Nietzsches Choice of Style
There are passages in Nietzsche's mature works that are sometimes decried (more often ignored) as unnecessary rhetorical excesses. A prominent instance is this from the Genealogy's First Treatise:
[the noble, the powerful] are not much better than uncaged beasts of prey toward the outside world [...] There they enjoy freedom from all social constraint [...] they step back into the innocence of the beast-of-prey conscience, as jubilant monsters, who perhaps walk away from a hideous succession of murder, arson, rape, torture with such high spirits and equanimity that it seems as ifthey have only played a student prank, convinced that for years to come the poets will again have something to sing and to praise. At the base of all these noble races one cannot fail to recognize the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast who roams about lusting after booty and victory; from time to time this hidden base needs to discharge itself, the animal must get out, must go back into the wilderness: Roman, Arab, Germanic, Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, Scandinavian Vikings—in this need they are all alike.3
Thomas Mann found in this passage among others a 'clinical picture of infantile sadism' before which 'our souls writhe in embarrassment'.4 Mann is too subtle a reader of Nietzsche to let it rest there: he later asserts that anyone who reads Nietzsche 'as he is' is lost, and that, in the light of Nietzsche's deeper concerns, 'the whole aesthetic phantasm of slavery, war, violence, glorious brutality whisks itself off to a realm of irresponsible play and scintillating irony'.5 But still for Mann the violence in these texts
3 GM I. 11. I shall not rehearse any of the debate about the infamous 'blond beast'. There is a firm consensus among recent commentators that Nietzsche despised both German nationalism and anti-Semitism (see Yovel 1994; Santaniello 1997: 23). GM III. 26 shows Nietzsche's contempt for the anti-Semites of his day. The extent to which Nietzsche's rhetoric itself is complicit in the development of National Socialism is another issue; Ken Gemes, for example, suggests, 'the real question of Nietzsche's culpability is best addressed in terms of his responsibility for fostering a set of metaphors, in particular, and most dangerously, the metaphor of degeneration' (Gemes 2001: 55 n. 14).
4 Mann (1959: 165). GM II. 6—7 with its theme of'without cruelty, no festival' provides a further example for Mann. 5 Mann (1959: 174).
is something irresponsible and inessential, a superficial feature that a less enthusiastic genius might have curbed.
I have suggested a different approach. At least some of these uncomfortable passages are uncomfortable because the writing is openly concerned with probing the affects of the reader. To this end the literary violence is an effective means. Nietzsche's project of revaluing moral values contains as an essential part the uncovering of a multifarious affective life beneath our moral judgements. By provoking a range of affects in the reader, Nietzsche enables the reader to locate the target for revaluation, the 'morality' which comprises a complex of attitudes of his or her own, central to which are affective inclinations and aversions. If, as Nietzsche alleges, the prime material we have to work with in revaluing our moral evaluations is a wide range of affective attitudes whose existence in ourselves may be in some degree masked by the accretions of rationalizing interpretation, then discovering even what our morality is may have as a necessary condition our being prompted into a reflection upon the many and various affective attitudes in question. If we were to find that the only way to reflect on the relevant affects was by first feeling them, then Nietzsche's provocative rhetorical method could be seen not only as effective, but as essential to his task.
With some oversimplification, one might point to two basic versions of Nietzsche that have been on offer in recent commentaries. There has been the 'literary' or perhaps 'postmodern' Nietzsche whose prime concern is with style and rhetoric and with undermining the possibility of attaining truth or stable meaning. And there is the Nietzsche more congenial to analytical philosophers, who opposes transcendent metaphysics in a more or less neo-Kantian spirit, but is committed to there being empirical truths in the realms of the historical, cultural, and psychological, and who takes up coherent philosophical positions for which there are arguments (even if he does not always present them plainly as such). A problem confronting common 'postmodern' readings of Nietzsche is that they implicitly undermine his claimed 'revaluation of values'. This exercise has a diagnostic component, which consists in a description of the conscious and unconscious processes involved in the formation of those beliefs, desires, and other attitudes that combine to constitute moral evaluations. I argue that Nietzsche puts forward these descriptions as candidates for truth about the way human minds work. For, as he says quite bluntly,
'there are [...] truths' that are 'plain, harsh, ugly, unpleasant, unchristian, immoral' (GM I. i). And indeed, unless Nietzsche can conceive of himself as uncovering truths, he cannot revalue the values of morality. If he is to carry out his diagnostic descriptions, then he must be 'allowed' to advance some truths (or hypotheses—a word he likes—i.e. candidates for truth). The 'postmodern' type of reading in which Nietzsche discards truth altogether will not allow us to make sense of his central project. On the other hand, a failing of those who allow truths to Nietzsche and concentrate on elucidating and finding arguments for his philosophical positions has tended to be their relative silence on questions concerning his literary methods. But it is essential to ask: Why does Nietzsche elect to write not in the form of philosophical or scholarly argumentation, but in his subtle, provocative, emotive manner? It would be an absurd mistake to think that Nietzsche was unable to write in the conventional form of connected arguments running from premiss to conclusion. It would be like treating Arnold Schoenberg as someone who never quite mastered major and minor scales, or de Chirico as someone who could not get the hang of conventional perspective drawing. (It would, in other words, be a kind of philistinism.)
In the firmament of the German academic world the young Nietzsche had been a star. He was a philologist who investigated the language, literature, and culture of the ancient world, studied with the strict systematician Ritschl/ and became a scholar so gifted that at the age of only 24 the academic establishment honoured him with a Chair at Basel. Nietzsche was an accomplished exponent of a Wissenschaft, a 'science' in a broad sense, or at any rate a discipline: a rigorous enterprise in which a body of knowledge was built up by argument from carefully sifted evidence, and findings presented for collective scrutiny. This philological discipline of nineteenth-century German academia became the foundation for much subsequent classical scholarship, including the study of the ancient philosophers. Perhaps it tends to be forgotten that for much of the twentieth century an education as a philosopher in the English-speaking world was likely also to be an education as a classicist. To that extent today's analytical philosophy owes some of its ingrained habits and assumptions to the very academic tradition in which Nietzsche was a prodigy—until he struck out in a new direction.
6 'Strict systematician' is the phrase used by Mann (1959: 143).
A new direction was evident in Nietzsche's first book, The Birth of Tragedy, which is arguably intended to be somewhat artistic in style and is preoccupied with art ancient and modern (and which was accordingly vilified by the academic establishment7). But it was through the sequence of works Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, and The Gay Science that Nietzsche developed his mature style. That he gave one of his works the title Die frohliche Wissenschaft—the gay or joyful Wissenschaft—may be taken as emblematic of the new course Nietzsche hoped to follow.8 We might also recall that in the middle of writing The Gay Science Nietzsche composed Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a book with evident artistic pretensions (even if many nowadays would place the emphasis on the second of these words9), and that The Gay Science itself begins and ends with poems, in the very last of which Nietzsche reflects on his methods thus:
Let us dance in every manner, free—so shall be our art's banner, and our science—shall be gay! (GS, 'To the Mistral. A Dance Song')
A presupposition, then, for reading the mature Nietzsche of the 1880s is to recognize his shift in method away from analytical argument as a deliberate choice of style. But why, with what aims, did Nietzsche make this move? I believe that the appropriateness of Nietzsche's later style is more than just a matter of philosophizing in a new mood or 'conveying a certain spirit'.1° Nietzsche moved deliberately towards a rhetoric of imaginative provocation of the affects, and certain aspects of this mode of writing flow naturally from his descriptive moral psychology.
7 For a thorough discussion of this controversy, see Silk and Stern (1981: 90—131).
8 Bernard Williams's elucidation of the title is helpful: 'It translates a phrase, ''gai saber'', or, as Nietzsche writes on his title page, ''gaya scienza'', which referred to the art of song cultivated by the medieval troubadours of Provence [... ] just as the troubadours possessed not so much a body of information as an art, so Nietzsche's ''gay science'' does not in the first place consist of a doctrine, a theory or body of knowledge. While it involves and encourages hard and rigorous thought, and to this extent the standard implications of ''Wissenschaft'' are in place, it is meant to convey a certain spirit, one that in relation to understanding and criticism could defy the ''spirit of gravity'' as lightly as the troubadours, supposedly, celebrated their loves' (Williams 2001, pp. x—xi).
9 See Tanner's assessment (1994: 46). 1° Williams (2001, p. xi; quoted in n. 8 above).
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