Value in Modernity The Philosophy of Existential Modernism in Nietzsche Scheler Sartre Musil Peter Poellner All Chapter

Value in Modernity: The Philosophy of
Existential Modernism in Nietzsche,

Scheler, Sartre, Musil Peter Poellner
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Value in Modernity
Value in Modernity
The Philosophy of Existential Modernism in
Nietzsche, Scheler, Sartre, Musil
PETER POELLNER
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Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
1. How to Redeem Nature: Early Nietzsche on Overcoming the
‘Tyranny of the Real’ 19
1.1 Nietzsche’s Early Works as Founding Texts of Existential
Modernism in Philosophy 19
1.2 Metaphysical Agnosticism: The Critique of Schopenhauer 23
1.3 Redeeming Nature Aesthetically: The Birth of Tragedy and
Myth-Making 24
1.4 Affectivity and the Ideal in Untimely Meditations 34
2. Later Nietzsche: Value, Affect, and Objectivity 46
2.1 Introduction 46
2.2 Values, Attitudes, Objectivity: Some Preliminaries 48
2.3 Emotions as Perceptions of Values 55
2.4 Affectivity as Constitutive of Value: Nietzsche’s Rejection
of Metaphysical Value-Objectivism 73
2.5 Value and Nietzsche’s Metaphysical Indifferentism 85
3. Nietzsche’s Evaluative Practice: Ethics and Aesthetics 97
3.1 The Heterogeneity of Nietzsche’s Thinking on Value 97
3.2 Nietzsche’s First-Order Valuations: Two Examples 102
3.3 Quasi-Aesthetic Grounds of Valuation 108
3.4 Phenomenally Intrinsic Value 114
3.5 Applying the Theory: The Value of Subjectivity 126
3.6 Higher Values and Conceptualization 130
4. The Scheler–Sartre View of Emotion and Value: Defending
Qualified Affective Perceptualism 136
4.1 A Qualified Perceptualist Model of Emotional Experience 136
4.2 Does the Qualified Perceptual Model Misdescribe Emotional
Experience? 144
4.3 Do Phenomenological Differences between Emotions and
Standard Perceptions Undermine the Scheler–Sartre View? 147
4.4 Different Rationalizing Properties? 152
4.5 Experiencing Values in Objects: The Very Idea 155
5. Indistinctness in Value Experience 161
5.1 The Problem 161
5.2 Non-Conceptual Contents of Perceptual Experience 167
viii Contents
5.3 An Analogy with Indistinct Affective-Evaluative Experiences? 174

5.4 Indistinctness in Anticipative Experiences of Futural Value 181
6. Distorted Value Experience and Intentional Self-Deception 191
6.1 The Example of Ressentiment 191
6.2 Ressentiment as an Intentional Project of Object-Mastery 197
6.3 Can One Intentionally Deceive Oneself? 204
6.4 Can Ressentiment ‘Create’ Values? 215
6.5 Conclusion: What Is Wrong with Ressentiment? 220
7. Freedom, Ethics, and Absolute Value: Early Sartre’s Two Philosophies 222
7.1 Intentional Consciousness 224
7.2 Freedom, Action, and Worldly Reasons 228
7.3 The Self-Determination of Consciousness 242
7.4 Ethics and Absolute Value 253
Appendix: Beyond Moral Principles 266
8. Modernity, Cultural Discontent, and the Experience of Wholeness:
Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities 269
8.1 What The Man without Qualities Is about: Musil’s Philosophical
Questions 269
8.2 Irony, Modernity, and the Ideal 274
8.3 Intentional Feeling, Value, and Concepts 282
8.4 The Reality of the Other Condition 295
8.5 Authentic Eros and the Reciprocity Thesis 302
8.6 The Outer Horizon of the Other Condition: Musil’s Holism 311
8.7 Action and the Other Condition 326
8.8 The Other Condition and Ethics 334
Conclusion 348
Bibliography 359
Index 369
Acknowledgements
Chapter 4 is a slightly modified version of a journal article published previously

as ‘Phenomenology and the Perceptual Model of Emotion’, Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society 116:3 (2016), pp. 261–88. I gratefully acknowledge permission
by the Aristotelian Society to use this material.
Introduction
This book has a twofold aim. First and foremost, it attempts to identify, and to
demonstrate the contemporary philosophical relevance of, a historical paradigm
or tradition in ethical and meta-ethical thought that has largely been neglected in
contemporary debates, although, I shall argue, it has much to contribute to them.
In particular, certain issues and theoretical options on the relation between values
and the affective domain—emotions and other ‘feelings’—that have become
prominent again in recent meta-ethical discussions were articulated in a sophisti-
cated way by the philosophers representing this paradigm. Since the latter has
hitherto not been recognized as such, it as yet lacks a name. I shall call it existen-
tial modernism. But this is little more than a convenient label, a replaceable short-
hand for a strand of practical philosophy characterized by a range of distinctive
methodological and substantive features, which I shall endeavour to isolate and
assess in this work.
The main exponents of this paradigm that I shall discuss are Friedrich
Nietzsche, Max Scheler, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Robert Musil, all of whom are
prominent, in some cases near-iconic, figures of the period of European cultural
history commonly referred to as modernism or high modernity, and usually
dated as extending roughly from the 1880s to the 1950s. This historical situated-
ness of the subjects of this study is one reason for the name I have chosen for the
philosophical approach they represent, but it is not its main rationale. Existential
modernism as I shall understand it is not confined to a particular period in philo-
sophical and broader cultural history, although it originated in that period and was
particularly influential in it, partly shaping and constituting it, while its wider cul-
tural influence receded subsequently.1 The primary reason for labelling this para-
digm ‘modernist’ is rather that it gives a specific inflection to intellectual concerns,
1 One of these figures, Robert Musil, is an exception, for he was largely neglected during and imme-
diately after his own lifetime (1880–1942) and the philosophical significance of his writings has only
begun to be appreciated somewhat more widely in the last two decades. But the reception of his
thought even now is fairly limited and cannot remotely compare to that of Nietzsche, Scheler, or Sartre
in their modernist heydays.
Nietzsche, of course, has never really ceased to be influential. But due to the multifaceted nature of
his thought, different generations of readers tend to find and appreciate a different Nietzsche. The
strands of thought in his work that will be highlighted in this study have rarely been placed centre
stage by readers after modernism, although it is precisely these strands that were taken up by later
existential modernists like Scheler and Musil, as well as (indirectly via Scheler) by Sartre, thus war-
ranting the talk of a common paradigm.
Value in Modernity: The Philosophy of Existential Modernism in Nietzsche, Scheler, Sartre, Musil. Peter Poellner,
Oxford University Press. © Peter Poellner 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192849731.003.0001
2 Introduction
preoccupations, and approaches that are often considered characteristically

modernist, and I want to indicate this specificity through the qualifier ‘existential’.
I shall say more about the nature of this inflection, which makes existential mod-
ernism a philosophical paradigm worth isolating as distinctive, in a moment.
The second main interest motivating this book is one of cultural hermeneutics,
in this case with a specifically philosophical focus. What is generally at stake in
projects of cultural hermeneutics is often not the contribution potentially made
by some historical cultural product or phenomenon to an already existing con-
temporary agenda or discourse. Rather, what frequently motivates it is the
thought that important questions or avenues of enquiry that are problematically
absent or at least largely occluded in the dominant current discourse are more
prominently present and recognized in the historical phenomenon under consid-
eration. What typically matters in a project of this kind—and this book is no
exception—is to achieve something like a verstehend articulation of that historical
phenomenon which ideally enables a renewed appreciation of those currently
latent or recessive interests, concerns and avenues of questioning neglected in the
contemporary mainstream. To illustrate, and anticipating a point I shall explain
more fully below: one such interest that is very important to the existential mod-
ernist philosophers, while being mostly absent in contemporary mainstream
debates in philosophical ethics, concerns the idea of experiential perfection—what
Sartre sometimes calls consciousness’s (impossible) ‘completeness’. For all the
existential modernist philosophers this plays a central role in ethics properly
understood, either as an unattainable ‘regulative ideal’ or as something actually, at
least intermittently, achievable. What would an appropriate understanding of
such experiential perfection be, one that, moreover, would make manifest its pur-
ported central importance for ethics? This is one important question that agitates
all the existential modernists discussed in this book at least at some stage of their
intellectual careers. It is closely linked with the ‘utopian’ theme that has often
been identified as a feature of much characteristically modernist culture. It is the
existential modernists’ distinctive inflection of that theme—and it is one that is
arguably rather alien, indeed probably suspicious, to the dominant contemporary
sensibilities either in philosophy or beyond. One question that the existential
modernists’ work poses for us, therefore, is whether such blanket suspicion is
justified, or whether, instead, there are forms of this modernist ‘utopian’ spirit
whose widespread loss has been an impoverishment, philosophically and for the
broader culture.
Before turning to the details of the existential modernists’ philosophical agen-
das and contributions—both those aspects which already find resonance in cur-
rent debates and those that do not—I want to say a few more words in defence of
the label I have chosen for what I claim is a distinctive paradigm in practical phil
osophy that they jointly inaugurated. To some extent, such name-conferral is simply
stipulative, but since in this case both components of the label already have
Introduction 3
established, albeit unavoidably fuzzy, connotations and uses, some explanation is

in order. What makes the philosophies of Nietzsche, Scheler, Sartre, and Musil—
or central strands of them—‘modernist’, and what makes them ‘existential’?
‘Modernism’ is an ambiguous term, with a range of partly distinct, partly over-
lapping meanings in different domains of cultural history and sociology. Its con-
ventionally central fields of application are the arts, especially literature, the visual
arts, architecture, and music. Unlike its derivative ‘postmodernism’, the term is
only rarely applied to works of philosophy, the main reason for this arguably
being that the great methodological divides in twentieth-century philosophy—
especially that between classical analytic philosophy and phenomenology—
originated in the period in which modernism was hegemonic, and both sides of
the divide often expressed some of its aspirations, so that the label ‘modernist’ is
clearly unhelpful for designating these methodological differences. But in this
book I shall not be much concerned with those methodological quarrels, which,
in any case, have been subsiding in many quarters of academic philosophy in
recent decades; in fact, like a growing number of philosophers, I shall draw freely
on both phenomenological and analytic insights and modes of argument.
What makes the label ‘modernist’ useful to characterize the philosophies I shall
be studying are certain substantive preoccupations, perspectives, and valuations
they share with those standardly ascribed to much modernist art, especially to its
literature. Modernist literature in particular has often plausibly been seen as a
response, typically an ambivalent one, by relatively small self-identifying—or self-
proclaimed—cultural elites (not rarely socially déclassées) to a Western industrial
modernity increasingly dominated by technology, industrial capitalism, and
urbanization;2 although, ironically, the forms of social life that the modernists
saw as already upon them can retrospectively be recognized as only the begin-
nings of what later came to full dominance on a global scale. Unlike most of our
Western contemporaries, the modernists therefore lived in the simultaneous
presence of extreme cultural contrasts in their life-worlds. In contrast to us, both
the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of the processes of modernization and ‘rationalization’ were
palpable, really present in their everyday experience, yet, unlike for the Romantics
a century earlier, any putatively positive aspects of the ‘before’ were recognizable
to them as about to disappear and as irrecuperable. This is reflected, among other
things, in their typically less sanguine picture both of ‘uncorrupted nature’ and of
the possibilities of reason than was prevalent, respectively, in Romanticism or
German Idealism. The modernists’ picture of both is often a disenchanted or at
best guardedly sceptical one, which places them much closer to the dominant
mindset of the early twenty-first century than can plausibly be claimed for either
of these earlier intellectual movements.
2 Cf. Bradbury and McFarlane (1991: 26–7, 46–7). My characterization of modernism here is delib-
erately broad-brush. On the diversity of literary modernisms, see esp. Nicholls (2009).
4 Introduction
The modernists characteristically responded to the ‘modern tide’ in an ambivalent

way: on the one hand, they tended to think of the world it had produced as a site
of extreme alienation, of inauthentic conventionality and of spiritual shallowness
and barrenness (as well as of injustice, but this respect was understandably not
regarded as particularly unusual or distinctive of their time). On the other hand,
they typically also affirmed aspects of modern rationalization; in particular they
often affirmed some version of the conceptually precise, hard-headed, and anti-
Romantic ‘scientific’ attitude that underlies, inter alia, modernity’s technological
achievements. So, the modernist spirit, if I may use this expression, characteristic
ally evinces both a fascination with, and partial affirmation of, aspects of modern
rationalization and a strong rejection of its totalizing tendencies. This tension
expresses itself in diverse ways, but one way in which it manifests among many of
the leading modernists is particularly pertinent here, for we find versions of it in
all the philosophers to be discussed in this book. The central aspect of this is a
heightened attention to subjectivity, to the concreteness of lived experience. Such
attention was seen as disclosing a domain of being that (at least potentially, or
partially) resists incorporation into the ‘mechanism’ of modern techno-capitalist
modes of rationalization.3 But disclosing this domain, for the modernists, required
at the fundamental level not abstract theorizing, or phenomenologically impre-
cise and high-handed conceptual architectonics (‘sensibility’, ‘imagination’, ‘rea-
son’), but a careful, unprejudiced attention to the specificities of concrete lived
experience, with the demand that the results of this should then be articulated
with the maximum of precision appropriate to this domain. Such attention then
typically yields the result that certain important aspects of subjectivity cannot be
fully conceptually grasped or ‘objectified’—thus showing their ultimate resistance
to rationalization—but this putative insight will itself have been gained by careful
unprejudiced attention to concrete subjectivity.4 Notable expressions of this atti-
tude in literature can be found, for example, in Proust, Pound, or Musil (qua nov-
elist), and it received its programmatic philosophical expression in the classical
phenomenology of Husserl. But the modernist qualified affirmation of aspects of
the modern, ‘scientific’ attitude often also manifested itself in other ways, beyond
the valorization of precision about lived subjectivity and about the fine grain of
phenomena as they present themselves to subjectivity. One other conspicuous
dimension of it is a frequent scepticism or relative indifference towards meta-
physics, as opposed to empirically grounded enquiry into the human life-world.
This general stance—which of course also marks out a common ground between
early phenomenology and early analytic philosophy—is, I shall argue, shared by
the protagonists of the existential modernist paradigm discussed in this book.
3 See also Taylor (1989: 460–2). 4 Cf. McFarlane (1991: 81–2).

Introduction 5
There is a further feature standardly regarded as characteristic of modernism

which makes this label apt for the philosophies I shall consider. The ‘utopian’
element mentioned earlier is a special case of it. Modernism typically envisages
the possibility of an overcoming of the alienation and the spiritual malaise or bar-
renness it diagnoses as pervasive in techno-capitalist modernity. This is some-
times envisaged in a quasi-redemptive spirit as a newly gained plenitude of being,
as an overcoming of not-being-at-home in the world. In the less aspirational
strands of modernism, what is held out as a possibility beyond alienation is at
least a new, ‘authentic’ kind of self-relation, a retrieval of submerged or latent
dimensions of the self, unrecognized by traditional metaphysics and effaced or
negated by (especially) the public culture of industrial-capitalist modernity. In
either of these versions, a new ‘meaning’—a profound and life- structuring
value—is held out as attainable for at least some individuals. But even in their
more aspirational, quasi-redemptive (‘epiphanic’) variants, what typically distin-
guishes such modernist meanings from their predecessors in the age of Idealism
and Romanticism are two related differences: first, these meanings are envisaged
as never fully and lastingly attainable; their presence is at best fragile and inter-
mittent. This is connected, secondly, with the anti-metaphysical thrust in mod-
ernism. The meanings in question are typically not understood as revelations of
some ultimate spiritual significance or value that obtains anyway, independently
of the contingencies of human experience—in nature, or in the rationally intelli-
gible, necessary itinerary of Spirit, or in some intelligible domain beyond empir
ical human life. As Charles Taylor puts it, the modernist meanings, unlike their
Romantic counterparts, are not to be understood as ‘epiphanies of being’.5 Rather,
they are conceived as achievable, if at all, only contingently and temporarily
within (some) empirical individuals themselves, or in some of their products,
such as certain artworks, when these are appropriately received. The upshot of
this is that, for the modernists, authentically understood and/or transformed
empirical, contingent subjectivity itself becomes potentially the locus of meaning,
without reference to any putative metaphysical embedding or any immanent his-
torical teleology. (The optimistic belief in such a teleology or this-worldly eschat
ology is, for most modernists, simply no longer credible.) This explains why the
interest of many modernists is focused on the individual, in particular on the
individual in so far as she is, or is capable of, enacting such a transformation or
achieving such a deeper self-understanding. Given that the modernists’ starting
point is the perceived cultural and ethical desiccation of the public world, the
individuals of primary interest to them are, at least for the time being, exceptional—
‘outsiders’—and this (partly) explains much of what is sometimes decried as the
anti-majoritarian elitism of the modernist cultural agenda, expressed pithily and
5 Taylor (1989: 459–65).

6 Introduction
programmatically by the protagonist of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (1882):

‘The majority is never right.’6
Many of the features listed above as characteristic of many strands of modern-
ism, and especially of literary modernism, also tend to be associated with existential
philosophy. Indeed, one could say that many—though of course not all—instances
of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century existential thought are
expressions of the modernist spirit within philosophy and can be seen as articu-
lating some of the philosophical foundations of those modernist commitments.
This is the approach I shall be adopting in my interpretation of those p hilosophers
treated in this book who have traditionally been placed in the existential camp,
namely Nietzsche and Sartre, and I hope to show that the point also applies, in
important respects, to Scheler and Musil. But there are also several other,
specifically philosophical, features normally associated with existential philosophy
that I wish to evoke by using the label ‘existential modernism’. The first is what is
sometimes referred to as the primacy of practice in existential philosophy. This
phrase is used for a variety of things, but part of what it aims to express in this
context is the idea that concrete human experience needs to be understood
fundamentally as worldly—as involving a relation to the world—and that this
relation is not, either at the basic level or at the level ultimately aspired to by
humans, ‘theoretical’, that is, constituted in terms of a repertoire of propositionally
structured true beliefs. In order to comprehend this relation analytically, we need
to understand the structure of human agency in the world and what—if it is not
such beliefs—is fundamentally involved in it. For the existential thinkers, such
understanding centrally requires, secondly, an adequate analysis of conscious
affectivity—of emotional experiences and other ‘sentiments’. As we shall see, for
all the existential modernists, the nature of conscious affectivity, as co-constituting
the human world-relation, takes centre stage. A third typical feature of existential
philosophy is an ethical preoccupation in a very broad sense: existential philosophers
usually—not always, to be sure—tend to be centrally concerned with the question
of how it is worthwhile or good to live, and this concern often gets articulated by
them in terms of a focus on the concept of value, especially in so far as this applies
to, and structures, the human relation to the world. This ethical-evaluative focus is
eminently present in all the four figures studied in this book.7
6 See also McFarlane (1991: 80–2).

7 The last-mentioned feature—a thematic focus on ethics in a suitably broad sense and on the con-
cept of value—is absent in one of the major representatives of philosophy conventionally labelled
‘existential’: the early Martin Heidegger. Possible ethical implications of Heidegger’s early philosophy,
in Being and Time and the writings surrounding it, continue to be a matter of controversy among his
interpreters. There are readings that attribute to him very minimal, but non-trivial, requirements that
any substantive ethical commitment even deserving consideration—whether Aristotelian, utilitarian,
etc.—would have to meet. (For a subtle version of this interpretation, see Mulhall 2005.)
But it should be beyond dispute that Heidegger in that period of his philosophical career is not
focally interested in substantive ethical questions, nor in meta-ethical theory. For him, the former are
Introduction 7
What makes it illuminating or even legitimate to speak of these thinkers as

creators of a distinctive philosophical paradigm, indeed as jointly instituting
something like a philosophical ‘tradition’? The very idea may seem initially
implausible. Much of what Nietzsche has to say on morality, for instance, is
explicitly contested by Scheler, while the early, existentialist Sartre has standardly
been interpreted as having concerns and commitments—centred around his
claims about human ‘radical’ freedom—that are at variance with positions associ-
ated with either of those philosophers. Musil, on the other hand, has usually been
treated primarily as a literary figure, having only recently received attention by
philosophers; his philosophical significance is still at best contested and, more
often, simply unrecognized.
I shall provide an initial sketch of specific and important philosophical com-
monalities that I claim to obtain among these figures in a moment. But I should
like to preface my interpretation of these with a caveat and a clarification of the
scope of the present project. It is not my intention in this book to provide a com-
prehensive treatment of the views of any of its philosophical protagonists, or even
of their views on ethical and meta-ethical matters. The aim is rather to isolate, to
bring into relief—sometimes to reconstruct—and then to assess certain import
ant strands of thought in these thinkers that bear on ethical and meta-ethical
issues. In some cases—those of Nietzsche and Sartre—these lines of thought are
in tension, and sometimes incompatible, with others simultaneously and promin
ently present in the same philosopher. I shall highlight these conflicts at the rele
vant points in the argument, but I shall in these cases only marginally be
concerned with the historical question of the philosopher’s own final position or
resolution—if any—of the conflict. What mainly interests me is a different task:
reconstructing, elaborating, and critically assessing those lines of thought which
link those thinkers and which motivate my thesis of a common paradigm. In the
cases of Nietzsche and Sartre, these strands of their thought have only rarely been
foregrounded in academic scholarship on them. But they are, as I hope to show,
far from marginal in their work; they are prominent, albeit sometimes internally
contested, features of these philosophers’ thinking. In Nietzsche’s case, these
features, although often overlooked in more recent Nietzsche reception, were
influential in the early twentieth century, effectively inaugurating the paradigm I
call existential modernism. In particular, Nietzsche’s ideas on the connection
‘ontic’ questions, and they are regarded by him as outside the purview of the ontological agenda of
Being and Time. Moreover, there are also some indications in that text that he believes that traditional
answers to these questions are based on a flawed ontology. This may explain why the language of val-
ues is scrupulously avoided in it. Heidegger also persistently criticizes the ontology purportedly pre-
supposed by ‘value thinking’ in later writings in the 1930s and 1940s. It is above all for these reasons
that I take Heidegger not to be a representative of the existential modernist paradigm as I shall under-
stand it in this book. So there is, with regard to this particular point, an unorthodox stipulative elem
ent in my use of the term ‘existential’ whenever I employ it as part of the complex name ‘existential
modernism’.
8 Introduction
between affectivity and value, as well as the early Nietzsche’s inconclusive but
suggestive reflections on ‘perfection’ and the ‘ideal’, find strong, clearly recognizable
echoes in both Scheler’s and Musil’s work. Given that both were strongly influ-
enced by their readings of Nietzsche—both of them adopting a partly affirmative
and partly critical attitude to various aspects of his philosophy—my working
hypothesis will be that the substantive overlaps and affinities that I shall identify
are not accidental. Rather, these corresponding ideas in Scheler and Musil can
plausibly be interpreted as attempts to elaborate, refine, and partly to correct
insights and suggestions that we find in Nietzsche. Scheler’s theoretically more
developed, yet (if I am right) partly Nietzsche-inspired, account of the relations
between Gefühle and value in turn significantly influenced the early Sartre’s
approach to these matters, a connection that also has not been adequately recog-
nized in received Sartre interpretation. In the light of these historical links, it is
perhaps legitimate to speak not just of a shared philosophical paradigm, but of
something like a tradition jointly constituted by these figures, for actual lines of
influence, direct or indirect, obtain among them. And, as is characteristic of intel-
lectual traditions, its later representatives generally do not simply take over posi-
tions or arguments from earlier ones, but they elaborate, refine, and, in parts,
criticize them. The philosophical narrative I shall offer in this book treats these
philosophers’ thought on ethics and meta-ethics—or the relevant strands of
thought in them—as a tradition in this sense. In this narrative, the governing idea
is of the later figures as in part correcting and in part enriching claims articulated
by other (usually earlier) representatives of the paradigm, unfolding new aspects
and dimensions which lay claim to superseding what is defective, or adding
something important that is missing, in the others’ work. In the ideal scenario—
that is, if the narrative is successful—the outcome is a cumulative one, in which
what is best in each is retained and contributes to the overall shape of a defensible
form of existential modernism.
Nietzsche occupies a somewhat special place in this narrative—as he does, of
course, in many accounts of modernist culture more generally. Many, though not
all, of the distinctive questions and positions I shall identify as characteristic of
existential modernism originate in his work, at least in the specific form or com-
bination in which they then get taken up by later representatives of the paradigm.
In Nietzsche’s case, the caveat expressed above is especially pertinent: the chapters
in this book that deal with the later (post-1876) Nietzsche’s work will be selective,
focusing on particular, albeit prominent, lines of thinking in it that conflict with
others also to be found there. This raises some interpretative questions that beset
philosophical commentary on Nietzsche more generally and that are generated
by the peculiar nature of this philosopher’s writings. Much of the later Nietzsche’s
work has a tentative, exploratory character, often consisting of relatively short
passages or even quasi-aphoristic fragments. While these are sometimes the
matically linked, Nietzsche generally only adumbrates or outlines certain ideas in
Introduction 9
them, rather than fully elaborating them in depth. In addition, and creating yet
more difficulties for the interpreter, these outlines often have a multi-perspectival
character: on many if not most issues addressed by the later Nietzsche, we find
statements and apparent commitments in his work that are prima facie in tension,
and in some cases incompatible, with each other. I shall note some of these, in an
ethical context, in Chapter 3, but we also find them, for example, in his statements
on the putative efficacy of the conscious will, or on the value and prospects of
metaphysical enquiry.8 These problems for the interpreter are further exacerbated
by the fact that Nietzsche, above all in the very final period of his philosophical
activity—from 1887, and then already under the shadow of his deteriorating
mental condition—at times cleaves towards a hyperbolical, polemical style that
makes it difficult to separate his actual commitments from provocations and
exaggerations aimed at eliciting a response from an, as yet, indifferent public.
These characteristics of Nietzsche’s work have led to a proliferation of inter
pretations that is without parallel among other major or canonical philosophers.
Different interpretative choices and emphases permitted by the texts lead to very
different readings, and these readings usually say as much about the interpreter as
they do about Nietzsche. No doubt this is also true for the reading offered in this
book. Some commentators of course believe that there is some Archimedean
point in Nietzsche’s philosophy that permits the reconstruction of an overall uni-
fied or final position from his texts despite apparent surface inconsistencies, for
example by constructing a suitably fine-grained developmental story. I am not
convinced that these attempts succeed, either in terms of an overall interpretation
or even with respect to particular Nietzschean topics or areas of enquiry, such as
the ethical and meta-ethical questions I shall primarily be concerned with. But I
am also not convinced that such an overall unified picture is needed. A more
fruitful general approach to Nietzsche, it seems to me, is to clearly isolate the vari-
ous distinct positions or internally linked idea-clusters that have a significant role
in Nietzsche’s work and then, if they have any initial plausibility, to develop and
elaborate them sufficiently so as to make them amenable to critical rational
assessment. This is what I shall attempt to do in this book with respect to one
prominent Nietzschean set of ideas on practical-evaluative matters. I therefore
have considerable sympathy for Robert Musil’s youthful diary remark on
Nietzsche:
He seems to me to be someone who has opened up a hundred new possibilities

and develops none of them. That is why he is loved by those who have need of
new possibilities and he is called un-philosophical by those who cannot do
without a mathematically specifiable result. Nietzsche per se has no very great
8 See Poellner (2013).

10 Introduction
value [Musil’s later insertion: ‘juvenile arrogance!’]. But Nietzsche and ten
capable intellectual labourers, who do what he only pointed to, would bring a
cultural advance [. . .] Nietzsche is like a park given over to public use. But
nobody goes in! (Musil, TB I: 50)
The kind of approach I am recommending, which combines rational reconstruc-

tion and elaboration with careful critical scrutiny, has in fact been adopted by
many anglophone Nietzsche interpreters in recent decades. The ensuing lively
debates are in my view what is most interesting in contemporary Nietzsche schol-
arship. They have brought to light a plurality of ‘Nietzsches’—or, more prosaically,
a plurality of parts or aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy in tension with each
other—but this should not be considered as a problem as long as we are not inter-
ested in treating Nietzsche as an authority or even a visionary, but are more inter-
ested in the philosophical credentials of (some of) the various ‘new possibilities’
he has opened up.
While a plurality of interpretations are textually licensed by Nietzsche’s corpus,
there is one type of reading that seems to me textually unwarranted, although it
has enjoyed considerable, and baleful, popularity among certain continental
readers. It is one that takes Nietzsche to treat concepts of normative assessment
and their validity, whether epistemically or practically, as themselves globally
relative to, or even reducible to, relations of power. This interpretation, often
articulated in vague and gestural terms, is considered by these readers to be
licensed by Nietzsche’s so-called metaphysics of the will to power, found mostly
in his posthumously published notebooks. It seems clear that such a purportedly
Nietzschean position is either openly irrationalist or, if putatively rational—here:
metaphysical—justification is offered for it, unintentionally incoherent. But
Nietzsche does not hold it, in either version, not even in those notebook sketches.9
What, then, are the specific questions, approaches, and positions that warrant
talk of a distinctive tradition in ethical thought represented by the figures who
will be discussed in this book? Let me briefly outline these in an introductory
manner, simultaneously providing a sketch of the book’s itinerary.
In Chapter 1, I shall introduce a number of key themes and concerns of
Nietzsche’s most influential early writings, namely The Birth of Tragedy and Untimely
Meditations. These pre-1877 writings are unusual within Nietzsche’s corpus, not
just because they are often seen, in my view correctly, as evincing substantive
9 Prominent versions or, respectively, appropriations of the irrationalist interpretation of Nietzsche

alluded to here can be found in Heidegger (1979–87) and, passim, in Foucault’s later writings. For
more careful interpretations of the psychological will to power, see esp. Reginster (2006) and Katsafanas
(2011). For textually more attentive, non-irrationalist reconstructions of the will to power qua meta-
physics, see e.g. Richardson (1996) and Poellner (2013). On the metaphysical dimension of Nietzsche’s
perspectivism, see also Poellner (2001).
Introduction 11
ethical commitments quite different from those of the later Nietzsche,10 but also
because these commitments are not always evident on the surface of these texts.
Especially in The Birth of Tragedy, they only disclose themselves if this opaque
work is read in conjunction with other writings surrounding it, above all Untimely
Meditations. Chapter 1 therefore has a largely interpretative character, primarily
aiming to highlight problems and questions, which, I shall argue, in different ways
and to various extents agitate later existential modernists, including Nietzsche’s
own later self. I shall therefore treat these major writings of the early Nietzsche,
with some unavoidable but (I hope) illuminating simplification, as founding texts
of existential modernism in philosophy, despite their ‘unphilosophical’ surface
character, which includes schwärmerische monumental history, cultural polemic,
and educational exhortation. The central concern of these texts, I argue, is ethical.
The early Nietzsche is in search of a mode of human being that would overcome
the defects of ‘nature’, which for him include not only the various forms of human
suffering but also the dominance of ‘egoism’ in ordinary human nature, a domin
ance which, he complains in Untimely Meditations, is tacitly or explicitly accepted
in the modern public world. Such an overcoming of the defects of nature, how-
ever, cannot be accomplished by morality as ordinarily conceived (say, on
Kantian or Aristotelian models). Morality in these senses leaves us, or some of
us, unsatisfied—it falls short of legitimate human aspiration. What answers to this
aspiration is only an ideal of perfection—that is, the reality or realization of a
value that is ultimate or unsurpassable, leaving out no significant (positive) value.
Such a value cannot be realized, of course, in any human individual, nor, Nietzsche
believes, in some really possible human collectivity. If real, it would have to exist
beyond the sphere of humans as they actually are. Yet, we have no reason what-
ever to believe that such a value exists beyond the human domain either. Nietzsche
himself therefore takes the ideal to be an ‘illusion’—to be unreal or even ‘impos-
sible’. Yet, the defects of nature can only be overcome, or rendered tolerable (‘justi-
fied’), through an orientation towards it. This train of thought leads to another
distinctive feature of Nietzsche’s early philosophy: the demand for a kind of
myth-making. The kind of existence that ‘justifies’ the defects of nature is one that
engages in the production of myths that embody an ideal of perfection, while
being unconcerned about the truth-value of these myths. One set of questions
that will be addressed in this chapter is how this demand is to be understood—
does it involve, for example, a form of ethical fictionalism?—and whether it is
plausible or even coherent. We shall encounter related ideas and questions in
10 I include Nietzsche’s so-called middle-period writings—Human, All-too-Human and Daybreak—

among his later work for present purposes. While there are some substantial differences between these
texts and the writings from The Gay Science onwards, they are not as pronounced as the rupture that
occurred in his thinking around 1876.
12 Introduction
connection with Nietzsche’s later metaphysical indifferentism (Chapter 2.5), in

Sartre (Chapter 7), and in Musil (Chapter 8).
A further set of claims that is at the heart of Nietzsche’s early thinking is that
the right kind of orientation to the ideal would have to be one that involves what
he calls ‘right feeling’, that is, a certain kind of conscious affectivity. Moreover, the
target or intentional object of this kind of feeling would itself have to be charac-
terized, at least partly, in terms of the latter—the content would have to mirror
the attitude. The first of these claims is a theoretically undeveloped special case of
a thesis that will be found to be central for all the existential modernists: an
adequate grasp of values, or of specific values, requires certain kinds of conscious
affectivity. They also hold (implicitly, in the case of early Nietzsche) that, con-
versely, we cannot understand certain sorts of conscious affectivity—the more
important ones—without a reference to values which are experientially given in
the former. But the early Nietzsche does not give fuller articulation to these ideas;
for that, we need to turn to the later existential modernists (including later
Nietzsche). The second of these claims is more perplexing. Why would the con-
tent of the right sort of attitude towards perfection (the ideal) have to mirror, in
some way, that very attitude, and what could this even mean? Early Nietzsche
gives us no more than pointers in this regard, but the idea is later taken up and
developed more fully in Musil. (It can also be found in Scheler, although I shall
not discuss his version of it.)
Chapter 2 offers a reconstruction of a central line of thought on meta-ethics in
the later Nietzsche. This chapter presents much of the general meta-ethical—and,
more broadly, meta-evaluative and meta-normative—framework that will be
developed and refined by the later existential modernists. Since Nietzsche’s own
explicit remarks in this area, as so often, are exploratory or programmatic rather
than systematic, I shall adopt a reconstructive- argumentative approach that
expands significantly on what can be found in the texts themselves. This will be
done in part by confronting the ideas outlined by Nietzsche with potential criti-
cisms from current debates. These ideas include prominently the following. The
fundamental concept in practical philosophy is the concept of value, and this is, at
the epistemically basic level, an experiential concept. Values, or value properties
as I shall say, structure the empirical human life-world. Since value properties
have an inherent ‘demand’ character—to be aware of something as having a posi-
tive value is to be aware of it as something that, pro tanto, merits being instanti-
ated or to continue being instantiated—experiencing values, as values, in the
world requires a mode of experience that picks up this character, while also being
an experience of objects in the world. Some of Nietzsche’s remarks suggest that
we should think of certain kinds of conscious affectivity, in particular some con-
scious emotions, as satisfying these requirements: we should think of some con-
scious emotions as affective perceptions of worldly values, values that characterize
empirical worldly phenomena. I shall devote the early parts of this chapter to an
Introduction 13
initial statement of the attractions of such a view, to the commitments it incurs,

and to the prospects of discharging them. This will require going beyond what
Nietzsche explicitly says, and it will also set up the agenda for subsequent chap-
ters. One central issue in this context is whether, or how, we can plausibly under-
stand some conscious emotions as being veridical experiences of value in the
world, while respecting Nietzsche’s thesis that values are experience-dependent in
a specific sense. This latter idea will also be sympathetically considered and some
reflections will be offered on what a Nietzsche-inspired approach should say
about putative values that cannot be experienced.
The final two sections of this chapter will be concerned with two issues. First, I
shall offer a defence of Nietzsche’s value-centred approach against alternative
approaches in practical philosophy that involve some kind of reductionism about
value, either naturalist reductions, or reductions to normative properties or
deontic reasons. Second, I shall address what I call (the later) Nietzsche’s meta-
physical indifferentism with respect to evaluative matters. This continues, and
modifies, the metaphysical agnosticism of his early work. Nietzsche’s later view, as
I interpret it, is that questions about the metaphysical status of values should be
practically irrelevant for us. Is this view plausible, and is it compatible with
Nietzsche’s commitment to the empirical, phenomenological objectivity of
some values?
Chapter 3 will offer further evidence for the interpretation developed in the
previous chapter by analysing some typical examples of the later Nietzsche’s own
evaluative practice. Nietzsche’s substantive value judgements are very often
grounded in his affective responses to objects (such as artworks) judged by him to
be suitable to express a kind of mental life, or in his affective responses to the
mental lives of others, which he takes to be sometimes experientially accessible to
him through their expressive actions and behaviours. I shall argue that this char-
acteristic evaluative practice is best explained on the model of affective value-
experience proposed in Chapter 2. In many cases, including cases that have an
ethical bearing, Nietzsche’s practice has a quasi-aesthetic character, in a sense to
be explained. There is therefore something right in the observation that the
grounds of Nietzsche’s ethical commitments are often quasi-aesthetic, although
there are important differences from aesthetic evaluation proper.
A second task of this chapter is to elaborate and defend the notion of phenom-
enally intrinsic value of conscious mental states or occurrences. Such values, I
argue, constitute the ground level of justification for most of Nietzsche’s own
evaluative and normative judgements. Phenomenally intrinsic value is the evalu
ative character that many experiences, or experience-involving actions, necessar-
ily exhibit when they are adequately given in the first-person perspective, and
considered by themselves. Evidently, this notion requires clarification and explan
ation. What is it for an experience to be given adequately to its subject, or to
someone simulating the experience, and why should such adequate givenness
14 Introduction
ever manifest an evaluative component intrinsic to the experience? If the idea can
be made plausible, it promises to supply what is needed to make sense of the view
I have attributed to Nietzsche: that some perception-based emotions about the
subjectivity of others can be veridical affective value perceptions. They make
perceptually accessible, from a third-personal (or second-personal) perspective,
phenomenally intrinsic value of stretches of the conscious mental life of others.
In the final sections of this chapter, I shall offer some reflections on why, for
Nietzsche, the most significant values, positively or negatively, attach to human
(or similar) subjectivity, or to objects and occurrences that express such subject
ivity. Non-expressive objects may have non-instrumental value, but they attain
neither to the peaks nor to the nadir of value, so to speak. Why does Nietzsche
think this? Some passages in Beyond Good and Evil suggest an answer, but it is an
incomplete one. The idea mooted by Nietzsche is that the special value of human
subjectivity, as distinct from any object-value, is connected with its aiming—often
implicitly—at ‘higher’ values that resist determinate conceptualization; therefore
human subjectivity is in an important respect itself non-conceptualizable (or ‘non-
objectifiable’). Nietzsche’s reflections on this are suggestive, but once again not
developed. They will be taken up more expansively by Musil (Chapter 8), while
similar ideas also have a central place in Sartre (Chapter 7).
In Chapter 4, I return in greater detail to the idea of affective perceptions, or
perception-derivative affective intuitions of value. An initial sketch of this was
presented in Chapter 2.3, when interpreting Nietzsche’s remarks on what he calls
‘affects’. But the idea is more explicit in Sartre’s account of his second main type of
emotions, and it is developed at length and defended especially by Scheler (whose
influence in this respect is acknowledged by Sartre). The Scheler–Sartre version of
the view is therefore particularly suitable for a closer consideration of objections
that have been levelled at affective perceptualism in current debates. The Scheler–
Sartre view is expressly a qualified version of affective perceptualism. According
to them, emotional experiences that are intrinsically and immediately intelligible
to their subjects have evaluative contents, and some conscious emotions present
themselves to their subjects as perceptions, or perception-derivative intuitions, of
values in their particular objects. Scheler and Sartre also explicitly articulate the
motivations for this view, the central idea being that the experience of positive or
negative value as such requires psychologically valenced experiences, which emo-
tions usually are; the valenced attitude involved in them typically presenting itself
as an uptake of some value feature of the emotion’s particular object.
I shall discuss the contemporary objections to this kind of analysis of (some)
emotions under four main headings. One complaint is that the theory misde-
scribes emotional experiences, and that, in particular (pace Scheler–Sartre), these
do not have evaluative contents. Secondly, it is often objected that there are
important phenomenological differences between standard perceptions and emo-
tional experiences—in particular that the former, but not the latter, are transparent
in a sense familiar from the philosophy of perception; and that emotions, unlike
Introduction 15
sense perceptions, are dependent ways of accessing their objects. A third line of
objection prominent in current discussions is that emotions and perceptual
experiences have different rationalizing properties. Perceptual experiences can
immediately justify corresponding judgements—they can supply reasons for those
judgements—but, it is argued, emotions never immediately rationalize value
judgements in an analogous way. A final problem I shall consider is relatively
under-discussed in current philosophy of emotions: how could value properties,
given what Sartre calls their ‘demand’-structure, be properties of objects at all? I
shall argue that the Scheler–Sartre view has resources for plausible rejoinders to
all these objections, and Scheler in fact often anticipates them. With respect to the
last problem mentioned, intersubjective emotions will turn out to play a crucial
role, as we have seen they also do in Nietzsche’s evaluative practice.
If one holds, as I have claimed Nietzsche does in one dominant strand of his
thinking, that the ground level of evaluative justification in the most important
cases is constituted by the intrinsic phenomenal (dis)values of experiences, then
an adequate first-personal access to the relevant experiences becomes a central
task for ethics. This partly explains why Nietzsche, but also the other existential
modernists, are very much concerned with identifying distorting factors that
militate against such adequate access. Similarly, if one thinks, as I have argued
Nietzsche, Sartre, and Scheler all do, that some affective experiences should be
construed as third- personal (or second- personal) perceptual experiences of
value, then some account is needed of factors that often make such experiences
inadequate or indistinct, and thus epistemically deficient. In Chapter 5, I examine
some typical cases of both the first and the second kind, where the epistemic defi-
ciency is, in a sense, innocent, that is, where neither distorting intentions nor
obvious irrationality are involved.
A case of the second type that I shall examine is the very frequent one of
indistinct third-personal experience of value where the target values are not
clearly apprehended but only vaguely or ‘inarticulately’ given. There is an account,
associated with Charles Taylor, that suggests that we should think of (at least)
central instances of this kind of case as non-conceptual experiences of values,
experiences that have a determinate evaluative content which we can, or may fail
to, subsequently conceptualize in appropriately fine-grained descriptions. When
successful, these descriptions, on Taylor’s model, explicate a determinate content
given non-conceptually prior to the description. This is a tempting picture, but I
shall argue against it, offering an alternative construal of these experiences as
typically involving only generic, determinable evaluative content. In critically
assessing the Taylor-inspired picture, I shall articulate and draw upon what I take
to be a plausible distinction between conceptualized and non-conceptualized
components of perceptual (re)presentation.
The final section of this chapter addresses a type of ‘innocently’ distorted or
indistinct first-personal experience of value that greatly occupies Sartre (and also
Musil), namely distortions in our affective entertainings, or envisagings, of futural
16 Introduction
values—values that we hope to become realized in the as yet unattained ends of

many of our actions and projects. For both Sartre and Musil, these values purport-
edly attaching to the ends of our projects are very often illusory, but the cognitive
distortion in these cases is not easily detectable, which explains its pervasiveness.
In Chapter 6, I turn to inadequate or distorted first-personal experiences of
value in which the inadequacy is the result of a distorting intention. Nietzsche’s
ressentiment and Sartre’s bad faith are prominent putative examples of this. Both
are explicitly presented as cases of intentional self-deception, in which subjects
pursue what Sartre calls a ‘project’ of self-misunderstanding. This purported kind
of self-deception has often been thought to be paradoxical and impossible, or at
least implausible, its critics arguing that it would require the subject consciously
and simultaneously to hold contradictory beliefs, and knowingly to pursue a pro-
ject of deception, one’s knowledge of which would have to undermine its success.
I shall argue, by contrast, that the idea is not paradoxical, and that the phenom
enon is important and far from rare. I aim to show this by offering a reconstruc-
tion of Nietzschean ressentiment, developing some of Sartre’s suggestions on bad
faith for this purpose. The key for understanding these phenomena, I argue, lies
in recognizing that the relevant components in the self-deceptive process, both at
the level of attitude and at the level of content, are phenomenally conscious but
not determinately conceptualized by the subject in a manner that would make
them straightforwardly available for inferences and thus undermine the success
of the self-deceptive project. While this construal of ressentiment, and of inten-
tional self-deception more generally, is not without problems, it will be shown
that these are not fatal to it. In the context of this reconstruction I shall also dis-
cuss, and reject, alternative construals of ressentiment and of similar kinds of self-
deception on so-called split-mind or deflationary models. While ressentiment as
Nietzsche conceives it is indeed possible, and while recognizing that it is import
ant for the diagnosis of various widespread evaluative distortions and errors, it is
doubtful whether it can have the fundamental ‘value-creative’ role Nietzsche
ascribes to it. I argue that, at least with respect to specific first-order values—as
opposed to ‘thin’ beliefs about the good, and general meta-ethical conceptions—
this radical Nietzschean thesis is implausible.
The final two chapters introduce significant new themes and aspects of the
existential modernist paradigm. Chapter 7 offers an interpretation and assess-
ment of Sartre’s claims concerning the relation between ‘authentic’, self-transparent
human autonomy and ethics. While many of the early Sartre’s views, indebted to
Scheler as they are, have close parallels in the other existential modernist thinkers,
he is unique among the figures discussed in this book in articulating a full-
fledged, phenomenologically based, theoretical account of human autonomy and,
connectedly, of the structure of intentional action. The initial sections of this
chapter will present a reconstruction of both of these sophisticated, and often
misunderstood, theories. The orthodox reading of Sartre has it that he holds a
Introduction 17
dubiously coherent radical-choice view of intentional action, according to which

human choices, or at least the most fundamental of these, are not grounded in
apparent good-making features of what is chosen. It will be shown that this read-
ing is mistaken. Sartre’s actual view is that intentional action is guided by appar-
ent values—and sometimes by genuine values—and that the ‘ultimate’ or most
fundamental values always at least implicitly guiding human intentional actions
are not object-values (although there are object-values), but that these are rather
provided by, and co-originary with, intentional consciousness itself. These ultim
ate values are motivatedly misconstrued in inauthentic consciousness—
consciousness in bad faith—but they are capable of ‘purification’ in authentic and
adequately reasons-sensitive consciousness. Since these apparent ultimate values,
according to Sartre, inform every human choice that is immediately intelligible to
the agent, the justifiability of actions depends on this purification. What would
such purified, and therefore genuine—not merely apparent—ultimate values be?
Sartre’s view on this question evinces conflicting claims. I argue that his most
plausible line of thought on it, found mostly in the War Diaries, yields the idea
that ultimate (or absolute) value would be instantiated in a universal ‘complete-
ness’ of all consciousnesses, in a universal absence of experienced ‘lack’. Such com-
pleteness is impossible for humans, yet authentic and adequately reasons-sensitive
consciousness remains oriented towards it as the end of an incompletable pro-
ject—something like a Kantian regulative ideal. I argue that this idea underlies
both a plausible version or modification of Sartre’s account of autonomy and also
his ethical claims. These centre around the idea that the autonomy of intentional
consciousness, in any instance, has a special value that exceeds any aggregate of
possible object-values. Sartre’s argument for this idea, which has some affinities
with claims familiar from the Kantian trad ition, will be reconstructed and
assessed in the final section of this chapter.
For Sartre, the idea of absolute value is co-originary with human intentional
consciousness—the latter could not be what it is without the former. If some of
his arguments for this claim go through, he would have provided a philosophical
foundation for the early Nietzschean claim that the concept of perfection (or of
‘the ideal’) is essential to any ethics properly responsive to human aspirations. Yet
what Sartre says on absolute value (or ‘completeness’) remains phenomenologic
ally underdeveloped. We would need to know what such value would concretely
consist in, were it realizable, in order even to know what an appropriate orienta-
tion towards it would be; and Sartre himself, in one strand of his thinking, takes
such an orientation to be central to ethics as an incompletable project. His exist
entialist philosophy therefore, on this crucial point, ends in a lacuna.
This question is taken up in the final chapter, offering a philosophical reading
and analysis of what is increasingly recognized as the pre-eminent philosophical
novel of modernism, Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities. One of Musil’s
central aims in this work is the articulation of a phenomenological account of
18 Introduction
what Sartre calls unsurpassable value. This is intimately connected with Musil’s
project to describe, with as much phenomenological precision as possible, a mode
of consciousness that experiences itself non-distortedly or appropriately as ‘com-
pleted’, as not characterized by Sartrean lack; Musil’s name for this ‘non-normal’
mode of consciousness is the ‘Other Condition’ (der andere Zustand). Much of
Chapter 8 is devoted to a philosophical reconstruction and assessment of Musil’s
claims on these two connected issues. According to Musil, the non-distorted
Other Condition is an affective experience with an all-comprehensive evaluative
content, which is necessarily not fully and determinately conceptualized, and
which seems to present, to a large extent in what Husserl calls a horizonal man-
ner, other consciousnesses as also instantiating and reciprocating that experience.
This Musilian account will be interpreted both as a profound phenomenological
rethinking and correction of the Platonic conception of eros, and as taking up and
developing an idea adumbrated by the early Nietzsche (discussed in Chapter 1.4).
For Musil, the undistorted Other Condition is at the heart of ethics, properly
understood. In the final section of this chapter, I shall offer a sympathetic assess-
ment of this claim, highlighting its partial affinities with one Sartrean line of
thought, but also its improvements on the latter.
Musil’s thinking on these issues is interlinked throughout his ambitious work
with his reflections on Western modernity as constituted by a process of rational
ization, a process manifesting itself, according to him, in systematizing concep-
tual precision, technologically oriented science, moralities of universal principles,
and the money-governed market economy—all of which are claimed by him to
share certain core features. Many of the voices in Musil’s novel are critical of
rationalizing modernity in this complex sense, regarding it as necessarily a site of
alienation. One of Musil’s endeavours in his work is to come to a deeper under-
standing of the sources of this alienation. On his analysis, rationalizing modernity
is not its fundamental cause; rather, it only makes explicit, and potentially self-
transparent, a condition that is humanly inescapable. Musil clearly sees his own
work as a project to achieve such self-transparency. He therefore does not join the
chorus of anti-modern and postmodern voices in his novel, but can be seen as
offering a qualified—and ironic, in a sense to be explained—affirmation of mod
ernity. Musil’s The Man without Qualities may thus be interpreted as an attempt to
understand philosophically, and to give appropriate and nuanced recognition to,
both of the antagonistic tendencies of modernist culture and philosophy men-
tioned earlier: its privileging of analytic conceptual precision and its anti-
representational revolt against it. I argue that Musil gives us good reasons to
follow him in affirming both of these, rightly understood.11
11 Throughout this book, I draw upon, develop, and revise points that I made in previously pub-
lished papers. Chapters 2, 3, 6, and 7 respectively incorporate material, in significantly expanded and
revised form, from Poellner (2007a, 2012, 2011, and 2015). An earlier version of Chapter 4, with only
minor differences from the present version, was published as Poellner (2016).
1
How to Redeem Nature
Early Nietzsche on Overcoming the ‘Tyranny of the Real’
1.1 Nietzsche’s Early Works as Founding Texts of Existential

Modernism in Philosophy
Existential modernism is a paradigm of thought and sensibility whose central

expressions have a clear historical situatedness as well as, often, certain lines of
influence traceable between them. A useful way to introduce this paradigm is
therefore through some of its founding texts, and this is the procedure I shall
adopt initially. The author who more than any other can plausibly be regarded as
its founder as well as one of its most prodigiously influential exponents is
Friedrich Nietzsche. The first three chapters of this book will therefore be con-
cerned with aspects of Nietzsche’s thinking, specifically with its central preoccu-
pation: the theory of value. In the present chapter, the focus will be on Nietzsche’s
early major publications, The Birth of Tragedy and Untimely Meditations, which
probably can lay a greater claim than any other to be the founding texts of existential
modernism in philosophy. In seeking to get a grip on the distinctive questions,
concerns, and views announced in these sometimes opaque texts, I shall also freely
draw on Nietzsche’s notebook entries from the period of their composition.
Before entering into the details of Nietzsche’s thinking in these early works,
whose complexities and internal tensions have often perplexed even sympathetic
readers, it may be helpful to give an initial, orientational précis of some key
assumptions and commitments expressed in those texts. These assumptions and
commitments delineate many of the central problematics and the trajectory of
subsequent existential modernism, although not all of them are retained by all of
its later exponents, including the later Nietzsche.
Nietzsche’s early philosophy is motivated, first, by a heightened sensitivity to
what might be called the structural deficiencies of the human condition and by a
generally pessimistic view of the predominant human practical dispositions. This
pessimistic vision, which explains the young Nietzsche’s continued great respect
for Schopenhauer despite his significant disagreements with him, has itself at
least two sources. One of them is what he generally refers to as the prevalence of
human suffering, which has multiple dimensions: it includes not only the suscep-
tibility and pervasive reality of pain, sickness, the debilitation of old age, and the
Value in Modernity: The Philosophy of Existential Modernism in Nietzsche, Scheler, Sartre, Musil. Peter Poellner,
Oxford University Press. © Peter Poellner 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192849731.003.0002
20 How to Redeem Nature: Early Nietzsche
reality of death but also the gross inequality of talents and ‘life chances’, as well
as the systematic indifference of the ‘external’—but real and non-negligible—
contingent goods of fortune to ethical merit. For Nietzsche, just as later for Sartre, a
stoic response to suffering, apart from being unattainable for most, is no solution,
for it is itself a form of debilitation and self-stultification, involving a voluntary
inner deadening of receptivity to the values of what even then he likes to call ‘life’.1
The second aspect of young Nietzsche’s pessimism is grounded in a
Schopenhauer-inspired scepticism about the human capacity for goodness—what
he tends to refer to as the pervasive human tendency towards ‘egoism’. According
to him, ‘egoism [. . .] has at all times been the lever of movements in history’ (UM
II 9: 114), and he is at least ambiguous on whether it is realistic to expect this to
change in a progress of spirit alleged by many of his contemporaries. There is little
doubt that early Nietzsche, as opposed to some of his later selves, would have
approved of those later twentieth-century political developments, at least in parts
of the world, giving an objectivized, institutionalized standing to respect for
human rights and to some kinds of generalized social solidarity. But he would
have regarded the stability of those arrangements as highly doubtful due to their
being in fact all too dependent on the satisfaction of the ‘egoism’ of the many in
the shape of greatly increased material well-being made possible by technological
advances which, in combination with an ever greater exploitation of non-human
natural ‘resources’, have enabled an ongoing economic expansion of dubious sus-
tainability. It is unlikely, therefore, that these—on Nietzsche’s assumptions, fragile
and quite possibly transient—developments would have changed his generally
pessimistic view of collective history.
A second central commitment of early Nietzsche arises from a profound dis-
satisfaction with what is standardly understood as morality and practical virtue
on broadly Kantian or Aristotelian conceptions. (Nietzsche never seriously con
siders consequentialist ethics, but some of his criticisms clearly apply to it too.)
Even if the young Nietzsche’s pessimism about the human condition, briefly
sketched above, were unwarranted, and even if humanity in general were more
amenable to morality as standardly understood than he takes it to be, he con
siders that morality itself to fall short of legitimate human aspiration. This is of
course explicitly acknowledged in Aristotle’s conception of practical virtue, but
Nietzsche is similarly discontented, for reasons I shall come to, with what
Aristotle proposes as satisfying that aspirational surplus (theoria). But, in any
case, the dominant conceptions of morality in modernity have not been
Aristotelian but more often of broadly Kantian inspiration, emphasizing univer-
salizability, the idea of the good will understood in terms of formal practical
rationality as having ‘incomparable worth’, and in the public domain the centrality
1 On stoicism, see UM III 3: 142; UM IV 11: 252. For Sartre, stoicism also typically involves the
form of self-deception he calls bad faith (see Sartre 1999: 50–1).
Founding Texts of Existential Modernism 21
of individual rights. Nietzsche’s dissatisfaction with such conceptions is palpable,

but the grounds for it are stated only obliquely in his early works. His often over-
looked eulogies on justice in Untimely Meditations (e.g. UM II 5: 83; II 6: 88; II 8:
106), his strong condemnation there of the arrogance of power (UM II 8: 104–5),
and his equally strong sympathies in the same text for the exploited, downtrod-
den, and oppressed (UM IV 8: 228–30) indicate clearly that he does not reject the
demands of a broadly Kantian form of morality at this stage of his philosophical
development. But it is equally clear that he does not regard Kantian morality as
‘the only thing which has dignity [. . .] that is, an unconditioned and incomparable
worth’.2 The possibilities of humanity and its—often disavowed or dormant—
aspirations are greater than the requirements of the Kantian kingdom of ends.
This thought is prima facie in tension with Nietzsche’s pessimism, and this might
suggest an elitist interpretation of these early writings: even more restrictedly
than morality as it is ordinarily understood, those aspirations going beyond
Kantian duty are alive only in a small cultural elite, which Nietzsche sometimes
designates by the Schopenhauer-derived terminological triad ‘(artistic) genius’,
‘(authentic) philosopher’, and ‘saint’. But, as will be seen shortly, the young
Nietzsche’s actual position on whether those legitimate aspirations going beyond
Kantian obligations are to be found only among the few or are present in human-
kind more generally is less clear-cut.
Whatever his position on this question may turn out to be, what are those
aspirations and what are their contents? In Schopenhauer as Educator, Nietzsche
says that ‘All existence that can be negated deserves to be negated; and being
truthful means: to believe in an existence that cannot be negated al all’ (UM III, 4:
153; trans. modified); and he characterizes the objective of culture as he under-
stands it as ‘perfection’ (ibid.; UM II 7: 95)—as that which is good or valuable
without qualification. ‘Perfection’ designates a state of affairs that leaves out noth-
ing of significant value; it is in that sense an absolute or unsurpassable value and
therefore cannot rationally be ‘negated’ at all, that is, regarded as deficient in some
important respect. Such formulations of course raise a host of questions, foremost
among them the following: (1) What are the grounds for Nietzsche’s assertion that
nothing short of perfection will satisfy the aspirations of humans, whether they
are explicitly conscious of this or not? (2) Why should this be a legitimate
aspiration, rather than an extravagant or otherwise irrational fantasy? (3) What is
the substantive content of ‘perfection’?
As for (1), Nietzsche has no developed view on this in his early works, where
he seems to take the reality of this aspiration as just an empirical fact about
(some?) humans. Indeed, a full-fledged theoretical account of it will be offered
only by later existential modernists, in particular by Sartre and Musil (see Chapters 7
2 Kant (1978: 97).

and 8). Regarding (2), the legitimacy of such an aspiration seems to depend at
least on two factors: the availability of a coherent and substantive characterization
of what perfection might consist in—that is, an answer to (3)—and the possibility
for humans to attain it. As we shall see, Nietzsche does have something to say on
both of these issues in his early writings, although what he does say is suggestive
rather than fully spelled out and offers room for different interpretations. What he
is clear about is that perfection at the level of the individual agent would have to
involve what he calls ‘right feeling’ (richtige Empfindung) (UM IV 5: 215). An
‘existence that cannot be negated at all’, one that would not merit rejection or cor-
rection in any important respect, would have to be one that involves a certain sort
of affectivity. One might be tempted to construe this, in the spirit of Schiller’s sup-
plementation of Kant’s ethics, as the idea that human aspiration aims at a union of
reason and sensibility, a harmonization of inclination with the demands of prac
tical rationality, such that the latter would also be reflected in ‘feeling’.3 While this
interpretation would not be entirely off the mark, it falls short of what Nietzsche
has in mind.
Early Nietzsche subsumes both the ‘egoism’ of what he takes to be the default
human disposition and the prescriptions of morality as standardly understood
under a wide concept of nature—which is thus closer to Aristotle’s than to
Kant’s—contrasting both with those further- reaching human aspirations just
alluded to. This explains his formulations to the effect that his cultural agenda
aims at a ‘transfiguration’ or even ‘redemption’ of nature (UM III 5: 159). What
such a transfiguration or redemption would amount to, and whether it can be
made coherent sense of, will be the central question of this chapter.
One of the key questions concerning early Nietzsche’s cultural–ethical agenda
concerns the place of metaphysics in it—metaphysics here being understood as,
roughly, a view or theory about the fundamental properties or characteristics of
what exists in the actual world. Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, seems
at first blush to set out a cultural ideal—the ‘world-view of tragedy’—that appears
to be to be grounded in a metaphysical conception of Schopenhauerian inspir
ation. On this traditional interpretation, Nietzsche’s position, at least in this work,
evinces considerable affinities with a broadly Romantic or (non- Hegelian)
German Idealist paradigm. What it aspires to, on this reading, is the realization,
or at least the pursuit, of an ‘ideal’ (UM III 3: 143–4) that involves centrally a
cognitive–affective relation to a putative absolute ground or dimension of reality
beyond the subject–object structure of ordinary human existence, a relation that
is supposedly achieved above all in the production of, or participation in, certain
kinds of ‘artistic’ practice.
3 See e.g. Schiller (2005: esp. 149–53).

Metaphysical Agnosticism: The Critique of Schopenhauer 23
I shall propose a different, non-orthodox, interpretation of Nietzsche’s early

views, according to which their central concern is ethical in the broadest sense—
they concern the question of how one should live—while separating this question
from metaphysics. Whatever warrant there is for Nietzsche’s answers to this ques-
tion, these answers are to be explicitly independent of metaphysics, while they are
nevertheless not intended to be merely subjectivist or expressivist. In severing the
content of the ‘ideal’, or human perfection, from metaphysics, Nietzsche departs
not only from Romanticism and German Idealism but also from Kant, for whom
the real possibility of perfection in the relevant sense—the supreme good, in
Kant’s language—requires the truth of the metaphysical postulates of practical
reason, concerning the existence of God and immortality.4 As I suggested in the
Introduction, this marginalization of metaphysics is generally shared by later
existential modernists, and the core ethical claims of even those of them who do
not avowedly share it—Sartre in particular; see Chapter 7—allow effortlessly for a
construal that preserves their substantive contents without recourse to metaphys
ical theory.
This broad-brush sketch of the young Nietzsche’s concerns and commitments
should suffice for initial orientation. It is now time to turn to the details of their
articulation in his early works.
1.2 Metaphysical Agnosticism: The Critique of Schopenhauer
Contrary to my suggestions above, Nietzsche’s early philosophy has usually been

interpreted as remaining under the spell of Schopenhauer, at least in respect of
the latter’s metaphysical tenets.5 But it is beyond doubt that Nietzsche no longer
accepts the key claims of Schopenhauer’s transcendental idealist metaphysics as
set out in The World as Will and Representation by the time he publishes The Birth
of Tragedy in 1872, notwithstanding the Schopenhauerian terminology pervading
that work. As early as 1868, he had written a relatively detailed critique of
Schopenhauer’s chief metaphysical doctrines, and the significance of this goes
beyond his specific objections to Schopenhauer, for it also reveals the young
Nietzsche’s attitude to metaphysics more generally.6 By Nietzschean standards,
this long fragment is an unusual piece, being written entirely in the dispassionate
style of traditional philosophical argumentation. Nietzsche here meticulously
dissects Schopenhauer’s basic metaphysical proposition, which he paraphrases as
follows: ‘the foundationless, knowledgeless will reveals itself, when brought under
an apparatus of representation, as [phenomenal] world’ (OS: 259). In Schopenhauer,
‘the thing in itself is given one of its possible forms. The attempt has failed’ (OS: 259;
4 Kant (1996: 238–54). 5 See e.g. Geuss (1999); Schacht (1992: 478–9); Young (2001: 26ff.).
6 ‘On Schopenhauer’, in Janaway (1998: 258–65). Henceforth cited as OS.
trans. modified). Among Nietzsche’s reasons for this verdict, three are especially
relevant in our context.
First, Schopenhauer’s identification of reality as it is in itself with a non-spatio-
temporal, intrinsically non-objective, ‘blind urge’—the metaphysical ‘Will’—is
rationally unfounded. What Schopenhauer ‘puts in place of the Kantian X—the
Will—is created only with the aid of a poetic intuition. The attempted logical
proofs, meanwhile, can satisfy neither Schopenhauer nor us’ (OS: 260).
Second, Nietzsche rejects the predicates which Schopenhauer applies, albeit
analogously, to reality as it is in itself, conveyed through phrases such as ‘powerful
impulse’, ‘blind urge’, ‘keen desire’, ‘determined striving’. The general connotation
here is of an aimless affective energy, and it is partly this connotation that was
responsible for the wide appeal of Schopenhauer’s philosophy in the final decades
of the nineteenth century. But, Nietzsche suggests, there is nothing at all that can
legitimately remain of the standard meanings of those expressions once that of
which they are predicated is entirely detached from embodied, spatio-temporal
individuals, and these terms are then applied to a purportedly non-individuated,
non-spatio-temporal dimension of being. In Schopenhauer, ‘a totally obscure,
inconceivable X is being decked out, as if in brightly coloured clothes, with predi-
cates drawn from a world alien to it, the world of appearance. Subsequently we
are required to regard the surrounding clothes—the predicates—as the thing in
itself ’ (OS: 262).
Third, Nietzsche denies that Schopenhauer has good reasons for postulating a
non-phenomenal dimension of being either ontologically distinct or different in
character from the domain of spatio-temporal entities and their properties. To be
sure, ‘there might be a thing in itself, yet only in the sense that in the region of
transcendence anything is possible that has ever been concocted in a philosopher’s
head. This possible thing in itself might be the Will: a possibility which, arising
as it does from the combination of two possibilities, is only the negative power of
the first possibility’ (OS: 261; trans. modified). It is clear, then, that Nietzsche,
even in the years immediately prior to the writing of his first major publications,
cleaves to a view that might be labelled metaphysical agnosticism, and a careful
reading of his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, confirms that he retains this stance
subsequently.
1.3 Redeeming Nature Aesthetically: The Birth of Tragedy and

Myth-Making
Among the young Nietzsche’s assumptions and commitments mentioned in sec-

tion 1.1, the one that is most explicitly present and prominent in The Birth of
Tragedy is his pessimism, and it is what provides that text’s point of departure and
the problem that it addresses itself to solve: how, in the face of the prevalence of
The Birth of Tragedy and Myth-Making 25
suffering (BT 3: 42) and the pervasiveness of human ‘egoism’, (BT 5: 52; 21: 125;
cf. UM II 9: 114) not just to bear human existence but to affirm it in the kind of
full-hearted way that would be appropriate to ‘an existence that cannot be negated
at all’ (UM III 4: 153). In order for this obviously un-Schopenhauerian objective
not to be irrational and ethically dubious, Nietzsche must believe that something
like a transformation or, as he puts it, transfiguration of ‘nature’ is possible. In the
Birth of Tragedy this transformation happens, at least prima facie, in certain kinds
of artistic practice, specifically in the collective practice of pre-Socratic Greek
tragedy and, potentially, in a new tragic practice and a concomitant world-view
that Nietzsche himself seeks to inaugurate. While Nietzsche’s aims in the Birth are
sometimes interpreted as offshoots of Wagner’s project for a new German national
culture,7 Nietzsche is fundamentally not interested in a merely national cultural
agenda—indeed, according to his probably over-charitable appraisal of Wagner,
even the latter’s ‘ideas are, like those of every great and good German, supra-
German, and the language of his art speaks, not to particular peoples, but to
human beings’ (UM IV 10: 250; trans. modified).
It is important to recognize that the collective practice and outlook of ancient
Greek tragedy, as interpreted by Nietzsche, and Nietzsche’s own, new tragic
world-view, are, despite some affinities, quite different in character. Both, how-
ever, quite centrally involve what Nietzsche calls ‘myth’. His explication of this
notion in sections 17 and 23 is, I want to propose, crucial to an adequate under-
standing of the argument of the Birth. Two senses of the word ‘myth’ are empha-
sized there. First, a myth is a narrative or an ‘image of the world’ that connects the
temporal flux of appearances to a supra-temporal ontological ground and that
presents that ground, and the relation between it and the empirical world, as not
or not fully amenable to rational explanation. Second, and most importantly in
our context, such a story or image relates transient human experiences in particu-
lar to a purposeful non-temporal or omni-temporal order of reality, understand-
ing them in a sense sub specie aeterni. This function of myth is emphatically
endorsed:
And any people—just as, incidentally, also any individual—is worth only as
much as it is able to impress upon its experiences the stamp of the eternal;
for thus it is, as it were, de-secularized and shows its unconscious inward convic-
tions of the relativity of time and of the true, that is metaphysical, significance
of life. (BT 23: 137; trans. modified)
The contents of myth in these two senses clearly overlap with some of the con-
cerns of traditional metaphysics, in particular with its interest in the fundamental
7 See esp. Young (2008: 217–45).

nature of entities, in first causes, and in grounding human values and norms in
the former. But while metaphysics typically deals in abstracta (forms, properties,
logical relations), myth offers foundational narratives involving concrete individ-
uals, and usually persons (UM IV 9: 236–7).
But there is a third, and familiar, sense of ‘myth’ sometimes operative in the
Birth of Tragedy: myth as Illusion or Wahn—a false story or one that is unlikely to
be true.8 The importance of this becomes clear once we recognize that the text in
fact contains two myths. There is the tragic myth Nietzsche ascribes, with some
historical liberty, to the pre-Socratic Greeks: the modes of experience and their
mythical interpretation putatively constitutive of the collective practice of Greek
tragedy. The central beliefs pertaining to this myth, both in its Apollinian and
Dionysian aspects, Nietzsche refers to as ‘an illusion spread over things’ (BT 18:
109). To see what he means by this we need to turn to some of the details of the
workings of Greek tragedy as interpreted by him.
But the book also contains a second myth, Nietzsche’s own mythical frame-
narrative, which allows him, among other things, to assign such an exalted
position within cultural history to the tragic myth of the Greeks. It is this frame-
narrative which underwrites his polemic against Alexandrian or the oret
ic
al
culture and which motivates and putatively legitimates the elevation of (certain
kinds of) ‘art’—understood as the creation of and participation in mythical
Wahngebilde (structures of error and illusion)—over the Socratic, rational pursuit
of truth. The pivotal question to ask here is whether the third sense of ‘myth’—
myth as a false or probably false story—can be either withheld from, or applied
to, Nietzsche’s own frame-narrative (henceforth: Nietzsche’s myth), without this,
in either case, undermining the project of the Birth of Tragedy, and indeed the
more explicitly ethical agenda of Untimely Meditations. I shall turn to this ques-
tion shortly.
But, first, what is the tragic myth of the Greeks (BT 10; 24) and what is its role
in the Greek collective practice of tragedy, as Nietzsche understands it? Given his
schwärmerische exposition of it, getting clear about his position is not a straight-
forward task.9 What is clear is that Greek tragedy for him involves a unique blend
of two types of art, the Dionysian and the Apollinian, which map on to an analogous
distinction between two kinds of psychological states, as well as—apparently—a
metaphysical distinction between two levels of reality. The central Apollinian arts,
epic and Greek sculpture, are essentially representational and involve a heightened
8 The German word Wahn means mania, madness, or delusion, but is also used more broadly to
refer to various forms of comprehensive error or illusion. Nietzsche often uses it alternatingly with
Illusion.
9 On Nietzsche’s distinctive mode of writing in BT, see especially Mulhall (2013): ‘[O]ne might
equally well view metalepsis not merely as a strategy adopted within the book but also as the basic
principle of its construction. For if BT does invite an understanding of itself as structured overall in
the terms it posits for understanding the structure of one phenomenon it analyses, then that part of
the book stands for (substitutes or goes proxy for, incarnates or exemplifies the living spirit of) the
whole—an essentially metonymic effect’ (252).
or idealized representation of individual ‘phenomena’, especially of human

individuals. The Apollinian component of Aeschylean and Sophoclean tragedy
consists in the dramatic action acted out on the stage, typically portraying ele-
vated, heroic individuals meeting an inevitable downfall and destruction. The
pleasure we gain from Apollinian art, according to Nietzsche, derives from the
idealization of spatio-temporally individuated appearances, including pre-eminently
the human individual, which presents them under the aspect of beauty. ‘What is
beauty?’, Nietzsche asks in one of his working notes, and answers:
An experience of pleasure that hides from us the actual purposes of the Will in a
phenomenon. How is this experience excited? Objectively: beauty is a smile of
nature, a surplus of power and of pleasure in existence. [. . .] But what is this
smile, this seductive something? Negatively: the disguising of distress [Noth], the
smoothing out of wrinkles and the serene, soulful look of the thing. [. . .] Beauty
is [. . .] the negation of distress [. . .] All the urge and greed, the pushing and shov-
ing, the contorted exertions must not be noticeable [. . .] how is this possible,
given the terrible nature of the Will? Only through a representation, subjectively:
through interposing a structure of illusion [Wahngebilde] [. . .]
(KGW III.3.7.[27])
Apollinian art, then, deals in beautiful representations, and beauty is a matter of

representing individuals in an idealized manner, as exhibiting ‘a surplus of power
and pleasure in existence’. This, we may suppose, is partly a matter of how the
object is represented, and partly a matter of the attitude taken towards, or invited
by, the representation. The Apollinian attitude is one of detached ‘contemplation’,
one that avoids a psychologically realistic identification with, or simulation of,
what is being represented. There is, then, a fairly clear sense in which Apollinian
art presents us with what Nietzsche calls transfiguring illusions.
But tragedy is of course not a purely or even primarily Apollinian art, rather, its
fundamental insight is said to be Dionysian. Pure Dionysian art is non-
representational, and its paradigms are music in its melodic and harmonic com-
ponents (BT 2: 40), and dance—the latter presumably and typically only for its
participants (BT 1: 37). Nietzsche characterizes such art primarily through its
psychological effect: an artwork is experienced in a Dionysian way just in case
experiencing it involves an affective condition of ‘blissful ecstasy’ analogous to
‘intoxication’ (BT 1: 36). The phenomenology of this kind of state or occurrence is
as of a breakdown of the barriers of individuation, such that ‘each one feels him-
self not only united, reconciled, and fused with his neighbor, but as one with him’
(BT 1: 37). This kind of Einsfühlung with others could thus be said to involve a
pleasurable ‘negation of individual existence’ (BT 21: 127), not as a thought or
belief, but as an affective experience.10
10 For a detailed phenomenological analysis of Einsfühlung, see esp. Scheler (2009: sect. A.ii, A.vii).
According to Nietzsche, pre-Socratic Greek tragedy combines Apollinian and

Dionysian elements in a specific way. The originally sole element of primitive
tragedy is the singing and dancing satyr chorus, while the stage drama is a later
addition that interprets the chorus’s Dionysian experience to it and to the audi-
ence through Apollinian mythical ‘images’ (BT 10: 73):
The metaphysical joy in the tragic is a translation of the unconscious Dionysian

wisdom into the language of images: the hero, the highest manifestation of the
will, is negated for our pleasure, because he is only phenomenon, and because
the eternal life of the will is not affected by this annihilation. ‘We believe in eter-
nal life’, exclaims tragedy [. . .] (BT 16: 104)
Thus it is intimated that [. . .] we are therefore to regard the state of individuation
as the origin and primal cause of all suffering, as something objectionable in
itself. [. . .] This view of things already provides us with [. . .] the mystery doctrine
of tragedy: the fundamental knowledge of the oneness of everything existent, the
conception of individuation as the primal cause of evil, and of art as the joyous
hope that the spell of individuation may be broken in augury of a restored
oneness. (BT 10: 73–4)
This ‘restored oneness’ is understood by the participants in the practice, including

the audience in the ancient Greek context, on the model of the Dionysian experi-
ence as exhibited by the original satyr chorus, as ‘infinite primordial joy’ (BT 17:
105). Hence the ‘transfiguring’ effect of tragedy in that original Greek context is
twofold. On the one hand, there is the pleasure in Apollinian beauty as repre-
sented by the heroic figures of the drama, seducing the audience to an affirmation
of individual existence modelled on this heroic pattern. On the other hand, the
initiated audience also understands the ultimate destruction of these figures as an
overcoming of even that heroic particularity, and thereby an overcoming of suf-
fering, towards a ‘joyful’, non-individuated Dionysian condition. It is clear that
this second aspect of Greek tragic pleasure involves belief in certain mythical
contents in the first two senses of ‘myth’ highlighted by Nietzsche. The pre-
Socratic Greeks believed, if we follow Nietzsche, in the ‘infinite primordial joy in
existence’ of ‘the one living being, with whose creative joy’ they believed the tragic
hero to finally become ‘united’ (BT 17: 105).
These beliefs clearly have significant affinities with Schopenhauerian meta-
physics. Yet, as we saw in section 1.2, Nietzsche himself criticizes as rationally
unfounded not just the specifics of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics but even Kant’s
substantive negative claim that reality as it is in itself differs qualitatively, and on
some readings also numerically, from empirical reality.11 The upshot of the 1868
11 While some interpreters would deny that Kant is committed to this negative claim, this is, in one
form or another, the standard reading of Kant’s transcendental idealism and it is also Nietzsche’s read-
ing. See also next note.
critique is repeated in section 18 of the Birth, where Kant and (less plausibly)
Schopenhauer are hailed as victors over the optimism of theoretical culture:
[G]reat men [. . .] have contrived [. . .] to make use of the paraphernalia of sci-

ence [Wissenschaft] itself, to point out the limits and the relativity of knowledge
more generally, and thus to deny decisively the claim of science to universal
validity [. . .] Kant showed that [space, time, and causality] really served only to
elevate the mere phenomenon [. . .] to the position of sole and highest reality, as
if it were the innermost and true essence of things, thus making impossible any
knowledge of this essence [. . .] (BT 18: 112)
Similar points are made in notebook entries from the same period (1871–2): ‘all
qualities indicate an indefinable absolute state of affairs’ (KGW III.4.19.[40]).
‘Even Schopenhauer’s “Will” is only the most general form of appearance of
something wholly undecipherable’ (KGW III.4.12.[1]). Nietzsche clearly inter-
prets Kant’s theoretical philosophy as articulating a type of metaphysical agnosti-
cism and epistemological humility, and this is also his own position.12 All of this
explains an important feature of the Birth, often overlooked by interpreters,
namely that the content of the tragic myth of the Greeks, including its Dionysian
components, is declared by Nietzsche to be Illusion:13
[T]he insatiable will always finds a way to detain its creatures in life and compel
them to live on, by means of an illusion spread over things. One is chained by
the Socratic love of knowledge [. . .] another is ensnared by art’s seductive veil of
beauty [. . .] still another by the metaphysical comfort that beneath the whirl of
phenomena eternal life flows on indestructibly [. . .] These three stages of illusion
are actually designed only for the more nobly formed natures [. . .] All that we
call culture is made up of these stimulants [. . .] (BT 18: 109–10)
The two last stages of illusion correspond to the Apollinian and the ‘Dionysian’-
mythical aspects of tragedy, and in regard of the latter it is not clear what Nietzsche
might mean by ‘illusion’ here other than the fact that the relevant metaphysical
beliefs have no rational basis and are (at least) unlikely to be true. The Greek
transfigurative artistic practice rests on what are very likely false beliefs, that is, on
a myth also in the third sense mentioned earlier. What makes all of this perplex-
ing is that Nietzsche nevertheless both affirms that practice as superior to
Socratic-inspired theoretical culture and, furthermore, offers his own mythical
narrative, which differs importantly from the Greek myth but is not clearly
12 Nietzsche’s reading of Kant is strongly influenced by Lange (1866). For recent interpretations of
Kant’s theoretical philosophy in terms of epistemological humility and metaphysical agnosticism, see
esp. Langton (1998) and Allais (2015).
13 Notable exceptions are Han-Pile (2006) and Mulhall (2013). See also next note.
presented as distinct from it, and which is supposed to (partly) articulate a new
and distinctively modern tragic world-view, a ‘tragic culture’ of modernity that
Nietzsche claims to have been ‘inaugurated’ by Kant’s metaphysical agnosticism
(BT 18: 112).
Here we have arrived at the fulcrum of this artfully opaque work. It would
appear, and this is still the standard reading, that Nietzsche proposes his own,
Schopenhauer-inspired, metaphysical story that he seems to use both for justify-
ing the exalted place in cultural history assigned by him to the tragic world-view
of the Greeks and for grounding a new tragic culture of modernity. But how could
it do that, given Nietzsche’s critique of Schopenhauer and his avowed metaphys
ical agnosticism in section 18 of the Birth? To respond to this question by saying
that this frame-narrative is self-consciously presented as a myth, without even an
attempt at rational justification, may be correct as far as it goes, but one may well
wonder how a mythical narrative in conjunction with a metaphysically agnostic
position can ground anything.
Before turning to this conundrum, the central puzzle of the Birth, let me briefly
outline the contents of Nietzsche’s myth. Its basic metaphysical dichotomy is
articulated throughout much of the text in Schopenhauerian terminology—the
empirical world in space and time as a ‘mere phenomenon’, analogous to a ‘dream’,
in which an essentially different, non-objective, non-spatial, but affective ground
of things, the ‘Will’, in some way ‘objectifies itself ’. But if one looks at the details, it
becomes clear that Nietzsche’s picture departs quite fundamentally from
Schopenhauerian precedent. While Schopenhauer’s metaphysical Will is sup-
posed to be a non-personal, unconscious, and yet affective ‘blind urge’, the ‘Will’
or ‘primordial unity’ (das Ur-Eine) of the Birth of Tragedy is insistently character-
ized both as personal and sentient. It is Urschmerz, primordial suffering (BT 4:
45), and it is also described as the ‘original artist of the world’ and the ‘one truly
existent subject’ (BT 5: 52). In the preparatory notes Nietzsche also refers to it as
the Urintellekt, whose ‘work’ is the empirical world (e.g. KGW III.3.5.[79]). So the
relation between spatio- temporal phenomena and their ground, which in
Schopenhauer was inconsistently both required and not permitted to be a causal
one, is here articulated in creationist terms, not only in the notes but also in the
text itself (BT 5: 52) and in the paraphrase added in the 1886 preface: ‘an amoral
artist-god who [. . .] by creating worlds, frees himself from the distress of fullness
and overfullness and from the suffering from opposites crowded within him’ (BT
‘Self-Criticism’ 5: 22; trans. modified).
Nietzsche’s ‘metaphysical assumption’ (BT 45: 45) is one of a suffering god or
demiurge who seeks to free himself from suffering by creating—by a cosmic ‘art’.
In line with this idea, Nietzsche in this mythical narrative denies the view that is
central to the Greek tragic myth, that ‘we are to regard the state of [spatio-temporal]
individuation as the origin and primal cause of all suffering, as something objec-
tionable in itself ’ (BT 10: 73). On the contrary:
that which suffers, struggles, tears itself apart is always only the one Will: it is the
most extreme conflict as the primordial ground of existence. Individuation is
therefore the result of suffering, not its cause. (KGW III.3.7.[117])
The self-redemption through creation of the suffering deity (BT 4: 45) takes place
in part through what we normally regard as human creativity—specifically
human artistic activity—so it requires what may seem like human co-operation,
but in Nietzsche’s story there is in fact no genuinely self-caused human activity
involved in this:
Insofar as the subject is the artist, however, he has already been released from his
individual will, and has become, as it were, the medium through which the one
truly existent subject celebrates his release in appearance. [. . .] [A]s knowing
beings we are not one and identical with that being which, as the sole author and
spectator of this comedy of art, prepares a perpetual entertainment for itself. [. . .]
[T]he genius in the act of artistic creation coalesces with this primordial artist of
the world [. . .] (BT 5: 52)
So ‘human’ art, according to this story, is in fact authored by the artist-god and, in
a curious semi-reversal of the Christian picture, humanity’s ‘highest dignity’
(ibid.) is to redeem god from suffering. What is it about art, and pre-eminently
tragic art, that is supposed to achieve this? On this question, Nietzsche’s dithy-
rambic utterances are especially unclear. Some of them suggest that it is the deity’s
contemplation (‘vision’; BT 4: 45) of humans who, via the practice of Greek tra
gedy, have succeeded in affirming their own existence, which accomplishes this.
On another possible reading, it might be supposed that, since the mind of the
human artist in the act of creation ‘coalesces’ with the ‘one truly existent subject’,
it is the content of the artwork that performs the god-redeeming function. Since
the content of Greek tragedy, as Nietzsche has been at pains to show, is Illusion,
the self-redemption of the deity through tragic art would then either amount to a
kind of divine self-deception, or be comparable to the pleasure taken in a fiction.
Another reading that has been proposed is that it is the act of creation itself that is
‘joyful’ and that it is what overcomes divine suffering.14 But this reading makes it
14 This proposal is due to Han-Pile (2006). Han-Pile’s subtle and original reading of Nietzsche’s text
differs substantially from the one put forward here. In her view, Nietzsche regards his myth in the
Birth as at least symbolically true (2006: 395–6)—as in some sense an insightful and truthful symbol
ization of what is metaphysically the case. According to Han-Pile, Nietzsche’s conception is inspired by
Heraclitus and involves the idea of a creative cosmic energy that experiences pain but ultimately a
surplus of pleasure in the creation and destruction of ‘worlds’ and individuals (2006: 380–1). At the
level of human existence, that existence is justified by the production of (human) art in so far as this
involves a symbolic identification with, and replication of, the creative and destructive activity of the
metaphysical ‘world artist’ (2006: 382–7). The two basic difficulties with this reading, as Han-Pile rec-
ognizes (2006: 396), are that it conflicts with Nietzsche’s expressly stated metaphysical agnosticism and
that it seems to make the metaphysics otiose for human ‘redemption’. If such redemption is achievable
mysterious why the demiurge’s world-creation is not sufficient for this and why
human art should also be needed for it.
Whatever the answer, all of this ‘artists’ metaphysics’ may well be thought, as
Nietzsche himself later called it, ‘arbitrary, idle, fantastic’ (BT ‘Self-Criticism’ 5:
22). It is clear that he regarded it as rationally ungrounded and very likely false
even at the time of writing it, given the metaphysical agnosticism he expresses
repeatedly both in the text itself and in the writings surrounding it. What he does
not consider arbitrary or fantastic, and certainly not idle, is the general pattern of
thought and experience that this apparent metaphysics exemplifies. This is, quite
openly, the pattern of myth. For Nietzsche’s seemingly metaphysical narrative,
first, connects the transient appearances of empirical existence to a supra-
temporal ontological ground and it goes out of its way to present both that ground
itself and the relation between it and the empirical world as not adequately explic
able by reason. This is a myth, secondly, because if it were true it would yield a
certain sort of time-transcending meaning for human experiences and (osten
sible) actions, giving them, in Nietzsche’s language, an ‘eternal’ purpose, one that
is ultimately independent of human volition—in this case, the god-redeeming
mission described above. It is through embracing or affirming such a purpose
that humanity is supposed to ‘transfigure’ its natural existence by both coming to
see suffering as meaningful and becoming able to legitimately affirm its own
existence, thus transfigured, unqualifiedly. This is part of what Nietzsche means
when he says that ‘any individual—is worth only as much as it is able to press
upon its experiences the stamp of the eternal; for thus it [. . .] shows its uncon-
scious inner convictions of the relativity of time and of the true, that is metaphys
ical significance of life’ (BT 23: 137).
The trouble appears to be, though, that Nietzsche himself does not take that
mythical story to be true, given his many metaphysically agnostic statements
throughout the early writings. We would therefore do well to heed the emphasis
on the words ‘ephemeral’ and ‘chance’ (or ‘accident’: Zufall) in the speech of
Silenus, through which Nietzsche expresses his pessimism about the ‘natural’, un-
transfigured human condition: ‘Oh, wretched ephemeral race, children of chance
and misery [. . .] What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born’
(BT 3: 42). For all we know or have any reason to believe, there is no ‘true, that is
metaphysical significance of life’ (BT 23: 137) independent of human choice,
whether of the sort expressed in Nietzsche’s myth or any other. That story is
therefore, quite self-consciously, a myth also in the third sense mentioned earlier.
by the creation of art with (symbolic) Dionysian and Apollinian components, why should it be neces-
sary to think of such activity as an imitation of what happens at the metaphysical level? Han-Pile’s
interpretation also raises psychological and normative questions: why should creation and rationally
unintelligible destruction, whether real or symbolic, be needed for joy? And even if that were so, would
such joy be justifiable beyond its hedonic benefits for the individual artist, or even redemptive in
Nietzsche’s sense?
It is, and is taken by its author to be, likely to be false, which explains why
Nietzsche makes no attempt to justify it by appeal to either argument, direct
(quasi-mystical) experience, or revelation-based tradition (in this case obviously
non-existent).
If the contents of both the tragic myth of the Greeks and of Nietzsche’s own
myth are not even considered to be true by him, how can they possibly ground or
justify the supposedly transfigurative project of a tragic culture? The question
obviously did not arise for the ancient Greeks, as Nietzsche interprets them, for
they did not regard their myth as false. But it does arise with respect to Nietzsche’s
privileging of a tragic culture, be it the Greek version, which he considers to be
based on Wahn, or his own envisaged modern pendant.
Perhaps the key to an answer can be found in a passage I have already cited
repeatedly: ‘And any people—just as, incidentally, any individual—is worth only
as much as it is able to press upon its experiences the stamp of the eternal’ (BT 23:
137). This sentence could be read as suggesting a kind of self-conscious fictional-
ism. Nietzsche’s idea might be that the deficiencies of the natural human condi-
tion can only be overcome by a transfiguration of nature in the sense of a certain
kind of commitment to a transcendent ‘ideal’ (such as a blissful Dionysian union
with the Ur-Eine, or the redeemed artist-god), which is treated ‘as if ’ it were real,
while knowing or believing it to be a fiction.
Fictionalism in normative or evaluative matters, whether putatively descriptive
or revisionary, is generally and in my view rightly considered to be unpromis-
ing.15 To mention just one set of problems associated with it: fictionalizing is a
human practice that depends on the possibility of a distinction, among conscious
attitudes and their objects, between the empirically real or genuine and the merely
pretended. Such fictionalizing or pretending is subject to normative assessments.
These assessments apply, first, to the appropriateness or otherwise of engaging in
fictionalizing at all in a particular situation. We do not, for example, think it
appropriate to react to what we take to be important practical (e.g. moral)
demands by engaging in fictionalizing that interferes with our ability to respond
to the urgency of those real-life demands. We also, secondly, make normative
judgements about worthwhile and less worthwhile fictions. Some fictions are
interesting or arresting, others are tedious and pointless, still others are objection-
able (e.g. treating random violence against helpless or weak people ‘as if ’ it was a
highly desirable and noble achievement). It is clear that the norms and values that
we take to authorize both of these kinds of judgement are not themselves con
stituents of the fictions that they are used to assess, nor of some meta-fiction in a
possible structure of nested fictions. Even for such a meta-fiction, the question
needs to be answered of whether it is worthwhile, in general or in a particular
15 For critical assessments of moral fictionalism in particular, see Blackburn (2005, 2007), Hussain
(2004), and Thomas (2012).
situation, to engage in it, and this cannot be answered by recourse to values or

norms that obtain only within the pretence of the fiction.
Applying these points to a revisionary fictionalist interpretation of the putative
ideals at the centre of the two myths of The Birth of Tragedy—the Greek tragic
myth and Nietzsche’s own—the worry would be this: if Nietzsche enjoins us to act
as if union with some non-individuated ontological domain were ‘infinite prim
ordial joy’ (BT 17: 105), or as if our ‘highest dignity’ consisted in redeeming a
suffering god, while knowing the relevant ontological propositions to be only
‘true in the fiction’, what makes this sort of ‘artistic’ fictionalizing activity so
extremely important and valuable? If the answer were to be that it is, in reality,
supremely pleasurable for the individual engaging in it, this would not only con-
flict with Nietzsche’s own vituperations against ‘egoism’, it would also delineate a
psychologically implausible and evaluatively paltry ideal of day-dreaming hedon-
ism. If the answer is instead that tragic fictionalizing enables, in reality, unquali-
fied life-affirmation, or some other attitude or comportment Nietzsche takes to be
of utmost importance, then other pressing questions would arise: why should a
tragic pretence be so uniquely conducive in these respects, and why, anyway,
should unqualified life-affirmation, or those other attitudes and comportments—
whatever they are—be so supremely valuable? The Birth of Tragedy gives no
explicit answer to these questions. For illumination on them, as indeed on the
prior issue of whether a fictionalist reading the argument of the Birth is textually
warranted, we need to turn to its sequel, Untimely Meditations.
1.4 Affectivity and the Ideal in Untimely Meditations
The problems which I have pointed to so far are largely implicit and not directly
addressed in Nietzsche’s first book, but they come more clearly into view in its
sequel, Untimely Meditations, and in the notebook entries of the same period.
What strikes, or should strike, the attentive reader of these writings is their perva-
sive use and endorsement, without irony or scare quotes, of the familiar vocabu-
lary of ethical evaluation. We hear much about good and evil here, and much in
praise of morality and virtue:
For speak of any virtue you will, of justice, magnanimity, courage, of human wis-
dom and compassion—in every case it becomes a virtue through rising against
the blind power of the factual and the tyranny of the real and by submitting to
laws that are not the laws of the fluctuations of history.
(UM II 8: 106; trans. modified)
What also becomes explicit in the Meditations is Nietzsche’s ethically inspired

pessimism about the trajectory of history. History so far ‘amounts to a compendium
of factual immorality’ (UM II 8: 105). Wherever we look in it, we find so much
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eloped, tore down the hill by special dâk, and were married at
Saharanpore. Where is she now?”
Wynyard made no reply. Captain Ramsay’s wandering memory had
evidently evoked a vision of his dark-eyed and remarkably pretty
mother. She had run away with the handsome Hussar officer, and
had, in consequence, been cast off by her relations.
“Dead?” inquired the other after a pause.
Wynyard nodded.
“Ah, well, we shall all be dead one day—some sooner—and some
later,” and he fell into one of his sudden silences.
“I think he is better!” whispered his wife to Wynyard, as they parted
at the hall door. “Didn’t he seem almost himself this evening? And he
took great notice of Topsy and Darkie, and made their dinner
himself.”
Two days later, as the chauffeur was leaving Mrs. Hogben’s cottage
after his midday meal, preparatory to getting ready the car, Mrs.
Ramsay suddenly appeared at her gate and beckoned to him
frantically. She looked white and frightened.
“Jim went off this morning,” she began, “and hasn’t been home
since. He never did this before. Oh, I ought to have taken your
advice,” and she wrung her hands. “I’ve been searching for him
since eight o’clock.”
“Did he speak to any one before he left the house?” inquired
Wynyard.
“No. Fanny saw him going out in a terrible hurry; he had on a pair of
white gloves, and said he would be late for parade.”
“Poor fellow!”
“And the stupid girl never said one word to me till she brought me my
hot water at eight o’clock.”
“I’m just off with the car, taking Miss Susan to a croquet tournament,
or I’d go and have a look round. What about the policeman?”
“The policeman! Why, he cannot walk! He weighs sixteen stone.”
“Well, anyway, if you don’t mind, I’ll send Tom Hogben and Jones;
they know the country, and will keep a shut mouth. I’ll just tell them
now,” and he hurried away.
Although Miss Susan had no money wherewith to buy diamonds,
sables, and motor cars, she contrived to extract a great deal of
pleasure out of her elderly spinster life. She enjoyed mild little tea-
parties, followed by bridge at sixpence a hundred—and received her
partner’s scoldings with disarming humility. Her one passion was
croquet. “Miss S. Parrett” was a notable player—her name appeared
in print in connection with local tournaments; her arm was steady,
her aim was deadly, and, not only this, she played the game with her
head as well as with her hands.
On the present occasion Miss Susan had lured her reluctant niece to
a meeting at Upstreet—a village about ten miles from Ottinge; in
fact, she made such a point of Aurea’s company, of Aurea’s support
—whether in success or failure—that the girl felt compelled to go—
and, at any rate, she took a sincere pride in Susan’s modest
triumphs. The tournament was prolonged till seven o’clock; Miss
Susan was detained, being in the Finals. Dusk was closing on the
world when the two ladies, with two prizes (salad bowl and a silver
cigarette-case), took their departure. The prize-winner, in exuberant
spirits, uttering effusive expressions of enjoyment and thanks, had
talked herself into the car, and there were so many after-thoughts
and messages that even the chauffeur became impatient with his
dear Miss Susan; he was desperately anxious to get home and hear
the result of the search for Captain Ramsay.
It was an unusually close evening—there was thunder in the air—
and the interior of the motor was stuffy even with the windows down
on both sides—and how they rattled! The old machine trundled along
at its best speed, as if inspired by the fear of Miss Parrett awaiting its
arrival, watch in hand. Its driver had another and more well-grounded
dread in his mind.
The ladies within discussed the recent party, the play, the prizes, and
the guests.
“The Wendovers were there; did you see them?” said Miss Susan
—“Mrs. Wendover and Gertrude. I thought they both looked very ill.”
“Yes, and I believe it was from hunger, Susan,” was her niece’s
surprising reply. “I never saw such a tea as they had—surreptitiously.
It’s shameful to watch, I know, but I was not playing, and happened
to be sitting near, and could not help myself. I felt so frightfully sorry
for them—I was inclined to cry!”
“My dear girl, surely you are not in earnest?”
“I only wish I wasn’t. Gertrude had a whole plate of sandwiches,
besides cakes; she took them quietly, when no one was looking, and
devoured them ravenously, and her mother pocketed several buns
and lumps of sugar.”
“But why? I don’t understand.”
“Because probably they have nothing to eat at home! Mrs. Lucas,
the parson’s wife, told me in confidence that they are almost
penniless; the little money they had has been lost in some bank that
tempted people with high interest and then went smash. The
Wendovers cling to the old cottage—it’s their own—but they have no
servant; they do their own washing and, very early in the morning,
their own doorstep! Everything is spick and span still. After dark they
steal out and collect firewood and apples, and even field turnips, and
yet they hold up their heads and ‘pretend.’ I heard Mrs. Wade
pressing them to have cake and tea—and they declined.”
“Have they no friends or relations?”
“I don’t know. Mrs. Lucas said she did not like to ask for their
confidence. She always has them to supper on Sundays, and sends
them eggs; but she is poor enough herself with eight children. She
thinks the Wendovers will break down now that the winter is coming,
and yet they won’t allow any one to guess that they are destitute.”
“Dear, dear, dear, how shocking! What is to be done, Aurea?”
“I’ve just had my allowance, and I’ll post them a five-pound note to-
morrow anonymously, and I’ll get something later on from dad.”
“Yes, yes, yes, and I must see what I can do too. Poverty is cruel—a
terrible thing—what a trial of one’s character!”
“It is indeed, and so are riches sometimes. They seem to change
people’s dispositions—if they come in for a fortune.”
“That’s true; but I do hope, dear child, you are not thinking of your
poor Aunt Bella?”
“Aunt Bella was much nicer when she lived in the Red Cottage,
dined at one o’clock, and put a penny in the plate.”
“Oh, now, Aurea, I can’t let you say that; she is very proud of you,
and a dear, kind sister to me. Why, only last week she gave me a
lovely lace parasol, and when she writes to me it is always ‘My own
darling Susan.’”
Aurea was silent. She was thinking of darling Susan’s many
deprivations, humiliations, and hardships.
“We all have our foibles, have we not, Aurea, my child?”
“Oh, I know that, Susan, and I——”
Whatever Aurea was going to add was cut short by her aunt’s
piercing scream. From some thick bushes on the left bank, a tall
figure had shot out; there was a lightning rush, a shout from the
chauffeur, who jammed on the brake, then a violent swerve, an
upheaval, and a sickening, crunching sensation.
A man had deliberately flung himself in front of the car, which had
gone over him, then stopped abruptly, shuddering throughout its
rickety frame.
The driver sprang off and dragged from beneath the wheels a limp
and motionless body. Yes, his vague fears had been justified.
“It’s Captain Ramsay!” he called to Aurea, who had already hurled
herself into the road. “I’m afraid he is done for. Stay where you are.”
As he spoke, he raised a limp and bleeding figure in his arms, which
he carried to the hedgerow; next, he took off his coat and laid him
upon it, and ran and lit a motor lamp. All his actions were surprisingly
prompt and vigorous.
“Now, will you come over here, miss?” he called to Susan
authoritatively, but she was almost beside him. In a crisis, simple,
talkative Susan was another person, and could rise to the occasion.
“And you, Miss Morven, try and find some water—we passed a
stream just now; bring it in anything—your hat or—yes, the salad
bowl! I’m afraid it’s a bad business,” he continued, “and his head is
all cut—and his wrist—it’s an artery. Miss Susan, fetch a stick
quickly, quickly, and I’ll make a tourniquet.”
The chauffeur seemed to have taken complete command of the
situation; he ordered the ladies hither and thither, he bandaged up
Captain Ramsay’s head with Aurea’s white scarf—which he tore into
strips—whilst Aurea stood by, eager to help, but trembling like an
aspen. She had never heard a man moan, or witnessed such a
scene.
“I think I’ve fixed him up just for the moment,” said Owen, rising, “and
now I’ll fetch the doctor. You two ladies won’t mind stopping, will
you?”
“Certainly not! What do you think we are made of?” rejoined Miss
Susan. “Here,”—now sinking down—“place his head in my lap, and
just go as hard as ever you can!”
“He is in a very bad way, I’m afraid, and I really don’t like leaving
you, but there’s no help for it.” Then, after sticking a flaring lamp on
the ground beside them, he climbed into his place and sped away.
In less than half an hour he had returned, accompanied by Dr. Boas;
they found the poor sufferer still alive and moaning, his head
supported by Miss Susan, and his lips bathed by her niece.
“I half expected this,” said the doctor, as he knelt beside Captain
Ramsay. “Internal injuries,” he announced, after a rapid examination,
“and fatal.”
“The stretcher and the parish nurse will be here presently,” said
Owen; and, hearing a familiar voice, Captain Ramsay slowly opened
his eyes and asked—
“Oh, it’s cold. Where am I? Where’s Katie?”
As he recognised Owen bending over him, he murmured—
“Wynyard, Wynyard—hold on—I’m coming!”
“You see he is off his head,” said Miss Susan, “poor fellow; he did
not know what he was doing.”
Then, as the chauffeur relieved her of the dying man’s weight, he
regained consciousness, and, again opening his eyes, he whispered
“Wynyard!” and passed away in the arms of Wynyard’s son.
CHAPTER XXI
BY THE SUNDIAL
A long time had elapsed since a tragedy or an inquest had taken

place in Ottinge; the last had occurred twenty years previously, when
Joe Watkins (a village name), being jealous, had thrown his wife
down a well, and, despite her prayers, entreaties, and screams, had
left her to drown, for which crime he had paid the extreme penalty of
the law in Brodfield Gaol.
A suicide was something entirely foreign to the character of the
community, and the topic was exhaustively debated in the Drum. Joe
Thunder gave it as his opinion that the remains of Captain Ramsay
—speaking from recollection—would be buried with a stake at a
cross-roads—probably at Crampton, being nearest. The village was
stirred out of its normal lethargy and, secretly, rather proud of being
the scene of a sensation, and newspaper paragraphs.
The Parson and Miss Morven spent the night succeeding Captain
Ramsay’s death at Ivy House, and were anxious to carry his widow
off to the Rectory; but she preferred to remain in her own home until
after the funeral, and then leave Ottinge. All Mrs. Ramsay’s little
world, gentle and simple, had shown her their kindness and
sympathy: the Rector looked after business matters, Miss Susan had
undertaken correspondence (she enjoyed letter-writing), Wynyard
took charge of the dogs, whilst Aurea gave personal attendance and
warm affection.
The inquest was conducted as quietly and as speedily as possible,
thanks to the good offices of Dr. Boas; the verdict returned was
“suicide whilst of unsound mind,” and the jury offered their sincere
condolences with the widow. At the funeral Ottinge was proud to note
a lord and two honourables appearing as mourners, and the remains
of Captain Ramsay received Christian interment in the churchyard;
there was no word of cross-roads—much less a stake!
Afterwards, Mrs. Ramsay’s brothers, who were guests at the
Rectory, took their departure, and it was generally known that their
sister would follow them to Ireland within a week. Her obstinate
persistence in for years clinging to a man who by rights should be in
an asylum had alienated her friends; but now that he was no more,
there reigned a great peace. The boarder dogs had been abruptly
dispersed, and Wynyard, who obtained special leave, personally
conducted several parties over the fields to Catsfield station, and
wound up matters out of doors. Aurea did the same within—but they
rarely met. She was surprised to discover the footing on which her
aunts’ chauffeur stood at Ivy House. Till now she knew little of their
acquaintance; it was a before-breakfast and after-dark affair.
It was also Wynyard’s task to collect and sort and pack the Captain’s
belongings, by his widow’s particular desire.
“I like to have you about,” she said. “Is it not wonderful how well we
have got to know one another, and how much we have in common,
since I opened the hall door to you, a stranger, that wet morning last
April? Jim was devoted to you, and you were so good to him—sitting
here, evening after evening, talking and listening and playing picquet
with that poor fellow. Oh, Owen, if you had known him as your father
and I knew him, you would understand why I, forsaking all my own
people, clung to him till the end!”
“Yes, you did that!” he answered, with emphasis.
“Only think of the tragedy of his life,” she resumed, in a broken voice,
“the last fifteen years, all through a branch knocking off his sun topee
and his determination to get first spear. Oh, what a little thing to
mean so much! The way of life.”
Wynyard, the handy man, packed up cases containing old Indian
relics, such as faded photographs, horns, bear skins, khaki uniforms,
Sam Brown belts, packets of tiger claws, and all sorts of rubbish
dear to Mrs. Ramsay. Among the collection was a photograph
album, aged at least thirty years, and considerably the worse for
Indian rains and Ottinge damp.
“I think this must be your father,” said Mrs. Ramsay, pointing to the
old-fashioned carte-de-visite of a handsome man in Hussar uniform,
“and this is your mother opposite,” indicating a pretty, dark-eyed girl
holding up a puppy. “You see, she was fond of dogs, like you and
me! Do you care to have them?” drawing them out as she spoke.
“Yes, thank you most awfully, I should. It’s funny that I should come
upon my people and hear so much of them in Ottinge of all the
world! I don’t remember either of them, for my mother died when I
was two years old, and my father was killed at polo—it killed her too
—and then my sister and I were sent home.”
“So you have a sister?”
“I have very much a sister,” and he laughed; “she has all the family
brains—and her own as well.”
“I will not allow that, Mr. Wynyard; it was marvellous how, with a few
hints from me, you threw yourself into a life before you were born.
Isn’t it strange that I am the only one in Ottinge who knows your real
name?”
“Except Miss Morven,” he corrected. “You know he recognised me,
and said ‘Wynyard.’”
“Yes, but no doubt she believes he was wandering. You don’t wish
your surname to be known here, do you?”
“No, my christian name does as well.”
“I must confess I wonder you remain! You are so young, and life here
is deadly dull for such as you, with all the years and energies before
you,” and she looked at him interrogatively. It was dusk; she was
sitting in the deep drawing-room window, her slim figure silhouetted
against the fading light. Wynyard had been nailing down some
cases, and came and stood, hammer in hand, in the middle of the
room. She knew perfectly well why he remained in the sleepy village;
it was because Aurea Morven had glorified Ottinge.
“I believe I know your secret,” she remarked suddenly. He made no
reply. Mrs. Ramsay was no doubt thinking of Aurea, whilst he was
dwelling on the bargain with his uncle. Should he tell her? They had
of late been drawn so much to one another—she already knew half
his story, and had just given him the photographs of his father and
mother—her husband and his father had been like brothers—yes—
he would!
And there in the semi-dusk, leaning his hands on the back of a chair,
in as few words as possible, he related his tale, and how he had
made a solemn compact for two years, which compact he was
bound to keep to the letter and the bitter end.
“And it’s a good deal more bitter than I expected,” he concluded.
Listening with tightly folded hands, the slim figure in black accorded
him her entire sympathy. Now she was in possession of all his
confidence, and such was his unhappy plight, he was desperately in
love with a girl, and could neither speak nor show a sign—nor make
his real position known. What an amazing state of affairs! Did Aurea
recognise in Wynyard a silent worshipper? And was it not true that
love and smoke cannot be concealed?
“You will keep this to yourself, I know,” he said. “I’m not sure that I’m
within my right in telling you, but somehow I had to.”
“You may be certain I shall never breathe it till you give me
permission,” she answered, drawing a long breath; “but what an
extraordinary man your uncle must be!”
“Yes, he is eccentric; but I believe he is right—this sort of
apprenticeship will do me a jolly lot of good. I know more of the
people now I’m one of them. Many a thing I’ve learnt here, that I’d
never have had a glimpse of, and I must tell you fair and square that
I gave Uncle Dick a lot of bother in the way of my debts.”
“Hereditary extravagance—your father—a younger son—drove a
four-in-hand, you know. Ah, here comes Aurea,” as the little gate
swung. “I half promised to go over there this evening.”
“Then good-bye, I’m off; I’ll finish the packing to-morrow,” and he
escaped through the back garden.
It was abundantly evident that of late Miss Morven avoided him, and
he had not spoken to her since the tragic occasion when they both
hung over a dying man on the high road to Upstreet.
More than six months had gone by since he had come to Ottinge;
sometimes it seemed an endless time, at others as but yesterday.
One thing was clear and stationary in his mind—his living among
working people had opened the eyes of a future landowner, given
him a better estimate of his responsibilities, and a sympathy and
understanding that nothing could obliterate.
At last Ivy House was closed; the blinds were drawn down, the key
hung in Mrs. Hogben’s bedroom, and the memory of the recent
catastrophe had become a little dim. It was three weeks since the
Captain had killed himself, and other events had begun to press
upon public attention. Since the tragedy Aurea had absolutely
refused to drive in the motor, to her Aunt Bella’s great annoyance;
she was painfully anxious to have it in daily use, for she feared that
being the cause of a man’s death might depreciate the car’s value!
And when the girl announced she would never get into it again, she
was furious, and her face assumed a dull red shade as she asked—
“Do you mean to tell me that, if there’s an accident to a carriage, or if
a cart runs over somebody, that cart is never to be used? How could
people get on?” she demanded. “I never heard of such affected
nonsense. And now I suppose you will go and give my nice car a bad
name? As if it could help the madman throwing himself under it!”
“I’ll say nothing about it, Aunt Bella, you know that perfectly well; but
if you had been in the motor yourself and felt the crunch, I don’t think
you would have cared ever to drive in it again.”
“Rubbish—you are hysterical! You should get Dr. Boas to give you a
tonic and go away somewhere for a change; only you are too much
away from your father as it is—every one says so. It was remarked
to me only the other day.”
“It is funny, Aunt Bella, how many people make nasty remarks about
me to you. Do you suppose that they think you like hearing them?”
and she laughed, and before Miss Parrett could find her breath or an
answer had left her.
It was a fact that Miss Parrett cultivated a cordon of idle, elderly
women, who came to tea or lunch or to spend the day, who were
aware that Miss Parrett had “a good deal in her power to bestow”
(not only in the form of fruit and vegetables), and who knew that,
even more than talking of herself and her wonderful successes in her
youth, her many broken-hearted lovers, she liked to discuss her
pretty, popular niece and to listen to their hostile criticisms. Miss
Parrett was openly jealous of this girl’s ascendancy in Ottinge, where
she was the great lady. After all, Aurea was only a sort of half-niece,
and she could leave her money where she liked. This notification
was promptly repeated, and received with unqualified and respectful
approval, by the two Miss Dabbs and Mrs. Forbes Cattermole and
her freckled daughters. On these occasions, when Aurea was the
topic, and her appearance, manners, and customs were figuratively
placed under the microscope, and then exhaustively debated, the
entrance of Miss Susan was invariably followed by an abrupt and
awkward silence.
It was a lovely afternoon—Saturday—the third day of September,

and the chauffeur was working in the Manor garden close by the
sundial, repairing some of the rose pergolas with nails and wire.
Suddenly, to his delight, he beheld Miss Morven coming through the
yew arch nearest to the house—a slim white figure in a dark green
frame—with her hat over her arm, and accompanied by Joss, who, in
exuberant joy, was leaping his own height from the ground.
As the young lady sauntered slowly up the broad walk, she stopped
every now and then to pick flowers from the luxuriant borders on
either hand. As these were white, she was evidently gathering them
for the church. He watched, surreptitiously, her wonderfully supple
figure, her lithe grace, as she stooped and stretched hither and
thither. Aurea had grown thin, her lovely colour had certainly faded,
no doubt she had not yet recovered from the shock of Captain
Ramsay’s horribly sudden death.
By and by his vicinity was discovered to her by Joss, who had been
dashing about among the cabbages in chase of an historic pheasant,
and now accorded him a rapturous acknowledgment. He had just
finished his task, and stepped out into the walk; as the young lady
approached he touched his cap, and she halted for a moment and
said, with obvious hesitation—
“A lovely day, isn’t it?”
“Yes, miss;” and then he ventured to add, “You never come out in the
car now?”
“No,” she answered, “never again; it’s a juggernaut!”
“I would not say that!” he protested. “What happened could not have
been helped; of course, it’s an old machine and out of date”—(he
was thinking of the 60 h.p. Napier at Westmere)—“and requires a lot
of humouring to get her to run at all, and if put to too high a pressure
might go to pieces—still——”
But here Miss Morven interrupted with a hasty gesture, and, laying
her flowers upon the sundial, turned to face him fully, and said—
“I’m rather surprised”—she paused for a moment, and then resumed
—“that when you saw what a dull sort of place this was, and what a
wretched old car you had to drive, you stayed on. You really have no
proper job; my aunt’s motoring is absurd. I cannot imagine why you
remain here.”
“Can you not, miss?” he answered, in a low voice, his gaze fixed on
the sundial and its motto, “Time Trieth All.” Suddenly raising his
eyes, he met hers steadily—for one unguarded moment the truth
was in his face!—and there was a thrill of passion in his voice as he
added, “Then, in that case, I am afraid it would be impossible for me
to tell you.”
For as long as one could count ten, there was an expressive silence,
only broken by the crashing of cabbage leaves, the notes of wood
pigeons, the boom of a passing bee.
Miss Morven remained motionless, but the trembling of her lip
indicated the tension of her self-control, and a wave of sudden colour
invaded her cheeks, and raced up into her wavy dark hair. This tell-
tale blush betrayed that she knew as well as the chauffeur, his sole
reason for remaining in Ottinge.
Then without a word she lifted the flowers, and, holding herself
unusually erect, the slim white figure proceeded down the walk that
led towards the old bowling-green.
Wynyard, as he stood watching her, asked himself, Was she also
passing out of his life? In another moment a yew hedge had hid her
from his eyes.
“I believe I’ve done it now!” he muttered. “I could not help it; she
knows, and is ready to kill me for my presumption! She will tell her
aunts, and I shall get the sack.”
He picked up a small blossom that Aurea had dropped on the
sundial, opened his watch, and carefully placed the little flower along
with the little photograph. When people are in love, what irrational
follies tempt them!
CHAPTER XXII
AUREA’S REFLECTIONS
But Aurea had no intention of “telling her aunts”; on the contrary,

she crossed the old bowling-green in order to avoid the Manor, and
returned home across the meadows that led by Claringbold’s Farm.
In the dim hall of the Rectory she encountered Norris—who, of an
afternoon, often haunted that vicinity—and said, as she handed her
the flowers—
“Will you please fill the church vases? I’ve rather a headache from
the sun.”
The girl really did feel considerably dazed and bewildered, and
passed into the drawing-room, where she ruthlessly dislodged Mac
from her own particular pet chair. Mac vacated the seat with an air of
injured deliberation, found another, and sighed as heavily as if he
were a human being.
The time had come for thinking things out, and his mistress, having
seated herself, prepared to hold a court of inquiry on Aurea Morven.
One would suppose that she really had had a sunstroke like poor
Captain Ramsay! What mad impulse had urged her to question the
chauffeur? At the moment, she seemed to be listening to another
personality speaking by her lips. She felt a fluttering in her throat as
she told herself that this inscrutable young man was certainly in love
with her. Behold, she summoned her evidence! The photograph in
the watch, the village concert, when, after a rousing camp song, he
had given, as an encore, “I’ll sing thee songs of Araby”; she believed
that the words were addressed to herself, that the singer was
pouring out his soul to her. Possibly other girls shared her conviction,
and had taken it to their tender and palpitating hearts. When the last
note had died away in a ringing silence, Ottinge recognised a
gentleman’s song and a gentleman’s voice; after a pause of
astonishment, there came a storm of belated clapping and applause,
and one or two timid female voices were heard to cry out “Encore!”
Some of the rustic audience grinned, and declared that the words
were no good, and damned nonsense, but the tune was pretty
enough; it was whistled in the street within the week.
Aurea summed up the photograph, the song, and the recent
interview by the sundial; the recollection of Owen’s voice, the look in
his extremely expressive grey eyes, set her heart beating. At the
same time she blamed herself for her amazing indiscretion. She,
who had lately avoided this gentleman chauffeur at choir practice, at
the Manor, and in the village—she, who knew that he treasured her
photo, to actually accost him in the garden, and demand what he
meant by remaining in Ottinge!
She felt her face burning, and no wonder! Well, at any rate the scene
had given her a shock—it had roused her to the knowledge of her
own feelings. It was with difficulty her maidenly reticence could put
the thing into thought, but it simply came to this—she had arrived, at
last, at the clear realisation that the daughter of the Rector of Ottinge
was in love with her aunts’ chauffeur! She whispered it to herself and
Mackenzie! How did it sound? How would it sound when talked
abroad, all over the parish and the county? What would people say?
When she thought of her Aunt Bella, she actually laughed aloud, and
Mackenzie, whom she had disturbed, raised his head and gave a
low growl.
The chauffeur disturbed her—even now her pulses were racing; she
had never felt like this when in the company of Bertie Woolcock—no,
nor any of Aunt Morven’s young eligibles—but this man affected her
differently. Was it because she knew that he cared for her? Was it
because he was handsome, reserved, and self-reliant? Was it
because there was a mystery about him? No; it was simply because
he was himself; his voice was still speaking to her inward ear—“It
would be impossible for me to tell you!” Nevertheless, his eyes had
been eloquent, and, since the truth must be confessed, her heart
was in a wild whirl of happiness.
But why was he here in retreat? Surely not because he had done
anything disgraceful? Mrs. Ramsay liked him, and said he had been
such a comfort to her husband and herself; her father liked him, so
did Susan, so did the village; the dogs adored him—all but
Mackenzie, an exception who proved the rule!
Yes, she would give her heart to the chauffeur—as a matter of fact it
was not a case of giving; it was already bestowed—and keep the
knowledge to herself. No one should ever know—above all, he
should not know. “Time Tries All.” His affairs might improve; some
day he might be able to throw off his chauffeur’s disguise and be
himself; meanwhile, she determined to avoid him, and never again
enter the Manor garden when there was a chance of meeting him; as
to the green motor, she had, as she assured him, done with it for
ever.
CHAPTER XXIII
AN HOUR OF LIBERTY
The white flowers had been gathered on Saturday in the Manor

garden, and it was now Monday. Miss Parrett had adventured a drive
to Westmere, returning home by four o’clock, and the car being
washed and put away betimes, the chauffeur found himself at liberty.
The glowing and golden September evening was enticing, and,
whistling for Joss, he set out for a good long stretch before supper.
On this occasion, man and dog deserted the low country and the
water-meadows, and climbed the hills which sheltered the village.
Their road lay by a grassy cart-track, which ran sometimes between
high hedges, sometimes along a headland, with here and there a
hoary old gate—it was chiefly used in harvest-time (indeed, wisps of
fresh hay and straw were still clinging to the bushes), and was the
short-cut to Shrapton-le-Steeple, a hamlet which lay eight miles
south of Ottinge. The track emerged upon a bare plateau, from
whence was a fine view of the surrounding country, and here was
also a sharp freshness in the air, which the man inhaled with
unmistakable enjoyment. Here, too, in the banks, were inviting
burrows, and these afforded the dog an absorbing interest, as he
drew their savour into his nostrils with long-drawn sniffs of ecstatic
satisfaction.
After a tramp of between three and four miles, Wynyard threw
himself down on a tempting patch of grass, drew out his case, and lit
one of Martin Kesters’ excellent cigars. His eyes roamed meditatively
over the broad landscape below, stretching away into the dim
distance—the spreading uplands splashed with orange gorse, dotted
with sheep and cattle, with here and there a rust-coloured
farmhouse, whose pale blue smoke lazily ascended into the cool
clear air. Wynyard enjoyed the scene and the sensation of absolute
freedom; at least he was out of livery—he glanced at his shabby
tweed coat—beyond the reach of orders, and master of himself! Not
much to boast of! To think that this job was the only one he could
take on when driven into a corner by circumstances and Uncle Dick!
He had no head, that was his trouble, although he could keep it at a
pinch—and wasn’t this what was called a paradox? If he were only
clever with his tongue and his pen, like Leila, and had her talent for
languages and for organisation, her genius for saying and doing the
right thing!
As he unconsciously picked bits of grass, his thoughts returned to
Aurea and their recent meeting in the Manor garden. Her confusion
and her vivid blush held for him a most stupendous significance.
Memory and imagination had magnified the occasion, until it seemed
to be the one important event in his whole life!
If, by any chance, Aurea cared for him, and saw in him something
more than her aunts’ civil man-servant, why should he not present
himself in his true character? The gruff replies in imitation of Tom
Hogben were surely an unnecessary handicap? Anyway, he had let
himself go on the night of the accident, hustling and ordering on the
spur of the moment, sending Miss Morven for water, Miss Susan for
wood—though no doubt they were both too much upset to have
noticed anything besides the tragedy.
Possibly a change of manner would make a difference, and Aurea
was so bright, and so wonderfully clear-sighted, she might divine
something of his situation, and wait. “Wait!” repeated incredulous
common sense, “wait eighteen months till he had cast off his
shackles!” On the other hand, Bertie Woolcock loomed large.
Undoubtedly he would not wait, nor would Aurea’s own relations.
The Rector himself was a good, unworldly old scribbler, but the
people that mattered, such as Miss Parrett and General and Mrs.
Morven, they would never allow their niece to refuse many
thousands a year and Woolcock, in order to keep faith with a
mysterious and penniless chauffeur. And Bertie undoubtedly meant
business; he was continually appearing at the Rectory or the Manor,
charged with paltry messages and unnecessary notes—any excuse
or none served him! He even attended evening church, where he
openly and shamelessly worshipped the Rector’s daughter, and not
the Rector’s God.
As Wynyard contemplated Woolcock’s position and the desperate
obstacles that lay in his own path, he picked many blades of grass.
Naturally he disliked his rival; he remembered him when he was in
the upper fourth at Eton, a big, loutish fellow—not of course in Pop—
and an awful duffer at games; who never did anything for himself,
that others could be bullied into doing for him. “Woolly” was now a
stout, sleek, well-groomed man of thirty, with a heavy red face, a
lethargic manner, and—in the company of respectable women—a
great talent for silence.
Supposing that Aurea was talked over? Westmere was a temptation.
No; he could not face such a hideous possibility—yet he was
penniless and gagged. Woolly, a rich man and free; he, a prisoner to
a promise and in a false position—a position which compelled him to
touch his cap, not only to his lady-love, but to his rival! and the latter
salutation made him feel murderous.
Woolly had tons of money; he was so rich that possibly he had never
seen a penny! His attentions to Aurea, his rides, his churchgoing, his
marked civilities to Miss Parrett, paraded themselves before
Wynyard’s mental sight—and the old Polly bird was all for the match!
Why, that very afternoon, as she was leaving Westmere, she had
held a long, mysterious “last word” conversation with Mrs. Waring
before she bundled into the car, and squeaked out “Home—and go
slowly!” Meanwhile, Woolcock’s fluffy-haired sister stood on the
steps with her hands on her hips, a newly lit cigarette in her mouth,
the very embodiment of triumphant satisfaction!
Undoubtedly a solemn treaty had been signed and sealed. He had
no powerful allies, how could he interfere? His mind groped round
the puzzle in confusion and despair. If his own forefathers had not
been such crazy, spendthrift fools, he would not have found himself
in this maddening situation. To think that his great-grandfather had
lost thousands of pounds and hundreds of acres, racing snails on the
dining-room mahogany, against another lunatic! However, the
original place still remained in the family, also the most important

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Value in Modernity: The Philosophy of

Existential Modernism in Nietzsche,

5.3 An Analogy with Indistinct Affective-­Evaluative Experiences? 174

Chapter 4 is a slightly modified version of a journal article published previously

preoccupations, and approaches that are often considered characteristically

established, albeit unavoidably fuzzy, connotations and uses, some explanation is

The modernists characteristically responded to the ‘modern tide’ in an ambivalent

3 See also Taylor (1989: 460–2). 4 Cf. McFarlane (1991: 81–2).

There is a further feature standardly regarded as characteristic of modernism

5 Taylor (1989: 459–65).

programmatically by the protagonist of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (1882):

6 See also McFarlane (1991: 80–2).

What makes it illuminating or even legitimate to speak of these thinkers as

He seems to me to be someone who has opened up a hundred new possibilities

8 See Poellner (2013).

The kind of approach I am recommending, which combines rational reconstruc-

9 Prominent versions or, respectively, appropriations of the irrationalist interpretation of Nietzsche

10 I include Nietzsche’s so-­called middle-­period writings—Human, All-­too-­Human and Daybreak—

connection with Nietzsche’s later metaphysical indifferentism (Chapter 2.5), in

initial statement of the attractions of such a view, to the commitments it incurs,

values—values that we hope to become realized in the as yet unattained ends of

dubiously coherent radical-­choice view of intentional action, according to which

1.1 Nietzsche’s Early Works as Founding Texts of Existential

Existential modernism is a paradigm of thought and sensibility whose central

20 How to Redeem Nature: Early Nietzsche

Founding Texts of Existential Modernism 21

of individual rights. Nietzsche’s dissatisfaction with such conceptions is palp­able,

2 Kant (1978: 97).

22 How to Redeem Nature: Early Nietzsche

3 See e.g. Schiller (2005: esp. 149–53).

Metaphysical Agnosticism: The Critique of Schopenhauer 23

I shall propose a different, non-­orthodox, interpretation of Nietzsche’s early

1.2 Metaphysical Agnosticism: The Critique of Schopenhauer

Contrary to my suggestions above, Nietzsche’s early philosophy has usually been

24 How to Redeem Nature: Early Nietzsche

1.3 Redeeming Nature Aesthetically: The Birth of Tragedy and

Among the young Nietzsche’s assumptions and commitments mentioned in sec-

The Birth of Tragedy and Myth-­Making 25

7 See esp. Young (2008: 217–45).

26 How to Redeem Nature: Early Nietzsche

The Birth of Tragedy and Myth-­Making 27

or idealized representation of individual ‘phenomena’, especially of human

Apollinian art, then, deals in beautiful representations, and beauty is a matter of

28 How to Redeem Nature: Early Nietzsche

According to Nietzsche, pre-­Socratic Greek tragedy combines Apollinian and

The metaphysical joy in the tragic is a translation of the unconscious Dionysian

This ‘restored oneness’ is understood by the participants in the practice, including

The Birth of Tragedy and Myth-­Making 29

[G]reat men [. . .] have contrived [. . .] to make use of the paraphernalia of sci-

30 How to Redeem Nature: Early Nietzsche

The Birth of Tragedy and Myth-­Making 31

32 How to Redeem Nature: Early Nietzsche

The Birth of Tragedy and Myth-­Making 33

34 How to Redeem Nature: Early Nietzsche

situation, to engage in it, and this cannot be answered by recourse to values or

1.4 Affectivity and the Ideal in Untimely Meditations

What also becomes explicit in the Meditations is Nietzsche’s ethically inspired

A long time had elapsed since a tragedy or an inquest had taken

It was a lovely afternoon—Saturday—the third day of September,

But Aurea had no intention of “telling her aunts”; on the contrary,

The white flowers had been gathered on Saturday in the Manor

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5.3 An Analogy with Indistinct Affective-Evaluative Experiences? 174

10 I include Nietzsche’s so-called middle-period writings—Human, All-too-Human and Daybreak—

dubiously coherent radical-choice view of intentional action, according to which

of individual rights. Nietzsche’s dissatisfaction with such conceptions is palpable,

I shall propose a different, non-orthodox, interpretation of Nietzsche’s early

The Birth of Tragedy and Myth-Making 25

The Birth of Tragedy and Myth-Making 27

According to Nietzsche, pre-Socratic Greek tragedy combines Apollinian and

The Birth of Tragedy and Myth-Making 29

The Birth of Tragedy and Myth-Making 31

The Birth of Tragedy and Myth-Making 33