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: Nietzsches Life and Intellectual Formation Born in 1844 in Rcken, 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 fathers 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, Germanys 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 Rischls recommendation alone. (He subsequently completed a thesis on Diogenes Laertius, a thirdcentury 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 worseuninterrupted three-day migraine[s], accompanied by laborious vomiting of phlegm (EH I:1) is one description Nietzsche offersuntil 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 1

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 Nietzsches 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 Schopenhauers The World as Will and Representation and Friedrich Langes 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 wellof reading facts without falsfiying them by interpretation (A:52).

Even more important for understanding Nietzsche, however, is what he learned from his study of the ancients. Nietzsches 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 timeand 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:

...[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 superficialout 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 Schopenhauers 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 Hegels 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 Schopenhauers idea of the unalterability of character, the idea that there is a certain psychic core of the person that remains unchanged throughout ones life, even if it admits of some pruningmuch as the

Schopenhauer 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.

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. Schopenhauers 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 Langes History of Materialism. Lange was both a NeoKantianpart of the back to Kant revival in German philosophy after the eclipse of Hegeland 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 Helmholtzs work in the 1840s and after). Materialism exploded on the intellectual scene in Germany the 1850s in such volumes as Jacob Moleschotts The Physiology of Food, Karl Vogts Blind Faith and Science, and Ludwig Bchners Force and Matter. Force and Matter was a particular sensation, which went through multiple editions and became a best-seller with its message, as Bchner 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 Kants transcendental idealism by proving the dependence of our knowledge on the physiological peculiarities of the human sensory apparatus. We know from Nietzsches letters that he viewed Langes 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 LangeI dont need anything else (ibid.).

These myriad intellectual influencesthe Sophists and Presocratics, Schopenhauer, German Materialism, Neo-Kantianism, among otherscome together in Nietzsches 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. Nietzsches Style and his Philosophy Before we turn to Nietzsches 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. Nietzsches 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 6

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 selfdevelopment of a cold, pure, divinely indifferent dialecticwhile 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 abstractand 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 iswhich 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 peoples 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 readers evaluative attitudes. The discursive mode of most philosophy, by contrast, is inert

See Katsafanas (2013) for useful discussion.

when it comes to reorienting the non-rational psychebut 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 Nietzsches 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 nonrational dispositions that actually explain our beliefs and values tend to vindicate them.) Nietzsches 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 Nietzsches 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. 8

Consciousness is a surface [Oberflche] (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 consciousnesssomething 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 spirits activityremains unconscious and unfelt (GS:333), that everything of which we become consciouscauses 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

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, Nietzsches 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 willingNor did one doubt that all the antecedents of an act, its causes, were to be sought in consciousness and would be found there once soughtas 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 anythingit 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 dreamsbut 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 Nietzsches 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 causalthen 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 Nietzsches 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 drives ends, whatever they may be. Sometimes, of course, 11

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 animalinstinctively strives forhis maximum feeling of power [Machtgefhl] (GM III:7). On either renderingas 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 [Ernhrung] 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, butin 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 Nietzsches doctrine of will to power.

Mostly 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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Nietzsches 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 Gods 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 institutions or practices 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 moralitieslike the moralities of all the worlds major religions, which preach denial of basic human desires for sexual gratification, cruelty, and powerin 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 Nietzsches 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. 13

On Nietzsches 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 Nietzsches 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 wasnt 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 processfor example, the desire of oppressed peoples to seek revenge against their oppressorsthen 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 14

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. Nietzsches Critique of Morality and the Aesthetic Justification of Existence Nietzsches 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 Nietzsches 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. Nietzsches 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 Nietzsches 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 Nietzsches two most frequently named and closely related targets, Christian and Kantian morality, share such assumptions about agency. Nietzsches central objection to morality is that it is harmful to the highest human beings, the exemplars 15

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 thegood, 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[Mchtigkeit 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 evolutionthan 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 contentmentas an ideal (Z Pref:3), while also revealing that it was preciselythe last men the most despicable men who invented happiness [Glck] in the first place (Pref:5). To be sure, Nietzsche allows that he himself and the free spirits will be cheerful orgay [frlich] they are, after all, the proponents of the gay science. His point is

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

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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 usbetter; 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

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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 potentiallyexcellent 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, Nietzsches 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 andgood-naturedness so often celebrated in contemporary popular culture. A great manis 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 manwants nosympathetic heart, but servants, tools; in his intercourse with men, he is always intent on making something out of them (WP 962).

Note 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 rhetori cal 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 activityhe 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 incharacter (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, thesuffering or other hardships it has involved. (Someone who says, I would gladly live my life again, except for my first 20

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 thehighest 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

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 Nietzsches 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 inexhaustibilitythat 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 Nietzsches understanding of aesthetic value, an account which, unsurprisingly, is articulated in opposition to Kants. Kant makes two kinds of mistakes in Nietzsches view, one about art, the other about knowledge. Nietzsche writes: Kant intended to honor art when, among the
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 Kants idea that the mark of aesthetic value is that it pleases without interest (GM III:6), endorsing instead Stendahls 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 insensuality [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 Nietzsches 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 destructionor 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
There 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 Nietzsches 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 Nietzsches 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 geniusas we learned from Nietzsches 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 Nietzsches 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
9

For 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.

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object, the more complete will our concept of this thing, our objectivity be (GM III:12) (the quotation marks on objectivity are Nietzsches). 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 Nietzsches 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 Nietzsches 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 valuesnorms for what we ought to believe--and it is hard to see why those values should be exempt from Nietzschean 26

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! Nietzsches 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 Nietzsches 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 Nietzsches 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 loadedbut semantically emptylanguage, 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 Nietzsches 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 Clarks influential and subtle reading, Nietzsche began his philosophical career as a NeoKantian, who thought that all knowledge is of the phenomenal worldthe world as it appears to cognizers like usand thus
Meyer (2014) defends a kind of Protagorean reading of Nietzsches 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 didnt 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 Clarks interpretation is Nietzsches 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 Nietzsches stages 4 and 5: 4. The true worldunattainable? At any rate, unattained. And being unattined, also unknown. Consequently, not consoling, redeeming, or obligating: how could something unknown obligate us? 5. The true worldan idea which is no longer useful for anything, not even obligatingan idea which has become useless and superfluousconsequently, 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 28

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 Nietzsches 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: 115119). 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 Nietzsches 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 Nietzsches 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, Smtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bnden, 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 Nietzsches 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 Nietzsches Notebooks of the Early 1870s, 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 Anderson, R. Lanier. 1996. Overcoming Charity: The Case of Maudemarie Clarks Nietzsche on Truth
12

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

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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: Nietzsches Debt to Schopenhauer and the Development of his Empiricism, in C. Janaway (ed.), Willing and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsches Educator (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Gemes, Ken. 1992. Nietzsches Critique of Truth, reprinted in Richardson & Leiter (2001). Janz, Curt Paul. Friedrich Nietzsche: Biographie (3 volumes). Munich: Hanser. Katsafanas, Paul. 2005. Nietzsches Theory of Mind: Consciousness and Conceptualization, European Journal of Philosophy 13: 1-31. -----. 2013. Nietzsches Philosophical Psychology, in K. Gemes & J. Richardson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Leiter, Brian. 1994. Perspectivism in Nietzsches Genealogy of Morals, in R. Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality (Berkeley: University of California Press). -----. 2002. Nietzsche on Morality (London: Routledge). -----. 2007. Nietzsches Theory of the Will, Philosophers Imprint 7 (September 2007): 1-15. -----. 2013. Nietzsches Naturalism Reconsidered, in K. Gemes & J. Richardson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

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-----. 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. Nietzsches 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. Nietzsches System. Oxford: Oxford University Press. -----. 2004. Nietzsches New Darwinism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Richardson, John and Brian Leiter (eds). 2001. Nietzsche. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robertson, Simon. 2012. The Scope ProblemNietzsche, 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.

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