Chapter 5

Nietzsche’s Battle With Philosophy

(created April 3 2016)

(copied to Nietzsche Revised Fragments October 2017)

It often seems, when I eavesdrop on my own thoughts and feelings and quietly attend to myself, as if I hear the tumultuous battle of wild parties. (Nietzsche, ‘On Moods’)

A philosopher: a man who constantly experiences, sees, hears, suspects, hopes, dreams extraordinary things […] a fateful man around whom snarling, quarrelling, discord and uncanniness is always going on. A philosopher: alas, a creature which often runs away from itself, is often afraid of itself – but which is too inquisitive not to keep ‘coming to itself’ again.

(Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil)

We are making an experiment with the truth! Perhaps mankind will thereby be destroyed! So be it! (Nietzsche, 1884 notebook entry)

Philosophy and Faith

The prime obstacle to understanding Nietzsche as every other philosopher is failure to understand the nature of philosophy. A crude example is when people are taken as philosophers because, in addressing matters that seem of universal interest, they speak in convoluted jargon: a speech or a book is accepted as philosophy insofar as it is unintelligible. This often happens nowadays, especially in academia, where so much of the audience, following the mass expansion of universities, is ignorant and lacks mental training. The culture of modernity generally, which places a premium on first impressions, sensationalism, celebrities and public opinion, encourages this frivolous attitude to philosophy, which, however, maintains an affectation of seriousness. Then there are misunderstandings due to preconceived ideas of what philosophers must address and how they must address it – for instance that Nietzsche speaks so much of apparent ‘psychological’ issues and sets forth his thought mainly in aphorisms rather than in orderly treatises, has led some readers and potential readers to altogether miss his intentions. Rhetoricians and demagogues are taken as philosophers because they make rousing speeches. Or poets are taken as philosophers because of their power to move the imagination. Then again philosophy is dismissed as ‘impractical’. All these miscomprehensions of philosophy are discussed by Plato and Aristotle. Still, it has to be acknowledged that the nature of philosophy is no ‘settled fact’. From Plato’s time onwards it has been contested, and it is in the nature of philosophy that it should be contested. Hegel maintained that the highest result of philosophy is precisely the concept of philosophy. The majority of philosophers since Hegel have disagreed with his specific conception of philosophy, but they too, in the main, have made the nature of philosophy a leading concern. This includes Nietzsche.

There are people today, as there were in Plato’s time, who deny the possibility of philosophy. In this area, however, it is necessary to avoid mere semantic disputes and remain attentive to logical difficulties. In the early seventeenth century Francis Bacon rejected the whole of Classical Philosophy from Plato to late Scholasticism, but he kept the term ‘philosophy’ to apply to science. This meaning of ‘philosophy’ became common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such that the ‘Philosophical Transactions’ of the Royal Society was actually a scientific journal. The non-semantic issue is why previous philosophy is supposedly unacceptable and what should take its place. Assuredly Bacon’s adverse judgement on Classical Philosophy does not belong to any branch of modern science. In what sense, then, is this judgement itself philosophical? What is the basis of this judgement? These questions will be addressed at a later point of this chapter. It is noteworthy, however, just how difficult it is, even when wanting to break from the tradition, to dispense with the term ‘philosophy’. For his part, Nietzsche rejected the tradition, claimed to do so from insight, called himself a philosopher, and had contempt for the idea that philosophy could somehow reduce to science.

For all his hostility towards the classical tradition of philosophy, and all his doubts about the way classical philosophers claim to arrive at their knowledge, Nietzsche’s understanding of himself as a philosopher is inseparable from his belief that he has attained knowledge and is in search of truth. This applies to all stages of Nietzsche’s thought: ‘truth’, it would be fair to say, was his first word and his last. Nietzsche often speaks loosely, but only superficial readers could be misled. In The Birth of Tragedy he proposes that the ‘Socratic’ faith in plumbing the depths of reality through logical thinking, the faith that (in concert with Christianity) governed Western culture for two thousand years, has at last been revealed as unsustainable, so that now a new ‘tragic’ culture can rise up, inspired by the Greeks of the pre-philosophical ‘tragic age’ and by Richard Wagner in the present. This tragic culture, nonetheless, Nietzsche takes to rest on a vision which he does not hesitate to call ‘knowledge’ and ‘wisdom’. At once artistic and mystical, this vision is in no sense intended by Nietzsche as subjective; on the contrary, he understands it as making contact with what is ultimate, most real and most true.

What then justifies Nietzsche’s claims on behalf of Dionysian philosophy. What validates his intuition? The short answer is that at this level there is no such thing as justification or validation. There must after all be an end somewhere to justification. Nietzsche’s Dionysian philosophy, like every other philosophy without exception, is unprovable by anything external to itself, that is, it is either accepted as self-proving or it is rejected. Admittedly this is a simplification, for the Dionysian philosophy has many aspects, but in exploring and assessing it one must rely on unprovable intuition. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche sees implicit or explicit refusal of Dionysianism, paradigmatically in Socratism, as symptomatic of weakness – indeed he regards weakness as more or less the counterpart, within Dionysian philosophy, of Judeo-Christian sinfulness. But if the acceptance of Dionysian philosophy is a test of strength this is not a matter, at least not primarily, of conscious assent. There is no doctrine in Dionysianism as there is in Christianity, although the Dionysian condition (state of mind, state of being) can certainly be described from within, as Nietzsche does. In this context Nietzsche tries to bring to light the conflicts between affirmative and negative attitudes to life, the battle between strength and weakness which, when strength wins out, he calls ‘self-overcoming’ – for the strong self, he believes, tests itself, seeing it as weakness to rest content in any ‘completed’ self. This struggle against weakness is at the same time a struggle against the Judeo-Christian and Platonic culture that, Nietzsche believes, valorizes weakness. Nietzsche considers himself, and more especially his idealized self Zarathustra, as an embodiment of the affirmative spirit of Dionysus: the justification of Dionysianism is simply the capacity to imitate Zarathustra-Nietzsche, which depends on the presence or absence of inner strength, the instinct for life, the force of indestructible life.

Dionysianism, then, is not in the first instance a view, not even a worldview. Neither are Christianity or Platonism or Hinduism or other religions at bottom worldviews. Each of these is a faith, which is indeed, at a secondary level, expressed in views. In a loose sense one can speak of a faith as a worldview but this is strictly inaccurate. A view is a picture; if one cuts part of it out and inserts something else it is a different picture. Neither religions nor philosophies are views or pictures; this is why they are not theories made up of assertions or propositions. This is not what they are, but they testify to themselves in words as also in visual images and music – Nietzsche thought his musical composition ‘Hymn to Life’ expressed his philosophy better than his books. Philosophies and religions are faiths rather than views. Faith is what makes understanding possible, for without faith there is nothing to understand. Nietzsche describes Socratic-Platonic philosophy as faith in the redemptive power of theoretical knowledge. As will be argued below, he is wrong on this. But what he says of the classical tradition does apply to modern philosophy in its main currents since 1600. Until modern times the principal business of philosophy was not taken to be the provision of views. This changed when in the seventeenth century modern science became the model of philosophy. People now came to think of ‘philosophies’ on the model of the Copernican world-system. The ancients, they came to believe, must have had inadequate views because they lacked knowledge, meaning validated views. This conception of philosophy is present to some extent in Nietzsche, but his innermost convictions were different; the chief reason he did not complete his planned trreatise ‘The Will to Power’ is that he could not make himself believe that his business was to produce theories or doctrines. The idea of philosophy as worldview, however, has become entrenched in modernity, because faith has become incomprehensible.^[1] Faith itself is regarded as a view, such that various faiths are compared to one another as different views. 

 

A faith is not a view of any kind, in particular not (as a common misconception has it) a ‘dogmatic’ view. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra exhorts his disciples: ‘Remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak of superterrestrial hopes!’^[2] It would be more than faintly absurd to take this as an exhortation to harden in a particular view, closing one’s mind to other views. ‘Remaining faithful’ is understood by Nietzsche as an orientation of the will, specifically of the will as determined by the instinct for life, of the will that remains courageous in the face of life, embracing life wholeheartedly without fears or doubts implanted by other-worldly religions. Faith in this sense takes over the whole person: one’s being is determined by this will to life.^[3] Nietzsche is very clear that this (Dionysian-Zarathustrian) will to life is utterly different from the drive to self-preservation: Dionysians are prepared to sacrifice their individual lives for what they worship as the supreme value and reality, which is Life with a capital L – in fact the Dionysian spirit means losing oneself in this greater unity. In the chapter ‘Of Voluntary Death’ in Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche has his prophet declare: ‘I want to die myself, that you friends may love the earth more for my sake; and I want to become earth again, that I may have peace in her who bore me.’ In his works, fragments and letters Nietzsche frequently speaks of the possibility that his drive to philosophy will destroy him but is not distressed at this prospect. For Nietzsche, it is those who lack the Dionysian spirit who are afraid of death, even if on occasions they choose death as an escape from life. Nothing sets individual human beings apart more fundamentally than their strength (courage) or weakness (cowardice). Nothing is more contemptible than weakness. Nothing is more unworthy of Life than weakness.

 

Christianity too is a faith, not a view. As such it is an orientation of the will, in this case a will that loves God rather than affirms life. The fundamental orientation of the will of the Christian is to love God (an otherworldly God) with all one’s heart and all one’s strength and all one’s soul. Christianity distinguishes between strong and weak human beings, but strength or weakness in the face of God instead of in the face of Life. Nietzsche maintains that Christianity is ‘anti-life’, but most Christians, despite the Christian ascetical tradition, would not admit this; they would say that Life is not for them the Supreme Good that is God, but that nevertheless the love of God implies the love of Life. Here certain difficulties of the first importance arise the discussion of which must be deferred for the moment. The most cursory familiarity with Nietzsche is enough to show that his key ideas and arguments – meant to elucidate his faith, not to constitute it – revolve around the terms ‘life’, ‘world’, ‘affirm’, ‘deny’, ‘God’, ‘reality’, ‘truth’, ‘falsity’, ‘strong’, ‘weak’, ‘noble’, and a few others. It should also be clear that Nietzsche’s use of these terms (as is the case with any philosopher) should not be treated lightly, with their meanings accepted without further ado as this or that. Indeed Nietzsche’s arguments have such far-reaching ramifications that it is necessary to give the closest possible attention to his terms, including to ambiguities and shifts of meaning. In the above paragraph it was necessary to distinguish between ‘life’ and ‘Life’, the former applying to individuals, the latter to the all-encompassing ‘object’ of Dionysian worship. Whether or not this distinction is marked by a terminological device, to ignore it must result in a failure to understand Nietzsche. This often occurs when readers are eager to assimilate Nietzsche to a preconceived opinion or where commentators get carried away by their own jargon and ‘cause’. At present, the point is just to highlight that both Nietzsche’s Dionysianism and Christianity recognize an essential battle – a fight both of and for the respective faiths – between strength and weakness.

 

Classical Philosophy is for Nietzsche another ‘anti-life’ tradition. Socrates was afraid of life, and developed the ‘dialectic’ as an expedient for coping with life: instead of entering into life one theorized about it. Socrates, and then Plato, taught the weak how to look down on the strong. Together they founded a proto-Christian intellectual and ethical system which eventually merged with Christianity, achieving a reversal of ‘noble’ values; what in traditional aristocratic culture counted a good now counted as evil, what counted as wisdom was now foolishness. Nietzsche is not of course able to prove his claim that Christian-Platonic culture is a culture of weakness. But he relies on his rhetorical ability in depicting the alternative Dionysian-Zarathustrian values, and also, not to be underestimated, the already existing hostility, common in educated circles since the Renaissance, towards everything pre-modern. Nietzsche’s judgement on Christianity is not very different from Edward Gibbon’s. His impatience with Plato and Classical Philosophy generally is not very different from Francis Bacon’s. He is certainly more extreme than these authors, and his philosophical elucidations have a decidedly more radical intent. Bacon and Gibbon believed that pre-modern culture is a thing of the past, having given way to something much more satisfactory. Nietzsche is sure that modern culture is untenable due to the continuing but disguised rule of Christian-Platonic faith. Indeed he is sure that unless there occurs the most radical reorientation of faith in world history the human race is doomed.

 

Dionysianism and Christianity are faiths. So too, as Nietzsche says, is Socratism. But is the latter – which since Nietzsche takes it to determine the intellectual history of the West is better called Platonism – the kind of faith Nietzsche claims it to be? The Dionysian faith is oriented to Life, the Christian faith to the Judeo-Christian God. To what then is the faith of Platonism oriented? The answer is obvious: the faith not only of Platonism in the narrow sense of a particular school but of Classical Philosophy in general, is oriented to reason – not meaning rational theorizing so much as rational living. It is sometimes difficult for the modern secular mind to grasp what the Greek philosophers mean by reason. This is because, since about 1600, Western philosophy has for the most part operated with a truncated scientific conception of reason, as an instrument rather than an end. Francis Bacon said that the purpose of philosophy is ‘the relief of man’s estate’, by which he meant the material improvement of the human condition; reason, in his view, is the chief instrument to this purpose. Thomas Hobbes agreed, and the mainstream of modern philosophy down to the present has hardened in this view. Nietzsche himself declares that ‘reason is an instrument’.^[4] Now since it would be absurd for a faith to be oriented to an instrument, however valuable, it must be, modern philosophers have concluded, that Classical Greek Philosophy misconceives the nature of reason, namely by superstitiously making it divine and worshipping it like a god. Indeed the Greek philosophers did view reason (logos) as divine, as God, as The Divine Principle; accordingly they saw the task of philosophy as bringing reason to rule in individual and society. Modern philosophers think this a superstitious idea, because reason neither is an end in itself nor can it determine ends. Nietzsche’s judgement on the faith of Classical Philosophy has this much in common with the mainstream: he believes it is oriented to something non-existent. He has the same view of the Christian faith. Of course he sees his own faith of Dionysianism differently, as oriented to a reality, the supreme reality he calls Life.

 

Nietzsche thinks that weakness in the face of Life is an obstacle to Dionysian faith, and that overcoming this obstacle is what Dionysianism is all about. Christians think in the same way about that weakness in the face of God they call sinfulness. It is the same with the faith of Classical Philosophy: weakness in the face of reason is the main obstacle to the philosophical faith. No theme is more prominent in the writings of the Greek philosophers than the ‘all too human’ resistance to reason: most people do not want to ‘be reasonable’ in the sense of making reason rule within them.^[5] Now while Nietzsche is by no means fully consistent on this topic, the main thrust of his thought is to say that this resistance to reason, deplored by the Greek philosophers, is something positive, because what is resisted is an ‘anti-life’ ideology based on a fiction. Here Nietzsche recapitulates in his distinctive garb the sentiments of romanticism, particularly of Rousseau but also of many others in the great current of European romanticism from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, sentiments that have had a strong influence on Western culture through to the present. Nietzsche believes, exactly like Rousseau, that rationalistic culture has stifled the instincts, has held down, repressed and ‘slandered’ the real life-force of humans in favour of the fictional ideal of a higher life of reason. Like Rousseau, Nietzsche wants to see human beings who flow-out rather than hold-back. And he wants a culture that creates the flowing-out type of individual.

 

It is not difficult to see how Nietzsche’s Dionysian faith must look from the vantage points of Christian faith and (classical) philosophical faith. To a Christian it must look like an attempt to validate sinfulness, or simply as defiance, the ultimate blasphemy of calling on everyone to be their own god. The Platonist must see it as misology, that is hatred of reason motivated by love of the ego-self, the ‘lowest part of the soul’. These judgements, obviously, are not very different, which is why it was so easy for Christianity and Platonism to come together. What is important to notice, however, is that neither early Christianity nor Platonism looked with disfavour at the historical Dionysian cults as these existed through to the fourth century A. D. and beyond. The earliest literary source on these cults is The Bacchae of Euripides, written in the late fifth century B. C.; in this work it is traditional Greek conservatism that resists Dionysus. Plato did not take an oppositional attitude to Dionysus; there is no reason why he should have. In one major Dionysus myth, which Plato surely knew, Dionysus is the god who, after being killed and devoured by the wicked Titans and after Zeus in his rage (Dionysus was his son) reduced the Titans to the ashes from which the human race emerged, is the ‘divine fragment’ that remains in all human beings.^[6] In fact Dionysus was more congenial to the Socratic-Platonic type of Greek philosopher than any other god, including in his persona as the god of exuberant life, ecstacy and madness.^[7] So little did his affirmation of life disturb the ascetic Orphics that he was their leading deity. More than any other god he was associated with belief in an afterlife. The idea of a divine fragment or ‘spark’ in the human soul seems to have been taken from the Orphic Dionysus by the Pythagoreans and been passed, now understood as the faculty of reason, to Socrates and Plato, thence to Aristotle, the Stoics, Neoplatonists, and Neoplatonic Christianity. Naturally Christians cannot admit the divinity of Dionysus but in the early period and for most of the history of Christianity (puritan tendencies aside) they have been less offended by Dionysus than fascinated by him. Friedrich Hölderlin, the favourite poet of the young Nietzsche, in his late work associated Christ and Dionysus and on occasions identified them.^[8] Richard Wagner was an enthusiast for Dionysus at the same time he was composing the text of his quasi-Christian Parsifal. His approval of Nietzsche’s Dionysian philosophy in The Birth of Tragedy did not stop Wagner’s drift towards Christianity.

 

Now strictly speaking there is no reason why Nietzsche should have been constrained by the character of the ancient Dionysian cults or the attitudes towards them of Greek philosophers and Christians. He is free to use the Dionysian symbolism in any way he wants, and to call his philosophy Dionysian without regard to the historical cults. The method of The Birth of Tragedy is typical of Nietzsche, for while he clearly thinks his ideas can be clarified by attending to the historical cults he does not discuss these in detail. He makes no use of historical sources, not even The Bacchae of Euripides. The point here is not one of scholarly rectitude but of the philosophical meaning of Dionysus. Euripides, recognized by Nietzsche as the most reflective of the Greek tragedians, believed the Dionysian cults to demonstrate something of importance in human life, but although The Bacchae would be a fitting context for exploring the meaning of life-affirmation, Nietzsche makes no use of this work, relying instead on his own polemical formulas. Other Greek sources, left undiscussed by Nietzsche, also bear on the issue. The most important is unquestionably Plato, from whom Nietzsche thinks to derive his picture of Socrates as an exemplary ‘life-denier’.

 

As mentioned, Plato is not hostile to Dionysus. But this does not go to the heart of the matter. In view of the fundamental antagonism Nietzsche posits between Dionysus and Socratic-Platonic philosophy it is worth noticing what Plato himself takes as his and Socrates’ chief adversary. This is plainly stated in practically all Plato’s works and can be taken as definitive for Greek philosophy as a whole (excepting of course the materialists): philosophy, considered as a way of life, is opposed to and by the life devoted to pleasure, money and honour; at a secondary level, considered as reflective wisdom, philosophy is opposed to and by sophistry, namely the pseudo-justification, in pseudo-wisdom, of the non-philosophical life. It is true, as Nietzsche says, that Plato makes lack of self-restraint, specifically inability and unwillingness to control impulses, a mark of the non-philosopher. However it does not seem right to identify this kind of ‘undisciplined’ person with the Dionysian type. Socrates was condemned by conventional respectable Athenians, just the same sort of people, to judge from Euripides, who were suspicious of Dionysus. Of the various anti-philosophical figures appearing in Plato’s dialogues the most striking is Callicles from the Gorgias, who, as has often been noted, rather resembles Nietzsche in claiming that philosophy is an expedient for the weak. The sphere in which Callicles lives, moves, and has his being, is the normal life of the city. His insistence that all mature competent people must be interested above all in power, money and pleasure, is not in the slightest suggestive of a Dionysian temper. Callicles is first of all a non-philosopher, thus he is worldly, but through his intellectual-sophistical defence of non-philosophy he is also an anti-philosopher. The worldliness of Callicles is world-affirmation, not life-affirmation in the Dionysian sense. The Dionysian individual, on the other hand, as revealed by the ancient sources and according to Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, is unworldly, not least because casting off individual identity for a mystical feeling of unity is the antithesis of what the worldly person desires.

 

It is a common error of romanticism to conflate the life of reason with civilized life, the person of reason with the fundamentally unimaginative philistine. Rousseau is the best example of this attitude but it is also found in Nietzsche. First as a student and then as a university professor Nietzsche developed a repugnance towards the common run of scholars who he believed had lost the spark of life in their orderly, methodical, laborious, scientific, ‘rational’ inquiry. There were exceptions, he admitted, like his friend Rohde and colleague Burckhardt, whose aesthetic sensibility proved they were more than scholars, but on the whole, he thought, contemporary European culture was crippled by theoreticism and intellectualism: the expansive emotional dimension of the mind was held down, because considered too dangerous to the safe predicable life recognized as civilization. Attacks on ‘lifeless’ scholars are frequent in Nietzsche’s writings and letters. His native suspicion and hostility to abstract intellectualism was reinforced when from 1865-66 he came under the influence of Arthur Schopenhauer. It would be unfair to say that Nietzsche confuses Socrates with the average nineteenth century German academic, but his sweeping condemnations of the rationalist tradition in philosophy as a protective shield for the weak do not distinguish an authentic from a corrupted life of reason. Nietzsche is not wrong to see the general culture of his day as moulded by the same type of rationalism that reigns in universities, but his constant insinuation that behind all this stands Socrates and Plato is remarkable. Probably, like many other moderns, Nietzsche fell into thinking of Classical Philosophy as partaking of the dogmatism of Christian theology and thus as supporting an intellectual culture of timid conformism. Doubtless the classical philosophers can be used in this way, as can any thinker, including Nietzsche. To stigmatize Socrates and Plato as lacking in ‘life’, however, is to stand the truth on its head, and is most readily intelligible as a rhetorical device for avoiding the issue. Nietzsche is quite right to represent ancient Dionysianism as an attack on ‘lifeless rationality’ but he seems not to realize that this kind of rationality can only be pseudo, which far from being promoted by Socrates and Plato is attacked by them.

 

A Dionysian society is difficult to imagine; likewise a steady Dionysian life-style. The ancient Greek cults existed to recognize and celebrate one side, the ‘irrational’ side, of human nature. In The Bacchae the chief issue is whether the divinity of Dionysus is going to be acknowledged by the city (Thebes); while the play certainly indicates that failure to do this must result in disaster, this is not the same as saying that man is at bottom irrational or that Socrates’ type of philosophy is invalid. Nietzsche makes Dionysianism mean more than it does in The Bacchae, and while he reads this embellished meaning back into the Greek cults this is not his primary interest. Above all it is the ‘tragic vision’ that Nietzsche sees as the philosophical heart of his Dionysianism. This vision reveals ‘the abyss’ that is ‘meaningless’ and ‘absurd’ but it also affords ‘the metaphysical consolation that life is at bottom, notwithstanding the constant flux of appearances, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable.’^[9] The label ‘Dionysianism’ is shorthand; it is a clue to Nietzsche’s philosophical stance. Especially today does it seem difficult to find a non-arbitrary place from which to interpret and assess Nietzsche: the decay of recognized meaning and standards, of which Nietzsche spoke so much himself, seems to pull his own thought into the void, from which it can be rescued only by an act of will, intent on using Nietzsche in some way. Is there any alternative to conceding that Nietzsche, like every philosopher, belongs to whomever has the power to appropriate him? Is there any Archimedian standpoint from where one can look over and judge competing ‘worldviews’ and ‘philosophies’?

 

 

The Philosophy of Relativism

 

It must be admitted that there is indeed no ‘neutral’ point of view for interpreting and judging philosophers. However this admission is very likely to be misunderstood. The usual attitude in the present day is that there are many philosophies each of which is a point of view or perspective that can be judged from other points of view but not from a purportedly neutral ‘view from nowhere’, because such a thing cannot exist. To the question of whether this attitude is itself a point of view the normal response is to turn away in perplexity or impatience, but some recent Nietzscheans, notably Rorty, are prepared to say that while ‘perspectivism’ (to use this convenient term) is admittedly a point of view, they have no interest in justifying it and see no need to do so, but that they ‘affirm’ it politically; moreover Rorty and like-minded Nietzscheans see all their specific political causes as rooted in perspectivism and thus as themselves requiring no ‘justification’ beyond assent from those in the ‘perspectivist community’. Perhaps never before has a ‘philosophy’ (Rorty is not happy with this word for what he does) sealed itself in such protective armour as this. But although this position is certainly unassailable from a purportedly neutral (in fact non-neutral) ‘point of view’, it can be criticized by philosophy, namely by reason itself. Of course perspectivists would dismiss this suggestion, but at least on Rorty’s way of thinking it can only be politics that decides, not rational arguments. Philosophy, then, in the sense rejected by Rorty and other perspectivists, will itself reject perspectivism, including its politics, but will insist that this is not an essentially political rejection: it will reject perspectivism for being at odds with reason. This is what Plato and Aristotle did. But since in their treatment of this issue Plato and Aristotle assume the existence of and validity of reason, the perspectivists pay no attention to their arguments.

 

Although the problem of self-reference in relation to perspectivism quickly leads to bewildering complexities it is not intuitively difficult to comprehend. What requires ‘training’ of a particular sort is the conviction that it is not a real problem. At bottom, failure to admit the problem is just refusal to admit the authority of reason, a refusal not responsive to the counter-arguments of reason. Does Nietzsche, then, make this refusal? As observed above, he surely does, but in a sense quite different to that of the perspectivists. The difference is that the perspectivists refuse the authority of reason formally, by refusing authority itself, whereas Nietzsche refuses authority substantively, by refusing that which is held to be authoritative. To be sure, Nietzsche does deny the authoritative status of reason (thus of Classical Philosophy) as such. But when he inveighs against the metaphysical concepts of Being and Absolute Truth, when he speaks of the Death of God and the coming of nihilism, when he denounces the Platonic tradition as dogmatic, he is rejecting one particular type of authority. Speaking of the Christian god in The Antichrist, Nietzsche explains: ‘What sets us apart is not that we are unable to find God, either in history, or in nature, or behind nature, but that we regard what has been honoured as God, not as “godly” but as pitiable, as injurious; not as a mere error, but as a crime against life.’^[10] Nietzsche’s self-confessed discipleship of the god Dionysus is enough to show that he does not reject authority as such; rather does Dionysianism as he understands it involve the divinization of ‘life’ such that refusal of its authority is the ultimate ‘crime’. Far from sharing the anti-authoritarian sentiment of the perspectivists (a larger group than the New Nietzscheans or Nietzscheans of any kind) Nietzsche is anti-anti-authoritarian; on many occasions he expresses contempt for anarchists, and in general for people who are incapable of or hate obedience.

 

The perspectivists (especially the New Nietzscheans) take authority itself, understood as an oppressive power with ‘the final word’, as the operative meaning of Classical Philosophy. In this way they gloss over the content of the tradition; they are always objecting to dogmatism (what they see as such) but pay scant attention to that which is dogmatically maintained. Derrida, for instance, in his criticism of Heidegger, has little or no interest in the actual content of Heidegger’s philosophy of Being but limits himself to castigating Heidegger’s ‘nostalgic’ search for a new ‘primary signified’. This is the rule with perspectivist commentators no matter what they discuss: once the presence of ‘essentialism’ (non-perspectivism) is exposed they see their work as done. Moreover since first-order critique gives way to meta-critique it is unnecessary to acquire knowledge of anything. This accounts for the sameness and airiness of this literature, with a small number of meta-critical points being constantly rehearsed in somewhat varying jargon; rounded interpretations of philosophers are not to be found, but meta-critical formulas are brought to bear at key pressure-points, resulting in ‘deconstructive’ dismissal.

 

It is not just the Christian god that Nietzsche finds ungodly, but the Platonic Good and more generally the morality affirmed in Classical Philosophy. Nietzsche’s objections, however, are substantive, revolving around the point that Christianity and Platonism cultivate weakness. This criticism would have very little meaning were it not for the authority that Nietzsche sees as residing in ‘life’, the divine authority of Dionysus. Nor can it be plausibly maintained (the expedient of perspectivist commentators) that ‘life’ in Nietzsche is synonymous with ‘diversity’, such that ‘weakness’ means ‘dogmatism’. Nietzsche thinks and says the opposite, namely that refusal of all authority (relativism) is the mark of the ‘weak personality’. Is it Nietzsche’s view, then, that the Platonist and the Christian, both of whom bow to authority, are weak in the same way as the modern relativist who denies all authority? This seems strange at first, but only until one realizes that for Nietzsche it is not authority as such that is pernicious, but the wrong authority (pseudo-authority). Nietzsche thinks substantively rather than formally, taking weakness as a primitive concept: the weak individual’s ‘recognition’ or ‘acceptance’ of authority is unreal, because it is merely a device, likewise is the relativist’s refusal of authority a device to mask weakness of will. As a matter of logic there can be no real acceptance of an authority that is not intrinsically authoritative. For Nietzsche, accordingly, since there is nothing authoritative except Dionysian ‘life’, the only true and real philosophy, the only authoritative philosophy, is Dionysianism (his own philosophy).

 

The term ‘perspectivism’ is usually applied to a tendency of post-1960’s academic philosophy and of Nietzsche-interpretation in particular; it was used by Nietzsche himself in his late period but with a meaning very different to the one that has become standard. In its normal usage nowadays, ‘perspectivism’ is a shamefaced and hesitant substitute for the word ‘relativism’. The issues around relativism and absolutism are very poorly understood in contemporary intellectual culture, because of failure to accept that these are exclusive alternatives: if one is not an absolutist one must be a relativist and vice-versa. The mainstream of modern philosophy, flowing from Bacon and Hobbes and including perspectivist Nietzscheans of all stripes, rejects absolutism and is therefore relativistic. This means, among other things, rejecting the idea of One True Philosophy, except for the Philosophy of Relativism (or Perspectivism) that says No to any purported absolutistic philosophy. Commentators on Nietzsche who adhere to this mainstream tendency (nearly all) should rule out Nietzsche’s Dionysianism as absolutistic, and many do, often with the claim that it is not the thought of the mature Nietzsche; or they acknowledge the Dionysian motif but take it to mean pluralism, in other words relativism or perspectivism.

 

Is the Philosophy of Relativism a faith? Surely it is, for like Christianity, Classical Philosophy, and Nietzsche’s Dionysianism, it is unprovable. Of course relativism is taught today in universities as if it were the conclusion of a long very complicated theorem proceeding from self-evident axioms; the clear intention of the ‘educators’ is that this theorem, discoverable from thousands of pages of abstruse ‘theory’, should confirm already existing intuitions of students who in most cases are one or two years out of secondary school. And it does confirm these intuitions, only, however, by students ‘believing’ the theorem rather than ‘following’ it, in particular believing the assurance that the theorem yields the indicated result. This is indeed a faith, albeit of a second-order kind. The primary faith, on the other hand, is expressed in the intuitions motivating educators and students alike: it is not a ‘view’ but an orientation of the will. Some relativists admit this, and are willing to dispense with the theorem, but the key question is what orientation of the will governs the faith of the Philosophy of Relativism. To this question different answers will be given by Classical Philosophy (that relativism signifies cowardly flight from Truth), Christianity (that relativism signifies cowardly flight from God), and Dionysianism (that relativism signifies cowardly flight from Life). What does the Philosophy of Relativism itself say about its faith? Just that it, not some other purportedly absolutistic-metaphysical philosophy, not even Dionysianism conceived absolutistically, is oriented to life – not to a fictitious Life spelled with a capital L, but to actual life in its ‘rich diversity’. By the same token, resistance to the Philosophy of Relativism is put down to ‘fear of diversity’.

 

If, then, there is no neutral way of discussing and assessing a philosopher or a type of philosophy, does this mean that the fundamentally different schools of philosophy can do nothing except recapituate, whether in self-explication or in critique of others, their respective faiths? Initially this seems to be the situation. Classical Philosophy declares that the Philosophy of Relativism is born from fear of Truth; in reply, the Philosophy of Relativism declares that Classical Philosophy is born from fear of diversity. But if this disagreement cannot be resolved from any neutral standpoint, this does not imply that one standpoint (or faith) is not superior to another or is even the authoritative standpoint. The Philosophy of Relativism, to be sure, is in an embarrassing situation, for while it insists upon itself it is not clear that it has the ‘right’ to do so. On the other hand Classical Philosophy, while also insisting on itself, and however much this insistence may be decried as dogmatic, is at least not contradicting itself in so doing. The same applies to the Christian faith and Nietzsche’s Dionysian faith: there does not seem to be in any logical difficulty when Christians insist on their Christianity, nor is it logically problematic when Nietzsche insists on his Dionysianism – not for everyone, admittedly, for he grants that many people are incapable of getting in touch with and ‘knowing’ Life, but for superior spirits, for the Masters and Supermen. Is any faith superior, however? If so which one? And how can one decide?

 

 

The Clash of Faiths

 

There are many writers and ‘thinkers’ today – latter day New Nietzscheans, post-New Nietzscheans, post-philosophers, post-Marxist theorists, post-poststructuralists, post-deconstructionists, radical cultural critics, anti-philosophers, media activists – who never stop attacking the ‘old’ philosophy. It is not just that this ‘old’ philosophy – Classical Philosophy essentially – obstructs their political objectives. Rather has the destruction of this ‘old’ philosophy itself bcome a prime political objective. To these people, even old-style leftist politics is offensive because of its reliance on the ‘old’ philosophy. A new kind of politics has arisen, which may be called  radical nihilism, or perhaps anti-philosophical radical nihilism as distinct from the conventional and almost staid nihilism of older days. By no means is all this a ‘passing fashion’; rather is it the latest and most extreme expression of the Philosophy of Relativism. It is true that not all who adhere to this philosophy gather at its sharp point, radical nihilism. There are ‘moderates’; there are those who, as Nietzsche put it, wish to be left alone in their ‘nook’. There are a large number of confused people who do not want to go ‘all the way’ to post-philosophy and who seek a middle position between ‘dogmatic metaphysics’ and the riot of nihilism; for a long time such people have been watching and waiting, but with every decade more of them are sucked into the riot. The direction of modern intellectuality today is seen with most relevance in such figures as Vattimo, Badiou and Slavoj Žižek: the all-consuming objective is ‘transgression’, to be pursued ever more resolutely, even when linking up with the Communist Party and looking sympathetically at Mao and Stalin.^[11] As Nietzsche said of the anarchists of his own time, these are radical nihilists intoxicated with lust to destroy: they ‘must destroy, because what exists, all existence, all Being, outrages and provokes them’.^[12] There is a logic to the present situation: the drive for total critique, to be expressed in total destruction, crystallizes around an attack on philosophy in its classical meaning, an attack precisely on Truth and Being. The problem of authority crystallizes around the problem of philosophy.

 

The reigning image of Nietzsche today is as the spiritual father of this movement of total critique and destruction. This image is as valid, however, as the Philosophy of Relativism that manufactures it. A different conception of the nature of philosophy will yield a different image of Nietzsche. There is of course no point in denying that Nietzsche’s thought is implicated in the Philosophy of Relativism; this is because he never quite frees himself from the scientific worldview. Nietzsche’s Dionysianism, however, which is absolutistic, is much more central to his thought than his celebrated ‘perspectivism’. And there are other features of his thought that cannot be reconciled with the Philosophy of Relativism. Walter Kaufmann, no friend to either Christianity or Platonism and ultimately an advocate for ‘diversity’, declared that Nietzsche ‘was a fanatical seeker after truth and recognized no virtue above intellectual integrity’.^[13] It is not uncommon for those promoting a ‘perspectivist’ Nietzsche to acknowledge that at least his language often suggests support for classical philosophical values, indeed even for religious values unacceptable to the Philosophy of Relativism. Sometimes this is put down to the sheer psychological difficulty of overcoming all at once two thousand years of prejudice – Nietzsche is still ‘all too human’ and not a Superman. Or, following Kaufmann, ‘respect’ for ‘Socratic’ and Christian values is made to fit a Nietzschean ethic of ‘sublimated’ impulses.^[14]

 

Perhaps, however, the presence in Nietzsche’s writings of apparently positive feelings towards Classical Philosophy does not have to be explained away but can be admitted as indicative of his real philosophical drive. Of course this is not something that the Philosophy of Relativism (to which Kaufmann too belongs) can acknowledge. Since Nietzsche speaks so much against Classical Philosophy, since his ‘experiment with the truth’ is obviously moved by hostility towards Classical Philosophy, and since the Philosophy of Relativism in any case dominates the modern mind, few commentators have been inclined to align Nietzsche with Plato and Aristotle or even Socrates; the assumption, rather, is that dubious tendencies in Nietzsche, which seem contrary to the Philosophy of Relativism, must be somehow accommodated to the main line of his thought or must be set aside as anomalies. If on the other hand Nietzsche is seen from the point of view of Classical Philosophy, and these dubious tendencies affirmed as authentic, it will nevertheless be impossible to deny that he also rejects Classical Philosophy. How then will Nietzsche be understood? Is it not necessary, after all, to in some way eliminate or sideline one pole of the contradiction? How can Nietzsche be said to offer a ‘teaching’ if his ideas are contradictory?

 

In addressing these questions one must avoid being confused by the popular (in New Nietzscheanism) sophistical solution that says contradictions do not matter in a transgressive thinker like Nietzsche. Secondary doctrinal and verbal contradictions, to be sure, are usually not problematic, or may be of positive value for indicating complexities and qualifications which an author has not tidied up. Nietzsche is right to say that preoccupation with external system and consistency is a mark of superficial thinkers.^[15] There are, however, contradictions in Nietzsche that go to the heart of his conception of philosophy insofar as they pertain to the faith governing his thought. Sometimes it seems that Nietzsche’s Dionysian faith in life (Life) is what moves him; for the most part he seems to think this himself. On other occasions it looks as if he is moved by the classical philosophical faith in the divinity of truth (Truth). Then again, and this is what relativistic philosophers take as Nietzsche’s creative side, he often appears to have faith only in the abyss or in this together with his own self-asserting self. If these are not secondary superficial contradictions they should not be treated, after the manner of Kaufmann and many others, as obstacles to be dealt with in order to pass on to a coherent account of ‘Nietzsche’s teachings’, but must be recognized as belonging to and defining the substance of his thought.

 

Especially in The Birth of Tragedy does Nietzsche come across as expressing a faith rather than setting forth a teaching. Thus Spake Zarathustra is similar in this respect, but is marred by Nietzsche’s delusion that he has a ‘secret teaching’ to communicate, namely the eternal recurrence of the same. The Birth of Tragedy has nothing to teach except life itself – the work’s ‘aesthetic doctrines’ are secondary and of little interest in themselves, for which reason Nietzsche rarely mentions them in his later writings. When he was composing this book Nietzsche felt confirmed in the same faith as his newfound inspirational friend Richard Wagner – an artist. Yet Nietzsche never understood his Wagnerianism in an ‘aesthetic sense’. For a while he believed – he later came to think he was wrong in this – that he and Wagner shared something hardly communicable in words, namely the Dionysian faith in ‘indestructible life’, more particularly in the redemptive significance of affirming life despite its pitiless indifference to the individual. When Nietzsche turned away from Wagner, this was not due to a loss of faith on Nietzsche’s part, but because Nietzsche thought Wagner had lost his faith, or had never had it in the first place. Coming to this view was for Nietzsche a highly traumatic experience, and it made him suspicious also of himself, even of his own Dionysian faith. The term ‘Dionysian’ vanished from his vocabulary for a decade, while in Human, All Too Human, written while in the process of cutting himself adrift from Wagner, he lauched an attack on ‘superstitious’ metaphysics and religion with apparent application to his own recent self. But in fact Nietzsche never abandoned his Dionysian faith, returning to it implicitly in Thus Spake Zarathustra before re-adopting the vocabulary in his final productive years (1886-88). Until the end, nevertheless, Nietzsche felt conflicted about his Dionysianism, particularly about whether he was ‘deifying after the old manner this monster of an unknown world’.^[16] He was conflicted, but his intuitions in favour of Dionysus won out, and he stepped over into insanity declaiming ‘Dionysus versus the Crucified One’.

 

Until three months before his mental collapse Nietzsche was still hoping to complete a treatise ‘The Will to Power’ which would set forth his ‘teachings’ in a systematic way. He finally gave up the idea, but his interest in this project says something about his confusion as to whether he needed to ‘ground’ his philosophy. In fact his worries on this score go back to the time he was working on The Birth of Tragedy, and are reflected in that book by his appeals to Kant and Schopenhauer. They are worries that are not peculiar to Nietzsche. Prior to his collapse he had few readers, but many of these were looking and waiting for ‘proofs’ of a sort. Even today many commentators on Nietzsche believe that ‘proofs’ and ‘arguments’ are to be found in his works. They are right, however, only in respect of secondary matters. There can be no proof of Nietzsche’s fundamental philosophical position, because it amounts to a faith. There can be no proof of Dionysianism, no more than of Platonism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, or the Philosophy of Relativism. But Nietzsche wavered in his faith. At all costs, and despite his contempt for the culture around him, he was intent on being a modern thinker. As a trained philologist he believed in rigorous scientific method, but it was the scientific worldview that made a claim on his intellectual conscience he could not ignore. In Human, All Too Human he replaced Dionysian faith with faith in science. Or almost did so, for he continued to waver. On the one hand he felt that the scientific worldview required an unequivocal rejection of metaphysics and religion, while on the other hand – as he repeatedly confessed in Human, All Too Human – he felt that the forfeiture of metaphysics and religion could only damage what was ‘best’ in human beings. This conflict, or tension in fundamental orientation, Nietzsche never resolved or even thematized in his writings; he evidently felt he could not resolve it, and so he pressed on, guided by his intuitions, relying always on ad hoc measures to keep his philosophy in one piece.  

 

From his school years onwards Nietzsche’s powerful artistic drive and philosophical reflectiveness co-existed with an austere scientific conscience. Even within the ‘dry’ discipline of classical philology which he made his profession, he chose, already as a student, limited and technical inquiries, priding himself on rigorous method. Indeed he admits, in an early fragment, that he gave himself so seriously to philology because it was ‘a counterweight to my restless and changeable inclinations, a discipline that could be pursued with cool sobriety, logical coldness, regular steady work, without its results seizing my heart’.^[17] A major influence on the young Nietzsche was Friedrich Albert Lange’s History of Materialism, which he discovered as a student in 1866. The positivist Lange had a negative view of metaphysics and religion, but he allowed that these could serve an edifying or elevating function somewhat as poetry. Nietzsche, who had recently become a devotee of Schopenhauer, especially of his ascetic ethical vision, was seeking a way of defending the latter in the face of scientific scepticism. He thought he had found it in Lange’s idea of poetizing edification, and in a letter to his friend Paul Deussen in April 1868 he sums up the point of view he had now made his own: ‘The realm of metaphysics, thus the province of “absolute truth”, has definitely been assigned a status alongside poetry and religion. Whoever wants to know something must now be content with a conscious relativity of knowledge – just like all respectable researchers into nature. For some, metaphysics belongs in the realm of emotional needs, essentially as edification. Or it is art, namely as the poetry of concepts. What is certain is that metaphysics, whether as religion or art, has nothing to do with so-called “true beings in themselves”.’ This is Nietzsche’s earliest allusion to the ‘relativity of knowledge’, and defines pretty accurately the position he will hold until the end. But everything depends on what is meant by ‘knowledge’. In The Birth of Tragedy he speaks of how the Dionysian state of mind, that is to say a state of mind very different to that of ‘all respectable researchers into nature’, attains ‘true knowledge, an insight into the terrible truth’.^[18] This is not an attitude Lange, or any other mainstream positivist (anti-metaphysician) could possibly endorse. Nor, as was shown in Chapter One above, is it a position just of the ‘early Nietzsche’: rather do his positivism and his ‘metaphysics’ – if this is the right term for a Dionysianism that achieves ‘true knowledge’ – co-exist in Nietzsche’s thought in tension.

 

Positivism and the Philosophy of Relativism are at bottom the same thing. Sometimes this is not understood, because positivism is too closely associated with its early exponents such as Comte and John Stuart Mill. The idea of a scientific worldview is also too narrowly conceived, as if it were determined by the natural sciences alone. In Comte it is sociology that becomes the successor discipline to metaphysics, providing a theory of the sciences and their social function. Comte, who was more a synthesizer than a creative thinker, has been called the founder of modern sociology, but has an equal claim to the title of founder of the modern Philosophy of Relativism. Nietzsche is obviously different from Comte in many respects, especially by his lack of belief in a ‘religion of humanity’ guided by science.^[19] And there is no reason to think Nietzsche was directly influenced by Comte’s writings. Nevertheless there is a side to Nietzsche very much akin to the spirit of Comte and of modern positivism generally. In the first place Nietzsche rejects (and had done since his schooldays) any kind of transcendental religion or metaphysics: precisely this is the fundamental meaning of his ‘materialism’ and scientific worldview, Lange having convinced him that old-style metaphysical materialism (Democritus, even Hobbes) is a doctrine without scientific import (thus an empty doctrine). Secondly, like Comte and mainstream positivism to the present day, Nietzsche puts historical, sociological and psychological inquiry in place of Classical Philosophy, notably in the field of ethics. It is a very common misconception to see in this positivist side of Nietzsche his chief significance as a philosopher, for instance by his ‘explanation’ of morality in terms of ‘will to power’ rather than by theological or metaphysical postulates. This is a misunderstanding into which Nietzsche falls himself when he becomes frightened by the spectre of his own ‘metaphysical’ Dionysianism, but especially have many of his commentators taken him this way, putting him next to Darwin, Marx and Freud as a ‘master of suspicion’ who ‘deflates’ the religio-metaphysical picture of man.

 

Darwin, Marx and Freud, however, do not and cannot ‘deflate’ the traditional picture of man by their specialized scientific research in biology, economics and psychology respectively. On the contrary, it is only by extrapolating from their special scientific domains that they have anything to say on philosophical topics, more particularly on morality. There is no inconsistency between either religion or metaphysics on the one hand and the scientific content of Darwinism or Marxism or Freudianism on the other hand. But the extrapolation is often made, not just from these but from many branches of science, to the effect that religion and metaphysics are untenable ‘views’. What does it mean, then, when Nietzsche’s ‘view’ of morality in Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals is taken as a demystifying ‘explanation’ and contrasted with the ‘views’ of religion and metaphysics? It is not difficult to see that Nietzsche begins by assuming the untenability of transcendental religion and metaphysics. Is he not offering, then, another materialist-secularist ‘theory of morality’ of the same general type as those of his despised British moralists, with the difference that he denies the essential ‘kindliness’ of human nature? And if this is what he is doing, what can decide on the ‘tenability’ or otherwise of Nietzsche’s ‘view’? Is it ‘objective science’ that Nietzsche is trying to put in place of religion and metaphysics? Can his ‘findings’ be assessed according to rigorous methodological norms as in physics, chemistry and biology? If this is not the case why is Nietzsche’s ‘view’ compelling? Moreover why do many recent proponents of the Philosophy of Relativism favour Nietzsche’s ‘view’ of morality above all others?

 

Nietzsche’s ‘view’ on morality is found compelling when it is understood to confirm a pre-existing faith, meaning reinforcing rather than validating that faith. But what faith is this? For Nietzsche himself, notwithstanding his hesitations and worries about falling into ‘metaphysics’, it is his Dionysian faith in ‘indestructible life’ that is expressed and confirmed in his statements on morality. Not all Nietzsche’s admirers and commentators understand him in this way however. Walter Kaufmann claims that Nietzsche should be understood as an empirical scientist, who from his ‘observations’ ‘discovered’ the will to power as the ‘force which underlies all human activities’.^[20] In the end this amounts to relativism: Nietzsche’s ideal is supposedly a willing of free-thinking, which willing, determined by the will to power, has superior value by being a ‘higher level’ of power. Contrary to Kaufmann’s assertion, the will to power does not overcome relativism by providing a standard for moral value: in the first place it is an indeterminate concept that can be used to produce any result one wants – Hitler and Napoleon are weak, Goethe is strong – while in the second place it cannot be a standard for morality anyway, because a ‘force’ is not something ‘willed’, and only an object of will can be a moral ideal.^[21] The guiding thread in all Kaufmann’s writings is his hostility to transcendental religion and metaphysics, but in trying to ‘overcome’ these he makes do with exceptionally weak arguments: he takes it as more or less established that the ‘will to power’ is the ruling force of human psychological life, and then, following a few declarations by Nietzsche, he is prepared to generalize this ill-defined doctrine in hyper-speculative fashion to the universe. He notices signs in Nietzsche of faith in the classical ideal of reason, such that reason clashes with naturalistic ‘power’, but insists that this pertains to his early writings, and that by the time of Zarathustra Nietzsche is on the way to resolving ‘dualism’ through a ‘monism’ of ‘will to power’ in which there are no longer opposing principles but rather different ‘levels’ of power. As for Nietzsche’s Dionysian faith, Kaufmann sees this simply as a psychological state: it is not a faith in any reality but the ‘power’ to say Yes to whatever life brings.^[22] But while Kaufmann offers words on Nietzsche rather than thoughts, the point is that his words serve a cause, namely the faith underlying the Philosophy of Relativism: the faith in diversity as the prime and even the only value in a meaningless world.^[23]

 

An interesting – albeit flawed – attempt to reconcile relativism and the Dionysianism of Nietzsche is by Raoul Richter in his 1902-03 lectures at the University of Leipzig. Unlike Kaufmann, Richter puts free willing rather than determined willing (by the will to power as ‘force’) at the centre of Nietzsche’s faith in life. The profound insight behind Nietzsche’s philosophy, according to Richter, is that values are not objective facts but are created, that is to say willed, which ‘discovery’ gives Nietzsche a license for his posture as a rhetorician, poet and prophet.^[24] As inevitably occurs, however, when avowed relativists try to take seriously any kind of moral willing, Richter is caught in a practical contradiction: there is no transcendental imperative, he says, to say Yes to life (the essence of Nietzsche’s moral willing), yet to do anything else is to turn one’s back on reality. In what sense, then, is there no imperative here? Surely the relativity of reality is not proved by anybody failing to acknowledge reality or look it in the face. And if Nietzsche’s moral willing is simply – as Nietzsche himself says – the willing of reality, is the value of this willing, as opposed to turning one’s back on reality and dreaming of another world, created by Nietzsche or by whomever so wills? In Christianity, the supreme value of love of God is not created in the actual loving of God but belongs to the recognition (knowledge) of God in the first place: one knows God only in the love of God. The same logic holds in the Dionysianism of Nietzsche (and also apparently in ancient Dionysianism): one knows ‘indestructible life’ only in the willing of it, that is in the loving of it. Of course Nietzsche does not think that somebody who turns away from life has absolutely no awareness of life, an obvious absurdity. For Nietzsche, life simply is: it is reality itself. Only by facing it, however, and in so doing loving it, does one genuinely know it. The parallels with the Christian love of God are clear and it is logical that they should be, for Nietzsche sees Dionysianism as a substitute for Christianity.  

 

Richter is right to stress that for Nietzsche Dionysian morality is not for everybody. Indeed Nietzsche does not want it to be a ‘universal faith’. The majority of human beings, according to Nietzsche, are incapable of facing life in the Dionysian spirit, which circumstance is even beneficial for the superior few who are served by those of servile spirit – the ‘slaves’ adhering to ‘slave morality’. There are admittedly some complexities in Nietzsche’s ideas on slave and master morality: it is not good for the masters when the slaves rebel, and it is disastrous when slave morality comes to infect the master class, as Nietzsche says has happened in Western culture. It remains true that Nietzsche’s prime aim, which is the elevation of the human race, can in his view come about solely through the strengthening of an elite whose Dionysian willing is the willing of reality as opposed to the willing of a fictitious other world (the flight from reality). Clearly this is very different to the affirmation of ‘diversity’ in the sense of egalitarian relativism. The last resort of the Nietzschean champions of ‘diversity’, which is to make ‘strength’ synonymous with ‘affirmation of diversity’ and even with Dionysianism as such, is actually the antithesis of Nietzsche’s attitude: it is the weak, he says, who invert the values of strength and weakness and celebrate the inability to judge as the highest wisdom.^[25]

 

The opposition between Nietzsche’s Dionysianism and Christianity is a clash of faiths between which no reconciliation is possible. It would for instance be no use offering Nietzsche evidence that Christianity does in fact ‘affirm life’. He could not admit it, for the vision upon which his Dionysianism is based is of the meaningless ‘abyss’. Nietzsche’s many descriptions and explanations of Christian ‘life-denial’ flow out of his original decision; by no means are they ‘neutral’ sociological, psychological, or historical observations that support his judgement on Christianity. By the same token there is an irreconcilable clash between Nietzsche’s Dionysianism and the Philosophy of Relativism: what for Nietzsche is the vision can for the Philosophy of Relativism be nothing except a different vision, one among many. How can it be, however, that where Nietzsche sees Dionysian life the Philosophers of Relativism see Nothingness, and that where Nietzsche feels an all-powerful exhilarating surge the Philosophers of Relativism feel a vacant space to be filled by arbitrary ‘diverse’ values? And why has the Philosophy of Relativism taken over Nietzsche-reception?

 

 

Nietzsche’s Battle With Philosophy Classically Conceived