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NIETZSCHE

Brian Leiter bleiter@uchicago.edu

to appear in M. Forster & K. Gjesdal (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth Century Philosophy July 23, 2013

Introduction: Nietzsche’s Life and Intellectual Formation

Born in 1844 in Röcken, a small village in the Prussian province of Saxony, Friedrich Nietzsche

was the son and grandson (on both sides of his family) of Lutheran pastors. After his father’s death in

1849, Nietzsche was raised primarily by the women in his family, both his mother and older sister

Elisabeth, as well as various aunts. He entered Pforta, Germany’s preeminent school for classical

studies, in 1858, then enrolled in 1864 at the University of Bonn to study theology. A year later, he

decided to change fields and followed the eminent classicist Friedrich Ritschl to the University of Leipzig,

where Nietzsche distinguished himself as a brilliant student of classical philology. He earned

appointment to the University of Basel (Switzerland) in 1869, without a doctorate but on the strength of

Rischl’s recommendation alone. (He subsequently completed a thesis on Diogenes Laertius, a third-

century commentator on early Greek philosophy.)

Nietzsche served briefly, in 1870, as a medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian war, but ill health

forced him out after only two months. His health problems grew progressively worse—“uninterrupted

three-day migraine[s], accompanied by laborious vomiting of phlegm” (EH I:1) is one description

Nietzsche offers—until he was forced to retire from his teaching position in 1879. Nietzsche spent the

remainder of his sane life as a pensioned invalid travelling between inns in Southern Europe seeking

both respite from his physical ailments and composing his most celebrated works.

In January 1889, after weeks of worsening symptoms, he suffered a mental collapse in Turin,

and spent the rest of his life under the care of institutions, his mother and, finally, his proto-Nazi sister

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Elisabeth. (Untreated syphillis from some twenty years earlier appears to be the most likely cause of his

health problems.) Elisabeth did her best to exploit his growing fame, and even issued heavily edited

editions of his work that omitted Nietzsche’s hostility towards both Germany and anti-semitism. By his

death in 1900, Nietzsche was one of the most celebrated philosophers in Europe; by the start of World

War I, the Kaiser issued German troops copies of Thus Spoke Zarathustra; and over the next generation,

every political party and every intellectual fashion fought to claim his legacy.

Less important than the basic biographical facts of his life are the crucial intellectual influences:

first, his deep scholarly engagement with ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, literature and culture;

and second, the two crucial books he discovered in the mid-1860s, Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as

Will and Representation and Friedrich Lange’s The History of Materialism. Let us consider these in turn.

Nineteenth-century Germany was the birthplace of the modern discipline of classics (or classical

philology, as it was then known), as it was of so many other modern academic fields. As a Wissenschaft,

training in classical philology emphasized the development of rigorous scholarly methods that would

guarantee the reliability of its results, from a thorough command of languages and primary source

materials, to various tools and techniques for determining the provenance of source materials,

evaluating their reliability, and fixing their meaning. Although Nietzsche--then under the influence of

his friend, the composer Richard Wagner--made clear with his first book, The Birth of Tragedy in 1872,

his impatience with the narrow cultural horizons of his professional colleagues, he never abandoned his

high regard for their intellectual discipline, writing in one of his very last works of his admiration for

“scholarly culture,” characterized by “scientific methods” including “the great, the incomparable art of

reading well” (A:59). Philology, for Nietzsche, represented that “art of reading well—of reading facts

without falsfiying them by interpretation…” (A:52).

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Even more important for understanding Nietzsche, however, is what he learned from his study

of the ancients. Nietzsche’s philosophical loyalty was to the PreSocratic philosophers (cf. WP 437, EH

III:BT-3), including the “Sophists” of the 5th-century B.C., an intellectual movement he interpreted

broadly to include the great Greek historian Thucydides. Nietzsche admired Thucydides for his “courage

in the face of reality” (TI X:2), that is, the courage to recognize the “immmorality” of the Greeks, their

lust for power and glory, which he portrayed so unflinchingly in his History of the Peloponnesian War.

Nietzsche viewed this kind of realistic appraisal of human motives as a hallmark of “the culture of the

Sophists, by which I mean the culture of the realists” (TI X:2), and he emulates their realism in his own

commentary on human motives and affairs.

But Nietzsche also admired other aspects of philosophy before Socrates, aspects that he finds

especially well-represented by the PreSocratic philosopher Thales. First, Thales, according to Nietzsche,

tries to explain the observable world naturalistically, that is, “in language devoid of image or fable,” thus

“show[ing] him[self] as a natural scientist” (PTAG: 3). Yet at the same time—and this is the second

important point about the PreSocratics for Nietzsche--in Thales, “the man of wisdom [Weisheit]

triumphs in turn over the man of science [Wissenschaft]” (PT:145), in the sense that, “Science rushes

headlong, without selectivity, without ‘taste,’ at whatever is knowable, in the blind desire to know all at

any cost” (PTAG:3), whereas the genuine philosopher (in possession of Weisheit ) pursues knowledge

not “at any cost,” but only in the service of what the philosopher deems valuable: “Genuine

philosophers,” as Nietzsche says, “are commanders and legislators: they say, “thus it shall be!” (BGE

211). Nietzsche claims to find this insight in Thales, and it is one Nietzsche himself prizes throughout his

work. As he puts it in the 1886 Preface to The Gay Science:

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...[T]his will to truth, to “truth at any price,” this youthful madness in the love of truth, have lost

their charm for us….Today we consider it a matter of decency not to wish to see everything

naked, or to be present at everything, or to understand and “know” everything….

Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop

courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones,

words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial—out of profundity.

(GS Pref:4)

The Greeks understood that the “truth” about the human situation is terrible, and that sometimes not

knowing the truth is to be preferred. This amounts to skepticism not about truth, but about the value of

always knowing the truth. That lesson from the Presocratics was only reinforced for Nietzsche by his

reading of Schopenhauer, the second great intellectual influence on his philosophy.

In 1865, he discovered Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, first published in

1818, but which only came to great prominence some twenty years later, as a reaction against Hegel’s

idealism took hold of German culture (Hegel himself had died in 1831, and it is unclear if Nietzsche ever

read him). Nietzsche took from Schopenhauer a number of ideas, but the most important was the

question how life, given that it involves continual, senseless suffering, could possibly be justified.

Schopenhauer offered a “nihilistic” verdict: that we would be better off dead.1 Nietzsche, throughout

his philosophical career, wanted to resist that conclusion, all the time acknowledging the terrible truth

about the inescapability of suffering. In addition, however, Nietzsche was profoundly influenced by

Schopenhauer’s idea of the unalterability of character, the idea that there is a certain psychic core of the

person that remains unchanged throughout one’s life, even if it admits of some pruning—much as the

1Schopenhauer did not, however, recommend suicide for the living, since that would still involve acting on

individual desire, namely, the desire for a cessation of suffering.

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seed of a tomato plant will necessarily give rise to nothing other than a tomato plant, though the quality

of gardening will surely affect its final character.

Schopenhauer’s naturalistic and fatalistic view of personality was reinforced for Nietzsche by

another major intellectual discovery he made a year later in his reading of Friedrich Lange’s History of

Materialism. Lange was both a NeoKantian—part of the “back to Kant” revival in German philosophy

after the eclipse of Hegel—and a friend of the “materialist” turn in German intellectual life, which

comprised the other major part of the reaction against Hegelian idealism after 1831. The latter, though

familiar to philosophers today primarily by way of Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx, actually received its

major impetus from the dramatic developments in physiology that began in Germany in the 1830s (and

which are associated today with Hermann von Helmholtz’s work in the 1840s and after). Materialism

exploded on the intellectual scene in Germany the 1850s in such volumes as Jacob Moleschott’s The

Physiology of Food, Karl Vogt’s Blind Faith and Science, and Ludwig Büchner’s Force and Matter. Force

and Matter was a particular sensation, which went through multiple editions and became a best-seller

with its message, as Büchner put it, that “the researches and discoveries of modern times can no longer

allow us to doubt that man, with all he has and possesses, be it mental or corporeal, is a natural product

like all other organic beings.” Nietzsche first learned of these German Materialists from Lange (though

he subsequently began reading the main journal of the movement, Suggestions for Art, Life and

Science), though Lange took the view (following Helmholtz) that the Materialist picture of man as

determined by his physiological and biological nature actually vindicated Kant’s transcendental idealism

by proving the dependence of our knowledge on the physiological peculiarities of the human sensory

apparatus. We know from Nietzsche’s letters that he viewed Lange’s book as “undoubtedly the most

significant philosophical work to have appeared in recent decades” (Janz 1978 I: 198) and that in 1866,

he declared, “Kant, Schopenhauer, this book by Lange—I don’t need anything else” (ibid.).

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These myriad intellectual influences—the Sophists and Presocratics, Schopenhauer, German

Materialism, Neo-Kantianism, among others—come together in Nietzsche’s work in sometimes

surprising and not always wholly consistent ways. They seem to have wreaked particular mischief with

his views about truth and knowledge, where his views may be more notable for their apparent

incoherence than their philosophical interest; but they are essential for understanding his central

contributions in ethics, moral psychology, and the philosophy of mind and action.

Nietzsche’s Style and his Philosophy

Before we turn to Nietzsche’s substantive philosophical contributions and claims, it is useful to

say a word about the “style” in which Nietzsche writes, a style that no doubt accounts for his immense

popularity beyond the realms of academic philosophy. Nietzsche can be funny, sarcastic, rude, wicked,

scholarly, offensive, clever, and scathing. He writes aphoristically, polemically, lyrically, and always very

personally. He eschews almost entirely the typical discursive form of philosophicial writing: he almost

never tries to persuade through the power of rational argumentation. Reading Spinoza or Kant, and

then reading Nietzsche, one might be surprised to discover they are part of a single genre called

“philosophy,” although there is considerable overlap in subject-matter. Yet in the course of examining

philosophical subjects, Nietzsche will invoke historical, physiological, psychological, philological, and

anthropological claims, and almost never appeal to an intuition or an a priori bit of knowledge, let alone

set out a syllogism.

Nietzsche’s philosophical style is no accident; it is precisely the approach one would expect him

to adopt given his philosophical views about the nature of persons and reason. For Nietzsche,

influenced as he was by Schopenhauer and the German Materialists, thinks the conscious and rational

faculties of human beings play a relatively minor role in what they do, believe, and value; that far more

important are their unconscious and subconscious affective and instinctive lives, as well as the

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physiological facts that explain the former. (We return to this topic below.) As Nietzsche puts the point

early in Beyond Good and Evil, what inspires “mistrust and mockery” of the great philosophers is that,

They all pose as if they had discovered and arrived at their genuine convictions through the self-

development of a cold, pure, divinely indifferent dialectic…while what really happens is that

they take a conjecture, a whim, an “inspiration” or, more typically, they take some fervent wish

that they have sifted through and made properly abstract—and they defend it with

rationalizations after the fact. They are all advocates who do not want to be seen as such….

(BGE 5)

Philosophical systems, then, are not the upshot of rational inquiry; the dialectical justifications for them

are supplied after-the-fact. Instead, Nietzsche explains, “the moral (or immoral) intentions in every

philosophy constitute the real germ from which the whole plant [e.g., the metaphysical system] has

always grown” and thus “there is absolutely nothing impersonal about the philosopher,” for his moral

(and immoral) intentions “bear decided and decisive witness to who he is—which means, in what order

of rank the innermost drives of his nature stand with resepct to each other” (BGE 6). Nietzsche,

crucially, will not partake of this charade of offering post-hoc rationalizations for metaphysical theses

that simply reflect his evaluative judgments which, in turn, reflect the psychological facts about who he

really is. To simplify a bit: since psychology determines values, and values determine philosophy, then

to change people’s evaluative and philosophical views, one must affect their psychology, more precisely,

their drives (drives being dispositions to have certain kinds of affective or emotional responses2). But

non-rational drives can only be influenced through non-rational devices, including all the stylistic devices

noted above: if you provoke, amuse, and annoy the reader, you thereby arouse his affects, and thus can

change the reader’s evaluative attitudes. The discursive mode of most philosophy, by contrast, is inert

2See Katsafanas (2013) for useful discussion.

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when it comes to reorienting the non-rational psyche—but reorienting the affects and values of at least

some of his readers is a paramount concern for Nietzsche, as we will see.

Philosophical Naturalism and Nietzsche’s Theory of Mind and Action

“Naturalism” as a tradition in philosophy views human beings as not really different from the

rest of the natural world, and thus one understands and explains human behavior just as one

understands and explains other natural phenomena. Nietzsche found variations of that vision in a

variety of philosophers he studied and admired, including Thales, Spinoza, Herder, Schopenhauer, and

the German Materialists; indeed, his own philosophical perspective on most topics bears the most

striking resemblance to that of the Scottish philosopher David Hume (whom Nietzsche, alas, knew little

about). Like Hume, Nietzsche notices that reason underdetermines what humans believe and what

they value; and like Hume, he thinks the explanation for human beliefs and values must be sought in

non-rational dispositions characteristic of creatures like us. (Unlike Hume, he does not think the non-

rational dispositions that actually explain our beliefs and values tend to vindicate them.) Nietzsche’s

own speculative “science” of human nature owed much to what he learned from his readings of the

German Materialists and from Schopenhauer, as well as own unparalleled gifts at pscyhological

observation.

Central to Nietzsche’s naturalism about persons was his general conception of the mind and of

agency. According to Nietzsche, (1) conscious mental states are largely (perhaps wholly)

epiphenomenal; therefore (2) the conscious experience of willing misleads us as to the actual genesis of

our actions; (3) actions, as well as the conscious evaluative beliefs that precede them, arise from

unconscious psychological processes, especially affective or emotional ones, of which we are, at most,

only dimly aware; and, given (1) through (3), Nietzsche believes that (4) no one is morally responsible for

his actions. Let us say a few words about each of these distinctive theses in turn.

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“Consciousness is a surface [Oberfläche]” (EH II:9), and it is a surface that conceals what is

actually causally efficacious in our mental lives, namely, our unconscious mental states, especially our

affects and drives. When we talk of the “will” or of the “motive” that precedes an action we are

referring to “error[s]” and “phantoms,” “merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness—something

alongside the deed that is more likely to cover up the antecedents of the deed than to represent them”

(TI VI:3). Only our “ridiculous overestimation and misunderstanding of consciousness” (GS:11) leads us

to fail to recognize that “the greatest part of our spirit’s activity…remains unconscious and unfelt”

(GS:333), that “everything of which we become conscious…causes nothing” (WP:478). There is some

debate in the scholarly literature about the extent and character of the epiphenomenal character of

conscious mental life according to Nietzsche (see Leiter 2002: 91-95; Katsafanas 2005; Riccardi 2013),

but the most plausible interpretation is that while we are aware in consciousness (both conscious

perception and conscious cognition) of various things and ideas, these mental states are only efficacious

in action in virtue of being internalized into unconscious mental processes. (Interestingly, this view has

been supported by much recent work in cognitive science, e.g., Wegner 2002, Rosenthal 2005; for

discussion in relation to Nietzsche, see Leiter 2007 and especially Riccardi 2013.)

Of course, if the conscious mental states that precede action are not causally efficacious, then

that means our conscious experience of willing an action is also misleading. “[T]he feeling of will [may]

suffice[] for” a person “to assume cause and effect” (GS 127) as Nietzsche notes, but this assumption is

faulty. As Nietzsche puts it, in one of his more dramatic denials of freedom of the will,

We laugh at him who steps out of his room at the moment when the sun steps out of its room,

and then says: “I will that the sun shall rise”; and at him who cannot stop a wheel, and says, “I

will that it shall roll”; and at him who is thrown down in wrestling, and says: “here I lie, but I will

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lie here!” But, all laughter aside, are we ourselves ever acting any differently whenever we

employ the expression “I will”? (D 124)

Throughout his corpus, Nietzsche’s answer to this last rhetorical question is in the negative. His key

insight is that “a thought comes when ‘it’ wants, and not when ‘I’ want” (BGE 17), and that includes the

thoughts associated with willing. If the “willing thought” that precedes an action is itself causally

determined by something else, then in what sense do I will the action? Nietzsche is quite clear that one

does not, even in a late work like Twlight of the Idols:

We believed ourselves to be causal in the act of willing…Nor did one doubt that all the

antecedents of an act, its causes, were to be sought in consciousness and would be found there

once sought—as “motives”: else one would not have been free and responsible for it. Finally,

who would have denied that a thought is caused? That the “I” causes the thought? (TI VI:3)

But it is, of course, Nietzsche who denies that “I” cause my thoughts. He soon makes clear, in the same

section, the import of this denial: “The ‘inner world’ is full of phantoms,” he says, and “the will is one of

them. The will no longer moves anything…it merely accompanies events. The so-called motive:

another error. Merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness…” There are no conscious mental

causes at all, he concludes (TI VI:3) (cf. Leiter 2007 for detailed discussion).

Unsurprisingly, this skepticism about the causal efficacy of what we experience as the will leads

Nietzsche to conclude that no one is morally responsible for his actions, an idea he endorses throughout

his philosophical career. So, for example, in the early 1880s, he writes:

Do I have to add that the wise Oedipus was right that we really are not responsible for our

dreams—but just as little for our waking life, and that the doctrine of freedom of will has human

pride and feeling of power for its father and mother? (D 128)

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We may have other motives for thinking ourselves free, but we are as little responsible for what we do

in real life as what we do in our dreams. It is hard to imagine a more bracing denial of freedom and

responsibility. The same themes are sounded in one of his very last works, The Antichrist:

Formerly man was given a ‘free will’ as his dowry from a higher order: today we have taken his will

away altogether, in the sense that we no longer admit the will as a faculty. The old word ‘will’ now

serves only to denote a resultant, a kind of individual reaction, which follows necessarily upon a

number of partly contradictory, partly harmonious stimuli: the will no longer ‘acts’ [wirkt] or

‘moves’ [bewegt]. (A 14)

Denial of the causality of “the will” (more precisely, what we experience as willing) is central, as we have

just seen, to Nietzsche’s skepticism about free will and also explains why he frequently denies “unfree

will” as well: what we experience as “will” does not, in fact, cause our actions, so the causal

determination or freedom of this will is irrelevant. If the faculty of the will “no longer ‘acts’ or ‘moves’”

(A 14)—if it is no longer causal—then there remains no conceptual space for the compatabilist idea that

the right kind of causal determination of the will is compatible with responsibility for our actions. If, as

Zarathustra puts it, “thought is one thing, the deed is another, and the image of the deed still another:

the wheel of causality does not roll between them” (Z I, “On the Pale Criminal”), then there is no room

for moral responsibility: I may well identify with my “thoughts” or my will, but if they do not cause my

actions, how could that make me responsible for them?

How, one might ask, does Nietzsche’s famous rhetoric about the “will to power” square with

this picture of mind and agency? Nietzsche does think he can discern a tendency in human action

towards power, which, following the influential account in Richardson (1996), is most plausibly

understood as a tendency of each drive in the human psyche to try to dominate the others, to redirect

their psychic energy towards the dominant drive’s ends, whatever they may be. Sometimes, of course,

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Nietzsche casts the idea of will to power in psychologistic terms that would make it the natural

opponent of psychological hedonism, i.e., rather than seeking feelings of pleasure, “every

animal…instinctively strives for…his maximum feeling of power [Machtgefühl] (GM III:7). On either

rendering—as the tendency of all drives to dominate others, or as a desire for the feeling of power--it

represents a psychological hypothesis that is supposed to be explanatory of observed behavior.3 Yet

Nietzsche frequently asserts that we are in the dark about the real genesis of our actions. As he writes

in Daybreak, “The primeval delusion still lives on that one knows, and knows quite precisely in every

case, how human action is brought about,” yet the reality is that “alll actions are essentially unknown”

(D 116). Indeed, “However far a man may go in self-knowledge, nothing however can be more

incomplete than his image of the totality of drives which constitute his being. He can scarcely name

even the cruder ones: their number and strength, their ebb and flood, their play and counterplay

among one another, and above all the laws of their nutriment [Ernährung] remain wholly unknown to

him” (D 119). Yet Nietzsche is confident that values “belong among the most powerful levers in the

involved mechanisms of our actions, but…in any particular case the law of their mechanism is

indemonstrable” (GS 335). Notice, however, that all these passages are compatible with the hypothesis

that we can know, from the third-person perspective, that, whatever the particular mechanism,

whatever the particular drives, at play in individual human actions, they manifest a general pattern,

namely, that particular drives try to gain dominion over all other drives in the psyche and that, in many

instances, that phenomenon is associated with a feeling of power. That is enough for Nietzsche’s

doctrine of will to power.

3Mostly in work he never published, Nietzsche presents “will to power” as an ambitious metaphysical

thesis about the nature of all reality. As Clark (1990: 212-227) argues, however, the most important treatment of will to power as a metaphysical thesis that Nietzsche publishes occurs in a context (the first chapter of BGE) in which he has just finished criticizing philosophers for propounding metaphysical doctrines as post-hoc rationalizations for their evaluative commitments. It would be extraordinary if Nietzsche would then turn around and do the same thing, without irony!

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Nietzsche’s famous method of “genealogy” is also a key part of his naturalistic approach to

morality and to human beings. Nietzsche thinks of genealogy as history correctly practiced (cf. Nehamas

1985: 246 n. 1), and as correctly practiced it reveals contemporary phenomena that might seem to have

an atemporal status (e.g., the demands of morality as we understand them) or supernatural origin (e.g.,

morality as God’s commands) to have, in fact, complicated natural histories, in which a variety of

differing human purposes are at work (cf. Leiter 2002: 166-173). Genealogy also avoids the ahistorical

mistake of thinking that some institution’s or practice’s current meaning or value necessarily explains

why that institution or practice originally came into being. Thus, most famously, in On the Genealogy of

Morality, Nietzsche shows that our current moral views arose from an historical process that included,

inter alia, the efforts of oppressed classes in the late Roman Empire to score a victory over their

oppressors by reconceptualizing their lives as morally reprehensible;the internalization of cruelty that is

a precondition for civilized life, which gives rise to a capacity for “conscience”; and the role of “ascetic”

moralities—like the moralities of all the world’s major religions, which preach denial of basic human

desires for sexual gratification, cruelty, and power—in rendering suffering meaningful and thus making

life bearable for the majority of mortals.

Nietzsche is explicit that he deploys the genealogical method in order to critique morality,

though he also notes it is “one means among many” for doing so (e.g., GM Pref:5). But how can a

genealogy have any critical import? Nietzsche recognizes and repudiates what we now call the genetic

fallacy; he says, for example, that, "Even if a morality has grown out of an error, the realization of this

fact would not so much as touch the problem of its value" (GS 345). Instead, Nietzsche uses genealogy

to make two kinds of critical points. First, as we will see in the next section, central to Nietzsche’s

objection to morality is that its demands have a deleterious affect on the flourishing of exceptional

individuals. The origin of a morality, however, has a special evidential status as to the effects (or causal

powers) of that morality, for example, as to whether morality obstructs or promotes human flourishing.

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On Nietzsche’s view, moralities (except in cases of false consciousness) are adopted for prudential

reasons, i.e., because they are in the interests of certain types of people. On Nietzsche’s Calliclean

picture, persons adopt moralities for self-interested reasons, because each “instinctively strives for an

optimum of favourable conditions in which fully to release his power” (GM III:7). Thus, people would

not have adopted a morality in the first place if its effect wasn’t to produce “favourable conditions in

which” they can “release [their] power.” That is, morality must have the creation of those conditions in

which certain types of people flourish as one of its effects. As Nietzsche puts it in the Nachlass:

Thus in the history of morality a will to power finds expression, through which now the slaves

and oppressed, now the ill-constituted and those who suffer from themselves, now the

mediocre attempt to make those value judgments prevail that are favorable to them. (WP 400;

cf. BGE 187; Z I:15; WP 134, 254, 258, 675)

If this is right, then it follows that insight in to the origin of our morality gives us insight into its causal

powers: namely, that it favors the flourising of certain kinds of persons, and thwarts the flourishing of

other kinds. The genealogy of morality is, of course, but one way of discovering this fact: for we

discover, in the Genealogy, that, at its origin, our morality (because of its distinctive effects) was in the

interests of the weak, base, and wretched. If that was its effect then, perhaps that is its effect now?

Genealogy supports another line of critique for Nietzsche, as when he observes that by revealing

the “shameful origin” of morality, the Genealogy simply brings “a feeling of diminution in value of the

thing that originated thus and prepares the way to a critical mood and attitude toward it" (WP 254; cf.

GS 345; second emphasis added). We can state the point more formally. If it turns out that our moral

beliefs arise from an epistemically unreliable process—for example, the desire of oppressed peoples to

seek revenge against their oppressors—then that fact gives us reason to wonder whether the resulting

beliefs are warranted (cf. Sinhababu 2007). Suppose, for example, an acquaintance recommends a

restaurant in glowing terms, making it sound almost too good to believe. You then learn that the origin

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of the acquaintance's enthusiasm for this restaurant is that he is a part-owner of the establishment. The

origin does not, to be sure, refute the acquaintance's reasons to patronize the restaurant, but the

discovery of this “shameful origin” surely “prepares the way to a critical mood and attitude toward[s]”

these reasons. One will revisit the reasons with a skeptical eye, knowing what one now knows about

the origin. So, too, Nietzsche clearly hopes that the readers of the Genealogy will stand ready to revisit

(indeed, revalue) morality given what his naturalistic account shows them about its origin and its effects.

Nietzsche’s Critique of Morality and the Aesthetic “Justification” of Existence

Nietzsche’s two central concerns are the problem of suffering, posed by Schopenhauer, and the

“revaluation of values” as he called it, meaning, in particular, a critique of the dominant morality. The

problem of suffering, recall, is the problem of how life can be “justified” in the face of the terrible truth

that suffering, loss, pain and ultimately oblivion await us all, as well as everyone we care about. Most

of Nietzsche’s writing, however, is devoted to attacking “morality” (Moral). We shall return in a later

section to the connection between these two dominant themes.

Let us start with the critique of morality. Nietzsche does not, needless to say, reject every code

of conduct governing human interactions that one might call “moral,” so it will be helpful (following

Leiter 2002: 74) to introduce the term “morality in the pejorative sense” (MPS) to pick out those values

to which Nietzsche centrally objects. Nietzsche’s critique of MPS proceeds on two fronts. On the one

hand, he attacks as false (as we have seen, above) certain assumptions about human agency that

undergird MPS, assumptions, for example, about freedom of the will and moral responsibility (for more

detail, cf. Leiter 2002: 80-112; see also, Robertson 2012). But Nietzsche’s main objections do not

pertain to these mistakes about the true nature of mind and action: that is, “[i]t is not error as error

that” he objects to fundamentally in MPS (EH IV;7), although Nietzsche’s two most frequently named —

and closely related — targets, Christian and Kantian morality, share such assumptions about agency.

Nietzsche’s central objection to morality is that it is harmful to the highest human beings, the exemplars

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of human excellence whom Nietzsche values above all others. “The demand of one morality for all,” he

says, “is detrimental to the higher men” (BGE 228), and that is because the prevalent morality, MPS, is in

the interests of the “herd,” the lower types of human beings. In the preface to the Genealogy,

Nietzsche sums up his basic concern particularly well:

What if a symptom of regression lurked in the“good,” likewise a danger, a seduction, a poison, a

narcotic, through which the present lived at the expense of the future? Perhaps more

comfortably, less dangerously, but at the same time in a meaner style, more basely? — So that

morality itself were to blame if the highest power and splendor[Mächtigkeit und Pracht] possible

to the type man was never in fact attained? So that morality itself was the danger of dangers?

(GM Pref:6)

The theme is sounded throughout Nietzsche's work. In a book of 1880, for example, he writes that, “Our

weak, unmanly social concepts of good and evil and their tremendous ascendancy over body and soul

have finally weakened all bodies and souls and snapped the self-reliant, independent, unprejudiced

men, the pillars of a strong civilization” (D 163). Similarly, in a posthumously published note of 1885, he

remarks that “men of great creativity, the really great men according to my understanding, will be

sought in vain today” because “nothing stands more malignantly in the way of their rise and

evolution…than what in Europe today is called simply ‘morality’” (WP 957). In these and many other

passages (e.g., BGE 62; GM III:14; A:5, 24; EH IV:4; WP 274, 345, 400, 870, 879.), Nietzsche makes plain

his fundamental objection to MPS: MPS thwarts the development of human excellence, i.e., “the

highest power and splendor possible to the type man.”

According to Nietzsche, MPS accomplishes this pernicious end by valorizing attributes and

actions (e.g., happiness, altruism, equality, pity) that are harmful to the flourishing of “higher men” (as

Nietzsche calls them) and demonizing (or deeming unvaluable) attributes that are essential to their

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flourishing (e.g., suffering, severe self-love, inequality, indifference to suffering).4 In the case of what

MPS valorizes, Nietzsche argues either that the attributes and actions have no intrinsic value (when MPS

claims they do) or argues that they do not have any extrinsic value (for the realization of human

excellence). With respect to what MPS demonizes or devalues, Nietzsche argues only that these actions

and attributes are, in fact, extrinsically value for the cultivation of human excellence (see Leiter 2002:

127-136). Throughout, his critique depends on a kind of speculative moral psychology about how

certain values affect human development, a critique which we may illustrate with one example here.

What could be harmful about the seemingly innocuous MPS valorization of “happiness” and

devaluation of suffering? An early remark of Nietzsche's suggests his answer:

Are we not, with this tremendous objective of obliterating all the sharp edges of life, well on the

way to turning mankind into sand? Sand! Small, soft, round, unending sand! Is that your ideal,

you heralds of the sympathetic affections? (D 174)

In a later work, Nietzsche says — referring to hedonists and utilitarians — that, “Well-being as you

understand it— that is no goal, that seems to us an end, a state that soon makes man ridiculous and

contemptible…” (BGE 225). By the hedonistic doctrine of well-being, Nietzsche takes the utilitarians to

have in mind “English happiness,”namely, “comfort and fashion” (BGE 228) — a construal which, if

unfair to some utilitarians (like Mill), may do justice to ordinary aspirations to happiness. In a similar

vein, Nietzsche has Zarathustra dismiss “wretched contentment”as an ideal (Z Pref:3), while also

revealing that it was precisely“the last men” — the “most despicable men” — who “invented happiness

[Glück]” in the first place (Pref:5). To be sure, Nietzsche allows that he himself and the “free spirits” will

be “cheerful” or“gay” [frölich] — they are, after all, the proponents of the “gay science.” His point is

4 See, e.g., D 108, 132, 174; GS 116, 294, 328, 338, 345, 352, 377; Z I:4, II:8, III:1, 9, IV:13, 10; BGE 197,

198, 201-202, 225, 257; GM Pref:5, III: 11 ff.; TI II, V, IX:35, 37-38, 48; A: 7, 43; EH III:D-2, IV:4, 7-8; WP 752

18

that such “happiness” is not criterial of being a higher person, and thus it is not something that the

higher person — in contrast to the adherent of MPS — aims for.

Yet why does aiming for happiness make a person so unworthy of admiration? Nietzsche's

answer appears to be: because suffering is positively necessary for the cultivation of human excellence.

He writes, for example, that:

The discipline of suffering, of great suffering— do you not know that only this discipline has

created all enhancements of man so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness which

cultivates its strength, its shudders face to face with great ruin, its inventiveness and courage in

enduring, persevering, interpreting, and exploiting suffering, and whatever has been granted to

it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness —was it not granted to it through

suffering, through the discipline of great suffering? (BGE 225; cf. BGE 270)

Nietzsche is not arguing here that suffering is really intrinsically valuable (MPS does not claim that

either). The value of suffering, according to Nietzsche, is only extrinsic: suffering — “great” suffering— is

a prerequisite of any great human achievement. As Nietzsche puts the point elsewhere: “Only great pain

is the ultimate liberator of the spirit….I doubt that such pain makes us‘better’; but I know that it makes

us more profound”(GS Pref:3).

We should remember that Nietzsche is primarily a critic of moral culture, not simply of particular

moral philosophies. He believes that when MPS values come to dominate a culture, they will influence

the attitudes of all its members, and thus influence how individuals with the potential for great

achievements will understand, evaluate and conduct their own lives. (This influence, of course,

operates sub-rationally and often not even consciously.) If, in fact, suffering is a precondition for these

individuals to do anything great, and if they have internalized the norm that suffering must be

alleviated, and that happiness is the ultimate goal, then we run the risk that, rather than — to put it

19

crudely — suffer and create, they will instead waste their energies pursuing pleasure, lamenting their

suffering and seeking to alleviate it. MPS values may not explicitly prohibit artists or other

potentially“excellent” persons from ever suffering; but the risk is that a culture — like ours — which has

internalized the norms against suffering and for pleasure will be a culture in which potential artists —

and other doers of great things — will, in fact, squander themselves in self-pity and the seeking of

pleasure. Thus, Nietzsche’s aim is to free such nascent higher human beings from their “false

consciousness” about MPS, their false belief that it is good, rather than harmful, for them.

Who are these higher human beings who manifest human excellence according to Nietzsche?5

Nietzsche has three favorite examples throughout his corpus: Goethe, Beethoven, and Nietzsche

himself! What makes these figures paradigms of the “higher” type for Nietzsche--beyond their great

creativity (as he says, “the men of great creativity” are “the really great men according to my

understanding” (WP 957)—are a variety of attributes (see Leiter 2002: 116-122). “Every choice human

being,” says Nietzsche, “strives instinctively for a citadel and a secrecy where he is saved from the

crowd, the many, the great majority…” (BGE 26). Unsurprisingly, then, the great or higher man lacks

the “congeniality” and“good-naturedness” so often celebrated in contemporary popular culture. “A

great man…is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar…” (WP 962). More than that, though,

the higher type deals with others (when he has to) in a rather distinctive way: “A human being who

strives for something great considers everyone he meets on his way either as a means or as a delay and

obstacle — or as a temporary resting place” (BGE 273). Thus, “a great man…wants no‘sympathetic’

heart, but servants, tools; in his intercourse with men, he is always intent on making something out of

them” (WP 962).

5Note that while Nietzsche speaks in Thus Spoke Zarathustra of the “superman” as a kind of ideal higher

type, this concept simply drops out of his mature work (except for a brief mention in EH in the context of discussing

Zarathustra). “Higher men” is an important concept in Nietzsche; the “superman” is nothing more than a rhetorical

trope in Zarathustra.

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The great man approaches others instrumentally not only because of his fundamental proclivity

for solitude, but because he is consumed by his work, his responsibilities, his projects. “What is

noble?”Nietzsche again asks in a Nachlass note of 1888. His answer: “That one instinctively seeks heavy

responsibilities” (WP 944). So it was with Goethe: “he was not fainthearted but took as much as possible

upon himself, over himself, into himself”(TI IX:49). But the higher type does not seek out responsibilities

and tasks arbitrarily. “A great man,” says Nietzsche displays “a long logic in all of his activity…he has the

ability to extend his will across great stretches of his life and to despise, and reject everything petty

about him” (WP 962). This is the trait Nietzsche sometimes refers to as having “style” in“character” (GS

290). (Note that this famous passage (GS 290) merely describes those — “the strong and domineering

natures” — who are able “‘to give’ style” to their character; it does not presuppose that just anyone can

do so.) Indeed, Nietzsche understood his own life in these terms:

[T]he organizing “idea” that is destined to rule [in one's life and work] keeps growing deep down

— it begins to command; slowly it leads us back from side roads and wrong roads…. Considered

in this way, my life is simply wonderful. For the task of a revaluation of all values more capacities

may have been needed than have ever dwelt together in a single individual….I never even

suspected what was growing in me — and one day all my capacities, suddenly ripe, leaped forth

in their ultimate perfection. (EH II:9).

Higher men also embrace what Nietzsche calls the idea of “eternal return.” In Beyond Good and

Evil, he describes “the opposite ideal” to that of moralists and pessimists like Schopenhauer as “the ideal

of the most high-spirited, alive, and world-affirming human being who has not only come to terms and

learned to get along with whatever was and is, but who wants to have what was and is repeated into all

eternity” (BGE 56). He thus evinces what Nietzsche often calls a “Dionysian” or “life-affirming” attitude,

that is, he is willing to affirm his life unconditionally, including, in particular, the“suffering” or other

hardships it has involved. (Someone who says, “I would gladly live my life again, except for my first

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marriage,” would not affirm life in the requisite sense.) Thus, we may say that a person affirms his life in

Nietzsche's sense only insofar as he would gladly will its eternal return: i.e., will the repetition of his

entire life through eternity.6 Nietzsche calls “the idea of the eternal recurrence” the“highest

formulation of affirmation that is at all attainable” (EH III:Z-1; cf. BGE 56). Strikingly, Nietzsche claims

that precisely this attitude characterized both himself and Goethe (cf. EH III:CW-4; TI IX:49).

Finally, higher human beings have a certain distinctive self-regard. In Beyond Good and Evil,

Nietzsche once again answers the question, “What is noble?”, this time as follows: “It is not the works, it

is the faith that is decisive here, that determines the order of rank…: some fundamental certainty that a

noble soul has about itself, something that cannot be sought, nor found, nor perhaps lost. The noble

soul has reverence [Ehrfurcht] for itself” (BGE 287). Self-reverence — to revere and respect oneself as

one might a god — is no small achievement, as the proliferation of “self-help” programs and pop

psychology slogans like “I'm OK, you're OK” would suggest. Self-loathing, self-doubt, and self-laceration

are the norm among human beings; to possess a “fundamental certainty” about oneself is, Nietzsche

thinks quite plausibly, a unique state of affairs. “The noble human being,” says Nietzsche, also “honors

himself as one who is powerful, also as one who has power over himself, who knows how to speak and

be silent, who delights in being severe and hard with himself and respects all severity and hardness”

(BGE 260).

It should be apparent now why creatives geniuses like Goethe, Beethoven, and Nietzsche

himself are the preferred examples of the higher human being: for the characteristics of the higher type

so-described are precisely those that lend themselves to artistic and creative work. A penchant for

solitude, an absolute devotion to one's tasks, an indifference to external opinion, a fundamental

certainty about oneself and one's values (that often strikes others as hubris) — all these are the traits

6“Will” in this context means something closer to desire; it is not a sotto voce smuggling back in of the

traditional notion of the will as the locus of agency that, as we have seen, Nietzsche critiques.

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we find, again and again, in artistic geniuses. (It turns out, for example, that Beethoven had almost all

these characteristics to a striking degree; for discussion, see Leiter 2002: 122-123.)

We are finally in a position to see the connection between the flourishing of geniuses like these

and the problem of suffering that Nietzsche took over from Schopenhauer. The challenge presented by

the latter, recall, was how life could be worth living given the pervasiveness of pointless suffering. The

animating idea of Nietzsche’s response remains steady from the beginning to the end of his career: as

he puts it in the new 1886 preface to The Birth of Tragedy, “the existence of the world is justified only as

an aesthetic phenomenon” (BT: Attempt 5). This phrasing echoes famous claims from the original work

more than a dozen years earlier: “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world

are eternally justified” (BT 5; cf. BT 24, GS 107). This kind of “justification,” whatever precisely it

amounts to, is equivalent in Nietzschean terminology to taking a “Dionysian” perspective on life (cf. BT:

Attempt 4; EH IV:9). As Nietzsche puts it in a late work, Twilight of the Idols: “Saying yes to life, even in

its strangest and harshest problems; the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility…that is what I

called Dionysian…” (TI Ancient:5). This Dionysian attitude is plainly an instance of being able to will the

eternal return.

So how does an aesthetic experience of the world “seduc[e] one to a continuation of life” (BT:3), as

Nietzsche puts it, how does it elicit in us a Dionysian attitude? For that is the essence of “aesthetic

justification” for Nietzsche, namely, that it makes one want to live, it makes one experience the terrible

truth about human suffering not as an objection to life, but as something necessary to it.7 The key here

is to appreciate Nietzsche’s understanding of aesthetic value, an account which, unsurprisingly, is

articulated in opposition to Kant’s. Kant makes two kinds of mistakes in Nietzsche’s view, one about

art, the other about knowledge. Nietzsche writes: “Kant intended to honor art when, among the

7 We shall ignore the answer Nietzsche gave in his first published work, BT, since he later abandons that

particular kind of answer, even as he retains allegiance to the idea that only an aesthetic justification of existence is possible.

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predicates of the beautiful, he privileged and placed in the foreground those that constitute the honor

of knowledge: impersonality and universal validity” (GM III:6). But “impersonality” and “universal

validity” are marks of neither art, nor knowledge. Indeed, Nietzsche ridicules Kant’s idea that the mark

of aesthetic value is that it “pleases without interest” (GM III:6), endorsing instead Stendahl’s formula,

namely, that “the beautiful promises happiness,” that is, it produces “the arousal [Erregung] of the will

(“of interest’)” (GM III:6). Nietzsche soon makes the connection between aesthetic and sexual arousal

even more explicit two sections later: “the peculiar sweetness and fullness characteristic of the

aesthetic condition,” he says, “might have its origins precisely in…’sensuality’ [Sinnlichkeit]” though it is

now “transfigure[d] and no longer enters consciousness as sexual stimulus” (GM III:8). This experience

of the “sweetness and fullness” of aesthetic experience is one for which the metaphor of “seduction”

seems especially apt. “Intoxication” (Rausch) is Nietzsche’s other preferred metaphor for it,8 as in this

passage from Twilight:

Without intoxication to intensify the excitability of the whole machine, there can be no

art….Above all, the intoxication of sexual excitement, the most ancient and original form of

intoxication. There is also an intoxication that comes in the wake of all great desires, all strong

affects; an intoxication of the festival, the contest, of the bravura of performance, of victory, of

all extreme movement the intoxication of cruelty; intoxication in destruction…or under the

influence of narcotics….The essential thing about intoxication is the feeling of fullness and

increasing strength. (TI “Skirmishes”:8)

The characterization of “intoxication” in terms of “the feeling of fullness and increasing strength” echoes

the characterization of aesthetic experience from the Genealogy noted earlier. In both cases, the

experience stimulates what we might call “feelings of aliveness,” counteracting therefore the depressant

8There is a helpful discussion of pertinent passages about Rausch in Richardson (2004: 229 ff.). As

Richardson writes, “something is beautiful [according to Nietzsche] if and only if it can (or does) produce Rausch” (p. 230). Less plausibly, and with insufficient textual evidence, Richardson tries to connect this to a selectionist theory of aesthetic experience, but the adequacy of that hypothesis does not matter for my purposes.

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effect of confrontation with the terrible truths about existence. “Art is the great stimulus to life,” as

Nietzsche says in Twilight (“Skirmishes”:24), but it does so in the same way that sexual arousal and

intoxication do so: by creating certain powerful feelings with a positive valence, feelings that stimulate

the subject and attract him to life.

Aesthetic experience, in short, is arousing, it produces a sublimated form of sexual pleasure. And it

is surely constitutive of a pleasurable experience, sexual or otherwise, that it attracts us. I shall refer to

this as Nietzsche’s minimal hedonic thesis, according to which pleasurable experience draws us towards

its object, rather than away from it. That is, of course, compatible with other motivations dominating

the minimal hedonic one, and also compatible with objects incompatible with hedonic experience also

attracting us. But the hypothesis on offer is that, per the minimal hedonic thesis, aesthetic experience

produces affective arousal sufficient to thwart the nihilistic impulse, the impulse to give up on life

because of the terrible truths about it.

But what aesthetic value could life possibly exemplify such that it produces the pleasurable effect

of Dionysian ecstasy that sustains our attachment to life? Here is the crucial connection with

Nietzsche’s critique of morality: in a culture in which moral norms predominate, nascent creative

geniuses like Goethe and Beethoven will not realize their potential. And if they fail to realize their

potential, then we shall be deprived of what we may call the “spectacle of genius,” that is, the spectacle

of human achievement that induces aesthetic pleasure, whether in the clearly aesthetic realm (for

example, Beethoven) or on the historical stage (for example, Napoleon). Life without music is a

“mistake”, Nietzsche famously says in an aphorism from Twilight, and the point can be generalized: life

without the spectacle of genius could not arouse aesthetic pleasure, and so would deprive us of a

“justification” for existence, that is, a desire to live and enjoy that aesthetic experience. Since suffering

is essential for the realization of genius—as we learned from Nietzsche’s speculative moral psychology--

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the “justification” of existence in the sense just described will require the affirmation of suffering as

well.

Truth, Knowledge and Perspectivism

We come finally to one of the more perplexing aspects of Nietzsche’s writings, his various

remarks about truth and knowledge. Even if we put to one side a very early essay that he never

published (probably wisely) called “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,”9 it is still the case that his

“perspectivism” (as it is commonly known) poses interpretive difficulties. The difficulty arises from the

fact that, on the one hand, Nietzsche makes claims that seem to deny that any perspective on the world

has any epistemic privilege over any other, that is, has objectively more warrant or justification; and, on

the other hand, that he repeatedly makes claims for which he appears to claim an epistemic privilege,

i.e., he appears to claim that they constitute knowledge and so, among other things, must be true.

So, on the skeptical side, he claims that “facts is precisely what there is not, only

interpretations” (WP 481), which echoes his remark in published work that even if his claim about will to

power “is only an interpretation too--….well, then, so much the better” (BGE 22).10 A few sections later

in the same work, he asserts that “the erroneousness of the world we think we live in is the most certain

and solid fact that our eyes can still grab hold of” (BGE 34), a claim that, however, seems to suppose that

we know one “fact”! In The Gay Science, in a famous passage on “perspectivism,” he declares that “we

have no organ at all for knowing, or for ‘truth’: we ‘know’ (or believe, or fancy) just as much as may be

useful, in the interest of the human herd, the species” (GS 354). And in the most famous passage on

perspectivism in the Genealogy, Nietzsche writes that “[t]here is only a perspective seeing, only a

perspective ‘knowing’” though he adds that the more “affects” (or interests) we bring to bear on an

9For doubts about the cogency of the argument this early essay, and evidence that Nietzsche changed his

view significantly thereafter, see Clark (1990) 10

In context, it is clear the target here is a kind of phenomenalist “positivism, which halts at phenomena” (WP 481). That kind of phenomenalism is widely rejected, of course.

26

object, “the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity’ be” (GM III:12) (the

quotation marks on “objectivity” are Nietzsche’s).

Despite these skeptical-sounding remarks, Nietzsche also announces that, “All credibility, all

good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses” (BGE 134), and that “reality is not

encountered at all” unless we “accept the testimony of the senses,” which means that metaphysics and

theology do not give us knowledge of reality (TI III:3). In passages like these, Nietzsche sounds more like

a logical positivist than a postmodern skeptic. So too Nietzsche’s naturalism, noted earlier, leads him to

repeatedly claim that naturalistic explanation for phenomena are epistemically superior to alternatives.

So, for example, he complains that moral and religious explanations appeal only to “imaginary causes”

(TI VI:6), and thus “believ[e] in realities which are no realities” (TI VII:1). Or similarly elsewhere: “in

Christianity neither morality nor religion has even a single point of contact with reality” (A:15).

How are we to reconcile the apparently skeptical-sounding remarks in some of the passages just

quoted with Nietzsche’s apparent confidence in the correctness of natural as opposed to religious or

moral explanations of phenomena? We may distinguish three possible readings.

First, perhaps perspectivism just is Protagoreanism, that is, an endorsement of the most radical

form of relativism associated with the Protagorean dictum “man is the measure of all things.” All claims

about what is true and knowable have no objective standing at all, they are all dependent on the

perspective of the person making the claim. We have already seen evidence that Nietzsche thinks all

evaluative judgments are affective, that is, products of the non-rational emotional responses persons

have to different states of affairs. But Nietzsche, as we have also seen, believes that nature itself “is

value-less” and that all value (Werthe) is “bestowed” by humans onto this value-free nature (GS 301).

But judgments about what we ought to believe in light of the evidence also depend on values—norms

for what we ought to believe--and it is hard to see why those values should be exempt from Nietzschean

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skepticism. All knowing is, after all, as Nietzsche argues in the Genealogy passage on perspectivism

(GM III:12), animated by affects (or interests), so how could it claim to be epistemically special or

reliable? Notice, of course, that the target here is explicitly epistemic, suggesting that norms of

epistemic warrant answer to interests and affects that, themselves, have no independent standing as

reliable trackers of the truth. But that would mean that there could be an objective truth, but it would

forever be beyond the ken of affective knowers like us! Nietzsche’s view then would combine a kind of

Protagoreanism about knowledge, with a kind of naturalized Kantianism about what is true or real—

what is true or real is beyond our ken because of the psychological facts that condition our “knowledge”

of the world. That kind of reading would be hard to square with Nietzsche’s professed skepticism about

the Kantian distinction between the world as it appears, and the world as it really is “in-itself” (see Leiter

1994: 338), and it also imposes an interpretive burden to explain away all of Nietzsche’s empiricist and

naturalistic claims which typically sound as if he thinks they represent an epistemically privileged view of

reality. Still, as I wrote nearly twenty years ago, this kind of Protagorean reading might maintain that “in

best Sophistic fashion, [Nietzsche] appreciates the rhetorical value of epistemically loaded—but

semantically empty—language,” and so this reading has to be a live possibility, though one that still

await a persuasive defense (1994: 339).11

More common in the secondary literature has been a different strategy, namely, trying to

“explain away” not Nietzsche’s apparent epistemic confidence in empiricism and naturalism, but rather

the apparently skeptical import of his remarks asbout perspectivism (Clark 1990 is the locus classicus,

though see Clark 1998 for modifications; cf. Leiter 1994 for a related account). On Maudemarie Clark’s

influential and subtle reading, Nietzsche began his philosophical career as a NeoKantian, who thought

that all knowledge is of the phenomenal world—the world as it appears to cognizers like us—and thus

11

Meyer (2014) defends a kind of Protagorean reading of Nietzsche’s perspectivism, though one he argues is compatible with a naturalism that privileges the relationalist ontology that is supported by what Nietzsche took to be the best science of his day.

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everything we believed about the world necessarily falsified reality as it is “in-itself,” since, of course, we

could know nothing of the noumenal world. Gradually, Nietzsche came to abandon the idea of the

thing-in-itself as incoherent, and thus in his final works realized there were no grounds for thinking

empirical knowledge of the world “falsified” a reality-in-itself that didn’t even exist. At that point, he

became an unabashed naturalist and empiricist. Scholars, however, have questioned whether Nietzsche

really abandons the idea that our claims about the world falsify it (e.g., Anderson 1996).

One of the key passages for Clark’s interpretation is Nietzsche’s own accounting of the evolution

of his views on these topics in Twilight of the Idols, where he writes about “How the ‘True World’ Finally

Became a Fable.” Here Nietzsche lays out, in six stages, the “error” of our belief in (to use Kantian

terminology) the noumenal realm (the “true world” of the title). In this history, the crucial moments

come in Nietzsche’s stages 4 and 5:

4. The true world—unattainable? At any rate, unattained. And being unattined, also unknown.

Consequently, not consoling, redeeming, or obligating: how could something unknown obligate

us?

5. The “true” world—an idea which is no longer useful for anything, not even obligating—an

idea which has become useless and superfluous—consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it!

Notice, however, that the grounds for "abolishing" the idea of the noumenal world given here are not,

e.g., that it is unintelligible, or that reality is necessarily perspectival, but rather that the idea of such a

world is not "useful." This suggests a third possible reading, which we might call “pragmatic.” Perhaps,

the pragmatic reading says, there is a way things really are as seen from no perspective at all; but the

possibility of such a world makes no difference to us, since we can know nothing about it. Practically

speaking, what Kant calls the "phenomenal" world is all that matters. This certainly seems to be

Nietzsche's posture in the passage from Twilight, and it is at least consistent with the epistemic

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emphasis of GM III:12, which, like the view described here, is officially agnostic about the (metaphysical)

question of the existence of the noumenal world.

This would also fit nicely with the fact that Nietzsche’s primary objections are to the practical

consequences of acknowledging the existence of a world beyond our cognitive ken, not to the existence

of such a world. As he puts it in the Nachlass: "It is of cardinal importance that one should abolish the

true [i.e., noumenal] world. It is the great inspirer of doubt and devaluator in respect of the world we

are: it has been our most dangerous attempt yet to assassinate life" (WP 583; cf. Poellner 2001: 115-

119). He makes the same point even more clearly in a series of four "propositions" from Twilight of the

Idols written around the same time as the Nachlass passage; I quote only the two most relevant ones:

Second proposition. The criteria which have been bestowed on the "true being" of things

are the criteria of non-being, of naught; the "true world" has been constructed out of

contradiction to the actual world....

Third proposition. To invent fables about a world "other" than this one has no meaning at

all, unless an instinct of slander, detraction, and suspicion against life has gained the upper

hand in us: in that case, we avenge ourselves against life with a phantasmagoria of "another,"

a "better" life. (TI III:6)

These are, again, practical objections to the idea of a “true” world, not metaphysical ones. Thus, on this

third reading, the skeptical remarks in Nietzsche pertain to the pernicious idea of a “true” world beyond

our cognitive grasp, but with respect to the world we can know, naturalistic and empiricist methods

reign supreme.

These do not exhaust the possibilities. Recently, for example, Nietzsche has been read as a

thorough-going Pyrrhonian skeptic (e.g., Berry 2011), a reading which sheds interesting light on many

portions of the corpus, though, again, has difficulty with Nietzsche’s confident endorsement of

naturalistic claims. A different possibility, noted, for example, in Gemes (1992), is that Nietzsche, self-

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taught as he was in philosophy, should not be thought to have coherent or sensible views on general

questions of metaphysics and epistemology, which were not, in any case, his real interest. His real

concern was in the overestimation of the value of truth in the post-Socratic world, a theme Nietzsche

treats from The Birth of Tragedy through the Genealogy. Since questions of value are the dominant

questions in his corpus, and arguably where Nietzsche’s greatest insights lay, perhaps we should

dispense with the attempt to reconstruct a Nietzschean theory of truth or knowledge altogether. I find

myself increasingly sympathetic to that view.12

References to Nietzsche

I have consulted a variety of existing English translations by Walter Kaufmann, R.J. Hollingdale, or

Maudemarie Clark and Alan Swensen (except as noted, below, for the material in Philosophy and Truth),

and then made modifications based on Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe

in 15 Bänden, ed. G. Colli & M. Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980); where there is no existing English

edition, the translation is my own. Nietzsche's works are cited as follows, unless otherwise noted:

roman numerals refer to major parts or chapters in Nietzsche's works; Arabic numerals refer to sections,

not pages. I use the standard abbreviations for Nietzsche’s works, as follows: The Antichrist (A); Beyond

Good and Evil (BGE); The Birth of Tragedy (BT); Daybreak (D); Ecce Homo (EH); The Gay Science (GS);

Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (PTAG); Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s

Notebooks of the Early 1870’s, ed. & trans. D. Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979)

(PT, cited by page number); Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Z); Twilight of the Idols (TI); The Will to Power

(WP).

Other References

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12

Thanks to Justin Coates and Michael Forster for comments on an earlier draft.

31

and Philosophy,” Nietzsche-Studien 25: 307-341.

Berry, Jessica. 2011. Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press.

Clark, Maudemarie. 1990. Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

-----. 1998. “On Knowledge, Truth and Value: Nietzsche’s Debt to Schopenhauer and the Development

of his Empiricism,” in C. Janaway (ed.), Willing and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s

Educator (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Gemes, Ken. 1992. “Nietzsche’s Critique of Truth,” reprinted in Richardson & Leiter (2001).

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Katsafanas, Paul. 2005. “Nietzsche’s Theory of Mind: Consciousness and Conceptualization,” European

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Handbook of Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Leiter, Brian. 1994. “Perspectivism in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals,” in R. Schacht (ed.),

Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality (Berkeley: University of California Press).

-----. 2002. Nietzsche on Morality (London: Routledge).

-----. 2007. “Nietzsche’s Theory of the Will,” Philosophers’ Imprint 7 (September 2007): 1-15.

-----. 2013. “Nietzsche’s Naturalism Reconsidered,” in K. Gemes & J. Richardson (eds.), The Oxford

Handbook of Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

32

-----. 2014. “The Truth is Terrible,” in D. Came (ed.), Nietzsche on Morality and the Value of Life (Oxford:

Oxford University Press).

Meyer, Matthew. 2014. Reading Nietzsche Through the Ancients: An Analysis of Becoming,

Perspectivism, and the Principle of Non-Contradiction (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014).

Nehamas, Alexander. 1985. Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).

Poellner, Peter. 2001. “Perspectival Truth,” in Richardson & Leiter (2001).

Railton, Peter. 2012. “Nietzsche’s Normative Theory? The Art and Skill of Living Well,” in C.

Janaway & S. Robertson (eds.), Nietzsche, Naturalism, and Normativity (Oxford: Oxford

University Press).

Riccardi, Mattia. 2013. “Nietzsche on the Superficiality of Consciousness,” in M. Dries (ed.), Nietzsche

on Consciousness and the Embodied Mind (Berlin: de Gruyter).

Richardson, John. 1996. Nietzsche’s System. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

-----. 2004. Nietzsche’s New Darwinism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Richardson, John and Brian Leiter (eds). 2001. Nietzsche. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Robertson, Simon. 2012. “The Scope Problem—Nietzsche, the Moral, Ethical, and Quasi-Aesthetic,” in

C. Janaway & S. Robertson (eds.), Nietzsche, Naturalism and Normativity (Oxford: Oxford

University Press).

Rosenthal, David. 2005. Consciousness and Mind . Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Sinhababu, Neil. 2007. “Vengeful Thinking and Moral Epistemology,” in B. Leiter & N. Sinhababu (eds.),

Nietzsche and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Wegner, Daniel. 2002. The Illusion of Conscious Will. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.