Nietzsche: Life as Literature Book

This has become one of the most respected and referenced interpretive works on Nietzsche and I can see why. It was first published in 1985, and Nehamas does a fine job of seeing past the competing extremes of Nietzsche interpretation to arrive at a mature, thoughtful portrayal that takes the best aspects from various modes of Nietzsche scholarship. Nehamas's Nietzsche is neither the "secular-humanist in disguise" that an existentialist like Walter Kaufman would present us with, nor is he the "executioner of the subject" that the post-structuralists claimed him to be. Rather, Nehamas argues, Nietzsche opened up the philosophical subject to relentless critique, but the role of the individual, evaluating consciousness is still paramount in his cosmos.

Nehamas locates the heart-beat of Nietzsche's thought in his perspectivism; the notion that interpretation could not be transcended. This, Nehamas acknowledges, begs the question of whether, for Nietzsche, there is anything to interpret, and therefor whether Nietzsche's thought constitutes a working philosophy at all. What is this world that we can only interpret, and does even asking that question mean that we are seeking to transcend interpretation?

According to Nehamas, the world is, for Nietzsche, the unmeasurable excess of all things acting upon all things. Every thing that happens to a person or thing shapes, absolutely and definitely, what that person or thing can become. This is not fatalistic determinism but its opposite. The subject is, after all, a thing in the world. The subject, therefore, acts upon the world and shapes it unalterably. The world is the invention of the self as much as the self in shaped by the world. But what is the self?

It, too, is the rationalized consumption of an excess. The body is the site of a violent ordering (acknowledgment and repression) of conflicting drives, simultaneous impulses, memories and hopes. The assertion of a self is the same as the assertion of any truth about any other object in the world. To say, "I am this way" is no more or less complex an operation of affirmation and negation as to say "that tree is this way" because someone looking at the same tree from a different perspective could see something very different in the tree. The assertion of Self X or Tree X are both wills to truth: the violent assertion (on ourselves) of one way of reading our countless drives and impressions. The will to truth (which is also the will to denial, to ignorance of the excluded) and the will to power are the same thing. The subject selects the impression and drive that is most beneficent for its particular mode of survival.

So how are we to answer, what is the thing that is interpreted? We can only answer by saying that it is the thing that is interpreted, and to give that answer any meaning we can only offer a history of the different ways it has been interpreted in different epochs. We can only offer a genealogy of how it came to be interpreted in the ways in which it is currently.

The mode of survival for the weak is, for Nietzsche, that of the herd. The herd interprets its fear of the world as a strength, and in a sense, it is a strength in so far as it is a mode of survival. For a unified horde of weaklings can gang up on and kill a mighty, solitary predator. But they must assure their absolute unity and crush not only specific dissent, but any instinct outside of that of the herd.

In one stage of history, what is good for the herd may, at a later stage, be bad for it. But as the herd can never allow for the possibility that anything could ever have been (or become) different than the way they say it is, they must offer a new interpretation, a new history, of how some things have "always been bad or always been good."

It would appear, then, that Nehamas views Nietzsche as a kind of godless Kant, asking of humanity no more from its thought than it must give to sustain itself. Indeed, this is what one of Nietzsche's most direct philosophical heirs, Michel Foucault, always imagined himself to be.

But it is also clear that Nietzsche has to be asking more than this from humanity, and Nehamas quickly acknowledges this. For not only is the role of subjective will, desire, and taste, which imply the possibility of dissenting from the herd, foundational for Nietzsche's thought, but Nietzsche also offers the concept of the Superman, that individual who not only makes others follow him, but who sees through the faulty concepts of good and evil while at the same time re-defining them for the herd; He who is both within and outside the historical moment. In other words, an authentic truth creator- He who has seen.... the Truth.

Nehamas thinks Nietzsche fulfills this role because through his writing he seduced a large segment of the world, the "philosophical public," into re-writing the history of morality.

I am not so sure. I see in Nietzsche a figure so ground-breaking that his work was, in the most ultimate sense, bound to failure. I mean failure, of course, in the most glorious sense. For Nietzsche foresaw the death of the subject, the fact that we cannot fully liberate ourselves from our cultural assumptions even when we come to realize the "mortality" of those assumptions, their fully provisional nature, but could not fully let go of the ghost of a "transcendental philosophical subject" that could see beyond its own limitations. That would take, perhaps, another couple generations. Perhaps, we have not gotten there yet, even in the realm of philosophy. And never, I think, will we get there in the realm of life. Sorry, Fred.