Tune in to Professor of Philosophy Lee Braver’s speech from the workshop Europe and the Crisis of Reason: “A Crisis Such as The Earth Has Never Seen: Why Reading Nietzsche Is Our Destiny.” Listen on Spotify
Full transcription:
What I want to talk about today is Nietzsche's discussion of writing. He talks a lot about writing, and he talks a lot about his own writing. I gave you some of his writing in the handouts if anyone needs one. And you can see the beginning, there's a pattern often. There's a pattern where at the end of his books, he often will talk about the writing that he just did. So, he'll write a whole book, and then at the end of it, he'll say, "Gee, you know, I just finished this book, and you know what? There are problems with it. I'm not really happy with the writing. It didn't do what I thought it would do." And we can see here for the 1A, you can see it's divided into sections by Roman numeral, and then quotes under them. So, 1A, he talks about, this is the very last section of Beyond Good and Evil, 296, and he says, "Oh, my written and painted thoughts", all the underlining is mine, just to help us focus in on the important parts, "you've already lost your novelty." So, they had novelty when he was writing them, but now they've lost it. "And I'm afraid that some of you are ready to turn into truths." That's not a very common worry that people have about their work, but Nietzsche is not really a common writer. So, what does he mean? Why is he worried about them being truths? Well, he immediately clarifies, "they already look so immortal." Right, we only immortalise things that cannot live. So, he is worried that they look like truths, because truths for philosophers mean things that are eternal, things that are out of time. This goes all the way back to Plato, at least. To be truth is to be unchanging, to never have any alteration. And for Nietzsche, that means it's dead. To not be able to change, to not be able to adapt to anything new, you are, he calls this mummification in another writing, where you give something eternal life by killing it, by desiccating it, by keeping it from doing all the things that it needs to do to be alive. And so, in order for him as, speaking very loosely, kind of a philosopher of flux, for his writing to be able to do what he wants it to do, he needs a new kind of writing. He needs a writing that won't do what Plato complained about, that it only says the same thing over and over again, that it never can say anything new. And this is what he says on 1C, where he says, this is from Ecce Homo, which is the main book that I'm going to be discussing, which I think is just a wonderful, wonderful book, "I also have a lot of stylistic possibilities, the most multifarious art of style that anyone has ever had at his disposal. No one has ever wasted a greater number of new and unheard-of artistic devices, devices created for this very purpose. Before I came along, no one knew what the German language was capable of, what was possible with language in general." So, he's saying, "I'm creating these new ways of writing, these new ways of using language that no one else has ever done." And Ecce Homo is kind of famous for being all this braggadocio, all this megalomania. And I used to be kind of dismissive of it, too. But I started kind of taking it seriously, which isn't the right word for Nietzsche, but I started really reading it, and if you start listening to what he's saying, there's actually a lot in there. And if you really take it seriously, it changes, for me, it changes the way that I read him, and it opened up a lot of avenues, and that's what I want to talk about today, is these new ways that I found of reading him by listening to these sometimes rather extreme things that he says. And if we look at 1B, this is the last section of Gay Science Book Five, the epilogue, which means both after the language and about language, he says, "I'm still willing to remind my readers of the virtues of reading the right way. Oh, what forgotten and unknown virtues." And at the end, "At least what you're about to hear is new, and if you don't understand it, misunderstand it, what does it matter?" So, on the one hand, he is recognising that what he's doing is new, and he's recognising there's a very significant possibility of misunderstanding, but he wants to remind us of the virtues of good reading. He wants to teach us how to read. That's something he says all over the place, that it's very important to read well, no one knows how to do this. And these are the hints that I've been following out, what he says about how to read well, what happens if you really listen to those and read the way that he says. And I'm going to share today with just one of those things.
Speaker 1 [00:04:53]: And so, this is on 2A. So, this is the end of Ecce Homo. This is Why I Am a Destiny. And like I said, the end of his books is a very common place for him to reflect on his writing. And Ecce Homo, the entire book is a reflection on his writings. This is where he reflects on all of his writings. And here is the final section of that book. And in section three of it, he talks about Zarathustra, he talks a lot about that in Ecce Homo, and he talks about how to read it. So, here, he is, as we just said, reminding his readers of how to read, the virtues of good reading. And he tells us something very specific here. He says, "I have not been asked, as I should have been asked, what the name Zarathustra means coming from my mouth, the mouth of the first immoralist, because it is precisely the opposite of what constitutes that Persian's monumental and unique place in history. But in principle, this question would already be the answer." So, he's saying here, here at the end of this book where he's telling us how to read himself, that this is the question we should be asking him. As we read him, we should be asking the question, what does it mean for these words from Zarathustra, from Zoroaster, the historical figure, to be in his mouth? This is the question that he thinks he should have been asked and wasn't. And his answer, as he answers there and then again at the end of the section, he says, "The self-overcoming of morality from out of truthfulness, the self-overcoming of moralists into their opposite, into me, that is what the name Zarathustra means coming from my mouth." So, that's the end of the section, he answers it again. And both times he talks about it becoming the opposite. So, what it means for him to take Zarathustra, the historical Zoroaster, and take those ideas, take those words, put them into his mouth, it means to turn it into the opposite. But we have to be very careful with what he means by opposite here. And that for a couple of reasons. First of all, if we're talking about the opposite, he is being the opposite of the historical Zoroaster. Zoroaster was for him the founder of morality, the founder of good and evil. And he says, in the sentence I didn't read, he says, "Because he was the founder of this mistake, we have to make him the first person to recognise it and undo all this harm that he's done." But it isn't just morality that Zoroaster founded, it's also this dualistic conception of the universe. Zoroaster presented his morality in extremely simplistic oppositional dualism. What is good is absolutely different from bad, what is bad cannot be good in any way, truth is not a lie, lies are completely opposite, and this is a totally incompatible binary opposition. And so, Zoroaster is both the founder of morality, which Nietzsche says he has to overcome and fix, but he's also in some ways the founder of the simplistic dualism. And if Nietzsche were simply to reject Zoroaster, or simply to reverse Zoroaster, say, oh no, what is evil is actually good, what is good is actually evil, then he would be perpetuating the dualism that underlies Zoroaster's whole thought. You'd be perpetuating the logic of it even while rejecting the content. And Nietzsche says many, many, many times that all of these disciplines, the metaphysics, logic, aesthetics, all of them are interconnected with morality. You can't overcome one without the others. It's all holistically interdependent. So, you cannot overcome morality without also overcoming logic, which is very much structured by dualism.
Speaker 1 [00:09:18]: So, if he were to simply reject or reverse Zoroaster, which is precisely the opposite, twice in that section, then he would be perpetuating the deeper structure of him, which is also harmful. And he discusses this in 3A. It's a very important section. He says, "The fundamental faith of the metaphysicians", [?? 00:09:47] metaphysicians, but it's logical, "is the faith in opposite values, and moral, of course, too." So, fundamental is the foundation. "It might even be possible that what constitutes the value of these good and revered things is precisely that they are insidiously related, tied to, and involved with these wicked, seemingly opposite things. Maybe even one with them, in essence. Maybe. But who has the will to concern himself with such dangerous maybes? For that, one really has to wait for the advent of a new species of philosophers." So, there, he really lays it out quite nicely that what underlies metaphysics, and I think many other things as well, is this view of belief in opposite values. That one thing, one value cannot be related in any significant way with the other, that opposites have to be completely different. This is what gives rise to morality, this is what gives rise to the metaphysics, because if this world is bad, there must be another world that's good, and many, many aspects of the philosophy that he is trying to reject, and it's only the philosophers of the future. To overcome this view, this way of thinking, would be so radical, so extreme, that it would be the philosophy of the future, what he is trying to bring about. And so, if we look, for instance, at the title, Beyond Good and Evil, I think we can read that in two different ways. On the one hand, he's trying to get beyond morality, we have to get beyond the morality of good and evil, but we also have to get beyond any kind of simplistic dualism, of which good and evil is a very important example, in order for this to be, as the subtitle of the book has it, prelude to a philosophy of the future. We get to a philosophy of the future when we transcend these oppositions. And he explains very briefly here in my 3A, how we get beyond it. We get beyond it by seeing that these seemingly opposite things are actually deeply interrelated. And if we can find a way to think with that, then we have gotten beyond simple contradiction, and we can get beyond Zoroaster without simply opposing him in a way that perpetuates his work. And this is what I think he's trying to do. We can see a 3B. He says, this is in the same section, Ecce Homo Destiny, "I contradict as nobody has ever contradicted before. And yet in spite of this, I am the opposite of a naysaying spirit." You've heard of a double negative, I'm not unready, I parse that as a sextuple negative, which is pretty impressive. Even the concept of these tasks has been lacking before. So, I, Nietzsche, am contradicting in this brand-new way, and there aren't even concepts for this, because logic is all based on the traditional notion of contradiction. And we can see this in this 2A in the discussion of Zarathustra. When he explains how he turns the opposite of Zoroaster into Zarathustra, he gives this very, very quick, very dense version of this argument. So, we turn back to 2A. "In my mouth, what does Zarathustra mean?" He says, "Well, first of all, Zarathustra created this faithful heir of morality", so he's the first to recognise it, and that's what everyone talks about when they say, why did Nietzsche choose this character, but Nietzsche says, "More importantly", this is the part that doesn't get as much attention, "More importantly than the fact that he founded morality, Zarathustra is more truthful than any other thinker. His teaching is the only one that considers truthfulness to be the highest virtue. Have I been understood the self-overcoming a morality from out of truthfulness? That's what the name means."
Speaker 1 [00:14:00]: So, he's describing Zarathustra not only as defined by morality, not only defined by dualism, but also defined by truthfulness. And we know that when he talks about becoming the opposite of this figure, it can't be the opposite of truthfulness, because he says in 2B, as you can see, just in this one section twice, he himself takes up Zoroaster's highest virtue of truthfulness for himself. And so, it's not a simple rejection. He's taking up the very thing he says is Zoroaster's highest virtue. And from Zoroaster's own notion, he is overcoming Zoroaster. He's not opposing him from the outside, but taking his own idea and showing how it leads into its opposite, and then overcomes him. Now, he explains, they use this argument many, many, many times against Christianity, against morality, and he explains it better in 3C. This is from Genealogy of Morals. He says, "Unconditional honest atheism," so there's the honesty, "is therefore not opposed to the Ascetic ideal," that's all morality and Christianity and so on, "as it appears to be seemingly opposite. Instead, it's only one of the ideal's last phases of development, one of its final forms and inherent logical conclusions." So, it's one in essence there, it's a logical conclusion of it, right? It's the all-inspiring catastrophe of a 2,000-year discipline in truth-telling, which finally forbids itself to lie and tell the belief of God. So, that's a clearer version of the same argument, that God commanded us to tell the truth, and then eventually, for various reasons and different contexts, we come to believe that God himself is a lie, and because we are charged with truthfulness, we cannot believe in that lie, even though that undermines the very ground for the truthfulness. So, it comes to overcome itself. And he lays out in this section this law, that all great things bring about their own demise through an act of self-sublimation. That is the law of life, the law of necessary self-overcoming in the essence of life. And I don't want to over formalise this, but you can kind of see a sort of alternate logic forming in Nietzsche's thought. I used to think that a lot of the comments about, oh, we have to think differently, we need a different way of thinking, a different way of writing, I used to find those as just promissory notes, IOUs. This is important... I've come to think that a lot of these philosophers, these continental philosophers who say that are actually operating with different logics, different metaphysics, different ways of writing, and if you really pay attention, you can see them at work. And I think Nietzsche is using this kind of law and scare quotes very loosely all over the place in his thought. It happens a lot, so much that he doesn't really draw attention to it, doesn't really explain, a lot of the time here he is, but he kind of takes it for granted a lot of the time. And this is a very different way of being different. It's a very different way to oppose another thinker, than to just say they're wrong, I reject them, I'm reversing them. It's to take their own thought and extend it in a way that it comes to mean the opposite. And this is what Zarathustra means in Nietzsche's mouth, the question that he is putting on to us. And it's very important, and I think when he says, in principle, the answer's in the question, it is this change that is so crucial.
Speaker 1 [00:18:11]: And this way of thinking, and I can't settle on a name for it, insidious logic, or the logic of dangerous maybes, or my favourite is Mobius logic, because it's like a Mobius strip, where a thing changes into its opposite over and over again, this has enormous consequences. It introduces time and change and history and dynamism into thinking, into truth, into logic. Now, ideas have a life, have developmental phases. Thinking is a dynamic process. It's not reaching a conclusion and believing it. It is an activity that is ongoing. It also, and we're not going to read it, but for 3D, it fits Nietzsche's, what we could call in terrible phrases, sort of epistemic psychology by separating the thoughts from the thinker. The thoughts are no longer in control of the thinker. Which is the way that he always wanted it, because Zoroaster didn't want his truthfulness to have this meaning, but it developed into the opposite of what he meant. And so, we have a different conception of subjectivity, a different conception of the way we relate to our thoughts, to our words, that no longer has us in control of them. And you can see, of course, connections with Hegel's dialectic, Heidegger's unsaid, Derrida's deconstruction, plenty of other things in there. But in this section that I quoted, I'm losing all my pages now, in 2A, where he talks about the meaning in his mouth, he's connecting it to hermeneutics. He's connecting it to reading. He's connecting it to a change in authorship. And that's what I've been kind of focusing on. This is a way of avoiding the problem that he complains about. This does not turn your writings into immortal truths. This keeps your writing dynamic. It keeps it active. It allows it to breathe and change and develop and evolve. Because as it changes mouths, as it changes context, as it changes texts, in itself changes meaning. It doesn't sustain a single identity. The different understandings of it don't have a contradiction in the sense we have to figure out and decide which one is right or not. We have a different way to relate these meanings to each other. And I think that we need to keep asking the question that he presses on us. He tells us he should have been asked what does Zarathustra mean in my mouth. Is Zarathustra from 1883, 1884, where he wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra? What does that mean to take the historical Zoroaster and put in that mouth? Well, we need to keep asking that question. What does the Zarathustra of 1883 and 1884 mean in 1889 Nietzsche's mouth? As he quotes it in Ecce Homo five years later, what does it mean now? How does that quoting affect it? How does that change of mouth, what effect does that have on it? If these texts are allowed to adapt and change, if changing mouths has an effect on their meaning, well, 1883 Nietzsche is not 1888 Nietzsche. If you read Nietzsche, he changes very, very quickly in these years. And the quoting that he does, he does a lot of quoting in Ecce Homo, and this quoting does very interesting things, I think. Because for one thing, just right off the bat, when he's quoting, on the one hand, he keeps the text the same, that's what it means to quote, word for word the same, but by quoting it, by putting it into a new context, he also changes it. It has new meanings now. And so, this apparently seemingly opposite binary opposition, same and different, he's able to find a way to reconcile them through his quoting of his own texts.
Speaker 1 [00:22:37]: Oh, I'm really out of time. And I have several examples of this. I'll just go to a couple of them. In 4B, he says, this is from Ecce Homo, quoting Zarathustra, towards the end of Zarathustra, "Zarathustra sometimes calls the good men the last men, the most harmful." And then, he quotes Zarathustra, "The good, they cannot create, they're always the beginning of the end. They crucify those who write new values on new tablets. They sacrifice the future to themselves." So, this is Ecce Homo quoting Zarathustra. But one thing that's going on here is that he isn't just quoting it. He is introducing [italicies? 00:23:30] that weren't in the original. So, the words "create" and "new", which I put in bold, those are italicized in Ecce Homo when they weren't in Zarathustra. So, he's quoting this, and he's taking the same words, but he's also changing them. It's still the same words, but as he says in someplace else in Ecce Homo, we need to listen to the tone of Zarathustra. He's changing the tone while keeping the words the same. And by doing this, by finding this way of drawing out these new meanings from his own texts, by putting them in this new context, by putting in a change that isn't exactly a change, he is creating a kind of a new writing by doing this, a new rhetorical device. And he's doing it by focusing on the words "create" and "new". By changing the words "create" and "new" while keeping them the same, he's changing the meaning of the same words, which is creating this new form of creativity. By not creating something new, he is creating it anew. And he's creating this form which is unleashing endless creativity. Because the meaning of what he's saying here is, the last men are the most harmful, they can't create, and they crucify those who write new values, who write in a new way. They won't allow that. They sacrifice the future to themselves. The text, this writing, this creating cannot have a future for the last men, because they want it to be the way that they see it. But by inserting this alteration into this phrase, Nietzsche is giving his past a new future. He's giving his words that seem frozen, he's allowing them to speak anew, with the words "new" and "create". And as he says in, where is it? Whoops. I'm all discombobulated. Sorry. Shoot. Oh, right, with 5C, well, 5A real quick, this is Ecce Homo preface, he says, "My Zarathustra has a special place for me in my writings. With it, I've given humanity the greatest gift it has ever received. This book with the voice that spans millennia is also the most profound thing to be born out of the innermost riches of the truth. And any bucket sent down to it will emerge from this inexhaustible fountain filled with gold and goodness." Gold has a big theme in Zarathustra, I can't get into, it has to do with the creativity that he takes from the sun. But he says that Zarathustra is inexhaustible, and it spans millennia. As it goes across time, it can keep giving and keep giving and keep giving, as we send buckets down into it. I don't know what else that would mean for a text except quoting and rereading. And then, 5C I think is a really fascinating quote. This is somewhat near the original end of the book. This is Zarathustra speaking, "I taught them all my creating and striving. I taught them to work on the future and to creatively redeem everything that was. To redeem what is past in mankind and to recreate all it was until the will speaks, but I wanted it so, I shall want it so. This, I told them, was redemption, this alone I taught them to call redemption." So, he's describing what he calls redemption here, which is to recreate the past by willing it. Which is, if you will it, you're not changing it, but by willing it, it now is willed, which does change it. And it recreates it, instead of creating something totally different, you are recreating the past now as what you are willing. And this is what he calls his creating. And this is totally bound up with eternal return, but that's a whole other presentation.
Speaker 1 [00:28:35]: But then, Zarathustra does something really, really neat. And this is just, this is a continuous block of texts. There's no gap here. He says, "Now I wait for my redemption, so that I can go to them for the last time. And I want to go to mankind one time more, among them I want to go under, dying I want to give them my richest gift. I learned this from the sun, for his gold from the sea to his inexhaustible wealth." Zarathustra wants to go under, he sits and waits, broken tablets around him, also new tablets partially written upon. So, he takes this redemption that he has used to the past, he redeems Zoroaster's truthfulness by willing it, which then put in his mouth and changes significance. And now he's saying, "I want that done to me." Saying, "I will be [?? 00:29:23] was to future readers. And I want them to recreate me. I want them to read me creatively. I want to go under, to perish, to no longer be in control of my words, of my meaning, so that they can have the control over now." And that's what makes it inexhaustible, and that's why the tablets are only partially written, so that there's space for future generations to write on. And then, this is the last significant quote we'll look at, 6A. This is the very end of the preface of Ecce Homo. He says, "It’s not a prophet speaking here, not one of those awful amalgams of sickness and willpower and of the founders of religion", like Zoroaster. "Nothing is being preached here. Nobody is being believed. I'm not trying to control the meaning. I don't want you to think what I think. I don't want these to be truths. What were Zarathustra's own words when he returned to his solitude for the first time? The exact opposite of what a wise man, saint, world redeemer, or other decadent would say in this situation. He does not just talk differently, he is different." And then, he quotes Zarathustra's speech at the end of Book One before he goes back up the mountain. So, he's come down the mountain, he's given sermons to his followers, and then he goes back up the mountain. But before he does, he gives one last speech to his followers. "I will go by myself, my disciples. You go as well and alone. This is what I want. Leave me now and guard yourselves against Zarathustra. Even better, be ashamed of him. Perhaps he has deceived you. You repay a teacher badly by remaining a pupil. You say you believe in Zarathustra, but who cares about Zarathustra? You have not looked for yourselves yet, and you found me. That is what all believers are like, and that is why belief means so little. Now I call upon you to lose me and find yourselves, and only after you have all denied me will I return to you." And then italics is added, I don't have time to go through why, what I think of that.
Speaker 1 [00:31:29]: And so, I'll just make one point of this. I've got several, but let's make one point. One of the things that's so fascinating about this passage, when I read this, and I ask the question that Nietzsche asked me to ask, what does this mean in Nietzsche's mouth at this time in November 1888, what I find is that it's gained this new meaning. This was written weeks, just a few weeks before Nietzsche himself went silent, before he withdrew, before he stopped sending us lessons on how to live, before he withdrew into madness and never wrote again, a man whose life was made up of writings. So, the things that he is quoting Zarathustra saying are the things that he ended up actually doing six weeks later. Which charges this speech that he's quoting from five years earlier with an almost unbearable poignancy, with this new meaning that he could not have given it. And that's the very theory of language and subjectivity and meaning that he's trying to explain, that he is not giving the meaning to his words. And the words have more meaning than he could give them. And this is demonstrated by the context of what occurred to him, what occurred to these words after he wrote them. I mean, he could not have known what was coming, and only in that way could this claim work. Only because he did not intend this meaning, he did not know this meaning, could the word show that he was not in charge of their meaning. When we read this speech, he didn't make it mean that, but it is in this context, these things did happen. The speech now sounds like Nietzsche himself giving a farewell. And he couldn't have known that, he couldn't have done that. And therefore, it does have the meaning that he says. What he's saying in the speech is, I'm not in control of these words. You determine the meaning. External events determine the meaning. Readers determine the meaning. And it's because he didn't determine this, that it can have that meaning. And that's why I think reading Nietzsche is our destiny, as a kind of a crisis, but a perpetual crisis. I didn't know this beforehand, I'm sure many of you did, the word crisis originally didn't mean catastrophe or terrible event, but a decision point where things can go either well or badly. In fact, an illness, which has pretty interesting ramifications for Nietzsche. And I think Nietzsche's trying to make his writings not truths, but a perpetual crisis, a perpetual decision point, an indeterminacy that is a provocation, rather than a set of claims. And that's the legacy that he leaves us, the legacy of leaving. The legacy of a legacy as a challenge, as a journey in exploration, an endeavour rather than a chore or an errand. It's not a burden imposed on us, but a heritage and identity we can recreate to make our own, as decisions and readings that we can make that enable us to become who we are. Thank you.