i Section i
The Preface to On the Genealogy of Morality opens with a beautiful and evocative piece of writing that may be read as a self-contained 'prose-poem', for want of a better word. Most immediately striking in this first section is the image of the bleary-eyed daydreamer whose whole life was a chiming of bells heard too dimly and too late to be counted correctly. Self-knowledge, we read, is something 'we knowers' never attain, and necessarily so: 'we remain of necessity strangers to ourselves, we do not understand ourselves, we must mistake ourselves'. Why must we? We are simply left to speculate, clueless as yet at the very start of the book. This opening throws the reader off balance: we might be tempted to pass over it, seeking stability in what follows, a policy encouraged by Nietzsche's construction. For a glance ahead discloses section 2 as a more conventional beginning, where the author tells us what the book will be about—the origin of our moral prejudices—and divulges something of the route by which he reached his ideas. So section i, with its whimsical-melancholy picture of self-elusiveness, remains detached and disconcerting.
Who are 'we' in this passage, 'we knowers' (wir Erkennenden)? One might understand this as 'we humans' or 'we subjects of knowledge'—perhaps then a Kantian 'we', perhaps a Schopenhauerian one. In early years Nietzsche was enthusiastic about Schopenhauer's thought and continued an intense debate with it, a fact soon to be acknowledged in section 5 of the Preface. Schopenhauer held that the epistemological subject, the subject of knowledge, was 'the knower never the known' (das Erkennende, nie Erkannte). According to Schopenhauer, 'everyone finds himself as this subject, yet only in so far as he knows, not in so far as he is object of knowledge... We never know it, but it is precisely that which knows wherever there is knowledge.'! Each conscious being is this subject of knowledge, but what this subject is is perpetually, necessarily, elusive to the one who 'finds himself' as it: an eye that cannot see itself.2 Can the reader of Schopenhauer fail to hear an echo of this in Nietzsche's opening words?
However, Kaufmann and Hollingdale translate Nietzsche's wir Erkennenden here as 'we men of knowledge', suggesting a restricted group of researchers, scholars, thinkers, or philosophers. Nietzsche can then be felt to draw the reader into a kind of complicity: 'People like you and me, engaged as we are in intellectual enquiry, in the pursuit of knowledge...'. In this light we may see more vividly Nietzsche's contrast between the life of'knowledge' and 'the rest of life' or 'so-called ''experiences'''. The image of the daydreamer and the bell, though still poignant, becomes a variant of the age-old caricature of the out-of-touch, unworldly thinker (which dates back at least to the stargazing Thales falling into a ditch3). We cannot know ourselves, because, as Nietzsche says, we have never gone in search of ourselves.4 Nietzsche appears to issue a warning to the kind of person who will read his book, and to include himself in its scope: the quest for knowledge demands a form of self-ignorance or self-neglect, necessitates our not understanding our own lives.5
On this reading the thought is not that self-knowledge is impossible as such, rather that a life of dedicated scholarship can be sustained only
1 Schopenhauer (1969: i. 5). 2 Schopenhauer (1974: ii. 46).
3 See Barnes (2001: 15). In this anecdote reported by Diogenes Laertius an old woman taunts the philosopher: 'Do you think, Thales, that you'll learn what's in the heavens when you can't see what's in front of your feet?'
4 In contrast with Nietzsche's beloved Heraclitus, whose fragment B101 is edizesanien emeouton—'I went in search of myself' (Kahn 1979: 116), or 'I enquired into myself' (Barnes 2001: 69).
5 Or is it a warning? Elsewhere we encounter Nietzsche's conviction that self-ignorance is a necessary condition of authentic creativity for artists and thinkers: 'To become what one is, one must not have the faintest notion what one is [...] nosce te ipsum [know yourself] would be the recipe for ruin [...] Meanwhile the organizing ''idea'' that is destined to rule keeps growing deep down—it begins to command' (EH, 'Why I Am So Clever', 9). In other words, the part of the self that will genuinely organize and shape one's work might have to remain free from tampering by conscious cognition in order to succeed. See also BGE 266; GS 335; and the discussions in May (1999, esp. 191 — 3) and Conway (2001: 121—2).
by leaving oneself unexamined. 6 This more focused reading gains support from the following part of section i:
It has rightly been said: 'where your treasure is, there will your heart be also'; our treasure is where the beehives of our knowledge stand. We are forever underway toward them, as born winged animals and honey-gatherers of the spirit, concerned with all our heart about only one thing—'bringing home' something.
This reads best as a picture of dedicated enquirers flying out to seek knowledge for their 'home', a figurative place where precious knowledge accumulates. The preceding quotation is from the Christian Bible (Matt. 6: 19-21) where Christ in his sermon on the mount says: 'Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven... For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.' Nietzsche thus reinforces the idea that the life of knowledge is unworldly, even otherworldly. As the Christian's heart is in heaven, the truth-seeker's is in the sweet, nourishing stock of knowledge to which he or she contributes.
Towards the end of the Genealogy—in what I shall claim is the culmination of the book's argument—Nietzsche thematizes the rigorous self-denying pursuit of truth in science and scholarship and renders it questionable under the notion of the 'ascetic ideal'. Nietzsche there refers again to 'we knowers today, we godless ones and anti-metaphysicians',7 and the sting in the tail ofhis book is that our modern, scientific, essentially atheistic conception of knowledge-seeking is akin to Christianity in that we remain wedded to an idealized vision in which the truth is a kind of holy grail, something of unquestionable unconditional worth to which our lives must be selflessly dedicated. 'We knowers today' are alienated from ourselves because we conceive ourselves as pure rational intellects in search of this precious truth, and have to suppress or deny the great bulk of the real self,
6 The interpretation of 'we are strangers to ourselves' given by Gemes (2006b) agrees with mine in taking the necessity of self-ignorance as what is needed by a specific type of person for its own preservation (and in taking Nietzsche's task as a progression towards some kind of restorative self-knowledge). However, the 'we' for Gemes is narrowed only to modern human beings in general. I would agree that contemporary scholars and philosophers exemplify characteristics that Nietzsche diagnoses in all moderns. However, Nietzsche's description of the obsessive search for knowledge in section 1 of the Preface hardly locates a feature of all modern beings, and seems much more pointedly aimed, in a similar way to the discussions of'we knowers today' in GM III. 24.
7 GM III. 24. Note also the reference to 'we ''knowers''' earlier in the same section.
which, for Nietzsche, is composed of many competing drives and feelings. The Genealogy diagnoses the origins of our attachment to selflessness and truthfulness and holds out some hope that we might understand and value ourselves in fuller and healthier ways that affirm and facilitate life. This provides an example of the many new resonances we may be able to catch on turning back to this first page—though nothing will fully dispel its air of enigma.
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