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Nietzsche, Nihilism and
the Philosophy of the Future
Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy
Series Editor: James Fieser, University of Tennessee at Martin, USA
Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy is a major monograph series from

Continuum. The series features first-class scholarly research monographs
across the field of Continental philosophy. Each work makes a major
contribution to the field of philosophical research.
Adorno’s Concept of Life, Alastair Morgan

Badiou, Marion and St Paul, Adam Miller
Being and Number in Heidegger’s Thought, Michael Roubach
Deleuze and Guattari, Fadi Abou-Rihan
Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation, Joe Hughes
Deleuze and the Unconscious, Christian Kerslake
Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New, edited by Simon O’Sullivan
and Stephen Zepke
Derrida, Simon Morgan Wortham
Derrida and Disinterest, Sean Gaston
The Domestication of Derrida, Lorenzo Fabbri
Encountering Derrida, edited by Simon Morgan Wortham and Allison Weiner
Foucault’s Heidegger, Timothy Rayner
Gadamer and the Question of the Divine, Walter Lammi
Heidegger and a Metaphysics of Feeling, Sharin N. Elkholy
Heidegger and Aristotle, Michael Bowler
Heidegger and Philosophical Atheology, Peter S. Dillard
Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction, Michael Lewis
Heidegger, Politics and Climate Change, Ruth Irwin
Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy, Jason Powell
Heidegger’s Early Philosophy, James Luchte
The Irony of Heidegger, Andrew Haas
Levinas and Camus, Tal Sessler
Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology, Kirk M. Besmer
Nietzsche’s Ethical Theory, Craig Dove
Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, edited by James Luchte
The Philosophy of Exaggeration, Alexander Garcia Düttmann
Sartre’s Phenomenology, David Reisman
Who’s Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari? Gregg Lambert
Žižek and Heidegger, Thomas Brockelman
Nietzsche, Nihilism and
the Philosophy of the Future
Edited by Jeffrey Metzger

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© Jeffrey Metzger and Contributors 2009
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Contributors viii
Note on Citations to Nietzsche’s Works x
Introduction 1
1 Nietzsche’s Double Rhetoric: Which Nihilism? 9
Stanley Rosen
2 Toward a New Aristocracy: Nietzsche contra Plato
on the Role of a Warrior Elite 20
Michael Allen Gillespie
3 Nietzsche: Nihilism and Neo-Gnosticism 37
Stanley Corngold
4 Nietzsche—Rhetoric—Nihilism: “Every Name in History”—
“Every Style”—“Everything Permitted” (A Political
Philology of the Last Letter) 54
Geoff Waite
5 Does That Sound Strange to You? Education and Indirection in
Essay III of On the Genealogy of Morals 79
Daniel Conway
6 Free Spirits and Free Thinkers: Nietzsche and Guyau
on the Future of Morality 102
Keith Ansell-Pearson
7 How Deep Are the Roots of Nihilism? Nietzsche on the Creative
Power of Nature and Morality 125
Jeffrey Metzger
vi Contents
8 Nietzsche and the Impossibility of Nihilism 143

James I. Porter
9 Nietzsche, Contingency, and the Vacuity of Politics 158
Robert Guay
Notes 171
Bibliography 196
Index 208
Contributors
Keith Ansell-Pearson holds a Personal Chair in the Department of Philosophy

at the University of Warwick. He has published several books, including
Nietzsche Contra Rousseau and An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker: The
Perfect Nihilist, and many articles and book chapters. He is also the co-author
(with Christa Davis Acampora) of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, and has
edited or co-edited, amongst others, A Companion to Nietzsche and The Nietzsche
Reader.
Daniel Conway is Professor and Head of Philosophy at Texas A & M University.

He is the author of Nietzsche and the Political, Nietzsche’s Dangerous Game, and
Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, and the editor or co-editor of several
other books, including the four-volume Nietzsche: Critical Assessments of Leading
Philosophers. His research has been supported by grants from the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the Oregon Humanities Center, the Deutscher
Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD), the Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fel-
lowship in the Humanities at Harvard University, and the National Humanities
Center.
Stanley Corngold is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at

Princeton University. He is the author of five books, including The Fate of the Self
and Complex Pleasure: Forms of Feeling in German Literature, has co-authored a
novel, and has edited or co-edited seven books. He has also published over one
hundred articles and book chapters. He has edited and translated the Norton
Critical Editions of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and of Kafka’s Selected Stories.
Michael Allen Gillespie teaches at Duke University, where he is the Jerry G.

and Patricia Crawford Hubbard Professor of Political Science, Professor of
Philosophy, and the Director of the Gerst Program in Political, Economic,
and Humanistic Studies. He is the author of several books, including Nihilism
Before Nietzsche and The Theological Origins of Modernity, and has edited or
co-edited three others, including Nietzsche’s New Seas: Explorations in Philosophy,
Aesthetics, and Politics.
Robert Guay is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Binghamton University,

State University of New York. His work on Nietzsche has appeared in European
Contributors ix
Journal of Philosophy, Inquiry, Philosophy and Literature, Philosophical Topics, and in

several edited collections.
Jeffrey Metzger is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and

Government at Cameron University; he has also taught at Brown University
and Kenyon College. He has held numerous fellowships and has published
essays on Nietzsche.
James I. Porter is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the

University of California, Irvine. His main research interests are in literature,
philosophy, and intellectual history. He is author of Nietzsche and the Philology
of the Future and The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on The Birth of Tragedy and
editor of Constructions of the Classical Body and of Classical Pasts: The Classical
Traditions of Greece and Rome. His book, Matter, Sensation, and Experience: The
Origins of Aesthetic Inquiry in Ancient Greece, is forthcoming from Cambridge. His
current projects include a study in the invention and reception of Homer, fur-
ther studies in ancient aesthetics, and Nietzsche and the Seductions of Metaphysics.
Stanley Rosen recently retired as the Borden Parker Bowne Professor of

Philosophy at Boston University; before that he was the Evan Pugh Professor
at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of over ninety articles and
book chapters and of 16 books, including Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay, The
Limits of Analysis, Hermeneutics as Politics, The Ancients and the Moderns, The Ques-
tion of Being: A Reversal of Heidegger, and The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche’s
Zarathustra. His work has been translated into ten different languages.
Geoff Waite teaches at Cornell University in the Department of German

Studies and in the Fields of Comparative Literature and Visual Studies. He is
the author of Nietzsche’s Corps/e and the forthcoming Heidegger: The Question of
Esoteric Political Ontology.
Note on Citations to Nietzsche’s Works
References to the German editions of Nietzsche’s work are to the volume and
page number of the following editions, indicated by the following abbreviations:
KSA = Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden. Ed. G. Colli and

M. Montinari. Berlin: DTV and de Gruyter, 1980.
KGW = Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari. Berlin:
de Gruyter, 1967–.
SB = Sämtliche Briefe, Kritische Studienausgabe, 8 vols. Ed. Giorgio Colli and
Mazzino Montinari. Munich and Berlin: DTV and de Gruyter.
We have followed the common English-language practice of referring to

Nietzsche’s published works by abbreviations of their translated titles. Unless
otherwise noted, references are always to the section numbers (and, where
appropriate, to book or part numbers, then section numbers), never to page
numbers. We have used the following translations; where a particular essay has
used different translations, they appear in that essay’s bibliography.
A or AC = The Antichrist. Trans. Walter Kaufmann, in Walter Kaufmann (ed.),

The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Viking Press, 1968. Also The Anti-Christ. Trans.
R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Viking Penguin, 1968.
BGE = Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books,
1966.
BT = The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books,
1967.
CW = The Case of Wagner. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books,
1967.
D = Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
DS = David Strauss, the Writer and the Confessor, in Untimely Meditations.
EH = Ecce Homo. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1969.
GM = On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and
R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1969.
GS = The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974.
Note on Citations to Nietzsche’s Works xi
HAH = Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
NCW = Nietzsche contra Wagner. Trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable
Nietzsche.
PTAG = Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. Trans. Marianne Cowan.
Washington, DC: Regnery, 1962.
RWB = Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, in Untimely Meditations.
TI = Twilight of the Idols. Trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche. Also
Twilight of the Idols. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Viking Penguin, 1968.
TL = On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense. In Philosophy and Truth:
Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s. Ed. and trans. Daniel
Breazeale. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities International Press, 1979.
UM = Untimely Meditations. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983.
WP = The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New
York: Vintage Books, 1967.
Z = Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking Press,
1968.
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction
Nietzsche famously referred to nihilism as “this uncanniest of all guests” (dieser

unheimlichste aller Gäste). The figure of the guest, “standing at the door,” sug-
gests that he is foreign, an outsider or alien from whom one can safely disso-
ciate or differentiate oneself. The fact that nihilism is the “uncanniest of all
guests,” however, suggests that he makes our home itself foreign and alien; his
chill figure is not simply unwelcome, it renders us homeless (heimatlos). It was
Nietzsche’s engagement with nihilism, his prescient experience of homeless-
ness, that dominated the serious reaction to his work in the early part of the
twentieth century. Nietzsche was regarded as the prophet of the death of God,
the herald of the most profound spiritual crisis to convulse the Western world
in centuries. There were of course exceptions, but for the most part the catas-
trophe Nietzsche had foretold and christened with the name “nihilism” was
never far from the minds of his readers, living as they were in the midst of
civilizational cataclysms every bit as terrifying as those Nietzsche had predicted.
At some point in the past 20 or 30 years this situation changed, at least in the
English-speaking world. Nietzsche’s name is no longer associated primarily
with nihilism, and in some cases the association does not seem to be made at
all. Certainly this period has produced numerous excellent treatments of
Nietzsche’s relation to nihilism (several by contributors to this volume), and
many very good discussions in books not principally devoted to the subject.
Overall, however, and given the explosion of academic work on Nietzsche over
the past 20 years or so, it is surprising to see how little direct attention the sub-
ject of nihilism has received. The concentration on other topics in Nietzsche’s
writings is obviously to be welcomed, and many important studies have appeared
illuminating aspects of Nietzsche’s work that had been obscured or overlooked
by the emphasis on Nietzsche’s cultural criticism and diagnoses. Despite this
expansion of our field of vision, however, one cannot escape the sense that we
have lost sight of something important, indeed vital, and that this loss is not
necessary. The present collection of essays therefore aims to contribute to our
understanding of Nietzsche by returning attention to his treatment of nihilism,
the aspect of his thought that Nietzsche himself considered perhaps the most
important and original. It does so by bringing together a series of distinct and
at times discordant perspectives on Nietzsche, representing not only substan-
tive, interpretive, methodological, and “disciplinary” differences but divergent
2 Nietzsche, Nihilism and the Philosophy of the Future
attitudes toward Nietzsche’s intentions and success in his confrontation with

nihilism.
Stanley Rosen begins the collection with a powerful restatement of some of
the major themes of his writings on Nietzsche. In particular, Rosen is concerned
with two main topics: Nietzsche’s double rhetoric and the inevitability of nihil-
ism in his thought. Nietzsche’s double rhetoric, his habit of both concealing
the fact that fundamentally there is only chaos and shouting it from the roof-
tops, reflects his position as the final, self-destructive culmination of modern
philosophy. There are, according to Rosen, two main streams of modern
philosophy, one which conceals the artefactual—that is, the constructed and
temporary—character of philosophical truth and one which insists on boldly
announcing it, whatever the consequences. “The oddity of Nietzsche is that he
accepts, or at least seems clearly to accept, both of these theoretical styles, often
in the same context.” Ultimately, however, both styles collapse into the recogni-
tion that without stable criteria for truth there cannot be stable criteria for
nobility; the result is not only that truth collapses into chaos, or that philosophy
cannot finally be distinguished from art, but that nobility collapses into mere
power. As Rosen puts it, speaking of Nietzsche’s distinction between active or
noble nihilism and passive or base nihilism, “It is essential for Nietzsche’s entire
program, both political and theoretical, that the distinction between the two
main types of nihilism can be preserved. In other words, there must be an
enduring distinction between the noble and the base that permits us to identify
instances of each general type. As we have seen, there is no such definite or
stable distinction of this or any other sort. Both the noble and the base deterio-
rate into chaos.” Of Nietzsche’s attempt to ground noble or active nihilism
in the doctrine of the will to power, Rosen says more pointedly, “Nietzsche’s
argument seems to be circular. The noble is the powerful and the powerful is
the noble.”
Michael Allen Gillespie continues Rosen’s critical treatment of Nietzsche, but
focuses more on the social and political aspects of Nietzsche’s thought, and
particularly on his attempt to create a superhuman type through his writings.
Gillespie’s essay begins with a discussion of the necessity of warriors for political
life, and specifically the treatment of the warrior as a human type by Homer
and Plato. Turning to Nietzsche, Gillespie begins with an insightful overview of
Nietzsche’s treatment of the cultural implications and meaning of nihilism.
The confrontation between Plato and Nietzsche that Gillespie reconstructs is
therefore not the familiar story of Nietzsche as antimetaphysician. Gillespie
rather provides an illuminating discussion of the two thinkers’ differing cul-
tural aims and particularly their contrasting goals for education—Plato seeks to
tame and moderate the warrior, while Nietzsche seeks the hardening of the
heart or the soul and therefore necessarily and in the first place the hardening
of the body (for the soul is simply an outgrowth of the body). Gillespie acknowl-
edges that Nietzsche had a more nuanced and respectful view of Plato than is
Introduction 3
often believed, and in particular that he did not actually mistake Plato, who
believed warriors to be necessary and even the breeding ground for philoso-
phers in his ideal city, for Christianity. Even so, however, Nietzsche does reject
Plato’s attempt to moderate warriors.
According to Gillespie, this ultimately reveals the superiority of Plato to
Nietzsche, for it shows that Plato better understood both the soul of the warrior
and the necessities of political life. Most tellingly, Plato’s account of education
is precisely what is missing in Nietzsche; although Nietzsche does not seek
merely to produce a race of ferocious warriors, he gives no account of how
the warriors he believes are necessary to move beyond bourgeois society will be
educated and civilized into something higher than mere destroyers. As Gillespie
writes, Nietzsche “was much more interested in convincing his contemporaries
to choose the path that leads to such an aristocracy rather than with detailing
how this aristocracy should be forged, trained, and ennobled.” Moreover, how-
ever inspiring Nietzsche’s rhetoric may be, without the necessary institutional
and educational structures to promote his spiritual vision over successive gen-
erations, there is little reason to expect his writings to exercise the kind of
formative influence he seemed to hope they would.
Stanley Corngold’s essay is also focused on Nietzsche’s attempts to create a
new aristocracy, though Corngold approaches this question by identifying a
Gnostic streak in Nietzsche’s writings, both published and unpublished, that
will surely surprise many readers. Corngold begins with a long, unpublished
essay-fragment titled “European Nihilism,” which provides a compressed narra-
tive history of nihilism and its stages of development before culminating in a
call for a new elect to emerge and rule Europe. This leads into the discussion of
Gnosticism, in which Corngold shows that Nietzsche shares with Gnosticism not
only a belief in “the ontological priority of an elect,” but also a desire for a more
or less irrationalist form of transcendence, which in Nietzsche’s case centers on
poetic or artistic creation and which he often illustrates with the figure of a self-
igniting and self-consuming flame. In his moments of Gnostic élan, in other
words, Nietzsche rejects not so much the transcendence as the moralized
transcendence of Christianity, the world-weary longing for an escape from
reality. But the image and imagination of a different, incandescent type of tran-
scendence clearly exercised a fascination for Nietzsche throughout his life.
Corngold isolates further significant elements of Nietzsche’s neo-Gnosticism,
including his antinomian and iconoclastic repudiation of Pauline Christianity,
and more generally of “the institutions constituting state and community,”
and his belief, especially evident at the end of “European Nihilism,” that this
repudiation will prepare the way for an almost miraculous transformation
of the social order and the institution of the rule of the elect. Even this, how-
ever, is not an exhaustive list, and one of the strengths of Corngold’s study
is his ability to discern this Gnostic strain both in Nietzsche’s poignant attem-
pts to communicate his singular aesthetic experience and in his somewhat
more clamorous calls for the cataclysmic renovation of the political and
cultural world.
The first three essays raise serious and probing questions about the success
of Nietzsche’s confrontation with nihilism; Geoff Waite’s characteristically
ambitious essay argues that Nietzsche has been all too successful in his attempt
to spread “a great severe form of contagious nihilism.” Waite’s work is one
of the most important challenges to the perennial attempts to normalize
Nietzsche, to read him as a simple precursor to contemporary trends in philoso-
phy, and he continues this challenge here with an analysis of Nietzsche’s claims
to be every name in history and to write in every possible style. These claims,
according to Waite, do not imply a nihilistic permissiveness, despair, or paraly-
sis; on the contrary, Nietzsche’s writings are governed by a highly selective
authorial intention. “This is why he can be ‘every name in history’ and yet prefer
being ‘Prado’ and ‘Chambige,’ can deploy ‘every style,’ yet prefer exo/esoteri-
cism. Like Eternal Recurrence, ‘everything is permitted’ demands selectivity.”
Waite is here referring to Nietzsche’s interest in the cases of Prado and
Chambige, two murderers whom Nietzsche claims to be in his final letter to
Jakob Burckhardt. Nietzsche’s interest in these murderers and the popular
accounts of their trials, and his subsequent tremendous influence on popular
as well as “high” culture, illustrate the Russian Formalists’ “law of the canoni-
zation of the junior branch,” according to which “popular culture—notably
feuilleton journalism, vaudeville, and, in the case of Dostoevsky’s novels, detec-
tive fiction—must be periodically elevated into the ‘canon’ before being
reciprocally returned to the ‘junior branch.’” This formalist law, according to
Waite, implying as it does the necessary and inevitable cross-pollination or
cross-contamination of high and low culture, “is how Nietzsche’s self-described
‘promotion’ of the ‘severe form of great contagious nihilism’ subsequently
has affected a vast array of popular literature, music, and cinema but also of
murderers.” Waite applies his political philology both to Nietzsche’s relation-
ship with the popular press and literature of his time and to his reference to
“my centrum,” concluding his essay with a detailed annotation of Nietzsche’s
last letter to Jakob Burckhardt.
Daniel Conway’s essay also centers on the rhetorical effects of Nietzsche’s
texts but offers a more positive reading of Nietzsche’s intentions and influence
(indeed, Conway’s chapter marks a shift in the volume as a whole from critique
to respectful interpretation). While Waite maintains that Nietzsche’s rhetoric
serves destructive and indeed murderous purposes, Conway suggests that it is
rather designed to educate and train “his best readers.” Conway begins with
Nietzsche’s reference in the Genealogy to his “unknown friends,” an instance of
the general type of comment one finds throughout Nietzsche’s writings address-
ing a “we” or his “friends.” These comments range in tone from impassioned
and exhortatory to intimate and confessional, and from seductive to ironic, but
in every case they raise the question of who Nietzsche means to reach with this
Introduction 5
rhetorical device, and never more so than in his reference to his “unknown
friends” in the Genealogy. Conway’s argument is that Nietzsche’s goal in the cli-
max of the Genealogy is to bring his “unknown friends” into being by teaching
them how to turn the destructive power of the ascetic ideal against itself. He
begins by highlighting several rhetorical snares and pieces of textual misdirec-
tion in these final sections, designed in the first place to separate those among
Nietzsche’s readers who are determined to oppose the ascetic ideal from those
who will be satisfied with half-measures or simple self-deception. Once the “last
idealists of knowledge” have pressed on, however, and have recognized them-
selves in Nietzsche’s portrait of the last, noblest instantiation of the ascetic ideal,
their education and training begins. Nietzsche, according to Conway, forces
his best readers to realize that their devotion to scientific truth is ultimately
grounded in the ascetic ideal, so that their attack on that ideal must be laun-
ched from within its “closed system.” This means then that the overcoming
of the ascetic ideal will require the self-overcoming, and thus possibly the self-
destruction, of these “unknown friends” Nietzsche sets out to create in the Gene-
alogy. Even Conway’s relatively benign or life-affirming Nietzsche requires his
best readers to live dangerously.
Keith Ansell-Pearson’s essay considers Nietzsche in relation to one of his con-
temporaries, Jean-Marie Guyau, whose works Nietzsche read with appreciation.
Although Ansell-Pearson modestly announces that his hope is to shed light on
“the wider intellectual context” of Nietzsche’s work, the comparison with Guyau
is of more than purely historical interest. While Ansell-Pearson is certainly suc-
cessful in showing that Nietzsche read and esteemed Guyau as an important
writer, the essay goes further and reveals Guyau to be an interesting thinker in
his own right. Furthermore, Ansell-Pearson provides a concise yet surprisingly
comprehensive account of Nietzsche’s thought on morality and nihilism
through a series of point-by-point comparisons by Guyau, who illuminates
Nietzsche as much by articulating what both have in common (but in a way that
emphasizes different aspects or a different context than does Nietzsche) as by
contrasting with him.
Ultimately, however, Nietzsche did find Guyau wanting as a thinker, and con-
signed him to the rank of “free thinkers.” As Ansell-Pearson’s title indicates,
Nietzsche draws a clear distinction in his mature works between “free spirits”
and “free thinkers,” where the former are clearly superior to the latter.
Nietzsche’s dismissal of Guyau as a mere “free thinker” forces us to ask what
exactly separates the two. Ansell-Pearson answers this question in the course of
his overview of Nietzsche’s thought, which uses the contrast between free think-
ers (like Guyau) and free spirits (like Nietzsche) to show the importance for
Nietzsche of affirming precisely the unchristian and immoral aspects of life and
nature, which are absolutely essential for vitality and growth. Thus Nietzsche’s
censure of morality is not merely a matter of an abstract critique of concepts
like selflessness and free will, but of affirming suffering and discipline as the
only means to enhance humanity. As Ansell-Pearson succinctly puts it, “the free
thinker holds that the human herd can develop without the need of a shep-
herd; the free spirit upholds the need for one.” Thus while Ansell-Pearson is
less critical or dubious of Nietzsche than some of the earlier essays, he agrees
that Nietzsche is no liberal and no democrat: “Nietzsche does value autonomy,
personality, and sovereign individuality but he couples his valuation of them
not with the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity but with an
unashamedly elitist ‘radical aristocratism.’”
My own contribution continues the focus on Nietzsche’s analysis of social or
political life and its relation to nihilism. It looks specifically at Nietzsche’s
account of the origin of political society in On the Genealogy of Morals, and asks
whether Nietzsche’s argument is that all society, precisely because it enacts and
relies upon repression of instinct, poisons its members with ressentiment and
thus leads to nihilism. I begin by asking whether the question of origins should
have any bearing on the examination of nihilism at all, given Nietzsche’s
emphatic statement that origins do not determine later meaning, and more
generally his keen awareness of the historical mutability of morality and human
nature. I suggest several reasons why the question of origins is relevant to an
appraisal of morality (especially for Nietzsche), the most important of which is
that an investigation of how political society, and so the “bad conscience,” came
into existence reveals the matrix or condition of all morality, and in particular
the role of nature in shaping and driving moral creation. I then turn to the
particulars of Nietzsche’s account in the Second Essay of the Genealogy, and
suggest that Nietzsche’s view is that socialized morality, despite requiring instin-
ctual repression, expresses the same natural form-creating force manifest in
the founders of states, and is therefore an experience of actual, creative power,
and as such does not provoke ressentiment.
The final two essays stand as something of a counterpoint to the rest of the
volume. While all of the other essays more or less agree that Nietzsche regards
nihilism as a genuine and terrible crisis, and that his analysis of nihilism is
meant to have profound political and social consequences, James Porter argues
that Nietzsche is not and cannot be a nihilist, and Robert Guay that Nietzsche’s
response to nihilism is fundamentally apolitical.
Porter begins his chapter with a brisk statement of the essay’s thesis or prem-
ise: “If you love life you cannot be a nihilist about life.” Porter’s argument is that
nihilism, or the negation or rejection of reality, is impossible for both philo-
sophical and psychological reasons. Porter traces the influence on Nietzsche of
both Kant, who argued that one cannot negate reality, and Schopenhauer, who
argued that one cannot negate life, and shows how both convinced Nietzsche
“that willing is an irrefragable constituent in human life.” Yet the fact that the
kind of total or uncompromising negation that nihilism may seem to imply
is not possible does not mean that we are or can be caught up in a simple
or unambiguous affirmation, either: “Nietzsche effectively wants to love life
Introduction 7
unconditionally, but knows he cannot do so because he recognizes that life

itself is never loved or lived simply or unconditionally: life is loved and lived out
of a complexity of motives, only one ingredient of which will be a purely affir-
mative gesture, the instantaneous affirmation of things. Love is overshadowed
by these complexities; and it is ultimately compromised by them as well.”
Nietzsche, in short, “by no means affirms all the forms of life, and he possibly
affirms no form of life unconditionally; all that he affirms is the most basic affir-
mation of life.” This is enough, however, to make nihilism an impossibility. One
cannot negate without willing, and one cannot will without affirming life as a
basic or general condition (here Porter points to Nietzsche’s discussion of
asceticism in the Third Essay of the Genealogy). But what of nothingness, the
total lack of meaning and purpose? Is not the specter of nihilism crippling
and terrifying, an abyss in which one’s will is annihilated, not something that
one can even affirm by negating? No, for the “prospect of the sheer absence of
meaning is not too horrific to bear owing to any lack of meaning, but rather
owing to its excess of meaning. Such an idea will always have too much meaning for
a subject. We can never, in fact, be nihilistic enough to realize the insignificance
that nihilism requires of us.” Thus nihilism remains as impossible as pure
affirmation, and we remain caught in the uneasy space between the two, seized
and animated by an imperfect love of life.
Robert Guay’s essay begins with an excellent account of how to reconcile
Nietzsche’s insistence on human creativity with his insistence that human
action is determined by impersonal forces of nature and history. “According to
Nietzsche, our spontaneous powers are not only conditioned by various deter-
minations, but they also depend on them, so much so that the possibility of these
powers is contingent upon being embodied, having a claim to a history or his-
tories, and belonging to a culture.” This means that contingency plays a crucial,
formative role in human identity and action: “Contingency is a feature of
human existence because we play a role in shaping our identities: what we are
is neither simply determined from outside nor invented in the absence of any
constraint.” Because contingency is such an essential and inescapable part of
the meaning that sustains agency, the possibility of failure is a necessary part,
indeed a necessary condition, of meaningful human action. How then should
we deal with or understand the inevitability of failure?
Guay identifies two major categories of responses to contingency in Nietzsche’s
writings, the Prudential and the Ironic. The Prudential seeks to eliminate or at
least minimize the gulf between our aspirations and our reality, either by simply
believing the two are already identical (Idealism), or by revising one’s hopes so
that they are attainable (Realism). The Ironic, on the other hand, affirms the
distance between the ideal and the actual, reacting to this reality with either
despair or a tragicomic self-awareness and resolve to continue orienting one’s
life by impossible ideals. Guay argues that for Nietzsche, the tragicomic response
is not only the most noble but in fact the only one able to support the possibility
of meaningful choice and action: “The productive process that makes us what
we are depends on maintaining a tension between human situatedness and
human aspiration.” Modern politics, on the other hand, is prudential and
therefore vacuous according to Guay, since its sole concerns are the rational
management of resources and facilitating peaceful social interactions.
Nietzsche is thus a liberal in Guay’s reading, but a very specific and unusual
kind of liberal: “Nietzsche’s position functions as a form of liberalism, since the
role of the state is restricted for the sake of free self-development. The point of
this restriction, however, is not to acknowledge inherent human worth, but to
promote conflict in a manner that is productive of the meanings that sustain
our senses of self.” Nietzsche, in other words, wants to preserve the division
between public and private in its modern liberal form, but only because it
positively produces or promotes more intense private conflict and tragicomic
struggle—not, as in the case of Richard Rorty, because relegating such spiritual
struggles to the private realm makes the public sphere of liberal procedural
justice more secure. In this reading Nietzsche subordinates the public to the
private because he subordinates the prudential to the tragicomic.
It is a cliché to say that a philosopher’s thought exhibits “breadth and depth.”
And these essays, while certainly giving evidence of the scope, rigor, and pene-
trating brilliance of Nietzsche’s mind, do more than simply answer a formal
requirement for diversity and heft. They not only demonstrate the power
of Nietzsche’s insistence that we stop worshipping the shadows of a dead God,
but, taken as a whole, force the reader to confront both aspects of nihilism
as Nietzsche experienced and anticipated it: both the “long plenitude
and sequence of breakdown, destruction, ruin and cataclysm that is now
impending . . . this monstrous logic of terror,” and the “free horizon” and “open
seas” that “[w]e philosophers and ‘free spirits’” perceive when hearing of the
death of God (GS 343). From just over the horizon Nietzsche calls to us, vehe-
mently imploring us to face the deadly truth of nihilism, joyously tempting us
to share in his “gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectations.” Whether
this is a sinister siren song, the delicate and luminous tune of a Dionysian
pied piper, or the fading echo of an explorer who has suffered shipwreck? That
we cannot know without setting out on these waters ourselves.
Chapter 1
Nietzsche’s Double Rhetoric: Which Nihilism?

Stanley Rosen
Anyone who studies Nietzsche with minimal care cannot fail to be struck by the
great importance he assigns to lying and concealment. “Ah! It is impossible to
have an effect with the language of truth: Rhetoric is necessary” (KSA 9: 160–1).
The frequency of remarks of this sort in the Nietzschean corpus is balanced,
however, by a constant and increasingly violent celebration of his philosophical
and political destiny, culminating in the manic assertion “I am dynamite!”
To exaggerate slightly, Nietzsche insists openly that he sanctions, and in fact
recommends, lying and concealment. We are therefore forced to ask which
Nietzsche is telling the truth. The answer to this question is not simply a matter
of literary style. It goes to the heart of his thought. I shall argue that there are
two roads leading to that heart. Both are intended to overcome nihilism, but
both make it inevitable. “The world is throughout no organism but [rather]
chaos” (KSA 13: 373). And again: “will to power as knowledge: not ‘knowing’
but schematizing, so as to impose onto chaos as much regularity and form as
suffices for our practical needs” (KSA 13: 333).
As I read him, Nietzsche is the culmination of modern epistemology, literally
a reductio ad absurdum, not at all the founder of a new postmodern philosophy
but the last consequence of the modern scientific split between primary and
secondary attributes. As such, Nietzsche exemplifies the repudiation of natural
as well as transcendental metaphysics. If there is any trace of metaphysics in
Nietzsche, it is materialism, not idealism. But the materialism is of the construc-
tive variety; we do not, according to Nietzsche, discover but rather produce the
order of the world. In that sense, Nietzsche is a Kantian, but with an important
difference. Nietzsche has no equivalent to the transcendental ego, which he
would regard as itself a production of the will to power. But these productions
emerge from chaos, and thus lead to nihilism.
To come back to the main argument, the problem is that Nietzsche seems to
reveal his doctrines fully and loudly, while at the same time claiming that he
sanctions comprehensive lying and concealment whenever they are necessary
to protect his insights from the degradation imposed by the many. Whether
these contradictions are logical or rhetorical, they are responsible for much
obscurity in Nietzsche’s writings. They have also led to a wide range of conflict-
ing Nietzsche interpretations and assertions that it is a mistake to look for a
coherent doctrine in what is essentially a series of aesthetic observations, lack-

ing in sustained supportive argumentation.
It should come as no surprise that Nietzsche is unable to distinguish between
the principles of art on the one hand and philosophical truth on the other.
Truth is an artifact for him, and therefore it is a lie, because it pretends to be
the discovery of natural order. We thus find two main streams of modern phi-
losophy. The first conceals the truth about the artefactual, whereas the second,
largely influenced by modern science and mathematics, adopts the edifying
rhetoric of truth and repudiates lying and concealment, whatever the difficult,
even disastrous, results of this honesty. The oddity of Nietzsche is that he
accepts, or at least seems clearly to accept, both of these theoretical styles, often
in the same context.
Nietzsche advocates both reticence and boldness, concealing the truth and
shouting it from the roof tops, all in one breath. Still more precisely, he pro-
claims the truth with ever-greater boldness, namely, the truth that there is no
truth. The point must be emphasized. Whereas Nietzsche was familiar with the
doctrine of the difference between esoteric and exoteric writing, which is
explicitly discussed in section 30 of Beyond Good and Evil, it is not quite accurate
to say that he had an esoteric teaching. Nietzsche states his esoteric teaching in
full view of the public, which teaching turns out to be the same as his exoteric
teaching.
So much by way of presenting the context for what follows. I turn next to
some remarks on the related characteristics of lying and concealment, as well as
their differences. To the best of my knowledge, Nietzsche does not distinguish
explicitly and systematically between lying and concealment, but the difference
is obvious. In general, lying is a form of speaking and it depends upon commu-
nication or what may be called political or social activity. Concealment may
also involve language, but it need not. One may conceal something without
being perceived, and this in two main ways—by remaining silent or by excessive
chatter: “To speak much of oneself is also a means to hide oneself” (KSA 10: 95).
The reiterated celebration of masks and concealment may indicate that
Nietzsche’s praise of lying is itself a rhetorical concealment of his deeper
thought: “Everything deep loves the mask” (BGE 40).
This point should be developed in connection with Nietzsche’s relation to
Plato. In the Nachlass of 1884 (KSA 10: 189), Nietzsche remarks: “knowingly
and willingly to lie is worth more than to say the truth involuntarily. On this,
Plato is right.” And again: “an educator never says what he himself thinks about
something, but always only what he thinks with respect to what is useful to those
whom he educates” (KSA 11: 580). As I understand this passage, it is useful to
lie for the sake of a noble end, but utility is not the same as nobility. This is more
or less reminiscent of Platonism, but there is a crucial difference. For Plato, the
noble element in the noble lie is not itself a lie. Perhaps we could call it an
Idea. In Nietzsche, however, truth itself is a lie. All lies are noble, if they achieve
Nietzsche’s Double Rhetoric: Which Nihilism? 11
a sufficient degree of power. Unfortunately, since there are no eternal or objec-

tive standards for the nobility of values, the definition of noble is a matter of the
strength of one’s will. And this is nihilism, the only alternative to which is the
equation of value with strength. There is no reason, other than that of taste and
sensibility, that validates aristocratic values for the person who lacks taste and
sensibility. And again, we come once more to nihilism.
There is little doubt that for Nietzsche, nobility is associated with conceal-
ment (= the mask). The many lack the power to preserve high culture, which
they bring down to their own level. One may also say that the many do not
deserve to come into contact with what is deeper or higher than they. In other
words, Nietzsche rejects the central premise of the French Enlightenment. This
can be made still more specific. Lying is closer to the surface than concealment.
In Nietzsche’s portrait, lying is social whereas concealment, as a steady detach-
ment from the surface, is also a turning toward isolation or solitude. There is
much here that reminds us of Freud, to mention only one explorer of subjectiv-
ity. We cannot study here the degree to which Nietzsche points us toward the
very faculty that he taught us to dissolve or “analyze.”
I want to say a word about the political significance of the doctrine of the will
to power. This concept is an extreme consequence of modern European revolu-
tions, which become progressively more violent in speech and deed. Lying and
concealment continue to hold a prominent place in modern revolutions,
thanks to the rise of pseudophilosophical ideologies, many if not all of which
equate ideological adherence with freedom of speech. Perhaps more impor-
tantly, the replacement of philosophy by ideology increases the recourse to a
double rhetoric, one part for the masses and one for the powerful few.
Nietzsche goes very far toward reliance upon this double rhetoric, so far,
indeed, that many of his readers come to see him as the champion of freedom
and creativity. Their vision is dimmed by the frequency and intensity of his
admirers, so that they are no longer shocked by what Nietzsche says bluntly.
Nietzsche can go so far as to dispense with the truth, or to reduce it to a work
of art. I shall return to this dispensation shortly.
It should now be evident that Nietzsche’s doctrine of rhetoric has been
influenced by Plato, and in particular by the doctrine of the noble lie, namely,
those that redound to the good of the city. But it is also plain that the analogy
is quite limited. Perhaps “useful” would be a better term than noble; lies are
for Nietzsche the tools by which we all, noble and ignoble, attempt to impose
our will onto others. The most powerful transform themselves into lawgivers
and commanders. Such individuals are in Nietzsche’s vocabulary world creators.
They are the paradigm of nobility.
Nietzsche does not say so explicitly, but it is obvious that he distinguishes
tacitly between lies and concealment. One can conceal oneself without speak-
ing, but lies require linguistic expression. As lying stands to discursive commu-
nity, or in a word, to politics, so concealment stands to privacy and solitude.
In Nietzsche’s lexicon, the deepest thoughts are also the highest thoughts; both
are accessible only to the poetic thinker, who both sees and creates at once.
Nietzsche is a philosopher of extremes who from time to time speaks moder-
ately for the sake of concealment.
As a corollary, I note that language is of central importance to the modern
(and postmodern) Enlightenment, whereas the status or respectability of con-
cealment, in politics and philosophy at least, steadily deteriorates. Experience
soon teaches us that openness is not the same as honesty. There are such things
as masks of transparence. Whoever enters into politics learns almost immedi-
ately that one may, and apparently must, conceal lies with masks of honesty.
There is then an inner connection between politics and lying.
In Plato’s Republic, the noble component of the noble lie is not the lie but the
nobility it serves. And this in turn is for Plato the Ideas, whereas for Nietzsche
it is continuous creation of new and ever higher values. Unfortunately,
Nietzsche’s argument seems to be circular. The noble is the powerful and the
powerful is the noble. This will be of some interest when we come to the eternal
return. Meanwhile, we continue with lying and concealment.
There is another way in which to illustrate the superiority of concealment to
lying. Consider the following passage from Stendhal, quoted by Nietzsche in
French: “A belief that is almost instinctive in me is that every powerful man lies
when he speaks, and for even stronger reasons when he writes” (KSA 13: 19).
The superior power of writing to speaking arises from the greater possibility
of concealment when one writes rather than speaking. Speeches may be judged
by actions, which speak louder than words. Conversely, it is no doubt true, as
Nietzsche himself observes, that “to speak much of oneself is also a means to
hide oneself” (KSA 10: 95). And the same is true of everyone, philosophers
and nonphilosophers alike. “If there were a God, he would need on grounds
of politeness alone to manifest himself simply as a resident of the world”
(KSA 11: 543).
Thus far we have examined the relationship between the Socratic and
Nietzschean noble lies. For Nietzsche, there is a correlation between nobility
and power. Everyone seeks to impose onto others his or her own values. The
most successful in this contest are the most noble. With the proper modifica-
tions, one could say something of the sort about Socrates and his students, but
with this crucial difference. For these thinkers, the will of the philosopher is
itself subordinate to a perception of the truth, whereas for Nietzsche, the truth
is what exerts the highest degree of power. Stated in equivalent terms, what
counts as true has been, or is being, produced by the will of the powerful per-
son. Truth is a creation of powerful human beings. It is a work of art. Art is
worth more than the truth for human life, because it is art that determines
what we regard as truth. This being so, however, it seems that the statement
about the true nature of art must itself be an artwork, and therefore an expres-
sion of the will to power. This is the same as to say that truth is a lie.
It should perhaps be obvious, but let me repeat for the sake of caution, that
Nietzsche’s praise of lying refers to the degree of utility of a given statement
for world-creations, and not to the truth value of empirical statements like
“Grass is green” or formal propositions like “2 + 2 = 4.” It is not intrinsically
better for 2 + 2 to equal four rather than five, but it is better for the sake of
the application of arithmetic to the task of creating new world-perspectives
or destroying old ones. It is helpful to think here of Kant’s distinction between
the domain of the transcendental and the empirical. For Kant, there is just
one set of transcendental, world-constituting laws, whereas for Nietzsche, the
number is endless.
Speaking very generally, there is a difference between purposely misidentify-
ing someone or something, and concealing something so that it cannot be
perceived. For the most part, there is no lie in concealment; lying begins, or
may begin, when something comes into view. Stated in another way, if we wish
to protect the genuine philosopher from the misunderstanding of the rabble,
then one must not speak or in some other way betray the nobility of his soul.
For example, philosophers must present themselves as prophets or lawgivers, or
perhaps as commanders and statesmen. More broadly stated, we move from the
love of ideas to the power of ideology.
I have been arguing that Nietzsche’s two rhetorics correspond to what he
himself distinguishes as active and passive nihilism (KSA 12: 350–2). The for-
mer is addressed to philosophers, and the latter to nonphilosophers. One could
also express this as the distinction between esoteric and exoteric teaching (KSA
12: 350, 355). It is essential for Nietzsche’s entire program, both political and
theoretical, that the distinction between the two main types of nihilism can be
preserved. In other words, there must be an enduring distinction between
the noble and the base that permits us to identify instances of each general
type. As we have seen, there is no such definite or stable distinction of this or
any other sort. Both the noble and the base deteriorate into chaos. In his own
way, Nietzsche attempts the strikingly Hegelian task of mastering chaos, but in
a poetical rather than a logical language, of which the high point is the myth of
the eternal return.
So far we have established that Nietzsche makes use of a double rhetoric in
ways that are a function of the nature of his audience. In the most important
cases, that of speaking to philosophers or more extensively to potential philo-
sophers, the problem is not so much that of safeguarding the many from dan-
gerous truths as it is of safeguarding dangerous truths from the many. The
question is that of nobility and baseness, which are beyond good and evil.
A failure to perceive this distinction is at the bottom of the defects of the late
modern European Enlightenment.
Nietzsche often provides contradictory definitions or characterizations of his
main technical terminology. He conceals his inner thoughts by masking them
with illusions or noble lies, but in so doing, he neither affirms nor denies the
truth. Let us take a concrete example: the ascetic ideal, which is developed
most fully in the third essay of the Genealogy of Morals.
It is not easy to understand what Nietzsche means by this expression. There
are almost too many senses to encompass its richness. There can be no doubt
of its importance, however. Nietzsche says “I know of hardly anything that has
had so destructive an effect on the health and racial strength of Europeans as
this ideal; one may without any exaggeration call it the true calamity in the history
of European health” (GM III: 21). We may connect it with decadence and
a sickness that debilitates life: “the ascetic ideal springs from the protective instinct
of a degenerating life which tries by all means to sustain itself and to fight for its
existence” (GM III: 13).
There is, however, another side to the ascetic ideal: “All honor to the ascetic
ideal insofar as it is honest! so long as it believes in itself and does not play tricks
on us!” (GM II: 27) In other words, Nietzsche rejects the simulacra of life-
enhancement and honors the honest efforts of decadent individuals to
preserve us from the spiritual death of nihilism (GM III: 26).
Unconditional honest atheism . . . is therefore not the antithesis of the

ascetic ideal but only one of the latest phases of its evolution . . . It is the awe-
inspiring catastrophe of two thousand years of training in truthfulness that
finally forbids itself the lie involved in belief in God. (Ibid.)
Nietzsche’s analysis of the ascetic ideal is a good example of his conceptual

style—“methodology” would be the wrong word. His key terms—ressentiment,
nihilism, truth, the philosopher—are frequently dialectical in the sense of bear-
ing two quite different, not to say opposite, meanings. In the present example,
two thousand years of truthfulness lead to the rejection of the lie required for
the belief in God. But the full understanding of the ascetic ideal includes the
knowledge of the destructive function of the revelation of the truth. Honesty is
not the least of the roads to nihilism.
Let us take another example. Consider the word “art” (Kunst). In the early
paragraphs of the third essay of the Genealogy of Morals, art is presented in a
quite unfavorable light. Nietzsche asks himself the question “What, then, is the
meaning of ascetic ideals?” And he answers: “In the case of an artist, as we see,
nothing whatever! . . . Or so many things it amounts to nothing whatever!” This is
of course not to say that artists never excel at their metier. The point is that this
metier does not include the ability to arrive at an independent understanding
of works of art, their own or those of others. “They have at all times been
valets of some morality, philosophy, or religion,” as well as surrendering to the
flattery of their admirers (GM III: 5).
It is an immediate inference from this passage that Nietzsche does not regard
artists as capable of the honest and independent search for the truth. But this
is not the whole story. In his notebooks for 1885 Nietzsche writes: “On the main
points, the artist has been more correct than all philosophers thus far,” and in
1887–88: “Art and nothing but art; it is the great enabler of life, the great
seducer to life, the great stimulus to life.” And again, Nietzsche says that he has
experienced that art is worth more than truth (KSA 11: 587; 13: 194). Art is
superior because there is no correct explanation of life, no logos, as we may
put it. Instead, there are myths of the whole, perspectives that may be rank-
ordered on the basis of their capacity to invigorate (see the various remarks
on interpretation and perspectivism in the Nachlass for 1885–86). We should
not fail to remember that Nietzsche’s own doctrine of life-enhancement by
means of art is itself a myth or work of art, not a correct philosophical analysis
of the meaning of life. This fact is obviously connected to the problem of the
place of philosophy within the rank-ordering of “explanations”—actually, inter-
pretations—of life. Throughout his writings, Nietzsche emphasizes that the
task of philosophy is to grasp the truth about the whole. But that truth is the
identification of the whole as a work of art. This is why the philosopher must
conceal the truth, as Nietzsche insists at length in Beyond Good and Evil. As
he says there, it is not so much that the rabble will be endangered by being
told the truth of things, but rather that they will vitiate that truth, bring it down
to their own level.
“Everything rare for the rare!” (BGE 43). The multitude does not deserve to
know the truth. In the Genealogy of Morals, the complementary point is made
about the few—Nietzsche both praises and criticizes those contemporaries who
regard themselves as free spirits and are not captives of the ignorance of the
rabble:
They certainly believe that they are as liberated from the ascetic ideal as
possible, those free, very free spirits; and yet, to disclose to them what they
themselves cannot see—for they are too close to themselves: this ideal is
precisely their ideal, too, they themselves embody it today, and perhaps they
alone . . . They are far from being free spirits: for they still have faith in truth.
(GM III: 24)
Clearly Nietzsche values truth enormously. But in order to perceive it, he

believes, we must be liberated from unexamined bondage to anything, includ-
ing and primarily the truth itself. The only truth is that there is no truth. That
is, at the heart of Being is chaos. It is almost as though freedom is more valuable
than truth because it is a prerequisite for the truth. I think that on this point,
Nietzsche is inadequate. The experiment with respect to the value of truth is
itself the truth or a perspectivist artifact. If it is true, that is, if it is the condition
for the possibility of truth, then the doctrine of perspectivism is false. But if it is
false, then it cannot sustain an investigation into truth. Nietzsche would have
been better advised to argue that some experiments on the value of truth are
sound, because they permit us to carry out the experiment.
In sum, Nietzsche thinks in what I would call the light of a double paradigm
of art. The whole discussion of art seems to have two different and opposing
principles. The first principle is, to modify for our own purposes a phrase from
Fichte, that art is higher than Being (i.e. Being cannot limit our creativity;
Fichte says that freedom is higher than Being). To this, Nietzsche as it were adds
that Being at its heart is chaos, which he derives as a corollary from the first
principle. I cited Fichte, but one could argue that the principle lies at the heart
of modern philosophy at least since Kant. The failure of modern idealism in the
nineteenth century is virtually simultaneous with Nietzsche’s transformation
and appropriation of nineteenth-century materialism into an emotionally satis-
fying but incoherent doctrine of freedom wedded to amor fati. Unfortunately
the marriage proved unstable.
The second principle of art is that art is subordinate to Being, or what comes
to the same thing, that it cannot know the truth but only construct it to the
specifications of the philosopher-lawgiver. It is not by chance that our discus-
sion of art quickly invoked a consideration of philosophy. This is because
what I called the two conflicting principles of art are in fact also the principles
of philosophy for Nietzsche. In Nietzsche’s notebooks for 1872–73 (KSA 7: 423),
we find the following note: “the philosopher must know what is needed, and the
artist must create it.” This could have been written by Plato. Twelve years later,
Nietzsche writes in his notebooks that there are two kinds of philosophers, those
that preserve the law and those that give it (KSA 11: 611 f). “Giving” is ambigu-
ous; it could refer to a gift that we ourselves create, but also to something that
is made by someone else and then presented to us.
The issue is taken up again in the following note from 1883 (KSA 10: 278):
“The higher man must create, i.e. impress his higher Being on others . . . Matters
stand the same with the philosophers; they want to make their taste rule over
the world.” Perhaps the decisive statement in this vein is to be found in Beyond
Good and Evil 211: Nietzsche insists here upon a distinction between genuine
philosophers and their servants, the scholars and scientific laborers, the poets,
critics, historians, and so on. The philosopher must be able to see
with many different eyes and consciences, from a height and into every
distance, from the depths into every height, from a nook into every expanse.
But all these are merely preconditions of his task: the task itself demands
something different—it demands that he create values.
The passage is too long to quote in its entirety. Suffice it to say that Nietzsche
insists upon the rejection of the past by philosophers who reach for the future
with creative hands. The genuine philosophers are commanders and legisla-
tors; they say “Thus shall it be.” “Their ‘knowing’ is creating, their creating is
a legislation, their will to truth is will to power” (BGE 211). The same point is
made in the Twilight of the Idols, a late publication (1889), where Nietzsche
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themselves finite and therefore only imperfectly real and individual,
they could not logically take the place which belongs only to the
completely and perfectly individual realisation of the ideal. That
would still fall partly outside them in the nature, as a whole, of the
system which harmoniously includes both ourselves and them. Thus
such beings would be “gods” in the sense of polytheism rather than
God in that of monotheism.
Further, I can see no means of deciding a priori that there could be
only one such being in the universe. Even supposing the series of
finite beings to be itself finite, it is not evident that it could contain
only one “best” member. And supposing it infinite, could there be a
“best” member at all?[224] Also it appears quite beyond the power of
Metaphysics to find either proof or disproof of the existence and
agency of such finite but exalted beings. We cannot say that our
general conception of Reality is such as to negative the suggestion,
and yet again that general conception gives us no positive evidence
in favour of taking it as true. It would certainly be the grossest
presumption to maintain that the Absolute can contain no higher
types of finite individuality than those presented by human society;
on the other hand, it would be equally presumptuous to assert that
we have reasoned knowledge of their existence and their direct
social relation with ourselves. Hence we must, I think, be content to
say that the hypothesis, so far as it seems to be suggested to any
one of us by the concrete facts of his own individual experience, is a
matter for the legitimate exercise of Faith.
§ 9. These reflections may naturally lead to some remarks, which
shall be made as brief as possible, about the so-called philosophical
“arguments for the existence of God,” which played a prominent part
in Metaphysics before their discrediting at the hands of Kant and
Hume.[225] Kant’s great achievement lies in having demonstrated that
the whole force of the “proofs” depends upon the famous ontological
argument, best known in modern Philosophy in the form adopted by
Descartes in the fifth Meditation. Descartes there argues thus:—By
“God” I mean a completely perfect being. Now, existence is a
perfection, and non-existence an imperfection. Hence I cannot think
of a non-existing perfect being without self-contradiction. Hence
God, because by hypothesis perfect, must exist, and is the only
being whose existence logically follows from its definition.
Kant’s even more famous criticism of this famous inference turns
upon the principle which he had learned from his study of Hume, that
logical necessity is “subjective.” If I think of a logical subject as
defined by certain properties, he argues in effect, I am necessitated
to ascribe to it all the predicates implied in that definition. That is, I
must affirm them or contradict myself. Hence, if “existence” is
originally included among the perfections by which the subject “God”
is defined, the proposition God exists is certainly necessary, but is
also tautological, and amounts, in fact, to the mere assertion that “an
existing perfect being is an existing perfect being.” But if the
“existence” spoken of in the predicate is something not included in
the definition of the subject, then you cannot infer it from that
definition. Now “real existence” is not a predicate which can be
included in the definition of a concept. The predicates by which an
imaginary hundred dollars are defined are the same as those of a
real hundred dollars. It is not by the possession of a new predicate,
but by being actually given in a concrete experience, that the real
coins differ from the imaginary. Hence all propositions asserting real
existence are synthetic, (i.e. assert of their subject something which
is not contained in the concept of it), and the real existence of God or
any other object can never be deduced from its definition.[226]
This Kantian criticism has itself been subjected to much criticism,
principally at the hands of Hegel and those subsequent philosophers
who have been specially affected by the Hegelian influence. What
appears to be the general principle of the Hegelian criticism has
been most clearly expressed in English philosophy by Mr. Bradley,
[227]
upon whose discussion the following remarks are chiefly
founded.
In estimating the worth of the ontological proof, we must
distinguish between the general principle implied in it and the
particular form in which it presents that principle. It is manifest that
Kant is perfectly right when he contends that, taking existence to
mean presence in the space and time-order, you cannot reason from
my possession of any idea to the existence of a corresponding
object. You cannot say whatever I conceive must exist as I conceive
it. But the principle of the ontological proof is perhaps not necessarily
condemned by its failure to be thus universally applicable. The
principle involved appears to be simply this. The idea and the reality
outside its own existence as a fact in the time-order which it “means”
or “stands for” are mutually complementary aspects of a whole
Reality which include them both. For there is, on the one side, no
“idea” so poor and untrue as not to have some meaning or objective
reference beyond its own present existence.[228] And, on the other,
what has no significance for any subject of experience is nothing.
Hence in its most general form the ontological argument is simply a
statement that reality and meaning for a subject mutually imply one
another. But it does not follow that all thoughts are equally true and
significant. In other words, though every thought means something
beyond its own existence, different thoughts may represent the
structure of that which they mean with very different grades of
adequacy. That which my thought means may be far from being real
in the form in which I think it.
Now, we may surely say that the more internally harmonious and
systematic my thought is, the more adequately it represents the true
nature of that which it means. If thoroughly systematic coherent
thought may be mere misrepresentation, our whole criterion of
scientific truth is worthless. How freely we use this ontological
argument in practice will be readily seen by considering the way in
which, e.g., in the interpretation and reconstruction of historical facts,
the internal coherency of a systematic and comprehensive
interpretation is taken as itself the evidence of its truth.[229] Hence it
may be argued that if there is a systematic way of thinking about
Reality which is absolutely and entirely internally coherent, and from
its own nature must remain so, however the detailed content of our
ideas should grow in complexity, we may confidently say that such a
scheme of thought faithfully represents the Reality for which it
stands, so far as any thought can represent Reality. That is, while
the thought would not be the Reality because it still remains thought,
which means something beyond its own existence, it would require
no modification of structure but only supplementation in detail to
make it the truth.
But if we have anywhere thought which is thus internally coherent,
and from its own nature must remain so, however knowledge may
extend, we have it surely in our metaphysical conception of the real
as the absolutely individual. Thus the ontological proof appears, in
any sense in which it is not fallacious, to amount merely to the
principle that significant thought gives us genuine knowledge; and
therefore, since the thoroughgoing individuality of structure of its
object is presupposed in all significant thought, Reality must be a
perfect individual. That this perfect individual must further be “God,”
i.e. must have the special character ascribed to it by beliefs based
upon specifically religious emotions, does not follow. How far the
“God” of religion is a correct conception of the metaphysical
Absolute, we can only learn from the analysis of typical expressions
of the religious experience itself. And it is obvious that if by “God” we
mean anything less than the Absolute whole, the ontological proof
ceases to have any cogency. It is impossible to show that the
possibility of significant thought implies the presence of a special
finite being, not empirically known to us, within the Absolute.
The “cosmological” proof, or “argument from the contingency of
the world,” unlike the ontological, has the appearance, at first sight,
of starting with given empirical fact. As summarised by Kant for
purposes of criticism, it runs thus:—“If anything at all exists, there
must be also an absolutely necessary being. Now, I exist myself;
ergo, the absolutely necessary being exists.” To make the proof quite
complete, it would be necessary to show that the being whose
existence is affirmed in the minor premisses, to wit, myself, is not
itself the “absolutely necessary being,” and the argument thus
completed would become in principle identical with the second of the
“proofs” given by Descartes in the third Meditation, where it is
inferred that if I, a dependent being, exist, there must be a God on
whom I and all things depend.[230] As Kant has pointed out, the whole
force of this inference rests upon the previous admission of the
ontological argument. By itself the cosmological proof only
establishes the conclusion that if any dependent existence is real,
independent existence of some kind must be real also. To convert
this into a “proof of the existence of God” you must further go on to
identify the “independent existence” thus reached with the “most
real” or “most perfect” being of the ontological proof. For otherwise it
might be suggested, as is done by one of the speakers in Hume’s
dialogue, that the series of phenomenal events itself, taken as an
aggregate, is the “necessary existence” upon which the “contingent
existence” of each several event depends. “Did I show you the
particular causes of each individual in a collection of twenty particles
of matter, I should think it very unreasonable should you afterwards
ask me what was the cause of the whole twenty. This is sufficiently
explained in explaining the cause of the parts.”
To avoid this objection, we must go on to maintain that only the
“most perfect being” can be an ultimately necessary being, and that
its “necessary existence” is a consequence of its character. This, as
we have seen, is the very assertion made in the ontological proof.
Hence our criticisms of the ontological proof will be equally
applicable to the cosmological. If we combine the two, restating them
in accord with our previous remodelling of the former, the argument
will take the following form. All propositions directly or indirectly refer
to real existence. Hence it would be self-contradictory to assert that
nothing exists. But existence itself is only conceivable as individual.
Hence the absolutely individual must be really existent. And this is
identical with the general principle of our own reasoning in Book II. of
the present work. Clearly, if valid, it is valid simply as an argument
for a metaphysical Absolute; it neither proves that Absolute itself to
be what we mean in religion by God, nor affords any ground for
asserting the existence of God as a finite individual within the
Absolute.[231]
The physico-theological argument, also known as the argument
from design, or the teleological proof, differs from the preceding two
in being in its current forms honestly empirical. In the shape of an
inference from the apparent presence of order and a regard for
human good in the structure of nature to the existence of a wise and
benevolent being or beings as the author or authors of nature, it has
been the most popular of all theistic arguments both in the ancient
world, where, according to Xenophon, it was specially insisted upon
by Socrates, and in the modern defences of theological beliefs
against rationalistic criticism. It must, however, be observed that the
criticisms of Hume and Kant are absolutely fatal to the “argument
from design,” when it is put forward as a proof of the existence of a
God of infinite goodness and wisdom. At best, as Kant says, the
observed order and harmony of Nature would enable us to infer a
finite degree of wisdom and goodness in its author. The assertion of
the absolute harmoniousness and goodness of Nature, which we
require to justify the inference to infinite wisdom and goodness in its
author, goes far beyond the limits of the empirically verifiable, and
can itself only be upheld by some form of the “ontological proof.”
Hence the “argument from design” could at best prove a God whose
wisdom and goodness are, so far as knowable, limited. As Hume
forcibly puts the same point, if the empirically known facts of the
partial adaptation of Nature to human purposes are valid, as they
stand, to prove a wise and good intelligence, are not the equally
well-ascertained facts of the partial want of adaptation equally valid
to prove defective goodness or defective wisdom?[232]
There is a deeper metaphysical reason for this difference between
the results of the physico-theological and of the other “proofs,” which
may be briefly pointed out. The whole conception of the order and
systematic unity of the world as due to preconceived “design” is only
intelligible if we suppose the author of that “design” to be finite, and
subject, like ourselves, to temporal mutability. For in the notion of
design itself are implied the severance of the mentally conceived
ideal from the actuality which waits to be brought into accord with it,
and consequently also the time-process, which we have already
found to be characteristic of all finitude. Hence the physico-
theological proof, by itself, can at best be used to establish the reality
of finite “gods,” not of “God,” because it works throughout with the
categories of finitude.
Upon the logical force of the argument, as thus limited by its initial
assumptions, only one observation need be made. What the
reasoning asserts is not merely that “Nature” is in reality a system
exhibiting individuality and purposive interest, or even “design,” but
that it reveals the particular design of assisting and fostering human
progress. Now, whether this is so or not would appear to be a
question of empirical fact only capable of determination by the
methods applicable to other problems of the same empirical kind.
Probably the lines along which it will have to be decided in the future
are of the following general kind. Evolutionary science seems clearly
to have shown that in the influences it knows, e.g., as “natural” and
again as “sexual selection,” we have processes which lead to
beneficial results without being, so far as we can see, in the least
directed by the conscious “design” of establishing those results.[233]
We should have to ask, then, whether there is actual ground for
holding that such influences are not of themselves sufficient to
account for the development of human civilisation, so far as it is due
to factors belonging to the “environment.” If they are so sufficient, the
“physico-theological” argument for benevolent super-human agency
in moulding the course of human development, becomes
superfluous; if they are not, their failure is, so far, good ground for
the recognition of finite “designing” intelligences of a non-human kind
as forming a factor in our environment. In either case the question
appears to be one of empirical fact, and to be incapable of
determination in advance on general metaphysical grounds.[234] Nor
are we justified in assuming that “design in nature,” supposing it to
exist, must always be directed to securing ends which are either
intelligible to us, or, if intelligible, “benevolent,” in the sense of
furthering our own special human interests. And here I must be
content to leave the subject.
Consult further:—F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, chaps.

25, 26; J. E. McTaggart, Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, chaps. 6, 8;
J. Royce, The World and the Individual, Second Series, lects. 9, 10.
211. To take a couple of concrete illustrations. It may be—I do not
say it is—conducive to moral goodness that there should be a
general conviction that in the long run our individual happiness is
strictly proportionate to our degree of virtue. But there is no means
whatever of showing that this belief is true, and, as Mr. Bradley once
pertinently argued against Professor Sidgwick, no philosopher is
entitled to assert its truth on moral grounds unless he is prepared to
maintain that he could produce more goodness and less badness by
such an exact proportioning of happiness to merit than without it.
Again, most of us would probably admit that ordinary moral rules,
such as that against wilful lying, have exceptions. But we are not
bound to hold it conducive to moral goodness that every one should
be aware of this.
212. I have not taken into account the argument from origins,
because it does not appear relevant. That our intellectual interest in
“truth” is historically a derivative from an interest in the “useful,”
“science” an offshoot of the arts, is, as we have seen for ourselves,
true enough, but it does not follow that the truth which is the ideal of
the developed intellect is the same thing as the “useful” from which it
has arisen. We rejected the claims of the mechanical postulate to be
final truth, not because of their origin in the needs of industrial
science, but because, as tested by the standard of final self-
consistency, they were unsatisfactory to the intellect.
213. ἐν μεταιχμίῳ σκότου, to use the poet’s phrase.
214. Not, of course, pure progress. It does not require profound
insight to discover that moral progress, like everything else, has its
price, and that all “progressive evolution” implies “degeneration” as
one of its aspects. But the moral progress of society will be genuine
if, on the whole, our gain is—from the moralist’s special standpoint—
more than our loss. We have no reason to despair of our kind if the
impartial historian, comparing the facts—not the self-complacent
fictions of popular optimism—about our current social life with the
facts—not the fancies of Apologetics—about social life, say, in the
first century of the Roman Empire, can pronounce that there has
been advance on the whole.
215. The “religious” temperament is apparently shown by
experience to be, in its intenser manifestations, quite as much an
idiosyncrasy of congenital endowment as the “æsthetic.” There are
persons, not otherwise mentally defective, who seem to be almost
devoid of it, just as there are others who have little or no sense of
humour or feeling for beauty. As many of these persons are ethically
excellent, some of them exceptionally so, and as again the religious
temperament is often found strongly developed in persons of quite
inferior ethical development, there seems to be no direct connection
between religious sensibility and moral excellence, though, of
course, religious feeling is the most powerful of moral influences
when it is conjoined in the same person with ethical fervour. For a
masterly description of some typical forms of religious feeling and
belief the reader should consult Professor James’s Varieties of
Religious Experience. He will find my own views as to the
philosophical interpretation of religion, if he cares to know them, in
the final chapter of my Problem of Conduct.
216. So Hegel insisted that the fundamental significance of the
Christian religion lies neither in the historical career nor in the moral
teaching of Jesus (which indeed contained little that had not already
been uttered in the form of precept or principle), but in the
recognition by the Christian community of the union of God and Man
as a fact already realised in individual form in the person of Christ.
See Dr. McTaggart’s essay on “Hegelianism and Christianity” in
Studies in Hegelian Cosmology.
217. So Plato suggested in the second book of the Republic, that
God is not the cause of all that happens to us, but only of the good
things that befall us. Perhaps, however, Plato is here consciously
adapting his expression to current theological doctrine of which he
did not fully approve. For a modern defence of the same conception
of a finite God, see Dr. Rashdall’s essay in Personal Idealism. Other
reasons which have often led to the same view, such as the desire to
think of God as a mutable being like ourselves, capable of being
influenced in His attitude toward us by our attitude towards Him,
seem to rest too much upon idiosyncrasies of private feeling to be of
serious philosophical weight. If private feeling is to count at all, one
does not see why that of those who would feel outraged by such a
conception of a finite changeable God should not be allowed an
equal significance with that of their opponents. It is a palpable
mistake to treat private feeling, whatever its worth may be, as all on
one side in this matter.
218. For if we once suppose that we know the universe, in which
“God” is only one finite being among others, to be so constituted as
to correspond to this demand, it will be the whole of which “God” is
one factor, and not “God” by Himself, which will become the supreme
object of religious emotion. Thus we may say, until God is thought of
as the individual whole, He is not fully God.
219. It should be scarcely necessary to point out that the Absolute,
if it can be worshipped at all, can be worshipped only as conceived
as fully individual. When it is falsely thought of as a “collection” or
“aggregate” or “totality” of independent things, it is no more divine
than any other collection. This is the fatal objection to vulgar
“Pantheism.” How far any of the serious thinkers who are popularly
charged with “Pantheism” have countenanced this view of the
Absolute as a mere collection, is another matter.
220. I am afraid that this essentially irreligious feeling has a great
deal to do with the complaints sometimes urged against the Absolute
as a poor substitute for a “living God.” Partly these complaints
spring, no doubt, from the mistaken notion that the Absolute is not a
concrete individual but a mere “collective concept.” But they seem
also to be motived by a suspicion that a finite Deity might be more
amenable than the Absolute to our wish to have our ideals gratified
in our own fashion. And so far as this is the motive of them, such
complaints are essentially impious.
221. The reader will naturally think of the famous Socratic
paradox, that “wrong doing is error,” “vice is ignorance.” If we
interpret this to mean that the fundamental advantage of the good
man over the bad lies in his truer insight into what he seriously
wants, it seems to be true.
222. Enneads, I. 8, 15 (quoted and translated in Whittaker, the
Neoplatonists, p. 83). Plotinus had just previously made the correct
observation that to deny the existence of evil in any and every sense
means to deny the existence of good. (κακόν γε εἴ τις λέγοι τὸ
παράπαν ἐν τοῖς οὖσι μὴ εἶναι, ἀνάγκη αὐτῷ καὶ τὸ ἀφαθὸν ἀναιρεῖν
καὶ μηδὲ ὀπεκτὸν μηδὲν εἶναι.) We might thus say, if good is to be at
all, evil must have some kind of relative or phenomenal existence as
its antecedent condition. But, as thus serving as a condition for the
realisation of good, evil is itself, from a more universal point of view,
good, and therefore its existence as evil only apparent. On the whole
question of the position of evil in the world-order, see the admirable
essay on “Sin” in Dr. McTaggart’s Studies in Hegelian Cosmology.
223. When it is said that the Absolute, if it exists, must be morally
indifferent, there is often a conscious or unconscious confusion of
thought. The Absolute must certainly be “indifferent” in the sense
that it does not feel the internal discord of hatred and animosity
against any of its constituents. Deus, as Spinoza says, neminem
potest odio habere. For the Absolute is not one of the two
combatants; it is at once both combatants and the field of combat.
But to infer that the Absolute, because devoid of the feelings of
hatred and private partisanship, must be indifferent in the sense that
our goodness and badness make no difference to our place in it, is a
fallacy of equivocation for which unconsciousness and bona fides
are scarcely sufficient excuse.
224. Thus I do not understand why, apart from respect for the
traditions of Christianity, Dr. Rashdall should hold that God, in his
sense of the word, is one and not many. His argument appears to
me to identify God with the Absolute, where it is required to maintain
God’s unity, and to distinguish them as soon as it becomes a
question of proving God’s “Personality” (see his essay in Personal
Idealism). Professor James appears more logical in his obvious
readiness to reckon with polytheism as a possible consequence of
his denial of God’s infinity (Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 524
ff.).
225. Kant’s famous onslaught will be found in the Kritik der Reinen
Vernunft, Transcendental Dialectic, bk. ii. div. 3 (“The Ideal of Pure
Reason”), §§ 3-7. Hume’s criticisms are contained in his posthumous
Dialogues concerning Natural Religion.
226. Kant’s criticism had been in part anticipated on the first
circulation of the Meditations by both Mersenne and Gassendi. See
particularly Gassendi’s strictures on Descartes’ confusion of
existence with properties in the “Fifth Objections,” with Descartes’
unsatisfactory reply. Leibnitz repeated the same objection, and
proposed to amend the Cartesian proof by a formal demonstration
that God’s existence is possible, i.e. does not imply a formal
contradiction. He then argues—If God’s existence is possible, He
exists (by the Cartesian proof). But God’s existence is possible,
therefore God exists. See, e.g., Leibnitz, Works, ed. Erdmann, p.
177; and Latta, Monadology of Leibniz, p. 274. Hume’s comments
are even more akin to Kant’s. “Whatever we conceive as existent we
can also conceive as non-existent. There is no being, therefore,
whose non-existence implies a contradiction. Consequently there is
no being whose existence is demonstrable.” (Dialogues concerning
Natural Religion, part 9.)
227. Appearance and Reality, chap. 24.
228. No thought can be merely and absolutely false, any more
than any act can be merely and without qualification bad. Though
words may be entirely meaningless, thoughts cannot be.
229. The appeal to experiment is no objection to the principle. For
in making the experiment we do not, of course, get out of the circle
of our thoughts, and the experiment only affords a criterion of truth in
so far as it leaves us with a new thought which can only be brought
into systematic harmony with our old ideas in one determinate way.
Except as interpreted by thought, the experiment has no bearing on
our knowledge.
230. This was also a favourite argument with Leibnitz, as Kant
notes. For an acute examination of Leibnitz’s use of it and the other
“proofs,” see B. Russell’s Philosophy of Leibniz chap. 15. For
Hume’s objections to it, see the already quoted part 9 of the
Dialogue concerning Natural Religion. The other “proof” of the Third
Meditation, namely, that my possession of an idea of God, which I
could not have derived from empirical sources, proves the reality of
the idea’s object, is only a special form of the ontological argument
from idea to existence.
231. As thus remodelled, the double ontologico-cosmological
argument might be attacked on two grounds—(1) That it only proves,
once more, that if we admit that all propositions are concerned with
real existence, either directly or remotely, we must admit the
existence of the Absolute, but does not demonstrate that all
propositions are so concerned. (2) That in saying that existence is
only conceivable as individual we fall back into the Cartesian
misconception of existence as a predicate. I should reply, (1) that the
validity of the premiss in question cannot be denied without being
confirmed in the act of denial. I.e. unless the suggested proposition
that “some propositions at least have no reference to a reality
beyond their own presence as psychical facts in my mind,” itself has
the very objective reference in question, it has no meaning, and is
therefore no genuine proposition; (2) that we must distinguish
between the what and the that of existence. The “that” of existence is
not conceivable at all, but our position is that this inconceivable that
is only logically, not really, separable from a what, and that it is
precisely this inseparability of the that and the what which we mean
by “individuality.”
232. Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, part 11.
233. This is quite consistent with our own view, that all real
processes are teleological in the sense of being marked by
subjective interest. For (a) not by any means all teleological process
is actual “design” or “volition” (impulse, organic craving, habit, etc.,
are all cases in point); and (b) actual volition need not always be
volition for the result it actually produces. Sexual selection in man
would be an instance of a process which may take the form of actual
volition, but in that case is rarely, if ever, volition for that improvement
of the stock which de facto issues from it.
234. Cf. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, pp. 200, 496-497 (1st
ed.). Professor Flint’s attempted reply to the Humian and Kantian
criticism of the theistic “proofs” (Agnosticism, chap. 4) has not
induced me to modify any of the opinions expressed in this chapter.
CHAPTER VI
CONCLUSION
§ 1. Can our Absolute Experience be properly called the “union of Thought and
Will”? The Absolute is certainly the final realisation of our intellectual and our
practical ideals. But (1) it includes aspects, such as, e.g. æsthetic feeling,
pleasure, and pain, which are neither Thought nor Will. (2) And it cannot
possess either Thought or Will as such. Both Thought and Will, in their own
nature, presuppose a Reality which transcends mere Thought and mere Will.
§ 2. Our conclusion may in a sense be said to involve an element of
Agnosticism, and again of Mysticism. But it is only agnostic in holding that we
do not know the precise nature of the Absolute Experience. It implies no
distrust of the validity of knowledge, so far as it goes, and bases its apparently
agnostic result on the witness of knowledge itself. Similarly, it is mystical in
transcending, not in refusing to recognise, the constructions of understanding
and will. § 3. Metaphysics adds nothing to our information, and yields no fresh
springs of action. It is finally only justified by the persistency of the impulse to
speculate on the nature of things as a whole.
§ 1. It seems advisable, in bringing this work to a conclusion, to

bring together by way of recapitulation a few important
consequences of our general principle which could not receive all the
notice they deserve in the course of our previous exposition. Our
main contention, which it may be hoped our discussion of special
problems has now confirmed, was that the whole of Reality
ultimately forms a single infinite individual system, of which the
material is psychical matter of fact, and that the individuality of this
system lies ultimately in a teleological unity of subjective interest.
Further, we saw that all subordinate reality is again in its degree
individual, and that the contents of the Absolute thus form a
hierarchy of ascending orders of reality and individuality, and that in
this way, while all finite individual existence is, as finite, appearance
and not ultimate Reality, appearances, themselves are of varied
degrees of worth, and that, apart from the appearances, there is no
reality at all. And finally, we learned that all the aspirations of finite
individuals must be somehow met and made good in the ultimate
Reality, though not necessarily in the form in which they are
consciously entertained by the finite aspirant.
This last conclusion naturally suggests the question, whether it
would be a correct description of the ultimate Reality to call it the
“union of Thought and Will.” I will briefly indicate the reasons why
such a description appears to be misleading. (1) The Absolute may
no doubt be called the “union of Thought and Will,” in the sense that
its complete individual structure corresponds at once to our logical
ideal of systematic interconnection, and our ethico-religious ideal of
realised individual purpose. But it must be added that the Absolute
appears to possess aspects which cannot fairly be brought under
either of these heads. Æsthetic feeling, for instance, and the
æsthetic judgments based upon it, must somehow be included as an
integral aspect in the absolute whole of experience; yet æsthetic
feeling cannot properly be regarded either as thought or as will. And
the same objection might be raised in the case of pleasure. However
closely pleasure may be connected with conative efforts towards the
retention or renewal of the pleasant experience, it seems quite clear
that the “pure” pleasures[235] are not forms of conscious “conation,”
and that even in those “mixed” pleasures, which depend in part for
their pleasantness upon relief from the tension of precedent craving
or desire, analysis enables us to distinguish two elements, that of
direct pleasure in the new experience, and that of the feeling of relief
from the craving. Hence, if it be admitted that the Absolute contains
pleasure, it must also be admitted that it contains something which is
neither thought nor will. The same argument would hold good, I
think, even if we held with the pessimists, that the Absolute contains
a balance of pain over pleasure. For, intimate as the connection is
between pain and thwarted conation, it seems a psychological
monstrosity to maintain that felt pain is always and everywhere an
experience of the frustration of actual conscious effort; and unless
this monstrosity can be maintained, we must recognise in pain too a
fundamental experience-quality irreducible to thought or will. Thus, at
best, the description of the Absolute, as the union of thought and will,
would be incomplete.
(2) But, further, the description, if taken to mean that the Absolute
itself has thought and will, as such, would be not only incomplete but
false. For actual thought and actual will can easily be shown to be
essentially finite functions, neither of which could ever reach its goal
and become finally self-consistent, without ceasing to be mere
thought or mere will. Thus actual thought always involves an aspect
of discrepancy between its content and reference. It is always
thought about a reality which falls, in part, outside the thought itself,
is only imperfectly represented by the thought’s content, and for that
very reason is a not-self to the thought for which it is an object. And
the whole process of thinking may be described as a series of
attempts on the part of thought to transcend this limitation. So long
as the content of the thought is not adequate to the reality which it
thinks, so long, that is, as there is anything left to know about the
reality, thought restlessly presses forward towards an unreached
consummation. But if the correspondence ideae cum ideato ever
became perfect, thought’s object would cease to contain anything
which went beyond thought’s own content. It would no longer be an
“other” or “not-self” to the thought which knew it, and thus thought
and its object would have become a single thing. But in this
consummation thought would have lost its special character as an
actual process, just as the object would have lost its character of a
something, partly at least, “given” from without. Both mere thought
and mere existence, in becoming one, would cease to have the
character which belongs to them in finite experience precisely in
virtue of our failure completely to transcend the chasm between
them.
The same is the case with will. If, indeed, by will we mean a
genuine actual process of volition, this result is already included in
our criticism of the claim of thought as such to persist unchanged in
the Absolute. For all genuine will implies possession of and actuation
by an idea which is entertained explicitly as an unrealised idea, and
is thus inseparable from thought. (This, I may incidentally observe
once more, is why we carefully avoided speaking of the “subjective
interest” we found in all experience-processes as “will.”) But even if
we improperly widen the interpretation of the term “will” to include all
conative process, the general conclusion will remain the same. For
all such processes imply the contrast between existence as it comes
to us in the here and now of actual feeling, and existence as it
should be, and as we seek to make it, for the satisfaction of our
various impulses, cravings, and desires. It is the felt, even when not
explicitly understood, discrepancy between these two aspects of a
reality, which is ultimately one and harmonious under the
discrepancy, that supplies all actual conative process with its motive
force. And hence we seem driven to hold that conation as such, i.e.
as actual striving or effort, can find no place in an experience in
which the aspects of ideality and real existence are once for all
finally united.
If we cannot avoid speaking of such an experience in terms of our
own intellectual, and again of our own volitional processes, we must
at least remember that while such language is true in the sense that
the all-embracing harmonious experience of the Absolute is the
unattainable goal towards which finite intellect and finite volition are
alike striving, yet each in attaining its consummation, if it ever could
attain it, would cease to be itself as we know it, and pass into a
higher and directer form of apprehension, in which it could no longer
be distinguished from the other. In the old mediæval terminology, the
Absolute must be said to contain actual intellect and actual volition,
not formaliter but eminenter.[236]
§ 2. It follows from all this that, just because the absolute whole is
neither mere thought nor mere will, nor an artificial synthesis of the
two, mere truth for the intellect can never be quite the same thing as
ultimate Reality. For in mere truth we get Reality only in its
intellectual aspect as that which affords the highest satisfaction to
thought’s demand for consistency and systematic unity in its object.
And, as we have seen, this demand can never be quite satisfied by
thought itself. For thought, to remain thought, must always be
something less than the whole reality which it knows. The reality
must always contain a further aspect which is not itself thought, and
is not capable of being apprehended in the form of a thought-
content. Or, what is the same thing, while all reality is individual, all
the thought-constructions through which we know its character must
remain general. We are always trying in our thought to grasp the
individual as such, and always failing. As individual, the reality never
becomes the actual content of our thought, but remains a
“transcendent” object to which thought refers, or which it means. And
hence our truest thought can at best give us but an imperfect
satisfaction for its own demand of congruence, between thought’s
content and its object. The reality can never be ultimately merely
what it is for our thought. And this conclusion obviously lends a
certain justification both to the agnostic and to the mystic. It is
important to understand how far that justification extends.
First, then, a word as to the limits of justifiable Agnosticism. Our
conclusion warranted us in asserting that Reality must contain
aspects which are not thought, and again must combine thought with
these other aspects in a unity which is not itself merely intellectual. In
other words, we had to confess that we cannot understand the
concrete character of the Infinite Experience, or, to put it in a more
homely way, we do not know how it would feel to be “God.” And if
this is Agnosticism, we clearly shall have to own that we too are
agnostics. But our result gave us no ground for doubting our own
general conviction as to the place which intellect and truth hold in the
Absolute. On the other hand, it left us with every reason for trusting
that conviction. For our conclusion that mere truth cannot be the
same thing as ultimate Reality was itself based upon the principle
that only harmonious individuality is finally real, and this is the very
principle employed by the intellect itself whenever it judges one
thought-construction relatively higher and truer than another.
Thus our Agnosticism, if it is to be called so, neither discredits our
human estimate of the relative truth of different theories about the
real, nor lends any support to the notion that “Knowledge is relative”
in the sense that there may conceivably be no correspondence
between Reality and the scheme of human knowledge as a whole. It
is based not on the distrust of human reason, but upon the
determination to trust that reason implicitly, and it claims, in declaring
mere truth to fall short of Reality, to be expressing reason’s own
verdict upon itself. Hence it does not, like vulgar Agnosticism, leave
us in the end in pure uncertainty as to the ultimate structure and
upshot, so to say, of the world, but definitely holds that we have
genuine and trustworthy knowledge of the type of that structure and
the nature of its materials. And it is upon this positive knowledge,
and not upon an uncritical appeal to unknown possibilities, that it
rests its denial of the simple identity of Reality with thought itself. For
all we know, says the common Agnosticism, our thought is sheer
illusion, and therefore we must confess that we have in the end no
notion what the reality of the world may be. Thought is not illusory,
says our systematic Idealism, and therefore its own witness that
Reality is an individual whole of experience which is more than
thought is a positive contribution to our knowledge. Between these
two positions there may be a superficial resemblance, but there is an
essential difference in principle.
So again with the mystical element in our result. In holding that all
genuine individuality, finite or infinite,[237] involves a type of immediate
felt unity which transcends reduction to the relational categories of
thought and will, we may fairly be said to have reached a conclusion
which, in a sense, is mystical. But our result is not Mysticism, if by
Mysticism is meant a doctrine which seeks ultimate Reality in mere
unanalysed immediate feeling as such. The results of intellectual and
volitional construction have not been treated by us as illusory and as
a sort of intellectual and moral mistake. On the other hand, we urged
that the ultimate unity of the real must transcend, and not merely fall
short of, the rational scheme of thought and will. And we
consequently insisted that our result, so far as it is a mystical one,
can only be justified by following out the constructions of the logical
intellect and the ethical will to their final consequence, and showing
that each of them itself demands completion in an individual Reality
which includes and transcends both. To quote the admirable words
of Dr. McTaggart: “A Mysticism which ignored the claims of the
understanding would no doubt be doomed. None ever went about to
break logic, but in the end logic broke him. But there is a Mysticism
which starts from the standpoint of the understanding, and only
departs from it in so far as that standpoint shows itself not to be
ultimate, but to postulate something beyond itself. To transcend the
lower is not to ignore it.” And it is only in this sense that philosophy is
justified in asserting “above all knowledge and volition one all-
embracing unity, which is only not true, only not good, because all
truth and all goodness are but shadows of its absolute
perfection.”[238]
§ 3. The reader who has persevered to the conclusion of this
volume may perhaps, on laying it down, experience a certain feeling
of dissatisfaction. Our investigations, it might be complained, have
added nothing to our stock of scientific information about the
contents of the world, and have supplied no fresh practical incentives
towards the strenuous pursuit of an elevated moral or religious ideal.
I must at once admit the justice of this hypothetical criticism, and
dispute its relevancy. Quite apart from the defects due to personal
shortcomings and confusions, it is inherent in the nature of
metaphysical study that it can make no positive addition to our
information, and can of itself supply no motives for practical
endeavour. And the student who turns to our science as a substitute
for empirical Physics or Psychology, or for practical morality, is
bound to go away disappointed. The reason of this we have already
had occasion to see. Metaphysics has to presuppose the general
principles of the various sciences and the general forms of practical
experience as the materials upon which it works. Its object as a
study is not to add to or to modify these materials, but to afford some
coherent and systematic satisfaction for the intellectual curiosity
which we all feel at times as to the general nature of the whole to
which these various materials belong, and the relative truth and
clearness with which that general nature is expressed in the different
departments of experience. Its aim is the organisation, not the
enlargement of knowledge. Hence for the student whose interests lie
more in the enlargement of human knowledge by the discovery of
new facts and laws, than in its organisation into a coherent whole,
Metaphysics is probably undesirable, or desirable only as a
protection against the intrusion of unrecognised and uncriticised
metaphysical assumptions into the domain of empirical service. And
similarly for the practical man whose interests in life are
predominantly ethical, the main, if not the sole, value of metaphysical
study lies in its critical function of exposing false metaphysical
assumptions, which, if acted upon, might impair the vigour of
spontaneous moral effort.
But for those in whom the speculative desire to form some
coherent conception of the scheme of things to which we belong as
a whole is strong, Metaphysics has a higher importance. In such
minds the impulse to reflect on the nature of existence as a whole, if
debarred from systematic and thorough gratification, is certain to find

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Nietzsche Nihilism and the Philosophy

of the Future 1st Edition Jeffrey

Friedrich Nietzsche and European Nihilism 1st Edition

The Problem of Affective Nihilism in Nietzsche:

Nietzsche and Other Buddhas Philosophy After

Roald Hoffmann on the Philosophy Art and Science of

The Future of the Philosophy of Religion M. David Eckel

Method, Substance, and the Future of African Philosophy

Saints Heretics and Atheists A Historical Introduction

Philosophy of Law Introducing Jurisprudence Jeffrey

Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy is a major monograph series from

Adorno’s Concept of Life, Alastair Morgan

Edited by Jeffrey Metzger

© Jeffrey Metzger and Contributors 2009

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

ISBN: HB: 978-1-8470-6556-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India

8 Nietzsche and the Impossibility of Nihilism 143

Keith Ansell-Pearson holds a Personal Chair in the Department of Philosophy

Daniel Conway is Professor and Head of Philosophy at Texas A & M University.

Stanley Corngold is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at

Michael Allen Gillespie teaches at Duke University, where he is the Jerry G.

Robert Guay is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Binghamton University,

Journal of Philosophy, Inquiry, Philosophy and Literature, Philosophical Topics, and in

Jeffrey Metzger is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and

James I. Porter is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the

Stanley Rosen recently retired as the Borden Parker Bowne Professor of

Geoff Waite teaches at Cornell University in the Department of German

KSA = Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden. Ed. G. Colli and

We have followed the common English-language practice of referring to

A or AC = The Antichrist. Trans. Walter Kaufmann, in Walter Kaufmann (ed.),

Nietzsche famously referred to nihilism as “this uncanniest of all guests” (dieser

attitudes toward Nietzsche’s intentions and success in his confrontation with

unconditionally, but knows he cannot do so because he recognizes that life

Nietzsche’s Double Rhetoric: Which Nihilism?

coherent doctrine in what is essentially a series of aesthetic observations, lack-

a sufficient degree of power. Unfortunately, since there are no eternal or objec-

Unconditional honest atheism . . . is therefore not the antithesis of the

Nietzsche’s analysis of the ascetic ideal is a good example of his conceptual

Clearly Nietzsche values truth enormously. But in order to perceive it, he

Consult further:—F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, chaps.

§ 1. It seems advisable, in bringing this work to a conclusion, to

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