I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous–a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.

–Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “Why I Am a Destiny.”

Proemium

For us who today read Nietzsche after Heidegger, Nietzsche symbolizes the end of metaphysics (the death not only of “God” but also, as a necessary consequence, of the human “subject”). Whether or not Nietzsche actually succeeded in “overcoming metaphysics”–by means of his inventive myths, his “fictions,” of the Will to Power, the Uebermensch, and the Eternal Return–or whether, as Heidegger would have had it, he was simply the “last of the metaphysicians,” his own “last man” in effect, is a question still awaiting an answer. What I wish to reflect on in this essay is the meaning of what has been and is going on in the wake of Nietzsche’s genealogically deconstructive critique of the Tradition. Where do we stand, where can we stand when the very concept of “ground,” the metaphysical concept par excellence, has been swept away?

A quote from the literary critic Terry Eagleton might help to pinpoint the crucial cultural issue arising out of Nietzsche’s all-out attack on the Tradition. Eagleton writes:

We are now in the process of wakening from the nightmare of modernity, with its manipulative reason and fetish of the totality, into the laid-back [“joyful,” as Nietzsche would say] pluralism of the postmodern, that heterogeneous range of life-styles and language games which has renounced the nostalgic urge to totalize and legitimate itself….Science and philosophy must jettison their grandiose metaphysical claims and view themselves more modestly as just another set of narratives.

In other words, what as a result of Nietzsche’s Fröliche Wissenschaft has been called into question in these postmodern times is that which has served always as the ultimate legitimation of the philosophical enterprise: the search for Truth, for Knowledge, for, that is to say, Science (Wissenschaft, episteme). i.e., the One (Universal), True Account of Things (Reality) (true heirs to Parmenides and Pythagoras, present-day physicists are currently expending a great deal of money and energy in search of what they call the Theory of Everything, “a single equation that describes the entire universe”). What under the inspiration of Nietzsche postmodernism has called into question is the foundational, cultural authority of Science.

The concept of Science is a Platonic invention, but it underwent a new twist at the beginning of modern times with the emergence of mathematical, experimental science of the Galilean sort. Modern philosophy can be said to have begun when, bedazzled by this new development, philosophers took the new science as the supreme model of genuine, foundational knowledge. They were, ever afterwards, to labor in the shadow cast by this great Idol. Even the “free thinking,” godless philosophers of late modernity continued to pay a sort of religious hommage to it. As Nietzsche remarked in the Genealogy of Morals, “They are far from being free spirits: for they still have faith in truth.” And as he went on to say: “It is still a metaphysical faith that underlies our faith in science–and we men of knowledge of today, we godless men and anti-metaphysicians, we, too, still derive our flame from the fire ignited by a faith millennia old, the Christian faith, which was also Plato’s, that God is truth, that truth isdivine.” When at long last Nietzsche took to doing philosophy with a hammer, it was precisely this Idol that he sought to demolish.

To get a sense of what happens when the Idol comes crashing down, listen for a moment to some of what Baudrillard has to say:

All of Western faith and good faith was engaged in this wager on representation [i.e., “science”]: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could exchange for meaning and that something could guarantee this exchange–God, of course. But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say, reduced to the signs which attest his existence [cf. Nietzsche’s “death of God”]? Then the whole system becomes weightless; it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum: not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.

In other words, as Nietzsche would say, when the value of (representational) truth is called into question, everything becomes (mere) interpretation (“There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing'”). The world itself becomes nothing more than a “sign-world,” i.e., merely a semiological construct, a mere signifier signifying only itself. In a way which reminds one of the section in the Twilight of the Idols entitled “How the ‘Real World’ at last Became a Myth,” Baudrillard lists the following as “the successive phases of the image”:

1 It is the reflection of a basic reality.

2 It masks and perverts a basic reality.

3 It masks the absence of a basic reality.

4 It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum (170).

When the “real world” at last becomes a myth, a simulacrum, we are witnessing the death not only of Truth and of Science, but also of Philosophy itself. At least Philosophy with a capital P, as Rorty would say. What are we then left with? Is there anything to be found in Nietzsche’s legacy (“Let us abolish the real world”) other than the most abyssmal of nihilisms? What are we to do when there is no more Truth and no more Reality–and no more Philosophy (Science) to tell us what Truth and Reality really and truly are? How are we to cope with this situation which defines our postmodernity? Perhaps we could pick up some pointers by considering how three eminent thinkers of our times–Rorty, Derrida, Gadamer–have sought to cope with Nietzsche’s legacy, each in his own quite distinctive way.

Rorty

Rorty, it must be admitted, has not had any great trouble knowing what to do after the end of Philosophy. Of the three thinkers I shall be considering, Rorty has been the least discomforted by the heavy burden of Nietzsche’s legacy. Indeed, in the light-hearted joyfulness of his new-found philosophical innocence, he has wholeheartedly embraced Nietzsche’s pronouncements about the demise of Truth. If he is anything at all, Rorty is a carefree, happy-go-lucky nihilist who is not about to let himself be bothered any more by the old concerns of philosophy. Nietzsche’s word about the “death of God” seems to have been the liberating news he had been awaiting throughout all of the years of his exile in the arid waste lands of analytic philosophy. He tells us now that reading philosophy books is mostly a waste of time (it doesn’t contribute to human solidarity): Who, he asks, was ever convinced in ways that matter by a philosophical argument? We ought to read novels instead, people like Nabokov and Orwell, Dickens and Proust. Rorty fully endorses Lyotard’s claim that philosophical metanarratives are out, mininarratives are in. What counts is not to say something “truthful” but something “interesting,” something “edifying.” We should also change the conversation as much as possible, lest it become boring (we do this, according to Rorty, by continually inventing new “vocabularies,” “simply by playing the new off against the old”). Not Socrates’ “Don’t tell a lie,” but Johnny Carson’s “Don’t be boring” seems to have become Rorty’s watchword.

And indeed Rorty has many interesting, even “edifying,” things to say. I have no doubt that his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature has performed an extremely valuable service to the English-speaking philosophical community (to those, at least, who have lent it an attentive ear). I fully agree with Richard Bernstein when he says: “Richard Rorty has written one of the most important and challenging books to be published by an American philosopher in the past few decades.” Bernstein is also right in remarking on how those who find it a “deeply disturbing book” and those who find it “liberating and exhilarating” are both right and wrong. It is unquestionably liberating and exhilarating, but it is also deeply disturbing, for reasons I shall indicate in a moment.

What is liberating and exhilarating about the book is the way in which it was able to open the eyes of so many people to the utter bankrupcy of traditional, foundationalist philosophizing. European philosophers (e.g., Derrida) had of course already said much the same thing, but Rorty’s easy style of writing served to bring the message home with great éclat. What is announced here so effectively is the demise of modern philosophy, of, in other words, the whole epistemological project of modernity or what Rorty calls “epistemology centered philosophy.” Rorty defines epistemology “as the quest, initiated by Descartes, for those privileged items in the field of consciousness which are the touchstones of truth” (210). Epistemology is a foundational discipline, not itself a science in the narrow sense of the term, but the theory of science which secures for each and every science its legitimacy by establishing for it its foundation and method. Rorty asks whether in these postmodern times, when the Cartesian-Lockean-Kantian “cognizing subject” of modernity–a subject which is nothing but a pure, disembodied gaze upon a fully object world (the mind as a “mirror of nature”)–has been deconstructed, “there still remains something for epistemology to be” (210). His answer, of course, is that there doesn’t. When, for just one thing, one considers all the interesting developments in postpositivist and postpopperian philosophy of science (Kuhn, Hesse, Toulmin, Feyerabend, etc.), it is hard not to agree. Epistemology is now dead, thanks in large part to Rorty.

In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Rorty uses the term “hermeneutics,” “a polemical term in contemporary philosophy,” as he calls it (357), to designate this central attempt on the part of postmodern thinking to set aside epistemologically centered philosophy. This is a most fitting term since Gadamer himself has characterized his philosophizing–hermeneutics–as an attempt to overcome the modes of thought of “the epistemological era (l’ère de la théorie de la connaissance).” In his subsequent writings, however, Rorty tends to use the term “hermeneutics” less and less, perhaps due to the influence of Derrida, who quite erroneously has insinuated that hermeneutics remains attached to the old metaphysics of presence. But this, too, is fitting since in this book Rorty gives a hint of what is to come when he says that “hermeneutics is an expression of hope that the cultural space left by the demise of epistemology will not be filled” (315, emphasis added). Unlike Gadamer who has sought, by means of hermeneutics, to provide an alternative, a postmodern option, to “epistemologically centered philosophy,” Rorty does indeed leave us with a culturalvoid. This is precisely what makes Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature a “deeply disturbing” book.

What indeed, we may ask, are the ultimate “consequences” of Rorty’s postmodern pragmatism? I think they can fairly well be summed up in two words: relativism andnihilism. Rorty has, to be sure, protested the charge of relativism, but his responses are evasive and his arguments lack the power of conviction (which I suppose is only fitting in the case of someone who no longer believes in philosophical argumentation). We are inevitably condemned to relativism when, rejecting like Rorty the metaphysical notion of Truth, we reject also all metanarratives, when, that is, we reject the legitimacy of theory, which always seeks some form of universal validity. And, similarly, we find ourselves in a state of nihilism when, rejecting the metaphysical notion of Reality, we go on to assert as well that everyone’s “truths” are merely their own private “fictions,” when, that is, we equate fiction with mere semblance (similacrum) and deny it the power to recreate or refigure, and thus enhance, what is called “reality.”

Rorty says that in a post-Philosophical age the attempt to understand things (by means of philosophical theory) is passé. The important thing, he says, is to learn how tocope. Rorty may have something of a point here. Indeed, one fairly common characteristic of postmodern thought in general is that it insists on the primacy of the practical over the theoretical (this is reflected, for instance, in Gadamer’s rehabilitation of the Aristotelian notion of phronesis: “the primacy of ‘practice’ is undeniable”). It is one thing to accord priority to praxis, to ethos; it is quite another, however, to deny to theory a legitimate and, indeed, central role in the formation and sustenance of life practices and socio-political modes of being-in-the-world–in other words, their justification or, as Habermas would say much to Rorty’s displeasure, “legitimation.” But this is something that Rorty, with his anti-theory stance, does. He ignores the fact that arriving at some (theoretical) understanding of things is a most important way in which humans manage to cope with things (and, I might add, not only cope with them, but critically and creatively engage with them).

Rorty obviously likes to view himself as a kind of social or culture critic, denouncing cruelty and promoting solidarity. One thing that flows from his postphilosophical stance, however, is the rejection of any form of universal theory (diverse cultures or “conceptual schemes” are simply “incommensurable”), and thus any form of philosophical, which is to say universal, critique; for this he would substitute a “de-theoreticized sense of community,” in other words, compassionate feelings of a Rousseauian sort. Having thrown overboard the universalist claims of Enlightenment reason, the best Rorty can do when confronted with “cruelty” is to express his personal distaste for it by not admitting cruel people to his own comfy club of “we postmodernist bourgeois liberals,” i.e., “people who are more afraid of being cruel than of anything else.” Letting it be known that they are not “one of us” (190) is about as condemnatory as he can get. We may believe in something like human rights and the value of the individual, but if we are candid, we must admit that “this belief is caused by nothing deeper than contingent historical circumstance” (189). What right do we have, therefore, to “impose” it on people in other cultures and historical circumstances? None, it would seem, since there are no “general principles,” only historical narrations whose validity (if that’s the proper word) is limited to a given community at a given time. It is hard to imagine what kind of argument Rorty could address to the violators of human rights in China other than to urge them to read George Orwell. I can in fact see how the ruling clique in China could well turn Rorty’s anti-universalist, “frankly ethnocentric,” stance to their own good use when they feel the urge to protest Western denunciations of their barbaric practices as so much interference in their “internal affairs”: Who are we Westerners, we “bourgeois liberals” (a term which is for them an invective), we non-Chinese to tell them what to do anyhow? Rorty has deconstructed the metaphysical absolutism of the Tradition only to land himself in the quagmire of a quite traditional form of ethical relativism.

What, like a number of other postmodernists of a relativist bent, Rorty fails to realize is that philosophical theory and critique need not necessarily be “foundationalist.” He has not realized that in the new postmodern, globalist, multipolar or polycentric civilization which is emerging everywhere in the world, universality and particularity need no longer be metaphysical opposites. It is only for a modernist, essentialist mentality that universalism has to mean homegeneity and cultural imperialism. Like so many other anti-theorists today, Rorty has not so much overcome modernism as he has simply abandoned it for its opposite (absolutism for relativism, necessity for contingency, [essentialist] universalism for “localism”); he is not so much a postfoundationalist as he is a mere antifoundationalist who has simply (as Searle would say of Derrida) “turned the world upside down.” In, as is his wont, merely “changing the subject,” he has failed to work out any viable theoretical alternative to the bankrupt conceptuality of philosophical modernity. Derrida, at least, has realized that “metaphysics” is not simply something one can drop at one’s pleasure, like an old, worn-out pair of shoes, or simply set aside, like a game with which one has become bored or a conversation which has gone stale. Like (as some would say) Nietzsche himself, Rorty has not succeeded in “overcoming metaphysics”–although he has at least managed, willy-nilly, to find a way of coping with the nihilism which, as Nietzsche pointed out, tends inevitably to follow upon the overthrowing of metaphysics. Rorty’s writings can be of value to those who no longer have any principled way of defending the notion of value.

Derrida

Derrida is one of Rorty’s cultural heroes, and it is not hard to see why. As a fellow postnietzschean who also proclaims the demise of philosophy and the end of “man,” Derrida has all the appearances of being a living incarnation of the Rortyan ideal of the nonchalant postphilosophical thinker, viz., the “kibitzer” and “all-purpose intellectual,” the “intellectual dilettante.” Derrida is clearly a child of Nietzsche’s, an heir, as Rorty sees it, to Nietzsche’s joyful wisdom who, beyond all metaphyscial seriousness, extols the playful “innocence of becoming.” Like, you might say, the child idealized by Nietzsche who in his playfulness “constructs and destroys, all in innocence,” who “builds towers of sand…at the seashore, piles them up and tramples them down…in innocent caprice.” For Rorty, Derrida is the great postphilosophical prankster, the “ironist,” the indefatigable turner-out of texts which are mercifully free from the burden of having to actually mean something (qui ne veulent rien dire, as Derrida himself would say), a superb fabricator of “private fantasies.” A number of Derrida’s writings, especially later ones such as Glas (which even Derrida scholars seem to have difficulty making sense of) would, on the face of it at least, seem to be nothing more than elaborate jokes, philosophy just for the fun (or pun) of it, a form of gleeful, uninhibited scribbling which, as Rorty says, seeks neither to demonstrate anything nor refute anybody. Compared to the up-tight analytic philosophers Rorty grew up with, Derrida is undoubtedly a delightful jokester. And yet there is a kind of seriousness to the Derridian enterprise that escapes Rorty’s notice or, to be more precise, that Rorty prefers to ignore, to which he turns a blind eye.

Derrida may indeed be a postmodern gamester, but there is more to his work than “just gaming” (to allude to the title of a work of Lyotard’s). It is of course true that Derrida is no more of a believer in the traditional metanarratives of philosophy than is Rorty and is thus, like him, a kind of postmodern agnostic who sets no store by philosophy’s traditional claim to “knowledge” (scientia) and is in fact out to undermine it as best he can. In some ways Derrida is even less of a “philosopher” than Rorty, since he not only does not have a “position” to defend but does not even engage in arguments against various philosophical positons. What is referred to as “deconstruction” is not a set of theses or beliefs, not even loosely articulated ones like those of Rorty, but is simply, so to speak, a method, a way of reading texts, philosophical ones in particular. Actually, it is not even a “method,” at least not in the modernist sense of the term, i.e., a set of explicit rules to be followed so as to arrive at certain positive results (“the truth”). This is why Derrida insists that what he is doing is not “hermeneutics,” by which he means that his reading of texts does not aim at unconvering a hidden meaning in them. Derrida quite simply does not believe in meaning–a hopelessly metaphysical concept according to him.

The task of deconstruction is in fact to show that philosophical texts do not mean what they seem to mean, do not mean what their authors wanted them to mean (what they “intended”), do not in fact have any “decidable” meaning at all. The aim of a deconstructive reading is to show how texts laying claim to knowledge are full of internal tensions and contradictions or antinomies which end up by subverting their stated goals and their own claims to truth. The purpose of a deconstructive reading of philosophical texts is frankly anti-Philosophical; it is aimed at showing how in every instance the attempt by traditional philosophers to use language in such a way as to get beyond language so as to arrive at some translinguistic, transcultural, transhistorical truth–“transcendental signified”–which language could then be said to “mirror,” inevitably fails. Philosophers who aim at the Truth, at universal essences, cannot in fact escape the gravitational pull of a particular language. Philosophy’s univocal concepts turn out to be nothing more than disguised metaphors of strictly local prominence and significance. There’s no escaping the play of language.

Just as Rorty undermines the “epistemologically centered philosophy” of modernity, so Derrida’s deconstructive undertaking calls into question not only modern philosophy but the entire philosophical tradition, or what Derrida calls the “metaphysics of presence.” This is the aspect of Derrida’s work which, to borrow Bernstein’s words, is “liberating and exhilarating.” Derrida’s deconstructive attack on what he calls “logocentrism” is liberating in that, among other things, it frees us from the tyranny of two particularly insidious notions which, from the beginning, have dominated philosophy: the notions of totality and essence.

The notion of “totality,” i.e, the idea that reality is One, and is, consequently, the proper object of a Unified Science, is oppressive because it invariably leads to the suppression of all sorts of loose ends to things (and to people) which cannot or will not (which refuse) to be fittled neatly into the System. This, of course, was the main point in Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel. Totality rules out both individuality and alterity (the “multiple forms of otherness” that postmodern thought seeks to safeguard). And as we have learned in our times, in late modernity, totalizing thinking is hazardous to human life because it serves to lend philosophical legitimacy to totalitarianism, i.e., the totalized society (the socio-political equivalent of the unified science dreamed of by modern rationalists). Thus, by discrediting the notion of totality, of a totalizing discourse, deconstruction serves to further the postmodern concern for particularity and difference, diversity and heterogeneity, the fragmentary and the marginal, in a word, pluralism–the kind of pluralism which is the necessary condition for genuine freedom and democracy.

The notion of “essence” is also oppressive and fully merits being deconstructed. “Essence” is the grounding notion of philosophical science, the that-without-which it could not be. Science or Knowledge is, by definition, the knowing of what something is (its “whatness” [quidditas] or essence). The metaphysical presupposition behind this epistemic endeavor is that a thing is indeed just precisely what it is and not something else; essentialism upholds the rule of the Principle of Identity, the cornerstone of logocentrism. The trouble with essentialism is that, as Sextus Empiricus already knew, it cannot but result in dogmatism (dogmatism being, as Sextus said, belief in “the substantial existence of the True”). And dogmatism is oppressive since it legitimates “expertocracy” and “rationalist terrorism,” i.e., the tyranny of those who claim to be “in the know.” To be constrained by essences (which, as Nietzsche pointed out, are simply what some people in the past have said things are and whose sayings have over time become fixed and canonical) is to be imprisoned in a stagnant universe of stringently limited possibilities and fixed, unalterable meanings. Essentialism provides a handy justification for the tyranny of the status quo and of established power structures.

That is the “liberating and exhilarating” side to Derrida’s work. But there is another side to it which, if not “deeply disturbing” (as in the case of Rorty), is, at the very least, disappointing. The trouble with deconstruction is that it does not seem to “go” anywhere. Unlike Rorty, Derrida realizes, as I mentioned before, that one cannot simply toss “metaphysics” out the window and be done with it once and for all. The work of deconstruction is serious and demanding, requiring “the skill of the tightrope walker, tripping the light fantastic on a world-wire over the abysss.” Overcoming metaphysics is thus no easy matter; it is necessary, Derrida suggests, to lodge “oneself within [the] traditional conceptuality in order to destroy it.” There is an honesty here that one does not find in Rorty who seems to believe that whenever it strikes our fancy we can change ourselves overnight by simply inventing new “vocabularies.” That notwithstanding, having deconstructed metaphysics but unable to get beyond it, remaining, as he might say, “on the edge,” Derrida is left, and leaves us, sitting in the rubble of this once magnificent monument to human pride and presumptuousness. This is perhaps why the later Derrida, who is much more to Rorty’s liking, tends more and more to just horse around, turning out texts whose philosophical significance, if any there be, is hard to detect but which are the aesthetic delight of lit crit audiences this side of the Atlantic.

But even Derrida’s earlier, more “serious” works are disappointing. After having deconstructed metaphysics, we are left, in a way similar to Rorty, with an immense philosophical void, with, indeed, a kind of nihilism. Derrida seems to believe that, in the absence of metaphysical absolutes, of a “transcendental signified,” all that remains is the ultimately meaningless play of words which refer not in any way to “reality” but only to more and more other words, in an endless drift, deferral, or dissemination of undecidable meaning (différance), words without end, an abyssmal labyrinth in which we are forever condemned to wander aimlessly about. “The absence of the transendental signified,” he says, “extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely.” “There are only, everywhere,” he says, “differences and traces of traces,” nothing but “a play of traces or differance that has no sense.” Or as Rorty says of his hero: “For Derrida, writing always leads to more writing, and more, and still more.” libido scribendi, ad nauseum, as the Romans would have said (or “logorrhea,” as Allan Megill says). Because (as Derrida rightly perceives) nothing means any one thing in particular, he concludes that in the last analysis nothing means anything at all.

As Rorty realizes, Derrida is an irrepressibly “excessive” writer. For him philosophical works are all play and no work (they do not, that is, seek to produce that effect called “truth”). Philosophy is turned into a form of “literature” (“a kind of writing,” in Rorty’s words), i.e., fiction. Philosophy’s world is but a dream world. When everything becomes textuality and intertextuality and nothing but, the real world of human concerns and human praxis vanishes into the black hole of free-floating signifiers. This is indeed nihilism, a joyful nihilism perhaps, but nihilism nonetheless. Thus, as David Hoy very pertinently remarks: “If dissemination is at times a useful antidote, in excess it may also be a poison.”

I conclude that in simply reversing the pro and the con, Derrida’s joyful wisdom, his response to Neitzsche’s legacy, remains, as does Rorty’s, a captive of the metaphyscial tradition and its tenacious oppositional, either/or mentalité.

Derrida’s rejection of logocentrism is not revolutionary, and because he thinks it is, he is unable to take advantage of the sophistication that the debate on essentialist thinking has already reached; as a result, he jumps from one extreme (meaning is a matter of fixed, immutable concepts) to the other (meaning is a matter of the indeterminate, infinite play of signs). This appears very like the undeveloped response of one who has just been surprised by the realization that real essences do not exist. The conclusion of this discussion can therefore only be that Derrida’s contribution to the debate on language and meaning is not substantial; it fails to establish any coherent new view of meaning or of the way language functions. In lieu of metaphysical fixity Derrida offers us nothing more than uncontrollable “slippage.” A pretty meager consolation prize for so great a deconstructive effort. Carefree and Dionysian though he may appear to be, I do not believe that Derrida has succeeded in freeing himself from the bad conscience of the metaphysicians. For this reason, and because for Derrida, as for those poststructuralists who repudiate the legacy of the Enlightenment, nothing can any longer be said to be better than anything else, only different, I do not believe that Derrida has much to contribute, in a positive way, to what is most needed today now that marxist-leninist ideology has been relegated to the rubbish heap of history–by which I mean the detailed working out of a postmetaphysical, postmodern way of doing philosophy, a form of critical theory free finally of foundationalist and essentialist hang-ups, one which could, by means of theory, advance the cause of a truly universal freedom, i.e., a freedom which would be the prized possession not only of ethnocentric bourgeois liberals like Rorty but of humanity everywhere. Derrida is at least to be congratulated on having abandoned the modernist tactic of previous left-wing intellectuals who extolled confrontational politics (“revolutionism”), in line with Lenin’s exhortation to “suppress the suppressors.” As various postmarxists have now (finally) realized, a politics of violence of this sort contributes only to more thoroughgoing forms of tyranny überhaupt. What is needed is a philosophical defense of universal human rights and individual freedoms, a postfoundationalist reassertion of Jefferson’s Enlightenment declaration that all men are “created equal” and are endowed with certain “unalienable rights.” The notion of universal human rights and freedoms can, however, make sense only if you have a universalist conceptuality with which to make sense of it–only if you have a “philosophy.” The “end of philosophy” and the end of “humanism” proclaimed by both Derrida and Rorty means, of course, the end of universalism, and thus the end, not only of “history,” but of “humanity” itself (it must not be forgotten that the concept of humanity–a humanity–was, like that of history [history being world history, the history of humanity], an invention of the philosophers, a product of philosophical theory).

Gadamer

Disregarding the standard (i.e., pre-postmodern) narrative ordering according to which, as Descartes insisted, one should always begin at the beginning, I turn to Gadamer last. Even though his work antedates both Derrida’s and Rorty’s, its significance is perhaps best understood when viewed in the light of his wayward progeny. It is, after all, a basic hermeneutical principle that we always understand backwards, après coup. As Gadamer himself has remarked: “All beginnings lie in the darkness, and what is more, they can be illuminated only in the light of what came later and from the perspective of what followed.” When examined in the context of what I have said about Rorty and Derrida, Gadamer’s hermeneutics may perhaps be seen to provide valuable suggestions for doing philosophy in a postnietzschean, postmodern age, ones that are not to be found in either Rorty or Derrida.

If the writings of Rorty and Derrida can be said to be liberating, and if indeed the notion of liberation figures prominently in one way or another in what they have to say, the same is no less true of Gadamer’s work. Indeed, Gadamer has no qualms about retelling one of the greatest metanarratives of all time, that of the progressive liberation of humankind. In the context (significantly enough perhaps) of a discussion of Hegel he writes:

[T]here is no higher principle of reason than that of freedom. Thus the opinion of Hegel and thus our own opinion as well. No higher principle is thinkable than that of the freedom of all, and we understand actual history from the perspective of this principle: as the ever-to-be-renewed and the never-ending struggle for this freedom.

One remarkable thing about this text is how it manages to reiterate most of those notions that postmodernists of a relativistic and nihilistic bent have felt obliged to discard, notions such as progress, humanity, reason (philosophy), and history. It would be all too easy, on the basis of a pronouncement such as this, to attribute to Gadamer a residual–or-not-so-residual–attachment to the old metaphysics of presence. Jack Caputo, a great admirer of Derrida’s, does not hesitate to accuse Gadamer of being a “closet essentialist.” Gadamer himself has protested Derrida’s portrayal of him as (in Gadamer’s words) “a lost sheep in the dried up pastures of metaphysics.”

What critics like Caputo fail to notice is that Gadamer (a true postmodernist in this respect) uses Hegel against Hegel. Whereas Hegel believed that “the True is the whole,” Gadamer does not subscribe to the notion of totality or closure, to the Hegelian notion of Knowledge (Wissenschaft). For Gadamer, there is only one thing we can know for sure, and that is that any kind of Hegelian absolute is irremediably beyond our grasp. “Philosophical thinking,” he writes,” is not science at all….There is no claim of definitive knowledge, with the exception of one: the acknowledgement of the finitude of human being in itself.” To acknowledge human finitude is to acknowledge that, for us at least (for any existing individual, as Kierkegaard would say), there can be no end to history–and thus no guaranteed, transcendenally sanctioned meaning to it (i.e., no science of history). The meaning not only of what is but also of what was is always in question (en jeu) and up for renewal. Later in this book Gadamer speaks of “a progress that always must be renewed in the effort of our living” (111). In “Text and Interpretation” Gadamer writes: “[T]he special feature of historical experience is that we stand in the midst of an event without knowing what is happening to us before we grasp what has happened in looking backwards. Accordingly, history must be written anew by every new present.”

As a major stream in the many-branched current of postmodern thought, hermeneutics is much closer to deconstruction than many deconstructions are prepared to admit. Indeed, Gadamerian or phenomenological hermeneutics incorporates a genuinely deconstructive strategy inasmuch as it decidedly rejects the modernistic objectivism of pre-phenomenological, romantic hermeneutics, the kind of hermeneutics which has continued to be represented in this century by Emilio Betti and E.D. Hirsch and to which Derrida’s objections against “hermeneutics” do indeed apply. Richard Palmer emphasizes “the importance of seeing the unfolding of the hermeneutical problematic in terms of the philosophical critique of the metaphysics of modernity” and remarks on how such a critique generates the need for a deconstructive strategy. Palmer in fact views the relation between hermeneutics and deconstruction as similar to that of parent and child.

David Hoy paints a somewhat similar picture. “Dissemination and hermeneutics should not be contrasted so extremely,” he says. According to Hoy, Derrida’s deconstruction agrees with the hermeneutical critique of traditional epistemology; it also, he says, takes “that critique to its extreme limits and [applies] it against traditional hermeneutics as well.” To compare the relation between hermeneutics and deconstruction to that of parent and child and to suggest that deconstruction goes beyond hermeneutics can be misleading, however. Chronology aside, deconstruction is not so much a successor to hermeneutics (“advancing” matters even further), as it is a spin off from hermeneutics–in a direction other than that which has continued to be pursued by hermeneutics itself (a spin off, as Derrida might say, into an “excentric” orbit).

Hermeneutics, I would argue, is as fully “postmodern” as deconstruction. What is often overlooked is that there are, in fact, two quite different trends in postmodern thinking. One writer distinguishes the two types of postmodernism in this way:

The first proclaims that modernity is over, that a new age has begun. The new age makes use of the past, and of modern achievements, but it has its own new freedoms and its own self-definition. The second type of thought is deconstructive, and works to undermine the unities and closures found in modernity, without escaping from them into some new age.

All things considered, this is a fairly apt description of the difference between hermeneutics and deconstruction, “the difference,” as Bernstein would say, “that makes a difference.” One could sum up this difference by saying that whereas deconstruction undermines the traditional notions of “truth,” “reality,” and “knowledge,” leaving nothing in their place (nihilism), hermeneutics has sought to work out a genuinely nonfoundationalist and nonessentialist understanding of these concepts.

For hermeneutics, “truth” no longer signifies the “correspondence” of “mental states” to “objective” reality, and “meaning” is no longer conceived of as some sort of objective, in-itself state of affairs which merely awaits being “discovered” and “represented” by a mirroring mind. “Truth” and “meaning” refer instead to creative operations on the part of human understanding itself, which is always interpretive (never simply “representational”). Hermeneutical truth is inseparable from the interpretive process, and meaning, as hermeneutics understands it, is nothing other than what results from such a process, namely, the existential-practicaltransformation that occurs in the interpreting subject (in his or her world orientation) as a result of his or her active encounter with texts, other people, or “the world.” Truth and meaning have nothing “objective” about them, in the modern, objectivistic sense of the term; they are integral aspects of the “event” of understanding itself, are inseparable from, as Gadamer would say, the “play” of understanding.

In reconceptualizing truth and meaning in this way, hermeneutics thereby also reconceptualizes the pivotal notion of “knowledge.” What is called “knowledge” is not, as Derrida would say, the possession of a “transcendental signified,” a translinguistic “essence” (this is the metaphysical or logocentric definition of knowledge, a definition which, it may be noted, Derrida uncritically accepts). “Knowledge,” for hermeneutics, is nothing other than the shared understanding that a community of inquirers comes to as a result of a free exchange of opinions. For Gadamer, understanding “is a process of communication.” In reconceptualizing matters in this way, and in insisting on the “communicative” nature of human understanding, hermeneutics offers us something more than does deconstruction, i.e., something more than the mere cacophony of everyone’s parodying, fanciful interpretations of things (the “private fantasies” of Derrida that Rorty speaks of).

Accomplished though he be in exposing the “blind spots” in philosophical texts, there is in Derrida’s own writings a rather curious and in any event very significant blind spot. If Derrida rejects the notion of truth altogether, it is because, like the metaphysicians themselves, he equates truth with representation. Gadamer breaks with this understanding of truth and proposes a quite different, genuinely postmodern conception of truth. Truth is not something simply to be discovered (“represented”) but something to be made–through the exercise of communicative rationality. Truth is a practical concept. It is something that can exist only if we take responsibility for its existence. “Philosophy” is one name for the exercise of this kind of responsibility.

In emphasizing the importance of common agreement and mutual understanding in what is called “knowledge,” hermeneutics allows us to conceive of, and to strive to realize, a society which would be something more than a deconstructed Tower of Babel. Gadamer’s dialogical view of understanding (as a communication process) provides the model for a social order based not on coercion or domination (Herrschaft) but on rational persuasion, the kind of tolerant and pluralist social order envisaged by the great rhetoricians and humanists of the past.

I might note as well that because hermeneutics, unlike deconstruction, contains quite definite implications for social praxis, it promotes the exercise of critical reason. The function of hermeneutical criticism is to expose and denouce forms of socio-political organization which oppress and stifle the communicative process–fosterning thereby the development of dialogical communities. As both the theory and the practice of interpretive understanding, hermeneutics, Gadamer says, “may help us to gain our freedom in relation to everything that has taken us in unquestioningly.” The hermeneutical enterprise is indeed, as Gadamer says, one of “translating the principle of freedom into reality.” As Richard Bernstein has clearly perceived, there is, as he says, “a radical strain implicit in Gadamer’s understanding of hermeneutics as a practical philosophy.” This radical strain, he says, “is indicated in his emphasis . . . on freedom and solidarity to embrace all of humanity.”

Gadamer’s hermeneutics is indeed one which “makes use of the past and of modern achievements”–but in accordance with its own renewed conception of such traditional notions as truth, meaning, and knowledge. Because Gadamer does not reject the tradition of Western thought en bloc, he is not condemned to dillydallying around on the margins of metaphysics, reduced to theoretical impotence. Because, unlike Rorty’s “Philosophers,” Gadamer recognizes that human understanding can never transcend its limitations so as to arrive at some atemporal Archimedean point, is always culturally and historically situated, is, indeed, rooted in tradition–and because he realizes that this is not a “defect” in the make-up of human understanding but the that-without-which there would be no understanding at all–because of this, he is able to appropriate elements within the tradition–such as, precisely, the all-important notion of freedom–in order to contest and deconstruct other aspects of the tradition which have consistently led us to misunderstand understanding itself, to form, as the marxists would say, a “false consciousness” of that which we ourselves are. As Gadamer has himself recognized, his hermeneutics–a form of theory which, as he insists, has universal scope, which is concerned with “our entire understanding of the world and thus…all the various forms in which this understanding manifests itself” –is guided by an emancipatory interest and has a pronounced critical thrust to it. The whole point of the self-understanding which is the goal of hermeneutics is, as Gadamer insists, that of “saving a freedom threatened not only by all rulers but much more by the domination and dependence that issue from everything we think we control.”

Afterword

Contemporary hermeneuticists agree with with other postmodernists that science and philosophy must, as Eagleton says, “jettison their grandiose metaphysical claims and view themselves more modestly as just another set of narratives.” This is because they all agree that what the metaphyscians worshipped under the name of “reality” (what Nietzsche refered to as the “being” of the Eleatics) is a Humpty Dumpty that can never be put back together again (though it will no doubt continue, even in its fragmentarity, to give rise to fantasies in the minds of would-be metaphysicians). If “reality” was, as Nietzsche would say, one of our longest and most tenacious of illusions, so also, accordingly, was the notion of “science” or “knowledge.” “Knowledge,” we now know, is but an honorific name for a certain kind of socially sanctioned narration and story-telling. What we now know is that there is no The Way It Is–and that that is indeed the way it is.

One thing that hermeneutics can do for us in this new postmetaphysical age in which the loss of “reality” and “knowledge” could, wrongly construed, lead to nihilism, is to allow us to tell stories with a good conscience–stories which could have the power of making a real difference to our lives. For once we have deconstructed the oppositional conceptuality of metaphysics (reality versus appearance, knowledge versus opinion, truth versus fiction, and so on) and have finally gotten over the bad conscience of the metaphysicians, there is no reason why we should think that fiction need be mere fiction, as Derrida nonethless still seems to think, troubled as he is by the ghost of metaphysics. That form of narration called theory–especially when it becomes metanarrative (theory with universal scope)–can actually help to bring reality into being, can, for instance, help to make of this world a freer and more democratic one.

History in the modernist sense, history as a would-be science providing for human affairs the kind of cause-and-effect explanations and “necessary laws” which were thought to be the glory of the natural sciences, history in this sense is finished. History, postmodernists realize, is a form of story telling, a kind of fiction. The disappearnce of reality in the metaphysical sense does not, however, necessarily entail the reign of the simulacrum, as Baudrillard, a lapsed marxist, so forlonly thinks it does. Fiction and reality are not, or need not be, metaphysical opposites; fiction (the exercise of the imagination) is not the same thing as simulation. New realities can in fact only be brought into being by means of new “imaginaries”; reality is, after all, simply virtuality actualized. Thus, although “history” may be a fiction, this is no reason why it ought not to be taken seriously and why we ought not to strive to write and rewrite it, to make and remake it, in all earnestness, why we should not strive to make history be the history of the struggle for freedom. As Gadamer says when speaking of the principle of which there is none higher, the principle of freedom, the “rational aspect proper to the concept” cannot be “refuted by the facts.” If the “facts” do not agree with the principle, “So much worse for the facts.” The “facts” will simply have to be changed–in the light of the principle, precisely. As Gadamer goes on to say, referring to Hegel:

[T]he rational need for unity is legitimate under all circumstances and…it can be satisfied only by philosophy….Anyone who does not see that this is precisely what history is, that the freedom of all has become an irrefutable principle and yet still requires ever anew the effort toward achieving its realization, has not understood the dialectical relationship of necessity and contingency and so also the claim of philosophy to know concrete rationality.

Rorty notwithstanding, we cannot of course make history turn out to be anything we might like it to be; we are, as hermeneuticists insist, constrained by our tradition. But as hermeneuticists also insist, taking exception to both Rorty and Derrida, although we cannot hope to transcend either historical or linguistic contingency, this does not mean that we are imprisoned in them. Contingency does not rule out an appeal to universality. In contrast to the cultural and epistemological relativists, Gadamer reminds us that although understanding is inescapably language-bound, “this assertion does not lead us into any kind of linguistic relativism.” Or any kind of Rortyan “ethnocentrism.” As Gadamer goes on to say:

While we live wholly within a language, the fact that we do so does not constitute linguistic relativism because there is absolutely no captivity within a language–not even within our native language. …Any language in which we live is infinite in this sense [in that it opens us to the infinite realm of possible expression], and it is completely mistaken to infer that reason is fragmented because there are various languages. Just the opposite is the case. Precisely through our finitude, the particularity of our being, which is evident even in the variety of languages, the infinite dialogue is opened in the direction of the truth that we are.

Perhaps after the demise of Reality and Truth it might therefore be possible to live, and to live well, after all. Perhaps something like a gay science, a joyful wisdom genuinely devoid of any arrière gout of despondency over the loss of metaphysics, is indeed possible.

 

Gary Brent Madison

McMaster University

madison@mcmaster.ca

[From my forthcoming book, The Politics of Postmodernity: Essays in Applied Hermeneutics]

Philosophy Today (Winter 1991), pp. 3-19.

[After Post-Modernism Conference. Copyleft 1997, by the author. All rights reversed.]

Nietzsche’s Amor Fati

THE EMBRACING OF AN UNDECIDED FATE

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By Friedrich Ulfers and Mark Daniel Cohen

There is in Nietzsche an unequivocal affirmation of life, and it would be precisely wrong to say, “notwithstanding the equivocality that he injects into his every assertion,” for there is nothing in Nietzsche that withstands his equivocality. Yet, it speaks to the essence of Nietzsche’s posture to observe that there is nothing diffident or less than forthright in his work—he makes assertions, enormously complex assertions, and they are clearly intended to be taken as asserted. Nietzsche means what he says. It is his saying that bears the complexity in its method, which practices the undermining and enhancing of inherited terminology and philosophical principles, often in ploys of overt contradiction, to propose what is unequivocally meant. One must follow him in his every move, through each verbal gambit, to get at a meaning that always constitutes straight answers to straight questions, at a meaning that presumably requires the richness of literary strategy, of complicated saying, to be formulated at all. The idea dissolves without the verbal underpinning. It evaporates in the absence of his statement. It is so subtle, even as it is so clear and unequivocal once grasped. In short, nothing in Nietzsche goes without saying.

One could be clever and say merely that, with Nietzsche, his very equivocality is itself equivocal, and it would be right to say so. However, left at that, such a characterization initiates a spiral of thought that burrows itself into the soil. It is the business of philosophy to digest such material, to sift it for its intrinsic clarity—otherwise, philosophy would be nothing more than gamesmanship and scholarly fantasy. And so it is as much to the point to observe that Nietzsche is dealing with conceptions that defy simple expression, that he is laced in and trussed by conventional terminology that resists the statement he needs to make, terminology that has been filtered by and formulated according to the very conceptions he wishes to deny, conceptions that frequently establish themselves as opposites, as choices one is required to choose between, and that he is seeking to say that which has not yet found its unequivocal terminology, which stands beyond the perimeters of established options. His verbal play is a ploy. It is a means to an end, not the end itself, not the thought but the only available statement for getting at the thought, and it is our business to find our way to it.

And so there is an unequivocal affirmation of life in Nietzsche, but it is not such as one would think, nor perhaps one that many readers would be prepared to affirm. The very category of expression becomes transformed under Nietzsche’s hand, by his voice. An affirmation is, by definition, an act of counsel: it is an attitudinal posture, a judgment of value, an expression out of a principle of appropriateness, which is recommended to the reader, which is voiced for the purpose of exhorting the reader to do likewise. Implicitly, it is intended as guidance. But if one asks if this is Nietzsche’s intention, if he affirms life so as to suggest to readers that in a matter open to discretion they choose to affirm life, the answer is as complex as is his personal rhetoric: it is both yes and no. In essence, the category of recommendation does not fit, not even so far as to warrant denial. Something subtler is at work here.

One of Nietzsche’s most overt, and perhaps his best known, assertions of affirmation for life is his clear exhortation: “Amor fati”—the love of fate, the acceptance of necessity. From his first expression of the thought in The Gay Science, Nietzsche makes it clear that his reference to fate is a reference to necessity: “I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! . . . And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.” (1) The issue of fate is not to be mis-read here. Nietzsche means the necessary, but it is not the necessary in an ordinary sense.

And so, to understand Nietzsche’s Amor fati, one must first comprehend what Nietzsche means by “fate,” what quality of the fateful is possible within Nietzsche’s ontology, within his vision of the world. The idea of fate is not to be understood as a fixed and unalterable orientation of events on a necessary outcome. It is not a promise and eventual achievement, extending from some source capable of guaranteeing outcome, of a final state, for oneself, humanity at large, or the world, and after the accomplishment of which, eventuality—the playing out of result—comes to an end. There is no teleology in Nietzsche’s universe—nothing comes to an end. The process that is the world, that is reality, is incessant. And so, Nietzsche’s fate must not be understood in the context of a determinism that takes the form of a finality that the world or the self are “fated,” or promised, to achieve. Nor is it fate in the sense of some categorical, transcendental moral imperative to which we owe absolute allegiance and under which we are laden with a sense of absolute responsibility. The incessant process, the continuous “Becoming” of the universe, leads to nothing in the end, for there is no end: “becoming aims at nothing and achieves nothing.” (2)

Nietzsche’s “fate” is something more complex than the nominal concept of fate as pure necessity, for as with everything in Nietzsche’s conception of the universe, it is riddled with its own opposite—the intricacy of opposites is the principle of relation in Nietzsche’s understanding of reality. Nietzsche emphasizes the aspect of necessity in his first explicit reference to Amor fati, yet he again and again returns to linking necessity and freedom in his conception of fate. It is an ideal, an ideal of Amor fati, that he envisions in his characterization of Goethe and the poet’s “fatalism”: “Such a spirit [as Goethe] who has become freestands amidst all with a joyous and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only the single is loathsome, and that all is redeemed and affirmed in the whole—he does not negate any more.” (3)

The fatalism of Amor fati involves an insight into Being as that which is, as Jacques Derrida phrased the comparable idea, “a third irreducible to the dualisms of classical ontology” (4) whereby Becoming negates Being. For Nietzsche, fate and the love of it involve us in a knowledge, amounting to wisdom, of an “excess” (5) beyond Being with Becoming as its negation, beyond the value of truth with non-truth as its negation, in a state of awareness that is beyond normative conception and that leaves him who “knows” it “only as a Yes-sayer.”

This saying as an intricacy of opposites—of those which are opposite from the logical point of view, which functions by means of an operative stipulation that everything is to be conceived according to what it is not, according to its negation—is a philosophical strategy, a tactics of proposition, that Nietzsche initiated at the beginning of his career, in The Birth of Tragedy, with his analysis of the tragic view of the world. There, the tragic, rather than constituting the “negating” side to an opposed “affirming,” embodies, through the conception of opposites as interpenetrating, what Nietzsche calls an irreducible “contradiction.” (6) “Contradiction,” for Nietzsche, does not mean the violation of binary logic, but an “intricate relation” (7) between opposites, such as bliss and pain, that simultaneously unites them and holds them apart.

The tragic worldview, then, is a chiasmic unity of opposites, one with neither negation nor affirmation, because as a medium that permits “Yes” and “No” to interpenetrate, it affirms them both equally, leaving affirmation affirmed precisely to the degree that negation is.

Thus, comparable to the tragic, as conceived in the tragic worldview, fate for Nietzsche is a seeming contradiction in terms—the terms of “freedom” and “necessity.” The solution is not a resolution, for no solution is required, for in a truer sense than that conveyed by phrasing the matter as “interpenetrating” opposites, there is no contradiction. Nietzsche does not attribute necessity to fate as determinism vs. freedom; he ascribes both qualities to fate in equal measure. The necessity of fate rests in Nietzsche’s insight that it is unalterably—eternally, necessarily—“free” in a playful elusiveness.

Nietzsche disabuses us of the interpretation of Amor fati as an embracing of fate without interpolation of freedom by linking it to the poetic. This linkage is particularly evident in one of Nietzsche’s Dionysus-Dithyrambs, “Only a Fool! Only a Poet!” (Nur Narr! Nur Dichter!), which alludes to the foolishness, or playfulness, of the poet as the epistemological frame within which to address the excess beyond truth and its opposite, the excess that is fate for Nietzsche.

You, the suitor of truth? [. . .]

No! Only a poet! [. . .]

May I be banished

From all truth,

Only a fool! Only a poet! (8)

It is the playfulness/foolishness of the poet and poetry—that is, of the ambiguity or indeterminacy of poetry’s metaphorical core—that would be able to capture the elusive “truth” of fate. But as before, Nietzsche ties together the “freedom” of fate—freedom in the sense of not being restricted by the oppositional logic of discursive language—and the dimension of “necessity” he acknowledges in fate. Thus he writes in “Praise and Eternity” of his love of fate as necessity:

My love is lit eternally

Only by the fire of necessity.

Shield of necessity!

Highest constellation of Being!

Not reachable by any desire,

Not sullied by any No,

Eternal Yes of Being,

Eternally I am your Yes:

For I love you, oh eternity! – – (9)

This interpretation of fate—which braces each with its opposite, rendering a “conception” that is “above,” inclusive of, paired normative conceptions in their definition by opposition, and which Nietzsche renders late in his philosophical career—has been implicit in all of his thought, in various guises. It is present in his view of the world as not being determined by the “outside” of some final cause or meaning that serves as its goal, that is not judged as “guilty” by the “No” of the fixity of transcendental Being for being “playful” in its ceaseless, goalless Becoming. In other words, fate, as Nietzsche interprets it, is the emblem of his insight that there is nothing—nihil—outside the transitoriness of the world of eternal Becoming. Fate, then, is the name for a totally immanent, perpetually transitory world that is not subject to the finality of a goal outside of it, the achievement of which would redeem the “guiltiness” of Becoming. Amor fati is the embrace of the world that is as it is—eternally Becoming—not as it “should” be, for there is no “should,” no imperative that it be, or be transformed into, something other than it is. Put differently, Amor fati is the embrace of a world that is an implicate order of freedom and necessity: of freedom in that it is free from any “should” that would judge it to be deficient, and from any goal that “should” be attained, and of necessity because the lack of a goal to be achieved allows the world its “must,” its having to be what it is, not what it is made by an authority beyond the perimeters of the world.

In particular, it can be said that Nietzsche’s appeal to love of fate is the consequence of his thesis of the “death of God,” love of a supreme center of the value of Being that guaranteed meaning to a meaningless world of Becoming—the authority beyond the limits of the world. The fate of Amor fati “frees” us, then, to a world of radical immanence, a world beyond the dualism of immanence and transcendence. Nietzsche characterizes this world as whole in the sense of an interconnectedness or web-like structure Nietzsche describes as Verhängnis (literally a “hanging together”), a word that also means “fate.” Given that the world of interconnectedness (Verhängnis) is its own fate (Verhängnis), it is beyond any outside determinism because there is no outside to the whole. Given a radically holistic world, there is no outside to its Verhängnis, and thus we must be what we are: Verhängnis. As Nietzsche puts it succinctly: “One is necessary, one is a piece of fatefulness [Verhängnis], one belongs to the whole, one is the whole.” (10)

It is clear that the freedom of Amor fati, of Nietzsche’s fate, of Nietzsche’s universe, is a “freedom from”: a freedom from a fate imposed upon the world from “outside” the world, the freedom from ultimate, absolute authority. The recipient of freedom in the interpenetration of necessity and freedom is the world, and thus is Becoming. With his appeal to Amor fati, Nietzsche affirms the lack of a center of Being, and thus recognizes a world without the horizon that Being would set to its Becoming. The world has been set free in this thought, and is free to become whatever it will. It is not “guilty” for departing from what it is or only approaching, eternally approaching, what it “should” be. It is innocent in that it is free to become anything—nothing is disallowed, there is no outside authority to disallow.

The realization of Amor fati thus brings us a “new ‘infinite’.” “Rather has the world become ‘infinite’ for us all over again, inasmuch as we cannot reject the possibility that it may include infinite interpretations.”(11) A world open to potentially infinite interpretations is one without the institution of a given, unalterable meaning stemming from the metaphysical source of meaning. And with the death of God, with the realization that the necessity of the world is that it must be free from the imposition upon it of any determining authority, “At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again . . . the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an ‘open sea’.—” (12)

Thus, Nietzsche is giving us Amor fati as the emblem of a world that demands to be interpreted beyond the “corner” of metaphysics, that is, beyond the reign of a dualistic perspective that insists on one interpretation of the world: the interpretation, the ultimate truth, of the supremacy of Being and its variants functioning as perfection, goal, meaning, and judge over the world of Becoming, the world that is, apart from its interdiction, eternally in process. The world is free in that no such interdiction is possible.

And the awareness of this freedom of the world, the freedom from a truth about which it, and we, would have no choice, is for Nietzsche a “new knowledge” and “the sun of a new gospel”—the gospel of necessity that sets us free and returns us to an innocence in place of the guilt that is inherent in being subject to an ultimate authority, an authority that sets a truth one can never become and a responsibility one can never meet, caught in a state of mutability, in a process of incessant change.

The sun of a new gospel is casting its first beam on the topmost summits in the soul of every individual: there the mists are gathering more thickly then ever, and the brightest glimmer and the gloomiest twilight lie side by side. Everything is necessity—thus says the new knowledge; and this knowledge itself is necessity. Everything is innocence: and knowledge is the path to insight into this innocence. (13)

The necessity is the necessity of play, play that is aesthetic, as the world has been for Nietzsche from the start, from the assertion in The Birth of Tragedy, “existence and the world seem justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon.” (14) That play, that integration of integral opposites, qualifies even the aspect of existence, subtending beneath it both existence and non-existence. The affirmation of life, the affirmation of fate that is life as necessity, as play, is, as Derrida put it in his reading of Nietzsche, an affirmation that determines the absence of a center of Being (“presence”) “otherwise than as loss of the center.” This interpretation is one in which “play must be conceived before the alternative of presence and absence,” that is, the alternative of Being and Becoming. It is an interpretation that is not “negative, nostalgic” about the lost center of Being but “the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming,” an affirmation that “tries to pass beyond man and humanism . . .” (15)

The sense of the affirmation of life, of fate, as a thought that moves “beyond man and humanism,” of a qualification of existence that intertwines it with nonexistence as a condition of its existence, points to the reason that underlies Nietzsche’s rhetorical strategies and that renders the terminology he employs impertinent to the truth he wishes to reveal—for there is a truth to “things.” Meaning is infinitely interpretable, but there is a reality to which we are subject, of which we are—the reality whose meaning is infinitely interpretable. There is a reason that fate for Nietzsche is authentically fatalistic and which compels all the standard terminology established for contending with questions of meaning and existence capable of nothing better than interpenetration and unending play.

The events of the world are not fatalistic in the sense that there is an ultimate eventuality, an outcome, and thus a meaning to which they always are trending and which puts an end to the process of eventuality. The process is unending, and it is for us fatalistic in that it is beyond our capability to influence. The freedom in necessity is for the world, but it is not for us. We cannot direct or curtail the course of events because we are not present within the course of events. We are, as is all else, merely momentary presences, our lives a sequence of disconnected, flashing events that demonstrate a sequence only for our perceptions. In themselves, they are as glimmering lights on an ocean of glimmering lights, in incessant motion but flowing nowhere. “Here I sat waiting . . . all time without aim”(16)—all time without goal, without finality.

We are without integrity, neither self-sustaining objects nor subjects in the world, for nothing is a self-sustaining object. There is freedom only for the world as there is necessity only for the world, for there is only the world. The rejection of individual integrity, of individual existence, can be found at the start of Nietzsche’s thought, as one can find the philosophical foundation of the aesthetic nature of existence and the world. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche dismisses the reality of the principium individuationis, (17)the principle of individuality, of the integrity of the object and its individual presence. There are, for Nietzsche, no “things,” no existences that stand apart in any way from all of existence. All exist only in the web-like structure of Verhängnis and exist in no other sense. Our conception of individual existences is a function of our error regarding the sense of unity. “We need ‘unities’ in order to be able to reckon: that does not mean we must suppose that such unities exist. We have borrowed the concept of unity from our ‘ego’ concept—our oldest article of faith. If we did not hold ourselves to be unities, we would never have formed the concept ‘thing.’ ” (18)

There is thus no free will, not for individual beings, “we realize the impossibility of any liberum arbitrium, or ‘intelligible freedom.’ ” (19) The Will to Power is the motivating impulse to apparent eventuality—more, it is the “substance” of constant eventuality rather than the power “behind” it—but the Will to Power is not ours. Our personal impulses to action are not freely chosen, we do what we do just as objects subject to interaction, subject to laws of physics, subject to the slip of gravity, do what they do—without motive, without intention. Our motivating impulses function something more like instincts than intentions. They function in a law-like fashion.

Weakness of the will: that is a metaphor that can prove misleading. For there is no will, and consequently neither a strong nor a weak will. The multitude and disgregation of impulses and the lack of any systematic order among them result in a “weak will”; their coordination under a single predominant impulse results in a “strong will”: in the first case it is the oscillation and the lack of gravity; in the latter, the precision and clarity of the direction. (20)

Comparable to gravity. Law-like, but our impulses are as if controlled by natural law within a universe free of outside imposition, free of imposed requirement. We follow what the universe does—we are of it, and are nothing else.

And it is the nature of Nietzsche’s universe that necessitates the absence of integral, individual existences—specifically, the nature of his temporality. In Nietzsche’s ontology, there is no time line, no movement from the past to the present and into the future, not as a continuous flow upon which all events and existences are buoyed, like leaves meandering down a stream. Time has no currents. There is no continuance. There are but isolated moments in time, points of time—“It is possible to speak only of points of time, no longer of time” (21)—and nothing endures, thus there is nothing to endure, for there is no time for anything to continue to exist.

The moment is an expansive idea, increasingly expansive over the course of his career to the point at which it becomes the central image of his ontological vision, comparable to, and explicative of, the Will to Power. It becomes the setting for the realization of the truth of the world. “On this perfect day [. . .] a glance of the sun fell upon my life: I looked backward, I looked outward, I never saw so much and so many good things at the same time. [. . .] How could I not be thankful to the whole of my life?” (22) It is important to realize that the perfection Nietzsche refers to here is not the perfection of Being beyond the world of Becoming but the contemplative experience of a moment, of a wink of an eye—Augenblick—during which time is a Becoming without the striving for a goal, and thus is not deficient, that it is “perfect,” complete unto itself, in the world of Becoming. The gratitude Nietzsche expresses for the time of his whole life, out of the experience of the perfection of the moment, is an affirmation of fate as the irreducible interplay of time and eternity, for the moment and eternity as an immeasurable moment become interlaced. “Can we remove the idea of a goal from the process and then affirm the process in spite of this?—This would be the case if something were attained at every moment within this process—and always the same.” (23) The moment is ever the moment, what is “attained” is “always the same,” but it is always something “attained,” always something newly achieved. The moment of attainment never departs, and Being and Becoming are inextricably intertwined under the aegis of the moment, of the point of time, as under the aegis of the Will to Power.

Yet, normally, we do not experience the moments, the time points, as always the same attainment—we experience them as constantly shifting, constantly transforming into something different and following each other in a sequence. The time points are isolated in the sense that each is a span of duration limited by its nature as a dynamic “atom” of time, but they are not isolated from each other in terms of influence—they are not walled off from each other. “The point of time affects another point of time, thus dynamic properties are to be presupposed.” (24) Thus, a world can exist—it does not flash into and out of existence, all time points compounded in some sense upon each other, with no time line along which to distribute them. And thus we are capable of interpreting—misinterpreting—a personal history, a continuing appearance of self, a memory. The appearance of distinct, individual, continuing identity becomes what was analyzed in The Birth of Tragedy as the Apollinian “beautiful illusion” (25) that obscures the Dionysian vision of continuous flux, the flux of incessant moments of time that somehow are always new and yet always the same—the “article of faith” of the idea of unity, which permits us to “reckon”: the reduction of the flux down to the appearance of a coherence of existence.

Thus there can be the appearance of personal outcome, of an inexorability to personally significant events, of eventuality on an individual level—of personal fate—but the viewpoint of integrity is our own Apollinian construction. It is error, but it is not our error, and it is not our Apollinian construction in the sense of personal commission. The construction is made, the error of interpretation committed, but they are not made and committed by us, for that could be so only if we created ourselves. Only then would we be present to construct the illusion of our own existence. We would then be causa sui, self-generating, and in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche committed himself to the unacceptability of causa sui, (26) to the absurdity of the claim of self-creation, on the basis of logical flaw.

Which is to say that, in Nietzsche’s universe, we can exercise no influence over events because we do not exist. We are mere appearance, delusions suffering the delusion of ourselves, apparent presences by our natures strangely capable of being aware of ourselves as appearances and incapable of seeing past the deceptive appearance of our natures. “ ‘Mankind’ does not advance, it does not even exist.” (27) We are not the source of events, and thus not in a position to be the source of any influence over events—we are events, comparable to all other events, appearances thrown up by the dynamism of the Will to Power, the active and sole reality of the world. In more technical language, we are epiphenomenal—moved as are all apparent “things” and incapable of moving them, patterns among the patterns woven and rewoven into the tapestry, and thus the center of a philosophy that “tries to pass beyond man and humanism . . .”

“World wheel . . . blends us in too,” (28) which is to say that Nietzsche’s is a nihilistic vision, a vision in which all that we know and all that we are is rendered void of reality: we are “something” done by “something” else. “It is only late that one musters the courage for what one really knows. That I have hitherto been a thorough-going nihilist, I have admitted to myself only recently.” (29) But for Nietzsche, Nihilism is a complex matter: “Nihilism. It is ambiguous: A. Nihilism as a sign of increased power of the spirit: as active nihilism. B. Nihilism as decline and recession of power of the spirit: as passive nihilism.”(30)

Passive nihilism, also “Nihilism as a psychological state,” (31) is a widespread and historically significant condition of despair, following upon the collapse of values that have been revealed to be untenable, that can no longer be believed. This is the psychological repercussion of the death of God, the loss of the sense of an outside authority to constrain the Becoming of the world and give it a fixed meaning, an ultimate and final goal. For Nietzsche, after 2,000 years of Christianity and its moral interpretation of the world, its belief that the world is organized by principles of good and evil, that principles of good and evil are true—a self-aggrandizing faith that envisions the world on the model of ourselves, that sees the world as centered on us and our fate, “the hyperbolic naiveté of man: positing himself as the meaning and the measure of the value of all things” (32)—the forced loss of faith in these values, the recognition of their arbitrariness, their lack of truth, brings about the “decline and recession of power of the spirit”—a general dispiritedness. Under the principle that attitudes give way to their opposites—“Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones but by extreme positions of the opposite kind” (33)—the loss of faith results in a yearning for nothingness. “At bottom, man has lost his faith in his own value when no infinitely valuable whole works through him; i.e., he conceived such a whole in order to be able to believe in his own value.” (34) Once we realize “the world does not have the value we thought it had,” (35) we become as nothing to ourselves, and the world loses all worth.

But there is also the form of active Nihilism, which in individuals of strength—the virtue that Nietzsche admires most, “I teach the Yes to all that strengthens, that stores up strength, that justifies the feeling of strength,” (36) a quality one may think of as fortitude—can realize the “new knowledge,” “the sun of the new gospel,” can observe the freedom of the world that is absent the imposition of a fate imposed from without. In the same conditions that bring about the despair that yearns for nothingness, in the collapse of all old values, “we find the pathos that impels us to seek new values. In sum: the world might be far more valuable than we used to believe; we must see through the naiveté of our ideals, and while we thought we accorded it the highest interpretation, we may not even have given our human existence a moderately fair value. What has become deified? The value instincts in the community (that which made possible its continued existence.)” (37)

In this, we are given the indication of the new value, of the higher aspiration that is revealed when we are made aware of the freedom of the world from outside authority and forced meaning, when the scales fall from the eyes of those who formerly believed in the values that imposed our image on our vision of the universe. The new value is that of the “community,” as conceived in the opening of The Gay Science, the species, that to which we are sacrificed: the existence that continues as we, as individuals, do not, but that depends on our fortitude to preserve it. (Indicating what Nietzsche makes clear in numerous passages: that which breaks the credibility of the values that held sway over us for 2,000 years is evolution, the realization that we do not come from a source outside the earth, that we are born of this world.) And, as the title of the book conveys, the tragic philosophy has been re-envisioned as something joyous.

Whether I contemplate men with benevolence or with an evil eye, I always find them concerned with a single task, all of them and every one of them in particular: to do what is good for the preservation of the human race. Not from any feeling of love for the race, but merely because nothing in them is older, stronger, more inexorable and unconquerable than this instinct—because this instinct constitutes the essence of our species, our herd. . . . 

Pursue your best or your worst desires, and above all perish!— In both cases you are probably still in some way a promoter and benefactor of humanity and therefore entitled to your eulogists—but also to your detractors! . . . I mean, when the proposition “the species is everything, one is always none” has become part of humanity, and this ultimate liberation and irresponsibility has become accessible to all at all times. Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom, perhaps only “gay science” will then be left. (38)

As with Goethe, “all is redeemed and affirmed in the whole.” Here is the affirmation of life, the essence ofAmor fati: we must learn the joy of perishing for the life of the species, of being sacrificed, as we have no choice but to be, for the continuance of life that both is ours and is not ours: not our individual lives but the life of the whole of which we are a part. We must learn to face with joy, with the Yes of affirmation, our part in a world that “lives on itself: its excrements are its food,” (39) and we are among what is consumed. For that is the continuing, unending eventuality of the Will to Power, and it is the counsel offered, the recommendation made, that there is joy in realizing “This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!” (40)

But there is an anomaly in this affirmation; there is a logical absurdity in the counsel offered. There is a flaw in this Yes to life that recommends itself to its readership. There is a ghostly presence haunting every proposition that Nietzsche propounds, brooding and questioning the very core of the philosopher’s reasoning. If there is no free will, then to what purpose the recommendation of a posture toward existence, an acceptance of fate—what point to Amor fati? To what purpose advising an attitude toward existence to those who do not exist, who “are also this will to power—and nothing besides”? What is the point of a new gospel? How can it be possible to choose to formulate new values in reaction to a recognition of necessity? How can one be exhorted to affirm necessity? If we should acknowledge fate, if we can, then isn’t it all something other than fated? If fate is something to which we owe “absolute allegiance” and from which devolves upon us “absolute responsibility,” if that allegiance is ours to give or not, if the matter even arises, then where is the fate? And if there is no mankind, if it “does not even exist,” then to whom is Nietzsche writing, and who is speaking? Where is the sense in all this?

The questions are right, for there is nothing in Nietzsche to indicate that fate is merely a quality of large-scale patterns of events whereas the petty events of an individual life occur freely, as if too unimportant to be noticed—the standard bail-out position for those reading denunciations of free will, as if Cassandra-like, we act and speak by our own discretion within an unalterable flow of history. And it is right to say that non-existence is a chiasmic unity of existence and non-existence and is not a pure quality different from its opposite, to say that freedom and necessity are two sides of the same infinitely self-differentiating and ontologically variegated coin. It would even be necessary to say it, but it would not be sufficient.

For just to say precisely what Nietzsche has told us is merely to say precisely what Nietzsche has told us. That is mere reiteration, a parroting of endowed phrasings, a demonstration of memorization, of received input, as if we were without the freedom to consider, to understand. We have yet to digest what we have been told. We have yet to see what sense it makes. We have yet to sift it for its intrinsic clarity. We have yet to make something of it.

In the end, there is only one answer, if one is to take Nietzsche seriously and not qualify what he has said without qualification, not partialize him where he has been impartial, so as to leave room in what he says for his act of saying it. Nietzsche is playing the game he must play, the game all philosophers must play, in order to write at all, in order to think at all. The necessity, the Nihilism of non-existence, of being an appearance generated by something he is not, applies to him as much as to everyone, but he writes as if he is exempt from his own conditions, from his own mental scenario, from the truth he is telling—as if he stood “outside” and commented on what lay under the gaze of his mind. To write at all, to think at all, is of necessity to do so—one cannot stand at both ends of the microscope at the same time. To announce the non-existence of free will, and of us, is significant only if the announcement is freely made. If one could not have done other than say it, then there is no significance in its being said, no more significance than there is in an earthquake, or a tidal wave, or any natural event—no more significance than in the falling of a leaf. When something is said, there must be a reason, and if the reason is that it had to have been said, that it could have not been other than said, that it was compelled, mindlessly, there thinking is at an end.

Here, Nietzsche has no choice but to place himself in the position of the Cretan Liar—if he chooses to speak the absence of free will, then he gives evidence of free will; if he says nothing to deny free will, then it is possible at least that there is no free will. If he denies existence, then he cannot not exist; if he does not arrive to deny it, then it might be there is no individual existence. But then, this is what it is to philosophize. All philosophers place themselves under the rubric of the Cretan Liar. All make themselves, as they have no choice but to do as they theorize conditions, exemptions from the conditions they theorize. To philosophize is that as much as it is anything more: to make oneself, for the moment, apparently, an exemption—an eye gazing in from somewhere else, from outside the philosophical vision.

However, there is a moral imperative here—for Nietzsche, for any thinker of integrity who confronts the image of deception entailed by the very attempt to state the truth. Given that the acts of thinking and speaking necessarily falsify themselves and imply the denial of what is being thought about and spoken of, and given that one has no choice but to think and speak—for to refuse to think about the absence of free will because there is no free will is as willful an act as deliberately to proclaim the absence of free will because there is no free will—it is an obligation, an imposition not out of authority but out of a sense of honesty, a sense against the odds, to speak so as to correct the inherent error in speech, to militate against the implication that speech is free and there is someone speaking, to speak what one seems to deny by speaking.

In the end, there is no guarantee, because there is no discretion—we cannot choose to be able to choose, that too would be causa sui: freedom creating itself. There is no set of appearances that could demonstrate that the appearance of freedom is freedom, even when the freedom appears through the act of deliberately denying freedom. It could well be that Nietzsche writes what he writes because he must, because he is the creature he is, and that there is no choice in his assertion of necessity or in his suggestion by demonstration that there is freedom in the saying. So too, we could be reading Nietzsche because we are fated to and thinking what we think of him because it is determined that we will. And it could be we are certain that the constraint of thought is palpably absurd—because we have no choice but to so think. “Everything is necessity—thus says the new knowledge; and this knowledge itself is necessity.” (41)

But to philosophize at all, one must embrace the contradiction and remain content that one will, of necessity, undermine the credibility of anything one can say by the act of saying it—one must affirm that contradiction. This would make philosophy itself the very image of life, and of the affirmation of life, and of Amor fati: the enthusiastic embrace of necessity, which is itself, in its simplest sense, an utter contradiction, a nonsensical counsel, as if necessity could care whether we embraced it. Thereby, freedom and necessity become a contradiction that does not entail a violation of binary logic but rather an intricate relation that simultaneously unites them and holds them apart. Thereby, we become what we already are.(42) And thereby, Nietzsche can be said to have affirmed life not so well by what he said as simply by his saying.

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FOOTNOTES

(1) Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), § 276, p. 223.

(2) Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), § 12, p. 12.

(3) Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man,” in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), § 49, p. 554.

(4) Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 165.

(5) Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), § 4, p. 46. “Excess revealed itself as truth.”

(6) Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, § 4, p. 46.

(7) Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, § 21, p. 130.

(8) Nietzsche, KSA 6.377. “Der Wahrheit Freier — du? [. . .] / Nein! nur ein Dichter!” “[. . .] dass ich verbannt sei / von aller Wahrheit, / Nur Narr! Nur Dichter!” Translation by the authors.

(9) Nietzsche, KSA 6.402. “Meine Liebe entzündet / sich ewig nur an der Nothwendigkeit. / Schild der Nothwendigkeit! / Höchstes Gestirn des Seins! / – das kein Wunsch erreicht / das kein Nein befleckt, / ewiges Ja des Sein’s, / ewig bin ich dein Ja: / denn ich liebe dich, oh Ewigkeit! – -” Translation by the authors.

(10) Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, “The Four Great Errors,” § 8, p. 500.

(11) Nietzsche, The Gay Science, § 374, p. 336.

(12) Nietzsche, The Gay Science, § 343, p. 280.

(13) Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, vol. 1, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), § 107, p. 58.

(14) Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, § 24, p. 141.

(15) Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 292.

(16) Nietzsche, The Gay Science, “Sils Maria,” p. 371.

(17) Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, § 1, p. 36.

(18) Nietzsche, The Will to Power, § 635, p. 338.

(19) Nietzsche, The Will to Power, § 8, p. 11.

(20) Nietzsche, The Will to Power, § 46, pp. 28-29.

(21) Nietzsche, KSA 7.575. “Es ist nur von Zeitpunken zu reden, nicht mehr von Zeit.” Translation by the authors.

(22) Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Vorwort, KSA 6.263. “An diesem vollkommenen Tage [. . .] fiel mir eben ein Sonnenblick auf mein Leben: ich sah rückwärts, ich sah hinaus, ich sah nie so viel und so gute Dinge auf einmal. [. . .] Wie sollte ich nicht meinem ganzen Leben dankbar sein?” Translation by the authors. See also Ecce Homo, “Preface,” in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p. 677.

(23) Nietzsche, The Will to Power, § 55, p. 36.

(24) Nietzsche, KSA 7.575. “Der Zeitpunkt wirkt auf einen anderen Zeitpunkt, also dynamische Eigenschaften vorauszusetzen.” Translation by the authors.

(25) Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, § 1, p. 35.

(26) Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, “On the Prejudices of Philosophers,” in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, § 15, pp. 212-213.

(27) Nietzsche, The Will to Power, § 90, pp. 55.

(28) Nietzsche, The Gay Science, “To Goethe,” p. 351.

(29) Nietzsche, The Will to Power, § 25, pp. 18.

(30) Nietzsche, The Will to Power, § 22, pp. 17.

(31) Nietzsche, The Will to Power, § 12, pp. 12.

(32) Nietzsche, The Will to Power, § 12, pp. 14.

(33) Nietzsche, The Will to Power, § 55, pp. 35.

(34) Nietzsche, The Will to Power, § 12, pp. 12.

(35) Nietzsche, The Will to Power, § 32, pp. 22.

(36) Nietzsche, The Will to Power, § 54, pp. 33.

(37) Nietzsche, The Will to Power, § 32, pp. 22.

(38) Nietzsche, The Gay Science, § 1, pp. 73-74.

(39) Nietzsche, The Will to Power, § 1066, pp. 548.

(40) Nietzsche, The Will to Power, § 1067, pp. 550.

(41) Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, vol. 1, § 107, p. 58.

(42) See Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra: Fourth and Last Part, “The Honey Sacrifice,” in The Portable Nietzsche, p. 351. “Become who you are!” — “Werde, der du bist!”

Friedrich Ulfers and Mark Daniel Cohen, 2007