c.3 Analytical Readings

Somewhere beyond the compelling metaphysical/antimetaphysical readings and the unfashionable existentialist ones, one can try to tell the unknown story of the relations between Nietzsche and the analytical tradition. It is no common knowledge that the leaders of the Wiener Kreis had a high regard of Nietzsche and even felt themselves to be post-Nietzschean in the sense of following many leads he had left behind⁷³⁹. Moritz Schlick spoke approvingly of the thoughts expressed in Zarathustra about the thisworldliness of values and made striking use, in another occasion, of a “beautiful simile” by Nietzsche.

He also rejected the erroneous caricature of Nietzsche who supposedly denied all claims to truth. What may be the most decisive, Schlick appealed to nobody but Nietzsche, as he stated as his conviction that

“[t]he whole of philosophy is chiefly a matter of putting language in order”.⁷⁴⁰

Otto Neurath, in turn, recognized Nietzsche’s impact on psychoanalysis and the modern behavioral sciences, while he also came to consider his contribution to “weakening the resistance force of the youth against [...] Nazism”. More tellingly, Neurath welcomed Nietzsche’s critique of the speculative elements in Kant, as he also rejected Spengler’s reappropriation of Nietzsche. Furthermore, Neurath credited Nietzsche for having discovered such phenomena as ’ressentiment’, in his boldly extra-academic and antisystematic studies designed to put metaphysics to an end. Resistance to metaphysics was the primary reason for Neurath to hail Nietzsche as “an immediate part of the blooming of the Vienna school”.⁷⁴¹

Neither is it generally known that what Nietzsche planned, “zur Erholung!” right after Zarathustra, was

“ein großer Front-Angriff auf alle Arten des jetzigen deutschen Obscurantismus (unter dem Titel “Neue Obscuranten”)” (KGB III/1, Januar 1884, 467). He related this obscurantism to both antisemitism and unscientific stance: it can “jungen Leute [...] ruiniren”, because it “treibt sie zum “Mystischen” und läßt sie das wissenschaftliche Denken verachten” (KGB III/1, April 1884, 494). As it happens, among

Nietzsche’s early readers, Christian von Ehrenfels paid attention to the way the philosopher, “in the final phase [of his career], sought, with good justification, to rescue himself, from the vague dimness

[verschwommenen Halbdunkel] of a subjectivist mysticism into which the Germans all too easily lose themselves, to the world of Romanic clarity and sharply defined realism”⁷⁴².

In other words, there is in Nietzsche, even after his so called “positivistic middle period”, a sufficiently strong inclination to the virtues of clarity and scientificness to make the seemingly surprising attitudes of Viennese logical empiricists easier to understand. If Nietzsche’s emphasis on ’life’ is regarded as an antithesis to the suggested linkage, one might consult Neurath writing about “the scientific world conception” as “serving life”, while life, in turn, approvingly accommodates this kind of conception⁷⁴³. All this may well be what is required to catch Rudolf Carnap’s point, in his famous article “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache” (1934), where he makes a reference to Nietzsche.

Carnap says that, in Also sprach Zarathustra, Nietzsche “openly chose the form of art, of poetry

[Dichtung]” to express more strongly what the others had done by “metaphysics or ethics”. Through this highly multivalent judgment, Carnap can be taken as, at the same time, according Nietzsche an equal status among the great ones, on the one hand, and closing him outside the arena of knowing and inside the field of sentiments, on the other.⁷⁴⁴

Carnap could be read as indirectly acknowledging his indebtedness to Nietzsche by specifying the uniqueness of the author of Zarathustra in an article with so “Nietzschean” title. The case for this interpretation can be strengthened by a recourse to Carnap’s other writings. In his most ambitious work, Der Logische Aufbau der Welt (1928), Carnap makes two crucial references to Nietzsche. Criticizing the notion of subjectivity, he writes that neither “the relatedness of experience to the self”, the

Ich-Bezogenheit, nor the existence of this ’self’ is any given fact. Here, he both quotes Nietzsche’s words on the self as a “grammatical habit” and relates, rather sensationally, Nietzsche’s and Russell’s annulling treatments of agency.⁷⁴⁵

Of the less famous Viennese philosophers of science, Philipp Frank went so far as to compare Nietzsche with the thoughts of the more official inspiration of the logical empiricist movement, Ernst Mach.

According to Frank’s estimation from 1917, Mach’s thoughts stand in a “striking agreement [...] with those of a thinker fro whom he cannot have had great sympathy, Friedrich Nietzsche.” On the basis of especially epistemological affinities with the two thinkers, Frank calls Nietzsche “the other great enlightenment philosopher of the end of the nineteenth century”, as well as “that great master of

language”, that is, with two descriptions more usually meant to refer to, first, Nietzsche’s opponents and, secondly, his more or less redeeming uniqueness. Frank has Nietzsche express “the positivistic world conception”. What it all boils down to is, in his view, the way Nietzsche came to fight “with cutting

sharpness the employment of very frequently misused concepts” of real and apparent.⁷⁴⁶

To introduce still one Viennese figure, one can turn to the mathematician Richard von Mises. Although he said, deploringly it seems, that “Nietzsche was not sufficiently interested in the theory of knowledge”

to carry out the dismantling of Kantian Schulphilosophie, he is ready to assert that “[i]n full agreement with Mach’s ideas, Nietzsche once said: “Originally it is language which builds concepts; later it is science.”“ After this citation, and in accordance with it, von Mises goes on to develop a view of there being “no sharp division between pre-scientific and consciously scientific thought”, no “question in any field whatsoever of a final conclusion, of a definite form of knowledge”.⁷⁴⁷

Despite all this, it was only as late as in D. J. O’Connor’s anthology, A Critical History of Western Philosophy (1964), when Arthur C. Danto gave authoritative plausibility to the idea that Nietzsche could be counted among the forerunners of the analytical tradition. Even though Danto admitted Nietzsche’s distance from a “dispassionate, careful analytician”, he observed as well the rejection of irrationalism, and held that many of Nietzsche’s views coming close to logical empiricism. Moreover, the contacts between Nietzsche and the analytical tradition were even more profound than that. Danto refers to the Kantian categories being traded for a study of language and its power to produce entities.⁷⁴⁸

It is somewhat ironical that Danto should proceed to write a monograph where he made Nietzsche workable with analytical tools but spoke quite unproblematically about his “metaphysics”. While Heidegger, Jaspers and the Viennese scholars can be seen as embodying the crude currents of

fundamental-ontological phenomenology, existentialism and analytical philosophy, respectively, what they all favor is the emphasis on the non-metaphysical.

In any case, neither Danto’s contributions nor any of the more immediate reactions discussed above have managed to enlighten the self-acclaimed neo-enlighteners or the broad school of analytical philosophy on the figure of Nietzsche. In point of fact, his role entirely escapes from three recent accounts of the making of analytical philosophy⁷⁴⁹. One might suspect that this is due to the persistent idea of Nietzsche as the very opposite of anything that the tradition stood for. In any case, a recent anthology edited by Klemens Szaniawski, contains Barry Smith’s article “Austrian Origins of Logical Positivism”, where Nietzsche gets mentioned only to be referred to, beside Kant, Schopenhauer, Spinoza and Plato, as a topic in the “rather old-fashioned sort” of historical philosophizing in Vienna, as opposed to the progressive “outsiders” of the Schlick and Mises Circles⁷⁵⁰.

Robert P. Pippin makes one the few references to the issue at hand, as he points out that “Nietzsche is sometimes said to be a precursor” of logical positivism. The context for this comment is Pippin’s

interpretation of Nietzsche in terms of “Anti-realism”. He unites this position with the “verificationism”

of the early Viennese school. Yet, Pippin concludes: “There are as many differences as there are similarities between the two, but several members of the Vienna Circle did know of Nietzsche and occasionally referred to him.”⁷⁵¹

On the whole, Nietzsche has been a particularly irritating figure within the analytical tradition⁷⁵².

O’Connor himself, for instance, had written in 1957 about a “born irrationalist” who degrades rationality,

“shrinks from and distrusts any systematic use of reason”, who wants to “decry what he calls ’intellect’

or ’logic’ and praise instead mysterious natural impulses and intuitions”. This attitude, O’Connor explained, is “very widespread” and it “characterizes the intellectually lazy, the woolly minded, the fanatical and the superstitious”. He concludes: ”And it is the more pernicious in having supporters who enjoy some reputation - philosophers such as Nietzsche and Bergson, theologians like Kierkegaard and a great many artists and writers, to say nothing of well-known pretentious mystagogues like Rudolf Steiner and Ouspensky. Two contemporary examples of the effect of this attitude can be seen in the

psychological theories (if they can be so called) of Carl Jung and the existentialist movement in Europe.”⁷⁵³

This was a time of the not just philosophical cold war. No wonder, then, if lazy and woolly opinions, albeit quite fanatical and superstitious, were advanced in the name of philosophical thinking. Perhaps it was no worse than nowadays but attacks were made, it seems, from clearer positions. Obviously,

existentialism was one of the most beloved targets of the analytical outrage and Nietzsche’s being turned into an eminent figure in this camp made it hard to reassess his status.

Yet, embarrassingly, O’Connor and many others manifested plain ignorance of not only Nietzsche but of their own Viennese heroes, too. In this spirit, G. E. Anscombe did not fail to condemn Nietzsche when rehabilitating Schopenhauer as Wittgenstein’s “philosophical ancestor”: ”It is one of the oddities of the present day [1959] that Schopenhauer is often vaguely associated with Nietzsche and even with Nazism, and is thought to be some kind of immoralist, worshipper of power and praiser of suicide; it is not the mythical Schopenhauer of popular repute, but the actual Schopenhauer, that we should remember in connection with Wittgenstein.”⁷⁵⁴

An unexpected defence of Nietzsche among the analytically mannered philosophers, albeit made in the passing, came from P. E. Strawson. Writing in 1961, Strawson touches upon the “region of the ethical”

housed by “truths which are incompatible with each other”. He spells out the lesson: ”One cannot read Pascal or Flaubert, Nietzsche or Goethe, Shakespeare or Tolstoy, without encountering these profound truths. It is certainly possible, in a cool analytical frame of mind, to mock at the whole notion of the

profound truth; but we are guilty of mildly bad faith if we do.”⁷⁵⁵

A remark such as this can, however, be taken to marginalize by the very act of appreciation: merits in literary moralism by no means guarantee a position among competent philosophers. Yet, editing the papers of a symposium held in 1969, Frederick Suppe made what could be seen as one of the most daring deeds in the present context. He smuggled Nietzsche into the confines of analytical philosophy of science. The few who are aware of Carnap’s use of Nietzsche as a reference point are, of course, not too shocked. To be sure, Suppe’s remark was, too, merely a footnote but it amounts to one of the most serious observations on Nietzsche by a scholar ostensibly equipped with a “cool analytical frame of mind”. In the occasion that the ideas are presented about the scientific practice as proceeding from within a Weltanschauung and the task of a philosophy of science as analyzing linguistic-conceptual systems through a world view, Suppe notes that this neo-Kantian-cum-pragmatic approach is an “inheritor to the philosophical tradition” of Nietzsche, C. S. Peirce, C. I. Lewis and W. V. O. Quine. It is about

abandoning the notion of a “unique set of categories determining the Weltanschauungen”.⁷⁵⁶

Recently, both Nietzsche’s interest in the history and contemporary state of science, or in such figures as Drossbach or Boscovich, and his role as the not that grey eminence in the breakthrough of modern scientific world view, have been objects of increasing scholarly curiosity⁷⁵⁷. In his book, Alistair Moles even wishes to focus on “Nietzsche’s admiration for science”. He notes that Nietzsche was “interested in scientific thinking of his day, and read much scientific literature.”⁷⁵⁸ By and large, however, Nietzsche’s repute, in those parts of the philosophical world where the analytical tradition has been dominating, cannot be said to have greatly improved even by the work of Strawson, Danto, Suppe or others. At best, Nietzsche is casted in a role where he can shed additional light to the discoveries made in the analysis. A good, and by no means common, example of this is the limited but bold use of Nietzsche made by Ingmar Pörn who, in the midst of examining the predictability of human agency, appeals to his notion of “the herd’s morality of truthfulness”.⁷⁵⁹

Among contemporary Nietzsche experts, however, analytical approaches have been tested not by Danto alone⁷⁶⁰. Richard Schacht’s thick monograph in the analytically modelled publishing series is certainly one of the most notable works in this field. Hesitantly, Schacht accepts the idea of Nietzsche as a pioneer in the “analytical movement” but stresses that Nietzsche also violently criticized, “ante rem”, this

movement. Schacht says that Nietzsche called for interpretative and evaluative measures to complete any analysis. Perhaps more strikingly than in his locating and characterizing Nietzsche’s work, Schacht’s analytically tempered (yet oddly Heideggerian) approach is visible in his strategy to ignore rhetorical moves and to go for “philosophical substance” instead.⁷⁶¹

In general, analytically trained philosophers have assessed the argumentative structures in Nietzsche’s works. After Danto, R. H.. Grimm and John T. Wilcox, for instance, have written extensively on Nietzsche’s epistemological views⁷⁶². It should be noted, however, that not all commentators have welcomed Danto’s basic idea of Nietzsche as the predecessor to analytical philosophers⁷⁶³. Maudemarie Clark’s Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (1990) could be the first comprehensive survey on

Nietzsche’s contributions to the theory of knowledge with constant references to the contemporary analytical discussion and to such theorists as Putnam, Rorty, Dummett, McGinn and others. Clark’s conviction was that “one need not take the life out of his thought by concentrating on arguments, objections, and other truth-related matters”.⁷⁶⁴ After Clark, Peter Poellner has written a monograph that relies heavily on the analytical tradition, yet criticizes previous attempts in this tradition and, in addition, underlines the proto-phenomenological features in Nietzsche⁷⁶⁵.

As the borderlines between the grand traditions of modern philosophy have become increasingly blurred, Nietzsche has acquired more attention among thinkers who have been schooled in the analytical fashion but whose interests and activities exceed the aged limits of the current once known as “analytical philosophy”. Particularly fruitful has been the convergence of pragmatic and analytical research. The works of Richard Rorty, Daniel C. Dennett and Hilary Putnam present cases in point. Since Rorty’s Nietzsche was already briefly introduced in section II.b, I shall be happy to say something about the other two.

Dennett’s special interest has been the philosophical questions of evolutionary theory. If it was, and undoubtedly still is, a general opinion of Nietzsche’s work that ”the vitality and beauty of his poetry is undeniable, but, unfortunately, it embraces among other errors of scientific conceptions the notions (a) that the survival of the fitter is an affair of individuals, and (b) that competition and aggression are one”⁷⁶⁶, the boldness of Dennett’s reassessments can be appreciated. He has taken up Nietzsche to expand the otherwise rather thin discussion in its historical depth. Already in 1976, Dennett referred to Nietzsche and Marx as thinkers who paid attention to the development of human consciousness and language under social pressure and to the correlative interdependence of an access to oneself and an access to other people⁷⁶⁷. In the early 80's, he likened Julian Jayne’s freshly argued case for mind’s developmental discontinuity to Nietzsche’s “view of the relation of consciousness and social and linguistic practices”⁷⁶⁸.

In his most recent works, Dennett has ventured to make more extensive use of Nietzsche. He takes him to be, after Hobbes, “the second great sociobiologist” painstakingly “imagining a premoral world of human life”. According to Dennett, “[t]he amazing and ingenious tale Nietzsche told about how the transvaluation of values happened defies fair summary and is often outrageously misrepresented.” He

says that Nietzsche’s “appreciation” of the import of Darwinism’s major directions is “remarkable”, when it is remembered that he never got to read Darwin.⁷⁶⁹ Further, Dennett writes, in his Kinds of Minds (1996), about the idea of the mind spreading from its original cerebral depository “to other parts of the body”. He says that “our control systems” containing the nervous systems are “noninsulated” and that

“our bodies themselves” actually “harbor” much wisdom. In this context, Dennett is ready to quote a passage from Zarathustra, about the “great reason”, since “Nietzsche saw all this long ago and put the case with characteristic brio”.⁷⁷⁰

Hilary Putnam, for his part, has found use for Nietzsche in his studies on realism. Whereas in Realism and Reason (1983) Nietzsche is merely mentioned as the representative of “a pessimistic wing” of modernism⁷⁷¹, The Many Faces of Realism (1987) has him appear as the announcer of the loss of foundations, the decisive theme for Putnam’s distinction between ’metaphysical’ and ’internal’ types of realism⁷⁷². Putnam’s Realism with a Human Face (1990) opens by a confession of debt to Kant and a quotation from Geburt, a move that is recognized by the author as “virtually blasphemous” for any “true Kant lover”. As Putnam specifies, he is not going to discuss Nietzsche, yet he describes him as

“immensely interesting” and goes on to hint at the affinity between his rejection of the “God’s-Eye-View” and Nietzsche’s destruction of the ‘true world’.⁷⁷³