d.1 Quarrel over Philosophy

Bertrand Russell may be the decisive figure in questioning Nietzsche’s philosophical stature. He did discuss Nietzsche, in many occasions, and took him along in his reconstructions of the tradition. Yet, Russell was eager to point out that Nietzsche was no philosopher “in the ordinary” sense of the term, but more of a literary master who produced poetic prose and not academic philosophy. These reservations did not, however, prevent Russell from speaking about “Nietzsche’s philosophy”.⁹⁸¹

Rudolf Carnap’s double blow on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra as poetry and metaphysics - even if it did include, as was suggested above (II.c.3), a considerable appreciation and even an acknowledgement of indebtedness - could be seen to provide back up to Russell. In any case Russell’s influence can be detected from, say, Roger Scruton who calls Nietzsche a “moralist, but one capable of considerable metaphysical ingenuity”. No matter how considerable or ingenious his thought was, however, to Scruton it stood for an “obsessive” critique of Christianity and “passionate extension of [...] egotism”, where

“rhetorical” or “literary gifts of a high order” could not help solve the self-created “confusion”⁹⁸².

In D. W. Hamlyn’s view, “[t]here are some who see Nietzsche as a moralist more than a philosopher”.

His own estimation is somewhat more balanced: “Nietzsche’s style is as much that of the poet as that of the philosopher”.⁹⁸³ John Passmore exemplify another typical, yet a bit more favorable than the usual, view of Nietzsche among Anglo-Saxon philosophers. He says that Nietzsche was “a man of remarkable

insight and literary gifts, although not at all a systematic academic philosopher”. According to Passmore, Nietzsche advocates “the conception of the philosopher as a critic of ways of life”. He calls Nietzsche a moralist and writes that, as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche was no “systematic philosopher - they were indeed positively opposed to systematic philosophy”.⁹⁸⁴

Commenting on Ernest Newman’s Wagner biography, in 1947, Theodor W. Adorno wrote that

”Newman quotes with sympathy such writers as A. J. Knight, who ruminates the hackneyed

commonsense thesis that Nietzsche was “not a logician at all”, that his “contribution to philosophy was negligible”, that he had no method, no system, and that he “never succeeded in providing any contention scientifically”. Even Knight’s fantastic statement that Nietzsche was “intellectually lazy” goes

unchallenged.”“ Adorno’s criticism is targeted against Newman’s overlooking of “the fact that the criteria he accepts from official philosophy are precisely those which were subject, by Nietzsche, to the most penetrating critical analysis, that the latter’s failure to comply with the rules of the game of academic thinking is not due to a lack of strength and selfdiscipline but rather to a lack of naivety and conformism.”⁹⁸⁵

Adorno points the way to appreciating the metaphilosophical potential inherent in a thinker that only with a great difficulty fits in the received model of philosophy. After a discussion of Kierkegaard’s philosophical standing, Alastair Hannay writes as follows: “Although philosophy for Kierkegaard was a limited enterprise whose terms of reference did not extend to the solution of the ultimate questions which concerned him, we are, of course, nowadays, well prepared to accept that the view that philosophy is limited is a philosophical view. Or better, a metaphilosophical view. Unlike paraphilosophy which carries the connotation of a project ’beside’ or ’beyond’ philosophy, metaphilosophy takes philosophy itself as its province and has just as good reason to be called philosophy as has, say, philosophy of religion, politics, logic, or whatever.”⁹⁸⁶

The lesson here is that one ought to try and study the specific kind of philosophy that emerges from an unconventional (meta)philosophical effort. It has been said that there is “no longer any need [...] to prove that Nietzsche’s philosophy is not quite like other philosophies”⁹⁸⁷. Some commentators have followed Adorno in thinking that Nietzsche deliberately embarked upon reconceiving philosophy. As K.

Weisshaupt chooses to put it, Philosophie appears, in Nietzsche’s eyes, as both a “title for errors and misconceptions of millennia” and a ”watchword”. It is Nietzsche’s “twofold basic word for a challenge and a programme to interpret the world’s basic text that, for him, consists in there being no such text.”

Weisshaupt concludes: “In Nietzsche, the unmasking of philosophy does not entail its death, it deals, rather, with transformation into another shape [Gestalt] and - mask.”⁹⁸⁸

It is safe to say that even though Nietzsche is, nowadays, being studied in the confines of a variety of philosophical currents, the common suspicion as to his very philosophicalness still persists, especially in the English-speaking world. In his book, Nietzsche in 90 Minutes (1996), Paul Strathern writes that

“Nietzsche’s larger philosophical ideas are barely worthy of the name”, albeit his “actual philosophizing is a brilliant, persuasive and incisive as any before or since”⁹⁸⁹.

J. P. Stern says that what is often “intolerable to Anglo-Saxon readers” is that “Nietzsche is not interested in the technicalities of philosophy” but “endears himself to literary men” by coming up with

“total statements of the human condition”. Stern goes on to add, however, that “Nietzsche also knew that men are inexorably, fatally committed to thought”.⁹⁹⁰ In another context, Stern says that Nietzsche neither advocates a view of philosophy as literature nor entertains a view of literature as philosophy. He is, rather, urging the readers to appreciate philosophy and literature as closely related “forms of life”.⁹⁹¹ Julian Roberts writes about from the same problem: “The very fact that his books are well-written makes them stand apart as ’literary’ for any reader accustomed to the severity of the analytical schools. The sheer extravagance of his ideas makes it hard to approach some of his work as philosophy in any accepted sense.”⁹⁹²

It is best to add that not always, not automatically, is Nietzsche more readily admissible outside Anglo-Saxony. In France, Francis Guibal has criticized his work as containing more “intensity and provocation”

or “aphoristic and poetic expression” than “coherent discourse” or “rigorous and positive analyses”⁹⁹³. As for the German discussion, one could refer back to Rudolf Steiner (cf. I.c). It was seen that Steiner was a key figure in questioning the reliability of Förster’s editorial work, as well as in rejecting

messianistic instances of appropriation. Yet, the paradox lies in the way the mere mentioning of Steiner, as the one to have understood Nietzsche enough to observe fraud copies of his thought, is to evoke a partnership that threatens Nietzsche’s philosophical image more than almost anything else. Even though Steiner was not yet, at the time he finished his monograph, the influential theosoph he came to be, and even though that book does contain a fair amount of good scholarship, there are features that may well cause these kind of second thoughts. For instance, Nietzsche is not just described as an individualist or a realist but as a vitalist and a personalist, too. He is not only divorced from “professional philosophers”

but his being a thinker (“in the conventional sense”, though) is also disputed in favor of “bold leaps of thought” and “deeper secrets of the human nature”.⁹⁹⁴

It was a part of Walter Kaufmann’s rehabilitative efforts to criticize both the artistic type of exploitation, as among the members of the George circle and the existentialist preference on “philosophizing” over philosophy, as in Jaspers. Kaufmann blamed Jaspers for “discounting Nietzsche’s philosophy” and for refusing to “take seriously” Nietzsche’s concepts. He felt that interpreters read their own vagueness onto

the Nietzschean text. The reason for this lay, so Kaufmann, in the way “the words and parables which had intoxicated Nietzsche soon intoxicated other, lesser writers as well”.⁹⁹⁵

Nietzsche’s questionable philosophical status is often related to the putative hegemony, in his texts, of

“metaphors” and “persuasions” over “arguments”⁹⁹⁶. At least, arguments are taken to be “seldom given in the text” but “latent within it and must be sought and found rather than passively received”⁹⁹⁷. Yet, as the case of another commentator shows, a view of Nietzsche as a “highly literary writer, the champion of brilliant isolated perceptions and colourful, arresting metaphors” need not entail the absence of

argumentativity, since “through the frequent use of genuine metaphors and through the fusion of those metaphors with more straightforward use of words, Nietzsche demonstrates in his style the theoretical argument that all his linguistic characterisations of life are in fact metaphors”⁹⁹⁸.

Be that as it may, Richard Schacht had a demanding task in accommodating Nietzsche in the publication series “Arguments of the Philosophers”. Schacht begins the inevitable justification with a comparison to Wittgenstein’s impact on the received view of the nature of philosophy. He goes on to characterize Nietzsche’s philosophical activism that involves investigating, developing and defending interpretations.

According to Schacht, the problem of the “philosophical argument” is transformed, in Nietzsche, into a problem of soundness and adequacy in the interpretative practice.⁹⁹⁹

Charlene Haddock Seigfried’s paper “Why Are Some Interpretations Better Than Others?” (1975) is one example of the efforts to attend to this problematic. The author argues that “it is a delusion to think that the standard for valuation and interpretation lies in some primitive spontaneity”, since “Nietzsche nowhere espouses absolute arbitrariness”. She stresses that the Nietzschean notion of interpretation involves “the introduction of meaning” and the idea of “a new interpretation” as “superimposed over an older one”. A crucial criterion is that to be better the new interpretation must “do justice to the greatest number of observations about what is being interpreted by opening up new, more comprehensive perspectives”. Wider perspectives “would cause what is interpreted to be observed in fresh, new ways.”

On this reading, Nietzsche does not abandon truth altogether but merely recognizes the absence of “one total, correct view of the world” and refuses “to be deceived by any partial truths”.¹⁰⁰⁰

It is the purpose of many analytically oriented Nietzsche scholars, provided that they are sufficiently favorable to his thought, to legitimate his philosophicality. Robert C. Solomon, for instance, has insisted on the necessity to investigate Nietzsche’s thought “within the philosophical tradition”. As he sees it, this is not a conspiracy of those who wish to lose the excitement of Nietzsche’s exceptionality and to opt for the neutral sobriety. What is at stake is to recognize, in this thinker, not only a “blustering “immoralist”“

but a “profound philosophical analytician” as well.¹⁰⁰¹

There are other routes to the problematic. Paul de Man has made much of the unavoidable “literariness”

of Nietzsche’s texts, while referring to the high frequency of philosophical statements within them. His pointed conclusion is that Nietzsche realizes the removal of the question of the difference between literature and philosophy.¹⁰⁰² What fuels the current quarrel over philosophy and Nietzsche is both the closeness of philosophy and literature felt uneasy by commentators with analytical background and the attachment of the two disciplines felt productive by many other linguistically oriented commentators.

Whereas Hamlyn concludes his discussion on Nietzsche by remarking that “philosophy could go no further in this direction”¹⁰⁰³, the editors of the anthology After Philosophy. End or Transformation?

(1987) relate Nietzsche to the complex “self-delimitation” of philosophy from the theory and practice of rhetoric and poetics.¹⁰⁰⁴

Attempts at coping with the literariness of philosophy and philosophicalness of literature have produced various proposals. Lewis White Beck has offered the notion of “philosophical literature” to cover two cases: literary text quotes philosophical text or embodies philosophical problematic.¹⁰⁰⁵ Yet, as Robert Gooding-Williams notes, more urgent than the issue of the philosophical momentum of literature is that of the philosophicality of philosophy. The specifically philosophical, in a given text of philosophy, may be pursued in its properties that have to do with themes, narrative techniques or structure. This involves supporting certain conception of philosophy expected to be expressed in the thematic, narrative or structural features of the text. However, it does not necessarily mean that philosophical texts should be seen as but a literary genre, as “deconstructivists” do. The scope of these texts is just expanded to accommodate at least some literary fiction. Gooding-Williams mentions, as one version of the potentially philosophical in Nietzsche, Richard Rorty’s distinction between philosophies that offer arguments for persistent problems in a fairly inert language and those supplying narratives and new vocabularies questioning the old problems and their aged answers.¹⁰⁰⁶

Gooding-Williams writes that in order to defend “narrative philosophy” arguments may be dispensable. A surrogate philosophical device could be ’explanation’, in the spirit of Robert Nozick. Explanation appeals to hypothetic conjectures about the sufficient conditions of a phenomenon. A given narrative could be philosophical in the sense that it delineates potential explanations.¹⁰⁰⁷ As Karsten Harries observes, Gooding-Williams’s treatment leaves open the ways in which the “integrity” of philosophical writings should be safeguarded, how the specifically philosophical in an explanation should be understood and how philosophy relates to poetry, on the one hand and to prose, on the other.¹⁰⁰⁸

The quarrel has broader dimensions. It is instructive to look at the manner in which Magnus, Stewart and Mileur argue their philosophico-literary joint effort, Nietzsche’s Case. Philosophy as/and Literature (1993): ”This difficulty of blending the voices of philosophy and literature mirrors the felt difficulty of

fruitful collaborative inquiry into root questions within one’s own discipline. [...] If the mutual shunning which has come to characterize philosophy in America has had undesirable consequences, the conflict in literary studies between those committed to traditional historico-critical methods and those pursuing recent developments in “theory” has been no less unfortunate. Indeed, the educational and political consequences of mutual shunning may have been and may continue to be as baleful in literary criticism as the analytic/continental split has been to philosophy.”¹⁰⁰⁹

To widen the boundary dispute to bear on the level of commitments that surpass those boundaries would be well in line with Nietzsche’s sense of his own questionable accomplishment that, in the spirit of the epigraph of the previous section, questions traditional limits of scholarly expertise. Where Magnus, Stewart and Mileur see “undesirable”, “unfortunate” and “baleful” effects, Richard Rorty speaks of “the tiresome “analytical-continental split”“ that will, in the future, be seen “as an unfortunate, temporary breakdown of communication”¹⁰¹⁰.

To be sure, the trouble is not exclusively American. Andreas Graeser wrote recently that the gap between Anglo-American analytical philosophy and continental hermeneutic philosophy “seems to constitute a threat far more devastating and annoying than anything that has been witnessed in the past”.

Having picked up the names of Charles Taylor, Arthur Danto and Thomas Nagel, as exceptional free movers, Graeser discussed the chances of a reunion. This will have to take place on the basis that

“philosophers, while clinging on to the tools and techniques developed by analytically minded thinkers and maintaining the ideal of clarity they inherited from Socrates, should not hesitate to cope with the wide range of interesting issues raised by hermeneutically oriented thinkers and try to develop them accordingly.”¹⁰¹¹ It is surely a fine thing to hope for a reunion. It is another thing to start the preparations with presuppositions such as these. In Graeser’s eyes, one camp is equipped with the instruments, the other with good questions. Only one camp is clear enough to qualify as the heir of Socrates. One camp is

“minded”, the other is “oriented”. If it is meant that there are those capable of manufacturing devices for

“coping with” whatever questions the others should “raise”, then what is proposed is not an agenda for further negotiations but a declaration of conquest.

I would hold that the “shunning split” is relevant in studying Nietzsche. It has to do with lacking self-awareness and shallow mutual acquaintance in the opposed interpretative camps. For instance, as I said above (II.c.3), there is ignorance about Nietzsche’s anti-obscurantist thrust and favorable reception among logical empiricists. Adorno is one of the very few to have caught something of this affair when he writes about the “irony” in the way Nietzsche “liked to identify himself passionately with Western

soberness and positivist disillusionment” and is, however, doomed to become “a helpless victim as soon as faced with positivist criteria”¹⁰¹².

As for the dispute between the philosophical and the literary, Derrida’s influence in intensifying this affair cannot be overlooked. According to Ernst Behler, Derrida considers Nietzsche’s philosophy to be “not so much an exercise in demonstrating that language turns back on itself, that Nietzsche’s philosophical rhetoric is untrustworthy, but that it constitutes a paradigm of overcoming philosophy in the traditional manner. Derrida does not, as does Heidegger, merely see Nietzsche as the last and most extreme philosopher of the tradition, but as the true end of traditional philosophy itself.”¹⁰¹³ Christopher Norris underlines the more cautious features in the French thinker: ”Derrida is far from endorsing Richard Rorty’s proposal that we should drop the idea of ’philosophy’ as a discipline with its own particular interests, modes of argument, conceptual prehistory etc., and henceforth treat it as just one ’kind of writing’ among others, on a level with poetry, literary criticism and the human sciences at large. In fact his recent essays have laid increasing stress on this need to conserve what is specific to philosophy, namely its engagement with ethical, political and epistemological issues that cannot be reduced tout court to the level of an undifferentiated textual ’freeplay’.”¹⁰¹⁴

In any case, Derrida has pronounced his objection to the notion of “the end of philosophy”: ”I think that the conclusion that philosophy has reached its conclusion, come to its term, is a very dangerous thing and a thing which I would resist. I think that philosophy has, is, the future, but for the moment it has to give its consideration to that which has enclosed it, a set of finite possibilities. What does this finitude consist of? What is this finite element in philosophy? We have the feeling that philosophical discourse is

exhausted, that it can only reproduce itself in different forms, in different combinations. What does this closure consist of? This is an opportunity for thought; it’s nothing like death, or the end, but an

opportunity. And if this is called philosophy, then I think that philosophy not only has a future but that it is only if there is a future, if non-anticipatible events lie ahead. What interests me here is the event, and the event is such only insofar as it cannot be programmed and therefore anticipated. That’s what provokes thought. And that’s what provokes philosophy.”¹⁰¹⁵

Despite these reservations, Derrida has certainly contributed to the boundary disputes surrounding or permeating philosophy. The most important gesture, on his part, has probably been the way he once read Nietzsche as “parodying the language of the philosophers”¹⁰¹⁶. In this, he is accompanied by

Jean-François Lyotard who has spoken of Nietzsche as “parodying prophecy”¹⁰¹⁷.

On the face of it, the traditional positivist or the modern analytical distrust for anything that looks even remotely like stylistic, poetic, aphoristic, satiric, playful, provocatory kind of expression produces, in

On the face of it, the traditional positivist or the modern analytical distrust for anything that looks even remotely like stylistic, poetic, aphoristic, satiric, playful, provocatory kind of expression produces, in