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Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Modern European Philosophy)

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I really admire the ambitiousness and courageousness of Clark's highly controversial readings of Nietzsche. It takes guts--and hard work--to defend her more outlandish claims, and I even admire the undercurrent of unmitigated contrariness that seems to motivate this aspect of her work ("Well, if everybody's going to say Nietzsche's anti-democratic, I'll say he's pro-democracy! Yes, that's the ticket!)

Unfortunately, she just doesn't make a very good case for her more interesting views. Even when I agree with the conclusions, I find her arguments far-fetched or just silly. Take, e.g., her treatment of the puzzling and well-known section 36 of Beyond Good and Evil, where Nietzsche appears to seriously entertain the view that the world is the will to power. Clark's solution to this admittedly problematic passage is to argue that Nietzsche inserts an argument and conclusion into his text that he disagrees with in order to show that he disagrees with it. You'd think the best way to show that would be to actually say so--or better yet, never to bring it up in the first place.

In any case, Clark does make a brave attempt to back up this reading, but ultimately it requires far too much cherry picking, twisting, and torturing of the text. By way of comparison, did you know that Nietzsche believes in God? It's true, he says so! "I" (p.20) "believe" (p.430) "in" (p.27) "God" (p.388)

Ultimately, Clark's book suffers from the same problem as so many interpretations (particularly the po-mo ones) do: her interpretation begins with what she wants Nietzsche to be, then forces him to be it.

I began this book with no small trepidation. I am not generally fond of Nietzsche, but have recently felt that he at least deserved to be engaged with systematically. I have been reading his works and I picked up this book on an off chance, knowing little about it except that Clark sought to systematically present Nietzsche as an anti-metaphysical author. And in doing this, she highlights his strengths and weaknesses.

I appreciate her sophisticated rebuttal of much current and past Nietzsche scholarship, especially the mis-reading of him by the so-called 'post-structuralists'/'deconstructionists'. Her critique of their absolute relativism, and Nietzsche's eventual rejection of that in favor of a radical perspectivism, which at bottom is founded on a kind of neo-Kantianism, won me over to the value of the book. And that kind of thing is necessary when you slog through the first two chapters, which may be necessary, but which are also ponderous.

The failure I find most interesting, however, ultimately undermines her own argument and releases Nietzsche from any kind of coherence in relation to truth. She basically premises her reading of Nietzsche at a key point contra Magnus on the question of whether Nietzsche is arguing against 'truth as the whole'. She argues that he is not and that Nietzsche was familiar with no philosopher who would have argued as such. It is here that I must reject her argument, for Hegel very much championed this notion of 'truth is the whole' and Nietzsche seems, contrary to Clark's otherwise well-thought out scholarship, not only familiar with Hegel, but also in debate with Hegel throughout much of his work. Hegel is the hidden text to Nietzsche as Aristotle is the hidden text to Hegel's Philosophy of Right.

In recognizing this, not only does Clark's reading of Nietzsche unravel, but, IMO since Clark is largely right in her reading of Nietzsche as a neo-Kantian, Nietzsche unravels.

Now, Nietzsche was infamously hostile to 'the craving for consistency' as a mark of the weak person, so the Nietzscheans out there will have a back door through which to escape. But that is their problem.

Secondarily, I think that this unraveling causes problems for Clark's argument that Will to Power and Eternal Recurrence are non-metaphysical, or at least consistently so. However, I appreciate the thoughtfulness of the argument, even when she is obliged to engage in gymanastics to sustain it.

Finally, this work really convinced me that the appropriation of Nietzsche by Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, etc. is not based upon Nietzsche's philosophical heritage, since they stop at his earliest work and effectively gloss over the rest of what Nietzsche writes. Rather, Nietzsche provides a radical re-affirmation of the role of intellectuals as privileged specialists. But Guy Debord knew the value of such people better than most, and the obnoxious politics which follow from such self-glamorization of the would-be revaluers of values.

This is possibly the best overall book ever written about Nietzsche. Several others have brilliant insights such as Martin Heidegger's Nietzsche which gives a powerful interpretation of art as the only purpose and meaning of life, and debunks the pseudo-concept of the 'superman' as the modern CEO of world technology, but completely misses Nietzsche's joke, which Clark does not, about the 'will to power' especially as a cosmological doctrine (something he toyed with seriously ONLY in the notebooks for years). Maudemarie Clark shows he made it into a trick upon the reader (amongst many!) in BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL (pp.218-227, esp.221-2, of her book). She starts her book by destroying the French deconstructionist 'irrationalist' version of Nietzsche by demonstrating that he dropped this irrationalism early starting with HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN (originally dedicated to Voltaire), and coming to a completely rational stance in THE GENEOLOGY OF MORALS. She makes the brilliantly obvious point (so obvious it makes you feel stupid, but definitely goes against the major trend of Nietzsche interpretation)that THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA was a novel, not a philosophical treatise or religious tract. Walter Kaufman implicitely made this same point by comparing it to ULYSSES and FINNEGAN'S WAKE. This essentially puts a logical question mark on 'eternal recurrence', 'will to power', and the 'superman' as distinct philosophical ideas and actually makes them literary concepts, a distinction postmodernists may entirely miss. She also, after having undermined most American commentators -- NOT Walter Kaufman --on Nietzsche by destroying the basic tenant of the French through applying the unimpeacheable arguments against scepticism and cynicism (essentially, as the Cretan philosopher said, "All Cretans are liars", one must step somehow into a higher order of reality for that to be judged true or false)against Nehamas'perspectivism and Danto's, Schacht's, and Rorty's ultimately meaningless relativism. Nietzsche was in no way a relativist. But one must apprize from that something very different Hegel's systematic absolutism. He knew the validity of reason and reality as an absolutely alone individual (singulare tantum)very much like Heidegger. Maudemarie Clark has essentially brought Nietzsche back into the question mark he deliberately placed himself. But it is a meaningful question that is rational. Maudemarie Clark makes part of this point explicitely clear when she states that on the one hand Neitszche says he is an immoralist and 'means' it, but on the other hand quotes him as saying, "Honesty is the only virtue". Honesty presupposes consistency. Consistency presupposes rationality. To end on an interesting sidenote Ayn Rand also went through a similar evolution to Nietzsche's. In her first edition of WE THE LIVING she preaches a populist version of Nietzsche's 'immoralism', then renounces him later on as an irrationalist when she takes up the primacy of reason herself. She never realized she still followed his path to some extent even in ATLAS SHRUGGED.

While Nietzsche is certainly more known as a moral philosopher, or as some are certain to remark, an immoral philosopher, one finds a certain necessary connection between his moral philosophy and his epistemology (and naturally aesthetic, scientific, political thought too, its all very much connected). Thus it was with open eyes that I began this work, as I knew Clark to be so very critical of much that Kaufmann, Wilcox, Derrida, Nehamas, and Schacht had written on Nietzsche. The majority of the work was overtly analytic, which I shall neither condemn nor praise at the moment. Clark did her best to demonstrate the faults of the aforementioned Nietzsche scholars insofar as Nietzsche himself would allow.

Although there is much I could say regarding the opening chapters of the book, I shall refrain from such things, as I found them generally to be on target, insofar as Clark's exegetical work found what was necessary to support her claims. Whether or not I agree with them all is still under debate, for I question how much Nietzsche felt consistency was absolutely necessary for his early writings and ideas (look at The Birth of Tragedy or a later work like The Antichrist for examples of this, while each is brilliant in its own way they still lack scholarship all too often in exchange for Nietzsche's polemics). As Danto (I believe it was him) commented somewhere in his work though, one thing is certain with Nietzsche, you have truly not read him until you have found a contradiction to every statement he made. While this is not true in every case, there is a sense in which Nietzsche's maturing philosophy demonstrates this claim, which Clark seems to have dismissed at times. Granted, Clark does demonstrate that Nietzsche underwent such changes in his thought, as would be expected of a philosopher set on such an experimental way.

In taking Nietzsche to completely dismiss metaphysics Clark does herself a great injustice, for it forces her to radically reinterpret the will to power and the eternal recurrence. And in doing so she becomes guilty of a certain intellectual uncleanliness (as someone or another once called it). I wholeheartedly agree that the eternal recurrence is best understood not as a cosmological doctrine, but rather as something of an existential imperative (if such a thing exists). Nonetheless, as Nietzsche's Nachlass testifies, he may still have believed it to be demonstrable as a cosmological claim though he had yet to demonstrate it as such. But the will to power as anything but a metaphysical claim? As a theology professor of mine often said to me, thats just not happening. And it is within these two chapters, the last two of the book, that Clark gets sloppy in her work. At one point she simply dismisses the text of Zarathustra as too metaphorical (the second to last chapter) to cite in evidence, yet, come the last chapter of the work, lo and behold, the metaphorical problems Zarathustra posed in the previous chapter disappear - citations abound. Naturally one asks, why should she do this? To help reinforce her point perhaps? Or to help her point by not introducing certain textual problems with her reading?

As it is, do read the last two chapters, on the will to power and the eternal recurrence respectively, with a careful eye and such inconsistent readings will become apparent. It was here then that I found fault with the book, which makes me want to reread it and see how often this problem occurs. But that will have to wait until the semester ends. So, overall, a mostly consistent reading, with obvious faults, which, as Nietzsche himself would have said, reflects Clark's desires to make Nietzsche consistent. Is such consistency in Nietzsche possible though? Probably not, as his writings seem to attest, if not his experimental nature of going about his work. But then again, how much do I really know? To best understand Nietzsche, sit down with The Birth of Tragedy and read chronologically until you get to Ecce Homo, and then start all over again.

My main problem with this book is that Clark is too analytical. The book reads like a thesis. She often "intellectulizes" her way too a point that is either obvious or that she could have gotten to in a lot less time and with more straight forward language. Don't get me wrong - she does have some insights into Nietzsche but they are few and far between. I actually thought that her chapter on the Eternal Recurrence was the best in the whole book. Overall, not that great a read.