kant? (Unlikely.)21 Schopenhauer? (!)22 Heidegger? (Apparently the very antithesis.)23 Wittgenstein? (Can you measure a role model from his scores of imitators?)24 Bertrand Russell? (What does it suggest about the self-awareness of a man who, while riding along on a bicycle, "suddenly" realizes that he does not love his wife?)25 Jean-Paul Sartre? (Why did he stop his account of his life at puberty, to have the story continued uncensored by his often ill-treated lifetime companion Simone?)26 W. V. O. Quine (Have you read his biography?)27 More likely examples are Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Giordano Bruno, who, like Socrates, literally gave their lives for their beliefs. But does it have to be so dramatic? What about Kierkegaard, who in

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some sense practiced what he preached (if only by preaching what he practiced), or the partly apocryphal Pyrrho, who is said to have survived his own skepticism (until the age of ninety) only by the grace of his students? There are the Stoics, especially Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, and the latter-day Stoic Spinoza. And, more often than one would think, there is the latter-day college philosophy professor, a real Mr. (or just as likely, Ms.) Chips, whose visions and ambitions are much more modest but, nevertheless, consonant with their daily behavior. Then, again, is consistency always a virtue, inconsistency always a vice? Must a philosopher live in accordance with his or her philosophy? And what follows if he or she does not?
Nietzsche Ad Hominem: Nietzsche as a Paragon of Virtue The inner struggle with his pathologically delicate soul, overflowing with pity, was what led him to preach "be hard!" and to look up with admiration at those Renaissance men of violence who had walked stolidly over corpses to reach their goal. - Marie von Bradke (who knew Nietzsche in Sils Maria, 1886)

One can make too much of biography, and with Nietzsche this is all too tempting, particularly by those who would like to simply dismiss him. (I am thinking, for example, of Ben-Ami Scharfstein's interesting but wholly reductive portrait of Nietzsche.)28 But, of course, Nietzsche, in an obvious sense, "asks for it." He is not one of those evaporating (sometimes said to be "dead") postmodernist authors that Barthes and Foucault talk about. Unlike Malcolm Bradbury's ludicrous example of that phenomenon (Mesonge), disappearing altogether and leaving his works quite literally without an author, Nietzsche is always "in your face," not only present in person but reminding us just who he is. Accordingly, one can and probably should take Nietzsche himself as a philosophical example.29 It is far from clear that he would come off at all well. He was lonely, desperate, occasionally embarrassing in his behavior (not to mention some of his published writings). He was incompetent to the point of self-humiliation with women, this great "seducer."30 He participated in no great friendships and had no memorable (or even plausible) love affairs. He did no great deeds. Unlike his imaginary alter ego Zarathustra and his one-time mentor Wagner, he addressed no crowds, turned no heads, confronted no enemies. Like his nearcontemporary in Copenhagen, S0ren Kierkegaard, he did not have much of a life. For Kierkegaard it was the "inner life," "passionate inwardness," that counted. But we should certainly ask: Can virtues be

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entirely "internal," even "private"? In what sense is a rich inner life an admirable life, a virtuous life? In Kierkegaard's case, at least, this seems plausible. But not for Nietzsche. For Nietzsche, a rich inner life could hardly be sufficient. His warrior and earth-shattering ("dynamite") metaphors cannot plausibly be restricted to thoughts and jottings, and what Kierkegaard called "subjectivity" was hardly his favored domain. Nietzsche's philosophy is a heroic philosophy, and, if you didn't know him, a philosophy of action. But the sad truth is that it degenerates into an almost self-help-like philosophy of health. Two of the favorite quotes among hoi poloi who have barely read him are "That which does not kill (overcome) me makes me stronger" and "Live dangerously!" The first, of course, is hugely implausible. That which doesn't kill me most likely leaves me debilitated. And the second? Nietzsche was sickly all of his life. His "danger" was overdosing on chloral hydrate, which he used to excess in his desperate quest for sleep. The celebration of "health" as a philosophical ideal, by a chronically unhealthy philosopher, is pathetic, at best. Nietzsche died badly; indeed, he was perhaps the worst imaginable counterexample to his own wise instruction "Die at the right time." He lingered in a virtually vegetative state for a full decade, cared for by a sister whose views he despised and who ultimately used him to publicly defend those views. He railed throughout his career against pity - that pathetic emotion that, according to those who knew him, was one of the most prominent features of his own personality.31 (His final if perhaps apocryphal gesture on behalf of animal welfare - throwing himself upon a horse beingfloggedin an attempt to protect it - deserves sincere appreciation.) As an example, Nietzsche is more plausibly viewed as a play of opposites, like Rousseau, whose advice might be best understood as, "let us admire people most unlike myself." Nietzsche's life, insofar as it serves as an example at all, is an example of a tortured and unhappy spirit who managed, through his genius and through his suffering, to produce a magnificent corpus of writings. Thus, Alexander Nehamas, in one of the most ingenious philosophicobiographical reconstructions since Plato set his sights on his teacher's career, gives us good reason to ignore the "miserable little man" named "Nietzsche" and accept instead the persona he created: namely, Nietzsche?2 One might counter by insisting that "life isn't literature,"33 but I now think that this blunt contrast glosses over not only the fascinating intimacy between Nietzsche and "Nietzsche" but also clouds over some of the most fascinating features of the notion of "character," and, thus, the nature of both personal identity and ad hominem arguments in philosophy.

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Briefly stated: that intimacy has to do with the complex interaction between a person's thoughts, plans, emotions, and self-conception and what one might (problematically) identify with the bald "facts" about a person's behavior, accomplishments, comments, and history. I am concerned here with the familiar distinction in Jean-Paul Sartre between "facticity" and "transcendence" (without getting into the exponential complications of what he calls "being-for-others"). The problem is this: How we "read" a person's behavior and the narrative of that history depends to a large extent on the person's intentions, ambitions, and ideals. In Nietzsche's case the "events" in his life were so minimal, and his intentions, ambitions, and ideals were so grand, that it is a mistake (as well as unfair) to interpret either without continuous reference to the other. In other words, what I am trying to do is to clear a path between overly ad hominem Scharfstein-style psychoanalytic reductionism and Arthur Danto's old "Nietzsche as Philosopher" thesis (which Danto himself has retracted).34 The relationship between Nietzsche and "Nietzsche" raises all sorts of tantalizing questions, such as whether good fortune - such as good up bringing or good health - is indeed (as Aristotle simply presumed) a presupposition of the virtuous, eudamimon life or whether (as in Kant) it is morally irrelevant. But the question of virtue, if we are considering the philosopher as example, is first of all to be sought in the philosopher's writing itself. The mistake is thinking that ad hominem arguments ought to look at the personal character instead of the writing - and this, certainly, is an even bigger mistake than its converse. It is the philosopher-in-the-philosophy that ought to be our point of focus. The virtues of the philosopher are those that are evident in the philosophy.35 Like many philosophers (Plato, Rousseau, and Marx come to mind), Nietzsche created an ideal world - or in his case an identity - dramatically different from the world of his experience. That vision becomes, in an important Sartrean sense, an essential part of the identity of the philosopher. Thus, there is another interpretation of the view that a philosopher should be an example, with somewhat less dramatic requirements. One need not be a world-historicalfigure.One need not be a hero or happy. One must not be a hypocrite, of course; and this alone would eliminate a considerable number of would-be philosophers (including a rather large number of philosophy professors). We judge a philosopher - and not only his or her ideas - by what he or she says, even ironically (indeed, especially ironically). Pleas for "playfulness" won't get you off the hook. In writing, in case anyone ever doubted it, one betrays oneself - pseudonyms, sarcasm, dialogue, or scholarly form notwithstanding. Nietzsche's character, in other words, cannot be detached from his

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writings. Nietzsche and "Nietzsche" cannot so easily be distinguished, or separated for the purpose of criticism and interpretation.36
Nietzsche's Virtues: Nietzsche's "List"

What are the Nietzschean virtues? I would not pretend to be able to isolate a small number of virtues, such as Nietzsche himself (twice) does in those two short lists: "honesty, courage, generosity, politeness" (D 556), and "courage, insight, sympathy, and solitude" (BGE 284). And one certainly must further distinguish between those virtues Nietzsche preached and those he exemplified in his writing. But preaching is itself an indication of a person's character; and disdainful preaching, prophetic preaching, ironic preaching may be quite distinct and quite relevant to the question who "the preacher" is. A philosopher who ponderously insists on being careful and serious - let's repeat: careful and serious, careful and serious - and is extremely careful to say this any number of times, quite seriously, surely shows us something important not only about his or her thesis (which will insist on caution and seriousness) but about this (most cautious and serious) person as well. So, too, when Nietzsche tells us - with multiple exclamation points and italics, with frequent references to the classics and theology, with rhetorical questions and harsh insults - that Christian morality is a "slave" morality, we rightfully conclude not only that he does not think particularly well of Christian morality, but also that he endorses and represents this intentionally offensive, polemical style. The perspectival view of history that he employs also indicates a distinctive personality, who clearly emerges from that particular style of presentation. And if we find many variations of styles in Nietzsche (as when one reads a handwritten letter in which the style changes with each line or sentence), this, too, indicates something quite illuminating about character. (Ask any handwriting analyst.) Nietzsche's virtues are to be found not only in what he says but in how he says it. What is a virtue? A full treatment of this question (along with adequate development of much of what follows) is properly postponed for a much more ambitious work, but let us just say for the moment that, as most virtue-theorists would think trivially true, a virtue is an admirable or desirable state of character. In fact, this says very little (and what it says can be challenged). But even accepting such a claim, virtues might be interpreted as interpersonally derived (as when Hume suggests that they are "pleasing" to self and others), or they might be taken to be (in a sense to be refined) good in themselves (as in Michael Slote's "agentbased" virtue ethics)37 or they might be action tendencies that are aimed

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toward an independently justified set of values (such as Christine Swanton's "value-centered" virtue ethics).38 One might tie the virtues to specific cultures (as Alasdair Maclntyre, for example, proposes);39 or there might be "non-relative virtues" (as Martha Nussbaum argues).40 One might complicate matters by insisting that Chinese (such as Confucian) conceptions of ethics are not to be simply assimilated to, say, Aristotle's conception of the virtues, despite some obvious but possibly superficial similarities (for example, the doctrine of the mean). And one might, of course, argue that there is not a single dimension to the virtues any more than there is a single "moral" dimension of an act. But all of this must be left until later. For now, I shall simply suggest a not-at-all simple list of more and less plausible candidates for a catalog of "Nietzsche's virtues." I offer these in three groups: first, what I call "traditional" virtues - those that might well appear on almost any respectable list of virtues. Second, a set of peculiarly "Nietzschean" virtues, although this list is hardly without its internal conflicts and contradictions. Finally, a "problematic" list - a mismatched set of Nietzschean virtues that require far more discussion and analysis than I will be able to give them here. To begin with, a somewhat traditional list (that is, pretty much in accord with Aristotle): courage honesty temperance honor/integrity justice pride (megalopsychos) courtesy friendship generosity All of these require some commentary, for it should not be assumed that what Nietzsche means by these virtue names is what other philosophers mean by them. For example, I would argue that courage, for Nietzsche, refers not so much to overcoming fear (the standard account), or even having "just the right amount" of fear (the overly quantitative Aristotlean account), and it certainly doesn't mean (the pathological conception of courage) having no fear. Rather, as in so many of his conceptions of virtue, Nietzsche has a model of "overflowing": in the case of courage, I would suggest, overflowing with assertiveness, overwhelming (rather than the bland "overcoming") fear. One imagines one of Homer's Greek heroes, surging with patriotism, warrior gusto, machismo (or whatever), who, driven by that passion, charges through whatever

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fear is surely there. So too the inspired artist or philosopher passionately and single-mindedly pursues his or her ideas despite the dangers of failure and ridicule - or, perhaps worse, being utterly ignored.41 Consider an example that would have been dear to both Aristotle and Nietzsche: the scene of Achilles' revenge in The Iliad.0 Achilles, enraged by the death of his friend Patroclus, crashes onto the battlefield outside of Troy with vengeance ("justice") on his mind. There is no fear. There is no room for fear in the midst of all of that well-directed murderous fury. To call Achilles "courageous," in such a state, would seem rather an understatement, if not absurd. Our own understanding of courage may or may not be in line with Aristotle's - that is, courage as the amount of resistance or fear that it has to overcome. But if we view the scene as Nietzsche (and Homer) did, fear and courage are not complementary but rather opposed; and it is Achilles who is courageous, not the poor soldier with the shaking knees who "forces himself" to stand his ground. (The word "brave" once carried with it this meaning, except insofar as it has also been infected with the Aristotelean understanding of "courage.") Courage, in other words, is not overcoming emotion (and more specifically, fear). It is itself constituted by an overwhelming and yet skillfully directed overflowing of emotion, which incorporates rather than excludes one's sense of honor, and which, because of its keen focus is too easily interpreted as calm. It is the power, efficiency, and effectiveness of the passion, not this only apparent calm, that is its virtue. One can give the same sort of analysis of generosity (which in Zarathustra is called "the gift-giving virtue"). It is not mere giving, nor the habit of giving. Consider generosity in the context of one current charity demand that insists, "Give 'til it hurts!" One can imagine the donor, struggling against the pain of his or her own miserliness, weighing the burden of conscience against that bottle of Chateau le Poeuf that is on sale at the wine store down the street. Finally, generosity overcomes resistance, and the virtue is admirably displayed. But notice, first of all, that the more one has to struggle to give, the less virtuous one is. Thus Aristotle insists that, with all virtues, their performance is actually pleasurable, not painful, and that this itself is a test of one's virtuousness. Suppose, however, that one's generosity consisted of what one might simply call one's "overflowing" nature. This is the way, I hear, that Mick Jagger behaves on tour. Having more money than he (or anyone) could know how to spend, Jagger simply allows it to flow freely, somewhat indiscriminately, to recipients and causes both just and frivolous. One might argue that this abandon and lack of concern is true generosity not a struggle against personal deprivation but an indifference that can only come with great wealth.

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So, too, the other virtues emerge as "overflow" of a great-souled spirit - of one who has an abundance. To object that the virtues are not this, but rather the sense of duty in contrast to self-interest and personal need, is to fall back into what Nietzsche would consider a pathetic model of the virtues - the model that emerges in Kant and in Christainity, where it is the poor and not the rich in spirit who become the focus. Aristotle, writing for the aristocracy, would have fallen somewhere in between. But what constitutes a Nietzschean virtue is first of all a kind of fullness, a sense of oneself as being on top of the world. One need not get hung up on money, prestige, and power to adopt such an ethic. Nietzsche himself, impoverished, passed over by his intellectual peers and poor in health, might serve as just such an example. Indeed, even temperance (the most tempting counter example to this account) represents a kind of fullness, a sense of buoyant fullness of self. (Consider Nietzsche's many Californische comments on diet, good health, and creative well-being.) Nietzsche's virtues are not proper "balance" or "means between the extremes." A virtue is an excess, and overwhelming, an overflowing. It is not merely withstanding or enduring (as in all of those made-for-TV movies about "heroes" and "heroines" who suffer through horrible diseases). This is only a sketch, of course, but it is a model that I think Nietzsche endorses throughout his philosophy, from Birth of Tragedy to Ecce Homo, as opposed to the more "rational" models of the virtues one finds in most philosophers and moralists. So too it is easy to understand generosity not as a mere overcoming of miserliness, but as a quite literal overflowing. One might think of honesty as an "overflowing" of the truth - or, more cautiously, one's most heartfelt opinions. This is obviously much more than Aristotle's "truthfulness," and it is radically different from any prohibition against lying that might be derived from the "categorical imperative." Telling the truth is not so much an obligation as it is a powerful "inclination." And needless to say, it has little to do with the "greatest good for the greatest number." Reading Nietzsche's letters (not to mention his embarrassing marriage proposals) we also get the sense that his conception of friendship was far from a calm amiability. It was rather an explosion of desperate affection. (No one, except perhaps Hume, has suggested that the virtues are necessarily easy to live with.) Integrity is a virtue (or a way of integrating the virtues) that is highly prized by Nietzsche, for example, in his elaborate praise of Goethe.43 Pride requires special attention as one of the traditionally controversial virtues, one of the "seven deadly sins" in Christianity but something more like "self-respect" in heroic society. (Thus, Hume, a self-proclaimed "pagan," took pride to be a virtue as opposed to its "Monkish" opposite, humility.) Nietzsche talks about pride

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as an ultimate motive, for examle, in Daybreak 32, where he analyzes pride as the basis of morality and asks, in closing, whether a new understanding of morality (viz. his own) will require "more pride? A new pride?" Justice, finally, requires considerable attention as well. Today few philosophers would consider justice to be a personal virtue, as Plato and Aristotle did (even given the much broader meaning that dike had in Greek). Bernard Williams, for example, has argued explicitly against it; and most other philosophers seem simply oblivious to (or contemptuous of) the possibility. Justice is a rational scheme, a virtue of societies, not individuals. But justice for Nietzsche is very much a personal virtue, and not a virtue of proportion (as in Aristotle), nor even "giving each his due" (as in Plato), although Nietzsche often makes comments that could be so construed. For Nietzsche seems far less concerned with "distributive" justice than either the ancient or most contemporary philosophers. In fact, his philosophy is virtually devoid of any suggestions (much less a theory) concerning the equitable distribution of material goods and honors in distributive justice. Yet Nietzsche is greatly concerned with what is sometimes called "retributive" justice - that is, essentially, the problems of punishment. In a word, he is against punishment. He finds it demeaning, essentially based on resentment, a sign of weakness, a traditional form of decrepitude. This may surprise those who are particularly struck by Nietzsche's frequent discussion - sometimes bordering on an excuse if not a justification - of cruelty. But for Nietzsche justice (which is tightly tied to the equally problematic concept of mercy) is first of all the overcoming of the desire to punish - not the usual interpretation of that virtue, to be sure. Second, I want to suggest a list of distinctively "Nietzschean" virtues: exuberance "style" "depth" dynamism venturesomeness fatalism (amor fati) playfulness aestheticism solitude Exuberance, I would want to argue, is not only a virtue in itself (in contrast to such traditional virtues as apatheia and ataraxia - "peace of mind") but the core of virtually all of Nietzsche's virtues. "Overflowing," on this view, is a metaphor that is derivative of his celebration of energy

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- very much in line (not coincidentally) with the new conception of physics that had become very much in vogue toward the end of the nineteenth century. Exuberance is hardly the same as "effervescence," needless to say, and Nietzsche would have nothing but utter contempt for those personalities that (particularly in the United States) are characterized as "bubbly" or "outgoing." Like most virtues, exuberance cannot be taken out of context - that is, the context of the other virtues (however true it may be to say that everyone has his or her own [set of] virtues.) Nietzsche denies that the virtues "fit" together in any unified way - a direct rejection of one of Aristotle's most perplexing theses. The virtue of exuberance, in particular, depends upon what it is that is "overflowing." (One can think of all sorts of unacceptable candidates.) It also depends on the discipline with which it is expressed - or, one might better say, on the style of its expression. But I'm also tempted to say that style, for Nietzsche, is exuberance (although not the other way around). Style, rightly represented as in some sense the heart of Nietzsche's "new" values, should also be conceived as the expression of exuberance. Style is not just a way of "dressing" oneself, a way of "coming on." It reflects an essential "inner" drive, sometimes expressed by Nietzsche in terms of the "instincts" - an obvious carryover of Schopenhauer's biologism (but without the metaphysical baggage of "the Will"). Thus, the metaphors of "depth" that permeate Nietzsche's writings (that is, when he is not being sarcastic, referring to a phony profundity), and the virtue of playfulness, which should be understood not in the current rather anemic sense of intellectual self-indulgence (hardly unknown in Nietzsche), but rather in terms of the rich, buoyant enthusiasm of a child. (The child metaphor in Zarathustra's "Three Metamorphoses" [Z 1:1], I would suggest, represents not so much newness as this exuberant playfulness. Nietzsche was not a fan of innocence as such.) Style, on Nietzsche's account, involves careful cultivation and experience (although, in some sense, it is the development or realization of an already existing inner template of the virtues). Aestheticism is a virtue that is certainly most pronounced in Nietzsche's early works, but I think that it would be a mistake to conclude that he rejected this perspective (along with metaphysics). What he rejected, I believe, was Schopenhauer's pessimism, and along with this his metaphysics of the Will (obviously, incompletely), and his view that art provides a unique escape from the meaninglessness of life. But the ideal of beauty is one that Nietzsche (like Plato) held onto far more obstinately than most philosophers have. He talks about beauty (and its antithesis, the ugly) in all sorts of different ways. Indeed, one would not

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go wrong in suggesting that it remains one of the primary nonmoral evaluative categories of his philosophy. But aestheticism, too, requires cultivation and experience. Nietzsche continually praises the aesthetic virtues of refinement and taste (and uses startling metaphors to suggest their absence). To see the world as beautiful, despite all suffering, and perhaps in part even because of suffering, remains one of his explicit aspirations throughout his philosophy. His attack on Socrates as "ugly," by contrast, goes hand in hand with Socrates' attempted "escape" through reason. Finally, it is worth at least a note to point out Nietzsche's repeated emphasis on solitude (and not only by way of Zarathustra's example). The virtues are often conceived (for instance, by Aristotle, Hume, and Maclntyre) as social functions. In Nietzsche, I want to suggest, they are better understood in an extremely individual context. Indeed, many of his traditional virtues (such as courtesy) rather painfully reflect the necessity of acting properly in the presence of other people. Most of Nietzsche's distinctive virtues, by contrast, are exemplified in solitude, and, sometimes, only in solitude. This is true, I would suggest, even of virtues that might more usually be taken as obviously social virtues. The image of a dancing Zarathustra, for example, is not set in a ballroom. The virtues exemplified by dancing are, to the contrary, very much the virtues of a hermit, dancing alone. (Of course, it is not clear that Zarathustra ever actually dances. He rather praises dancing, talks about dancings, and "walks like a dancer." Nevertheless, one can safely assume that, were he to dance, he would not be dancing the tango.) One of the most personally troublesome problems of Nietzsche's philosophy is this continuous suggestion (and sometimes more than that) of a deep misanthropy. "Hatred" of humanity and being "weary of man" are not only other people's symptoms of decadence and sickness. Nietzsche exhibits them all too frequently. But then, his account of the virtues, like his portrait of his example Zarathustra, shows an uncomfortable bias toward the solitary. Perhaps this is what appeals to a good many of Nietzsche's most admiring followers; but I hesitate to follow them. "Herd'Mike behavior is possible in isolated individuals as well as in mobs and in what are usually called (in non-Nietzschean contexts) "communities." Indeed, that is where solitude becomes least a virtue, sundered from what Nietzsche sometimes refers to as custom and tradition - "free," as one might conceive oneself, to follow a path that is least one's own, under the illusion that one is following nothing but "oneself." Finally, there are the problematic virtues. The problem is not their frequency of mention in Nietzsche but their status as virtues, for various reasons:

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health strength "presence" "the feminine" "hardness" egoism existentiality Health, of course, is one of the pervasive themes of Nietzsche's philosophy (not to mention his personal life). The question, of course, is whether good health can sensibly be called a virtue. (I take it that this question turns, in part, on the degree to which one believes oneself to be responsible for one's good health - and, even then, the health itself might well be understood as the result of certain virtues rather than constitutive of them.) Strength, too, is a pervasive theme, but the same sorts of questions apply. This is made more confused, of course, by some of Nietzsche's comments about "natural" strength, as in his brilliant but discomforting "lambs and eagles" parable in GM 1:13. And then there are Nietzsche's obsessive references to "the will to power." It is not at all clear to what extent strength and the will to power are correlated, and Nietzsche presents all sorts of conflicting views about this. His suggestion that "increase in power" is the ultimate motivation (for all things, not to mention his sometimes quoted note to the effect that everything is nothing but the will to power) makes it somewhat unclear to what extent we are talking about a state of character in any sense. Nevertheless, if strength is taken to be a virtue (and we have not even broached the question, What is strength?), it is clear enough why Nietzsche would take it to be such, given his repeated accusations of "weakness" in virtually everything he opposes. The contrast to Christianity ("the meek shall inherit the earth") is obvious, but the virtue of strength presents us with far more problems than answers. "Presence," of course, makes no sense except as an interpersonal phenomenon.44 (Nietzsche is certainly not consistent in this.) But he does seem to admire those with that je ne sais quoi that we all recognize in certain people who command (not just "attract") attention. He suggests that Zarathustra has it, despite his failure to command much attention on his entrance to the marketplace. Goethe certainly had it - but here, again, there are difficult questions about whether or not "presence" can be cultivated. And this line of reflection may lead to a more basic reopening of the question: What is a virtue? If health, strength, and presence are considered virtues (and not just "excellences"), then perhaps the

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whole discussion of the virtues, as carried on since Aristotle, has to be reconsidered. The idea of "the feminine" as a Nietzschean virtue involves much more discussion than I can possibly give it here, but it is a suggestion that I think is often overshadowed by the (unfortunate) emphasis on Nietzsche's well-known misogynist comments. His "hardness," too, is, I think, typically misunderstood, typically as part of his dubious campaign against compassion and pity (Mitleid). I think a better interpretation would involve only Nietzsche's exaggerated (but not un-German) emphasis on self-discipline. (A Buddhist proverb: "If a man were to conquer in battle a thousand times a thousand men, and another conquer one, himself, he indeed is the greatest of conquerors" Dhammapada.y5 Egoism, too, is a theme that requires a long discussion. Suffice it to say that, for Nietzsche, it is not a vice but a virtue, but it must be egoism properly understood, not "selfishness"46 and not mere self-aggrandizement. "Existentiality," finally, refers to the complex sense in which Nietzsche properly belongs to that group of ("existential") philosophers with whom he so often taught, for whom non-self-deceptive individual choice is an essential ingredient in "authentic" existence. But Nietzsche expresses more than his share of skepticism about many of the conceptual presuppositions of autonomy and free choice, not to mention the complications he adds to the idea of self-deception. How this important conflict can be resolved must, again, wait for a more protracted study, as must the further elaboration of the theses suggested here.47
Conclusion: Nietzsche and the Future of Philosophy

I began by saying that if philosophy is to have a future, it must be something more than academic analysis and hermetically sealed social criticism. It must address people and change lives. It must be personal rather than merely technical, impassioned rather than dispassionate - in other words, just the contrary of what so many philosophers in "mainstream" philosophy insist that it be. Nietzsche's philosophy has been celebrated for many reasons; but what is best and perhaps most important about his philosophizing has for the most part been ignored. His ideas are now absorbed into debates about truth and value, his stylistic extravagance and "playfulness" is often used to license imitations; but his very personal, even autobiographical, approach to philosophy has for the most part been ignored. That is the way Socrates practiced his craft; and one can trace a long line of philosophers - indeed, most of the great ones who have always known that philosophy isn't just a "profession," it is a

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personal "calling," a means of expression, a powerful tool for affecting others (and not just "teaching them to think clearly"). Even Kant, the "Chinese of Konigsberg" - but especially Nietzsche. The future of philosophy has a great deal to learn from his example.
NOTES 1. Stephen Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890-1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 2. Collected and printed in The Will to Power, trans, and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1969). The status of Nietzsche's unpublished notes (Nachlass) has been exhaustively debated and no doubt commented upon by virtually every contributor in this volume. The best policy, it seems to me, is to trust Nietzsche's notes only when they are confirmed by (and thus reiterate, occasionally in more striking language) Nietzsche's published statements. In the case of eternal recurrence as a physical hypothesis, no such statements are to be found. 3. For example, the Magnus book already mentioned, Nietzsche's Existential Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978); Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), Kathleen M. Higgins, Nietzsche's Zarathustra (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), Julian Young, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 4. Bernd Magnus, Jean-Pierre Mileur, and Stanley Stewart, Nietzsche's Case: Philosophy as/and Literature (New York: Routledge, 1993), with reference to Maudemarie Clark's (excellent) discussion. 5. As has often been noted, the phrase comes from Pindar. 6. Kelly Oliver, Womanizing Nietzsche (New York: Routledge, 1995). 7. This is certainly true of Jacques Derrida, who recently has emerged from his own web of obscurantism to make it amply clear that deconstruction as he practices it is rich with "political" implications (see, for example, his recent The Specter of Marx [New York: Routledge, 1994]), and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who has always made her political commitments (if not her prose) quite clear. 8. Not that the topic itself is thin. See Alexander Nehamas, Virtues of Authenticity: Essays in Plato and Socrates (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 9. The phrase is a title briefly considered by Nietzsche for his last several works. 10. The interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy as an ethics of virtue has been developed at length by Lester Hunt in his Nietzsche and the Origins of Virtue (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1991). I first defended this interpretation in "A More Severe Morality: Nietzsche's Affirmative Ethics" in Nietzsche's Affirmative Ethics, ed. Y. Yovel (Hebrew University, 1985) and Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (1985), reprinted in From Hegel to Existentialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 11. William Miller has suggested that disgust is the most basic moral emotion.

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12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

See his Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard: University Press, 1997). For example, Arthur Kroker, to take one example of many, The Postmodern Scene : Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988). Kant has been turned into an "agent-based" virtue ethicist, for example, by Steve Darwall. John Stuart Mill betrays his Aristotelean secrets in chapter 5 of Utilitarianism. I owe this insight into the nature of early Greek morality to Julius Moravscik. Hans Sluga, Heidegger's Crisis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994). Again, the opposite of a vice is not a virtue. Gossiping is a vice. Not gossiping is not a virtue. Indeed, one might argue, it is itself another type of vice. Ray Monk, Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Free Press, 1990). No one is more pithy on this point than Nehamas, who is in process of working out the Nietzsche-Socrates connection in great detail. See note 8 above. Gregory Vlastos would certainly disagree. But for a semischolarly reply see I. F. Stone's The Trial of Socrates (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988). Alasdair Maclntyre, in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), is far from praising of his Scots countryman. Heine's account of a clockwork Kant (in his Religion and Philosophy in Germany), for instance, may make the man charming but hardly a hero. One doesn't have to believe Bertrand Russell here, but Schopenhauer's grumpy hedonism is indeed at odds with the pessimism of his philosophy. Nietzsche is much more insightful than Russell on this matter, needless to say. Whereas Russell simply dismissed Schopenhauer, Nietzsche had once idolized him. Accordingly, Nietzsche is also, at times, more scathing. But see, for a more subtle account, Sluga's admirable Heidegger's Crisis. Monk's Wittgenstein makes perfectly clear the unenviable sense in which Wittgenstein was an exemplar of his philosophy, a philosophy of tortured self-doubts (rather than the mere gestures taken up by some of his students and followers). Bertrand Russell, Autobiography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967). Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: G. Braziller, 1964). Suggested subtitle: Mauvaise Foi. Willard van Orman, Quiddities (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1987). Ben-Ami Scharfstein, The Philosophers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). Here is an example of a typical anti-Nietzsche ad hominem argument, from a logic textbook, no less: "Don't waste your time studying the philosophy of Nietzsche. Not only was he an atheist but he ended his days in an insane asylum" (from William H. Halverson, A Concise Logic [New York: Random House, 1984], p. 58). Dionysus, as Nietzsche well knew, was also considered the great seducer (see, for example, Euripides Bacchae). Cf. the Marie von Bradke quote at the beginning of this section, "his pathologically delicate soul, overflowing with pity."

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32. Nehemas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature. 33. See my commentary on Nehamas, "Nietzsche and Nehamas's Nietzsche", in International Studies in Philosophy XXI, no. 2 (summer, 1989). 34. Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: Macmillan, 1963). I do not mean to deny for a moment, of course, that Danto's book was one of the most important events in recent Nietzsche scholarship. Following Walter Kaufmann's equally important de-Nazification of Nietzsche a few years earlier, Danto captured Nietzsche's ideas in a form that made Nietzsche "respectable" in the then overwhelmingly analytic world of American professional philosophy. His recognition of the limits of this approach can be found in several places, among them his presidential address to the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division and in his essay on Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals in K. Higgins and R. Solomon, Reading Nietzsche (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 35. It is the demand for integration of philosopher and philosophy that distinguishes philosophy from most other disciplines, and it is what makes it so odd when we meet "philosophers" (almost always philosophy professors) who keep their philosophical interests wholly compartmentalized and isolated from the rest of their lives - no matter how exciting or boring, no matter how admirable or loathsome. This is also what drives the "Heidegger crisis." 36. Here I backtrack from my objection to Nehamas's reconstruction of Nietzsche as "Nietzsche." The issue now seems to me much more complicated. 37. Michael Slote, Virtues (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 38. Christine Swanton "Profiles of the Virtues" (unpublished paper). 39. After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). 40. Martha Nussbaum, "Non-Relative Virtues," in Ethics and Character: Midwest Studies in Philosophy XIII, ed. P. French et al. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988). 41. But see Daybreak 277 on the "hot and cold virtues." 42. Homer, The Iliad, xv.348-51; Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, book III, ch. 8 (1116ff.). Aristotle writes: "passion is sometimes reckoned as courage;... for passion above all things is eager to rush on danger.... Hence Homer's 'put strength into his passion.'" He goes on to say that men who act from passion are not truly brave but more akin to beasts. They do not act "for honor's sake nor as the rule directs." Nevertheless, he adds, "they have something akin to courage" (1117). 43. Michael Tanner, Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 44. See Robert Nozick on people with an "aura" (emphatically not the New Age sense) in his Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981). 45. Quoted in Freny Mistry, Nietzsche and Buddhism (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1981), p. 3. 46. As in Ayn Rand's derivative "virtue of selfishness." 47. See Brian Leiter, "The Paradox of Fatalism and Self-Creation in Nietzsche," in Willing and Nothingness: Essays on Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, ed. C. Janaway (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Nietzschean Normativity
RICHARD SCHACHT

Morality [Sittlichkeit, ethicalness] is nothing other (therefore no more!) than obedience to mores [Sitten, customs], of whatever kind they may be; mores [Sitten], however, are the traditional ways of behaving and evaluating. In things in which no tradition commands there is no morality [Sittlichkeit]. Daybreak (1881), 9 Anyone who now wishes to make a study of moral matters [moralischen Dingen] opens up for himself an immense field for work. All kinds of individual passions have be be thought through and pursued through different ages, peoples, and great and small individuals.... Have the mores [Sitten] of scholars, of businessmen, artists, or artisans been studied and thought about? There is so much in them to be thought about. The Gay Science (1882), 7 Wherever we encounter a morality [Moral], we also encounter valuations and an order of rank of human impulses and actions. These valuations and orders of rank are always expressions of the needs of a community and herd The conditions for the preservation of different communities have been very different; hence there were very different moralities [Moralen, morals]. Considering essential changes in the forms of future herds and communities, states and societies, we can prophesy that there will yet be very divergent moralities [Moralen]. The Gay Science (1882), 116 The real problems of morality [Probleme der Moral]... emerge only when we compare many moralities [Moralen]. Beyond Good and Evil (1886), 186 Morality [Moral] in Europe today is herd animal morality [Herdentier-Moral] - in other words, as we understand it, merely one type of human morality [menschlicher Moral] beside which, before which, and after which many other types, above all higher moralities [Moralen], are, or ought to be, possible. Beyond Good and Evil (1886), 202

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As in the realm of stars the orbit of a planet is in some cases determined by two suns... so we modern men are determined, thanks to the complicated mechanics of our "starry sky," by different moralities [Moralen]. Beyond Good and Evil (1886), 216 I understand by "morality" [Moral] a system of evaluations that partially coincides with the conditions of a creature's life. Nachlass (1887-8), WP 256 Every naturalism in morality [in der Moral] - that is, every healthy morality [Moral] - is dominated by an instinct of life: some commandment of life is fulfilled by a determinate canon of "shalt" and "shalt not." Twilight of the Idols (1888), V:4

Normativity - as a topic of interest in its own right - at long last is taking its rightful place at stage front and center in moral-philosophical inquiry; and that is a very welcome development indeed. For reasons that are understandable enough, philosophers in the analytic tradition in whom normative interests have been rekindled have tended to revive ways of thinking about normativity associated with familiar philosophical and even religious traditions, with the utilitarian and Kantian contenders leading the pack. Christine Korsgaard's recent book The Sources ofNormativity^ is a good example of recent neo-Kantian thinking; and her title nicely frames a basic issue that must be faced by all of us for whom normativity is a fundamental issue in philosophical reflection on moral matters. Bernard Williams exemplifies a dissatisfaction with all such neotraditional ways of thinking about these matters that I share; and, like Williams, I am drawn in directions marked out by Hegel and Nietzsche - directions, I might add, that are by no means as opposite as is commonly supposed. Williams has taught us to talk in terms of "thinness" and "thickness" in our moral philosophizing and is known to prefer "thick" to "thin." I am not sure how far he is prepared to go in that direction; but Nietzsche and I are prepared to go quite far indeed. If the thickness of moral concepts does not go all the way down, we would say that by the time they thin out there is no longer anything of much normative interest left to them. But that, for us as for Williams, must be understood very positively; for without the thickness of such concepts, humanity would be in bad shape indeed, and the nihilism Nietzsche foretold would be more than just a transitional stage. In this essay I shall offer an account that is at once an interpretive elaboration of the direction in which I take Nietzsche to have been moving with

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respect to moral normativity, and also a sketch of my own like-minded approach to it. I I should grant in advance that the Nietzsche I will be talking about will sound rather strange to those whose ideas about him have been modeled on the pictures of him that have long been current among his self-styled friends and his many detractors alike. I believe this Nietzsche to have much to be said for him, however, interpretively as well as philosophically. The construal of him along existentialist lines, as an advocate of a kind of radical individualism, was a great improvement upon the Nazi travesty; but it too is wide of the mark and distorts the way he is read and understood. To understand him aright on matters relating to morals and normativity, I suggest, one should at least try to forget about existentialism, remember Hegel as well as Kant and Schopenhauer, and take into account what he wrote pertaining to them before as well as after Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Otherwise it is all too easy (and common) to misconstrue his larger moral-philosophical project, which reduces neither to his polemic against what he took to pose as and pass for morality itself in the modern Western world, nor to his panegyrics to the autonomous "sovereign individual," nor yet again to their mere sum. In the account I shall be advancing I do take liberties here and there, pulling back in some places where Nietzsche seems to me to go astray, and going further than he explicitly does in others, where he seems to me to be on a right track that is worth extending. I consider it important to undertake this sort of judiciously elaborative effort, in an attempt to see what can come of taking up and pursuing the kinds of tasks he initiates in his "Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future," in a manner and direction suggested by his own first steps and arguments along these lines. I do some adjusting on two points in particular: first, I pull back from Nietzsche's tendency at times to construe human types and forms or spheres of human life in what I consider to be an overly biological (or biologistic) manner; and, second, I amplify his recognition of the plasticity and variability of human life into a more overtly and significantly multifarious conception of the manner in which both individuals and societies can turn out. On the first point, here, as on other matters, Nietzsche experiments with quite different ways of thinking. More specifically, he often indulges in biological speculation, from at least some of which (as in the case of his Lamarckianism) I believe we do best, to save him - as I like to think his own intelligence and intellectual conscience

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eventually would have led him to save himself - to the extent that we can find indications in his own writings of alternatives to which he was also drawn. With respect to the second point, Nietzsche often paints with a broad brush in his characterizations of human types, as though it were an allor-nothing affair whether one were of one or another of them. It seems to me, however, that he shows himself equally often to realize that matters are frequently far more complicated and mixed in human life and lives, and that we do better to pick up on the latter awareness rather than to take the former penchant to show his true colors. If these ways of appropriating him make the account I shall be offering neoNietzschean rather than as ^zrfeo-Nietzschean (so to speak) as it is possible to be, so be it. Thus, I do not claim for this account of normativity that it is in fact Nietzsche's, which I am simply reporting, or that, had he had a longer productive life, he would have wound up saying more or less what I do here. I claim for it only that it is an account for which he amply prepares the way; that its basic ideas are suggested by things one can find throughout his texts, both early and later, in such passages as those cited at the outset; that it is Nietzschean in spirit as well as in inspiration, true to what I take to be the general features, basic direction, cardinal insights, and most promising moves in his thinking relating to the matters under consideration; and that it has the advantage of making good and important sense of him on them. Others are more than welcome to play the same game; and I look forward to the discussion to which this may lead.2 II Nietzsche thought not only that the kind of morality he called "herd animal morality" leaves a good deal to be desired, at least when imposed in Procrustean fashion upon all, but also that the entire phenomenon of morality needs to be reconsidered, reinterpreted, and revalued. So much is reasonably well known. But he also thought that the result should be, not the elimination of all morals, but rather moral renewal - albeit with significant modifications in form, substance, and understanding. He may have styled himself not only "genealogist of morals" but also "immoralist," and may have made "beyond good and evil" his watchword; but it is only in relation to certain ways of conceiving of morality that his stance may properly be considered flatly rejectionist. "His attempted "overcoming of morality," as he calls it (BGE 32),3 is more its Aufhebung4 than its abolition.

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Nietzsche's main "contribution" to moral philosophy is generally taken to be his attack upon the kind of morality that seemed to him to have come to be taken for granted in the Western world, in both its popular and its philosophical forms and variants. This "contribution" in turn is then most often deemed to be of straightforwardly negative significance. (On this view, Nietzsche is seen as something like a "moral terrorist," in Arthur Danto's phrase.) A few others (like Philippa Foot and Alasdair Maclntyre) go a bit further, but consider Nietzsche to be of only indirectly positive significance to moral philosophy, through performing the service of reinvigorating the adherents of his target, and leading them to a new appreciation of this purported crown jewel of humanity.5 To my way of thinking, both versions of this fundamentally negative appraisal are quite undeserved; and Nietzsche's main contribution to moral philosophy is actually a positive one. But its positive upshot too is often reduced to caricatures that are only too easy to dismiss. There are two ways in particular in which it is commonly oversimplified and (mis-) conceived, with hostility in some cases and a friendlier disposition in others, but to belittling effect in both. I do not want to dignify them by lingering over them; but I must mention them if only to label them and lay them to rest, lest my view of the matter be assimilated to them. The first such mistake, which I call "the 'Blond Beast' Blunder," consists in taking Nietzsche to be advocating a return to or revival of the sort of thing he labels "master morality" in the First Essay of GM. (If Danto stops just short of this mistake, Bertrand Russell gave it classic expression;6 and it continues to be echoed by many today who ought to know better.) Nietzsche does evince a kind of appreciation and even admiration for that sort of morality, particularly in relation to the contrasting type of morality he calls "slave morality." But his genealogical analysis is not even intended to be taken as an assessment of these types, let alone as an endorsement and commendation of the former in place of the latter, even for the potential "higher types" among us today or to come. To be sure, Nietzsche's "genealogical" analysis is intended to help set the stage, both for a critique of prevailing moral values and ways of thinking about morality and for their supersession. It does no more than that, however, nor is it purported to do so, as even a cursory reading of his Preface to GM ought to make quite clear. In the course of his analysis of morals (and ourselves) in the body of GM Nietzsche does offer some hints and suggestions with respect to his idea of a higher type of morality for a higher type of human being, notably in his brief remarks about the "sovereign individual" in the First Essay. If these hints are construed along the lines of his portrait of the "master morality" of the barbarian

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"beasts of prey," however, the resulting picture is a gross caricature of his conception of "higher humanity" and comes nowhere close to conveying the general outlines of the moral philosophy toward which I take him to have been moving, or even his commended code of conduct for the cream of the crop. The second mistake might be called "the 'Bland Blather' Blunder." It involves supposing that, while Nietzsche does (for example, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra) distance himself from the "Blond Beast," the "higher morality" he supposedly advocates in place of Blond Bestiality is an insipid counsel of New-Wave-style self-improvement, self-expression, and self-celebration that has no real content, other than a vague elitism with an Ayn Rand-ish flavor. Danto does not stop short of this mistake; and he is not alone in this attempted reductio ad Californiam. Nietzsche does not even try to say with any precision and clarity either what he would have people in general do, or how he would have them do it. His silence on this score is taken by some who read him in this second way to write off the idea that there is anything of a positive nature to his moral philosophy that is worthy of attention and development. And, indeed, I would readily grant that, //there were nothing more to it than Zarathustrian hand-waving, this would be so. But I think there is much more to it than this. Nietzsche's larger normative-philosophical project, as I understand it, extended to nothing less than a fundamental reiterpretation of the general character of normativity. In this connection he does insist that moral philosophers must first of all direct their attention to what he calls "the facts of morality" to be found in human history and present-day life, with all the care, detachment, and descriptive and analytical acumen they can muster (BGE 186). But he came to believe that he had done enough along these lines to place him in a position to begin to develop a new form of normative theory, centering on what he took to be his "fundamental innovation" of a "naturalization of morality" (WP 462). In what follows I shall make common cause with him in this venture. Ill Nietzschean moral philosophy takes as one of its points of departure what Nietzsche calls "the death of God." By this he means not only the abandonment of what he calls the "God-hypothesis," but also the demise of any and all versions of or metaphysical substitutes for it, involving the postulation of some sort of transcendent reality, standard of value, or other "absolute" fundamental principle in terms of which the nature and significance of human life and the world in which we find ourselves are

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to be interpreted and evaluated. For those of a Nietzschean persuasion, our nature, existence, and world accordingly must be interpreted and evaluated strictly on their own terms. Another point of departure is the idea that everything about ourselves has come to be as it is in the course of developments of a biological and historical nature, and that while these developments may indeed have explanations of one sort or another, there is neither any world-historical teleology nor any essencerealization process at work in them. I am not going to argue for these premises here; for my objective on this occasion is rather to look beyond them with Nietzschean eyes, and consider what sort of conception of normativity might still be possible and of philosophical and human significance. With Nietzsche, I thus take it to be the case that there are, as he puts it, no ultimate, nonderivative "moral phenomena," existing independently of creatures like ourselves with conditions of life and genealogies like ours (WP 258). Nor are there even any derivative but nonetheless ultimately grounded such "facts" that are as good as absolute, for all practical purposes, in relation to our nature and existence. The phenomenology and the general view of the matter may be otherwise; and most moral philosophers are of a different mind as well. For present purposes, however, I am going to suppose that Nietzsche is right (even though the kind of campaign he wages against all such alternative ways of thinking, by its very nature, does not amount to a conclusive demonstration). But there are moralities. This is something neither Nietzsche nor I would dream of denying. The question is: What is to be made of them? And, even more importantly, perhaps, what is to be wanted of them, or of anything of the kind? What sort (or sorts) of place or role, if any, do they continue to be needed to fill or play in human life? And is there some sort of morality that is anything like valid, defensible, or justifiable? Is there any way (as Korsgaard puts the question) not only of explaining the claims any of them make upon human agents, but of vindicating them? To lay some cards on the table without further ado: I concur with Nietzsche in abandoning not only the idea that there are irreducible moral facts, but also the ideas that there are (or need to be) categorical imperatives, and that moral principles are (or must be) necessarily and universally valid, standing or falling depending upon whether they can or cannot be supposed or shown to have such validity. I would observe, however, that while these points may be taken negatively, they may and, Nietzsche and I would say, they should - be taken no less positively, as opening the way to a resurrection and re-legitimization of moral and other normative concepts suitably reinterpreted. On a Nietzschean view

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of the matter, there are moralities that are more appropriate than others - but the plural must be noted, and their appropriateness obtains only for agents of certain descriptions, in certain sorts of circumstances. There are no absolute duties, no absolute rights (human or otherwise), and no absolute prescriptions and prohibitions of which sense can be made by the Nietzschean moral philosopher. The only moral rules there are, on this view, have their only basis in contingent features of human life that have no universal or absolute validity and authority. We have long been accustomed to want and suppose there to be more to the moral than this. When presented with such a prospect, many both within and beyond the philosophical community are inclined to throw up their hands in dismay or horror, and to pronounce any such moral philosophy to be hopelessly inadequate at best. If Nietzsche and I are right, however, this reaction is misdirected; it is merely wishful thinking to long for and demand something more, and the messenger should not be blamed for the message. Nor does it follow that those who are so minded must be indifferent to the atrocities so often cited at this juncture, or to have no scruples with respect to such conduct themselves. Indeed, one may even fight them in good Nietzschean conscience, with moral banners flying - although those who do so with a Nietzschean interpretive sensibility will not be surprised in at least some such cases to see other moral banners arrayed against them. Fighting for what one cherishes and esteems, and against what one abhors and despises, is the last thing a Nietzschean would eschew - but there are, in Nietzschean eyes, no moral monopolies or trumps. Even ascetic ideals and ruthless fanaticisms, although they may be exposed, generally cannot be refuted; and Nietzsche knew better than to suppose that their exposure would cause their adherents to strike their banners en masse. IV In what follows I shall be speaking of "morals" as well as of "morality" and "moralities"; and it will become apparent that I have a preference for the former expression. There are reasons for this, including the fact that its German cognate is the term Nietzsche uses (rather than Moralita't) in the title of GM (Zur Genealogie der Moral) and for the most part elsewhere. "Morals" is a term that can function either in the singular despite the "s" (like "ethics") or in the plural, which suits my purposes better than either "morality" (which is much too singular, and too pretentious as well) or "moralities" (which has connotations of multiple systematicity that I would prefer to avoid). It also is a construction similar to "values" and "norms" - and to "mores," "rules," "customs," and "laws"

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as well - which aptly suggests a parallel with them that I would like to highlight. "Morals," as I take Nietzsche rightly to understand them, are most properly thought of as a loosely related family of norms pertaining to human conduct of various sorts, standing in relations that are not at all neat and tidy to others such as "rules," "laws," and "customs." They may or may not relate to conduct affecting other human beings; and while they may be either prescriptive or proscriptive, they also may be more weakly or differently directive either positively or negatively. It is characteristic of morals, however, that they are experienced as having normative force in or with respect to the appropriate situations by those whose morals they are, above and beyond descriptive content that others may be able to discern and characterize. They are action-guiding, not merely in the external way that laws and rules may be action-guiding for those who know of them without embracing them as one's own, but rather in a way reflecting one's identification with them, not only in cases involving some sort of self-legislation but also (and much more commonly) by way of internalization. Further, whatever people may happen to think about the basis of their morals, it is Nietzsche's and my view that their normativity or normative force derives from the embrace of values of one sort or another with which their morals are associated, and which they serve, whether they derive from them or have been grafted onto them. This is by no means to attribute particularly lofty origins to them, however; for the values in question may be all-too-human, and indeed may be deeply pathological - as in the case of Nietzsche's diagnosis of the origin of slave morality, in what he calls ressentiment born of domination. Korsgaard usefully frames her discussion of what is going on here in terms of the notion of the "sources of normativity." On Korsgaard's view, there are several such "sources," the most fundamental and important of which is roughly that to which Kant appeals, and which on her and his view suffices to supply Kantian morality with its basis and legitimacy. Nietzsche and I follow Kant and Korsgaard neither in this respect nor in their larger supposition that moral normatively must have a necessity and universality rendering all beings sharing our fundamental nature (as essentially rational agents) subject to it. And we further part company with them in considering it imperative to reinterpret both humanity and normativity along "naturalistic" lines. For a Kantian, little of interest would remain of the whole topic of normativity after such a reinterpretation; indeed, it would be tantamount to opening the gates to nihilism. From a Nietzschean perspective, however, "naturalizing" our conceptions of our nature and of all value renders it

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all the more important to raise the question of the sources of normativity, and endows that question with even more intense interest. For it by no means follows from what Nietzsche calls "the death of God," and from the attendantly necessary "de-deification" of our understanding of nature and human reality, that values and morals drop out of the picture. As Nietzsche observes, while the "advent of nihilism" may indeed be at hand, that is only because the stage has been set for it by the cultivation of an addiction to absolutism, which when no longer satisfied results in pathological withdrawal symptoms. At this point the issue changes, to that of how values and morals are to be positively reconceived. Where are the sources of "real normativity" to be found? This, for Nietzsche, is the key to the determination of what one might call "real morals for real people" - morals, moreover, that are not merely all-too-human or pathological phenomena, but are constructively and crucially operative in what he calls "the service of life" and its "enhancement." And that, for him, is the trump consideration in all matters of meaning and value. Both for Nietzsche and for me, all normativity is ultimately of extramoral origin. For Nietzsche that ultimate origin - the Ur-source of all normativity - is to be found in the basic disposition he takes to be operative in all that transpires in this world, which he calls "will to power," and which expresses itself in the various more specific dispositions informing our affective constitutions and lives. Like Hume, Nietzsche holds that reason in this respect is and cannot but be and something like "the slave of the passions." Indeed, "reason" for Nietzsche just is a kind of configuration and instrument of the affects, brought into patterns of controlled and ordered expression. I subscribe to the general drift of this account, but without committing myself to Nietzsche's or any other particular interpretation and characterization of the C/r-source, or even to whether it is one or many. For me it suffices to say that it is our affective and ultimately psychophysiological constitutions, in conjunction with our lifecircumstances, that set the basic context of all normativity. And for Nietzsche as for me, our natures and circumstances have a kind of generality up to a point, giving us a good deal in common, and setting us apart from our relations in the animal world (and undoubtedly at least to some extent from our pre- and proto-human ancestors along with them). But for both of us, this is not the whole story; for our affective constitutions also are both differing and plastic, in ways that make possible significant variation with respect to normativity in human life at the level of its sociocultural articulations and diversifications. And this may also not only permit but actually warrant divergence in what I might call

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normative affiliation among the possibilities available to historically situated human beings. It thus is only the beginning of the story to observe that the fundamental ground of normativity is to be so conceived. The proximal sources of normativity pertaining to the living of human lives are to be sought and found - neither in the deepest depths of something about our essential or biological or even rational nature, nor in our particular individual "selves" either, but rather much closer to the surface. For Nietzsche as for Hegel, I suggest, and on my own view of the matter as well, their primary locus is the indisputably real historically engendered, culturally configured and socially encoded macro- and micro-forms of human life or broader and narrower Lebensspharen, ("spheres of life"), in Nietzsche's phrase (WP 898), in which our human reality expresses and develops itself.7 Forms of life without affects (one might say) are normatively empty; but affects without forms of life are normatively meaningless. Forms or spheres of life, as I mean them here to be understood, are nothing particularly mysterious. They are first and foremost the various sorts of sociocultural formations and configurations - institutions, practices, endeavors, and the like - setting the contexts of the greater part of what we variously do in the courses of our socioculturally articulated lives. They are exemplified by the differing contours of social, economic, political, religious, and family life, for example, found today not only in different places but also often in close proximity, and also by those of different sorts of institutions and practices - in academia, sports, the arts, the sciences, various walks of professional life, and myriad other sorts of human endeavor. While admitting of varying degrees of combination and "customization," they have the basic character of Hegelian Allgemeinheit - of commonality or generality, in the sense of being shared or common to communities or groups of greatly varying scope. Their Allgemeinheit, however, is invariably limited, contingent, and historical, at least insofar as they are human rather than merely biological. Further, our affective natures may motivate their generation (or may have done so, once upon a time), their modification (along the way), and their adoption or rejection (here and now); but their specific content is another matter. And once forms of life are established and get going, they develop features that normatively constrain and direct activity within them. There is nothing absolute or necessary or universal in any stronger sense about them; and consequently the same is true of the values associated with them, and of the morals deriving from them. This is where Nietzsche and I part company with Hegel, as well as with Kant and Korsgaard. There is no "higher" kind of validation available; and it

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is a serious mistake, on our view, to demand or long or search for one for that way nihilism lies, when one will settle for nothing less, but concludes that the quest is in vain. Values are engendered within the contexts of such forms of life, and develop along with them; and morals, as Nietzsche relatedly contends, are fundamentally something like partial expressions of various conditions of the possibility of their (as well as "our") preservation, flourishing, growth, and development - sometimes transparently so, but more often than not relatively opaque to this connection. This is intended as a partial gloss on what it means to speak of them functioning "in the service of life." But this may mean quite different things in different contexts. The "life" that is (or is to be) "served" is by no means invariably or fundamentally that of individuals, and indeed on a Nietzschean way of thinking is better conceived in a much more general way; and the forms of life in question accordingly may be of very diverse sorts and dimensions. Nor is this all; for considerations of preservation, flourishing, growth, and development may push and pull in quite different directions, as Nietzsche often observes. Construed as instances, special cases or outgrowths of norms associated with such forms of life, morals are as real as their sources and contexts; and in this respect, far from denying any reality to them, Nietzsche and I would insist that they are among the most prominent and significant features of human life. They have a reality - and indeed an objectivity - no less substantial than the associated forms of human life and endeavor that have come to be and continue to take shape on this earth. And supposing that there are indeed no loftier sources of normativity than these, it would be foolish to give oneself over to lamenting that this is so, and that these do not amount to something more awesome (like Kant's "majestic moral edifices"). One does better to seek to do justice to them, warts and all, and to make the most of them and the human possibilities for which they prepare the way, even while diagnosing their pathologies and alerting ourselves to their liabilities. One also needs to learn to take a larger view of them. For example, while morals would appear to be a distinctively human phenomenon (at least as far as we know), it is worth observing and bearing in mind that human beings hold no monopoly on the phenomenon of normativity broadly conceived. Sources of normativity both more primordial and also quite other than any expressed in human morals may be discerned wherever living creatures are to be found, whose constitutions and circumstances likewise combine to configure what might also be called "forms of life," with their own requirements and desiderata. The sources of normativity in human life may be considered special cases of a much

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more widespread phenomenon, just as our forms of life may be regarded as a large and diverse array of variations on a very general theme. Nietzsche makes much of such observations, in the course of his "naturalization of morality" (along with the rest of our humanity), as a part of his effort to show how good naturalistic sense may be made of it. While this basic kinship ought not be denied or overlooked, however, the differences along these lines between ourselves and our fellow creatures on this planet have come in the course of human events to be enormous, even when human life is at its all-too-human least. The forms of life of other creatures known to us - and thus the sources of normativity for them - are largely if not entirely biological determinate. It is characteristic of human sources of normativity and human morals, on the other hand, that they relate to forms of life involving significant admixtures of historically developing and varying sociocultural features, which both supplement and modify the ways in which biologically originating imperatives and dispositions are expressed.

Nietzsche clearly also was very much interested in the possibility of human morals that would be more appropriate to what he calls "higher" humanity than any of the sorts of morals we have come up with so far, philosophically or historically, "master" morals as well as "slave" and "herd" varieties included. I share that interest. But our interest in it notwithstanding, a more general account of morals is still needed that is no less attentive to the human rule than to the exceptions to it - not only as this distinction may be drawn between human beings but also even within particular human lives. Nietzschean "higher humanity" is best conceived (or reconceived), on my view, in such a way that it never really is - or is ever likely to be - more than a sometime or piecemeal thing even, among those who do have it in them to be exceptions to the human rule; and this has important implications for the understanding of morals and their appropriateness in human life under different descriptions and conditions. (Nietzsche seems to be of different minds about this on different occasions; and I consider it the course of wisdom to resolve the difference in this direction.) In Nietzschean eyes, it is importantly true that human life transcends animality; but it is a mistake to construe the crux of this transcendence in terms of any sort of spirituality, rationality, or individuality other than those which may be understood in terms of the internalization and development of what I am calling "forms of life." All such phenomena, to the extent that they represent real human possibilities and attainments, have

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their origins in developments of a sociocultural nature. And by the same token, to the extent that morals are a more than merely biological affair, they are first and foremost sociocultural affairs, albeit with affective entanglements both genealogically and biographically that may not only be powerful and complex but also troubled, in a variety of ways to which Nietzsche was highly attentive. Forms of human life, as I am speaking of them, thus are to be at once (in Nietzsche's phrase) "translated back into nature" and naturalistically understood, and also read back out of it again, as emergent phenomena. If nature itself may be said to establish the sources of proto-normativity whenever biological forms of life appear, the emergence and the proliferation of human forms of social and cultural life take this process to a higher level, transforming the manner as well as the richness with which it unfolds. Indeed, they may be thought of as "sites" and "mechanisms" for value-generation, thereby rendering human life a very different sort of thing from all merely natural forms of existence. And some of the values thus generated are expressed in the action-guiding norms I am taking morals fundamentally to be. Far from reducing human beings to their animality by construing morality in this manner, therefore, the Nietzschean account I am offering accords morals a key role in the transformation of human animality into humanity, and in the maintenance of that humanity as well. Thus, our humanity itself, so conceived, insofar as it amounts to something more than its biological origins and materials, is very much a sociocultural affair. In this respect Nietzsche and I can agree not only with Hegel but also with Marx, who contends that the Wesen - the being and nature - of our humanity is neither metaphysical nor biological, but rather lies in "the ensemble of social relations."8 For Nietzsche too the Wesen of human life revolves, fundamentally and always very significantly, around socioculturally engendered possibilities. And it is worth noting that this is so for him no less with respect to forms of life he deems "higher" than for those he ranks "lower"; for his "rank-ordering" is no more keyed to individual uniqueness than it is to rational generality. To be sure - and this is a point Nietzsche constantly stresses - we never leave our physiology behind. "Soul is only a word for something about the body," as he has Zarathustra put it (Z 1:4). Or, as he remarks elsewhere, "perhaps the entire evolution of the spirit is a question of the body; it is the history of the development of a higher body that emerges into our sensibility. The organic is rising to yet higher levels" (WP 676). I intend my account to be entirely consistent with this theme, and indeed to build upon it. All of human sociocultural life is a part of this "history," and indeed is the very device by means of which, in our case, "the

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organic" is thus elevated. Its structures function as a kind of shared exoskeleton, interacting with our biologically and psychologically shaped and powered affective natures to yield the character of our lives as we live them. A Nietzschean naturalism of this sort is far removed from the biological determinism to which sociobiologists tend to subscribe. Its presumption, on the contrary, is that biological imperatives and variables certainly condition and constrain but do not specifically determine what transpires in human life - or at any rate do not do so across the board even though nothing above and beyond the realm of the human does so either. This, on Nietzsche's view as well as my own, is owing to the mediating role played by sociocultural systems, to the existence of which human biology itself has adapted. These systems have taken on lives of their own, the dynamics of which have more to do with the configurations of forms of human life than with their biological underpinnings. One might think of our forms of life and our psychophysiological constitutions as the warp and woof of our humanity, distinguishable in character but inextricably bound up together in human reality. The independent reality of various forms of life in relation to each of us as we initially encounter them is only a relative autonomy, real enough in relation to us as individuals, but originating in the dynamics of prior human expression and interaction. Although they may ultimately be the products of "the body" and "our affects," however, the substantiality they may attain is very real, and can be very significant, as Nietzsche was acutely aware. They often have had and continue to have enormous consequences, as he recognized (and, in certain salient instances, lamented). And as he further observes, they remain - as they long have been - of crucial importance in the production of humanity in all of its varieties, "higher" no less than others. Once internalized, they become its infrastructure; and even the most individuated of Nietzsche's "sovereign individuals" are no less indebted to them than Shakespeare was to the English language. To go "beyond good and evil" in the "higher human" sort of way, properly understood and elaborated, therefore, is to live in a manner far from devoid of normative dimensions, notwithstanding its emancipation from thraldom to Procrustean moralism. On this account, much if not all of one's moral life in such circumstances is bound to be a function of involvements and commitments making up the different parts of one's life and identity, which may be entered into and sustained in a genuinely autonomous manner. And as I read him, Nietzsche grasped this point as early as Schopenhauer as Educator and remained committed to it to the end.

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While it is a basic feature of this account that morals have nothing to be keyed to beyond forms of life, it is a point of great importance that forms of life and associated morals may differ not only from one society to another but also within a given society (as obviously is envisioned by Nietzsche when he describes "master" and "slave" moralities locked in fateful combat). Moreover, particularly in the complex societies of the modern world, these differences can and do become very considerable, with multiple spheres of life existing in close proximity. And what makes this situation even more interesting, challenging, and promising is the apparently increasing capacity of human beings to involve themselves with them less than completely but nonetheless seriously enough to internalize the associated norms. This is a phenomenon that caught Nietzsche's attention, and that he found both worrisome and promising: worrisome, because it carries with it the danger of psychic as well as cultural fragmentation and breakdown; but promising, because it heralds the possibility of a humanity better able to live with and benefit from such diversity both individually and collectively. For those moving within and among diverse domains with differing structures, patterns of meaning, values, and norms, the keys are what Nietzsche calls "rank-ordering" (or prioritization) and "giving style to one's character." For such a society more generally, the keys are defusing the potential for conflict and finding a way to attain and sustain a sufficient degree of mutual accommodation to ensure viability. Nietzsche has less to say on this latter score that is of any worth than one would wish; but that is no reason to suppose that the lack cannot be made good in a way that both remains true to the spirit of his concerns and thinking and makes good sense. What bothers Nietzsche about the sort of thing he calls "herd morality" is not that it is ill-suited to the "herd" and herd life (which makes up the greater part of human life even under the most admirable of circumstances, and is by no means to be despised in its place). His concern rather is that its effects are detrimental when its importance is overestimated and it oversteps its bounds, to the detriment of what could turn out to be exceptional in relation to the general human rule - within ourselves as well as among ourselves - in contexts in which it would better march to a different drummer. And what distresses him even more about the sort of thing he calls "slave morality" is the further fact (as he defines and characterizes this sort of morality) that it is a pathological phenomenon, framed reactively in opposition to a contrasting form of life perceived to be threatening, fueled by resentment directed against it, and impacting destructively on all sides. Remove the latter dynamic, however, and curb the universalistic pre-

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tensions of any and all forms of life and their moral expressions, and one is well on the way to the sort of future Nietzsche envisions "beyond good and evil" - a future that would be free of moral absolutism and imperialism on the part of all, and free also of pathologically motivated uses of moral concepts as weapons of guerrilla warfare, but by no means devoid of morals. On the contrary, morals of various sorts would be ubiquitous even if not homogeneous, and would be taken quite seriously - more so, perhaps, than what goes by the name of morality is by many at present. They might well come to differ from that morality not only in aspect but also in content; but their content would change only as the forms of life with which they are associated change or give way to others. Indeed, many of them would be - nonpejoratively speaking - "herd" (or homogeneous group) phenomena, geared to forms of socially structured life, even if others might be more highly individuated, reflecting ways in which uncommonly creative exceptions to these human rules spin off from them. For Nietzsche does not suppose that all actual and possible instances of garden-variety human morals must have the pathological character of "slave morality." Healthier varieties, attuned to the flourishing and development of forms of life passing muster in other respects and kept within these bounds, are by no means to be disparaged, even when they are of a modestly quotidian nature. On the contrary, we surely will never be able to do without them, and would be naive to wish or try to do so. VI In taking the position that the only actual sources of normativity available to human beings beyond those deriving from their (general and particular) biological constitutions are those associated with forms of life of varying sorts and dimensions with which it is possible for them to identify, I realize that I am inviting the charge of relativism. And indeed I do consider any and all values and morals one might actually be able to live by to be bound up with and thus "relative to" historically varying and contingent sociocultural formations, institutions, and practices. Nietzsche and I both would insist, however, that this does not render them "subjective" and capricious, any more than are the rules of chess or the norms of conduct associated with the practice of medicine or the conduct of scientific inquiry - notwithstanding their undeniable mutability, contingency, and historicality. And it is my intention to suggest (as Nietzsche does in the first passage from The Gay Science cited at the outset) that we do well to take cases of these sorts as guides to the understanding of

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morals; for they bring the whole issue down to earth in a way that I believe to be quite salutary. I take it to be something no longer in need of argumentation that morals started out as mores, which are quite evidently bound up with the historically varying and developing contingencies of the communities and cultures in which they appear. We nonetheless manage relatively easily to convince ourselves (as people long have done) that we have purified our moral convictions of their contingencies, and that what remains of them should be beyond dispute for any decent human being. It is my Nietzschean contention, however, that, as has been observed in the case of politics, all morals are local, even if the bounds of the "local" have grown very wide indeed, and even if elements of one morality were to become the moral equivalent of English (which seems on its way to becoming the lingua franca of the modern world). This is clearly so in the cases of a number of human practices, from the scientific and mathematical to the artistic and athletic. I see no reason to believe that there is any domain of human life in which the matter is otherwise. But this is only a part of the story. My next crucial point is this: Without the bond forged by the identification of human beings with forms of life, the existence of sources of normativity in these forms of life will come to nothing - just as, without the establishment of a similar connection between human beings and languages or forms of art, the availability of sources of value in them will likewise come to nothing. Further, morals and other sorts of culturally engendered values and norms are relational affairs, and stand in equal need of the appropriate sorts of education if they are to attain and continue to find realization in human life or any other form of sentient existence, which is their only possible abode. Such education is an indispensable precondition of the possibility of this identification, as Hegel stressed and Nietzsche well knew. By "education" here I do not mean mere "instruction," let alone "indoctrination," but rather the sort of thing Hegel and Nietzsche called Bildung, and Hume called the cultivation of sensibility. In this matter I (and Nietzsche) side emphatically with Aristotle and against both Plato and his kindred philosophical and religious spirits, for whom the sources of normativity transcend human reality and are to be apprehended either through some special type of cognition or by way of some sort of revelation. For those of us who take the Aristotelian fork in the road, there are no such sources (although humankind has been all too willing to ascribe that status to those it itself has engendered). On this way of thinking, what moral education actually amounts to at most and at best is a kind of character formation in a sociocultural context, taking advantage and making the most of both the developmental potential with which we

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generally and also more specifically happen to be endowed, and also the materials at hand in the normative structures of the various forms of life made available in a society by the vicissitudes of history. In this respect morals are no better but also no worse off than any other part of human civilizations, and should be neither overestimated nor underestimated accordingly. They are elements of the cultural systems by virtue of which our humanity has become what it is and so has bootstrapped its way above and beyond mere animality - and also by virtue of which variants of humanity set themselves apart from each other. In ages past these systems often tended to exist as worlds unto themselves, intersecting for the most part either only at their margins or in fateful clashes. In the modern world contact, conflict, and competition among them is the rule. We may continue to long for some sort of authority or referee who would settle the contest; but here we are confronted with divergences for which there is no decision-procedure other than the existential process of undertaking to live by one or another alternative and the political process of their competition for allegiance. There is a place here for advocacy, not only within but beyond measures serving to enable a culture to endure. Indeed, the conviction that the world would be a better place if everyone were to buy into a certain set of values and associated morals is not incoherent, even if absolute truth cannot be claimed for it, and so' may warrant a kind of "moral proselytizing," as it were - or at any rate, there is no higher-level normative principle that would rule it out. The way is even open to "muscular" versions of such proselytization, endeavoring to impose adherence to norms associated with values to which one attaches exceptional importance. But these are contests of aspirations rather than truthcandidates, on a Nietzschean view of the matter; and a human world in which this is constantly happening would be a sorrier place than one in which it never happened at all. Thinking this problem through is one of the trickiest and most important items on the Nietzschean moralphilosophical agenda. In any event, on my interpretation and view of the matter, as on Nietzsche's in the second passage from The Gay Science cited at the outset, it undoubtedly is neither to be expected nor even to be desired that moral homogeneity will eventuate. Moral difference will surely be the rule rather than the exception in any world in which one of a Nietzschean sensibility would choose to live, on the intra- as well as intercultural level. And to come to terms with such a world, it will become necessary to think of those whose moral sensibility differs from one's own not necessarily as "immoral," but possibly as being something like "differently moraled" - in significant contrast to those whose

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sensibility remains at or reverts to coordinates relating chiefly to their own biologically and psychologically shaped inclinations. The latter may be tolerated if they remain marginal and nondisruptive to the forms of life to which others are committed. If they prove immune both to attempts to draw them in and to efforts to get them to curb their intrusions upon the forms of life of others, there are no general moral barriers to defense against them. We may be well advised to curb our rough treatment of the barbarians within or without the gates, however, not because we "morally" owe it to them as human beings, but rather because of what such treatment of them might do to us. But this drama is not played out only at the level at which civilizations collide and conflicts are matters of life and death. In the modern world, we are constantly "demoralizing" and "remoralizing" different parts of our lives, in ways with which philosophy typically has precious little to do. Forms of life are many and diverse, and examples of changes in them with implications for the morals associated with them are easy to cite. In sports, for example, what is and is not acceptable behavior is very different today than what it was not so very long ago - for example, in Olympic competition, but also at the professional, collegiate, and even high school and lower levels. And the changes in standards at various levels and in different contexts are equally great in such spheres as politics, warfare, and scientific inquiry. Other areas of life have become arenas of competition or of moralization in novel ways and degrees - for example, relations between races and sexes; the treatment of animals and of the environment, not to mention children, the aged, the mentally distressed, and those with disabilities of various sorts; and the conduct of legal, medical, business, and international affairs, to mention but a few examples. In all such cases, the Nietzschean assessment is that we are dealing not with the discovery of moral truths, but rather with their invention and establishment and modification, in ways that generate their own validity. They last and sustain that validity as long as - and only as long as - there is human commitment in accordance with them. They do not have to be true in the first place in order to come true, or to gain sufficient acceptance to count as true for all practical purposes within the universe of the spheres and forms of life in which they figure. If the notion of "truth" has an application and a meaning in this context, it is an application and meaning of this sort; for on a Nietzschean view of the matter, there is nothing else - or at any rate, nothing loftier and more absolute - for it to mean and be. It should further be added, however, that there is no necessary corre-

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lation between excellence or even proficiency in a particular domain and the extent to which one's conduct within it accords even with its own morals. The annals of sports are replete with cases in point - as are those of science, music, politics, and virtually every other area in which excellence is humanly defined and attainable. Morals are not everything where values are concerned, even in contexts in which they have been engendered as expressions of some of the conditions of the possibility of realizing these very values. Nietzsche's recognition of this point, and his ambivalence with respect to the question of whether it is best expressed in terms of the appropriateness of exceptional individuals working out their own norms and customized higher moralities or simply ceasing to concern themselves with norms and moralities, accounts for no little of the strain in his rhetoric as he attempts repeatedly and in different ways to come to grips with the problem. VII Let me now further elaborate the conception of normativity I have been presenting somewhat more systematically. All normativity, on this view, including that of morals, is bound up with culturally configured spheres or forms of life, deriving from their characterizing and organizing principles and values, even if in exceptional cases it may develop in a manner transcending (and sometimes transforming) them. In a Wittgensteinian way of speaking, it is in such forms of life that normativity has its "original home"; and here "forms of life" may be thought of, not just as "language games" (though they are that), but as "value games." And I hasten to add that this way of referring to them should no more be taken to trivialize them than Wittgenstein's expression does. I consider it a mistake to think of normativity as fundamentally a firstperson singular affair - a matter, as Korsgaard puts it, of "what / ought to do," with an emphasis on "I." Indeed, I would maintain that it is not even fundamentally a first-person plural affair - a matter of what we ought to do, or simply of what we do, or of what "we" would say about what people do. Rather, it is a matter first and foremost of that peculiar third-person modality, neither clearly singular nor clearly plural, expressed in German by means of the expression "man" and in English by "one," as in "One does X" and "One does not do Y" - or, more colloquially, at least in the States, by "you," as in "You just don't Z around here," or "You really must W." These figures of speech are geared to conveying the idea of some sort of conduct that is or is not appropriate or

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desirable or admirable in some sort of situation, in the context of some particular institution, practice, or social setting. The normativities associated with these value-games may exist as properties of them regardless of whether you or I or others buy into them; but they will be moot as far as we (or various others) are concerned unless we (or they) do so - and they will amount to nothing if no one at all does so, like the grammar and vocabulary of a dead language. The question therefore needs to be addressed of how to think about what might be called the engagement or realization of normativity. We are surrounded by such forms of life or value-games, which may attract or repel us, and which may through their initiates either recruit or exclude us. The key issue, where the engagement of normativity in our own instances is concerned, is identification. But a number of distinctions need to be marked out. The first such distinction I would make is between involvement and indifference. Involvement is not necessarily desirable, and indifference is not necessarily undesirable. In fact, while some involvement in some value-games is undoubtedly desirable, indifference to a good many of those around us is a virtual necessity. It is an important part of the task of such processes as child-rearing, socialization, acculturation, and other forms of education to foster some degrees and forms of such involvement. And in this connection, it is well worth noting and exploring the differences between the roles and functions of parents, teachers, mentors, peers, and purveyors of popular culture, to mention only some of the more salient possibilities among those who midwife the engagement of normativity in our lives. Within the rubric of involvement, I would distinguish between opting in and being co-opted. Opting into a form of life or value-game makes possible the identification I am suggesting to be the key to the engagement of normativity in a genuine rather than merely superficial way, of the sort that may accompany being co-opted (a paradigm instance of which is being drafted into the army). Under the heading of "being co-opted," I distinguish three general types of stance and response: (a) Accepting one's lot, making the best of the situation by way of putting up with and outwardly conforming to the rules of the game; here one is (in Paul's classic phrase) "in it but not of it." (b) Resisting even while making some sort of minimal accommodation. Here one may more appropriately speak of rebellion than of acceptance, although that rebellion may be either passive or active, (c) Rejecting, while remaining sufficiently connected with the form of life that it continues to figure importantly in one's life and experience, even if largely by negation. In this sort of case one may appropriately speak

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of alienation - as one cannot where those in question opt out so completely that they cease to care at all about the form of life in question and become indifferent and oblivious to it. I distinguish four modalities of "opting in." The first is that of what Hegel called "immediacy"; it is the modality of having happened into a form of life and going along unreflectively with it, as though it were utterly natural. It involves a form of "identification"; but the identification achieved occurs in a manner that does not involve and reflectively engage the person to any significant degree. The second such modality is characterized by what might well be called heteronomy. Here the norms in question are as alien to one as the rules of a second language or the practices of a foreign land, but one arrives at a determination to embrace them nonetheless, as an optional role deemed worth choosing on selfinterested grounds. (Its distinction from the first modality of being coopted should be clear enough in principle, although they may be harder to distinguish in actual cases - whether one's own or those of others and indeed may give way to each other in both directions.) The third modality I distinguish - both from the others indicated above and from the fourth below - involves taking the further step of affirming and experiencing the scheme in question as one's own law, and of coming to conceive of one's identity at least in part in terms of one's involvement in it, even though one has not actually contributed in any significant way to its crafting. I call this modality authenticity. The fourth modality I call autonomy. It satisfies the additional criterion that one has actually and to some significant extent contributed to the scripting or authoring of the form of life in question, thereby (as Nietzsche puts it) "legislating" or "giving the law to oneself." In most instances, however, this can and will mean no more than a marginally discernible rescripting or incremental revision of the form of life. I take Nietzsche's talk about the importance of "value creators" and "legislators," as well as about "sovereign individuals" and "becoming those we are," to have its primary application in this fourth context. There has been plenty of value-creation and -legislation in human history; but it has tended to occur rather haphazardly, in ways reflecting the contingencies of that history. For individuals to make a difference in this respect, even only at the margins, would be a very notable and significant development. Despite its rough edges, I favor preserving the basic point Nietzsche attempts to make in his contrast of "master" and "slave" morals or moralities, casting it in the more general form suggested in the course of his discussions of it. The point of this contrast is to mark and underscore the distinction between a type of normative scheme that is directly expres-

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sive of conditions relating to the character and requirements of flourishing of a form of life that has engendered its own values and organizing principles, and a contrasting type that is formed primarily in reaction to such a scheme and form of life, and only secondarily as an expression of the requirements of the form of life of which it is a part. One might prefer to speak instead of "positive" and "reactive" moralities here. I likewise consider it worth preserving the point Nietzsche seeks to make by means of his contrast of "herd" and "higher" types of morals, albeit in a relativized form permitting of its more flexible application. "Herd" morals may be taken chiefly to feature norms relating to common-denominator values in contexts in which the paramount concerns are the preservation and facilitation of some sort of community at the common-denominator level of its population. It is widely supposed that Nietzsche is implacably hostile to all such morals. Viewed through post-polemical Nietzschean eyes, however, as Nietzsche himself at times shows himself to be capable of viewing them, they have a place in human life, and indeed even in human life at its best; and, in their place, they are by no means to be despised. There is an important point here, that Nietzsche himself sometimes makes, but that his rhetoric on other occasions also often tends to obscure. All of us participate in forms of life to which such norms are appropriate, and indeed usually do so far more often than we can be said to be - or in some sense would do better to be - marching to different drummers, or to our own different drumming. Much of our lives, for much of the time, even in the cases of the most ubermenschlich among us, are herdlike affairs; and this not only is to be expected, but is entirely appropriate, and is by no means inconsistent with or detrimental to the attainment of whatever "higher humanity" may be humanly possible in this or that dimension of activity. Indeed, it is part of what makes its realization possible on the margins of human life more generally. It is commonplace normativity for commonplace situations; and that is precisely what commonplace situations call for, not only in and of themselves but in the interest of establishing the conditions of the possibility of the emergence of forms of "higher humanity" transcending them. This is something Nietzsche certainly knew very well, even if he did not always make provision for it in the heat of polemical battle. To be sure, at times Nietzsche did envision as well as recall conditions in which the forms of life of "higher types" are quite distinct from those of others; and what I am suggesting here is a picture that is at variance with that thought-experiment. But I do believe that this "mixed-mode" alternative picture of how things might go - and indeed do already go -

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is very much in keeping with the way he thought about the matter on other occasions, and is no less true to the spirit of his conception of enhanced life and higher humanity. In any event, this point needs to be incorporated into any account of normativity that is not to be seriously incomplete. I think Nietzsche would agree. "Higher humanity" is a notion that pertains first and foremost to a dimension of human possibility or "enhanced life" transcending the commonplace, and only secondarily to those who show that they have it in them to realize this sort of possibility in one way or another. It almost surely will always be the exception rather than the rule. All may have it in them to rise above the ordinarily human some of the time, and some may have it in them to do so more of the time and to greater effect, but none can do so all of the time; nor would it even make sense for anyone to aspire to do so. "Higher humanity" has to do with the cultivation and expression of human abilities in what Nietzsche calls "life-enhancing" ways, transforming the biological materials and social circumstances of human life in ways that affect its quality and contribute further to what he calls the "creation of values" and the endowment of life with meaning. And the "higher morals" of which he speaks in this connection have to do with the guidance of conduct in ways contributing or conducing (directly or indirectly) to this bootstrapping process of the transfiguration of human animality into an aesthetically vindicatable humanity. Nietzsche at one point in his notebooks refers to higher types of morality as those that train "for the heights" (WP 957); and he often makes observations to the effect that the humanly attainable heights are many and diverse. His theme of value-creation is to be understood in precisely this context. There is no fixed short list of domains of human life and activity in which alone excellence is possible and desirable. And as the profusion of forms of life in which this can occur increases, and their pursuit and cultivation proceed, the affirmation of life is given more sense than it would have if there were little more to it than what is merely animal, social, and all-too-human about it. I believe that a version of Nietzsche's conceptions of higher humanity and higher morals of this sort, expanded in certain ways to embrace forms of admirability of which he himself may not have been sufficiently appreciative, has much to be said for it. It may be conceived as a supplement to the indispensability of forms of commonplace morals geared to the facilitation and refinement of our mundane dealings with each other. There is much more that needs to be said with respect to both. Saying it is a good part of the constructive business of a neo-Nietzschean moral philosophy.

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VIII In the foregoing discussion I have sought to counter two common tendencies in understanding the positive upshot of Nietzsche's thinking with respect to morals and normativity. One is to construe it in a radically individualistic manner; the other is to take it to be reductively biologistic (or perhaps psychologistic with a strongly physiological cast). Considerations of a psycho-physiological nature, on my view and also my interpretation of Nietzsche, strongly condition and prompt the development of normativity, at both general and individual levels, but are mediated and modified in their expressions by the objectified sociocultural formations that have emerged in the prior course of human events, which I have characterized as the actual structural locus of normativity in human life. Considerations of a more significantly autonomistic sort, on the other hand, may indeed come into play, when certain very special conditions are satisfied - of the sort, for instance, to which Nietzsche refers in speaking of "the sovereign individual" (GM 11:2). They cannot be taken to characterize normativity generally in human life, however, and indeed can only be properly understood in relation to as well as in distinction from the more general case. It is in part with such exceptional human possibilities in view, although also with the more general case in mind, that I would maintain that neither our general nor our particular psycho-physiological affective nature generates or otherwise determines normative content with any strong degree of specificity. I am quite prepared to allow that some protonormative content may be at least prefigured in the configuration of the kinds of vital conditions Nietzsche has in mind in speaking of moralities expressing or reflecting conditions of a creature's life. For normative content proper to emerge, however, on the account given here, and for anything deserving to be called morals to be involved, the kind of socialization Nietzsche associates with the transformation of our pre-human animality into humanity (cf. GM 11:16) and the development of consciousness as a medium of communication (cf. GS 354) must take place, setting the stage for the emergence of the capacity to learn and act in accordance with rules and standards. Similarly, when one looks to the exceptions to the human rule Nietzsche envisions becoming possible at the end of the long process beginning with these changes, and seeks to understand the normative possibilities associated with their emergence, it does not suffice to observe - truly enough - that the affective natures of these emerging "higher" human beings are involved. But how, on this account I am advancing, and toward which (at least) I take Nietzsche to have been

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working, is this to be understood? Where some measure of autonomy in the normative lives of these "higher types" is attained, what is involved? To the extent that they do manage to "give style to their character," and "create their own new tables of what is good," "give themselves laws," "create themselves," "become those they are," and the like - what is going on, if neither biology nor the metaphysics of free-willed soulsubstances hold the answers? And, for that matter, what motivates new, continued, or modified identification with available norms even in less "sovereignly individual" sorts of cases? The answers to these questions obviously cannot be given merely in terms of the particular contents of any of the different forms of life to which one might happen to be linked or exposed. With Nietzsche, I do think that it has only partly (though it does have partly) to do with considerations of this sort, or with psycho-physiological considerations, or even with the sort of "education" one has had (with the sort he champions in Schopenhauer as Educator holding a clear edge over all others). Their full answer, I would suggest, requires taking account of the complex dynamic that may come about among the elements of the various forms of life one has internalized in their interrelation, and in their further interaction with one's affective constitution, and in the catalyzation of the whole mix when some such transformative education is added to it. I have suggested above that forms of life have a kind of life of their own in the distinctive domains of culture from which they derive. I would now suggest that they have a further such career within those who internalize something of them, where they may remain compartmentalized, and where these further (affective and educational) influences may also figure very significantly in what becomes of them. The exploration of all of this would be a part of the business of a genuinely Nietzschean moral psychology. It is a moral psychology Nietzsche himself clearly advocated and sought to initiate, not only with respect to the many pathological and all-too-human cases that attracted his attention, but also with respect to the ways of "turning out well" that he associated with a diversely flourishing humanity and complexly occurring enhancement of life. This is a kind of "emergentist" view of higher humanity and normativity alike. It accords major importance both to nature and to nurture, as well as to the possibility of the creative transformation of what one owes to both of them in the lives of exceptional individuals. It makes much of the historically engendered normative structures objectified in sociocultural forms of life, as the devices that have enabled human beings to bootstrap their way to humanity, as well as to find their way to its

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further enhancement and more significant creativity and individuation.9 To the objection that this account would seem to represent us even in our finest hours and most authentic moments as the products of a combination of environmental influences, general and particular psychophysiological constitutions, and interpersonal encounters, leaving no place for any more significant sort of selfhood, self-determination, and responsibility for ourselves, our lives, and our conduct, and real normativity and morality, I would make a two-part reply, which I believe to be essentially Nietzsche's as well. First, this is the best deal we can get, and so we are ill-advised to belittle it because it does not meet certain desires and expectations to which we may have become attached for all-too-human reasons. Second, it actually amounts to something quite rich, representing a remarkable possibility. There is nothing guaranteed, divinely sanctioned, metaphysically grounded or necessary and universal about any of it; nor is there anything about any of it that applies across the board, humanly speaking, giving all of us the same status, and rendering us all subject to the same rules and standards. But those are criteria of significance and reality that we simply must unlearn, replacing them with considerations pertaining to how we may make the most of what we have to work with. On a Nietzschean way of thinking, this reorientation is a part of the task of normative theory, but is actually only its proper beginning.
Postscript

Once one begins to look at Nietzsche's texts with the conception of normativity set forth here in mind, I believe that their convergence toward it can readily be seen. The Birth of Tragedy and the nearly contemporaneous fragment "Homer's Contest" are both case studies of instances in which cultural forms with distinctive and highly significant normative features were developed in a particular society, with implications for our own. They richly illustrate Nietzsche's early sensitivity to the extraordinary importance of what he was later to call "value creation" at the cultural level in human life, and of the great difference it can make in the manner in which underlying physiological phenomena and practical circumstances of human existence are expressed and dealt with. Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations may be read as a series of reflections relating to the same general sort of concern, focusing more directly on more contemporary developments, with the second and third Medita-

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tions (HL and SE) being of particular importance for present purposes. What distinguishes his later writings from these earlier explorations of matters of normative significance, in addition to certain changes of a substantive nature in his thinking, is the development of his awareness and understanding of the kinds of problems these matters present. This development is already in evidence in Human, All Too Human and its first sequels. I refer, in the first instance, to the second division of the first part of this work Nietzsche published (in 1878), which bears the heading "On the History of the Moral Sensations" (35-107). (See also the earlier sections 14, 23, and 25, as well as sections 138, 475, and 512 later in the volume.) Sections 89-91 of the first supplement (1879, now the first part of the second volume of this work) are also of interest. In the second supplement, first published under the title The Wanderer and His Shadow (in 1880), there is a good deal more, scattered throughout the work. In particular, I would call attention to 22, 31, 40-5, 48, 57, 62-4, 70, 114, 190, 212, 216, and especially the important concluding section 350. The subtitle of Nietzsche's next work, Daybreak (1881), is further evidence of the centrality of what he was already coming to think of as "the problem of morality" at this point: "Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality." As in all of his aphoristic works, he covers a great deal of ground in this slender volume; but it contains a good deal of discussion in which he attains a further level of sophistication in his treatment of moral matters. They are the main focus of the first forty-odd sections of Book I; and he returns to them repeatedly, notably in 131,174-5,187-8,207, 442, and two later sections of particular interest, 453 and 534. A year later (1882) this work was followed by The Gay Science, in which similar themes are to be found; see especially 7, 76,116, 292, 335, and 345. Then came Zarathustra (1883-5), and after that (in 1886 and 1887) the two books commonly thought to contain Nietzsche's main contributions to moral philosophy: Beyond Good and Evil (in particular in Part V, "Natural History of Morals") and On the Genealogy of Morals. The whole of the latter is of undeniable importance; but its importance is a good deal narrower than is generally supposed, as the above way of approaching it makes clear. Nietzsche covers more ground in BGE, even in the mere eighteen sections (186-203) of Part V. Part IX, "What Is Noble," is clearly relevant as well, although its main focus is obviously upon what is to be said about the exceptions to the human rule rather than upon the account to be given of morals and normativity in human life more generally. One does well to pay particular attention to 4,32, 186-203, 215, 221, 225-30, 257, 260,262,268, and 272.

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GM, of course, is a text with which any interpretation of Nietzsche on the matters with which I am concerned in this essay must be squared. And I believe that it squares with my interpretation (and position) very well indeed. Here as previously, the "morals" whose "genealogy" Nietzsche is discussing are first and foremost group rather than individual phenomena and have a strongly cultural and socially situated character as well. This is particularly evident in the First Essay. In the Second Essay the "sovereign individual" makes his appearance, as a type of human being both late and exceptional, "liberated again from the morality of custom [Sittlichkeit der Sitte], autonomous and supramoral [iibersittliche] (for 'autonomous' ['autonom'] and 'moral' ['sittlich'] are mutually exclusive)" (GM 11:2). But it is left unclear just what this is supposed to come to, other than that such an individual clearly is no longer in thrall to this type of morality. (The point Nietzsche is making in the final parentheses is merely obvious, rather than radical, once one sees what German term he is using, and considers what it very literally means.) And indeed the whole burden of this Second Essay is to contrast the "conscience" and special sense of "responsibility" of such an individual both with the mentality of those who are merely sittlich and with the "bad conscience" of others in whom a different sort of psychology has been cultivated - and to show the sorts of social circumstances and cultural developments involved in the genesis (and contributing to the psychology) of these alternatives to Sittlichkeit as well. Finally, the Third Essay is very obviously an analysis of "ascetic ideals" in the different forms they have taken not in various particular individuals but rather in a variety of distinctive social and cultural human types (priests, scientists, philosophers, and so on). Thus the entire book may be read as a series of case studies of ways in which forms of life and their associated sorts of normativity may be supposed to have taken shape. This series of case studies was continued in the three last books (apart from Ecce Homo) Nietzsche went on to write in the next and final year (1888) of his productive life: Twilight of the Idols, The Case of Wagner, and The Antichrist (or The Antichristian, as the title might equally correctly and more aptly be rendered). The fact that he focuses primarily upon a variety of what he clearly considers pathological forms of normativity, far from signifying any generalized opposition on his part to anything of the kind, has precisely the opposite significance; for he was seeking to learn all he could from these pathologies, in the service of his great underlying and overarching concern: to come to understand what it would take to achieve the sort of humanity that would be most "worthy

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of a future," and what alternative forms of normativity might both promote its attainment and characterize its flourishing. Thus, in these books we find Nietzsche preoccupied with a related series of contrasts: in The Case of Wagner, between "decadent" and healthier forms of music and aesthetic sensibility, and between "the morality of Christian value concepts" and "noble morality, master morality," which is "the sign language of what has turned out well, of ascending life" (CW Epilogue); in Twilight, between "naturalism in morality" and "anti-natural morality" (TI V:4); and in The Antichrist(ian), between "morality [as] the expression of the conditions for the life and growth of a people" and morality that has "become the antithesis of life" (A 25) which he refers to as "the concept of morality falsified" (A 26). See also Nietzsche's lament (in A 59) concerning what was lost when the classical culture of the Greco-Roman world was subverted by the triumph of Christianity. When one thinks through the implications of these and other such discussions, looks beyond the polemics, and considers how one might proceed to work out the sort of approach to normativity that may be discerned here, it seems to me that certain themes interpreters of Nietzsche have tended to neglect come to the fore, both requiring and rewarding attention. I have sought to begin to rectify this situation in this essay. In any event, I hope I have made it clear that there is much more to the topic of Nietzschean normativity than can easily be summed up - or written off. Like most topics with which he deals, he left it a piece of very unfinished business. But he also left it strongly and suggestively begun.

NOTES 1. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 2. I take fewer liberties in my Making Sense of Nietzsche (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995) and in the chapter on "Morality and Moralities" in my earlier Nietzsche (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983). 3. In my references I follow the practices indicated in the Note on References. For the most part I follow the Kaufmann and Hollingdale translations (see the Bibliography to this volume), although I have modified them in a few instances. 4. An excellent Hegelian term with frequent aptness in Nietzsche; it conveys the threefold idea of elimination, preservation, and supersession, with the last sense prevailing. 5. See the essays by Danto, Foot, and Maclntyre in my edited volume Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 6. In his History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1945). 7. Neither Nietzsche nor Hegel, to my knowledge, actually uses the term Lebensformen favored by Wittgenstein in this connection. Had it been current coin,

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however, either of them easily could have; for they both make much of the phenomenon, and the term is highly apt. 8. See the sixth of his "Theses on Feuerbach." 9. See WS 350 in this connection.

Nietzsche's Perfectionism: A Reading of Schopenhauer as Educator

JAMES CONANT

Nietzsche says that the worst readers are those "who proceed like plundering soldiers . . . picking up only those few things they can use . . . and blaspheming the whole" (HH ll:I:137),1 and that the best readers are those who patiently develop an eye for the whole and know that reading must be practiced as an art - an art that "has been unlearned most thoroughly nowadays" (GM P:8).2 The prevailing tendency among contemporary scholars of Nietzsche's work, when expounding his views, is to refrain from concentrating on a single work. Nietzsche's corpus is often treated as if it were one enormous, disorganized text from which one can draw individual passages at will and consider them in isolation from their original home in a given work without cost to one's understanding of his thought. Arthur Danto begins his book Nietzsche as Philosopher with a candid defense of this procedure: Nietzsche's books give the appearance of having been assembled rather
than composed. They are made up, in the main, of short, pointed aphorisms, and of essays seldom more than a few pages long.. .. And any given aphorism or essay might as easily have been placed in one volume as in another without much affecting the unity or structure of either. And the books themselves . . . do not exhibit any special structure as a corpus. No one of them presupposes an acquaintance with any other.... [H]is writings may be read in pretty much any order, without this greatly impeding the comprehension of his ideas.3

The interpretative premise of this essay will be roughly the opposite of Danto's: namely, that Nietzsche's works are composed, rather than merely assembled, and indeed composed with an exquisite degree of care.4 Throughout his work, Nietzsche posts warnings to this effect, anticipating that the difficulty of his writings will fuel our natural propensity to scavenge about in search of isolated remarks that delight or offend

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us, overlooking the challenge posed by the design of the whole.5 As Nietzsche's conception of his activity as an author develops, he is increasingly driven to search for a form of writing consonant with his philosophical aims, leading him to experiment with a variety of literary styles, genres, and devices. Those scholars of Nietzsche's thought who employ Danto's exegetical principles (such as "any given aphorism might as easily have been placed in one volume as in another") are thus apt to underestimate the development not only in what Nietzsche says but in how he says it. Their approach obscures not only the considerable evolution in Nietzsche's substantive first-order doctrines, but - even where there is continuity in doctrine - the equally considerable development in his conception of the mode of presentation best suited to his philosophical objectives. Without careful attention to the structure and overall strategy of one of Nietzsche's works, one is bound to mistake the import of many, if not most, of the passages it contains. One cannot get ahold of what he thinks without attending to how he says it and why (he thinks) he must say it in the way he does. This problem (of the inextricability of Nietzsche's thinking from his mode of presentation) deepens as one moves into his later thought. I have therefore chosen here to focus on a very early work - one in which it is comparatively easy to assess the content of his thinking without an extended preliminary consideration of the authorial strategy of the work. Even here, however, as we shall see, such preliminaries cannot be dispensed with altogether. Schopenhauer as Educator is the third of Nietzsche's four Untimely Meditations, all of which are written in the traditional essay form - a form that Nietzsche subsequently abandons. On the reading proposed here, the third meditation advances a version of moral perfectionism.6 That Nietzsche is some sort of perfectionist is hardly news. (As we shall see, Nietzsche tends to figure in contemporary discussions as the perfectionist par excellence.) But what does it mean to say that Nietzsche is a "perfectionist"? This essay will begin by trying to get clear what sort of perfectionist Nietzsche is not - and it will turn out that this is just the sort he is usually taken to be. It will emerge that Nietzsche's perfectionism does not (as is often assumed) take the form of a teleological (moral or political) theory that seeks to maximize certain social or cultural goods. It will emerge further that one cannot grasp the sense in which his philosophy is perfectionist apart from an understanding of why he thinks there is a problem about how philosophy, as he seeks to practice it, should be written and read. For the perfectionist moment in his work is tied to his conception of the manner in which that work seeks to engage its reader.7

Nietzsche's Perfectionism Is Nietzsche an Elitist? People are always complaining that German authors write for such a small circle, and even sometimes just for themselves.8

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Nietzsche's perfectionism has often been taken to entail some form of (moral or political) elitism. Let us define elitism as the view that certain individuals are not to be counted as having the same weight in moral or political judgment as others. Let us now pose the question: Is Nietzsche an elitist? The reading of Nietzsche as an elitist is generally not argued for in much more detail than Clarence Darrow bothered to argue for it. Darrow, in his famous plea for the defense in the trial of The State of Illinois versus Nathan Leopold, Jr. and Richard Loeb, pointed to his impressionable young clients' exposure to the philosophy of Nietzsche as the precipitating cause of their horrendous crime: Your Honor, I have read almost everything Nietzsche ever wrote. He was a man of wonderful intellect; the most original philosopher of the last century.... Nietzsche believed that some time the superman would be born, that evolution was working towards the superman . . . and that the laws for good and the laws for evil do not apply to those who approach the superman.... Although no perfect superman has yet appeared in history, Nietzsche's types are to be found in the world's great figures.... They rightly felt themselves to be above the law. What they thought was right, not because sanctioned by any law, beyond themselves, but because they did it.... Here is a boy at sixteen or seventeen becoming obsessed with these doctrines.... He believed in a superman. He and Dickie Loeb were the supermen.... The ordinary commands of society were not for him.... Many of us read this philosophy but know that it has no actual application to life; but not he. He lived it and practiced it; he thought it applied to him. . . . Your honor, you are asked to hang a boy of his age . . . obsessed of a philosophy that destroyed his life, when there is no sort of question in the world as to what caused his downfall.... [T]his act would never have been committed or participated in by him excepting for the philosophy which he had taken literally . . . , and which no one can take literally and practice literally and live.9 Darrow offers two options for reading Nietzsche appreciatively: (1) to regard Nietzsche (as Darrow himself does) as "a man of wonderful intellect" and "the most original philosopher of the last century," an option that remains open to you, Darrow thinks, only if you read him "poetically" - that is, if you do not take his philosophy "literally," and thus do not take it to have "actual application to life"; or (2) to read Nietzsche as Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb did (and then hope you are lucky enough to secure Clarence Darrow's services as your attorney).

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The question still remains with us today: Can one take Nietzsche seriously as a moral thinker - that is, as someone whose thought is properly taken to have (as Darrow puts it) an "actual application to life" and thus can be "lived and practiced" - without thereby certifying oneself to be either a moral lunatic or someone likely to be in immanent need of the services of a criminal defense lawyer? The question is made all the more poignant by the fact that it is still widely taken for granted - as if it were a well-established cultural fact - that if you need a handy and vivid example of a foaming-at-the-mouth elitist, you could hardly do better than Nietzsche. If the claim that Nietzsche is an elitist is at all supported, it is usually by quoting a few brief passages out of context. A favorite source for these passages is Schopenhauer as Educator. In a moment, we will look closely at some of the passages from that essay that have helped to establish Nietzsche's notorious reputation in this regard. It is, of course, no longer fashionable to suppose that Nietzsche would smile upon the exploits of Leopold and Loeb. Our Nietzsche of today is much less bloodthirsty than it was once fashionable to suppose him to be. Nevertheless, when people offer a sketch of Nietzsche's political philosophy, they still assume he favors a particular sort of blueprint for how to organize a society. In particular, they assume that he favors institutions that promote the interest of an elite few, where those few are characterized as being in some general way "superior men." They are gifted, talented. On some readings, this is still explicated along biological lines; but this too has become unfashionable. It is now almost universally agreed that an elitist interpretation of his work can no longer be cashed out in terms of race, creed, or nationality. Yet it is still generally taken as uncontroversial that Nietzsche does think that the world divides into two sorts of human beings: the superior ones and the inferior ones. And it also is still assumed that his primary contribution to political thought consists of an argument in favor of promoting the welfare of the former at the expense of the latter. As the author of a recent book on perfectionism puts it, Nietzsche holds "that some human beings are intrinsically superior to other human beings and that political principles should take such differences of intrinsic worth into account."10 The standard elitist reading of Nietzsche is often, in its cruder forms, coupled with an interpretation of his notion of the Overman. The way this is often understood is that the Overman designates a type of "superman." (The term Ubermensch is thus often translated - as Darrow prefers to translate it - as "superman.") The supermen are certain extraordinary members of our society. This reading, in its original unvarnished form, is also no longer as popular as it once was - and for good reason. If one

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looks carefully at the few occurrences of the notion of the Obermensch in Nietzsche's writings, it becomes clear that he is not employing this expression as a designation for one of our fellow humans. But although these details of Darrow's interpretation have been widely repudiated, the assumption remains that the Ubermensch must refer to a certain kind of man - one who is in some way specially gifted or talented. Bertrand Russell, in his chapter on Nietzsche in his History of Western Philosophy, offers a sanitized version of Darrow's interpretation. Many of the details of Russell's reading have, of course, been rebutted. Nevertheless, the broad outlines of his portrait of Nietzsche are retained in works that aspire to offer a careful scholarly exegesis of Nietzsche's writings (something to which Russell's own discussion hardly pretends). Thus, Russell's formulation continues to be helpful in the pithiness of its candor: Nietzsche's criticism of religions and philosophies is dominated entirely by ethical motives. He admires certain qualities which he believes (perhaps rightly) to be only possible for an aristocratic minority; the majority, in his opinion, should be only means to the excellence of the few, and should not be regarded as having any independent claim to happiness or well-being. He alludes habitually to ordinary human beings as the "bungled and the botched," and sees no objection to their suffering if it is necessary for the production of a great man.11 Russell's animus here is polemical. Nevertheless, his portrait of Nietzsche resembles in many respects the portrait of him that George Bernard Shaw was not only concurrently offering but also applauding. Shaw writes: "Nietzsche is the champion of privilege, of power, and of inequality."12 This reading clearly has its finger on an undeniable moment of exclusivity - one that reverberates throughout Nietzsche's writings. Nietzsche does say, over and over again, that he is only "addressing the few." This recurrent gesture is taken by both Russell and Shaw to indicate that he is simply dismissing the great "mass of humanity" from his concern. Russell assumes that this moment of exclusivity reflects Nietzsche's adherence to some principle of exclusion - one that demarcates those individuals who really matter from those who do not. The suggestion that something of importance is possible only for an aristocracy would seem to be implied by Nietzsche's repeated insistence on how small the class of his "genuine readers" will prove to be. But in what sense is what is aimed at only possible for a minority? The passage from Russell quoted above suggests a certain direction of answer to this question. Russell writes: "[T]he majority, in [Nietzsche's] opinion, should be only means to the excellence of the few, and should not be regarded as having any independent claim to happiness or well-being" (p. 762).

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The idea that suffering is necessary for there to be great men is a Nietzschean theme. But Russell suggests something more: namely, that the suffering of some (as it were, expendable) people is required in order that some other person (or set of people) can become great. In its refusal to mince words, Russell's unflattering portrait of Nietzsche highlights interpretative assumptions that persist in much of the secondary literature on Nietzsche - assumptions such as that (1) "the great man" (of whom Nietzsche so frequently speaks) is naturally endowed with extraordinary gifts or talents that mark him out as qualitatively distinct from ordinary humans,13 (2) it is the good of such extraordinary humans that we (ordinary humans) are asked to promote, and (3) we can only promote their good - and thereby the good of humanity as a whole - at the cost of our own good.'4 Let us examine these assumptions in reverse order. Rawls on Nietzsche
A perfect republic would have to be more than just democratic, it would have to be at the same time aristocratic.15

Why can we promote the good of "the great man" only at the expense of the good of everyone else? It is the merit of Rawls's discussion of Nietzsche to have provided a clear answer to this question. Rawls's A Theory of Justice (TJ) advances enormously influential accounts both of perfectionism and of Nietzsche as perfectionist. Rawls's book seeks to demonstrate that there is room for a liberal democratic theory of justice between the competing alternatives of utilitarianism and perfectionism, and that such a theory - if it is to be a theory of justice - must distinguish itself clearly from each of these alternatives in certain respects. Rawls's fear concerning perfectionism is, in a word, that it will ask the claims of justice to take a back seat to the claims of excellence. When Rawls first introduces perfectionism, he says that, like utilitarianism, it is a teleological doctrine. And then he goes on to say: "Teleological doctrines differ, pretty closely, according to how the concept of the good is specified. If it is taken as the realization of human excellence in the various forms of culture, we have what may be called perfectionism."16 Notice Rawls's words here: "human excellence in the various forms of cultured A certain emphasis on the notions of "excellence" and "culture" are taken to represent a threat to the priority of the claims of justice. (Both of these words certainly occur frequently in SE.) Rawls immediately goes on to say: "This notion of perfectionism is found in Aristotle

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and in Nietzsche, among others" (TJ p. 25). These appear to be his two favorite examples of perfectionists. Furthermore, it turns out that when he goes on to discuss perfectionism, it is Nietzsche, above all, who plays the role of a central example (to the extent that any single figure does). Section 50 of A Theory of Justice (where Rawls engages in his only extended discussion of perfectionism) dismisses Nietzsche's version of perfectionism on the grounds that it is inherently undemocratic. In particular, Rawls takes Nietzsche to epitomize what he calls the "strong version" of perfectionism, which, through its extreme prioritization of the claims of excellence and culture, attempts to override what Rawls takes to be (given his aspiration to establish a democratic theory of justice) the stronger claims of liberty and justice. He is clearly worried that the principles of justice are jeopardized in Nietzsche's emphasis on (what Rawls calls) "the realization of human excellence in the various forms of culture" (TJ p. 325). For Rawls, the interests of culture - as he interprets the notion of culture in perfectionism - inevitably compete with the interests of justice. When he introduces perfectionism he says: There are two variants of the principle of perfectionism: in thefirst,it is the sole principle of a teleological theory directing society to arrange institutions and to define the duties and obligations of individuals so as to maximize the achievement of human excellence in art, science, and culture (ibid.). This first variant is what Rawls calls the "strong" version of perfectionism, according to which the value placed on "the achievement of human excellence in art, science, and culture" takes priority over all other goods. Perfectionism, on this interpretation, calls upon us to "maximize the achievement of human excellence" in such domains. The view that Rawls here ascribes to Nietzsche might be termed excellence-consequentialism. Rawls interprets the idea that we must "strive to produce great individuals" to mean (1) that the perfectionist is concerned with optimizing the conditions which promote the achievement of excellence in the arts and sciences, and (2) that the goodness of an action is to be assessed in accordance with the degree to which it maximizes such forms of excellence.17 Perfectionism, Rawls suggests, in its most extreme variants, calls upon us not to flinch at the moral or political consequences of a complete single-mindedness of purpose with respect to the goal of "producing" great men. Thus, Rawls, immediately following the passage quoted above, goes on to say: "The principle of perfectionism is obviously more demanding the higher it is pitched." Nietzsche, it turns out, is an extreme instance of this (already extreme) sort of perfectionist: "The absolute weight that Nietzsche sometimes gives the lives of great men such as

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Socrates and Goethe is unusual. At places he says that mankind must continually strive to produce great individuals" (TJ p. 325). That's almost Russell's phrase again: "the production of a great man." But it takes on an even more ominous tone in this context. Rawls continues: "We give value to our lives by working for the good of the highest specimens" (ibid.). He offers this as a paraphrase of a quotation from Nietzsche. He precedes this paraphrase with the words: "Particularly striking is Nietzsche's statement" and supplies the following passage from SE as textual evidence: Mankind must work continually to produce individual great human beings - this and nothing else is the task.... [F]or the question is this, how can your life, the individual life, retain the highest value, the deepest significance? . . . Only by your living for the good of the rarest and most valuable specimens [as quoted by Rawls, p. 325n]. I will henceforth refer to the above as "Rawls's version of the focal passage," and to the corresponding passage from Nietzsche's essay (of which the above is a translation of an excerpt) as "the focal passage." Rawls's version of the focal passage is the only textual support adduced by him for the claim that Nietzsche adheres to "the strong version of perfectionism." In a moment, we will look closely both at the context of the focal passage and at the translation of it upon which Rawls is relying. Suffice it to say for now that this quotation, in this translation, is a great favorite among commentators who read Nietzsche as a perfectionist. As the first of two examples of how influential Rawls's treatment of these matters has proven to be, consider the following passage from Alan Donagan's book The Theory of Morality: Yet, although the extent of their divergence is disputed, utilitarianism is evidently incompatible with traditional morality. And even among academic philosophers traditional morality has remained too strong, as a disposition, for many of them to have been able to embrace utilitarianism with a tranquil mind. Unfortunately, the only other constructive doctrine to have gained academic recognition has been perfectionism, which is representatively expressed by Nietzsche's answer to his own question: [then follows a verbatim quotation of Rawls's version of the focal passage].18 Donagan uncritically adopts Rawls's placement of perfectionism in a box together with utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is held by Donagan to be "evidently incompatible with traditional morality" because it instructs us to perform actions that maximize the happiness of the greatest number, even when such actions belong to the category of actions which "traditional morality" would regard as morally unthinkable. (If, for instance, you can save ten lives by killing your grandmother then, according to a

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"strict utilitarian," you should overcome your squeamishness and do away with your grandmother.) Nietzsche's theory (as expressed in Rawls's version of the focal passage) is taken to have exactly this (teleological) structure - prescribing all and only those actions that promote the greatest good (even when such actions are by the lights of "traditional morality" unthinkable). Nietzscheanism is taken to differ from strict utilitarianism only in that it substitutes a different conception of wherein the greatest good consists. (If, for instance, you can optimize the degree of genius in the world by sacrificing the lives of countless mediocre individuals, then, according to the strict perfectionist, you should sacrifice them.) Hence perfectionism, according to Donagan, resembles utilitarianism in being a theory few are able to embrace with "a tranquil mind." Thomas Hurka's recent book on perfectionism provides the second example of how influential Rawls's treatment of these matters has proven to be. Hurka, like Donagan, follows Rawls in taking it for granted that a perfectionist moral theory is a teleological theory - one that seeks to maximize those states of affairs that it deems desirable and that evaluates moral principles primarily according to the degree to which they maximize optimally. Nietzsche, however, according to Hurka, favors a particularly pernicious principle that rejects distributive neutrality in an anti-egalitarian direction. Since it is the opposite of Rawls's "maximin" principle, he suggests this principle be called "maximax." Maximax, according to Hurka, finds its "clearest expression" in a passage from SE:
According to maximax, each agent's overriding goal should be not a sum or average of lifetime value, but the greatest lifetime value of the single most perfect individual or, if perfections are not fully comparable, of the few most perfect individuals. There is a single goal for all agents to aim at, but not all agents figure in it. Global value is determined entirely by the good of the few best individuals. . .. Like averaging within lives, maximax across them finds its clearest expression in Nietzsche: [then follows a verbatim quotation of Rawls's version of the focal passage].19

Hurka's book, unlike Donagan's, seeks to defend perfectionism. It does so, however, not by challenging Rawls's characterization of the structure of the theories held by the major figures in the perfectionist tradition of moral thought, but rather by retaining the broad outlines of that characterization and isolating Nietzsche as an unrepresentatively nasty sort of perfectionist - one who seeks to base a calculus of social and cultural goods on teleological principles of an excessively anti-egalitarian nature: "Nietzsche equates the aggregate excellence in a society with the excellence of its few best members, and wants social policy to maximize

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that."20 (Where in his writings, it is worth pausing to ask, does Nietzsche ever address a question of "social policy"?) Rawls had already recast Nietzsche's theory so that it would yield a sketch of an answer to the question, What sorts of goods should a "social policy" seek to maximize? Hurka, with the aid of the maximax principle, fills in the sketch. Under the guise of merely paraphrasing (Rawls's version of) the focal passage into a contemporary moral-philosophical idiom, Hurka is thus able sharply to distinguish Nietzsche's brand of perfectionism from other (teleological) variants of perfectionism. The final result is that a mode of ethical thought that once could seem sublime (and not only to Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb) can now only seem monstrous. But the invitation to read Nietzsche as proposing some such form of moral arithmetic was already present in Rawls's and Donagan's - not to mention Hitler's - understandings of Nietzsche. Hurka's maximax principle merely casts into an unblushingly explicit form a reading of Nietzsche that has been with us ever since his sister first took control of his literary estate. Rawls, as is his way, touches on these issues far more gingerly than does a Hitler or a Hurka. He expresses his central worry concerning what he takes to be the upshot of Nietzsche's perfectionism in the following terms:
The extent to which . . . a view is perfectionist depends, then, upon the weight given to the claims of excellence and culture. If for example it is maintained that in themselves the achievements of the Greeks in philosophy, science, and art justified the ancient practice of slavery . . . , surely the conception is highly perfectionist. The requirements of perfection override the strong claims of liberty (TJ p. 325).

This raises a question we will need to go into later: Does Nietzsche seek to maximize certain goods at the expense of certain other goods (such as liberty, justice)? The nature of the Nietzschean perfectionist's interest in culture looks to Rawls and other readers of Nietzsche as if it conflicts (1) with the interests of liberty, and (2) with the interests of justice (in that it seeks to enhance the liberty of a few at the expense of the liberty of many). Rawls sums up the inherently anti-egalitarian nature of perfectionism as follows: "The capacity for a higher life is a ground for treating men unequally" (TJ p. 326n). He offers the following account of what he takes the content of such "a higher life" to be: "In order to arrive at the ethic of perfectionism, we should have to attribute to the parties a prior acceptance of some natural duty, say the duty to develop persons of a certain style and aesthetic grace, and to advance the pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of the arts" (TJ p. 328).

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"A certain style and aesthetic grace," "the pursuit of knowledge," and "the cultivation of the arts" - these are the goods the perfectionist wants to see attained by some people, and its promotion is so important that other people can languish.21 The emphasis here on "a certain style and aesthetic grace" connects Rawls's interpretation of Nietzsche with that of Philippa Foot and others, according to which Nietzsche is concerned to champion aesthetic values at the expense of moral values. We will return to this issue. But first we need to take a closer look at the focal passage and the passages in in SE that surround it.
The Focal Passage If the genius in art is always the first, the throng of imitators being always in his train, in morality, each agent has the prerogative of genius.... [H]e who "imitates" the example of a moral creator or a sublime model is in his turn a creator.... The imitator of the [artistic] genius is a simple, talent; but the imitator of a hero is himself a hero.22

The passage that Rawls, Donagan, and Hurka all invoke (apparently) concludes with the thought that we should live "for the good of the rarest and most valuable specimens." The time has come to take a closer look at that passage. First, let us look at it in the form that Rawls supplies it (quoted from a book on Nietzsche by R. J. Hollingdale):
Mankind must work continually to produce individual great human beings - this and nothing else is the task . . . for the question is this: how can your life, the individual life, retain the highest value, the deepest significance? . . . Only by your living for the good of the rarest and most valuable specimens.23

If you listen to that quote out of context, it certainly seems to fit the reading of Nietzsche to which Russell, Rawls, and Shaw, among others, subscribe. Here is how Nietzsche's German reads in context:
Mitunter is es schwerer, eine Sache zuzugeben als sie einzusehen; und so gerade mag es den meisten ergehen, wenn sie den Satz uberlegen: "die Menschheit soil fortwdhrend daran arbeiten, einzelne grosse Menschen zu erzeugen - und dies und nichts andere is ihre Aufgabe."... Denn die Frage lautet doch so: wie erhalt dein, des Einzelnen Leben den hochsten Wert, die tiefste Bedeutung? Wie ist es am wenigsten verschwendet? Gewiss nur dadurch, dass du zum Vorteile der seltensten und wertvollsten Exemplare lebst.

Two things should strike us here. First of all, the opening sentence of the passage Rawls, Donagan, and Hurka all adduce (and the meaning of which they take to be self-evident) occurs in quotation marks in the

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German. Indeed, the rest of 6 of Nietzsche's essay is offered as a commentary (one might say a reading) of that proposition - a proposition to which Nietzsche predicts we will at first find it difficult to accede. Second, the word that particularly jars in Rawls's version of the passage - especially against the background of Nietzsche's appropriation by the Nazis - is the word "specimens." It invites a biologistic reading. But the English word "specimens" is a questionable translation of the German word that occurs here: Exemplare - which, after all, has an English cognate. The term Exemplar and its adjectival form exemplarisch figure importantly in the history of German philosophical discussions of the concept of genius - a history in which, among others, Herder, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Schelling, Schlegel, and Novalis participate. Its locus classicus, unsurprisingly, is to be found in Kant. The most influential expression of Kant's theory of genius is 46-50 of The Critique of Judgement. The following excerpts are the most pertinent for an understanding of the significance that the term Exemplar comes to acquire in subsequent German aesthetic theory:
[F]ine art is only possible as a product of genius.... [G]enius (1) is a talent for producing that for which no definite rule can be given: and not an aptitude in the way of cleverness for what can be learned according to some rule; and . . . consequently originality must be its primary property. (2) Since there may also be original nonsense, the products of genius must at the same time be models, i.e. be exemplary [exemplarisch]; and, consequently, though not themselves derived from imitation, they must serve that purpose for others, i.e. as a standard or rule of estimating.... Genius . . . is the exemplary originality of the natural endowments of an individual in the free employment of his cognitive faculties.24

Here Kant only employs the adjectival form exemplarisch. Elsewhere he also employs the noun; for example, in 57 of his Anthropology, "On Originality of the Cognitive Power, or Genius":
[W]e apply this term [genius] only to artists.... Moreover, we do not apply it to mere imitators: we reserve it for artists who are disposed to produce their works originally, and,finally,for them only when their work is exemplary - that is, when it serves as an example (exemplar) to be imitated. So a man's genius is the exemplary originality of his talent.25

According to Kant's theory of taste, taste cannot be acquired by learning to judge according to some antecedently specifiable standards or principles of aesthetic excellence. Aesthetic excellence, by its very nature, resists prescription. Taste can be cultivated only through the contemplation of exemplary instances of aesthetic production - what Kant calls "works of genius": works produced in a nonimitative fashion. Subsequent artists must practice their taste, not by attempting to derive from

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such works a rule for their reproduction, but rather by treating the products of genius as exemplars to be imitated. Judgments of taste possess what Kant calls an "exemplary necessity" - "a necessity of the assent of everyone to a judgment that is regarded as an example of a universal rule that we are unable to state" (ibid., 18). In SE Nietzsche is concerned to preserve the following four features of Kant's theory: (1) genius represents a kind of excellence which makes a demand on us; (2) the kind of demand it makes cannot be formulated in terms of an explicit rule and cannot be attained through following a rule-governed procedure; (3) this demand, its amorphous and inarticulate character notwithstanding, requires our assent; and (4) assent in such a case expresses itself in an effort to treat the source of the demand as an exemplar to be "followed" or "emulated." The question over which dispute arises is: In what manner are they to be "followed" or "emulated"? Nietzsche sides with the German Romantics in their characteristically Romantic emendations of Kantian theory. The Romantics agree with Kant that the concept of mere imitation has no place in the characterization of the accomplishment of genius, but they go further and argue (1) that imitation has no proper place in fine art altogether, and (2) that (as Friedrich Schlegel puts it) "ethics and aesthetics should seek to become one," and thus that mere imitation - as opposed to emulation should have no place in ethics either: Only the creative individual can be truly moral, and the pursuit of artistic excellence thus has an intrinsically moral dimension. (This line of thought was seen by some Romantics as a radicalization of the thought in The Critique of Practical Reason that mere conformity to the moral law does not suffice to confer moral worth upon an action.) In the light of these emendations, the Romantics modify Kant's account of the relation we bear to an exemplar in the following two respects: (1) one emulates the example of genius only insofar as one strives to attain to genius oneself, and (2) it is morally incumbent upon everyone to strive to attain some form of genius (whether or not one is, in the narrow sense, an "artist").26 To be an exemplar, according to this revised version of the Kantian theory, is to be someone whose way of life - whose effort to exemplify an answer to the question "How should one live?" - places a demand on others to emulate his example in a nonimitative fashion. Nietzsche's numerous polemical wisecracks about Romanticism notwithstanding, this Romantic line of thought evidently left its mark on him: "A: 'What? You want no imitators?' B: 'I do not want to have people imitate my example; I wish that everybody would fashion his own

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example, as / do'" (GS 255).27 But Kant had his reasons for restricting the scope of the concept of genius. How can everyone attain to genius? It makes no sense to require of everybody something more than most are able to do - more than mere imitation of an exemplar. Nietzsche is thus concerned to repudiate a further assumption of the Kantian theory of genius: Kant's claim that genius represents an expression of talent an "originality of the natural endowments of an individual." This concern, as we shall soon see, lies at the heart of Nietzsche's early essay. It becomes impossible to see any of this, however, if Exemplare is translated as "specimens." Hollingdale, when he retranslated the focal passage (later in his career, when he translated the whole of SE), changed his own earlier translation, deciding instead on the English cognate "exemplars." It seems reasonable to suppose that, when turning to the task of translating the work as a whole, the question as to which English word to use came to seem of considerable importance to Hollingdale.28 For the concept of the exemplar is one that is threaded throughout the argument of both the second and the third of Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations?9 Here is Hollingdale's later translation of the passage in context:
Sometimes it is harder to accede to a thing than to see its truth; and that is how most people may feel when they reflect on the proposition: "Mankind must work continually at the production of individual great men - that and nothing else is the task."... For the question is this: how can your life, the individual life, receive the highest value, the deepest significance? How can it be least squandered? Certainly only by your living for the good of the rarest and most valuable exemplars (SE p. 162).30

As with any writer who depends on the accuracy of his prose as much as Nietzsche does, matters of translation are never mere matters of translation. What rests on the choice of the English word "exemplars" here? What is the difference between saying these are "specimens" and saying they are "exemplars?"31 Specimens are representative samples of a particular class or genus. This encourages the elitist reading of Nietzsche, which assumes that he wishes to promote the interests of a certain class of privileged individuals, and that the interests of anyone who is not in the class is of (at best) only secondary interest to him. If one reads Nietzsche as presenting the great human being to us as a specimen, then it becomes natural to assume that what the great human being is a specimen of is a genus to which we do not belong (of which we ourselves could not serve as specimens).32 Specimens are characterized by their traits; exemplars (in Nietzsche's sense), by their excellence. One cannot serve as a specimen of a genus unless one exhibits traits all (nondeficient) members of the genus

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possess. But it is the whole point of an exemplar (in Nietzsche's sense) that other members of the genus do not share its excellence. A specimen exhibits what is essential in order to count as a member of a genus. An exemplar exemplifies one way of excelling qua member of a genus. A specimen is to be compared and contrasted with another specimen (that is, one with different traits and hence belonging to a different genus). An exemplar (in Nietzsche's sense) is to be contrasted with members of its own genus (whom it surpasses in the relevant respect). Nietzsche's notion of an exemplar thus involves three aspects: (1) commonality of genus - an exemplar is to be compared and contrasted with members of its own genus; (2) exemplarity - an exemplar illustrates a feature(s) of interest which other members of the genus display to varying degrees; (3) exemplariness - an exemplar is distinguished by the pronounced degree to which it displays the feature(s) in question, with the further implication that this represents a virtue or perfection. These three features of the concept of an exemplar work together in Nietzsche's discussion: the exemplariness of an exemplar consists in its perspicuous realization of some possibility that, in its perfected form, is clearly recognizable as an excellence - an excellence to which other members of the genus can attain. As a matter of ordinary English grammar, it suffices if something fulfills the second condition (that of exemplarity) in order for it to qualify as an exemplar; but, in order to qualify as an exemplar in Nietzsche's sense, the third condition (that of exemplariness) must be fulfilled as well. Using the term successively in each of these senses, one could say: To be an exemplar in Nietzsche's sense one must be an exemplary exemplar. The third condition must be satisfied if the great man is to play an educative role in our lives: His exemplarity is the mark of his (essential) relatedness to us, his exemplariness is the mark of his (inessential) difference from us. When we situate the focal passage back into its context in the essay, it becomes clear that you, the reader, are asked to ask yourself a question. The question you should ask yourself is: How can your life, the individual life, attain the highest value and the deepest significance? That's a question Nietzsche says you must ask yourself in solitude; and, in order to answer it, you must, at least inchoately, avail yourself of a conception of an exemplar - of the kind of being for whose good you should live. For Nietzsche, it is part of what it is to ask and answer this question for oneself that one arrives at the formulation of a concrete representation of whom one seeks to become - a representation enabling one to focus one's conception of what it is to which one aspires. It is the role of an exemplar to provide in this way a concrete representation of how one should live and to what one should aspire.33 It is only through attempt-

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ing to supply oneself in this manner with a paradigmatic example of an answer to the question "How should I live?" (or as Nietzsche prefers to put it: "How can I confer upon my life the greatest value?"), and then by attempting to emulate (as opposed to imitate) the example in question, that one eventually learns to answer the question for oneself. In the paragraph immediately after the one in which he presents us with that question, Nietzsche goes on to say that by coming to this resolve (to live your life for the good of these exemplars) the individual thereby does something further: "By coming to this resolve, he places himself within the circle of culture [Nietzsche's emphasis]; for culture is the child of each individual's self-knowledge and dissatisfaction with himself" (SE p. 162). The position of the word "culture" should interest us after the stress we've seen readers such as Rawls and Shaw place on that notion on Nietzsche's behalf. We are offered here a provisional gloss on this concept: Nietzsche says "culture is the child of each individual's self-knowledge and dissatisfaction with himself." How are these exemplars to provide avenues of self-dissatisfaction and self-knowledge? Face to face with both the exemplarity and the exemplariness of an exemplar - his being (generically) the same and yet so much more excellent - it is not hard to see how dissatisfaction with oneself might ensue. But how so selfknowledge? The question of elitism returns: What does it require to achieve this self-knowledge? Is this the prerequisite that restricts the scope of the genus? Does Nietzsche think that some special gift is required to follow the call of an exemplar? What Nietzsche says next, immediately after what I have quoted above, is: Anyone who believes in culture is thereby saying: "I see above me something higher and more human than I am; let everyone help me to attain it, as I will help everyone who knows and suffers as I do" (ibid.). Notice: "let everyone help me to attain it, as I will help everyone." Nietzsche is clear on the following point: The person who believes in culture excludes no one else who believes in culture from his concern. Who believes in culture? Apparently anyone who says: "I see something higher and more human than I am." But what is this "something higher"? Is it some other person? And hence: not me?
Writing for Everyone and No One You should demand genius from everyone, but not expect it. A Kantian would call this the categorical imperative of genius.34 What does it take for one to be able to say the words "I see above me something higher and more human than I am" - which we are told one

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needs to say in order to enter (what Nietzsche calls) "the circle of culture"? The answer to this question is prepared by the opening paragraph of SE: The human being who does not wish to belong to the mass needs only to cease being comfortable with himself; let him follow his conscience, which calls to him: "Be yourself! All you are now doing, thinking, desiring is not you yourself (p. 127, trans, amended). What one apparently needs is the capacity to say to oneself: "I am not myself." How can I not be myself? Nietzsche suggests that when you say these words ("This is not my self") to your "self," you acknowledge the existence of a self that is not who you presently are.35 Nietzsche courts this paradox of the absent self throughout his writing. The subtitle of Ecce Homo is "How One Becomes What One Is"; and at scattered moments throughout his authorship, Nietzsche hurls at his reader the enigmatic imperative "Become who you are!"36 In the passage above, he tells us that this is, in fact, the imperative that our own conscience issues to us.37 It is a person's conscience that calls: "Be yourself! All you are now doing, thinking, desiring is not you yourself." To have a conscience is to be able to hear a voice within oneself saying this to oneself. So his writing aspires to occupy the position of our conscience - as if we had somehow severed our connection with our own conscience, and his writing aimed to restore it. Yet Nietzsche also insinuates here that this is a connection we ourselves can establish at any moment: "The man who belongs to the mass needs only to cease being comfortable with himself." This suggests that the merest of efforts is required. This is a further paradox Nietzsche will court: only the merest - and yet, nevertheless, the greatest of effort is required. What is needed is the most difficult thing of all - and yet anyone is capable of it at any time. This paradox, according to Nietzsche, is fundamental to the logic of self-knowledge. All one need do is become uncomfortable with the discrepancy between oneself and one's self - between who we are at present, and the self that is somehow ours and yet presently at a distance from us. So we have a specification of Nietzsche's audience here: He is addressing the person who can become uncomfortable with himself. His audience would therefore seem to comprise everyone who has a conscience.38 This should raise for us the question: Who has a conscience? (If someone is being excluded from Nietzsche's audience here, do we have a clear proposal as to how he should go about including him?) To have a conscience, for Nietzsche, is distinct from being able to attend to one's conscience. This again, however, is something for which no special talent is required. Yet virtually no one seems able to do it.

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Nietzsche sees us all living lives dedicated to the business of fleeing from a voice that threatens incessantly to whisper something in our ear. Thus, the object of our lives tends to become one of elaborately arranging never to be sufficiently alone to hear what we have to say to ourselves: In individual moments we all know how the most elaborate arrangements of our life are made only so as to flee from the tasks we actually ought to be performing, how we would like to hide our head somewhere as though our hundred-eyed conscience could not find us out there.... Haste is universal because everyone is inflightfrom himself.... [W]e live in fear of memory and of turning inward. But what is it that assails us so frequently, what is the gnat that will not let us sleep? Every moment of our life wants to say something to us, but we refuse to listen.... We are afraid that when we are alone and quiet something will be whispered into our ear, and so we hate quietness and deafen ourselves with sociability (SE p. 158). This theme (of the self evading conversation with itself) is present from the opening pages of the essay. The second paragraph of SE begins: "Every youthful soul hears this call - 'Be yourself! All you are now doing, thinking, desiring is not you yourself - day and night and trembles when he hears it" (p. 127).39 The responsibility for our failure to attend to this call lies with us; for Nietzsche suggests that, if we choose to, we are able to hear what we need to hear at any time. As I have already noted, Nietzsche is famous for saying that he writes "for only a few"; and I observed that this is generally taken to mean that all but a few are excluded from his audience. A careful reading of SE reveals that Nietzsche understands the process of exclusion with which the work is concerned to be one that is self-imposed: If most of us are excluded from the demand that his philosophy places on us, it is not because he excludes us. Richard Rorty writes: "Nietzsche . . . relegate[s] the vast majority of humanity to the status of dying animals."40 On the reading of Nietzsche proposed here, if we are relegated to such a status, it is because we relegate ourselves. Nietzsche's work is unquestionably esoteric; but the esotericism of his writing is not a function of the way in which it seeks to delimit the class of its readers in advance.41 It is rather a function of its criterion for what counts as its having been seriously read. It demands the transformation of its reader as the mark of its reception. Such writing divides its audience into insiders and outsiders - not, however, because it speaks in a language that only a few are equipped to understand. If its audience proves in the end to consist of only a few individuals, it is not because others are in principle debarred from the pursuit of the ideal it sets forth. One might be tempted to say that the esotericism of such work is simply a function of its difficulty. But it is a peculiar difficulty if what it turns on

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is an acknowledgment of that which each of us cannot help but already know. Yet this, according to Nietzsche, is where the difficulty of his philosophy lies. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is subtitled "A Book for Everyone and No One."42 This paradoxical dedication encodes both the esoteric structure of Nietzsche's teaching and the exoteric moment in Nietzsche's undertaking that the elitist reading of his work occludes: namely, that his books are, in a sense, written "for everyone." Zarathustra, after having attracted a number of individuals whom he describes as his "disciples," turns to them and says:
Now I go alone, my disciples. You too go now alone. Thus I want it. Verily I counsel you: go away from me and resist Zarathustra. And even better: be ashamed of him. One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil. Why do you not want to pluck at my wreath? You revere me, but what if your reverence tumbles one day? Beware lest a statue slay you. You say you believe in Zarathustra. But what matters Zarathustra? You are my believers, but what matter all believers? You had not yet sought yourselves, and you found me. Thus do all believers. Therefore all faith amounts to so little. Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves. And only when you have all denied me, will I return to you (Z 1:22).

What Zarathustra faults in his "disciples" is precisely their discipleship. Zarathustra's auditors had not yet sought themselves and they found him. Nietzsche's text here, as his texts do, is furnishing us with directions for how to read it. It in effect says to us: "You had not yet sought yourself, and you found this text. Now this text bids you: Lose me and find yourself. The text wishes to elicit your resistance. Your posture of admiration - your mere belief in what the text says - casts suspicion not only on you, but on what you admire. If your teacher encourages discipleship, you should not only be ashamed of yourself but of your teacher." Of course, Nietzsche is at his most seductive at moments such as this, in which he bids us to renounce him. He knows that an admiration for a teacher who claims he wants no followers can nurture a false sense of independence. He knows that the gesture of rejecting the reader will attract her. But he also knows how to turn his seductiveness to his own ends. The burden of throwing a reader back on herself is distributed over specific moments in the writing - moments that require that the text first be "deciphered" before it can be understood. Frustrated by how most of his readers remained oblivious to the demands his writing sought to place on them, during the year 1886 Nietzsche contributed a new preface to each of his major works (and, from then on, continued the practice of providing his books with a cautionary preface). In each preface one finds a discussion of how the book

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in question is to be read, along with some observation such as the following: "Nowadays it is not only my habit, it is also my taste - a malicious taste perhaps? - no longer to write anything which does not reduce to despair every sort of person who is 'in a hurry.' "43 The final sentence of the preface to On the Genealogy of Morals puts the point even more dramatically, observing that writings such as his are "readable" only for one who is able to practice the requisite "art of reading" - and for that "one thing is necessary above all, something for which one has almost to be a cow: das Wiederkauen." A Wiederkauer is a ruminant, and Wiederkauen means "rumination" - or literally, to rechew, to hold in one's mouth and work over with one's teeth thoroughly before attempting to digest. Nietzsche's works are to a reader as vegetable matter is to a ruminant - only assimilable after painstaking preliminary processing. Of course, some readers will neither ruminate nor be reduced to despair, but will just continue to hurry past each remark, assimilating only those remarks that (appear to) bear their meaning on their sleeve. For the benefit of such readers, within the body of each of his texts, Nietzsche issues the occasional speeding ticket and provides further instructions as to how the work in question is to be read. It is in the context of his offering such instructions that one most often encounters Nietzsche's insistence that he does not write for "just anybody": "It is not by any means necessarily an objection to a book when anyone finds it impossible to understand: perhaps this was part of the author's intention - he did not want to be understood by just 'anyone'" (GS 381). Nietzsche calls the art of reading that his books presuppose - and that they aim to impart - philology, saying that he writes only for those who are willing to learn this art:
A book like this . . . is in no hurry; we both, I just as much as my book, are friends of lento.... I am a philologist still, that is to say, a teacher of slow reading.... For philology is that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to take the long route, to take time, to become still, to become slow - it is a goldsmith's art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve its lento.... [I]n the midst of this age of "work," that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to "get everything done" at once . . . - this art does not so easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously, before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers.... My patient friends, this book desires for itself only perfect readers and philologists: learn to read me well! (D P:5). In order for a work to teach the art of lento - and wean the reader from his love of allegro - the work must first be able to defeat the reader's

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inclination to enter into premature agreement with the author. One of the "marks of the good writer" is that he "prefers to be understood rather than admired" (HH 11:1:138), and that he be versed in the art of defeating those forms of admiration that obstruct understanding. The relation Nietzsche wishes to encourage between his reader and his text is fundamentally of the same character as the relation he wishes to encourage between us and the great human being. What sort of relation is this? Zarathustra provides a preliminary answer to this question: "Only when you have denied me will I return to you." The implication is that one has not learned anything from the author of this work unless one has in some way denied him. Nietzsche writes books that demand of their reader that he learn to reach the point at which he can throw them away.44 The sign of our genuine appropriation of them is that we ultimately reject them. Of course, we may want to throw them away immediately. Nietzsche pictures us as repelled by those books that might educate us, desperate to evade a claim they make upon us, while at the same time clinging to some other book (one we may think of as The Book). An integral part of what he seeks to teach is when to throw a book away. When it is pursued in the resolute and uncompromising spirit of a Nietzsche, the paradoxicality of such a literary undertaking is not easily overestimated: It requires a form of writing that seeks to enter into agreement with its reader in order to provoke him to disagreement. Nietzsche's prose seeks alternately to ingratiate and disingratiate. Thus, he is able to say of one of his works: "I do not allow that anyone knows that book who has not at some time been profoundly wounded and at some time profoundly delighted by every word in it" (GM P:8).45 The numerous labels and subtitles he confers on his various writings announce his intention to write against the grain of his readers' sensibility - "an antidotal work," "a corrective to the age," "a polemic." The last of these is the subtitle of GM, subtitled in German "Eine Streitschrift" - a piece of writing that seeks to pick a quarrel, to engage in confrontation. Referring to one of his earlier works, Nietzsche writes: Even then my real concern was something much more important than hypothesis-mongering.... What was at stake was the value of morality - and over this I had to come to terms almost exclusively with my great teacher Schopenhauer, to whom that book of mine, the passion and the concealed contradiction of that book, addressed itself as if to a contemporary (- for that book, too, was a "polemic" [eine "Streitschrift"]) (GM P:5).46 SE similarly seeks "to come to terms" with Nietzsche's "great teacher" - to demonstrate the teacher's capacity to educate by showing that his

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student is more than disciple. Nietzsche's commentators, if they bother to mention SE, invariably remark on how poorly conceived the essay is: Although Nietzsche claims he admires Schopenhauer greatly, on the whole he does not talk about him very much; and furthermore, the views put forward in the essay seem to contradict Schopenhauer's own philosophical views. Zarathustra says to his disciples: Only when you have denied me will I return to you. Only when Nietzsche denies Schopenhauer does Schopenhauer return to him - the author of the essay is now able to invoke Schopenhauer as his educator only because he has denied him.47 Nietzsche's Concept of an Exemplar One can only become a philosopher, not be one. As soon as one thinks one is a philosopher, one stops becoming one.48 We are now ready to tackle the following three questions: (1) Who are my exemplars? (2) What is (or should be) my relation to an exemplar? (3) What does an exemplar disclose? We will take them in reverse order. Shortly after the focal passage, Nietzsche writes: It is hard to create in anyone this condition of intrepid self-knowledge because it is impossible to teach love; for it is love alone that can bestow on the soul, not only a clear, discriminating and self-contemptuous view of itself, but also the desire to look beyond itself and to seek with all its might for a higher self as yet still concealed from it (SE p. 163). There is at play, in the beginning of this passage, an attitude of contempt - but it is directed at our (present) selves, a contempt of ourselves that, we are told, we can only achieve through love.49 The end of this passage answers the third of our questions. What does an exemplar disclose? It discloses to you your own "higher self" - which is "as yet still concealed" from you. That you possess such a "higher self" is a central topic of the essay: "[F]or your true nature lies, not concealed deep within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you usually take yourself to be" (SE p. 129). We can now begin to see part of what is fundamentally misguided in the elitist reading of Nietzsche: If an exemplar is to awaken you to your "higher self," then she can't be understood as somebody who is qualitatively unlike you. One may be tempted to exclaim at this point: "But what, according to Nietzsche, is an exemplar? Is it someone else, some exemplary other, and thus not me? Or is it me, or some eventual state of myself?" Nietzsche purposely allows the term "exemplar" to slide between these two significations. For your "higher self," according to him,

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comes into view only through your confrontation with what you trust and admire in an exemplary other. The lineaments of such a self are not specifiable in advance of such a confrontation. Thus, (what Nietzsche calls) your higher self necessarily confronts you, at first, as other. Among those most valuable exemplars for whose good you are to live (if your life is to acquire "the highest value") is the one you are to become, if you are "to become who you are." Rawls, Donagan, and Hurka take the focal passage's answer to its own question ("How can your life, the individual life, receive the highest value, the deepest significance?") to be that you should live in subservience to great men, helping them to do what they need to do, thereby serving humanity by raising the standard of humanity as a whole. This leaves out what the context of the focal passage makes clear: that your life - "the individual life" that is yours alone to lead - can acquire the highest value and the deepest significance only if your higher self is among the exemplars for whose good you are to live. Nietzsche takes for granted just what the elitist denies: Everyone has his good days when he discovers his higher self; and true humanity demands that everyone be evaluated only in the light of this condition and not merely in the light of his workaday unfreedom and servitude (HH 1:624, my emphases). Not only does everyone have a higher self, and not only is everyone able to "discover his higher self," but, Nietzsche says here, there are days when everyone in fact discovers his higher self. The difficulty lies not where the elitist imagines it to lie (namely, in what it takes to possess or acquire the capacity to make such a discovery) but elsewhere: namely, in what it takes to remain faithful to what one thus discovers - and it belongs to the nature of such a difficulty that it is one that is equally difficult for everyone. Nietzsche pictures you as split in two: You consist of who you are now and who (he thinks) you really are - the self you could or should be. It is the latter for whom he is writing, but it is the former to whom he writes. (A yet closer reading, as we shall see, reveals that he pictures each of us as a series of such selves, each in flight from, and yet each also representing a stepping stone toward, its own unique, exemplary successor.) One aim of this essay of Nietzsche's is to furnish an example of what it means to write "for the good of the highest exemplars," and hence to furnish an illustration of one way of following the instruction of the focal passage - the way that the author of SE has chosen. Rawls and Shaw both imagine that Nietzsche is concerned above all with the great artist or philosopher - and that he is concerned with them

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rather than with everyone else. But what he says he is interested in is our relation to the artist and the philosopher. This takes us to our second question: What is the nature of the affiliation that each of us bears to an exemplar? Shortly before the focal passage, Nietzsche has this to say about our relation to the artist and the philosopher: "It is incontestable that we are all related and allied to the saint, just as we are related to the philosopher and artist" (SE p. 161). Later on in SE he says quite explicitly who he thinks should feel addressed by the exemplariness of the artist and the philosopher: "The artist and the philosopher . . . strike home at only a few, while they ought to strike home at everybody" (SE p. 178). Nietzsche insists here on what I earlier called the exemplarity of the artist and the philosopher - that we are all members of the same genus. They ought to strike home at each and every one of us. Nietzsche's hubris lies in his wishing to occupy the position of the great artist or the great philosopher for us, interpolating himself between us and the unattained self that calls to us. In the absence of our having, in our "laziness," supplied ourselves with a genuine exemplar who requires of us the task of our own self-transformation, he forces himself upon us.50 He makes no attempt to conceal the arrogance of his undertaking: such arrogance, he thinks, is a precondition of his enterprise. It is an arrogance that requires its own special sort of humility - one that lies in the author's being so completely interested in us, his reader: in our mutual relations as reader and author, in our relation to other authors, in our relation to other potential exemplars, and, above all, in our relation to that exemplar that Nietzsche awkwardly persists in calling our "self." Immediately after introducing the concept of an "as yet still concealed higher self," Nietzsche continues: "Thus only he who has attached his heart to some great human being is by that act consecrated to culture" (SE p. 163).511 have broken this passage off in mid-sentence. The phrase "only he who has attached his heart to some great human being" calls forth the image of a disciple, apparently inviting the (elitist) construal of the essay. This proposal - that one attach one's heart to some great human being - provides the best textual support the essay has to offer for one aspect of the reading of Nietzsche that Darrow, Rawls, and Russell take for granted: Nietzsche calls upon us (ordinary folk) to worship the great man, place him on a pedestal, and sacrifice our own good for his. But in the second half of this sentence, he specifies what he has in mind: "the sign of that consecration is that one is ashamed of oneself without any accompanying feeling of distress." This is a critical concept for Nietzsche: the concept of a distinctively self-revelatory sort of shame. When one experiences this sort of shame, it is the sign that one is on the

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path to self-overcoming - that one has entered that "condition of intrepid self-knowledge" that enables one to attain the right sort of "discriminating and self-contemptuous view" of one's (present) self, thus filling one with "the desire to look beyond" one's present self and to seek "a higher self as yet still concealed" from one (ibid.). The characteristic mark of this sort of shame is that one is able to experience it - that is, feel genuinely ashamed of who or what one is - without thereby experiencing the feeling of distress that ordinarily accompanies shame. The role of an exemplar is to occasion the experience of this distinctive sort of shame. It is worth contrasting this (Nietzschean notion of a) special sort of shame with ordinary shame. The latter is an important topic in Kant, and Rawls occasionally alludes to it and Kant's discussion of it, as, for example, in the following passage: Kant's main aim is to deepen and to justify Rousseau's idea that liberty is acting in accordance with a law that we give to ourselves.... Kant speaks of the failure to act on the moral law as giving rise to shame and not to feelings of guilt.... Such actions therefore strike at our self-respect... and the experience of this loss is shame (TJ p. 256). There are parallels between what Rawls says here about how such actions "strike at" us and what Nietzsche says about how the great man should "strike home." But what interests us at the moment are the differences. Kantian moral shame is an emotion that one strives to overcome (or avoid) through the cultivation of virtue; whereas Nietzschean impersonal shame is an emotion that one strives to engender in oneself so as to overcome (or avoid) a false sense of virtue. The former seeks the restoration of genuine self-respect; the latter, the exposure of counterfeit self-respect. Rawls explicates moral shame as the emotion that follows upon the loss of something valuable: namely, "our sense of our own worth" (ibid.). But the onslaught of the feeling of impersonal shame (which is the sign of our "consecration to culture") occurs "without any accompanying feeling of distress," precisely because it is not the loss of anything valuable. It is the shattering of a facade of self-satisfaction, which Nietzsche claims serves to disguise our "laziness" (SE p. 127). Rawls argues convincingly that shame crucially involves "our relations with others" (TJ p. 446): Face-to-face with the other, our loss of selfrespect becomes palpable to us. Nietzsche agrees. However, in regard to the experience of the ethically desirable sort of shame, he thinks it is not just face-to-face with any human being that one experiences this sort of shame. We are now in a position to answer our remaining question: Who are

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your exemplars? They are those individuals who are able to trigger this experience of impersonal shame in you. (How rare such individuals are will depend partly upon who you are.) Part of what goes missing in the elitist construal of the focal passage is Nietzsche's insistence that the life you are to lead is an individual life - that is, not just one that is numerically distinct (something it could hardly fail to be), but one that is qualitatively distinct (that is, one that displays, rather than conceals, the distinctive marks of its individuality). From Nietzsche's point of view, the elitist understanding of perfectionism (according to which our relation to an exemplar should be one of discipleship) and the Kantian understanding of genius (according to which the role of an exemplar is to furnish a model for imitation) rest upon a common lack of appreciation of the (ethical, political, and aesthetic) significance of individuality. Nietzsche's own view represents the radical antithesis of such views insofar as it rests on the assumption that each person's individuality carries obligations with it - in particular, an obligation of what he calls (in this lovely quatrain from 7 of the Prelude to The Gay Science) "faithfulness" to oneself:
Es lockt dich meine Art und Sprach', Du folgst mir, du gehst mir nach? Geh nur dir selber treulich nach: So folgst du mir - gemach! gemach!

"Following" an exemplar is not a matter of following in someone's footsteps (jemandem nachgehen), but of regarding someone as an exemplary instance of (how to instantiate the paradoxical concept) "faithfully following in one's own footsteps" (sich selber treulich nachgehen). Zarathustra says he seeks companions "who follow me because they want to follow themselves [weil sie sich selber folgen wollen]" (Z I:P:9). To treat an exemplar as a model for mere imitation is to fail faithfully to follow oneself. This faithlessness to oneself, viewed in its ethical aspect, amounts to a failure of fulfilling one's duties to oneself; viewed in its aesthetic aspect, it amounts to a failure of originality. Nietzsche thinks our tendency to partition philosophy into artificially isolated departments of thought (politics from aesthetics and both from ethics) helps to obscure how elitist political theory and Kantian aesthetic theory prescribe, each in a different guise, the same mode of self-betrayal. Nietzsche's later paradoxical notion that you should faithfully follow your own footsteps finds its equivalent in SE in the notion that there is a path along which no one can go but you, but that there is no answer to the question "Whither does it lead?" until you have gone along it:

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No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone. There are, to be sure, countless paths and bridges and demi-gods which would bear you through this stream; but only at the cost of your self: you would put yourself in pawn and lose yourself. There exists in the world a single path along which no one can go except you. Whither does it lead? Do not ask; go along it (SE p. 129, trans, amended).52 To let someone else bear you across the stream of life would be to put yourself in pawn, Nietzsche says. Conversely, the manner in which you can best promote the good of others is not by helping to ease their load, but by fashioning your own exemplar of how the individual life can "receive the highest value, the deepest significance." If there is a role for the (exemplary) other to play in your life, it is not that of furnishing you with an opportunity for discipleship or a model for imitation. Rather, as the passage says, it is the role of revealing a path to you that you then have to go alone. The role of the great human being in your life lies in her capacity to reveal to you your own repressed knowledge of your "higher self." It is the testimony of (what, in this early essay, Nietzsche is happy to call) your "bad conscience" (SE p. 127), which signals that you possess such knowledge.53 It is the role of exemplary individuals to undo such repression. In depicting his confrontation with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche is thus not prescribing an ideal in the sense in which (what analytic philosophers think of as) "a moral theory" prescribes certain sorts of actions. SE does not aspire to "prescribe" anything to a reader she has not (at least inchoately) prescribed to herself. Its announced aim is to provoke a reader to attend to the duties prescribed to her by her own higher self.54 The only "prescriptions" the essay's elaboration of its central concepts (such as higher self, exemplar, bad conscience) issues in is a set of recommendations for going about the task of discovering and remaining faithful to that which you already value.55 Nietzsche's essay bears the title Schopenhauer as Educator. We have arrived at the point where we can ask what, in this essay, the function of the example of Schopenhauer is meant to be. In what sense is this essay about Schopenhauer (who is, after all, barely mentioned in the essay)? Schopenhauer played the role of an exemplar for him: He enabled Nietzsche to define for himself a conception of who he wanted to become.56 Schopenhauer thus furnishes an example of an answer to the question that Nietzsche tells us "one finally asks oneself: where are we, scholars and unscholarly, placed high and low, to find the moral exemplars and models among our contemporaries, the visible epitome of morality for our time?" (SE p. 132). Where are we - high and low,

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scholarly and unscholarly - to find these exemplars? Nietzsche offers us Schopenhauer, saying: I sensed that in him, Schopenhauer, I had discovered that educator and philosopher I had sought for so long I strove ... to see through the book and to imagine the living man ... who promised to make his heirs only those who would and could be more than merely his readers (SE p. 136). This signals that we shouldn't expect in these pages an explication of the writings of Schopenhauer. If Nietzsche is offering us (his readers) a reading of Schopenhauer, then he is remaining merely Schopenhauer's reader - nothing more. His relation to Schopenhauer will have failed to exemplify the "educative" (that is, transformative) role that an exemplar should play in our lives. The role of the exemplar is (to borrow a phrase of Emerson's) to unsettle us.57 Yet our tendency is to react to his capacity to unsettle us with a craving to be just like him, to imitate him. In order for an exemplar to play an educative role in our lives, he must know how to defeat our tendency to want to mimic, rather than be provoked by, his example.58 Nietzsche's essay thus aims to exemplify the relation between a youthful soul and the exemplar who stirs his conscience. This exemplification occurs at several levels. Most evident among these, announced in the title of the essay, is the fact that Nietzsche is naming Schopenhauer as the great human being to whom he "attached his heart." Nietzsche's depiction of his relation to Schopenhauer, however, seeks to exemplify something further: the relation this text wishes its reader to enter into with it.59 This is a pervasive feature of a tradition of philosophical writing (which I am here calling "perfectionist") - one that begins with Plato's dialogues.60 It is characteristic of such writing that a relation obtaining between voices in the text mirrors a relation into which the reader is invited to enter with the text. This relation, in turn, models a further relation: one into which the reader is called upon to enter with her (higher) self. The text enables you to read it in order to reveal that it is able to read you.61 The horror and the exhilaration of the discovery that a text can uncover your unacknowledged secrets is conferred by a structure that is designed to yield a further discovery, at once more terrifying and more exhilarating: namely, that this is something you can do without the text. (Both the horror and the exhilaration, Nietzsche suggests, are a measure of an effort each of us has invested in evading this discovery.) The horror is tied to the thought of the past (what we have thus far made of our lives). The exhilaration is tied to the thought of the future (what we have now learned we can make of our lives).

Nietzsche's Perfectionism Nietzsche's Critique of the Elitist Conception of Genius Every complete human being has some sort of genius. True virtue is genius.62

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Early in his essay "Self-Reliance" Emerson writes, "In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts. They come back to us with a certain alienated majesty" (Essays and Lectures, p. 259). Such writing enacts the very phenomenon it describes. The burden of such writing is to allow you to recover your own rejected thoughts, to appropriate them as your thoughts. The name both Emerson and Nietzsche give to the author of those of your rejected thoughts that return to you with alienated majesty is "your genius".63 These various relations between reader and text (between Nietzsche and Schopenhauer's text, between us as readers of SE and the text itself) aspire to mirror the proper relation between you and your genius. This is the sense in which the text is to function as an exemplar. Nietzsche's text strives to exemplify the character of one's relationship to an exemplar in a way that will defeat our tendency to picture our relation to the great human being as one that calls for admiration unaccompanied by inner change. Hero-worship, as we shall see in a moment, is interpreted by Nietzsche as a strategy for evading an inwardly felt demand for self-transformation through the cultivation of ethically impotent forms of admiration. Nietzsche's essay, in its role as exemplar, works to depict his confrontation with Schopenhauer as a model of the confrontation it wishes to provoke with its reader. To depict Schopenhauer as his educator requires demonstrating himself no longer to be merely his chosen teacher's pupil. To attach one's heart to a great human being may be the sign of one's "consecration to culture"; but the ideal (to which one thereby consecrates oneself) is only first realized as one approaches the point when that attachment becomes superfluous. It is a recurring theme in Nietzsche's work that the glory of great human beings lies in their capacity to render themselves superfluous:
Of what account is genius if it does not communicate to him who contemplates and reveres it such freedom and elevation of feeling that he no longer has need of genius! - Rendering themselves superfluous - that is the glory of all great human beings (HH 11:1:407).

Rawls and Russell read Nietzsche as saying that those who are not great are superfluous, and that what matters is promoting the good of those who are. This has it backwards. To read Nietzsche as recommending that one neglect one's own good and give one's life over to the higher good

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of "culture" - and hence recommending a manner of "attaching one's heart to a great human being" that frees one from the obligation to give birth to one's (higher) self - is to fail to grasp what he thinks culture is: "culture is the child of each individual's self-knowledge and dissatisfaction with himself" (SE p. 162). A proponent of the elitist interpretation of Nietzsche will nonetheless insist: Only those individuals who are distinguished by some special gift or quality (or set of gifts or qualities) will be able to rise to the task of self-overcoming. Is this Nietzsche's view? SE explicitly addresses this question in its commentary on Schopenhauer's conception of the heroic life. The commentary is appended to the only passage from Schopenhauer quoted in the entire essay: "A happy life is impossible: the highest that the human being can attain to is a heroic one.64 He leads it who, in whatever shape or forms, struggles against great difficulties for something that is to the benefit of all" (SE pp. 1534; trans, amended).65 Nietzsche's commentary runs as follows: Such a heroic life, to be sure, together with the mortification accomplished in it, corresponds least of all to the paltry conception of those who make the most
noise about it, celebrate festivals to the memory of great human beings, and believe that a great human being is great [grass] in the same way that small men are small [klein], as it were through a gift and for his own satisfaction, or by a mechanical operation and in blind obedience to this inner compulsion: so that he who has not received this gift, or does not feel this compulsion, has the same right to be small as some other man has the right to be great (SE p. 154, trans, amended).

The play on language here is difficult to capture in English. The English word "great" can mean either (1) very large in size, or (2) remarkable or superior in quality or character. But, in modern English, the former of these meanings, even when applicable, tends to be eclipsed by the latter. This is not true of the German gross, which is equally frequently used both to mean great in quality or character and to mean merely large. Being great (gross) can therefore be opposed both to being not (or not yet) great in quality or character or to being (physically) small (both of which are captured by the German klein). The former is something one can become, the latter is something one is or is not. Greatness is a mark of virtue, largeness is a trait. One is a feature of an exemplar, the other of a specimen. Our tendency, says Nietzsche, is to conceive of greatness on the paradigm of a natural attribute (such as physical size) - as if it were something one either is or is not, like being a certain kind of specimen. Nietzsche says quite explicitly here that, if it is in virtue of a gift that certain men are great, then their kind of "greatness" is of precisely no

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interest to us. If a person's "greatness" is simply, as it were, a result of his "blind obedience" to "an inner compulsion," then the "great" man is something he could not help but be. If he is "great" simply by dint of forces beyond his control, then his greatness makes no claim upon us. He is a distraction from our task. He does not represent the heroic life. But it is a distraction we crave and therefore manufacture. Our difference from the great man is a measure of our failure - a failure we are eager to forget. This picture of "greatness," Nietzsche says, is a perversion of the heroic life.66 What brings about this perversion? Nietzsche goes on: But being gifted, or being compelled, are contemptible words designed to enable one to ignore an inner admonition, slanders on him who has paid heed to this admonition, that is to say on the great man; he least of all lets himself be given gifts or be compelled - he knows as well as any little man how to take life easily [F]or the objective of all and how soft the bed is on which he could lie down human arrangements is through distracting one's thoughts to cease to be aware of life (SE p. 154). The suggestion is that we make great men "heroes" - we put them on a pedestal, manufacture their fame - precisely in order to differentiate ourselves from them. They can do what we cannot; they're heroes. They no longer represent an admonition. If they are mounted on a pedestal, we can ignore what Nietzsche calls our own "inner admonition." Each of us, he claims, is aware of such an "imperious voice" within her.67 Our praise of great human beings is actually slander because we attempt to camouflage their true accomplishment. The greatness, and the terror, of their accomplishment is tied to the fact that they are in no relevant way different from us - that is the insight we attempt to bribe them into sparing us. Fame is a mechanism for depriving the individual of his moral claim on us. We attempt to hide from ourselves the knowledge that what attracts us to the great man is "the virtue in ourselves." Insofar as Nietzsche, as an author, aspires to make such a moral claim on his readers (to attract the virtue in each of us), he is placed in the paradoxical position of having to defeat the prospect of his eventual canonization. Hence the ambivalence with which he predicts his own posthumous fame, and the relentlessness with which he attempts to subvert various lines along which we might seek to admire (and therefore disarm) him. A central aspect of the modernist predicament in the arts - that the artist must repudiate the audience that seeks to admire her, and that the author can only write for her readers by writing against them - is revealed by Nietzsche here, at the inception of the modernist period, to be tied to a moral demand that such art seeks to exert: a demand

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such art anticipates we will attempt to evade, through a strategy of admiration. 68 Nietzsche begins the previous passage with the observation that "being gifted, or being compelled, are contemptible words designed to enable one to ignore an inner admonition." He here denounces precisely the conception of "greatness" that Russell and Rawls take him to espouse and he goes on in this passage to denounce precisely the sort of relation to the great human being they take him to advocate. These passages from SE by no means represent an isolated case in Nietzsche's corpus of a repudiation of such a reading of his work. The same theme recurs throughout his work - although it has remained extraordinarily invisible to commentators: Do not talk of being gifted, or possessing innate talent! One can name great men of all kinds who were not very gifted. They acquired greatness, became "geniuses" (as we put it), through making the most of qualities which no one would care to admit he did not have: they all possessed the seriousness of the efficient workman (HH 1:163, trans, amended). This passage makes the point clearly: "Genius," in Nietzsche's writings, should not be taken to denote the product of inborn gifts or innate talents - of extraordinary powers of intuition or understanding that great human beings possess and the rest of us lack.69 It signifies rather an achievement that requires "making the most of qualities which no one would care to admit he did not have." That about a person which others are most likely to interpret as "a gift," Nietzsche insists, is that about him which is most due to himself: "a person's higher self... is often called a gift of the gods, whereas in reality it is everything else that is a gift of the gods (of chance): this however is the man himself" (HH 1:624). As recurrent as Nietzsche's insistence that "being gifted or being compelled are contemptible words" is his diagnosis as to why we are prone to conceive of genius in this "contemptible" manner. We do so in order to remain undisturbed by the example of genius - in order to preserve (what Nietzsche calls, in the following passage) our "vanity": Because we think well of ourselves, but nonetheless never suppose ourselves capable of producing a painting like one of Raphael's or a dramatic scene like one of Shakespeare's, we convince ourselves that the capacity to do so is quite extraordinarily marvelous, a wholly uncommon accident, or, if we are still religiously inclined, a mercy from on high. Thus our vanity, our self-love, promotes the cult of genius: for the only way to keep the genius from aggrieving us is to think of him as being very remote from us, as a miraculum.... But, once we put to one side these suggestions of our vanity, the activity of genius no longer

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appears in any way fundamentally different in kind from that of the inventor of machines, the scholar of astronomy or history, or the master tactician.... The genius, too, does nothing other than first learn how to lay foundation stones, then how to build, always in search of material and always forming and reforming itself around the material it has found.... What then is the source of our belief that genius exists only in the artist, orator and philosopher? . . . It is clear that people speak of genius only where the effects of the great intellect are most agreeable to them and they have no desire to feel envious. To call someone "divine" means: "here there is no need for us to compete" (HH 1:162, trans, amended).

We promote "the cult of genius" in order to keep the example of genius from aggrieving us. This analysis of excessive admiration as a form of moral evasion pervades nineteenth-century perfectionist writing. Such authors advert to concrete exemplars of the moral life - not in order to recommend to the reader that she pursue their good instead of her own, but rather - as part of an ad hominem strategy for exhibiting to a reader - that she is (and feels herself to be) beholden to demands she otherwise evades (or seeks to deny). This is roughly the opposite of what Rawls takes the source of perfectionism's preoccupation with certain exemplary individuals to be - namely, a desire to confer special rights or privileges on those individuals who possess special gifts or talents. But such an understanding of the moral claim that the lives of great human beings make upon us is not one that perfectionists (such as Nietzsche) endorse; it is one into which they predict that we will fall. On their diagnosis, our attraction to such an understanding is a measure of our eagerness to evade an alternative understanding of the claim such lives make upon us.70 In Ecce Homo Nietzsche argues not only that his eventual fame is an inevitability, but moreover that it is equally inevitable that it will come about posthumously.71 In the third Meditation (SE) he explores the logic of this problematic with respect to the fate of Schopenhauer's authorship. For, as author of an essay entitled Schopenhauer as Educator, Nietzsche is in danger of encouraging the very phenomenon of canonization that he condemns. Hence Schopenhauer figures only insofar as he can serve as an educator. If Nietzsche were to present him as an extraordinary human being, where what "extraordinary" means is that he is possessed of fabulous gifts and talents, then he would be unable to serve as an exemplar. He would fail to make a claim on us. Nietzsche's portrait of Schopenhauer must depict him as human; both his strengths and his failings must present themselves as achievements and failures that reflect upon (and therefore educate us to) our own capacities. Hence he writes of Schopenhauer:

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He bore many scars and open wounds, it is true; and he had acquired a disposition that may perhaps seem a little too astringent and sometimes also too pugnacious. But even the greatest of human beings cannot attain to his own ideal. That Schopenhauer can offer us a model is certain, all these scars and blemishes notwithstanding. One might say, indeed, that in his nature which was imperfect and all too human brings us closer to him in a human sense, for it lets us see him as a fellow sufferer and not only in the remote heights of a genius (SE p. 143, trans, amended).

This emphasis on (what Nietzsche calls) our "affinity" or "relatedness" to the hero is to be contrasted with the widely disseminated stereotype of the Nietzschean superman. Consult the definition offered in virtually any dictionary. Webster's Collegiate Dictionary offers the following:
superman, noun, 1. In the philosophy of Nietzsche, an ideal man of superior physique and capacity to dominate, to be produced by the evolutionary struggle for survival. 2. A man of superhuman powers.

The notion of the "superman" that figures in the second entry is what Nietzsche himself terms the "superstitious belief in genius" - the "religious or semi-religious superstition" that some individuals "are of suprahuman origin and possess certain miraculous abilities," thus attaining their ends "by quite other means than the rest of mankind" (HH I:164).72 If Schopenhauer were in any sense what is here defined as a "superman," he would be of precisely no use to the author of Schopenhauer as Educator, he would fail to be exemplary. He would not be someone in whom each of us could discover his or her own deferred possibilities. The first entry in the Webster's definition of "superman" rests on the idea that the superman "is to be produced by the evolutionary struggle for survival." In the second Meditation (HL), Nietzsche writes: "The time will come when one will prudently refrain from all constructions of the world-process or even the history of human being" (UM/HL p. I l l , trans. amended).73 The ideal we are supposed to subserve, for Nietzsche, does not lie in the realization of some historical or evolutionary telos. Since the demise of Nazism, few commentators have been tempted to argue (in the face of the textual evidence to the contrary) that Nietzsche thinks that the superman represents the eventual culmination of some process of biological or historical evolution. But little progress is made if one substitutes for the Nazi reading a Social Darwinist reading of Nietzsche, according to which Nietzsche views society as a competitive arena in which (some cultural analogue of) natural selection allows "superior" individuals to rise to the top. The translation of Exemplare as "specimens" can help to encourage such a reading. One then reads the focal passage as saying that our duty

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is to facilitate and oppose those who obstruct this process of natural selection. There is, in this connection, another favorite passage (in this case from HL) that, often in conjunction with the focal passage, commentators love to quote out of context. It is usually given as follows: "The goal of humanity cannot lie in its end, but only in its highest specimens." This passage is then interpreted as saying that the high points of human history lie, along the way, in "the fittest specimens" thrown up by this process of social evolution. Let us retranslate the passage and restore some of its context:
These [great] individuals do not carry forward any kind of process but live contemporaneously with one another.... They live as that republic of genius of which Schopenhauer once spoke.... It is the task of history to be the mediator between these individuals and thus again and again to inspire and lend the strength for the production of the great human being. No, the goal of humanity cannot lie in its end, but only in its highest exemplars (UM/HL p. I l l , trans, amended).

To say that "the end lies in humanity's highest exemplars" only specifies an end to the extent that such individuals prove able to serve as exemplars - as representatives of "that republic of genius of which Schopenhauer once spoke."74 As we shall see, this Schopenhauerian theme turns out to be a central topic of the next Meditation, SE. Nietzsche, in this passage, specifies something that he is willing to call "the task of history," which, as we shall also see in a moment, turns out to be identical to what he (both in this meditation and the next) calls "the goal of culture." This additional clue, however, does not provide much illumination unless one is clear about what Nietzsche thinks culture is. To some recent commentators on Nietzsche's work, it has seemed evident that his perfectionism calls for the realization of some sort of cultural or aesthetico-literary - as opposed to some sort of biological or historical - ideal. This at least provides a salutary alternative to an elitist construal of Nietzsche's emphasis on the importance of exemplars. According to this reading of Nietzsche, what an exemplar provides is a model of a certain sort of aesthetic perfection. But the substitution of a notion of culture or aesthetics for one of history or biology still does not mark much progress in the interpretation of Nietzsche's work, if one takes this to mean (as many recent commentators have) that the telos that Nietzsche's perfectionism calls upon us to promote is one that is merely cultural or merely aesthetic. Thus, the relevant sort of perfection might be attained through, say, cultivating "a beautiful self," or unfettering one's "artistic genius," or fashioning an aesthetically well-integrated "literary persona" - where a stress on the concepts of the beautiful, the

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artistic, or the literary is taken to mark a desire on Nietzsche's part to see some other species of valuation take over the role formerly played in our lives by moral valuation. Such a reading of Nietzsche saves him from one charge of moral lunacy, only to leave him open to another. Aestheticism and Perfectionism Everyone is an artist whose central purpose in life is to educate his spirit.75 A worry that repeatedly arises in Nietzsche scholarship is whether Nietzsche's conception of the "higher human being" is so inclusive as to encompass individuals who are morally reprehensible. This worry is exacerbated by the thought that Nietzsche is commending to us a way of life on (what appear to be) merely aesthetic grounds. Alexander Nehamas puts the worry as follows:
Nietzsche's emphasis on the aesthetic organizational features of people's lives and characters . . . brings out a . . . difficulty that attends [his "aesthetic model"]. . . . This involves what one may feel compelled to consider a moral dimension. A literary character... may be a perfect character but (represent) a dreadful person.... [T]he uncomfortable feeling exists that someone might achieve Nietzsche's ideal life and still be nothing short of repugnant.76

The worry is that Nietzsche's conception of the "ideal life" does not rule out the possibility that a "dreadful person" might qualify as "a perfect character." This worry makes two assumptions about the sort of "ideal life" or "perfect character" Nietzsche seeks to commend to our attention: (1) that Nietzsche seeks to impose his own idiosyncratic conception of wherein such perfection consists, and (2) that this conception is to be specified in purely "aesthetic" or "organizational" terms - in terms, that is, which, at least in principle, license the admiration of a morally monstrous character. The first assumption presupposes the idea that the content of your unattained self is something Nietzsche seeks to prescribe to you in advance of your confrontation with an exemplar, and thus that what (Nietzsche thinks) ought to strike you as ideal might actually strike you as repulsive. According to Nietzsche, however, it is the "mark" of his or her greatness that you do find yourself attracted to the great human being. What is misguided in the second assumption comes to the fore in Nietzsche's formulation of the guiding question of SE: "Where are we to find the moral exemplars and models among our contemporaries, the visible epitome of morality for our time?" (SE p. 132, my emphasis).

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What attracts us to an exemplar, Nietzsche says, is that we recognize him to be a "visible epitome of morality"; or, as Nietzsche puts it when speaking of the friend: He attracts the virtue in you. You admire him because you trust in him what you want (but are unable) to trust in yourself. In his later writings, Nietzsche openly opposes (what he calls) "Christian morality" and is pleased to refer to himself as an "immoralist." The unabashed call in this early essay for a "visible epitome of morality for our time" raises the question whether Nietzsche here champions, under the banner of "morality," something he later attacks (under the banner of 'immoralism'). Getting the answer to this question right requires seeing that the rhetorical strategy underlying Nietzsche's later repudiation of (something called) "morality" concedes only the term - and not the concept - to the enemy. Nietzsche justifies his choice of the term "immoralism" by invoking an Emersonian concept that figures centrally in SE - that of provocation: "I needed a word whose meaning would serve as a provocation for everyone" (EH IV:22, trans, amended). Nietzsche's later "immoralism" still seeks to make something we may still call a moral claim on its reader. But it becomes impossible to see how this might be the case, if one remains wedded to a reading of Nietzsche according to which he utterly disdains the idea that other persons might count in moral judgment with the same weight as oneself - as long, that is, as he appears to fail to grasp the concept of the moral altogether. The irony here is that Nietzsche, too, wants to accuse someone namely, his contemporaries - of failing to grasp the moral concepts they employ. The situation, as he sees it, is outlined in GS 292. People "talk from morning to night of the happiness of virtue, of composure of the soul, [and] of justice," until the "the gold gradually wears off" these ways of speaking, and these words have only the value of paper currency in a bankrupt economy: from "so much handling..., all the gold turns to lead." In this section Nietzsche nicely sums up this process of the gradual impoverishment of our moral concepts in a single phrase: "inverse alchemy" - a process that accomplishes "the devaluation of the most valuable." Nietzsche's aim as an author is to place our moral vocabulary back on the gold standard. But first he must render his reader unable to rest complacent in the thought that she is already possessed of a linguistic means for laying hands on good things. The strategy for accomplishing this is also outlined in GS 292: "Deny these good things, withdraw the mob's acclaim from them as well as their easy currency; make them once again . . . [available] to solitary souls."77 Nietzsche's rhetorical strategy of denying "morality" is thus in the service of reversing the process of inverse alchemy: rendering devalued valuables valuable once again. One goes utterly astray in reading Nietzsche's later writings if one

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deprives him of the resources to draw a distinction between a wider (positive) concept of morality and a narrower (negative) one. There are, of course, a variety of terminological options for marking such a distinction, each of which has its advantages and disadvantages. It has become increasingly fashionable for contemporary moral philosophers (sometimes self-consciously inspired by Nietzsche's critique of "the morality system") to take the word "morality" to name something undesirable, and to mark the distinction between what we should want and what we should not want by opposing "ethics" to "morality." "Morality" is then taken to refer only to that peculiar ethical institution that flourished on Christian soil. This permits one - quite correctly - to understand Nietzsche's opposition to "morality" not to entail an opposition to valuation per se. Here and there in his later writings, Nietzsche does occasionally warn the reader that his employment of the term "immoralism" marks not the wholesale repudiation of valuation, but rather the repudiation of a type of human being and a type of morality:
Fundamentally, my term immoralist involves two repudiations. First, I repudiate a type of man that has so far been considered supreme.... And then I repudiate a type of morality which has attained validity and come to dominate as [if it were] morality itself - the morality of decadence or, more concretely, Christian morality. It is admissable to consider the latter contradiction [Wiederspruch] the more decisive one (EH 111:4, trans, amended).

Notice that, in order to clarify his own rhetorical strategy, Nietzsche distinguishes here between a particular "type of morality" (one which he seeks to repudiate) and "morality itself." According to him, the former has attained its dominance and semblance of validity by passing itself off as the latter. The former, he assumes, is now so "prevalent and predominant" as to be indistinguishable from the latter for most of his readers. Notice, further, that the distinction upon which Nietzsche here relies can have content only for a reader who is able to distinguish between the repudiation of "Christian morality" and the affirmation of nihilism. In keeping with the rhetorical strategy of his later writings, Nietzsche often uses the term "ethics" in a broader (positive) sense (especially in connection with Greek ethical thought), on occasion opposing it to (a narrower notion of) "morality." He thus seeks to displace (what he calls, in his later writings) "morality" through recourse to an appeal to something that, as he repeatedly concedes, is not exactly not morality: "Hasn't the time come to say of morality what Meister Eckhart said of God: 'I call upon God to rid me of God'" (GS 292, trans, amended). Moreover, Nietzsche does not cede the term "morality" to the enemy altogether. Even Beyond Good and Evil - the work that most loudly

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trumpets his "immoralism" - permits itself an occasional lapse from this rhetorical strategy. Passages such as the following indicate that the indictment of "morality" which that work pursues is in service of something that (Nietzsche here indicates) might aptly be termed "a higher morality": Morality in Europe today is herd animal morality - in other words, as we understand it, merely one type of human morality beside which, before which, and after which many other types, above all higher moralities, are, or ought to be, possible. But this morality resists such a "possibility," such an "ought" with all its power: it says stubbornly and inexorably, "I am morality itself, and nothing besides is morality" (BGE 202).78 The last sentence of this passage makes clear that the identification of morality per se with a particular, historically contingent moral configuration is not a terminological innovation for which Nietzsche seeks to claim credit. Much of Nietzsche's later work is concerned to demonstrate how this identification of the wider concept with the narrower one leaves us prone to fall prey to (what Nietzsche calls) nihilism. Once (the very possibility of) morality is identified with this "one type of human morality," then the disillusionment brought on by the collapse of (so-called) "morality" leads us to rebound into the metaphysical mirror image of "morality": a nihilistic conception of the nature of value that drains values of their prescriptive force.79 Such a nihilism Nietzsche predicted would haunt the moral thought of the next (our) century. To view Nietzsche's later writings as offering a retraction of his call in the Meditations for a "visible epitome of morality for our time" - on the grounds that the term "morality" must necessarily denote something that he is, in his later writings, concerned to oppose - is to read him as condoning what he most condemned: It is to mistake his "immoralism" for a species of nihilism. In his later writings he seeks in various ways to refine the project inaugurated by his early critique of Schopenhauer, and to assist the reader in pursuing the question the focal passage poses: "How can your life, the individual life, receive the highest value, the deepest significance?" The crucial refinement lies in his seeking to refine the terms of the question so that its answer does not appear to require a forced choice between either a wholesale acquiescence in "one particular ideal of human perfection" or an equally indiscriminate refusal to so acquiesce - so that the only alternative to acquiescence seems to entail the repudiation not only of that particular ideal but of all such ideals. The accusation of immoralism is one that any form of moral perfectionism will tend to invite insofar as it places an emphasis on each person's obligation to cultivate her (higher) self; for such an emphasis

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threatens to slide into a license for egoism. Insofar as such a perfectionist author appears to insist on the priority of one's duties to oneself over one's duties to others, he is bound to appear open to the charge of being excessively casual about allowing an interest in one's own development to trump one's obligations to others.80 If such an author's aim were merely to show us that we often seek to evade our duties to ourselves by picturing them as if in conflict with our duties to others, then there is no great difficulty in seeing such an author's quarrel to be not with the concept of a duty to others per se, but only with much that masquerades as if it were a requirement of such a duty.81 But Nietzsche appears to wish to press a more radical claim - one not so easily taken in stride: that the strenuous cultivation of one's "higher self" is a precondition of the development of one's capacity for genuine responsiveness to the needs and claims of others.82 The burden of numerous passages (in particular, the recurrent critique of the Christian morality of Mitleid) throughout Nietzsche's corpus is to provide support for this more radical claim: Only once one has learned to discriminate and act upon one's own "innermost needs" is one able to discriminate, appropriately evaluate, and constructively act upon those of others. According to Nietzsche, the neglect of one's duties to one's self cripples one's capacity to formulate and recognize one's (true) duties to others. He therefore urges that a prior preoccupation with the formation of character (rendering oneself capable of exercising practical wisdom) - which he identifies as formerly having been a central preoccupation of Hellenistic and Roman philosophy - once again be restored to its rightful place at the center of philosophy. Nietzsche can be seen here as a belated participant in an eighteenth-century German neoclassical effort (found in authors such as Winkelmann, Wieland, Goethe, and Schiller) to rehabilitate (what was taken to be) a Greek conception of moral beauty and a correlative conception of moral education as the formation of the beautiful soul - where such formation is taken to be a prior condition of cultivating the capacity to recognize the moral needs of others.83 It thus would be at least as accurate to say that what Nietzsche is concerned to furnish is an ethical model that "involves" an aesthetic dimension as it is to say - as Nehamas does - that what he wants to offer is an "aesthetic model" that "involves a moral dimension." But the mere suggestion that ethical valuation could so much as "involve" an aesthetic dimension seems to a number of commentators already to import into the context of ethical valuation considerations that have no place there. Philippa Foot's way of motivating this charge (of conflating distinct sorts of valuation) begins by pointing out that Nietzsche, throughout his work, is preoccupied by the sort of admiration "a splendid type of man" is able

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to elicit in us. She goes on to argue that such admiration generally turns on quasi-aesthetic (as opposed to moral) features of the life or character of such a man.84 Nietzsche, she concedes, is certainly interested in "arguing about the way in which men must live in order to live well"; but she argues that his own discussions of what it is to live well run together questions of moral and aesthetic valuation. Nietzsche's views on what constitutes moral flourishing, she concludes, are obscured - and to some extent rendered hopelessly confused - by his introduction of "quasiaesthetic criteria which are irrelevant in this context."85 Nietzsche himself will take this fact about us (namely, that his conception of the good life is bound to strike us as commending an aesthetic as opposed to an ethical ideal) to reveal as much about our late-modern conception of morality as it does about his view of the good life. For, he thinks, it is only given a certain conception of morality that the considerations he adduces will so much as appear to rest on merely aesthetic considerations.86 If there is one single point that the four Meditations hammer away at, it is that the questions "How should I live?" (or: "What is the good life?"), "What do I admire?" (or: "What is great?"), and "What is culture?" (or: "What is beautiful?") are to be answered together. To attempt to secure an answer to any one of these questions, in isolation from the other two, is to fail to encounter the difficulty of each. Nehamas and Foot are two of the better readers of Nietzsche we now have; and, the many differences in their respective readings of Nietzsche notwithstanding, both identify Nietzsche's philosophy as a kind of "aestheticism." Both notice that Nietzsche seeks to set his face against "morality"; but they also notice his horror of nihilism, and his abiding preoccupation (and his evident desire to instill in his reader a similar preoccupation) with questions concerning what one should value - questions such as "What sort of person(s) should I admire (and what sort of response should such admiration elicit in me)?" "How should I live (if I wish to be worthy of such admiration myself)?" And "In what ways (and by what means) should I endeavor to shape and change my self?" Given both this abiding concern with what one should value and his virulent critique of "morality," these commentators (and not only they) conclude (1) that Nietzsche's aim must be to recommend forms of valuation belonging to some category of value other than the ethical, and (2) that category must the aesthetic. So they conclude that Nietzsche seeks to recommend answers to his questions (about what one should value) in which aesthetic values are given pride of place over ethical values. But what this reading overlooks is that Nietzsche seeks to transform our understanding of the category of the aesthetic every bit as much as he

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does our understanding of the category of the ethical - and in particular our understanding of these categories as resting upon distinct and mutually independent kinds of valuation. Nietzsche's aesthetics cannot be understood apart from his perfectionism. His position on these matters (from the Meditations on)87 is a radical one: His criterion of "true" aesthetic (or cultural) value is that which is (in some way) able to educate or provoke us to selftransformative change. He in effect brands any art that is utterly devoid of this sort of (potential) ethical significance a species of counterfeit art.88 He seeks, on these grounds, to expose as "fraudulent" much that is categorized by our cultural institutions as art. He seeks to oppose what he calls culture to (much of) what we call "culture."89 The unifying theme of the Meditations as a whole is that, because the philistine has become the spokesman of "culture," we need to recover the concept of culture.90 Yet what Nietzsche calls "the culture of the philistine" is strikingly reminiscent of what the perfectionist, on Rawls's portrait of him, champions in the name of culture. This is why any attempt to summarize his doctrine (a la Rawls) as one that "places an absolute priority on the claims of culture" is bound to lead to a misunderstanding - as is any attempt to summarize his thought by saying that he calls upon us "to turn our lives into works of art." What we celebrate as culture Nietzsche describes as "the perversion of culture" and the use we make of art he describes as its "misappropriation" - as we earlier saw him describe our festivals in honor of great men as "slanderous" (SE p. 154). The slander lay in our representation of the great men as having done something qualitatively beyond the scope of our capacities. Similarly, the perversion of culture lies in our tendency to represent the interior of the circle of culture as accessible only to a select elite, as making no claim on how we live, and as revealing nothing to us about who we are (other than as a "lover of art"). Rawls suspects that Nietzsche, out of an impatience to promote the interests of culture, will encourage an attitude of indifference to the claims of justice. But Nietzsche himself voices a similar charge; and he too directs it against those who are "most actively engaged in promoting culture":
[T]here exists a species of misemployed and misappropriated culture - you have only to look around you! And precisely those forces at present most actively engaged in promoting culture do so for reasons they reserve to themselves and do so not out of pure disinterestedness (SE p. 164, trans, amended). Nietzsche is as suspicious as Rawls of those who champion the priority of the claims of "culture," not only on Rawlsian grounds, but on other grounds as well: "culture is promoted by all those who are conscious of

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possessing an ugly or boring content and want to conceal the fact with a so-called beautiful form" (SE p. 166). The taste for (much of) what passes for culture is traced here to its usefulness as an instrument of selfdeception. So-called culture is the opposite of what (Nietzsche thinks) culture ought to be. It is a means of shrouding oneself in an outwardly beautiful form in order to conceal an inward absence of cultivation - a means, that is, for concealing a lack of (what Nietzsche will call) true culture. But, according to Nietzsche, we are all to some degree conscious and ashamed of possessing an ugly or boring content; thus, none of us is immune to the temptation of philistinism. Yet, he also says, at some time or other in a person's life, everyone experiences a moment of profound distrust in the character of our shared attraction to that which we generally call "culture": His honesty, the strength and truthfulness of his character, must at some time or
other rebel against a state of things in which he only repeats what he has heard, learns what is already known, imitates what already exists; he will then begin to grasp that culture can be something other than a decoration of life, that is to say at bottom no more than dissimulation and disguise.... [Ejvery increase in truthfulness must also assist to promote true culture: even though this truthfulness may sometimes seriously damage precisely the kind of cultivatedness now held in esteem, even though it may even be able to procure the downfall of an entire merely decorative culture (SE p. 123).

As Nietzsche's emphases seek to make clear, true culture is to be opposed to purely decorative (pseudo-)culture - to "arts and artifices for prettifying life" (SE p. 167). Here he blasts the very conception of culture Rawls takes him to champion - one that revolves around (what Rawls calls) "the duty to develop persons of a certain style and aesthetic grace." Nietzsche's word for what true culture reveals to us is our "humanity." This call for the human pervades the essay: "Who is there then, amid these dangers of our era, to guard and champion humanity'!... Who will set up the image of the human?" (SE p. 150, trans, amended).The paradox underlying Nietzsche's later concept of the Ubermensch is that the human (as we know it) is something that must be overcome in order that it may become (fully) human:91 "We have to be lifted up. And who are they who would lift us? They are those true humans, those who are no longer animal, the philosophers, artists, and saints" (SE p. 159, trans, amended). Rawls, Russell, and Darrow notice the tremendous importance Nietzsche attributes to the figure of the philosopher and the scientist; Rawls, Nehamas, and Foot notice his interest in art and the lives of great artists.92 But Nietzsche will often group the philosopher and the artist

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together with each other and together with the saint, and he specifies here wherein their significance lies: We have to be lifted up - and they are the ones who can lift us. (At no point in the essay is there any suggestion that we should arrange our institutions for their benefit and not ours. It is precisely our benefit that is the issue here.) They are in a position to help us become "no longer animal." Nietzsche's (and Emerson's, and Arnold's, and Mill's, and Marx's) way of attempting to bring home to us (their readers) that our present condition is one in which the preconditions of the possibility of the moral life have yet to be fully satisfied is to describe us as not yet human?3 As he opposes culture to what we call "culture," and our duties to what we call our "Duty,"94 Nietzsche also identifies what generally passes for education as an obstacle to our education: "The education of a scholar is an extremely difficult problem, if his humanity is not to be sacrificed in the process" (SE p. 132). Our educational institutions, Nietzsche argues, shrink from "the difficulty of the task of educating humans to be human" (SE p. 131, trans, amended). Culture, in Nietzsche's vocabulary, does not refer to a luxury we can afford to forgo in the interest of accommodating other allegedly more pressing human needs. Even in the absence of (what he calls) culture, we are able to learn to identify and satisfy our animal needs; culture is the cultivation of those forms of sensitivity which enable us to recognize what, as human, our (real) needs are: "[T]he goal of culture is to promote the production of true human beings and nothing else" (SE p. 164).95 Nietzsche refers to the protohumanity of our condition as our "animality" or "bestiality":
Yet let us reflect: where does the animal cease, and where does the human being begin? . . . As long as anyone desires life as he desires happiness, he has not yet raised his eyes above the horizon of the animal, for he only desires more consciously what the animal seeks through blind impulse.... [U]sually we fail to emerge out of animality; we ourselves are the animals whose suffering seems to be senseless. But there are moments when we realize this:... and we see that we are pressing towards the human as towards something that stands high above us (SE pp. 157-8, trans, amended).

At what point does the animal in us cease and the human being begin? At the moment when we first realize that "we are pressing towards the human as towards something that stands high above us." This realization, Nietzsche says, takes the form of one's realizing that one harbors a longing (ein Sehnen) - a longing that is characterized in the essay in a variety of ways (which the reader is to learn to recognize as only apparently distinct): as a longing to overcome one's animality, as that longing each person feels "for himself," and as a longing "for a healthier and

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simpler humanity" when "genius itself is summoned" and the individual can behold "with astonished eyes the genius in himself" (SE p. 146, my emphasis). Under this latter characterization - as a desire for the genius in oneself - this longing is also identified as "the root of all culture":
Every human being is accustomed to discovering in himself some limitation . . . which fills him with melancholy and longing:... as an intellectual being he harbors a profound desire for the genius in him. This is the root of all culture; and . . . I understand by this the longing of the human to be reborn as saint and genius (SE p. 142, my emphasis, trans, amended). Russell says that Nietzsche is interested in "the production of genius"; Rawls says that Nietzsche is interested in "the promotion of culture"; and Nietzsche says that he who fails "to consecrate himself to culture" "fails to recognize his goal" to be "the production of genius" (SE p. 163). But these claims take on a very different aspect, when we are told here that "the root of all culture" is that "longing" that each individual feels

for the unborn "genius in him." Rawls is concerned that Nietzsche's interest in promoting culture entails a recommendation for distributing our communal resources unjustly - the lion's share going to scholars and artists of exceptional talent and intellect. The passage quoted above, however, continues: Where we discover talent devoid of that longing in the world of scholars or that of the so-called cultivated, we are repelled and disgusted by it; for we sense that, with all their intellect, such people do not promote an evolving culture and the procreation of genius - which is the goal of all culture - but hinder it (ibid.). Not only is talent in itself not celebrated in this essay, but talent "devoid of that longing to be reborn as saint and genius" is declared "disgusting." Nietzsche's scorn is directed not - as Russell and Rawls have it - at the reader who happens not to be a genius (because he happens not to be endowed with certain gifts or talents), but at the reader who evades his genius: "There exists no more repulsive and desolate creature in the world than the human being who has evaded his genius and who now looks furtively to left and right, behind him and all about him" (SE p. 128, trans, amended). "Genius" figures in Nietzsche's vocabulary as the term for a "productive uniqueness" each of us harbors (SE p. 143).96 Nietzsche does not seek to "maximize" genius (in the way that Rawls and Hurka imagine) because the only species of genius that concerns him is one that is already perfectly distributed.97 Without the stimulus of culture, the genius within one - this "basic material of one's being" - remains "difficult of access, bound and paralyzed." The aim of culture, Nietzsche says, is education. "Education" is

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his term for the process of liberating the genius within a person: "Your true educators and formative teachers reveal to you what the basic material of your being is [Y]our educators can be only your liberators" (SE p. 129). The essay bears the title Schopenhauer as Educator. Schopenhauer is presented in these pages not as an example of someone who deserves special rights and privileges (because he has done what very few can do), but rather as an example of someone who can serve as educator: that is, as an example of what, in principle, anyone can - but, in fact, very few - do. Schopenhauer's exemplarity inheres in the fact that "few thinkers have felt with a comparable intensity and certainty that genius moved within them" (SE p. 142). He was extraordinary, in the eyes of the author of this essay, not because he possessed extraordinary talent but because he was able to feel with an unusual degree of "intensity and certainty" something each of us is able to feel - for "each of us bears a productive uniqueness within him as the core of his being" (SE p. 143).
Democracy and the Cultivation of the Self [I]n the final analysis, the whole classification of duties into duties toward oneself and duties toward others... really rests on a completely immoral distinction. Out of it emerges the notion that there are, as it were, two completely different and conflicting attitudes that either ought to be kept carefully apart or else artificially reconciled by means of some petty arithmetic.98

One motif in Nietzsche's writings that has helped to kindle elitist interpretations of his work is the occasional barbed remark concerning "the democratic movement of our times." Most commentators have taken it to be self-evident that there is a straightforward connection between these remarks and the emphasis throughout his work on the significance of great human beings. It is, so the standard reading goes, because Nietzsche is infatuated with the good of the outstanding individual that he deplores democracy. The problem with democracy, according to this reading, is that it lowers the standard of humanity as a whole by seeking to promote an overly inclusive good (that of the insignificant ordinary citizen) instead of focusing exclusively on the only good that counts (that of the extraordinary individual). Here is a representative example of what one of Nietzsche's remarks concerning "the democratic movement of our times" sounds like: "We have a different faith; to us, the democratic movement is not only a form of the decay of political organization but a form of the decay, namely the diminution, of the human being, making him mediocre and lowering his

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value. Where, then, must we reach with our hopes?" (BGE 203). On the strength of passages such as this, it has seemed manifest to many commentators that Nietzsche seeks to advance some sort of anti-egalitarian political ideal (although it is usually by no means clear, even to them, what that ideal is supposed to be). One aim of this essay is to argue that, insofar as his perfectionism is taken to constitute the nexus of his disagreement with democracy, a confrontation between his thought and democratic political theory is not as easy to arrange as has been commonly supposed. If perfectionism calls (as Rawls imagines it does) for a form of society in which, as a matter of policy, certain privileges or goods are conferred upon some members of the society at the expense of others, then it clearly conflicts with a democratic commitment to treat each citizen with equal respect and as of equal value. There clearly are proponents of such antidemocratic social policies." But where in his writings does Nietzsche advocate such policies? He certainly wants to pick a quarrel with "the democratic movement." But this still leaves the question open: To what extent does the perfectionist dimension of his thought conflict with a commitment to democracy? To what extent does Nietzsche's perfectionism promote something - call it the cultivation of the self - that competes with the aspirations of democracy? It is worth noticing, to begin with, that nothing in the passage quoted above forces one to take what Nietzsche calls "the democratic movement" to be an undistorted expression of the aspirations that underlie democracy. Indeed, such an equation (between the patent actuality of democracy and its highest possibilities) is often distasteful to those who most celebrate those aspirations. Many a theorist of democracy has discerned within "the democratic movement" a tendency to suppress democracy's capacity for criticism from within - a pressure to collapse into (what de Toqueville called) "a tyranny of the majority." John Adams, Matthew Arnold, William James, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Stuart Mill, Alexis de Toqueville (not to mention Emerson and Thoreau) all dread that debasement of democracy that both Mill and Emerson refer to as "the despotism of conformity." There is a perfectionist strain within the tradition of democratic thought that takes it as a matter of urgent concern that the antiperfectionist tendencies latent within the democratic movement be kept from eroding democracy's resources for criticism from within - where the pressure of such criticism is taken to be essential to democracy's capacity to remain faithful to its own aspirations.100 Each of the theorists of democracy listed above emphasizes that democracy can flourish only if its citizens cultivate - rather than disdain

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- those virtues that formerly were the sole prerogative of aristocracy (such as independence of mind, disregard for fashion, eccentricity of conduct). The aim of democracy, as conceived for example in the correspondence between Adams and Jefferson, is not to overthrow the idea of a society "ruled by the best," but to exchange one form of aristocracy for another: to replace "an artificial aristocracy" founded on the contingent precedents of "wealth and birth" with "an unprecedented aristocracy" from whose ranks ideally no one is, as a matter of contingent social circumstance, excluded.101 These early theorists of democracy are acutely aware that this is not an ideal easily attained, and that there is a danger that "the democratic movement" will attempt to forestall disappointment by giving up on the ideal of an unprecedented democracy, exchanging its ideal of equality for another - one achieved through a leveling rather than a raising of its citizenry. From the point of view of these theorists, such an exchange would represent a betrayal of democracy's promise and an avoidable outcome of the democratic experiment; from Nietzsche's point of view, it would represent merely a predictable and rapidly impending consequence of the democratic political process. We should, however, not allow this disagreement between Nietzsche and theorists such as Mill or Emerson to obscure the extent of their underlying agreement. Nietzsche writes:
Two kinds ofequality. -The thirst for equality can express itself either as a desire to draw everyone down to oneself (through diminishing them, spying on them, obstructing their progress) or to raise oneself and everyone else [my emphasis] up (through recognizing their virtues, helping them, rejoicing in their success) (HH 1:300, trans, amended).

Nietzsche's quarrel with "the democratic movement" is a function of his belief that the ultimate consequence of its ascendancy will be the promotion the first rather than the second of these "two kinds of equality." He and the perfectionist theorists of democracy concur on the point that within the democratic movement there exists a pressure to substitute for a noble and elusive ideal of equality a very different and far more readily attainable ideal - one that purchases equality at the cost of "a diminution of the human being." Their disagreement lies in their relative estimation of both the capacity and the inclination on the part of those engaged in the democratic experiment to withstand this pressure. A related way of seeing that Nietzsche's quarrel with democracy is not a direct consequence of his perfectionism is to note that his emphasis on the importance of exemplary individuals is echoed by many of these early theorists of democracy. Mill writes, in On Liberty (OL):

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I insist emphatically on the importance of genius and the necessity of allowing it to unfold itself freely both in thought and in practice People think a genius a fine thing if it enables a man to write an exciting poem or paint a picture but in its true sense, that of originality in thought and action, though no one says that it is not a thing to be admired, nearly all, at heart, think that they can do very well without it.... Originality is the one thing which unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of. They cannot see what it is to do for them: how should they? If they could see what it would do for them, it would not be originality. The first service which originality has to render them is that of opening their eyes: which being once fully done, they would have a chance of being themselves original.'02 Proponents of the elitist interpretation of Nietzsche seize upon his emphasis on the significance of great human beings as if it sufficed to demonstrate a sympathy for a militantly antidemocratic political ideal. Yet it is difficult to distinguish some of his remarks on this topic from those of Mill quoted above; and moreover he himself (as we have seen) is profoundly critical of the elitist conception of the great human being. This affinity between Nietzsche's thought and that of certain theorists of democracy becomes less surprising when one discovers that his concept of the exemplar - like (as we shall see) a number of other concepts that figure prominently in SE - derives in part from a concept of Emerson's. 103 Emerson goes beyond maintaining that the idea of the moral significance of the exemplary individual (and the correlative idea of "attaching one's heart to an exemplar") is not in conflict with those forms of relationship between persons that a democracy should seek to foster. He insists that, if democracy is to flourish, it is essential that it not be so conceived. This insistence may be seen in the manner in which Emerson appropriates American political terminology to formulate his version of a perfectionist appeal to the role of an exemplar: In the Essays his term for your exemplar is your "delegate,"104 and in his later writings it is your "representative." 105 Emerson's vision of democracy, like Mill's, is one of a society in which the pursuit of an aristocratic ideal of excellence is the birthright of every citizen; but the pursuit of such an ideal cannot, for Emerson, be detached from (what he calls) "the proper uses of great men" - that is, from our acknowledging and attending to those "representative men" who are able to help us to discover the unacknowledged duties that each of us bears to herself.106 How am I to identify those duties that I bear to myself and that I ought to - but do not as yet - acknowledge as mine? The answer that SE as a whole suggests is: By learning to ask myself certain questions. At every critical juncture in the essay, Nietzsche pauses to recommend a particular question that one should press upon one's self; and he provides various indications of what might count as a sign that one has genuinely

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asked the question of one's self: for example, feeling "ashamed of oneself without any accompanying feeling of distress" (SE p. 163). Each question that one is asked to ask oneself eventually gives way to a further such question. Here is the first of the essay's interlocking chain of questions: "Let the youthful soul look back on life with the question: What have you truly loved up to now, what has drawn your soul aloft, what has mastered it and at the same time blessed it?" Each person is to ask himself this question, each person will answer differently. It is not a question that can be posed collectively. If you press on yourself this question "What have you truly loved up to now?" and then contemplate the answers you give, then a discovery will ensue: "Set up these revered objects before you and perhaps their nature and their sequence will give you a law, the fundamental law of your own true self" (SE p. 129). The next sentence of the essay makes it explicit that arriving at "the fundamental law of your own true self" is not a matter of disclosing the self "which you usually take yourself to be," but rather one of bringing into imagination a further, eventual (state of your) self which lies "immeasurably high above you" (SE p. 129). What you are presently inclined to do and think and feel are not expressions of your true (unattained) self. Yet Nietzsche also tells us that in order to form some conception of our higher self, we first need to ask ourselves: What do I love? What do I admire? What do I desire? But you may wonder: How can putting such questions to yourself advance you if, at the outset of such a process, you have yet to cultivate any feelings or desires that are properly yours! It might seem that, as you stand now, you are not even in a position to ask (let alone answer) the question you are told to put to yourself. Here is another of those paradoxes perfectionist authors court. How am I to act only on those inclinations that accord with "the fundamental law of my own true self," if I, in my present undeveloped condition, have hitherto only sought to suppress such inclinations? Mill, an author with a limited taste for paradox, is perhaps the least coy of the theoreticians of this dilemma. Yet he too calls upon his reader to consult the desires of a self that has hitherto failed to express itself:
Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns only themselves, the individual or the family do not ask themselves, what do I prefer? or, what would suit my character and disposition? or, what would allow the best and highest in me to have fair play and enable it to grow and thrive? They ask themselves, what is suitable to my position? what is usually done by persons of my station and pecuniary circumstances? or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of a station and circumstances superior to mine? I do not mean that they choose what is cus-

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tomary in preference to what suits their own inclination. It does not occur to them to have any inclination except for what is customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things commonly done; peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct are shunned equally with crimes, until by dint of not following their own nature they have no nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved; they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly of their own. Now is this, or is it not, the desirable condition of human nature? (OL pp. 58-9).

This passage might have been lifted from SE. (In a standard introductory survey course on the history of political philosophy, Mill and Nietzsche usually find themselves pitted against one another as the most eloquent friend and foe respectively of the ideals of liberal democracy. One way to mark the unsatisfactory character of this textbook opposition is to notice how any number of passages from On Liberty can be mistaken for ones from SE and vice versa.) Not only are the questions Mill says we fail to ask ourselves (What do I prefer? What would allow the best and the highest in me to have fair play and enable it to grow and thrive?) the same as the ones Nietzsche urges on us, but Mill's diagnosis of our condition is the same as well: Our "human capacities are withered and starved." (Nietzsche says [SE p. 163] that one must learn "to hate one's own narrow and shriveled nature.") Yet if, as Mill says, I lack "any inclination except for what is customary," how will asking myself the question "What do I prefer?" help me develop that "peculiarity of taste" that will allow me to nurture opinions and feelings that are properly my own? Indeed, in my present condition - where "the mind itself is bowed to the yoke" and "incapable of any native pleasures" - can I even properly aspire to pose to myself Mill's concluding question concerning my present condition: "Is this, or is it not, the desirable condition of human nature?" Mill's sensitivity to the delicacy and intricacy of this problematic should provoke us to rethink what happens to the doctrine of Utilitarianism in his hands - where the appeal to utility, he says, is to be understood as an appeal to what he calls "utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being" (OL p. 10, my emphasis). Nietzsche's solution to the dilemma posed above parallels the solution Emerson offers (in the passage quoted earlier) in "Self-Reliance": One trusts in the work of genius what one is unable to trust in one's (present) self - one recognizes in such an exemplar a reflection of one's own rejected self. It serves as "a rough and imperfect mirror."107 You "become who you are" by learning to cultivate a trust in your (higher) self as it

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appears reflected in what you admire. Nietzsche says of Schopenhauer in the middle of this essay in which he declares his independence from Schopenhauer: "I trusted him at once and my trust is the same now." The role of an exemplar is twofold: to allow us to arrive at an articulate conception of what we value, and to ensure that we fasten upon duties suited to our needs - duties stringent enough to require our transformation, yet not so stringent as to be unfulfillable: "I am sure of only one thing: that from that ideal image it is possible to fasten upon ourselves a chain of fulfillable duties" (SE p. 157). The delicacy of this operation lies in the difficulty of adjusting the trajectory of our ideal toward the optimal height: The dangers are always great when things are made too difficult for a human being and when he is incapable of fulfilling any duties at all.... The hardest task still remains: to say how a new circle of duties may be derived from an ideal and how one can proceed towards so extravagant a goal through a practical activity - in short, to demonstrate how an ideal educates (SE p. 156, trans, amended). Schopenhauer is an educator only insofar as the ideal he represents is one that was able to educate. The essay justifies its exemplar's claim to be an educator by reporting on how its author was able to derive a circle of duties from the example of "his first teacher." But this represents only the retrospective dimension of the essay's demonstration of how an ideal educates; folded within its pages is also a demonstration of how its author presently proceeds "towards so extravagant a goal through a practical activity" - where one aspect of that activity is the writing of the essay itself. To grasp how Nietzsche's essay seeks to exemplify what it teaches, we need to see not just what his relation to an exemplar was, but what it is - and to see this we need to notice how his prosecution of the practical activity of authoring the essay itself represents an effort on the part of the author (not merely retrospectively to report on or imaginatively to describe, but in addition) to exhibit the sort of practical activity he seeks to commend. Quoting and Saying The mind understands something only insofar as it absorbs it like a seed into itself, nurtures it, and lets it grow into blossom and fruit.108 Commentators are fond of condescending to Schopenhauer as Educator. As noted before, they point out how ill-conceived the essay is: Its title promises a celebration of Schopenhauer - yet Schopenhauer is barely mentioned; much of the essay contains an implicit critique

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of Schopenhauer's doctrines; and the essay ends, after criticizing Schopenhauer by praising Emerson.109 Why is it that an essay whose ostensible purpose is to hold up Schopenhauer as an exemplar ends by replacing his name with that of Emerson? The antepenultimate paragraph approvingly quotes a passage from Emerson's "Circles" from which the following sentence is italicized by Nietzsche: "A new degree of culture would instantly revolutionize the entire system of human pursuits."110 This echoes Emerson's earlier call in "Self-Reliance" for "the gradual domestication of the idea of Culture," which, in turn, is echoed in SE. But this is only the easily visible tip of the iceberg. Closer examination reveals that Nietzsche's essay contains much more than a respectful closing nod in Emerson's direction: Emerson's sentences haunt the entire essay. Countless passages in SE echo passages from Emerson.111 The concepts of genius, exemplar, culture, animality, timidity, shame, custom, humanity, trusting oneself, conformity, longing, a circle of duties, and a higher self are only a handful among a seemingly endless number of concepts in SE that either repeat or accord with concepts in Emerson's essays "Self-Reliance" and "Circles."112 How are we to understand the pervasiveness of Emerson's presence in this essay whose title bears Schopenhauer's name? Here is how the essay introduces Schopenhauer:
Certainly there may be other means of finding oneself, or coming to oneself out of the bewilderment in which one usually wanders as in a dark cloud, but I know of none better than to think on one's true educators. And so today I shall remember one of the teachers and taskmasters of whom I can boast, Arthur Schopenhauer - and later on I shall recall others. (SE p. 130)

Eventually Emerson's name is recalled, but it is Schopenhauer's that stands italicized here at the outset of the essay. Why? Nietzsche says: "First I shall remember one of the teachers of whom I can boast." Schopenhauer is a teacher of whom he can boast. Why couldn't he boast of Emerson? Nietzsche writes elsewhere: "Emerson. - Never have I felt so much at home in a book, and in my home . . . - I may not praise it, it is too close to me."113 Schopenhauer is a teacher of whom the author may boast because he is a teacher the author has outgrown. Schopenhauer's sentences no longer represent sentences the author wishes to appropriate as his own. The essay tells us about how "Schopenhauer as a human being can serve as an example" (SE p. 137). It describes a completed process of how one can "profit from an example." Emerson is an example that, as the texture of the essay itself serves to reveal, continues to function as one of the author's current exemplars. The essay thus underscores that the task of

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relating oneself to one's "higher self" is not something one does only once. In denying that the task of self-perfection is one that culminates in the telos of a perfected self, Nietzsche thereby aligns himself doctrinally with Emerson as well. What Emerson calls "conformity" is the condition in which one takes one's present self as not only final (as an end that one has attained), but as last (as the end). The condition of self-reliance which Emerson defines as the aversion of conformity - is one in which one's attained self leans toward a (further) "unattained and attainable self."114 Nietzsche pictures each of us as a series of attainable selves, each, once attained, leaning toward a further unattained yet attainable successor. Nietzsche appears in SE to be recommending Schopenhauer to us as a figure who can play the role of exemplar for us - and who did play that role for him. A temptation here is to think that this is something that one only does once - something that Schopenhauer did for Nietzsche and that now perhaps Nietzsche can do for us. Nietzsche's strategy is to elicit this temptation in order to frustrate it. It is for this reason that he chooses to depict his relation to two exemplary figures: the one to whom he once attached his heart, and the one to whom his heart is presently attached. This is what it is "to become who you are" for Nietzsche: to be negotiating the transition between a self attained and a self that is to be attained. "Becoming who you are" consists not in actualizing some preexisting entity called one's "true self," but rather in properly managing this transition. Becoming who you are is not something one is ever finished doing - or, for that matter, something one can utterly fail to be doing. The question is one of how one manages the economy of the structure of selfhood: whether one leans the attained self toward the attainable. The recurring transcriptions of Emersonian sentences in Nietzsche's essay furnish a concrete demonstration of how to make use of an exemplar. Each sentence has been "absorbed like a seed," nurtured, and allowed to blossom afresh. The author, through questing in this manner for a voice that is not yet his, leans his attained self toward an as yet unattained self. This is how you, the reader, are to reclaim the rejected thoughts that you recognize as your own when they return "with a certain alienated majesty" in an exemplary work: Make what you trust in such a work yours.115 Nietzsche's essay seeks to demonstrate how to do this. Just to offer a series of sentences surrounded by quotation marks would fail to depict the relation to an exemplar the essay aspires to illustrate. The essay ends with a quotation from Emerson only after it has unpacked the central thoughts that figure in the quotation and woven them through the fabric of the essay as a whole. Nietzsche's placement and appropriation of Emerson's sentences could usefully serve as an illus-

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tration of Emerson's point in his essay entitled (and devoted to the topic of) "Quotation and Originality." Emerson writes: "By necessity, by proclivity - and by delight, we all quote."116 The question that Emerson's essay explicitly poses is under what conditions an act of quotation can amount to more than mere quotation. One can see Nietzsche's essay as implicitly posing this same question. The answer that Emerson's essay proposes turns on how far you can measure, and let yourself be measured by, what your quotation says. He writes: "Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it." This is one way of summarizing the ambition of Nietzsche's early essay: to be the first quoter of an Emerson sentence. Being "the first quoter" (in this honorific sense) is a matter of being the second originator of a sentence. It involves more than putting quotation marks around it - it involves making its words your own. You had not yet sought your own voice and you found this one; now you must find your own. This problematic of finding and losing a voice that both is and is not his own is enacted in Nietzsche's essay's appropriation of Emerson's sentences. The structure of Nietzsche's essay also mirrors a feature of the structure of the essay of Emerson's it quotes: Both climax in a quotation. Here is the concluding quotation of Emerson's essay: '"A man,' said Oliver Cromwell, 'never rises so high as when he knows not whither he is going.'" Very early in SE we find the following: "Who was it who said: 'a man never rises so high as when he knows not whither he is going'" (SE p. 129, trans, amended). Emerson's "Circles" is thus quoted both in the opening and in the concluding segment of Nietzsche's essay, thus framing the body of the essay. What are we to make of this transposition of Emerson's closing quotation stripped of its attribution? Once we have decoded its relation to the essay inscribed in the conclusion of Nietzsche's essay, it certainly provokes us to ponder the relation between these two essays. But should we take it for granted that the answer to Nietzsche's question is simply: "Emerson"? Nietzsche asks: "Who was it who said . . . ?" and then presents the quotation. Hollingdale provides a footnote that purports to contain the answer to Nietzsche's question: "Oliver Cromwell, as quoted by Cardinal de Retz in his Memoirs" (SE p. 129n). Is this the answer to his question Nietzsche wishes us to arrive at? Is the task he assigns us here one of tracing a series of nested quotations back to their (hidden) point of origination (so that the bit of additional erudition supplied by the provision of the name of Cardinal de Retz closes the question out)? Does this mean Emerson is not the answer to his question? (Is the author of SE - who presents us with this quotation - thus also not an answer?) What counts as someone's having said something?

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This is the question Nietzsche's gesture of quoting Emerson quoting Cardinal de Retz quoting Cromwell (and asking "Who was it who said" these words?) asks us to ask. Nietzsche has just remarked (in a passage cited earlier) that if you let another bear you across the stream of life to your further self, you "put yourself in pawn and lose your self (SE p. 129). The words of another can disclose the way to your (further) self, but they cannot carry you there. If you seek to adopt another's words as your own, you run the risk of depriving yourself of a self. The words of a Nietzschean/Emersonian essay are misunderstood, turned against their own ambition, the instant they are invoked as authority - the instant they are merely quoted.117 How does one claim the words of another as one's own (as opposed to merely repeating them)? That is what the relation of Nietzsche's essay to Emerson's is meant to exhibit. As we have seen, Nietzsche's essay proposes a series of questions you are to ask yourself. In each case he provides some words and tells you to say these words to your self. But what counts as your having asked (rather than merely repeated) the question? Nietzsche furnishes as an illustrative parable the following quotation from a letter by Heinrich von Kleist:
Not long ago I became acquainted with the Kantian philosophy.... I have no reason to fear it will shatter you so profoundly and painfully as it has m e . . . . If the point of this thought does not penetrate your heart, do not smile at one who feels wounded by it in the deepest and most sacred part of his being (SE pp. 140-1).

Kleist's attempt to ask Kant's question (concerning the nature and limits of human knowledge) leaves him "shattered" and "wounded by it in the deepest and most sacred part of his being"; yet Nietzsche presents Kleist's attempt as exemplary: "When, indeed, will human beings again feel in this natural Kleistian fashion, when will they again learn to assess the meaning of a philosophy in the 'most sacred part' of their being?" (SE p. 141, trans, amended). Nietzsche then goes on to propose another of his questions:
[T]he creative human is now to answer the question: "Do you affirm this existence in the depths of your heart? Is it sufficient for you? Would you be its advocate, its redeemer? For you have only to pronounce a single, heartfelt Yes! - and life, though it faces such heavy accusations, shall go free" (SE p. 146).

This question is evidently the precursor of (what Nietzsche later calls) "the thought of eternal recurrence." The exercise of posing this question is to serve as an antidote to (what the essay identifies as) our most deeply rooted inclination: namely, "to kill time" (SE p. 128). The opening topic of SE is that what each of us most needs to affirm - and most shrinks

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from - is her own uniqueness: "In his heart every human being knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is: he knows it but he hides it like a bad conscience - why?" (SE p. 127, trans, amended). Each of us "cloaks" herself in the "conventionality" of her neighbor, attempting to flee her uniqueness by making herself resemble others (ibid.). Nietzsche's question in SE (which is the precursor of "the thought of eternal recurrence") is designed to obstruct this path of flight. Much of his subsequent authorship is concerned both with how best to frame this question and with what criteria to propose for what counts as one's having genuinely asked it. The paradox underlying Nietzsche's later reformulations of this question is that one is best able to measure the extent of the uniqueness of one's life by imagining its recurrence. The question thus receives its most famous reformulation in The Gay Science:
What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness, and say to you, "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust! Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine." If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, "Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?" would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate and eternal confirmation and seal? (GS 341)

The question is here posed in the form of a thought-experiment. The Kleistian response is again invoked as the criterion of whether one has fully measured the question (and thus whether it is this question one has addressed to one's self): "If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you." The demon whispers the question to you "in your loneliest loneliness" - that is, under the very circumstances that Nietzsche, as we have seen, elsewhere identifies as those under which the whisper of your conscience becomes audible. Attempts to pose versions of this question recur throughout Zarathus-

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tra. Playing on the various senses of the word "abgriindlich," Zarathustra terms it "der abgriindliche Gedanke" - the most difficult, the most repellent, and the most bottomless of thoughts.118 It is literally an abgriindliche (abysmal) question because to pose it requires that you reaffirm your life, as you live it, at every instant. As the demon says, its demand (that you continually renew your previous affirmation) is to lie upon your each and every action "as the greatest weight." The thoughtexperiment is designed to place the fullest possible pressure on the point of the present moment.119 It requires of you that you attend to the endless domestic details of your everyday life:
[O]ne is bound to admit that most people see the closest things of all very badly and very rarely pay heed to them.... [BJeing unknowledgeable in the smallest and most everyday things and failing to keep an eye on them - this it is that transforms the earth for so many into a vale of tears. Let it not be said that, here as everywhere, it is a question of human lack of understanding: on the contrary there exists enough, and more than enough, understanding, only it is employed in the wrong direction and artificially directed away from these smallest and closest things. (HH 11:1:6)

The thought-experiment is designed to enable you to keep an eye on (as the demon puts it) "every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small... in your life." What usually passes for philosophy, according to Nietzsche, tends to diagnose our confusion as due to a lack of understanding, thus "artificially directing" our vigilance away from the smallest and most everyday things - encouraging us to attempt an ever more sophisticated employment of the intellect in the place of the requisite exercise of attention.120 This provides a general specification of what Nietzsche takes the task of philosophy to be: to enable us to see those closest things of all that most of us see very badly and very rarely heed.121 Zarathustra as a whole offers a vivid allegory of the problematic of speaking and quoting adumbrated in SE. The thought of eternal recurrence is first expressed by the figure named "the Dwarf" who enunciates it in the form of a doctrine - a cosmological hypothesis about the structure and nature of time. The Dwarf says: "Time itself is a circle." Zarathustra responds: "Do not make things too easy for yourself" and chastises the Dwarf for not entering the thought through the gateway that has "inscribed above it: 'Moment.'" To say that the Dwarf does not inscribe the thought of eternal recurrence under the aspect of the Moment is to say that his attempt to think it does not transform his relation to each moment of his life - it does not lie upon his actions as "the greatest weight." Later the thought is given expression again by

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Zarathustra's animals: this time, more properly, as an attitude toward life - but as a mere attitude, one of shallow optimism, the attainment of which still requires no fundamental transformation of self. Each of these characters in Zarathustra strives to give voice to a thought that they take to be the equivalent of the one to which Zarathustra aspires. In each case Zarathustra turns on the speaker(s) and rejects the thought in their mouths as a counterfeit version of the "most abysmal thought." In each case the failure to meet the demand posed by the task (of thinking this thought) does not, as Nietzsche says, turn on a lack of understanding: "there exists enough, and more than enough, understanding, only it is employed in the wrong direction."122

Schopenhauer as Educator ends with the following anecdote: "Diogenes said when someone praised a philosopher in his presence: 'How can he be considered great, since he has been a philosopher for so long and has never yet disturbed anybody?'" (SE p. 194).This is thefinalquestion you are to ask yourself, upon completing Nietzsche's essay: Has it disturbed you? If not, it has failed its purpose; and the epithet that Nietzsche says should be applied to academic philosophy should be applied to it as well: "This, indeed, ought to be the epitaph of university philosophy: 'it disturbed nobody'" (ibid.). As our brief peek at Zarathustra indicates, it subsequently becomes Nietzsche's central ambition to find a way of writing philosophy that defies the conferral of that epithet. The elaborations on the theme of quoting and saying in SE represent the first, comparatively timid steps in the development of that project. The search for a form of authorship that successfully undercuts the reader's temptation to merely quote the text - to confer a false authority on his words - spurs Nietzsche's composition of texts that increasingly resist mere quotation. This leads not only to the abandonment of the essay form in his work, but also to the gradual disappearance of an authorial voice to whom "views" can straightforwardly be ascribed. Hiding behind what he later calls his "masks," he offers genealogies and polemics designed to serve as antidotes and correctives to our natural intellectual inclinations, repudiating in advance the reader who wishes simply to subscribe to some piece of doctrine he finds in Nietzsche's prose. One is thus led to wonder: Would Nietzsche deem the contemporary reception of his (evidently quotable) work a measure of its success or its failure?123 NOTES 1. Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

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2. On the Genealogy of Morals, trans, with Ecce Homo by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967). 3. Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), p. 19. 4. It matters: (1) in what order Nietzsche's works were written; (2) out of what sort of literary components an individual work is composed (for example, essays vs. aphorisms); (3) how a remark is positioned within a work; (4) what relation a remark bears to the aim of the work as a whole; (5) how a remark is to be taken (for example, whether it is put forward in the voice of "the author"); and (6) what one needs to do with a remark before one can claim to have unpacked it (for example, whether what it asserts is to be taken at face value, or is only grasped once it is "deciphered," as Nietzsche puts it in GM P:8). 5. GM - to take the most famous case - bears the subtitle "A Polemic," immediately raising the question where, in its dialectical progression, one is to locate the moment(s) in which Nietzsche speaks in his own voice. It divides into three "essays," each of which subdivides into "sections," each of which consists of aphorisms. The work begins with a set of instructions concerning what we are to do with each of its aphorisms - for an aphorism "has not been 'deciphered' when it has simply been read" (GM P:8). Understanding the work thus requires grasping (1) the point of each aphorism and its position within the overall dialectical progression; (2) the degree of embeddedness of each remark in its dialectical context - and hence which remarks can or cannot be taken from context (for example, "the blond Aryan beast") or attributed to "Nietzsche" without serious misunderstanding; (3) the sense in which the work as a whole is intended as "a polemic" (as opposed to a straightforward enunciation of doctrine); (4) the relation between the claims put forward in the three distinct essays (which, as is commonly observed, appear to contradict one another); and (5) the overarching philosophical purpose(s) this elaborate arrangement of parts is meant to serve. Nietzsche begins the work by insisting that the work is likely to be incomprehensible to anyone who fails to read his work in the proper sequence: "If this book is incomprehensible to anyone and jars on his ears, the fault, it seems to me, is not necessarily mine. It is clear enough, assuming, as I do assume, that one has first read my earlier writings and has not spared some trouble in doing so: for they are, indeed, not easy to penetrate" (GM P:8). 6. In calling Nietzsche a perfectionist, I am relying on the characterization of perfectionism set forth by Stanley Cavell in his book Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). All references to Cavell, unless otherwise indicated, are to this book. 7. In Schopenhauer as Educator, as we shall see, this results in an (only partially successful) attempt on Nietzsche's part to negotiate a tension between the (essay) form and the (perfectionist) aspiration of the work. My aim in the latter part of this essay is to prepare the way for a claim concerning the Entstehungsgeschichte of Nietzsche's work: namely, that reflection on this tension (between the form and the content of the Untimely Meditations) leads to the demise of the essay form in Nietzsche's work and to his subsequent incessant preoccupation with the form of his work - with the question, that is, of how philosophy should be written. 8. Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments, 275, trans. Peter Firchow, in Philosophical Fragments (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 56.

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9. Attorney for the Damned: Clarence Darrow in the Courtroom, ed. Arthur Weinberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 70-2,76. According to Darrow's defence, Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb, acting under the influence of Nietzsche's philosophy, planned and executed "the coldblooded and otherwise motiveless murder" of an adolescent acquaintance in order to prove themselves "beyond good and evil." 10. Vinit Haksar, Equality, Liberty, and Perfectionism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 2. 11. A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), p. 762. 12. G. B. Shaw, "Nietzsche in English" (in Nietzsche: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert C. Solomon [New York: Anchor, 1973], p. 373). I do not mean to suggest that Shaw himself is to be read as a crass elitist. What Shaw applauds in Nietzsche is (what he calls) his "naughtiness," his ability to provoke the complacent reader. When Shaw gives voice to explicitly elitist views (ones that he imagines to be deliciously "Nietzschean") it is generally through the mouthpiece of a character in one of his plays - such as Henry Higgins - a character who eventually receives afittingif gentle come-uppance. 13. Russell admits that it remains unclear, if one just looks at Nietzsche's writings, whether Nietzsche regards "the superiority of the aristocrat as congenital," but Russell then goes on to "assume" that Nietzsche's argument must presuppose the claim that the aristocrat is in some way "biologically superior" (p. 736). 14. Hence Russell concludes that Nietzsche "holds that the happiness of common people is no part of the good per se"; that he "regards compassion as a weakness to be combatted"; and that his theory rests on "a complete lack of sympathy" with anyone other than the extraordinary individual (pp. 731,735,738). 15. Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments, 214, p. 46, trans, amended. 16. A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 25. 17. Henry Higgins in George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion says to Eliza:
If you can't stand the coldness of my sort of life, and the strain of it, go back to the gutter. Work 'til you're more a brute than a human being; and then cuddle and squabble and drink 'til you fall asleep. Oh, it's a fine life, the life of the gutter. It's real: it's warm: it's violent: you can feel it through the thickest skin: you can taste it and smell it without any training or any work. Not like science and literature and classical music and philosophy and art. You find me cold, unfeeling, selfish, don't you? Very well: be off with you to the sort of people you like. (Pygmalion [London: Penguin, 1941], p. 130)

This passage could serve as a crude summary of what many readers, including Shaw himself, seem to imagine the upshot of Nietzsche's message to be. Shaw's Higgins and Rawls's Nietzsche agree: Art, science, and culture is where "excellence" is to be found and pursued. The pursuit of it is the business of an aristocratic elite. Those of us who do not belong to that elite will be unable to stand the "coldness" of that sort of life. The members of such an elite, in their indifference to ordinary human priorities, will strike us (as Higgins strikes Eliza) as unfeeling and selfish. 18. The Theory of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), pp. 26-7. Donagan explains in the endnote appended to the quotation that he "owes the reference to Rawls" (p. 247).

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19. Thomas Hurka, Perfectionism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 75-6. 20. Thomas Hurka, "Perfectionism," in The Encyclopedia of Ethics, ed. Lawrence C. Becker and Charlotte B. Becker (New York: Garland, 1992), p. 948. 21. This also fits with another detail offered by Rawls concerning what he takes the perfectionist's emphasis on matters of culture to amount to: The perfectionist will be concerned to advocate that a very strong priority be placed on public support and funding for the arts and sciences and will oppose competing proposals concerning how one might distribute communal goods. 22. Vladimir Jankelevitch, L'Austerite et la Vie Morale (Paris: Flammarion, 1956), pp. 189-90.1 owe the passage and the translation to Arnold Davidson. 23. Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965. The translation of Exemplare as "specimens" can be found on p. 127 of that book and is invoked on p. 325 of A Theory of Justice. (The fact that the same translator is involved is obscured by the fact that Rawls cites "J. R. Hollingsdale"!) The revised version of the Hollingdale book that is currently available, under the title Nietzsche (Boston: ARK Paperbacks, 1985), now omits this passage. (Further confusion is introduced by the fact that Hollingdale has a second, completely different book available with the same title: Nietzsche [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973].) 24. The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 168-9,181. 25. Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Mary Gregor (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), p. 93. I have simply reproduced Gregor's translation. The English word "exemplary" here is used to translate the German musterhaft, example (Beispiel), and Exemplar. 26. Commentators, guided partly by Nietzsche's nasty cracks at the Schlegel brothers (and, especially, at their writings on Greek tragic drama), tend to minimize Nietzsche's indebtedness to German Romanticism. As a corrective to this tendency, the epigraphs that preface each section of this paper document some of the affinities between Nietzsche's and Friedrich Schlegel's versions of moral perfectionism. 27. The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1974. 28. The following remark (from a recent essay of Hollingdale's entitled "The Hero as Outsider") furnishes a bit of circumstantial evidence for the claim that, in retranslating the essay, Hollingdale came to appreciate the centrality of the term Exemplar in Nietzsche's essay: "Nietzsche's early essay Schopenhauer as Educator... contains next to nothing about Schopenhauer's philosophy. It is almost wholly concerned with Schopenhauer as an exemplary type of man" (The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Bernd Magnus and Kathleen Higgins [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], pp. 77-8). 29. In the reprint of the book (Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy) from which Rawls quotes the focal passage, Hollingdale completely omits not only the focal passage and his discussion of it, but also the whole section of the book that contained it (and that presumably influenced Rawls's reading of Nietzsche). It appears that once Hollingdale turned to the task of carefully working through and translating the whole of SE his understanding of the

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30.

31. 32.

33.

34. 35.

36.

essay underwent a significant evolution. Also available to Rawls was the first influential English translation of SE by James Hillesheim and Malcolm Simpson, which also rendered Exemplare as "specimens" (Schopenhauer as Educator [South Bend, Indi.: Regnery/Gateway, 1965]). Hollingdale's excellent (1983) translation mercifully replaced that very inadequate translation of the essay. But Hollingdale's translation has now allegedly been superseded by two (considerably inferior) translations - by William Arrowsmith (Unmodern Observations [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990]) and Richard Gray (Unfashionable Observations [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995]) - both of which render Exemplare once again as "specimens." So much for progress. Schopenhauer as Educator, in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). All references to SE and to any of the other three Meditations (David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, and Richard Wagner in Bayreuth), unless otherwise indicated, are to this edition. My answer to this question is indebted to chapter 1 of Cavell's Conditions. It would be an overstatement to say that nothing in the passage Rawls seizes upon encourages such a reading. Nietzsche sometimes attempts to forestall a predictable reaction on our part; but he also prefers at other times to encourage such a reaction precisely in order to be able to round on it and bring to our attention just how reactive we are. In SE he is concerned to expose our tendency to imagine that there is only one way to promote an aristocratic ideal, and our consequent hastiness to conclude that we already know that we are against such an ideal. Nietzsche believes he spies a bad conscience napping beneath our eagerness to rush so vociferously to the defense of our democratic ideals. That Nietzsche thinks that we should derive our duties from the consideration of concrete exemplars of the moral life (rather than from, say, the application of a moral theory) touches on an important topic: Why Nietzsche's repudiation of a certain conception of morality - in which "morality" is articulated in terms of explicit principles or obligations - is not a repudiation of the moral life as such. To get clear on this topic would require exploring a claim common to Nietzsche, Kant's Critique ofJudgement, and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations: Namely, that there is a way of following a rule that is not a matter of adhering to an explicitly formulated prescription for action; and that there is thus a way of being genuinely beholden to a norm that is not a matter of acting on an articulate conception (let alone in accordance with a "theory") of what one "ought" to do. Schlegel, Critical Fragments, 16, p. 2. To say this is not yet to dissipate the (appearance of) paradox. Alexander Nehamas puts it nicely: "We are . . . faced with the problem of explaining how a self that truly must be created and that does not in any way appear to exist can be considered that which an individual is" (Nietzsche: Life as Literature [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985], p. 175). Zarathustra, we are told, "once counseled himself: "Become who you are!" (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Viking, 1954], IV: 1, p. 351). Nietzsche says he takes these "solemn words" from Pindar's Second Pythian Ode (see his letter to Erwin Rhode, 3 November 1867). Cavell points out that a variant occurs in

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the concluding paragraph of Emerson's essay "Considerations by the Way" (Essays and Lectures, ed. Richard Poirier [New York: Library of America, 1983], p. 1096). 37. See also GS 270: "What does your conscience say? - You must become who you are." 38. Nietzsche says of this essay: "My little essay Schopenhauer as Educator serves me as a touchstone: he to whom it does not speak personally will probably not be able to make anything of me in any other regard either" (letter to Georg Brandes, 10 April 1988, my translation). 39. The claim folded into the beginning of this remark (that "every youthful soul" hears this call - a call that Nietzsche identifies in this essay, as well as in GS 270 as the voice of our conscience) might appear to offer an alternative substantive criterion for delimiting Nietzsche's audience. It might lead one to believe that, if it is the case that only "youthful souls" hear this call, then perhaps Nietzsche is only addressing himself to certain readers: those readers who are sufficiently young. But then we have to ask: Who, for these purposes, counts as young! Nietzsche here echoes a mode of address that recurs throughout Emerson's essays. The references to youth recur throughout SE. In the sentence directly after the focal passage, for example, Nietzsche says that "the young human being" should be taught to regard his (present) self as a failed work of nature - as an unnatural outcome of the process that is his life. How are we to interpret this incessant emphasis on "youth"? Are we to understand Nietzsche and Emerson as only addressing themselves to people under thirty? Cavell is helpful here:
Emerson and Nietzsche notably and recurrently direct their words to "youth," as a word against despair, showing that they themselves have survived the incessant calls to give over their youthful aspirations.... The promise of Emerson and Nietzsche is that youth is not alone a phase of individual development but - like childhood for the early Romantics - a dimension of human existence as such. (Conditions, pp. 51-2)

40. 41.

42. 43. 44.

This is not to deny that these two kinds of youth - biological youth (measurable in terms of the quantity of time one has been on the planet) and Nietzschean youthfulness (measurable in terms of one's capacity for productive self-dissatisfaction and self-transformation) - often tend to be closely correlated. It is only to deny that they are necessarily correlated in the customary manner. (Nietzsche's remarks in BGE 31 on "youth" and on the transition to what we take to be "adulthood" are also pertinent in this connection.) Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 35. The sense in which Nietzsche's philosophical ideal is an esoteric one is nicely captured by a formulation of Stanley Cavell's: "If philosophy is esoteric, that is not because a few men guard its knowledge, but because most men guard themselves against it" (Must We Mean What We Say? [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976], p. xxvii). Schlegel: "Every honest author writes for nobody or everybody" (Critical Fragments, 85, p. 10). Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), P:5. I argue that the writings of both Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein have such a

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45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50.

51.

52. 53.

structure in "Must We Show What We Cannot Say?" (in The Senses of Stanley Cavell, ed. R. Fleming and M. Payne [Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1989]), and in "On Putting Two and Two Together: Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and the Point of View for Their Work as Authors" (in The Grammar of Religious Belief, ed. Timothy Tessin and Mario von der Ruhr [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995]). The "book" in question is Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The "book" in question here is Human, All Too Human. A central concern of the essay is to trace the sources of attraction that a Schopenhauerian doctrine of pessimism exerts on so many of Nietzsche's contemporaries (including his own former self): "It is true that, as we usually are, we can contribute nothing to the production of the redemptive human being. That is why we hate ourselves as we usually are; and it is this hatred which is the root of that pessimism which Schopenhauer had again to teach our age, though it has existed for as long as the longing for culture has existed" (SE p. 161, trans, amended). The essay goes on to suggest that a Schopenhauerian feeling of pessimism is not the end of the philosophical line, but only a necessary way-station en route to a more productive feeling: "the truthful person feels that the meaning of his activity i s . . . explicable through the laws of another and higher life which is in the profoundest sense affirmative" (SE p. 153, trans, amended). Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments, 54, p. 24. The position of the concept of love here contrasts strikingly with Shaw's and Russell's picture of how contempt, pictured as a posture of cold indifference, figures in Nietzsche's thought. I find myself here in agreement with something Nehamas emphasizes: "Nietzsche's positive thinking consists not so much in . . . specific ideas . . . as . . . in the presentation, or exemplification, of a specific character, recognizably literary, who makes of these philosophical ideas a way of life that is uniquely his" (Nietzsche, p. 4). Hollingdale throughout translates grosse Mensch as "great man" (instead of "great human being"). This has two drawbacks: (1) it obscures the pervasive thematic contrast in the essay between humanity and animality, and (2) it obscures the way in which the essay is "for everyone" (including women!). This second point touches on a controversy I cannot enter into now, other than to remark that it suffices for my present purpose that one can find remarks such as the following in Nietzsche: "The perfect woman is a higher type of human being [Mensch] than the perfect man: though also something much rarer" (HH 1:377). Henceforth I will so indicate that I have amended the translation, for purposes of brevity. This sets up an interesting topic: the question of the relation between the positive notion of the "bad conscience" that figures prominently in Nietzsche's early thought and the stigmatized notion of the "bad conscience" (that is the legacy of slave morality) that figures prominently in his later thought. Not only does one miss an important continuity in his thought, but one also drastically mistakes the import of his later "immoralism," if one thinks (a la Leopold and Loeb) that Nietzsche's critique of the latter notion turns on a claim to the effect that responsiveness to a bad conscience is itself a bad thing - that is, that in his view all forms of responsiveness to a con-

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54. 55.

56.

57. 58.

59.

science are to be utterly unlearned. What needs to be arduously unlearned in Nietzsche's view is something far more particular: the specific species of bad conscience that slave morality sought to instill (so successfully that we late moderns are no longer able to distinguish the species from the genus). The (generic) notion of "conscience" in Nietzsche is coeval with that of "selfovercoming" (or becoming who you are). Nietzsche's quarrel with slave morality derives from its Platonic/Christian conception of "higher" things, not from its insistence on an obedience to a demand to realize one's "higher self." "When your higher self... speaks it speaks imperiously" (HH 1:624). This is a neighborhood of Nietzsche's thought that has been taken to anticipate the existentialist concept of authenticity. This has led to misunderstandings of Nietzsche's thought. But what is right in that idea is that it is a mistake to look in passages such as the above (having to do with the moral significance of exemplars) for the outlines of a substantive normative theory. To say this is not to claim that Nietzsche does not elsewhere have a great deal to say of a substantive nature concerning what one should - and especially what one should not - value. Nietzsche writes: "I have myself lived in just the manner which I prescribed to myself (namely in Schopenhauer as Educator)" (letter to Franz Overbeck, beginning of August 1884). Even near the end of his (productive) life, Nietzsche is still willing to say of his early essay: "Schopenhauer as Educator basically contains the plan according to which I have hitherto lived: it is a strict promise [to myself]" (letter to Georg Brandes, 10 April 1888, my translation; see also letter to Brandes, 19 February 1888). In Ecce Homo he says, "[I]n Schopenhauer as Educator my innermost history, my becoming, is inscribed" (p. 281); and he tells Lou Salome he gave her a copy of the essay because it sets forth "my most fundamental convictions" (letter to Lou von Salome, December 1882). In his correspondence Nietzsche recurs to the description of SE as "containing promises to myself a number of times. At one point he even says, "Believe me, I would have ceased living a long time ago if I had turned aside even a single step from these promises! Perhaps someone will yet discover that from Human, All Too Human on I have done nothing but fulfill my promises" (draft of a letter to an unidentified correspondent, August 1885). In "Circles" (from which Nietzsche quotes at the end of SE) Emerson writes: "People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them" (Essays and Lectures, p. 413). I am in agreement here with Nehamas's remark that the character Nietzsche presents us with "is produced in a way that prevents it from ever being a model for direct imitation" (Nietzsche, p. 4). However, I take the literary production of such a character not to represent for Nietzsche an end in itself (which is how I understand what Nehamas calls "Nietzsche's aestheticism") but rather a means to a further end (which I have been calling "Nietzsche's perfectionism"). Hence in Ecce Homo he says of SE: "[A]t bottom it is admittedly not 'Schopenhauer as Educator' that speaks here, but his opposite: 'Nietzsche as Educator'" (EH III:UM:3, p. 281). And: "Schopenhauer as Educator is not really about Schopenhauer, but solely about me" (letter to Franz Overbeck, August 1884).

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60. Nietzsche says in Ecce Homo of his third Meditation (SE) that in it he employs Schopenhauer "in the fashion that Plato employed Socrates" (EH 61. The rigor that informs such writing may remain invisible to philosophers raised on certain canons of rigor. The conviction such writing seeks to elicit does not turn, for example, exclusively on the quality of its arguments. It is a tempting misdescription of the sort of power that such writing (at its best) possesses to say that it must therefore turn on some nonrational means of persuasion (on, say, the style of the writing, as opposed to its content). The conception of rigor that informs an enterprise such as Nietzsche's is by no means as foreign to traditional canons of rigor as such a description is determined to make it appear. (Schlegel: "What is commonly called reason is only a subspecies of it: namely, the thin and watery sort" [Ideas, pp. 12-13]). Central to perfectionist authorship are numerous strategies undertaken in many a classical philosophical work - such as the accurate wording of a reader's intuitions, the proper identification and diagnosis of his philosophical fixations and resistances, the shifting of his sense of significance - but in a perfectionist work these strategies come to assume a central, rather than a peripheral, role. The primary virtue to which such writing aspires is a kind of responsiveness - a sensitivity to what a reader will and will not want to hear, and a knack for finding the words that will free her to hear what she otherwise could not hear. Such aspirations to responsiveness (as embodied in perfectionist writing) in no way compete with traditional canons of rigor; but authors who excel in one respect will often fall short in the other. Each of these sorts of author exemplifies a dimension of the aspiration to philosophy. The claim each makes on the other is as deep as their mutual implication in a tradition that traces back to Plato's dialogues. 62. Schlegel, Ideas, 36, p. 97. 63. Nietzsche, as we shall see, speaks of "the unborn genius" within us (SE p. 142), and of someone having "evaded his genius" (SE p. 128). He here adopts Emerson's grammar for the term "genius." Genius, according to Emerson, appears to you to be the name of some rare commodity only because you shrink from an encounter with "your genius." Thus, he repeatedly enjoins his reader: "follow your genius." 64. Does Nietzsche mean here to be endorsing Schopenhauer's remark that "a happy life is impossible: the highest that the human being can attain to is a heroic one"? Nietzsche, at various junctures, associates an emphasis on the concept of happiness with all that is most shallow in "English moral philosophy" and often seems inclined to dismiss happiness as "an illusory end." As Zarathustra says, those who come closest to attaining it are those who cease to pursue it. In some passages, however, Nietzsche appears to look favorably on the pursuit of (a certain kind of) happiness. It would serve as a crude first approximation to say that the concept of happiness he scorns is a hedonistic (or utilitarian) one, whereas the one upon which he looks favorably is closer to one found in various strands of Hellenistic philosophy. While a life of suffering is inconsistent with a life that is happy in the former sense, it cannot simply be opposed to one that is happy in the latter sense. Indeed, a life of suffering is a prerequisite of attaining the condition in which Nietzsche says one will know "only the sadness of the most profound happiness, and no other sadness at all" (GS 183). To avoid terminological confusion,

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Nietzsche tends to prefer to speak of the life to which one should aspire as one of "cheerfulness." 65. Note: Schopenhauer, too, insists here on "the benefit of all." Indeed, he singles out disinterestedness as a denning characteristic of greatness:
What makes him [that is, the great human being] great in all circumstances is the fact that he does not seek himself and his own interest.... [H]e who is great recognizes himself in all and thus in the whole.... [O]n account of this extension of his sphere, he is called great. Accordingly, that sublime predicate belongs by right only to the true hero in any sense and to the genius; it signifies that, contrary to human nature, they have not sought their own interest, and have lived not for themselves, but for all. (The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2, trans. E. F. J. Payne [New York: Dover, 1969], p. 385)

66. The promotion of this perversion of the heroic life constitutes the business of (what Nietzsche calls) "the hero-cult" (see, for example, D 298). Nietzsche identifies "the formula for this kind of prostration" above all with the work of Carlyle - the author of On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History - and seeks to distinguish his own views sharply from those of Carlyle (ibid.). Late in his life Nietzsche takes various "scholarly oxen" to task for continuing to "read into" his work "the hero-worship of Carlyle" a reading that Nietzsche says he already "repudiated so maliciously" in his earlier writings (EH III:UM:3). 67. "Everyone has his good days when he discovers his higher self.... Many live in awe and abasement before their ideal and would like to deny it: they are afraid of their higher self because when it speaks it speaks imperiously" (HH 1:624). 68. This bears on whether - as a number of commentators have supposed - Nietzsche is concerned to substitute aesthetic for moral values. 69. That the sort of capacities Nietzsche calls upon his reader to exercise are not ones that require extraordinary intellectual powers - and that a failure to exercise them is not in general indicative of a deficiency in understanding is the theme of 6 of The Wanderer (HH 11:11:6). 70. Kierkegaard is perhaps the most vehement among such authors in his insistence that "there is nothing everyone is so afraid of as being told how vastly much he is capable o f (The Diary ofSoren Kierkegaard [New York: Citadel, 1960], p. 110). His diagnosis of our tendency to resort to eulogy parallels the one Nietzsche offers:
[I]f an ethical man finds that people want to admire him . . . he must himself see that this holds a deception, an untruth. An ethical man must not let people admire him, but - through him - they must be urged toward the Ethical. As soon as people are permitted to admire an ethical man they elevate him into a genius, i.e. put him on a different plane, and, ethically, that very thing constitutes the most horrible fallacy, for the ethical shall and must be universally human. An ethical man must constantly maintain, and inculcate in others, that every human being is as capable as he.... They wanted to admire him in order to be rid of him (i.e., the gadfly-sting of his existence) but the human feeling in him that makes him say: "anybody can do it as well as I" calls forth hatred and makes people wish to have him at a distance. And another result of this is that after he is dead they will honor him, as by then the sting inherent in his being their contemporary will have gone. The very objection to such an ethical man during his lifetime becomes a eulogy of him after his death, (ibid., pp. 113-14)

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71. For the very reasons that Kierkegaard (in the passage quoted in the previous endnote) adduces. 72. Nietzsche in this passage argues not only that we should not conceive of the great human being as a "superman" (in the Webster's sense), but that it is equally important that the great human being not conceive of himself in this manner:
The belief in great, superior, fruitful spirits is not necessarily, yet nonetheless is very frequently associated with that religious or semi-religious superstition that these spirits are of supra-human origin and possess certain miraculous abilities by virtue of which they acquire their knowledge by quite other means than the rest of mankind.... It is at any rate certainly questionable whether this superstitious belief in genius, in the privileges and special abilities of genius, is of any benefit to the genius himself if it takes root in him. It is in any event a dangerous sign when a man is assailed by awe of himself..., when the sacrificial incense which is properly rendered only to a god penetrates the brain of the genius, so that his head begins to swim and he comes to regard himself as something supra-human. The consequences that slowly result are: the feeling of irresponsibility, of exceptional rights, the belief that he confers a favor by his mere presence, insane rage when anyone attempts even to compare him with others, let alone to rate him beneath them, or to draw attention to lapses in his work. Because he ceases to practice criticism of himself, at last one pinion after the other falls out of his plumage: that superstitious belief eats at the roots of his powers For the great spirits themselves it is therefore probably more beneficial if they acquire an insight into the nature and origin of their powers, if they grasp, that is to say, what purely human qualities have come together in them and what fortunate circumstances attended them. (HH 1:164, trans, amended)

73.

74.

75. 76.

77.

Notice that Nietzsche lists, among the unfortunate consequences of a superstitious belief in one's own genius, the feeling that one possesses "exceptional rights" - in effect, identifying the Leopold and Loeb syndrome as one of the possible consequences of such a misunderstanding of genius. In SE Nietzsche again explicitly takes a moment to deny the suggestion that what is at issue for him is whether a historical process will eventually climax in some great man (or anything else): "He who regards his life as no more than a point in the evolution of a race or of a state or of a science, and thus regards himself as belonging only to the history of becoming, has not understood the lesson set him by existence, and will have to learn it over again" (SE p. 155). This is a reference to chapter XXXI of WWR - which is entitled "On Genius." Warning the reader not to construe the subsequent discussion of genius in elitist terms, Schopenhauer begins the chapter by distinguishing between "the concept of genius," which is his concern, and the (ethically irrelevant) concept of "the person endowed with talent" (vol. 2, p. 376). Schlegel, Ideas, 20, p. 96, trans, amended. Nehamas, Nietzsche, pp. 165-77. J. P. Stern also raises a version of this worry. After quoting the line from SE that "Your true self... lies immeasurably above that which you usually take to be yourself," Stern asks; "But is it not possible that 'your true self may lie immeasurably below 'your usual self?" (A Study of Nietzsche [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979], p. 116). Emerson: "Whoso would be a man . . . must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness" (Essays and Lectures, p. 261).

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78. Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966). Later on in the same work, Nietzsche asks: "Isn't a moral philosopher the opposite of a Puritan? . . . Should moralizing not be - immoral?" (BGE 228). The remark is typical of Nietzsche in the complexity of its structure, inviting two distinct, mutually consistent interpretations: (1) the true moral thinker is the one whose moral thought is bound to strike us as immoral, (2) it is the Puritan in us who moralizes morality, who represents the greatest threat to the moral life. On the first way of taking the remark, it is the (in Nietzsche's eyes) genuine moral thinker who is charged (by us) with immorality; on the second, it is the moralism chararacteristic of the typical moral philosopher that is to be recognized as a debasement of morality. On both readings the remark turns on the thought that, as things stand, our access to a "higher" conception of the moral remains obstructed. 79. I take up this topic in more detail in my "Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Anscombe on Moral Unintelligibility," in Morality and Religion, ed. D. Z. Phillips (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996). 80. An author such as Kant is careful to head off such a charge. Kant does recognize duties that a person bears to himself, emphasizing in this regard both a person's duty to increase his "natural perfection" (his intellectual, imaginative, and physical abilities), and his duty to increase his "moral perfection" (to cultivate purity in his attitude to duty - his capacity to act not merely in conformity with, but from the motive of, duty). Kant will insist, however, that all such duties to oneself are only imperfect duties - duties that are subordinate to one's fundamental duties to humanity as a whole. A person's duty to perfect himself is a duty "regarding the end of humanity in one's own person" (The Doctrine of Virtue, part 1, book 2). One's duty to increase one's own natural and moral perfection, for Kant, is thus a function of one's duties to oneself as a representative of humanity. There is therefore a contrast to be drawn between the perfectionism of a thinker such as Kant and that of Nietzsche. For the latter, the pursuit of one's own perfection is prerequisite for - rather than derivative from - the recognition of one's (true) obligations to others. 81. What Nietzsche's "immoralism" would then combat is what the word says it negates: moralism. Moralism and (its aesthetic counterpart) philistinism figure in the Meditations as the two telltale symptoms of (what Nietzsche calls) "a lack of culture." They result, on his analysis, whenever one's attained self seeks to eclipse (rather than relate itself to) one's unattained but attainable self. 82. This, too, is an Emersonian thought: "Great men are a collyrium to clear our eyes from egotism, and enable us to see other people and their works" (Essays and Lectures, p. 626). 83. Wieland, for example, writes of Greek education:
The goal... was to form or cultivate their young citizens into that which they termed kalokagathia. By this term they understood all of the excellences and perfections that distinguish a free and noble human being from a slave and from a human-like animal; it encompassed all of the qualities and talents that elevate and beautify a person and make one fit to fulfill a noble role in life. To this end, which alone is worthy of human nature, they inculcated in their youth as early as possible a taste for the beautiful and the good. (Christoph Martin Wieland, Gesammelte Schriften [Berlin: Weidemann, 1909], vol. 4, p. 183)

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According to Wieland, the topic of finding worthy role models derives its importance in classical ethics from the fact that such role models are deemed to be essential in enabling one to discover and realize one's own "inner beauty." (In his Discourses, Epictetus says: "We all carry the seeds of greatness within us, but we need an image as a point of focus in order that they may sprout.") The German neoclassical project of rehabilitating the notion of kalokagathia takes on a different (militantly anti-Christian) emphasis in Nietzsche's thought, however. Perhaps the most general way of characterizing the sense in which Nietzsche takes his project to involve a return to a Hellenistic and Roman ethic would be to say that he seeks to shift the focus of ethical assessment from the exercise of the free will to the formation of the noble character - that is, away from a characteristically Christian focus on moral deliberation (and on the intentions with which actions are performed, and hence only on those actions that can be taken as realizations of intentions) and toward a characteristically Greco-Roman focus on being a certain kind of person (and what naturally flows from the character of such a person). This shifts the focus of moral reflection away from a concern with those sorts of actions anyone is in principle able to perform insofar as their will is free (and away from a concern with how to formulate the unconditionally binding obligations that prescribe and prohibit such actions) and toward a concern with which sorts of actions one finds it natural to perform (and a concern with how one goes about shaping one's nature so that such actions become second nature and thusflowfrom one's character as a matter of course). 84. In puzzling over the sense, if any, in which Nietzsche could be said to be a moralist, Foot notes that he constantly asks us to attend to what it is that elicits our admiration when confronted with great individuals: We dofindpatterns of reaction to exceptional men that would allow us to see here a valuing on aesthetic grounds, even if it is one for which we have no special name. I am thinking of the interest and admiration which is the common attitude to remarkable men of exceptional independence of mind and strength of will. Such men hold our attention.... [Nietzsche] is appealing to our tendency to admire certain individuals. Foot concludes that Nietzsche's aim here is to draw our attention to what we value. Like Nehamas, she is inclined to see this sort of admiration as a product of something more akin to aesthetic than moral valuation. She herself, however, is not quite comfortable suggesting that the sort of valuation in question here is merely aesthetic (and thus prefers to employ the term "quasi-aesthetic"): "[T]he analogy with an aesthetic valuation should not be pressed too far. Perhaps what we should do is simply suggest a similarity between the way we attribute value (aesthetic value) to art objects and the value that Nietzsche attributes to a certain kind of man" ("Nietzsche: The Revaluation of Values," in Virtues and Vices [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978], p. 89). 85. Foot goes on (in the essay quoted in the previous note) to observe that "Morality is necessarily connected with such things as justice and the common good, and it is a conceptual matter that this is so" (p. 92). Foot is able swiftly to conclude that the "criteria" elicited through our admiration of exemplary individuals must be for Nietzsche of a quasi-aesthetic (rather than of a moral) character because she takes it as evident that Nietzsche is

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not much concerned with "justice and the common good." (Nietzsche himself, on the other hand, claims in SE that genuine culture - as opposed to that "misemployed and misappropriated species of culture" which is a purely aesthetic affair - can only be promoted out of "pure disinterestedness" (SE p. 164). 86. In particular, Nietzsche, again under the influence of German neoclassicism, claims that such considerations would not have struck the ancient Greeks as "merely aesthetic." Wieland, in the midst of one his eulogies to the Greek concept of kalokagathia, asks, "What is more beautiful than a virtuous human being?" (Gesammelte Schriften, pp. 71-2). Drawing on the language of Plato, we might say that the sort of beauty with which Nietzsche is concerned is the beauty of a good soul. Consider this excerpt from Plotinus's "On the Beautiful":
Shut your eyes, and change to and wake another way of seeing, which everyone has but few use. And what does this inner sight see? When it is just awakened it is not at all able to look at the brilliance before it. So the soul must be trained, first of all to look at beautiful ways of life: then at beautiful works, not those which the arts produce, but the works of men who have a name for goodness: then look at the souls of the people who produce the beautiful works. How then can you see the sort of beauty a good soul has? Go back into yourself and look; and if you do not yet see yourself beautiful, then, just as someone making a statue which has to be beautiful cuts away here and polishes there and makes one part smooth and clears another till he has given his statue a beautiful face, so you too must cut away excess and straighten the crooked and clear the dark and make it bright and never stop "working on your statue" [ref. to Phaedrus 252D7] till the divine glory of virtue shines out on you, till you see "selfmastery enthroned upon its holy seat" [ref. to Phaedrus 254B7] [W]hen you see that you have become this, then you have become sight; you can trust yourself then; you have already ascended and need no one to show you; concentrate your gaze and see. This alone is the eye that sees great beauty. (Enneads, 1.6.9; trans. A. H. Armstrong, in Loeb Classical Library: Plotinus [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966], vol. 1, pp. 259-61)

This passage is strikingly reminiscent of passages in SE. The aesthetic and the moral do not neatly divide into separate categories of valuation on such a conception of the (morally) beautiful soul. Plotinus's discussion is in this regard representative of a long-standing tradition of ethical thought (which, in recent centuries, includes, among others, Wieland and Goethe, Schiller and Schlegel, Emerson and Whitman, Arnold and Ruskin, and Santayana and Dewey). Although Romanticism is the most characteristic form such a conviction in the interdependence of aesthetic and moral value takes in the nineteenth century, it is only the most strident species of a pervasive genus of ethical thought. As sober an author as Jane Austen experiences no awkwardness in lacing her ethical vocabulary with aesthetic terms. Not only do we often hear, in her novels, of "moral taste," "beauty of mind," "elegance of sensibility," moral and literary "refinement," "the beauty of truth and sincerity," "a delicacy of principle," and so on, but the progress of the narratives themselves testify to the indissoluble character of (genuine) moral and (genuine) aesthetic refinement. As Gilbert Ryle notes concerning her novels, "there is a prevailing correlation between sense of duty, sense of propriety, and aesthetic taste. Most of her people who lack any one of these three, lack

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87. 88. 89.

90.

the other two as well." Ryle conjectures that "Jane Austen's specific moral ideas derived directly or indirectly . . . from Shaftesbury," who also "assimilated moral sense to artistic sense, aesthetic taste to moral taste" ("Jane Austen and the Moralists," in Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 [London: Hutchinson, 1971], p. 287). Thus, before we censure Nietzsche's discussions of the morally admirable individual on the grounds that they appeal to "morally irrelevant quasi-aesthetic criteria" (Foot, p. 92), we do well to notice that we are employing a very particular and parochial concept of the moral. This represents a repudiation of the position taken in The Birth of Tragedy. Despite the remarkable divergence in their first-order aesthetic judgments, in this respect Nietzsche's aesthetic theory is very close to that of Tolstoy. The Meditations probably comes as close as any philosophical work ever has to defending the straight antithesis of an institutional theory of art. For what we today by and large call "culture" is for Nietzsche the celebration of the antithesis of culture: "The 'cultured' person has degenerated into the greatest enemy of culture, for he wants lyingly to deny the existence of the universal sickness and thus obstructs the physicians" (SE pp. 148-9, trans, amended). The negative half of this task (the critique of the philistine concept of culture) falls mainly to the first two "Meditations" and the positive half (the recovery of the concept of culture) to the last two. Thus Nietzsche writes in
Ecce Homo: "[T]he third and fourth Untimely Ones a r e . . . pointers to a

91.

92. 93.

94.

higher concept of culture, [their aim is] to restore the concept of culture" (EH III:UM:1). Schlegel captures this thought in the following remark: "The need to raise itself above humanity is humanity's prime characteristic" {Ideas, p. 96). Nietzsche is often criticized for being too vague about his concept of the Ubermensch. The following remark from Michael Tanner is representative: "Nietzsche failed to develop the concept of the Ubermensch sufficiently for it to occupy the central position in his thought that is strongly suggested by Zarathustra" ("Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil," in Philosophers Ancient and Modern, ed. Godfrey Vesey [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986], p. 202). Yet Nietzsche is as precise as he can be. "Become who you are" is not an injunction one fulfills by attaining some determinate goal: Any given state of the self is always related to a further (higher) self - and each such higher self is only discoverable through its internal relation to an empirically given present self. This is also why Nietzsche's perfectionism is not a teleological doctrine in Rawls's sense - there is no telos that could count for him, once attained, as representing the fully realized human self. All of them and many others tend to omit the figure of the saint. Thus, we are said to live in "an era ruled, not by living human beings, but by pseudo-humans dominated by public opinion; for which reason our age may be to some distant posterity the darkest and the least known, because least human, portion of human history" (SE p. 128, trans, amended). Nietzsche says that what we have come to call "Duty" is simply a means of underwriting what he calls our "laziness." We picture Duty as a set of obligations imposed on us from outside our self. Nietzsche retains and radicalizes a Kantian line of thought: only those duties are genuinely binding that we are able to legislate to ourselves.

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95. To say that the goal is a "final and supreme becoming-human" is not to deny that the full "miracle of transformation" it entails is one "which the game of becoming may never hit upon" (SE p. 161). 96. It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that the central project of the third Meditation (SE) is the illumination of this concept of genius. It is remarkable how invisible this topic has remained to commentators on Nietzsche's work. Michael Tanner has even written an essay entitled "Nietzsche on Genius," which begins as follows:" 'Genius' is not a crucial term in Nietzsche's vocabulary." The essay mentions the Meditations only in order to remark on the following irony: "There is no . . . illumination on the topic of genius to be found in the four Untimely Meditations which Nietzsche wrote in the succeeding four years, though two of them, 'Schopenhauer as Educator' and 'Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,' are ostensibly concerned to celebrate his two greatest cultural heroes" (In Genius, ed. Penelope Murray [Oxford: Blackwell, 1989], p. 131). Contrast this with Nietzsche's own summary of his essay: "genius itself is here summoned, so that one may hear whether genius, the highest fruit of life, can justify life as such" (SE p. 146). 97. This point is argued by Cavell in Conditions. 98. Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments, 371, p. 76, trans, amended. 99. Bertrand de Jouvenal - the other thinker who, along with Nietzsche, Rawls cites in this connection - is a much better example than Nietzsche of someone who fits Rawls's, Donagan's, and Hurka's characterizations of a perfectionist. 100. I am here rehearsing a central theme of Cavell's Conditions. 101. Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams (28 October 1813) in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul L. Ford (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1899), vol. 9, pp. 425-8. 102. On Liberty (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), pp. 62-3. All references to Mill are to this work. 103. One of Nietzsche's posthumous notebooks from the fall of 1881 (which contains some remarks that are virtually transcriptions of passages from Emerson) bears the title Emerson - Exemplar (KSA, vol. 9, pp. 618-22). 104. "Each philosopher, each bard, each actor has only done for me, as by a delegate, what one day I can do for myself" (Emerson, Essays and Lectures, p. 67). 105. The opening chapter of Emerson's Representative Men, titled "Uses of Great Men," develops at length the theme that the significance of the great man lies in his capacity to serve as "a representative" of another's unrecognized possibilities: "We have never come at the true and best benefit of any genius, so long as we believe him an original force.... [WJithin the limits of human education and agency, we may say, great men exist that there may be greater men" (Essays and Lectures, pp. 631-2). 106. Judith Shklar, in her essay "Emerson and the Inhibitions of Democracy" (in The Pursuits of Reason, ed.T. Cohen, P. Guyer, and H. Putnam [Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1993]) argues that Emerson's emphasis on the importance of great men is in tension with his fondness for democracy. Shklar interprets Emerson's employment of the democratic terminology of "representative" and "delegate" as an ingenious ploy to paper over the tensions in his view. Her essay revolves around an opposition between the great man (who is averse to conformity) and the ordinary man (who is impris-

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107.

108. 109. 110.

oned by conformity). She writes of "a vast gap between the two kinds of men" and pictures the greatness of "great men" as a function of their natural endowment. Her reading of Emerson thus recapitulates the problematic we have been examining in the elitist reading of Nietzsche. Shklar says great men "are delegated to us." But Emerson says they are delegated by us to do what each of us can one day do for himself (Essays and Lectures, p. 67). Shklar writes: "It is as absurd to speak of a hidden great man as of an ungifted genius." Yet this is precisely what Emerson teaches: There is a great man hidden inside each one of us, whispering to get out. Shklar cites the following remark as an instance of Emerson's irony: "great men: the word is injurious" (Essays and Lectures, p. 629). But Emerson's point here is that the word is injurious for the very reasons Nietzsche cites (when he similarly enjoins us: "Do not speak about being gifted or possessing innate talent!" HH 1:163). Emerson continues: "Is there caste? Is there Fate? What becomes of the promise to Virtue?" (Essays and Lectures, p. 629). The opposition between great men and common men that Shklar presupposes is one that Emerson explicitly seeks to repudiate: "As to what we call the masses, and common men; - there are no common men" (ibid, p. 630). "What is the face of your friend anyway? It is your own face in a rough and imperfect mirror?" (Z 1:14, "On the Friend"). The role of the exemplar is an idealization of one aspect of (Nietzsche's concept of) friendship. Nietzsche presents Schopenhauer as someone who is in this respect a (potential) friend - someone who can mediate the conversation between me and my higher self. Zarathustra says that "the friend is always the third person," for "I and me" should be "deep in conversation." Schlegel, Ideas, 5, p. 94, trans, amended. J. P. Stern, in his introduction to the Hollingdale translation of the Meditations, furnishes a representative example of this attitude of condescension (see p. xxv). In its entirety Nietzsche's citation from "Circles" reads: "Beware," says Emerson, "when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at a risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end.There is not a piece of science but itsflankmay be turned tomorrow; there is not any literary reputation, not the socalled eternal names of fame, that may not be revised and condemned; the things which are dear to men at this hour are so on account of the ideas which have emerged on their mental horizon, and which cause the present order of things, as a tree bears its apples. A new degree of culture would instantly revolutionize the entire system of human pursuits." (SE p. 193; cf. Emerson, Essays and Lectures, pp. 407-8)

111. Cavell's way of putting this point, in Conditions, is to say that SE consists of "virtual transcriptions" of passages from Emerson. He gives some examples. Here are a few more: (la) [Everything bears witness to what we are, our friendships and enmities, our glance and the clasp of our hand, our memory and that which we do not remember, our books and our handwrinting." (SE p. 129) (lb) Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice admit a breath every moment. ("Self-reliance," Essays and Lectures, p. 266)

256

JAMES CONANT (2a) I profit from a philosopher only insofar as he can be an example. (SE p. 136) (2b) Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. ("Divinity School Address," Essays and Lectures, p. 79) (3a) "[R]ead your own life and comprehend from it the hieroglyphics of universal life." (SE p. 142) (3b) To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men - that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense. ("Self-reliance," p. 259) (4a) "[H]uman beings . . . are timid. They hide themselves behind customs and opinions." (SE p. 127) (4b) Man is timid and apologetic He dares not say "I think," "I am," but quotes some saint or sage. ("Self-reliance," p. 270)

112. 113.

114.

115.

116.

117. 118.

SE and "Self-Reliance" share numerous such pairs of twins. This is not something unprecedented in Nietzsche's work. Reformulations of Emersonian thoughts are to be found among Nietzsche's earliest writings. Two of Nietzsche's earliest essays are, in fact, transparent attempts to recast two Emerson essays, "History" and "Fate." Nietzsche's essays bear the titles "Fate and History" and "Free Will and Fate" (Friedrich Nietzsche: Werke und Briefe [Munich: C. H. Beck, 1934], vol. 2, Jugendschriften, pp. 54-63). A parallel line of filiation also runs from Emerson's concept of the "Oversoul" to Nietzsche's concept of the Ubermensch. Quoted by Walter Kaufmann in his "Translator's Introduction" to The Gay Science, p. 12. Kaufmann goes on to remark: "It is well known that Nietzsche always carried a copy of Emerson's Essays with him, and, for example, that he wrote of Emerson: 'The author who has been richest in ideas in this century so far has been an American'" (ibid.). The quotation is from "History" (Emerson, Essays and Lectures, p. 239). See the introduction to Conditions for a discussion of this region of Emerson's thought (especially p. 12). For Cavell's discussion of Emerson's remark that self-reliance is the "aversion" of conformity, see pp. 137-8; for the remark, see Essays and Lectures, p. 261. Nietzsche's essays in fact encode at one remove a parallel demonstration (concerning how one philosopher may appropriate the prose of another) exemplified in the relation Emerson's Essays bear to Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and Critique of Practical Reason. "Quotation and Originality" is collected in Emerson's (seldom reprinted) Letters and Social Aims. It can be found in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson, 12 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903-4), vol. 8. The passage quoted is on p. 178. Zarathustra says," 'This is my way; where is yours?' - thus I answered those who asked me 'the way.' For the way - that does not exist" (Z 111:11:2). In WWR Schopenhauer says of the thought of eternal recurrence that if you were seriously to attempt to think it - fully to contemplate the prospect of living your life over again exactly as you have lived it - it would drive you insane (vol. 1, pp. 279-80). Beginning with SE, Nietzsche seeks to contest Schopenhauer's contention that one's attitude toward one's own existence, if one is honest with oneself, must be as follows: "[A]t the end of his life, no man, if he be sincere and at the same time in possession of his faculties, will ever wish to go through it again. Rather than this, he will much prefer to choose complete non-existence" (vol. 1, p. 324).

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119. In this, as in other respects, it is the cousin of Kierkegaard's concept of "repetition." 120. GS 299 starts by asking the question: "How can we make things beautiful, attractive and desirable for ourselves when they are not?" and traces our trouble to a tendency on our part to learn the wrong thing from the artists. We cultivate a talent for poetically misrepresenting and prettifying the details of our lives to ourselves, instead of learning from the artist how "to be the poets of our own lives - first of all in the smallest, most everyday matters" (trans, amended). 121. To this extent, the purpose served by the thought-experiment of eternal recurrence parallels that served by the contemplation of an exemplar: In both cases one is enabled to attend to that which lies closest of all and yet is most difficult to heed. 122. In the final part of Zarathustra our hero, after much struggle, is finally able to rise to the thought, and we are shown how it transforms him. He becomes capable of a "laughter that is no longer human" (Z 111:2). Nietzsche in his later work (particularly in Ecce Homo) often refers to Zarathustra as "the thinker of the thought of eternal recurrence." One way of reading this is as a refusal to confer this title upon himself. 123. This essay has been through many versions. It grew out of co-teaching successive versions of an undergraduate course at Harvard with Stanley Cavell on Moral Perfectionism and is greatly indebted to material presented in Cavell's lectures for that course, some of which has found its way into print in his Conditions. It is, in addition, indebted to conversations with Steve Affeldt, Bill Bristow, Greg Fayer, Arata Hamawaki, John McNees, Hilary Putnam, and Martin Stone. The final version of this paper owes a special debt to improvements suggested by David Finkelstein, Michael Lopez, and Robert Haraldsson. It would never have found its way into its present form but for the encouragement, perseverance, and ubermenschliche Geduld of Richard Schacht.

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GERMAN COMPREHENSIVE EDITIONS Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke (KGW). Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinare. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967ff. Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Briefwechsel (KGB). Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1975ff. Samtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA). Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980. Werke in drei Ba'nden. Ed. Karl Schlechta. Munich: Carl Hanser, 1965. ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITIONS, IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER The Birth of Tragedy/Die Geburt der Tragodie (1872) Trans. Walter Kaufmann, with The Case of Wagner. New York: Vintage, 1966. Trans. Frances Golffing, with The Genealogy of Morals. Garden City: Doubleday, 1956. Trans. Shaun Whiteside. London: Penguin, 1993. Trans. Ronald Speirs, with The Dionysiac Worldview and On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Homer's Contest/Homers Wettkampf (1872) Trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Kaufmann. New York: Viking, 1954. Trans. Christa Davis Acampora, as Nietzscheana #5. Urbana: North American Nietzsche Society, 1996. On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense/Uber Wahrheit und Luge im aussermoralischen Sinn (1873) Trans. Daniel Breazeale, in Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth, ed. Breazeale. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979. Trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Viking, 1954. Trans. Ronald Spiers, with The Birth of Tragedy (see above).

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Untimely Meditations/Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen (1873-6) Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Trans, as Unmodern Observations, ed. William Arrowsmith. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Trans. Richard T. Gray, as Unfashionable Observations. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life/Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie fur das Leben (1874, second Untimely Meditation) Trans. R. J. Hollingdale, in Untimely Meditations. Trans. Richard T. Gray, in Unfashionable Observations. Trans. Gary Brown, as History in the Service and Disservice of Life, in Unmodern Observations. Trans. Adrian Collins, as The Use and Abuse of Hiistory. Indianapolis: Liberal Arts Press, 1957. Trans. Peter Preuss, as On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980. Schopenhauer as Educator/Schopenhauer als Erzieher (1874, third Untimely Meditation) Trans. R. J. Hollingdale, in Untimely Mediations. Trans. William Arrowsmith, in Unmodern Observations, intro. by Richard Schacht. Trans. Richard T. Gray, in Unfashionable Observations. Human, All Too Human/'Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (first vol. 1878; first part of second volume first published as Assorted Opinions and Maxims, 1879; second part of second volume first published as The Wanderer and His Shadow, 1880) Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Trans. Marion Faber, with Stephen Lehmann. First volume only. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality/Morgenrothe (1881) Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. The Gay Science/Die frohliche Wissenschaft (Books I-IV, 1882; Book V added, 1887) Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974. Trans. Thomas Common, as Joyful Wisdom. New York: Fredrick Ungar, 1960. Thus Spoke Zarathustra/Also Sprach Zarathustra (Parts I and II, 1883; Part III, 1884; Part IV, 1885) Trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Viking, 1954. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961. Beyond Good and Evil/Jenseits von Gut und Bo'se (1886) Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1996. Trans. R. J Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. On the Genealogy of Morals/Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887) Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, with Ecce Homo. New York: Vintage, 1967.

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