Nietzsche illusion truth and redemption

Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption
R. Lanier Anderson
Truth is the first and most basic part of virtue. It must be loved for its
own sake.
Montaigne, On Presumption
But the depressive and self-wounding ego. . . rebuts: . . . ‘illusion of the
senses and of the mind holds us prisoner always’.
Calvino, Mr. Palomar
As Bernard Williams lately observed (2002: 1–19), the reception of Nietzsche’s
thought has prompted sharp controversy about truth. Some readers highlight
Nietzsche’s widespread and provocative remarks dismissing the value or even
the possibility of truth and science. Against these ‘deniers’, Williams identifies a
‘party of common sense’ (2002: 5–7), whose adherents stress the ubiquity of
ordinary truths in our practical and scientific projects. As they note, Nietzsche
himself adduces such truths in his withering attacks against traditional
metaphysical and religious pieties, and even the debunking claims of the very
deniers are motivated by a spirit of critique—a devotion to truthfulness
exempting nothing from the purview of its suspicion. The puzzle about this
controversy is that both ‘deniers’ and ‘common-sensers’ have gotten important
things right about Nietzsche. This paper aims to explain how that could be. I offer
a reading of Nietzsche on truth and illusion which saves the insights on both
sides, reconciles the tensions among the texts, and accounts for the importance of
both truth and illusion in his thought overall.
It is worth noting, first, the broad array of positions available to either side.
Quite different theses may be denied or affirmed about truth. ‘Deniers’ have
ranged from Hans Vaihinger (1905, 1986 [1927]), who took Nietzsche as a
forerunner of his own fictionalist strategy for saving science and other practices,
to an essentially skeptical ‘post-modernist’ reception that tends to dismiss science
in favor of art, in which ‘precisely the lie sanctifies itself’ (GM III, 25).1 On the
‘pro-truth’ side, as well, a wide variety of readers have found Nietzsche of
substantial aid, whether through frankly metaphysical system-building (Heidegger 1979 [1961], Richardson 1996), or in the service of more empiricist-minded
philosophical programs (Kaufmann 1974 [1950], Schacht 1983). Perhaps the
staunchest recent defenders of Nietzsche’s commitment to truth have been
Maudemarie Clark (1990, 1997) and Brian Leiter (2002), who seek to acquit
Nietzsche entirely of any global ‘falsification thesis’ (Clark 1990: 1–4, 95). On
philosophical grounds, they claim that he could not coherently maintain the
view: it would be at odds with his many specific truth claims, and it seems selfEuropean Journal of Philosophy 13:2 ISSN 0966-8373 pp. 185–225 r Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005. 9600 Garsington Road,
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refuting. On textual grounds, Clark (1990) deploys a developmental reading to
disarm falsificationist texts.2 A good indication of the depth of the difficulties
here can be gleaned from Peter Poellner. His meticulous assessment of the texts
exposes serious skeptical (Poellner 1995: 29–78) and anti-essentialist (Poellner
1995: 79–111) lines of thought, which motivate radical-sounding falsification
claims. At the same time, he shares the philosophical concerns of Clark and Leiter
(Poellner 2001: 85n), and he stresses the many truth claims essential to
Nietzsche’s own views about moral psychology, the will to power, etc. For
him, these different strands simply remain in irreconcilable tension,3 so his view,
in effect, is that the conflicts raging in the recent secondary literature began
already within the body of Nietzsche’s own beliefs!
The controversies show no signs of abating, and Poellner’s conscientious
handling of the texts reveals a clear reason why. There is simply too much textual
evidence available to each side.4 Just as Clark and Leiter insist, Nietzsche does
commonly assert the truth of his views, and more, he appeals to that truth as the
basis for their superiority to the deceptions of traditional religion and
metaphysics. Still, post-modernist readers like Alan Schrift (1990) can just as
easily point to texts which dismiss all truth claims, or even ‘laugh at the way in
which precisely the best science seeks most to keep us in this. . . suitably falsified
world’ (BGE 24). Nor is it plausible that Nietzsche was merely undecided or
forgetful here: in too many cases, suggestions of falsification and claims to truth
occur together in the space of a single paragraph, or even one sentence.5
Clearly, then, the real exegetical burden we must face is to explain how
Nietzsche could have thought himself entitled to both kinds of claim at once. It is
that burden I aim to assume. Unlike Poellner, I believe it is possible to outline a
consistent and genuinely Nietzschean position on truth and falsification. Section
1 brings together ideas I developed in earlier work to provide a specific and
tenable sense to Nietzsche’s falsification claims. It avoids self-referential paradox
by making room for another sense of ‘true’ and ‘false’ (separate from the one
involved in the falsification claim), thereby affording Nietzsche the resources to
defend his substantive views on epistemic grounds.6 If such a reading is correct,
then Nietzsche’s denials of the existence of truth (in one sense) are compatible
with his claims to truth (in another).
But a further question remains. In many key passages contributing to our
textual dilemma, Nietzsche’s direct concern is not the existence or possibility of
truth and knowledge, but their value.7 Therefore, an adequate interpretation must
not only outline a background view that reconciles positive truth claims with
some global falsification thesis (sec 1.A.). It must also show how Nietzsche can
place such value on science and knowledge, and simultaneously praise illusion,
or mere appearance (sec. 1.B.). That is, a satisfactory reading must explain how
Nietzsche thought these two apparently conflicting values could function
together, and why both were so important to him that he was willing to court
misunderstanding by praising each in a way that seems to exclude the other.
As it turns out, a proper understanding of truth and illusion in Nietzsche cuts
to the core of his philosophy, because their value is essential to his conception of a
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good life. In section 2, I sketch the role of Nietzsche’s thought of eternal
recurrence in articulating that conception of the good. I then argue that, rightly
understood, affirming the eternal recurrence of one’s life requires both a core
commitment to truth and a far reaching willingness to create and endorse
illusions. Only with both commitments in place can a person hope to attain
redemption in Nietzsche’s sense—which redemption alone, he thinks, can make it
possible for us to lead satisfactory lives as measured by the thought of recurrence.
This conclusion indicates the broader importance of truth and illusion in
Nietzsche, but it only sharpens the problem of how they can be reconciled.
Section 3 suggests the shape of Nietzsche’s solution, which treats the demands of
honesty and artistry as regulative ideals. By connecting the resulting account of
artistry to Nietzsche’s claim that we sometimes need ‘saving illusions’, I suggest
the proper place of ‘fictionalism’ and the ‘creation of values’ within his
philosophy. The result also clarifies the real differences between the type of
redemption Nietzsche sought to provide through the thought of recurrence, and
(what he takes to be) the false redemption offered by Christianity.
1. Truth and Illusion in Nietzsche: Posing the Textual Dilemma
Before turning to Nietzsche’s ideas about recurrence and redemption, it is
important to get the textual dilemma about truth and illusion firmly in view. I
have already noted two key axes of the puzzle. First, Nietzsche apparently
vacillates between the denial of truth and its affirmation. In addition, Nietzsche’s
remarks—both denials and affirmations—are divided between those that speak
to truth’s existence or possibility, and those that worry instead about its value.
A. On the Possibility of Truth
The tension in the texts is most obvious when we consider the existence or
possibility of truth. On the ‘pro-truth’ side, Nietzsche routinely takes particular
theses as true, or condemns others as false.8 It is not convincing to treat such
claims as mere rhetoric designed to convey what are officially non-cognitive
preferences on Nietzsche’s part, because he supplements his particular truth
claims with sweeping general pronouncements on the existence of truths—as in
his praise for psychologists who ‘sacrifice all desirability to truth, every truth,
even plain, harsh, ugly, repellent, unchristian, immoral truth—For there are such
truths.—’ (GM I, 1). Of even more consequence is the critical thought behind the
last passage, which may be the single most characteristic stance of Nietzsche’s
intellectual conscience. The attitude is best expressed by his rejection of the
biblical ‘proof of strength [Beweis der Kraft]’ (see GS 347, WP 17, 452). According
to that idea, it would count as evidence of a doctrine’s truth that it brings
contentment, blessedness, or peace of soul to the one who believes it. Nietzsche
counters with a blunt antithesis: ‘Nobody is very likely to consider a doctrine true
merely because it makes people happy or virtuous. . . Happiness and virtue are
no arguments’ (BGE 39). Or, in a still stronger key,
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We ‘knowers’ have gradually come to mistrust all kinds of believers. . . .
We, too, do not deny that faith ‘makes blessed’: precisely for that reason we
deny that faith proves anything—a strong faith that makes blessed raises
suspicion against what is believed; it does not establish ‘truth’, it
establishes a certain probability—of deception. [GM III, 24]
The practice of adopting beliefs because they make you happy or blessed is a
worthy target of suspicion precisely because such ‘motivated’ or ‘interested’
believing aims at blessedness rather than truth—and potentially, or even typically,
at the expense of truth. As the many related texts show, Nietzsche here relies on
the traditional assumption that cognitive judgment ought to aim at truth, even
where the truth violates our ‘heart’s desire’ (see BGE 229).9
At the same time, though, Nietzsche often provides comfort to ‘truth deniers’ by
asserting that our cognitive representations are subject to some ‘great, thoroughgoing. . . falsification’ (GS 354), or even a whole ‘system of fundamental falsification’
(WP 584). He is attracted to the idea throughout his writings,10 and recent efforts to
disarm such texts, however heroic, remain unsuccessful. For example, inaugurating his mature period in The Gay Science, Nietzsche speaks of ‘the insight into
general untruth and mendaciousness that is now given to us through science—the
insight into delusion and error as a condition of cognitive and sensible existence’
(GS 107), and he claims, citing basic ideas of his epistemology, that the ‘essence of
phenomenalism and perspectivism as I understand them’ entails that ‘all
becoming conscious is bound up with a great, thoroughgoing corruption,
falsification, superficialization, and generalization’ (GS 354). Leiter (2002: 17–18n)
notes that such passages simultaneously advance specific truth claims—for
instance, claims about consciousness in GS 354, or about the scientific results that
identify error as a condition of cognitive and sensory life in GS 107—but so far
from removing evidence of a falsification thesis, this observation just sharpens the
central interpretive problem. That problem, again, is how to reconcile such
apparent truth claims with the idea—equally well attested in the texts—that there
must be some ‘deceptive principle in ‘‘the essence of things’’ ’, since ‘the
erroneousness of the world in which we believe we live is the surest and firmest
thing we can lay our eyes on’ (BGE 34). It will not do to insist that error is supposed
to be limited to the excesses of metaphysics, morality, or other suspect branches of
thought, for Nietzsche is also willing to claim that ‘precisely the best science seeks
most to keep us in this simplified, through and through artificial, suitably
composed, suitably falsified world’ (BGE 24; first ital. mine).
The underlying motivation for these claims about systematic falsification is
what I will call a ‘subtraction argument’, which is derived from Nietzsche’s
perspectivism. On this view, cognition always depends on some particular
perspective, so that the ideal of some direct cognitive grasp—or ‘ ‘‘interest-free
intuition’’ ’—that captures perspective-independent objects is incoherent: it
would demand ‘an eye that can by no means be thought, an eye that is supposed
to have absolutely no direction, in which the active and interpreting forces,
through which after all seeing first becomes seeing something, are supposed to be
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cut off, or lacking’ (GM III, 12). Nietzsche’s rejection of ‘ ‘‘interest-free intuition’’ ’
suggests that perspectives are ultimately rooted in values, drives, and affects;
they represent the world in the service of our practical needs and interests (WP
567). But the immediate mechanisms through which perspectives function are the
concepts we use to order our experience. These organizing representations carry
content of their own by means of which they structure our experience, and they
add that positive content to experience in a way that shapes our world-picture.11
The falsification argument then seems to be this: Strictly true representation
would have to capture the way the world is independently—it would represent
the world after the subtraction of any perspectival content superadded in
cognition; But subtraction is impossible, since perspectives are a necessary
condition of cognitive representation (‘As if a world would still remain over after
one had subtracted the perspective!’ (WP 567)); Thus, cognitive representation
systematically falsifies (WP 584, GS 354).12
This emphasis on the falsifying effect of ‘added’ perspectival content is
widespread in Nietzsche’s notes.13 In the published works, too, Nietzsche writes
(against the sober realist), ‘That mountain there! That cloud there! What, then, is
‘‘real’’ in that? Subtract for once the phantasm and the whole human addition
from it, you sober ones! Yes, if you can do that!. . . There is no ‘‘reality’’ for us—
and not for you either, you sober ones’ (GS 57). Clearly, then, cognition is
supposed to falsify because subjective perspectives have a positive influence on
the content of our representations which cannot be subtracted out.
Equally clearly, there are difficulties with Nietzsche’s picture. We can well
wonder to what our perspectives are supposed to be ‘added’, and why that
content has some special claim to represent truth, so that its transformation via
perspective counts as distortion. From this standpoint, the very claim that
perspective cannot be ‘subtracted out’ already raises worries about the inference
to falsification. The influence of perspective was supposed to be ineliminable,
recall, because it helps to constitute the very content we represent: it is only
through the ‘active and interpreting forces’ of a perspective that ‘seeing becomes
seeing something’ (GM III, 12). The same idea motivated Nietzsche to reject the
thing in itself: ‘That things possess a constitution in themselves quite apart from
interpretation and subjectivity is a completely idle hypothesis: it would presuppose
that interpretation and being subjective were not essential’ (WP 560). In light of these
points, some will insist (with Clark) that Nietzsche’s claims about ‘subtraction’
and falsification must be confused, or at least overstated. If it makes no sense to
speak of things apart from our ‘human addition’, then the things our theories
purport to describe can only be empirical objects as constituted via our
perspectives. Our representation of those objects should be perfectly accurate,
because they are the very objects we experience—before any ‘subtraction’. As long
as we do not posit a separate ‘true world’ of things in themselves behind the
empirical world, there is no justification for stigmatizing our representations as
‘merely apparent’, or otherwise defective.14
But despite rejecting the thing in itself and the ‘true world’ as early as The Gay
Science, Nietzsche nonetheless continues to the end to speak of some systematic
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falsification through the basic concepts of reason and logic. Of course, his denial
of any underlying ‘true world’ only sharpens our question about what it is that
our perspectival concepts are supposed to falsify. In my view, Nietzsche’s answer
to these puzzles emerges in a telling 1887 note:
1. . . . The material of the senses organized by the understanding, reduced
to rough outlines . . . Thus, the indistinctness and chaos of sense
impressions are as it were logicized;
2. . . . the world of ‘phenomena’ is the organized world which we sense to
be real. The ‘reality’ lies in the . . . recurrence of like, familiar, related
things in their logicized character . . .
3. . . . the antithesis of this phenomenal world is not ‘the true world’, but
the formless unformulable world of the chaos of sensations—therefore
another kind of phenomenal world, a kind ‘unknowable’ for us; . . . [WP
569]
The same note goes on to reject ‘things in themselves’ as well, because
‘ ‘‘Thingness’’ is first created by us’ as part of our ‘logicizing’ activity (WP 569).
That is, precisely because there are no things in themselves, Nietzsche concludes
that the only kinds of reality are phenomenal. Cognition is thus restricted to an
apparent world, and in that sense falsifies our beliefs, but the falsification arises
not because perspectives cut us off from independent things in themselves.
Falsification is supposed to follow rather because cognition transforms the
‘material of the senses’.15
Some careful reconstruction is needed to make solid philosophical sense out of
Nietzsche’s suggestion. In particular, we need to know how ‘the chaos of sense
impressions’ is supposed to form ‘another world’ whose transformation amounts
to falsification, and in what sense that world can be ‘phenomenal’. In my view,
Nietzsche’s idea was to apply the subtraction argument to experience ‘from
within’. That is, Nietzsche does not begin his argument from the distinction
between an independent world and our representations of it, construed along the
lines of our present-day realist conventional wisdom. Rather, he starts (in a
loosely Kantian vein) from the content of cognitive experience itself, understood as
the joint product of ‘the material of the senses’ and the subject’s ‘logicizing’
conceptual schemata. The question is whether such experience counts as true.
Nietzsche answers in the negative because the logicizing schema transforms the
sensory material, so that what we represent is a ‘phenomenal world’ whose
content differs from what is given independently (the raw sensory ‘material’).16
The key point is this: on the present view, the underlying domain that gets
‘falsified’ by perspectival transformation is not a world of independent objects,
with a determinate ‘constitution in themselves’ (WP 560), but ‘another kind of
phenomenal world’ (WP 569), constituted by contents provided from the ‘chaos of
sensations’. Given that the argument has started from within experience, these
sensations are not to be understood in terms of their reference to some further,
mind independent objects. They do carry content, which we organize in
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representing the world we experience, and for all its ‘formless’ character, that
content clearly must present things in a certain way, so as to contribute something
to our ‘logicized’ representations of the world. But such contents
are not taken to represent some further world of objects beyond the sensations; on
the contrary, they constitute the second ‘phenomenal world’. Since Nietzsche
abstemiously swears off all talk of metaphysically more substantial ‘things
referred to’, he must be construing this world as merely intentional (or ‘in the
representation’), in a way reminiscent of Ernst Mach’s treatment of the contents
carried by his sensory ‘elements’ of experience.17 Still, despite Nietzsche’s refusal
to posit an independent world ‘in itself’, the raw material of sense still has a claim
to present what is distinctively real in our experience because its contents are
ultimately responsible for the resistance to willing and thinking through which the
world can frustrate and surprise us, and which we rightly associate with the
reality of things. At the same time, Nietzsche’s construal of the underlying sensory
world as ‘phenomenal’ is justified by the thought that its denizens, qua sensations,
present their content only from some point of view, and vary from one cognitive
agent to another.18 Note, finally, that the ultimate sensory contents are not available
to direct awareness. All cognition, even conscious sensory experience, already
involves the operation of a value-laden perspective, which alters the radically
independent, but ‘ ‘‘unknowable’’ ’ (WP 569), material of sense. Therefore,
Nietzsche assigns the ultimate sensory content to unconscious sense impressions,
modelled on Leibniz’s petites perceptions (GS 354, 357)—and that is why
consciousness by itself is already supposed to have a falsifying effect (GS 354).19
We can now sum up. In order to give sense to a plausible falsification claim,
what Nietzsche needs is a clean distinction between the way the world appears to
a cognitive subject, and the content that appears. The subtraction argument could
then warrant our treating the underlying content as ‘true’, in the sense of being
undistorted, or independent from the appearance-generating influence of
perspective. When Nietzsche runs the subtraction argument ‘from within’,
however, he arrives at an unusual version of the appearance/reality distinction.
Rather than distinguishing between representations and objects, or between two
‘worlds’ of appearance and thing-in-itself, Nietzsche gets what he needs by
contrasting two kinds of representations: he separates the way things appear in
consciousness from the underlying content of unconscious petites perceptions. He can
thereby justify talk of ‘appearance’, and even falsification, without positing a
separate ‘true world’ of objects. Cognition falsifies in that it captures a realm of
appearance, represented in conscious experience and ordered in accordance with
our needs (WP 568), which differs from the content given independently.20
There is one final, and critical, point to notice. The subtraction argument for
falsification is strikingly similar to Nietzsche’s inference against the ‘proof of
strength’—which we saw above as a frequent occasion for his positive appeals to
truth. In that case, recall, Nietzsche insisted that the fact that some judgment
accords with a believer’s needs is no reason for its truth. On the contrary, it
provides grounds for suspicion against it. The present application of the
subtraction argument makes a parallel point. The fact that our basic concepts (e.g.
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ocause4,osubstance4,othing4, etc.) make experience tractable, and ‘organize a world for ourselves in which our existence is made possible’ (WP 521), is
not evidence of their truth; on the contrary, it raises the suspicion that they are
deceptive (WP 513). That is, for the very reason that our perspectives are so useful
for organizing and manipulating our experience, Nietzsche suggests that they are
not to be taken as true representations of how the world is, independently of our
needs. Strikingly, then, Nietzsche’s claims about systematic falsification turn out
to appeal to the same line of thought that generates many of his claims to truth!
B. On the Value of Truth
We are now in a position to face worries about the value of truth squarely. From
the present standpoint, it becomes clear why a genuinely scientific spirit which
subordinates other commitments to a thoroughgoing ‘will to truth’ might tend
toward asceticism. A global falsification thesis would be troubling enough by
itself, but we have also seen that cognitions are supposed to falsify precisely
because they ‘organize a world for ourselves in which our existence is made
possible’ (WP 521). That is, an unfettered will to truth threatens to undermine the
believability of the very representations that serve to make our existence
bearable. It is therefore plain why:
The faith in science . . . cannot have originated from such a calculus of
utility, but rather despite the fact that the disutility and dangerousness of
‘the will to truth’, of ‘truth at any price’ is proved to it continually. . . . Ask
yourself carefully, ‘Why do you not want to deceive?’, especially if it
should appear—and it does appear!—as if life aimed at appearance—I
mean at error, deception, delusion, and self-delusion . . . . Charitably
interpreted, such a resolve might be a quixotism, a small fantastical
conceit; but it might also be something worse, namely, a principle that is
hostile to life and destructive.—‘Will to truth’—that might be a concealed
will to death. [GS 344]
Life itself aims at error and self-delusion, in that it uses cognitive representation
not to secure the truest beliefs, but to ‘organize a world for ourselves in which our
existence is made possible’ (WP 521). So the attempt to deploy cognition
differently—to explode error and secure truth instead of arranging the world
conveniently—not only courts self-flagellation, but even risks degenerating into
the vain wish that things were radically otherwise with the world and our
cognitive faculties. That, ultimately, would be a wish that we ourselves were
otherwise—that we had different cognitive abilities, or at least were inhabitants
of a world better suited to our powers. In that case, the will to truth would be
merely another version of the ascetic’s ‘incarnate desire to be otherwise, to be
elsewhere’ (GM III, 13).
It is important to be clear about what Nietzsche is, and is not, committed to
regarding the pursuit of truth. The subtraction argument claims that cognitive
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representations are false in a specific sense: they organize the given ‘material of
sense’ in a way that transforms and distorts the mind-independent part of the
content of experience. But some kind of pursuit of truth can still make sense, for
the same picture affords a straightforward sense in which some perspectives may
be cognitively superior to others: they may be more adequate to the underlying
sensory contents, or organize them in a way that better satisfies distinctively
cognitive values like simplicity or explanatory power. Granted, for Nietzsche no
univocal empirically adequate theory can be expected, since he recognizes the
possibility of instability, or even inconsistency, among contents within the
underlying ‘chaos of sensations’.21 But all that just means that the account of
cognitive superiority must include a second part—a demand that we ‘make the
variety of perspectives and affective interpretations useful in the service of
knowledge’ (GM III, 12), so as to reveal different aspects of the content of
sensation. Each perspective exposes some limitations of others, and this cognitive
strategy therefore promises representations that are more responsive to the range
of sensory contents and less limited by the peculiarities of any one perspective.
Perspectives, again, are responsible for the ‘merely apparent’ character of our
representations, so to the extent our beliefs are made more independent from
perspective in these respects, they will also be ‘less apparent’, or ‘truer’ (see BGE
34). Thus, even though ‘the world with which we are concerned is false’ in one
sense, still ‘every elevation of the human brings with it the overcoming of narrower
interpretations’, and thus truer representation, in the sense of cognitive
improvement (WP 616).
When Nietzsche offers assertions as truths, I submit, he means to lay claim to
comparative truth or objectivity, in a ‘theory-internal’ sense filled out by this
notion of cognitive superiority.22 Such superiority is compatible with a
representation’s being party to the systematic falsification of experience, in the
distinct sense of ‘false’ assumed in the subtraction argument. Thus, as Schacht has
long urged (1983, 1984, 1995), the paradoxes generated by Nietzsche’s denials of
the possibility of truth are to be resolved by distinguishing different senses of
‘true’ and ‘false’.23
But if my account of Nietzsche’s epistemology is right, the same strategy for
reconciliation does not extend cleanly to his worries about the value of truth.
Suppose we take talk of truth ‘internally’ or ‘perspectivally’ in the proposed
sense. Then the will to truth amounts to a search for representations arising from
the interplay of a ‘variety of perspectives’, which are thereby relatively more
independent from any one and for just that reason ‘less apparent’, or ‘truer’. This
does not commit us to ‘things’ with a ‘constitution in themselves completely apart
from interpretation’ (WP 560), but we are enjoined to seek representations that are
more and more perspective-independent. After all, what does the real work to
make a representation truer is not the mere fact that it is accessible from multiple
perspectives, but the independence from the peculiarities of any one viewpoint that
goes with its having a role in more, broader, and better perspectives. This means
that the focus imaginarius guiding the asymptotic progression through everbroadening perspectives is an ideal of fully perspective-independent, or
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aperspectival, representation. As a result, even if the possibility of attaining
aperspectival knowledge is rejected, attributing value to the will to truth still
commits us to valuing just such ‘ ‘‘interest-free intuition’’ ’. Note, it is perfectly
coherent, albeit pessimistic, to value what is in fact unattainable. In that case, the
impossibility of aperspectival representations simply highlights the risk that the
will to truth is ascetic.
We can now pose the textual dilemma about the value of truth sharply. On the
negative side, we have seen reasons to suspect that valuing truth is a version of
asceticism. Nietzsche himself raises the worry (GM III, 24; GS 344), pointing out
the ‘venerable philosopher’s abstinence’ implied in any pursuit of truth, since it
involves a:
renunciation of interpretation altogether (of forcing, adjusting, abbreviating, omitting, padding, inventing, falsifying, and whatever else belongs
to the essence of all interpreting)24—considered in the large, all this
expresses just as good an asceticism of virtue as any denial of
sensuality. . . [GM III, 24]
To oppose asceticism, moreover, Nietzsche turns to ‘Art. . . in which precisely the
lie sanctifies itself, in which the will to deception has good conscience on its side’
(GM III, 25). The move is prominent already in Birth of Tragedy, where art
provides ‘saving illusions’ by which we cope with tragic insight into the truth of
a metaphysically grounded pessimism inherited from Schopenhauer.25 While
Nietzsche later rejected Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and his pessimism, he
never abandoned the idea that art is valuable because it creates illusions, and gets
us to endorse them: ‘Now our honesty has a counterforce which helps us to avoid
[its bad] consequences: art as the good will to appearance’ (GS 107; cf. GM III, 25);
or again, what we learn from artists is how to ‘make things beautiful, attractive,
and desirable for ourselves when they are not’ (GS 299, my italics). Such praise of
mere appearance stands in clear tension with the value of truth, so it is tempting
to view this strand as the entering wedge for a wholesale dismissal of truth’s
value, a program apparently advanced in the ringing finale of GM III, 24: ‘The
will to truth requires a critique—let us thus define our own task—the value of
truth is for once to be experimentally called into question’.
Still, on the positive side, few virtues or projects get as much unqualified
endorsement in the Nietzschean corpus as honesty and pursuit of truth.
Intellectual honesty is so deeply built into Nietzsche’s scheme of values that he
can hardly even comprehend that most people ‘do not consider it contemptible to
believe this or that and live accordingly, without previously making themselves
aware of the final and most certain reasons pro and con’ (GS 2). The same virtue
of truthfulness, we saw, underwrites his central criticisms of the ‘proof of
strength’ type argument. Perhaps most striking of all, though, is that Nietzsche
praises honesty even while stressing its ascetic tendencies. One typical account
introduces honesty as ‘our virtue, the only one left to us’ (BGE 227), and then goes
on to claim that it is a ‘palpable truth’ (BGE 229) that such honesty rests on
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cruelty against oneself (BGE 229–30). Honesty is cruel because it denies ‘the basic
will of the spirit which unceasingly strives for the apparent and superficial’ (BGE
229)—the ‘sublime inclination of the knower works against’ that basic will to
superficial appearances, so that the knower ‘takes and wants to take things
deeply, multifariously, fundamentally, as a kind of cruelty of intellectual
conscience’ (BGE 230). Nietzsche’s apparent endorsement of a fully ascetic will
to truth culminates in the following passage:
How much truth does a spirit endure, how much truth does it dare? More
and more that became for me the real measure of value. Error (—faith in
the ideal—) is not blindness, error is cowardice. Every attainment, every
step forward in knowledge, follows from courage, from hardness against
oneself, from cleanliness toward oneself. [EH P, 3; cf. A 50]
What is asceticism, after all, if not ‘hardness against oneself, . . . cleanliness
toward oneself’? And here that counts as ‘the real measure of value’.
Our puzzle is now in clear relief: Nietzsche attributes apparently unqualified
value to both artistry and honesty, but each virtue seems to compromise the
other. On the one side, artistry’s importance is rooted in its capacity to generate
illusions and get us to endorse them. But, we must ask, why is that not simply
‘faith in the ideal’, and thus ‘cowardice’ (EH P, 3) of the same ilk as the condemned
‘proof of strength’? On the other side, Nietzsche demands a virtue of honesty that
would explode such ideals. But, we must also ask, why is that not, as he himself
suggests (GM III, 23–7), just another version of the self-defeating ascetic ideal,
whose effect—whose very aim—is to condemn the world and render it
unbearably ugly (see GS 130)?
The clue for addressing this quandary emerges from closer consideration of
Nietzsche’s famous call for a critique of the will to truth in GM III, 24: ‘The will to
truth requires a critique—let us thus define our own task—the value of truth is for
once to be experimentally called into question’. The first point to note is that a
‘critique’ is not a denial of value, but an assessment of its sources and validity.26
Any inference by truth ‘deniers’ that Nietzsche must be ‘against’ truth simpliciter
is thus too quick. Once this is noticed, a second curious question surfaces: in what
sense is truth’s value to be assessed experimentally? What sort of ‘experiment’
could Nietzsche have in mind? An answer is suggested in The Gay Science 110,
which traces the origin of knowledge back to the ‘basic errors’ we use to order
experience. At first, these errors were accepted solely ‘as a condition of life’.
Gradually, though, it emerged that competing claims might be compatible with
both experience and the basic errors, and only then does the pursuit of
knowledge arise, as another possible goal of cognitive life, helping us to choose
among those claims. By and by, ‘the striving for the true finally arrayed itself as a
need among other needs’, and:
Thus knowledge became a piece of life itself, and . . . finally knowledge
and those primeval basic errors butted up against one another: two lives,
two powers, both in the same human being. The thinker: that is now that
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being in whom the drive to truth and those life-preserving errors clash
for their first fight . . . . Compared to the significance of this fight,
everything else is a matter of indifference: the ultimate question about the
conditions of life has been posed here, and the first attempt has been
made here to answer this question by experiment. To what extent can truth
endure incorporation? That is the question; that is the experiment. [GS 110, my
italics]
Nietzsche’s experiment, then, must be the life of the thinker. And the question to be
answered, beside which ‘everything else is a matter of indifference’, is at bottom
the very one still gripping him in the Genealogy, viz., ‘What is the value of truth?’
(cf. also BGE 1). We are to explore the issue by considering what kind of life a
truth-seeking thinker would have, and asking whether it is good. If so, then the
will to truth may hold ‘value for life’. Assessing the value of truth thus means
assessing the value of a type of life, and the role of truthfulness in it.27 For
Nietzsche, all such assessments are made by coming to grips with the thought of
eternal recurrence.
2. Eternal Recurrence and the Value of a Life
Nietzsche sees the doctrine of eternal recurrence as his most important thought
(EH P, 4; also III, ‘Z’, 1, 6, 8). It has often been read as a cosmological hypothesis
that time has a circular structure, so that all events of world history endlessly
repeat themselves in the same sequence. In recent years, though, philosophers with
doubts about the plausibility of such a theory have contended that the view should
rather be taken as a device for assessing the value of a life—less a theoretical
doctrine than a practical thought experiment. Nietzsche asks us to imagine that our
lives will return over and over, and our reaction to the prospect is supposed to
show something about how good they are. While some arguments from the
notebooks purport to prove the doctrine in its full cosmological form, the most
important of these have been shown to fail.28 A practical reading makes that failure
less consequential for Nietzsche’s philosophy, since the thought of recurrence could
still be useful for provoking reflective self-assessment even if the hypothesis that
life recurs is false, or outright impossible (see Clark 1990: 266–70).
Such readings by no means remove all difficulties, however. On some
treatments, the practical function of the thought of recurrence still depends on
striking metaphysical theses—for example, that every property of a person is
equally essential to her identity.29 Moreover, different versions of the practical
reading offer competing answers to key questions about it: Exactly what are we to
imagine about the return of events? Must we actually believe in a ‘realistic’
recurrence for the doctrine to have its intended practical effect? Just how does the
thought experiment serve as a criterion for assessing a life? I will not try to address
all the debates.30 Instead, I will sketch a relatively minimal version of the practical
interpretation, which can do at least a significant part of the work Nietzsche
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assigned to the doctrine. The minimal account is enough to indicate the relevance
of the values of truth and illusion to recurrence, so for present purposes we need
not decide which further commitments Nietzsche in fact assumes, or can defend.
The minimal reading takes its cue from Nietzsche’s first introduction of the
recurrence idea at the end of The Gay Science (1st ed.):
The greatest weight.—What if some day or night a demon were to steal
after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you
now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and
innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every
pain and every pleasure and every thought and sigh and everything
unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the
same succession and sequence . . .’ Would you not throw yourself down
and gnash your teeth and curse the demon . . .? Or have you once
experienced a tremendous moment when you could have answered him:
‘You are god, and I have never heard anything more divine!’. If this
thought gained dominion over you it would change you, as you are, or
perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you desire
this once more and innumerable times more?’ would lie upon your
actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to
become to yourself and to life to wish for nothing more than for this eternal
confirmation and seal? [GS 341]
This is the formulation of the doctrine that Nietzsche later counted as ‘the basic
thought of Zarathustra’, and even of his philosophy more broadly (EH III, ‘Z,’ 1,
8). It clearly offers a practical thought experiment applied to an individual life:
one is to imagine that ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have
to live once more and innumerable times more’.
In the minimal version, then, the recurrence idea is applied to the events that
make up a person’s life, along with any others so closely tied to them that she
could not be the same without them.31 Nietzsche’s thought experiment then
invites the person to consider the endless recurrence of that life, with every detail
the same. It is not important that the agent believe her life will or even could
actually recur; she simply imagines its return so as to elicit her response to it.32 A
reaction of joy is supposed to indicate that the life was good, whereas sorrow,
regret, and the like show it to have been wanting. For reasons that will become
clear, it does matter even for the minimal reading that what she imagines is the
endless repetition of the very same life that she has lived; the notions of eternity
and sameness give the Nietzschean assessment its distinctive content.
Two characteristic features of the proposed test should be noted from the
outset. First, its standards of assessment are not specified independently, but are
just the ones endorsed by the person. Those are the standards engaged by
appealing to her own reaction when imagining her life’s return.33 Second, the
idea of recurrence blocks a natural, but dubious, tendency of self-assessments that
would promote positive judgments—a propensity to underweight the unchanger
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able past, relative to the future, which we might still be able to affect. It is easier
for me to think of my life as going well if I focus on plans for a more glorious
future, and minimize the importance of regrettable parts of my past. Temptations
to such thinking are strong enough to have worked their way into conventional
expressions of consolation (‘Well, at least that’s behind you now’; ‘What a relief!
I’ll never have to live through that again!’). Construed as attempts at
encouragement or self-motivation, these responses are unimpeachable, but if
what is wanted is a cold, clear-eyed assessment of whether a life has been good,
taking consolation from the mere fact that a regrettable event lies in the past is
self-deception. Its being past in no way removes it from the life itself—a fact made
manifest by the thought of life’s recurrence. In this respect, Nietzsche’s test bears
comparison to another common piece of wisdom: in thinking through a difficult
decision, one is often well advised to imagine one’s life under the alternatives,
assessing what each would be like through ‘off-line simulation’ (think of
Kundera’s Tomas, trying to decide what to do by alternately living out in
imagination his life with Tereza and without Tereza). That procedure can be a
better gauge of overall preferences than conscious deliberation alone, which may
neglect, or even actively suppress, considerations that one must admit in
retrospect were important. The thought of recurrence puts one’s entire life
imaginatively into the future. In that way, it both encourages a genuine
assessment (making it a ‘live question’), and permits a judgment engaging all
the values that actually move us—even ones we might fail to notice, or admit to.
With these ideas in place, we can begin to appreciate the distinctive force of
Nietzsche’s thought experiment. Bernard Reginster points out that many
readings have difficulty explaining why it should be important that we imagine
our return over and over, eternally—as opposed, say, to our being willing to
accept its repetition once.34 Reginster addresses this problem of eternality by
building an emotion of joy into the very notion of affirmation sought by the test;
willing eternal repetition is supposed to pick out a genuinely joyful reaction. He
offers an impressive philosophical analysis of joy to back up the textual evidence
for the proposal, and some interpretation along these lines may well be correct.
But there are also more minimal grounds for the demand that we will life’s
eternal return. At least part of its motivation, I submit, is the thought
experiment’s function of blocking the sort of unjustified consolation taken from
the mere pastness of events described above. If the recurrence to be imagined is
eternal, then I can never look forward to a time when I can pretend to be
thoroughly ‘finished’ with an event, and the salience of its belonging to my life is
thereby set squarely before me. Versions of an afterlife that came to an end, or else
advanced to some eternal stage very different from my actual life (as in the
typical Christian conception) would lose this clarifying, rationalizing feature of
the Nietzschean assessment.35
Beyond Reginster’s problem of eternality, three key questions remain for even
minimal versions of the doctrine: 1) Why should we accept a person’s own reaction
to the thought of recurrence as a significant or correct judgment on the value of
her life?; 2) Why does it matter to Nietzsche that every event in the life is imagined
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to recur unchanged (this is the problem of sameness, alluded to above)?; and 3)
What practical effect is the thought experiment supposed to have, and how?
The first question raises broad and difficult issues. One obvious objection to
Nietzsche’s thought is that its conception of the good is radically incomplete. It
seems unconstrained by the most conspicuous form of value usually supposed to
attach to lives, moral value. A life might be as desirable as one likes for the person
herself—and thereby be a paradigm candidate of a good life from the standpoint
of recurrence—while unacceptably violating or ignoring the interests of others.
Nietzsche frankly courts such objections by his lavish praise of morally troubling
figures like Napoleon (e.g. GM I, 16),36 but the complaint would surely not worry
him. The thought behind his notorious ‘immoralism’ is that moral evaluations
have deeply corrupted our judgments about whether a life is good, so for him,
the fact that recurrence gives them no necessary role would appear not as a bug,
but as a feature. Such immoralism is likely to attract resistance today, but I do not
have space to pursue the serious issues it raises. I mention just one point in the
neighborhood. By de-emphasizing morality per se, Nietzsche intends to recall our
attention to the broad question of ancient ethics, which asked whether a life was
good overall. That is, like many ancient followers of Socrates, Nietzsche resists
any simple equation of the good life with the virtuous or moral life; such an
equivalence would have to be established by a special and non-trivial argument,
which the ancients sought, but Nietzsche doubts can be delivered.
Another worry is that Nietzsche’s conception is so formal as to be empty, because
all it assays is the compatibility of a person’s life with values she already has. But
once the ethical question is conceived in the broad ancient sense just broached, it
becomes clear that Nietzsche’s test does identify a substantively important part of
what makes a life good—viz., a deep-going consistency between the agent’s
avowed values and her actual life. In order for an agent to affirm recurrence, the
events of her life must escape condemnation under the values she endorses, since
those are the ones engaged by the thought experiment. An agent who fails the test
condemns her own life, and to that extent, turns against herself: the part of her that
sets standards and judges is set against the part that actually lived the unaffirmable
events. Avoiding such inconsistency or division within the person is deeply
important to Nietzsche. It is also related to a very old ideal for human life—one
that used to be given names like ‘harmony of soul’.37
We can now begin to address the second question as well, seeing why
Nietzsche thought it important that every event in the person’s life be supposed to
recur (‘everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return’). If
the life whose recurrence I affirm omits some events that really happened to me,
then my managing the affirmation is by no means sufficient to establish the kind
of harmony between my life and values that Nietzsche intends to emphasize.
Affirmation could easily be made compatible with quite serious disharmony
between my values and my actual life, as long as I take care to exclude from the
recurring events exactly those that are troubling from the point of view of my
values. Thus, if affirmation is to count as a genuine test of harmony, I must
include every event of my life as part of the sequence imagined to recur.
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But of course, no one has a life free of any regrettable feature, and in that
respect, the thought of recurrence seems to advance a conception of the good that
is utterly out of step with the human predicament. This is a serious worry. Given
the incongruity of these desiderata with our actual condition, how could it be at
all reasonable to assess our lives by Nietzsche’s test?
We now face the central problem Nietzsche means to address by his thought
experiment—the problem of redemption.38 For Nietzsche, the crucial ‘task’ of
philosophy was to ‘say Yes to the point of justifying, to the point of redeeming
even all the past’ (EH III, ‘Z,’ 8). He explores the relevant conception in
Zarathustra’s chapter ‘On Redemption’, which evokes the issue of harmony of
soul by lamenting the ‘inverse cripples’ so common in the world—people in
whom the hypertrophy of one capacity or character trait has left their lives
completely out of balance. Such people need a strategy to make themselves
whole, and that is the task of redemption, which Zarathustra characterizes as a
product of ‘willing’ and ‘creating’. One must:
create and carry into One what is fragment and riddle and dreadful
accident. . . . To redeem those who lived in the past, and to recreate all ‘it
was’ into a ‘thus I willed it’—that alone should I call redemption. . . . All
‘it was’ is a fragment, a riddle, a dreadful accident—until the creative
will says to it, ‘But thus I willed it’. Until the will says to it, ‘But thus I
will it; thus I shall will it’. [Z II, ‘Redemption’]
The suggestion is that fragmentary, accidental, puzzling, or regrettable aspects of
a person’s life or character can be redeemed by being brought into a whole that
the person can affirm. Thus, we can go beyond the earlier suggestion that
recurrence is a device for self-assessment by ‘off-line simulation’. The thought of
an event’s recurrence not only forces a serious recognition of its relevance to the
value of my life, but also opens the possibility of my taking a specific new
attitude toward it, which redeems it by changing its import in my life. If I can tell
my life story in such a way that I will the whole, then I can likewise affirm each
event within it, in virtue of its essential contribution to the meaning of the whole
story.39 Thus, events that were, considered by themselves, regrettable (‘fragment,
riddle, dreadful accident’) may be affirmed nonetheless. I thereby bring my life
into greater harmony with my values, and thus improve it in the dimension of
Nietzsche’s concern.
To get a sense of the issue, consider Jimmy Carter, whose crushing 1980 defeat
at the hands of Ronald Reagan poses the problem of redemption in sharp fashion.
Carter had suffered earlier setbacks in politics, but nothing had prepared him for
the level of disappointment attending his loss of the Presidency (J. & R. Carter
1987: 4–10). It not only ended service projects of great importance to him, but also
represented a sweeping repudiation of his core values and accomplishments.
Perhaps most troubling, it threatened to mark the end of his career, and define it
as a failure. The loss—especially this last aspect of it—was so bitter for Rosalynn
Carter that her only consolation was the thought that Carter would run again and
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win, thereby changing the end of the story (J. & R. Carter 1987: 8, 9). President
Carter himself had no stomach for another race, but that stance did little to ease
his disappointment.40 On the contrary, it only sharpened the question of how to
prevent the defeat’s circumscribing his public life as a whole, defining it as a
failed political career. If Rosalynn’s dream of a new campaign was not realistic,
her idea about what Jimmy needed was nonetheless on target: he needed the
redemption of the defeat, in just Nietzsche’s sense—a way of turning it from a
debilitating setback into something that could be accepted—even willed.
The idea for organizing a life of meaningful work after his Presidency came to
Carter in the middle of the night. Here is how Rosalynn Carter describes it:
One night I woke up and Jimmy was sitting straight up in bed. He
always sleeps so soundly that I thought he must be sick. ‘What’s the
matter?’ I asked. ‘I know what we can do at the library’, he said. ‘We can
develop a place to help people who want to resolve disputes. There’s no
place like that now. . . If there had been. . ., I wouldn’t have had to take
Begin and Sadat to Camp David’. . . . A center to settle disputes. For the
first time since we moved back to Plains, I saw Jimmy excited about
plans for the future. [J. & R. Carter 1987: 31]
Jimmy Carter was not sick; he was beginning his convalescence.41 With the idea
of transforming his Presidential library into the Carter Center, he saw his way
forward to a new project, allowing him to do work that was rewarding for him,
and useful—even important—for the world. At the time, he could hardly have
imagined how successful the Center’s work would eventually become, not only
in contributions to dispute mediation, but also in broader projects of disease
eradication, human rights protection, and poverty alleviation. In the event, Carter
attained a kind of credibility as a moral leader that no other twentieth century exPresident has even approached—leadership ultimately recognized by former
adversaries and allies alike, culminating in the 2002 Nobel Prize for Peace. It is
fair to argue (and is now commonly observed) that Carter built the greatest U.S.
Ex-Presidency ever.
The final and crucial point to note is this: it is not at all likely that the Carter exPresidency would have been as accomplished had he won re-election in 1980. The
range of his activities has gone so far beyond the normal course of ‘elder
statesman’ politics that it is hard to imagine his even conceiving the project, let
alone implementing it so energetically, without the need for redemption posed by
the stinging 1980 defeat. In that sense, to wish for such an ex-Presidency is also to
wish for the defeat, and precisely that fact allows the later successes to redeem the
earlier failure. Of course, Carter could not have guaranteed success back in 1981,
or even envisioned exactly what it would look like (and this will turn out to be
important), but he did have in view something very like the ideal of redemption
found in Nietzsche. Long before the full extent of his achievement was apparent,
back in 1987, he wrote of having conceived the Carter Center with the thought,
‘Who knows what we can do if we set our goals high? We may even be able to do
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more than if we had won the election in 1980!’ (J. & R. Carter 1987: 32). Thus, what
the Carters write of Chuck Colson, their collaborator in Habitat for Humanity,
applies equally to themselves: ‘Sometimes an unpleasant or even catastrophic
event can transform one’s life and reveal opportunities that could never have been
envisioned [otherwise]’ (J. & R. Carter 1987: 114).42
Carter’s success required good moral luck, and Nietzsche is aware that having
a good life in his sense often depends on luck. But it was not merely luck that
effected Carter’s redemption. He also had to do something that would change the
meaning of his life from the story of a failed political career into a narrative of
moral leadership. That lesson provides the practical upshot of Nietzsche’s
thought experiment, thereby addressing our third question.
Recurrence is supposed to place ‘the greatest weight’ on events in our lives,
and ‘change’ us (GS 341). The context of redemption reveals the sort of weight
and the sort of change at issue. We saw that the thought of recurrence is meant to
show the limits of coping with difficulties by simply waiting for them to slip into
the past. Merely enduring troubles may be preferable to the alternative (if the
alternative is not enduring!), but it does nothing to make the troubles themselves
any less troubling. We saw that imagining their recurrence highlights the ‘weight’
they really have, past or not, and thereby sharpens the problem of redeeming
what is accidental or dreadful in our lives. The same thought, however, also
provides a practical recommendation for taking arms against our troubles—the
construction of a unifying, redemptive story rendering the life meaningful and
affirmable, a story that ‘carr[ies] into One what is fragment and riddle and
dreadful accident. . . [so as to] say to it, ‘‘But thus I will it; thus I shall will it’’ ’
(Z II, ‘Redemption’).
Such a narrative itself alters the life, especially in the dimension of what it
means. First, the narrative adds to the ‘weight’ of each event, enhancing its
significance by tying it to the whole. Second, a new overall story can also change
the character of an event’s meaning—and thereby even its value—in the way
Carter’s life exemplifies. If genuinely successful, in fact, such a narrative will
work its way seamlessly into the life itself. It becomes crucial to the agent’s selfunderstanding, and in that form it is one causal factor helping to shape the course
of new events in the life, which events, in turn, serve as the indispensable
mechanism through which the larger narrative shapes the meaning of the past. In
the end, Nietzsche hopes, the story and the life interpenetrate so fully they can no
longer be cleanly distinguished, and endorsing the story can then make a person
well-disposed to her life, thereby promoting the consistency between her life and
values for which the recurrence test assays: ‘How could I not be grateful to my whole
life?—and so I tell my life to myself’ (EH F).43
It is crucial here that a new narrative for my life can not only alter the
significance, or relative importance, of an event in my life, but can also change its
meaning for me, and thereby also whether (and in what degree and character) it
was good or bad for me.44 Carter’s later projects altered the meaning of his defeat
(e.g. qua the end of his public life), and so substantially changed its value within
his life overall. The point is important because it helps mark out a key contrast
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between mere compensation, and genuine redemption in Nietzsche’s sense. Later
goods can certainly be balanced against earlier evils, and can compensate me in
part for bad things that have happened to me, but such compensation alone by
no means redeems the bad things themselves. The recurrence test makes the
point vivid, since the imagined return of past evils invites comparison of my life
with its share of evils and compensating goods to an alternative life containing
the goods without the evils. The latter life will surely seem preferable to me
unless the evils themselves are redeemed by some narrative that actually alters
their meaning and value within my life.
This contrast sharply separates Nietzsche’s notion of redemption from the
Christian one. For Nietzsche, what needs redeeming is not a person or soul,
somehow detached from the actual events of her life, but the life’s troubling
events themselves. From this standpoint, it is a major flaw of Christian
redemption that it offers mere compensation, leaving the actual troubling events
of life unredeemed, even condemned, along with everything that is merely ‘world’.
Otherworldly redemption thus fails to make a person’s actual life (here and now)
better by one whit. In fact, the case is worse. It is a positive precondition on
admission to redemption in its Christian form that we reject many events of our
lives, in our considered view. We are all sinners, and redemption requires
repentance for sin.45 In sharp contrast to all demands for confession and
repentance, Nietzsche’s counter-ideal is rather ‘To commit no cowardice against
one’s actions! Not to leave them in the lurch afterwards!’ (TI I, 10). It therefore
emerges that Nietzsche has purely practical reasons to insist on the return of a life
that is the same in every detail. For him, it is the particular troubling events that
really need redeeming. Thus, a life-story counts as redemptive only insofar as it
incorporates each of the very same events in the life and gives it a significance
that can be affirmed, rather than leaving it mired in regret.46 Now that we have
sketched the task of redemption, we can return to the role of virtues of honesty
and artistry in affirming recurrence, and to the problems raised by the relation of
the two values to one another.
3. Honesty and Artistry as Regulative Ideals in the Quest for Redemption
I might do or suffer all manner of ‘dreadful accidents’ (Z II, ‘Redemption’) that
set my life in tension with my values. The thought of recurrence is supposed to
test for such accidents, and teach me how to redeem them, by ‘creating’ (Z II,
‘Redemption’) a narrative organization for my life, in which they are ‘carried into
One’ (Z II, ‘Redemption’) and affirmed in the whole, even under the condition
that the same life comes back ever again. As it turns out, each of the apparently
contradictory virtues sketched in section 1.B.—honesty and artistry—is essential
to successful redemption, so understood.
Consider first the demand for honesty. Without any constraint of truthfulness,
I might ‘tell my life to myself’ (EH F) as a pretty story indeed. But if the life-story
I affirm is mere fiction, I will not have approved my life at all, and its troubling
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events remain unredeemed. As long as I manage to accept my life only by
pretending it was something else, the problem of redemption is not solved, but
ducked. As Nietzsche is well aware, any self-assessment that is at all deep-going
involves serious temptations to such self-deception. It is in this vein that we
should hear his claims about the intimate relation between honesty and strength:
‘the strength of a spirit should be measured according to how much of the ‘truth’
one could still barely endure—or more distinctly, to what extent one would
require it to be thinned down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, falsified’ (BGE 39).
While the most obvious deceptions distort the plain facts of our individual lives,
those are merely the crude cases. More subtle versions indulge in false global
stories about the world (say, of a religious, moral, or metaphysical sort), which
tend to magnify the importance of human beings, and by extension ourselves. It
is in this dimension that the ‘de-deification of nature’ (GS 109) of which Nietzsche
counts himself an heir is so striking: ‘We have become hard-boiled, cold and hard
in the insight that . . . the world in which we live is ungodly, immoral,
‘‘inhuman’’; —we interpreted it far too long in a false and mendacious way, in
accordance with the wishes of our reverence, that is, according to our needs’ (GS
346). In fact, then, we first lay hold of the real problem about redemption only in
light of an honest overall account of the world: the issue is not, as the Christian
conception of redemption would suggest, to replace a hopelessly ‘fallen’ world
with another, better life, but to make this very life, honestly described, into
something we can affirm. Without a forthright account of what needs redeeming,
the very problem cannot even become visible.
But now we return to our difficulties: the same rigorous, courageous, (ascetic?)
honesty that reveals the problem of redemption threatens to make it insoluble.
After all (if we are honest with ourselves), we all commit stupidities and endure
trials that must be counted as ‘dreadful’, or worse. Accepting them at all, much
less affirming their endless repetition, would seem to require either that we
pretend they were not bad for us (as they really were), or else that we adjust our
values ad hoc so as to count them as good when they were not. On either
approach, it seems, we will have compromised the virtue of honesty. To make
matters worse, when Nietzsche himself sketches the strategy for redemption, he
appears to endorse just such subversions of the truth.
On his conception, again, artistic illusions are just as essential for redemption
as honest self-assessment. We are supposed to create an organizing narrative
under which to affirm our lives (Z II, ‘Redemption’), and the key lessons about
creation come from artists, who show us not only how to make things beautiful,
but also how we could endorse something frankly illusory:
What one should learn from artists.—What means do we have to make
things beautiful, attractive, desirable for us when they are not? And I
think that in themselves they never are. Here we have something to learn
from . . . artists, who are really continually trying to bring off such
inventions and feats. Moving away from things until there is much of
them that one no longer sees and much that one must ‘see into’ them, in
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order still to see them; or seeing things around a corner and as cut out and
framed; or placing them so that they partially obstruct one another and
allow only perspectival glimpses through; or looking at them through
colored glass or in the light of the sunset; or giving them a surface and
skin that is not fully transparent—all this we should learn from artists
while being wiser than they are in other things. For with them, this subtle
power usually comes to an end where art ends and life begins; but we
want to be the poets of our life . . . . [GS 299; see also GS 78]
The artistic lesson is twofold: we learn how to ‘make things beautiful’—but
also how to acknowledge their beauty, even and especially ‘when they are not’
beautiful ‘in themselves’. That is, we assimilate our attitude to that of ‘art as the
good will to appearance’ (GS 107), so as to clear our conscience about endorsing
illusions. The specific tactics of beautification described in GS 299 make the
fictionalizing implications of Nietzsche’s position increasingly clear. Artists do
sometimes work by abstracting away from flaws, omitting features, or
simplifying (all of which would be compatible with the truth, albeit partial, of
the content that remained). But even when their ‘inventions and feats’ use such
subtractive means, the devices still depend on representing things so that there is
‘much that one must see into [hinzusehen]’ things (my italics) in order to see them
at all, and thus an additive alteration remains essential to the effect. Often, too, as
Nietzsche notes, the method is positively to obscure, ‘obstruct’, cover over, or
alter the ‘color’ of what is represented. By all these means, artistic representation
glorifies its object by depicting it as other than it is. And lest we think falsification
is supposed to apply only within a fictional world, Nietzsche drives home his
point at the end, insisting that while artists may concern themselves with mere
fictions and not real life, ‘we want to be the poets of our life’. Thus, there is no
avoiding the conclusion that the artistic redemption Nietzsche seeks, and relies
upon as the genuine opponent of the ascetic ideal (GM III, 25), is in fact, just as he
describes it, a ‘counterforce’ against our honesty (GS 107).
Our earlier problem, then, is sharpened. Not only does Nietzsche claim to
value both honesty and artistry in a way that sets them into tension, but he is
driven to that stance by his most basic evaluative commitments. For him, the
goodness of a life is measured by the possibility of affirming its recurrence, and
any such affirmation requires both a thoroughgoing will to truth and a kind of
artistry that serves as a ‘counterforce’ opposing that honesty.
The very idea just broached, however, suggests a way to do justice to both
sides—balancing the demand for truth against the need for illusions, as
‘counterforces’. Though the two stand in tension, there is no contradiction.
Truthfulness and artistry and could each be goods for us, just as sweet and sour
are both good in sauces. Clearly, moreover, Nietzsche holds that the two key
virtues can be balanced in a single life, just as the flavors might be in a single
sauce. In a telling section of The Gay Science (113), he takes up the hypothesis that
the different virtues involved in scientific excellence were separately acquired,
and that in their original, isolated form (as ‘the doubting drive, the negating
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drive, the waiting drive, the collecting drive, the dissolving drive’) they were by
no means unproblematic, and were sometimes frankly ‘poisons’ for their
possessors. What interests Nietzsche, though, is not so much the happy outcome
that these drives are now combined as ‘functions of one organizing power’—
intellectual conscience—but the even grander prospect that the resulting
scientific conscience itself might take its place within a still broader virtue. He
looks forward to the day ‘when scientific thinking will find its way to join with
the artistic forces and the practical wisdom of life to form a higher organic system
in relation to which the scholars, physicians, artists, and legislators as we know
them at present would have to look like paltry relics of ancient times’ (GS 113).
That is, Nietzsche’s ideal is precisely a virtue in which the honesty of ‘scientific
thinking’ is synthesized with illusion-generating ‘artistic forces’, plus the practical
wisdom to deploy both in the service of perfecting human life.47 Is he deceived,
or might such a synthesis be achieved?
The basic notion needed to get beyond the metaphorical appeal to ‘balancing’
and carry out the wanted unification in philosophical detail has been well known
since Kant—it is the notion of a regulative principle. Regulative principles are
contrasted to constitutive ones, which are ‘objectively valid’ or strictly binding
for their domains. The name ‘constitutive’ is derived from the Kantian
explanation of that validity, which treats the valid principle as a rule according
to which experience is constituted, guaranteeing that objects in the domain
conform to it. By contrast, merely regulative principles do not constitute objects,
but simply govern our attempts to manage the domain; they have subjective,
rather than objective validity. In the first instance, that is, they bind our own
practical or theoretical efforts, not the actions or objects we think about. As a
result, they make no claim about how things must be in detail, but merely lay out
an ideal to which we should approximate. Precisely for that reason, two
regulative principles with opposing tendencies can still be valid simultaneously,
and it is routine for a pair of regulative principles to be balanced against each
other.48 Just such mutual limitation, in fact, is a feature of the general conception
of perfection Kant inherits from Leibniz and bequeaths to Nietzsche— maximal
unity amid maximal variety. We need not find any particular degree of unity, but
are enjoined to seek as much unity as possible, compatible with the requisite
variety, and as much variety, given the needed unity.49
The suggestion, then, is that in the recurrence thought experiment, honesty
and artistry are mutually limiting regulative ideals. We are to tell our lives to
ourselves in the most beautiful way possible consistent with the demands of
honesty, and as honestly as we can, given that they must be attractive enough to
affirm. To develop the idea, though, we must examine the detailed interaction
between the demand for truth and our need for illusions.
On the side of honesty, it turns out to be quite natural to understand will to
truth in terms of a regulative ideal, given Nietzsche’s views. For him, intellectual
conscience cannot require an account of things capturing their ‘constitution in
themselves quite apart from interpretation,’ since it is ‘a completely idle hypothesis’
that things even have such a constitution (WP 560). Instead, we saw, honesty
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demands an awareness of ‘the final and most certain reasons pro and con’ (GS 2),
so as to attain the sort of objectivity available within the limits of perspectivism.
For that, we need not ‘interest-free intuition’, but ‘the capacity. . .to make the
variety of perspectives. . .useful in the service of knowledge’ (GM III, 12), thereby
obtaining cognitive representations that are truer, or cognitively superior, in a
sense specified via empirical adequacy plus defensibility across the broadest
possible range of perspectives. For Nietzsche, such cognitive superiority serves
as a regulative ideal governing belief formation.50
This is so not only in theoretical contexts, but also in the narrower (but
immediately salient) case of assessing one’s life through the thought of its
recurrence.51 As we saw, the thought experiment crucially depends on a
constraint of empirical adequacy, in that the life story I affirm must include all the
facts of my actual life, at least under some description. Significantly, the raw facts
of my life may well admit of different descriptions, under which they would
assume different meanings. It is important to be honest no less about what the
facts of my life mean than about what they are, and the potential range (and
variation) of meanings complicates the task. Thus, here too it is essential, beyond
empirical adequacy, to use a ‘variety of perspectives’ (GM III, 12) to explore the
potential meanings, and test how much sense they make of my life overall. Still, I
cannot hope for a uniquely true life story. The open-endedness of my life, and the
potential for different ‘endings’ to affect the meanings of earlier events (shown in
Carter’s case), means that the facts to date will always leave room open for
differing interpretations of their significance.
Some might take that plurality of potential interpretations by itself as sufficient
to explain the role of artistic fictions in Nietzsche as well, citing his hyperbolic
claim, ‘precisely facts do not exist, only interpretations’ (WP 481). But this
underestimates the real tension between the honesty he demands and the
illusions he thinks we need. Even if we cannot capture a life’s ‘constitution in
[itself] quite apart from interpretation and subjectivity’ (WP 561), some lifestories can nonetheless satisfy our cognitive norms to a high degree, and thus be
relatively truer than their competitors. The genuine worry, then, is that to affirm
our lives we might need stories that were not honest in this sense—fictions that
would require us, in telling our lives to ourselves, either to fabricate outright, or
to endorse utterly implausible stories impossible to square with even a regulative
will to truth.
Several commentators have proposed that Nietzsche takes truthfulness to be
sufficiently satisfied if only our illusions themselves are honest, or lucid, ones, in
that we know that this is what they are.52 On this reading, what we learn from
artists is first and foremost a certain stance, a way of taking things: we see
something as an F, though we know that in reality it is no such thing, just as we
might see some patches of color on canvas as a boy in the grip of a seizure. For
present purposes, the thought would be that art teaches me how to create value
in my life, and so to affirm it, even where the life’s features are intrinsically
meaningless or frankly bad for me. It does this by showing me how to see my life
as valuable, despite its ultimate meaninglessness or regrettable character. By
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providing a sense that my actions are worthwhile, such illusions could be quite
useful, or even necessary to support my practical engagement in the world.53 The
appearance of value or purpose could be a psychological condition of effective
action despite my knowledge that it is only appearance, just as feelings of pain
and fear serve as psychological devices to help me avoid danger, even though I
know they are only features of my phenomenal experience. As Hussain
(forthcoming) puts it, we would get a ‘fictionalist simulacrum of valuing’ that
saves the phenomenal role of valuing in practical life.54 At the same time, artistry’s
fictional illusions avoid all conflict with the demands of honesty: the illusion does
its work to make life ‘bearable’ (GS 107; cf. BT 4, 24) while being recognized as a
fiction, and thus, we need not, indeed should not, actually believe that the life is
any different from what the cruelest will to truth would suggest about it.
A fictionalist reading of Nietzsche’s talk of creating values has a distinguished
ancestry (see Vaihinger 1986 [1911], 771–90), and surely there is something to it.
Nietzsche is attracted to art partly because it is especially honest in recognizing
its illusions as such. But I doubt that fictionalist simulacra can do all the work
Nietzsche needs on questions of recurrence and redemption. Seeing why
suggests a better account of the place of illusions in his thought. Consider again
Carter’s 1980 defeat. The problem he faces, made conspicuous by the idea of the
defeat’s recurrence, is that of reshaping his life into something acceptable, despite
the fact that it now includes that intensely disappointing setback. Entertaining
the lucid illusion that his life is still worthwhile fails to address the difficulty,
precisely because it does not change him. It does nothing to make his life any
better. As we just saw, it would not even dislodge his own belief that it is rightly
(honestly) to be viewed as a failure. To put the point in starkest terms, pretending
to be redeemed is no redemption.
If pretense, fiction, and simulacra are all we learn from artistry, then it does not
balance or limit our honesty, but is just an expression of it—the expression that
forces us to admit, sadly, that all redemptive thoughts about our life must be
ruthlessly confined to the realm of ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’. In that case, we
still lack an antidote for the ascetic tendencies of the will to truth, and the artistic
redemption Nietzsche touts turns out to be a false promise. It succumbs to the
same objection as the Christian redemption he condemns: it does nothing to
make our actual, honestly described, lives any better, but offers only a makebelieve redemption, in which we palliate ourselves by pretending things are
otherwise than they are.
Nietzsche himself sees the point, for he does not limit the artistic lesson to the
insight that honest illusions, or self-conscious fictions, are possible. On the
contrary, artists also teach us positively ‘how to make things beautiful’ (GS 299;
my italics), how to ‘create values’ (BGE 211), how to ‘make something that was not
already there: the whole eternally growing world of valuations, colors, accents,
perspectives, scales, affirmations, and negations’ (GS 301; cf. GS 58, 143, 276–7,
290). Note, once an object of artistic attention has been made beautiful, it is no
longer necessary to pretend that it is beautiful. If the artistry was successful, it is
beautiful (now).
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To insist that acknowledging this beauty is a mere pretense misplaces the role
of pretending in aesthetic experience, even on a pretense account of mimesis.55
Consider BT 4, where Nietzsche takes up Raphael’s Transfiguration as his example
of artistic redemption. Nietzsche takes the painting to represent the art impulse
itself: its official content is merely a symbol for the real message—viz., the
redemption of life through art. The possessed boy, confused disciples, and
general chaos in the lower half of the painting stand for the troubling aspects of
existence which need redeeming, while the glowing vision of Christ’s
transfiguration at the top points the way to redemption. But for Nietzsche, the
real vision, and the real redemption, is not the Christian promise but Raphael’s
artistic one. The beauteous vision of Christ’s transfiguration depicted in the
painting symbolizes the experience of viewing the painting itself, whose actual
splendor does the real work of transfiguring the possessed boy, bewildered
disciples, and the rest, into something that is, unquestionably, beautiful.56 Note
the right place of pretense in the story. In viewing the painting, we pretend that
certain patches of color are a possessed boy in the grip of a seizure, but we do not
pretend that he and his companions have been beautified. If we have to pretend
that the painting is beautiful, then the artwork has failed, and nothing is
redeemed. The real lesson of art for Nietzsche, then, is not only to teach us the
attitude of pretense, but to show us a way that things might be really made
beautiful, and thereby redeemed.
So, against outright fictionalism about value in Nietzsche, the present reading
insists that once something is made valuable by artistic intervention, thenceforth it
really has value (pending further transformation). Such a potential to bestow
actual value is crucial to the role of artistry in redemption.57 Nevertheless, there
remains an important role for pretense or illusion in artistry, as well. Think again
of Carter: to give his life a new, redemptive ending, he had to embark on an exPresidency capable of ‘doing more than if we had won in 1980!’ (J. & R. Carter
1987: 32). More, he had to do so at a time when, as a matter of fact, his life was
defined by defeat in the shape, ‘failed political career’. Plausibly, it was a
psychological requirement on Carter’s ability to identify with his new project,
find it worthwhile, and carry it off, that he not think of himself under the
description that was then true of him: ‘failed politician at the end of a career’. To
redeem himself, he had to act under a different self-conception, thereby
pretending to be someone he was not (yet)—a voice of world moral leadership.
The last claim will seem too strong to some, but I think it can be defended in a
sense strong enough to provide a basis for Nietzsche’s continuing insistence on
the need for ‘saving illusions’. All of us face the problem of redemption: there is
plenty of frustration to go around, which is the moment of truth in
Schopenhauer’s pessimism.58 In any serious case, moreover, redemption requires
a change in the meaning of some defining event of the life, transforming it in the
eyes of the agent from ‘dreadful accident’ into something valuable. In this sense,
the process involves an alteration in central self-regarding beliefs—a change of
self-conception. Carter had to stop viewing himself as a failed politician to reimagine himself as a moral leader. When the needed alterations are deep-going
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enough, an illusion becomes inevitable because the change of belief is essentially
prospective—the new self-conception is itself a means involved in my selftransformation, so it must run out in advance of the actual facts about my life.
Therefore, given the need for a substantial degree of change, it will misrepresent
the meaning of my life now. In real redemption, I transform myself into a new
kind of person, of whom some new, redemptive self-conception will be true. But
for the project to seem feasible, worthwhile, and meaningful to me, I must think
of myself as the sort of person who can carry it out. That is, really, I must think of
myself as the new person. Who else could meaningfully carry out the project of
being him?! I need an illusion, then, so as to act under the new self-conception
when it is not yet true of me. Redemption demands ‘living in the future perfect’—
believing that after my success (if I have it) I will have been a certain kind of
person, even though right now I am not. If I were, then of course I would not
need redeeming.59
Naturally, there is no guarantee that my efforts will meet with success. If they
do not, then the new self-conception I invented will remain nothing but the
fiction it was when I started. But, Nietzsche would insist, the possibility that such
a fiction might be realized should not blind us to the fact that it began as fictive,
any more than it should tempt us into pious, self-deceived hopes that real
redemption is available through mere faith, mere belief in a fiction, when in fact it
demands works, too—actual, hard-won achievements that change the meaning
of my life.60
It is still tempting, however, to think that I might get by without illusion,
through the weaker (and perhaps true) prospective belief that I am possibly the
new sort of person. From Nietzsche’s standpoint, though, the weaker claim will
not suffice. He famously doubts the justification of any belief that one could be
otherwise than one is. Even aside from that theoretical skepticism, it is hard to see
how mere belief in possibilities could play the needed practical role sustaining
self-transformation. Wherever the problem of redemption is sharp, there is
serious incompatibility between my life’s meaning now and the one it would
have under a redemptive self-conception—and there is therefore also a real
question about whether I am entitled to the new self-understanding. I need to
act in the ways appropriate to the new self-conception, but in the face of what my
life really means (and is) now, a belief that I might be such a person is mere
wishful thinking. For example, the thought that I might be a better hitter and
finally make the majors (despite my slow bat speed and .150 average hitherto) is
unlikely to sustain me hacking away in Class A baseball; what I need to believe
is that I am a better hitter than that, deep down.61 Similarly, to act as a voice of
moral leadership, Carter needs to regard himself not as someone who might
someday be something other than a failed politician, but as someone who is that
person now.62
The needed illusion is analogous to Raphael’s. We imagine a shape the world
might have, but does not have, and then believe in it as part of an attempt to
bring it about. One needs to see the beautiful form in the stone, like
Michelangelo, in order to call it forth. But at least in the case of Nietzschean
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‘poesy of one’s life’ (if not in the other arts), we ought to admit from the point of
view of cold-hearted honesty that such artistic visions are illusory. The beautiful
form there turns out to have been in Carter’s life up to 1981 was not there all
along. It was achieved— made, not found—along with the successes of the exPresidency. To set about achieving it, Carter needed a saving illusion; he had to
pretend to be something other than the failed politician he was.
Saving illusions of this sort, unlike fully honest illusions, lucidly recognized as
such in the bright light of consciousness, do put a limit on the regulative ideal of
honesty. They prevent the will to truth from fixating us on the (real) badness of
the bad things in life (see GS 78), which would cut us off from the spiritual or
psychological resources we need to imagine things otherwise and effect
redeeming change in the life stories we tell ourselves. On Nietzsche’s view, of
course, no story is perfect, and the quest for better ones is never ending. The
artistry involved in being a ‘poet of one’s life,’ like honesty, is a regulative ideal
we can only approximate. Conversely, though, just as the need for illusion limits
the claim of honesty, the demand for truth limits pursuit of the perfect story. If I
never discharge the illusion by realizing my imagined self-conception through
changes in my life, then there is only illusion, and no redemption. Absent the
constraint of honesty, our stories have no bearing on ourselves, and so cannot
redeem the actual facts of our lives, any more than the false Christian
redemption. From this side, too, pretending to be redeemed is no redemption.
Thus, honesty and artistry serve as mutually limiting regulative ideals, each
equally needed in our quest for redemption, and thereby necessary to the good as
Nietzsche sees it.
4. Conclusions
I have attempted to resolve textual and philosophical dilemmas surrounding
Nietzsche’s position on truth and illusion. The real interpretive burden posed by
the texts is more challenging than recent writers suggest. We must explain how
Nietzsche thought it possible both to affirm and to deny the existence of truths,
and moreover, why he risked misunderstanding by praising the value of both
truth and illusion in ways that appear to conflict. I suggested an interpretation of
the falsification thesis (via the subtraction argument) which is compatible with
claims to truth in a separate, specific sense (constituted by a notion of cognitive
superiority). In addition, I contended that Nietzsche’s core argument for
falsification is motivated by the very critical stance—rejecting the ‘proof of
strength’ as dishonest—which also serves to underwrite many of his truth claims.
Potential conflict between the values of truth and illusion, however, is not
obviated by my distinction between senses of ‘true’ and ‘false’. I argued that the
tension between these values must be removed by treating them as mutually
limiting regulative ideals necessary in the pursuit of a certain conception of the
good, characterized in terms of the ability to affirm the recurrence of one’s life.
The fact that honesty and artistry are essential to the good life explains their great
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importance for Nietzsche, which plausibly led to the extravagant and sometimes
unqualified praise that generates the appearance of contradiction.
Finally, fixing the roles of honesty and illusion in affirming life’s recurrence
also determines the proper place of fictionalism in Nietzsche, and illuminates
his doctrine of the creation of value. Fictions are (often if not always) necessary
for us to frame and pursue the projects of creating value that allow us to redeem
the dreadful accidents of life. In the end, however, those projects aim not to
pretend that life has value, but to make it so in fact. When successful, the
imagined fiction of my better self is a ladder kicked away. Success as a ‘poet of
one’s life’ involves living up to the ideal well enough to make the life story of one’s
better self come true.63
R. Lanier Anderson
Department of Philosophy
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2155
USA
[email protected]
NOTES
1
(Nietzsche’s works are cited by the abbreviations listed in the references. I have made
use of the translations listed there, but I often depart from them in the interest of greater
literalness.)
Opponents of the deniers (e.g. Leiter 2002) do not always distinguish among the
different versions of the view they reject, but there are at least three substantially distinct
‘pro-falsification’ approaches in the recent literature: fictionalism, post-modernism, and
anti-essentialism. On fictionalism, see Vaihinger (1986 [1911]: 771–90), Miklowitz (1998),
Landy (2002, 2004), and Hussain (forthcoming). The skeptical post-modernist and
textualist approach finds expression in Kofman (1993 [1972]), Derrida (1979), de Man
(1979), Shapiro (1989), and Schrift (1990), and by contrast, Grimm (1977), Abel (1984),
Nehamas (1985: 42–105), and Poellner (1995: 79–111) explore versions of anti-essentialism
which (contra skepticism) defend substantive metaphysical claims. Other prominent
readers have also emphasized themes similar to the post-modernist strand, but out of
philosophical assumptions incompatible with it (e.g. Danto 1980 [1965], Bittner 1987).
2
Specifically, she argues that while the early Nietzsche rejected the possibility of truth,
he later abandoned metaphysical tenets crucial to his ideas about falsification (notably the
posit of things in themselves), and finally overcame his former denial of truth. Clark’s
reading is controversial (see Poellner 1995: 22–4; Anderson 1996), but her discussion
deserves much credit for clarifying the debate. Indeed, Williams’ own talk about ‘deniers’
of truth seems indebted to her formulations about Nietzsche’s ‘denial of truth’ (Clark 1990:
1–4 et passim; cf. Williams 2002: 12–14).
3
See Poellner (1995: 137–8, 162–3, 191–3, 196–200, 266, 276–305, et passim).
4
I canvass the evidence in some detail in section 1 below, since the charged character
of recent debate has prompted many readers to minimize its full range. Discussion has
become so divisive, in fact, that one can now conduct polemics largely by mere
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classification of an adversary into the opposing camp, thereby tarring him/her with the
(real or imagined) liabilities of its standpoint on truth. Some seeking to accommodate the
manifest textual pull in both directions, like Nehamas (1985), have therefore become
tempting targets from both sides. Leiter, for example, attacks alleged ‘postmodernist’, or
‘anti-truth’, elements of Nehamas’s interpretation with a somewhat single-minded fervor
(Leiter 2002: 2n, 38, 71–2, 83–4n, 96–7, 115–16n, 207n, 291), while Shapiro (1989: 24, 86–9)
criticizes Nehamas’s conception of interpretation because it is too much restricted by
traditional philosophical concerns about securing truth and the unity of the text.
5
Millgram (forthcoming) attempts to explain away Nietzsche’s apparent inconsistency by creative and sophisticated appeal to a rhetorical strategy of forgetting. But such a
line is hard to believe in the face of sentences like these: ‘the erroneousness of the world in
which we believe we live is the surest and firmest thing we can lay our eyes on’ (BGE 34);
or again, ‘Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of living being could
not live’ (WP 493). The ring of paradox obtainable by combining claims to truth and claims
of systematic falsification within a single thought was clearly part of the attraction for
Nietzsche the rhetorician.
6
The elements of the strategy I propose in section 1 were initially developed and
defended in Anderson (1996), Anderson (1998), and Anderson (2002). The general
approach of distinguishing different senses of truth is also prominently defended by
Schacht (1983: 52–117) and Richardson (1996: 220–90).
7
See thought-provoking papers by Gemes (1992), and Pippin (1997a and 1997b).
8
In light of the attention often garnered by the texts suggesting a global falsification
thesis, it is worth emphasizing that ordinary truth claims really are completely routine in
Nietzsche. For a selection of remarks, consider the claims to truth, accuracy, or correctness
in GS 107, 354, 360; BGE 39, 186, 202, 229, 253, 259; GM I, 4; II, 11; TI V, 1; VI, 1, 4, 6, 8; VII, 1,
5; and VIII, 6; A 50–1; and EH P, 3. Conversely, in the following passages Nietzsche charges
that some view he opposes is false, erroneous, or mendacious, and should be rejected for
that reason: GS 29, 37, 99, 109, 126, 138, 326, 335, 345, 346, 355; BGE 11, 12, 16, 17, 19, 22, 38,
48, 53; GM I, 3, 14; II, 11; III 15, 19, 20; TI II, 11; V, 5; VI, 1–8; A (entire!); and EH P, 2.
9
On this point, see GS 344, 347; BGE 48, 59, 210; TI VI, 5; A 50–1; EH P, 3; WP 171, 452,
455. Occasionally, Nietzsche even claims (hyperbolically) that ‘making blessed’ actually
entails the falsehood of a belief: ‘Faith makes blessed: consequently it lies’ (A 50).
This widespread line of thought in Nietzsche tells conclusively against the attribution
of any ‘pragmatic theory of truth’, which would define truth as a property of beliefs or
judgments that ‘work’, in the sense of conveying happiness, satisfaction, or practical
benefit onto their holders. (Danto (1980 [1965]: 72, 79–80, 130) famously claimed to find a
pragmatist theory of truth in Nietzsche, and Rorty (1982: 205) defends the attribution in
fully unqualified form.)
10
Paul de Man (1979) emphasizes a pithy early expression of the falsification view:
‘Truths are illusions about which we have forgotten that this is what they are’ (TL 84).
Similar comments abound in Nietzsche’s notebooks right through to the end of his
productive life (see, e.g. WP 493, 517, 535, 540, 584). In his published works, Nietzsche’s
criticisms of truth are sometimes more oblique, but many texts strongly suggest the ‘system
of fundamental falsification’ (WP 584) advocated in the notebooks. Consider, for example, GS
57, 107, 112, 121, 301, 344, and 354; BGE 4, 11, 16, 24, 34, 229–30, and 289; GM III, 12 and 24;
TI, III, 2, 5; VIII, 7–8; and the Epilogue of CW.
11
From a contemporary point of view, it might be thought that the interests involved
in cognition could serve to reveal things as they really are, rather than separating us from
the world by a distorting effect. But Nietzsche’s opposite view does have serious
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philosophical motivations, based on his conception of the actual mechanism through which
interests shape our world-views. Like many of his contemporaries, Nietzsche worked
within the (broadly) Kantian assumption that the organizing structure of experience comes
from certain concepts that serve to order our other representations (e.g. ‘unity, identity,
permanence, substance, cause, thinghood, being’ (TI, III, 5; cf. TI III, 2, GS 110–11), or
again,’ ‘bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content’ (GS
121)). Such concepts do their work by means of their own representational content, which
must be added to that of the representations they organize, thereby transforming the
content of experience overall. See Anderson (1996) and (1998) for detailed textual evidence
of Nietzsche’s commitments along these lines, and defense of the intrinsic plausibility of
views with this general shape. In Anderson (2002), I showed why the relevant organizing
concepts must (for Nietzsche) add positive content beyond what is already included in the
sense perceptions they organize. The argument turns on Nietzsche’s rejection of an
empiricist semantics for metaphysical concepts (BGE 20), which entails that the meaning of
those concepts is not exhausted by the sensory data to which they apply. The (broadly)
Kantian aspects of Nietzsche’s epistemological views were also recognized and developed
by Clark (1990: 127–58), and they have recently been explored by Hill (2003), as well. (An
anonymous reviewer for EJP helpfully pressed me to become clearer on these points.)
12
One striking feature of Nietzsche’s argument is the sweeping generality of its
falsification claims; the argument purports to cover all cognitive representation as such. To
my mind, that unqualified generality tells against an otherwise attractive strategy of
coping with Nietzsche’s falsification claims—developed most systematically by Richardson (1996: 220–90)—which attempts to avoid paradox by limiting the scope attributed to
the influence of perspective. On such accounts, the merely perspectival status of most
representations is supposed to be established on the basis of substantive truths of
Nietzsche’s own metaphysics or logic, which are not themselves perspectival (or not
‘merely’ perspectival), and which therefore fall outside the scope of the falsifying effects of
perspective. Other interesting versions of this basic strategy have been defended by
Schacht (1983: 95–117), and by Hales and Welshon (1994, 2000), and Hales (1996).
13
The relevant passages are far too numerous to quote, but consider, for example,
WP 521: ‘One should not understand this compulsion to fashion concepts, species, forms,
purposes, laws. . . as if we were thereby to fix in place the true world; but as a compulsion
to organize a world for ourselves in which our existence is made possible—we thereby create
a world which is calculable, simplified, understandable, etc., for us.’ Along similar lines, see
also WP 503, 512, 513, 515, 517, 568, 569, 583, 584; and cf. the published GS 354, BGE 24, 34.
14
For the argument that Nietzsche eventually rejected the falsification thesis based on
just this reasoning, see Clark (1990: 95–158, esp. 109–17). Elsewhere (Anderson 1996: 319–
21), I dispute Clark’s reading of the central passages she cites to defend her suggestion that
Nietzsche changed his mind about falsification. Further considerations against Clark’s
interpretation may be found in the surrounding paper, and also in Poellner (1995: 22–4).
15
Wilcox (1974) also identifies this idea in Nietzsche.
16
As Nietzsche insists in the note under discussion, all ‘questions how the ‘‘things in
themselves’’ may be apart from our sense receptivity and the activity of our understanding
must be rebutted with the question: how could we know that there are things? ‘‘Thingness’’
was first created by us’ (WP 569). That is, the realist version of the question about whether
our cognitions can be strictly true of the world (of ‘things in themselves’) is flatly refused
as a legitimate question from the outset, based on an argument against the coherence of a
realist notion of independent things (see Anderson 1998 for discussion). Instead, Nietzsche
focuses on experience (‘sense receptivity’ plus ‘the activity of our understanding’), whose
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content represents a world ‘as we experience it’. The procedure is to ask of this represented
content (in abstraction from any thought of experience-independent objects) whether it, or
any part or aspect of it, justifiably counts as real or true in a philosophically important
sense. This is the force of the move I described in the text as ‘beginning the argument
‘‘from within’’ ’.
17
Mach (1910 [1886]) is the locus classicus for discussion of this doctrine of elements,
which are officially characterized as neither subjective mental sensations, nor objective
sensible things, but rather as neutral sensory contents out of which experience (whether
subjectively or objectively understood) is composed. For an extremely intriguing and
thought-provoking argument that Nietzsche was actually influenced by Mach’s doctrine
of the elements, and adopted a positivist view in more or less the Machian sense, see
Hussain (2004). For the isolation of some important differences between Nietzsche and
Mach on questions related to falsification and to ‘neutral monism’ sensu Mach, see
Anderson (2002).
18
Thus, the sense in which these contents are ‘phenomenal’ is not that of
contemporary philosophy of mind, which often explains the phenomenal by paradigmatic
appeal to conscious sensory qualia, but instead by reference to the common nineteenth
century philosophical sense of ‘phenomena’ as the ‘objects of appearance’. The sensory
materials are here supposed to be Erscheinungen in a sense descended from the use of that
term in Kant, Schopenhauer, the Idealists, etc. and that is why Nietzsche talks so easily in
these contexts of ‘phenomenal worlds’.
19
Thus, we cannot directly access the ultimate sensory ‘matter’, but only postulate
it, by imagining the subtraction of its perspectival ‘form’. Sensory content can play its role
in cognition only after being transformed by a (falsifying) perspective: ‘This same
compulsion [to organize the world conveniently] occurs in the sense activities that support
reason—this simplification, coarsening, emphasizing, and elaborating . . .’ (WP 521; see
also 505, 532).
Some philosophers and Nietzsche scholars—notably Poellner (1995: 218–23)—have
doubted the very intelligibility of unconscious mental representations like those
envisioned here. Space forbids full discussion, but I remain unmoved by such skepticism.
Certainly the Cartesian thesis that consciousness is the essence of the mental has a
distinguished history. Nevertheless, as a textual matter such Cartesianism was clearly
rejected by Nietzsche, who explicitly sides with Leibniz in favor of unconscious
representations—including sensory representations (see GS 354, 357, and for discussion
of additional textual evidence, Anderson 2002). I think it likely that Nietzsche and Leibniz
have right on their side. The posit of unconscious sensory representations is a
commonplace of going theories in cognitive science (e.g. the Marr theory of vision).
Moreover, many everyday human achievements (e.g. hitting a major league pitch; reacting
in time to a fly ball) are all but impossible to understand absent the supposition that the
agent represented something about the world (and did so by means of the senses) in a way
that did not rise to the level of consciousness. (That said, it is worth noting that in this
context Nietzsche’s ‘unconscious sensations’ (like the Leibnizian petites perceptions) must
be understood broadly as representational states contributing to sensory cognition. As a
result, they might not count as sensations construed more narrowly—e.g. for philosophers
who restrict the term ‘sensation’ to essentially conscious qualia states in which the notions
of representation and the act-object distinction have no place.)
20
Thanks to Alexander Nehamas, John Richardson, Robert Pippin, Alison Simmons,
and an anonymous referee for EJP for comments that helped me to clarify the thoughts in
the previous three paragraphs.
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It is striking that Nietzsche does not assume that all contents included in the ‘chaos
of sensations’ are consistent with one another (see GS 109, WP 508, 515, 516, 517, 530, 535).
The possibility of contradictions here is part of what makes the chaos chaotic. Nietzsche
concludes that knowledge requires the use of different perspectives so as to capture
(serially) the conflicting aspects of the ‘chaos of sensations’ and thereby do justice to the
world. He does think we should make every effort to reconcile incompatible perspectives,
but this norm is understood as a demand on us, not as a constraint on the character of the
sensory contents themselves: ‘We are unable to affirm and deny one and the same thing:
this is a subjective empirical law; no ‘‘necessity’’ expresses itself thereby, only an incapacity’
(WP 516). Thus, the laws of logic, including the principle of contradiction, are ‘not
cognitions at all! they are rather regulative articles of belief!’ (WP 530). Nietzsche’s approach
bears interesting parallels to recent efforts to employ paraconsistent logics in modelling
certain domains of representations (e.g. a person’s actual beliefs) which must be allowed to
contain contradictions, if the model is to be accurate. Paraconsistent logics employ various
devices to block the ‘explosive’ character of classical logic, which allows anything at all to
be inferred from a contradiction, and thus trivializes contradictory systems. (Brown (2002)
classifies such logics according to their strategies for blocking explosion.) Although
Nietzsche does not conceive of the problem in a sophisticated technical way, his appeal to
perspective difference seems to play a similar explosion-blocking role. The relative
isolation of two perspectives prevents triviality-generating inferential explosion, and
permits us to treat potentially contradictory aspects of the ‘chaos of sensations’ serially.
(Thanks to Darko Sarenac for exchanges that led to this note.)
22
See Anderson (1998) for discussion and textual defense of this claim.
23
That is, truth can be understood, on one hand, as correspondence to something
radically independent (call this the metaphysical sense; it is the one assumed in the
subtraction argument). Or on the other hand, it can be taken as cognitive superiority
according to the epistemic norms governing some theoretical tradition or context (call this
the theory-internal, or epistemic sense). The contrast can then be exploited to state Nietzsche’s
falsification thesis itself without paradox: the falsification thesis could be true in the
epistemic sense (i.e. a superior account of the operations of cognition), while remaining a
conceptual organization and transformation of the relevant sensory contents like any other
theory, and thus false in the metaphysical sense. Indeed, this is just the sort of view
Nietzsche suggests when he insists that the ‘insight into delusion and error as a condition
of cognitive and sensible existence’ has ‘now been given to us through science’ (GS 107; my
italics).
24
The worry here about the potential asceticism of the will to truth is quite a bit
sharper than Leiter (2002: 264–79) allows, and is related to Nietzsche’s falsification thesis
in ways he is at pains not to acknowledge. The problem is sharp because 1) all knowledge
involves interpretation (GM III, 12), and 2) ‘falsifying’ is ‘of the essence of all interpreting’
(GM III, 24). Thus, we must worry that the conditions for true knowledge are unsatisfiable
for us, which is what makes the pursuit of truth a form of self-flagellation. The falsification
thesis is inescapable in grasping Nietzsche’s concerns here: it is only because the practice
of interpretation is falsifying that the will to truth must renounce interpretation, and thus
comes to count as ‘abstinence’ (GM III 24).
Leiter (2002: 17–18n) has objected to my reading GM III, 24 along these lines,
but his reasoning is unpersuasive. The quoted remark at GM III, 24 is not a limited
criticism of an idiosyncratic positivist brand of fact-worship, as Leiter suggests, but a
perfectly general claim that the ‘essence’ of interpreting involves falsification. Leiter
might still want to claim that such (essentially falsifying) interpretation is not necessary to
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our cognition, but again, it is impossible to understand why renouncing interpretation
would be ascetic in the first place, unless we needed it as a essential part of our efforts
to know. The fact that the claim is parenthetical, noted by Leiter, is immaterial as far as I
can see.
25
For Nietzsche’s early conception of redemptive artistic illusions, see BT 1, 3, 4, 7, 15,
25. Pippin (1997a) offers helpful discussion of the relevant issues.
26
Nietzsche’s deployment of the notion evokes its use in Kant, whose demand for a
critique of metaphysics was not a suspicious rejection of all claims to metaphysical
knowledge, but rather a call for a ‘court of justice’, which issues a ‘decision about the
possibility or impossibility of metaphysics in general, and the determination of its sources,
as well as its extent and boundaries’ (Kant, KrV, A xi–xii).
27
It is implausible to construe the wanted experiment as a straightforward scientific
trial. The surrounding discussion resists any simple assumption of the value or
appropriateness of scientific procedures themselves: ‘Science itself henceforth requires a
justification (which is not to say that there is such a thing for it)’ (GM III 24). Instead, I am
proposing, we should read Nietzsche’s demand that ‘the value of truth is for once to be
experimentally called into question’ (GM III 24) as a call for the sort of experiments in living he
envisions at GS 110. Such experiments are fundamentally practical in a way that separates
them from more narrowly scientific experiments. Nietzsche means to try out a kind of life
(the life of the thinker), which he hopes can make him a better person. If he can improves
himself by leading a theoretical life, then the will to truth would receive some genuinely
independent justification of its value, and to that extent pass muster before the tribunal of
the proposed critique. Probably a person would also have learned some things of a
theoretical nature along the path of such a life, but they are not what justifies the will to
truth. On the contrary, any value those answers might possess would itself have to rest on
the prior assumption that truths have value.
28
Nietzsche’s main argument defending a cosmological recurrence is based on the
thought that the finite number of centers of force in the world must, in infinite time,
exhaust all possible combinations and repeat their cycle. The argument is vulnerable to a
classic counterexample, due to Simmel (1920 [1907], 250–1n), who gives a method for
generating an infinite number of combined states from the motion of only three rotating
elements. Even more salient, though, is the fact that Nietzsche’s argument has a clear
historical antecedent in Lucretius (1975: 255; DRN III, 854–8), of which he must have been
aware (even if Nietzsche did not consult Lucretius in the Latin during the 1880s, the
relevant point is clear in the German translation he owned (Lucretius 1865)). In the
Lucretian context, it becomes obvious that atomism (which Nietzsche rejects) is essential to
the proof: without indivisible atoms, the finitude of the overall universe does not entail a
finite number of ‘centers of force’. Thus, the argument is bound to fail on Nietzsche’s own
terms, even aside from Simmel’s example. It therefore seems likely that Nietzsche never
published a proof because he knew his ideas were inadequate. Consequently, the
cosmological theory of recurrence could hardly have been the central feature of the
doctrine for him. (Kaufmann 1974: 327, Nehamas 1985: 141–69, and Reginster, forthcoming, all reach similar conclusions.)
29
Nehamas (1985: 74–105, 141–99) is the locus classicus for treating Nietzsche as (what I
will call) an ‘inverse superessentialist’, holding that every property of a person or thing is
equally essential. Other commentators have found this view implausible, but there is
strong evidence that Nietzsche held it—particularly from texts expressing his version of
fatalism (see e.g. GM I, 13; or TI V, 6 and VI, 8). I call Nietzsche’s view ‘inverse
superessentialism’ by comparison to a parallel doctrine in Leibniz, who holds that an
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individual like Adam has a complete conceptual essence, which ‘contains’ all Adam’s
properties. Given that concept, every property of Adam is essential. Nietzsche arrives at a
similar result via converse reasoning. Precisely because there is no essence of a thing
separate from its properties and effects, the thing is nothing but their collection (WP 551,
557; GM I, 13). But then each property is essential in a sense, because without it the
collection would be different. Whereas Leibniz’s superessentialism derives from the
existence of a conceptual essence containing all the properties, Nietzsche’s ‘inverse’
version arises from the lack of a conceptual essence which could preserve identity across a
change in properties.
30
Among the more notable treatments in the literature are Simmel (1920), Löwith
(1997 [1931]), Soll (1973), Nehamas (1985), Clark (1990), and Reginster (forthcoming).
31
Nietzsche sometimes suggests a stronger version of the thought, according to which
all the events in the course of the world are repeated (see, e.g. GS 109, 233; Z III, ‘Vision,’ 2;
BGE 56). Nehamas (1985: 154–7, ff.) argues that superessentialism (see note 29) could make
this thought relevant to the practical question about my life, since my identity is so deeply
enmeshed in the nexus of the universe that any changes in it would bring about changes in
me. Even here, though, what is crucial is that I myself return, so what matters for Nietzsche
is just the demand that I endorse my own individual life (however its identity is
constituted).
32
In this sense, my minimal reading follows Clark’s (1990: 266–70) enormously
fruitful suggestion that we are meant to construe the practical thought experiment
‘unrealistically’—somewhat along the lines of the thought called for by a person’s query
whether her spouse would want to marry her again ‘if you had it to do all over’.
33
The fact that the agent’s values are the ones engaged as standards of assessment in
the thought experiment is not meant to make them immune from revision through it. The
thought of recurrence is supposed to force the agent to confront the life she has really lived
with the values she endorses, and vice-versa. In case of conflict, the agent may side with
features of the life and against some of her hitherto avowed values, so the experiment may
force a change of values (see WP 1059). The best way to understand such cases, I think, is
that the thought experiment exposes a latent conflict within the agent’s value set, part of
which drives her recognition that the given feature of her life is good, despite its
condemnation by another part of her value set. In this sense, the thought of recurrence
serves as a kind of coherence or consistency test. Still, since the person’s avowed values are
vulnerable to revision through the thought experiment, a coherence test of this sort avoids
the charge of emptiness leveled against ‘formal’ accounts of the recurrence idea by
Reginster (forthcoming, ch. 5). (Thanks to Robert Pippin and to Bernard Reginster for
forcing me to become clearer on this point.)
34
See Reginster (forthcoming, ch. 5). To motivate the point, Reginster observes
that a person might well be willing to marry her spouse again (or several more times),
without necessarily welcoming the prospect of infinite repetitions, or preferring that
prospect over some variety in spousal arrangements over eternity. Kundera (in Immortality)
again offers a striking exploration of the thought, when he has Agnes reflect on the meaning
of a dream in which she rejected the chance to be married to Paul again. (In short, she thinks
it was fine the first time, but she’d just rather try something else the next time round; notice,
a slightly more positive version of Agnes might well have chosen to do it one more
time, but not again after that—the way one might rewatch a movie that was pretty good, but
not classic.)
35
Helpful comments from Bernard Reginster and an anonymous referee for EJP
contributed to this paragraph.
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219
For a thoughtful discussion of these issues for Nietzsche’s view, see Nehamas
(1999).
37
In note 33, I mentioned one important way that inconsistency between one’s life and
values can lead directly to questions about harmony among the agent’s attitudes: when
she sides with her life against some avowed value(s), this is best understood as exposing
latent conflict among values. Note now that the very feature of Nietzsche’s thought
experiment responsible for its immoralist implications—the restriction of standards of
assessment to those endorsed by the agent—is essential to its ability to capture the value of
self-consistency he envisions. While ‘formal’ in an important sense, such harmony among
the parts, aspects, drives, or attitudes of the self is nevertheless a substantive ideal: one can
fail to attain it, and such failures are pretty clearly a bad thing for a person. Nietzsche’s
criticisms of the resulting forms of inner conflict—e.g. the treatment of Socrates at TI II, 9–
12, his attacks on weakness of will (TI V, 1–2), on guilt (GM II; TI VI, 7–8), on asceticism
(GM III, et passim), and on ressentiment (GM I, III; and Reginster 1997)—are all central to
his praise of this ideal, under which a person’s greatness consists in ‘wholeness in
manifoldness’ (BGE 212). Crucially, the harmony of character Nietzsche advocates must
not exclude being ‘rich in internal opposition’ (TI V, 3); the idea is simply that oppositions
should be successfully harmonized (TI V, 3; see also IX, 38, 41; BGE 12, 19, 21). (Thanks to
Robert Pippin, Bernard Reginster, and Elijah Millgram for discussion.)
38
Pippin (1997a, b) also notices the centrality of this issue.
39
The locus classicus for the development of the broad approach to the recurrence
doctrine defended here is Nehamas (1985: 141–99), but cf. also Nehamas (1980, 1983).
40
To add difficulty to disappointment, the Carters’ business also faced major financial
difficulties when they returned to it from public office (J. & R. Carter 1987: 10–11, 15),
threatening the business success they had achieved, just as the Reagan victory marked the
failure of their political projects.
41
Cf., of course, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, III, ‘The Convalescent’, which offers one of the
main treatments of the recurrence idea.
42
Chuck Colson attained fame as an especially ruthless political operative in the
Nixon White House. While in prison for Watergate related crimes, he became born again
as a Christian. The Carters report having been dubious about his conversion before they
actually worked with him through Habitat.
43
The discussion in this paragraph benefitted from exchanges with Alexander
Nehamas.
44
For a contrary view, see Reginster (forthcoming, ch. 5).
45
This is true even on conceptions which emphasize some fortunate aspects of our
sinful condition (usually the fact that the sin of the human race is needed as the
opportunity for God’s act of grace, which redeems us through the sacrifice of Christ).
Thus, notions of a ‘Happy Fall’ (as found in Milton, in Mormonism, etc.) still would not
permit honest affirmation of an eternal recurrence of the same particular life. Adam’s Fall
might be viewed as fortunate or providential in the limited sense of providing God’s
opportunity for grace, and that thought might be some consolation. But such thoughts are
by no means genuinely redemptive in Nietzsche’s sense, precisely because it remains crucial
to the Christian doctrine that sin is an evil state, and the particulars of our condition are by
no means to be willed as such. On the contrary, they must be renounced in full repentance
if we are even to be worthy of God’s grace. (Penetrating comments from an anonymous
reviewer for EJP forced me to become clearer about this issue.)
46
These practical reasons for insisting on the return of every event are fully
independent from theoretical considerations tied to Nietzsche’s superessentialism. The
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present interpretation thus advocates a more fully practical understanding of the
recurrence test than that of Nehamas (1985: 141–69).
47
The thought of an ideal somehow based on the mutually limiting combination of
virtues drawn from art and science clearly gripped Nietzsche deeply. The thought informs
his idea of a ‘gay science’ in later works, but its prominence goes all the way back to The
Birth of Tragedy, where it appears in metaphorical form in his call for the development of a
psychological type answering to the ‘music playing Socrates’ (BT 15; cf. also GS 340, which
brings out Nietzsche’s allusion to Alcibiades’ speech in Plato’s Symposium, and thus the
seductive, captivating aspects of Socrates qua music player).
48
Kant writes that ‘If merely regulative principles are considered as constitutive, then
as objective principles they can be in conflict; but if one considers them merely as maxims,
then it is not a true conflict but it is merely a difference of interest of reason. . . and a
reciprocal limitation of methods satisfying this interest’ (KrV, A 666/B 694; my italics). See
also A 660/B 688, A 644/B 672.
49
For Leibniz’s version of the principle, see Monadology 58, ‘And this is the
way of obtaining as much variety as possible, but with the greatest order possible, that
is, it is the way of obtaining as much perfection as possible’ (AG 220), echoed by Kant
(A 644/B 672) and by Nietzsche’s definition of greatness as ‘wholeness in manifoldness’
(BGE 212). (It is controversial whether Leibniz’s own understanding of perfection should
be understood as a balancing of two desiderata in tension, or rather as the maximization of
two mutually reinforcing desiderata. For discussion, see Rutherford (1995: 22–45). I need
not take a position on Leibniz interpretation here; for my purposes, it is sufficient
that Nietzsche (like Kant) definitely envisions a situation of trade-off, not mutual
reinforcement.)
50
A contrary account of the virtue of honesty may be found in Wood (2002: 1–88,
et passim), who defends a Cliffordian ethics of belief, according to which it is always
wrong—indeed, immoral—to believe out of strict proportion to the evidence. From Wood’s
point of view, the demotion of truthfulness from an absolute demand to a merely
regulative ideal already amounts to a violation of honesty, which he takes to be a moral
demand trumping all non-moral considerations. Nietzsche, of course, is keen to resist just
this claimed ‘trumping’ force of traditional morality in general. In particular, moreover, his
views on systematic falsification provide some support for his efforts to work out a
regulative conception of honesty. If Nietzsche is right, we cannot even hope for beliefs that
are true simpliciter in the metaphysical sense, but must content ourselves with improving
the satisfaction of our cognitive values over time. In this context, it is reasonable to balance
the demands of cognitive values with those of other values in constructing an overall life,
as long as we are not asked to adopt settled beliefs that stand in clear violation of cognitive
norms. This is just what we can expect from a merely regulative commitment to honesty.
There are further complexities here, but I defer their exploration to another occasion.
51
Pippin (1997a, b) points out that Nietzsche also sometimes takes up the problem of
truth’s value for the affirmation of life in a broader context, investigating the basic cultural
conditions under which life can be affirmed.
52
Perhaps the most detailed exposition of such a fictionalist reading of Nietzsche is to
be found in Hussain (forthcoming). Intriguing proposals along similar lines, as well as
worthwhile historical connections, may be found in Miklowitz (1998) and Landy (2002),
see also 2001 and 2004). The term ‘honest illusion’ is Hussain’s usual formulation, while
Landy speaks of ‘lucid illusions’.
53
Nietzsche claims that something very like this idea is the true lesson to be drawn
from the case of Hamlet (see BT 7).
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221
Hussain is primarily concerned with metaethical questions about the status of value
judgments, and his ‘fictionalist simulacrum’ is meant to capture the phenomenology of
valuing in the context of a global error theory of value he attributes to Nietzsche. On this
theory, no value judgments are ever true, so the role of valuing in our lives must be filled
by fictions. For reasons that will become apparent, I do not accept the error theoretic
aspects of Hussain’s account.
55
For discussion of the variety of pretense accounts of fiction, and the sustained
development of his own powerful ‘make believe’ theory of fictionality, see Walton (1990),
where chapters 1–3 are of special interest on the point.
56
The same basic idea first broached in BT clearly still guides Nietzsche’s later
thinking about the artistic role in the redemption of life. Compare GS 78 on artistic
transfiguration: ‘What should win our gratitude.—Only artists . . . have given men eyes and
ears to see and hear with some pleasure what each man is himself, experiences himself,
desires himself; only they have taught us to esteem the hero that is concealed in everyday
characters; only they have taught us the art of viewing ourselves as heroes—from a
distance, and as it were, simplified and transfigured . . . . Only in this way can we deal
with some base details in ourselves. Without this art, we would be nothing but foreground
and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and
most vulgar appear as if it were terribly vast, and reality itself’.
57
Notice, the point is not that we can make something good or beautiful merely by
thinking it so. Raphael had to carry off the painting to place the possessed boy in a
beautiful light, just as Carter had to build a life of moral leadership in order to make the
1980 defeat into a moment of opportunity, rather than failure. In neither case does mere
thinking make it so. Value creation in the sense defended here does involve certain
subjective attitudes to the valued object, as necessary conditions of its coming to have
value (which is why ‘in themselves they never are [beautiful]’; GS 299, my italics), but the
mere adoption of the relevant attitudes is not sufficient to create the value. That takes actual
artistic success.
58
In fact, Nietzsche’s own confidence on the point seems to rest on ideas very closely
related to Schopenhauer. His doctrine that the world is will to power commits him to the
thesis that different drives, or centers of power, interact by attempting to incorporate or
overwhelm one another, so that the boundary of influence of a given drive will be set at the
point where some other drive resists, and successfully frustrates, its activity. From this
point of view, it seems impossible—even self-defeating—to avoid frustration altogether,
and this is one reason Nietzsche is so suspicious of ideals that seek the total elimination of
suffering. See Reginster (forthcoming, ch. 3) for a compelling account of these aspects of
the will to power doctrine, which traces the clear connections to Schopenhauer (e.g. to his
argument that suffering is omnipresent due to the inevitable frustration of the striving
will, which underlies all phenomena).
59
The description ‘living in the future perfect’ is due to Landy (2001: 120–3, et passim),
who helpfully describes the phenomenon in Proust. Interested readers should also consult
Landy (2004) for expanded discussion. The key point for us is that future perfect claims
like ‘Later on, I will have been a writer, and so this life will have been all to the good . . .’
require a certain fiction: right now, when I make the claim, I am not a writer, but the future
perfect statement insists that later on I will have been so (now). To my mind, in fact, at the
time of the claim I am not even a ‘future writer’, since if I fail to become a writer, the right
judgment is not that I lost my former property of being a future writer, but that I was never
a future writer. I only had (unrealistic) dreams of being a writer. Compare a child who tries
on different careers under the rubric ‘when I grow up’. In a sense, she is by turns future
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farmer, future physicist, future fire chief, etc. but surely at the time this is all pretense, all
fiction. Only much later, if at all, can any of these become true.
60
‘Future perfect’ believing is always done at our risk, since if my project fails, then
my believing will likewise be condemned under the regulative demands of honesty.
61
To see the point in stark terms, notice that all kinds of things could make it true that
I might be a better hitter than I have yet shown, including many that would do nothing to
sustain my efforts. Surely, for example, there are possible worlds where my counterpart is
stronger, taller, has a better eye and superior bat speed, but the thought of that will hardly
be enabling for me. Likewise for possible worlds where the pitching is substantially worse.
The kind of thing I need to believe, of course, is that deep within me is a capacity to be a
great hitter—a capacity which has yet to show itself in my results. But this is no longer the
belief that I might be a hitter, but that I am one, deep down. Note the striking similarity, in
fact, between this belief and the illusion Nietzsche attributes to the lambs at GM I, 13, who
convince themselves that what really matters is not what one accomplishes, but the
character of one’s ‘neutral, independent ‘‘subject’’’, who always might be radically
otherwise than one’s achievements suggest.
Nietzsche’s recognition of the importance of such ‘belief in oneself’ provides the force
behind his remark that for the noble type of person he admires, ‘It is not the works, it is the
faith that is decisive here, that here decides, that here determines the order of rank. . . some
fundamental certainty that a noble soul has about itself’ (BGE 287). For Nietzsche, there is
simply no nobility of character without (at least relatively) wholehearted belief in oneself.
There are deep and interesting connections here to the Kantian notion of practical faith, but
exploring those must await a future occasion.
62
For another approach to the idea, recall the recognition, central to the thought of
recurrence, that the past has serious weight in my life. The same reasons that make it
possible for my future actions to have redemptive effects on the meaning of my past,
conversely give the ‘fragments’ and ‘accidents’ of the past real ‘weight’, real power over
the meaning of my life and identity now. To pursue redemption, I must break free of that
power, imagine my life differently, and act as if my life did not have the meaning that past
assigns to it. That distance from what I am is just what my fictive self-conception delivers.
63
For helpful conversations and comments, I am indebted to Karen Bennett, Simon
Blackburn, Sarah Darby, Peter Godfrey Smith, Charles L. Griswold, Nadeem Hussain, Paul
Katsafanas, Joshua Landy, Brian Leiter, Elijah Millgram, Alexander Nehamas, Robert
Pippin, Katherine Preston, Bernard Reginster, John Richardson, Darko Sarenac, Richard
Schacht, Alison Simmons, Allen Wood, and an anonymous referee for EJP. Thanks also to
Meng Xi and Sarah Darby for research assistance. Some ideas for the paper were
developed during a fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center, which I gratefully
acknowledge.
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