Zeal For Truth

Note: While this may be rather long reading, it servers two purposes: to introduce a particular reading of Nietzsche and to give some background study on Deleuze who is the next subject of my “Faith Problems” series. One cannot read Deleuze without knowing Nietzsche.

How does one read Nietzsche? Is there a way to remain faithful to Nietzsche’s thought? In what ways is one a “Nietzschean”? Reading Nietzsche requires seeing a philosophy of contradictions, duplicities, and inconsistencies.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche depicts noon as the time “when man stands in the middle of his way between beast and overman.”¹ Noon is the period of transition between many things; one is neither one or the other but a multiplicity. This idea of the “Great Noon” runs throughout Nietzsche’s writings and presents a lens through which Nietzsche can be understood. Throughout his writings, Nietzsche presents a multiplicity of singularity where a person is never exactly one thing but always in the state of becoming. This lens should not be seen as a looking-glass to understand Nietzsche completely; Nietzsche’s philosophy has made it impossible to view from some kind of “objective” point of view.

Just as Nietzsche’s genealogies trace the presuppositions of a concept, we can also trace the presuppositions of his writings and philosophy; and sometimes these are contradictory. One cannot read his critique of truth without also seeing his defense of truth; it is not “Dionysius versus the Crucified” as a battle of two different things but rather a struggle of two extremes of the same thing within a person. This is how he paints his concept of the overman—Dionysiusand the Crucified.

Critiquing Truth
One focus of Nietzsche’s thought is that of truthfulness. It is sometimes deeply buried within Nietzsche’s works and often missed on casual readings. Yet he begins the preface to Beyond Good and Evil with the question “Supposing truth is a woman—what then?”² He also hints at his take on her: “What is certain is that she has not allowed herself to be won”³–truth is to be pursued, but it is a difficult task. This is because truth is a multiplicity—between two extremes of the same concept.

Nietzsche consistently affirms truth and knowledge. He thinks that he has found a radically new view of truth: “Perhaps nobody yet has been truthful enough about what ‘truthfulness is.’”⁴ So, what has he found that no other philosopher has found before? One extreme of truth that he sees is the idea of a transcendent, objective, universal truth—the “truth” of science. All philosophers have treated their discoveries as this great “truth”: “They all pose as if they had discovered and reached their real opinions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic.”⁵ For Nietzsche, it is clear that none have truly plumbed the depths of knowledge and found any kind of truth fit to be called transcendent. These philosophers have instead “[stood] truth on her head and [denied] perspective, the basic condition of all life.”⁶ Ironically, however, Nietzsche claims his own critique of this inversion to be “objective”!⁷ This is because of the opposite extreme, perspectivism: “Supposing that this also is only interpretation—and you will be eager enough to make this objection—well, so much the better.”⁸ This is an instantiation of truth as an individual’s truthfulness, which Nietzsche ultimately affirms as the highest virtue.⁹

This analysis of truth now exposes “everything that has hitherto been called ‘truth’…as the most harmful, insidious, and subterranean form of lie.”¹⁰ Here, Nietzsche begins to unearth the myth—the stories—behind all things held as “true.” Truth cannot be anything objective because that concept involves a contradictio in adjecto—these “immediate certainties” are subject to an unquestioned I that performs the thinking. Nietzsche’s response to such a thought is “it is improbable that you are not mistaken; but why insist on the truth?”¹¹ All truth is in reality an interpretation of truth, which Nietzsche implies in his fragment “On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense”:

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.¹²

We can see here Nietzsche’s one extreme of perspectivism in its full splendor. As metaphor, truth is unable to be transcendent because it is bound by human language and experience.

Affirming Reality
The birth of the overman is intrinsically tied to the death of God. The duplicity of life and death is, for Nietzsche, tied together at their roots. The first time Nietzsche writes about the death of God, the news is delivered by a madman to the marketplace; yet the more shocking part is that God was murdered by men.¹³ Ironically, however, the madman never answers his questions as to how or why men killed God. The answers to these questions are the ugly truths which only truthful men can bring.

The death of God is something that must be overcome not synthesized into a Hegelian dialectic. It is not a singular point of objective, transcendent truth; it is a multiplicity. God dies many kinds of deaths, as is fitting for all gods.¹⁴ First and foremost, “God died of his pity for man.”¹⁵ Later in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra expands upon this while talking to the retired pope: pity strangled God because God could not bear the sight of man hanging on the cross.¹⁶ This may answer how God has died, but it does not yet face the ugly truth of why God has died. For this, Nietzsche turns to morality: “I have already in the fourth act killed all the Gods—for the sake of morality!”¹⁷

It is not enough to see the death of God as an act against Christianity for it must also be seen as the capstone in the revaluation of all values. The death of God is so the overman can live; it is the symbol of truthfulness, of morality, and of redemption. Nietzsche’s revaluation of values is a new creation that stands in contrast to the old values: “We free spirits are nothing less than a ‘revaluation of all values,’ an incarnate declaration of war and triumph over all the ancient conceptions of ‘true’ and ‘untrue.’”¹⁸

Nietzsche’s new values are found in what he calls the Dionysian, the artistic and anti-Christian manner of valuing life.¹⁹ It is in Greek tragedy that Nietzsche finds the supreme affirmation and valuation of life which has been perverted and inverted in Socratic and Christian thought. Within tragedy, Nietzsche sees the duplicity of the Apollonian and Dionysian forms of art. Here, the truth of reality is portrayed as “the Dionysian chorus which ever anew discharges itself in an Apollonian world of images.”²⁰ Greek tragedy transforms the man into a satyr and is able to experience the wisdom of nature.²¹ Nietzsche’s new values are in reality the oldest values of the earth.

It is Nietzsche who, by perceiving the truth with all of its beauty and ugliness, rediscovers this and fights to bring truth back into philosophy and morality. Where is it that Nietzsche finds this lost truth? Within himself: “Revaluation of all values: that is my formula for an act of supreme self-examination on the part of humanity, become flesh and genius in me.”²²

Duplicity of Singularity
Through his self-examination, Nietzsche finds not a being or any agent of action but a flux of becoming. It is not a self that is unified through time—a transcendent self—but a self that is always between multiplicities. He sees himself in multiple ways as different selves that are the same: “I am a Doppelgänger, I have a ’second’ face in addition to the first. And perhaps also a third.”²³ This is the multiplicity of becoming that any conception of “being” in the former sense loses meaning because “whatever has being does not become; whatever becomes does not have being.”²⁴ Nietzsche is the first philosopher to fully reject the task of ontology and transvalue all ontological philosophy into the philosophy of becoming and multiplicity.

By now, the answer should be obvious as to how one should read Nietzsche. His writings are full of multiplicities and contradictions. He cannot be read as a coherent singularity that revolves around one focus; it is always many, five or six, three or two, but never one. In between these points, however, Nietzsche’s sense becomes apparent and felt. Nietzsche’s contradictions form the basis of his thought; they cannot be explained away in the service of a systematic Nietzschean thought. His immorality is a method of returning to morality. His affirmations are negations and his negations are affirmations. Nietzsche’s singularity is in his duplicity.

Nietzsche is not to be followed at all: “I want no ‘believers’; I think I am too malicious to believe in myself; I never speak to masses.— I have a terrible fear that one day I will be pronounced holy: you will guess why I publish this book before; it shall prevent people from doing mischief with me.”²⁵ To truly follow Nietzsche means that one must reject him and lose him.²⁶ Only then can one affirm his philosophy. To accept Nietzsche without rejecting him, without overcoming him, is to misread Nietzsche.

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1F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (TSZ) I, “On the Gift-Giving Virtue,” 3 in W. Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche.
2F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (BGE), Preface in W. Kaufmann, Basic Writings of Nietzsche.
3BGE Preface.
4BGE 177.
5BGE 5.
6BGE Preface.
7F. Nietzsche, The Antichrist (AC), 20 in W. Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche.
8BGE 22.
9F. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (EH), “Why I Am a Destiny,” 3 in in W. Kaufmann, Basic Writings of Nietzsche.
10EH, “Why I am a Destiny,” 8.
11BGE 16.
12F. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in an Extramoral Sense” (TL) in W. Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche.
13F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science (GS), 125.
14TSZ IV “Retired.”
15TSZ II “On the Pitying.”
16TSZ IV “Retired.”
17GS 153.
18AC 13.
19F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (BT), Attempt at Self-Criticism (ASC) 5.
20BT 8.
21BT 9.
22EH, “Why I am a Destiny,” 1.
23EH “Why I am so Wise,” 3.
24TI “’Reason’ in Philosophy,” 1.
25EH, “Why I am a Destiny,” 1.
26TSZ I “On the Gift-Giving Virtue,” 3.