Few philosophers are as widely read as Nietzsche, and few are as widely misunderstood as Nietzsche. When the classic Nietzsche study by the famous American analytical philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto was first published in 1965, many regarded Nietzsche as a brilliant but elusive thinker. Danto presents, however, a very different portrait, arguing that Nietzsche offers a systematic and coherent philosophy that goes ahead of time on many of the questions that define contemporary philosophy.
Nietzsche sometimes refers to his philosophy as nihilism in his speech, and to Danto the seemingly appropriate title implies negativity and emptiness. "I will understand nihilism as the central concept of Nietzsche's philosophy, through which I will try to show a completely systematic connection between these extraordinary doctrines, otherwise they will appear so palely in the surrounding aphorisms and crazy ancillary discourses," Danto said. I will even try to show that these ancillary statements are neither the surface of the views that Nietzsche had to say nor the essence of the views that Nietzsche had to say, but rather the many illustrations and the application of certain universal principles to special situations. Finally, I wish to determine the place of these universal principles in the main philosophical tradition as Nietzsche's answer to some of the same questions that are of greatest concern to philosophers of all ages. ”
The following is an excerpt from Nietzsche as a Philosopher, with subtitles added by the editor and not original. It has been authorized by the publishing house to publish.
Nietzsche as a Philosopher, by Arthur Danto, translated by Hao Yuan, Qi zhenguan 丨 Zhejiang University Press, December 2021.
One can quickly get tired of Nietzsche as a writer
Nietzsche's writings give the impression that they are assembled, not assembled. They consist mainly of short, sharp aphorisms and short essays that rarely exceed a few pages; each volume resembles more of a collection of the author's choice than a well-deserved treatise. Any given aphorism or essay in one volume of works may easily be placed in another without much impact on the unity or structure of the two volumes. Apart from the order of time before and after, the treatises themselves do not exhibit any particular structure. None of them presupposes knowledge of any other treatise.
Although Nietzsche's ideas and style must have developed, his works can be read in almost any order, without great prejudice to the understanding of his ideas. His numerous and disorderly posthumous works have been produced in many volumes and have been given titles by his sister, Elizabeth Foster Nietzsche, who has appointed herself executor of Nietzsche's literary legacy. However, even if there is some evidence, it is almost impossible to find any intrinsic evidence that they were pieced together by someone other than Nietzsche, and even a reader who is very familiar with Nietzsche's works will find it difficult to say what the differences are between those printed by Nietzsche himself and those pieced together by Nietzsche's editors in fragments.
The situation in The Birth of Tragedy must be an exception, and such an exception may also include Zarathustra, who exhibits a unity in conformity with tradition and unfolds a theme, while the latter acquires a certain definite external structure by proposing in each section the didactic rhetoric made by Zarathustra. Nevertheless, neither book has a well-ordered development, no direction of argument or statement. People can start reading these two books from anywhere.
The ideas expressed in these essays and aphorisms, like their literary representations, have an incoherent appearance. In the case of individual passages alone, they are witty and sharp—"full of stinging and secret interest"—but, after reading some of these short essays and aphorisms, one finds themselves boring and repetitive, and Nietzsche throws many almost identical sarcastic words to almost the same goal over and over again. The sight of the sea for the first time, the first hearing of the sound of the waves lapping at the shore, these are indeed intoxicating and uplifting to the spirit, but when this experience is prolonged, such feeling dissipates; after all, the waves are similar to each other to a significant extent, and they soon become unrecognizable, and in some whole flow and monotonous noise we lose their character.
One can quickly get tired of Nietzsche as a writer, just as one might get bored with the sight of diamonds made up of diamonds that will eventually dim each other' light. In the absence of structure to sustain and guide the reader's thinking, once the reader begins to read, they are bound to put down the books very quickly, and the reader will experience these books: they are either many isolated expositions that are not related to each other, or they are blurred lights and noises.
The first impression of these maxims on the reader is that they are a paranoid, irritating, destructive, and impersonal critique and mockery of his contemporaries' morality, politics, culture, religion, and literature—he is a clever freak, he has some kind of abused literary talent, he has a long list of personal troubles, and he is more like the kind of person who constantly writes letters to editors than a constructive thinker. These aphorisms will make the casual reader feel that they are filled with some kind of traditional deep thought and an amateurish and elusive knowledge: they mention philosophers, religious figures, historical fragments, literary works, musical compositions, and after a few words are published on these, they quickly change the subject. One feels that one is dealing with a self-taught freak, not a university professor, a scholar trained in the strict disciplines of German Chinese literature, or a philosopher (for this reason, even according to the most perfunctory meaning of the term "philosopher", Nietzsche's reputation as a philosopher cannot be saved). The hallmarks of professional philosophical writing are delicate and ingenious distinctions, perceptive arguments, and careful and reserved inferences, which Nietzsche clearly lacks. Nor have people ever heard the philosopher feign a calm and stern tone. Instead, the pamphlet author has long been dissatisfied with the status quo, and he makes a sharp, nitpick, sometimes hysterical voice.
Most of Nietzsche's works do not place harsh demands on the intellect and knowledge of the reader. These ideas are clear and direct, the goals are significant and significant, and the language is clear and understandable, even if it is intense. Some readers are led to believe that philosophy is difficult, but because of Nietzsche's ease of understanding, they find that either philosophy is easier than they originally thought, or they themselves are more intelligent than they thought. Perhaps for the same reason, philosophers are reluctant to count Nietzsche as one of them. Everywhere these philosophers refer to darker and more confusing doctrines: the doctrine of eternal return, the doctrine of Amor Fati, the doctrine of superhumanism, the strong will, the art of Apollo and the art of Dionysus.
Stills from the movie "In Love with the Philosopher" (2016).
Perhaps here, in a somewhat narrow sense, Nietzsche speaks as a philosopher. But these doctrines do not give the impression that they are matched together in any systematic and coherent way, and that they cannot be easily attributed, either individually or in groups, to certain convenient and unavoidable treatises by which we distinguish many philosophical ideas. Nor do they seem to be solutions to the philosophical problems that we recognize. If Nietzsche's philosophy is indeed to be found in these doctrines, it presents itself as a combination of many completely different teachings, which is still a collection, not an assembly, composed of many unproven, misunderstood and unique speculations, which are not suitable for positioning them in the context of philosophical analysis that makes philosophical critics or historians of philosophy feel at ease.
Nietzsche's collected writings seem to be an odd and incongruous page in the history of formal philosophy, a non-sequitur inserted into the standard history of the discipline, largely because it is even less conspicuous when attributed to other histories. Even in the history of philosophy, it is an obstacle to be circumvented, not an integral part of the vast array of ideas or narrative scenes from Thales to the present. Nietzsche seems to have ascribed to philosophy only as a last resort (faute demieux). Nietzsche himself, however, felt that he had completely severed his ties with formal philosophy; if Nietzsche was indeed almost unfit for the discipline that he attacked so frequently, Nietzsche would say that it was even more unfortunate for the discipline of philosophy. If there is an irony here, it is that Nietzsche himself is a remarkable part of the history of philosophy that he hopes to destroy.
Not surprisingly, Nietzsche's philosophy does not have a ready-made name like conceptualism, realism, or even existentialism. Nietzsche sometimes refers to his philosophy as Nihilism in his speeches, and given what I have spoken of in Nietzsche's writings, styles, and ideas, this seemingly appropriate title implies negativity and emptiness. Nevertheless, if we wish to understand Nietzsche to some extent, we must free his nihilism from these two implications and gradually regard it as a positive and fundamentally respectable philosophical teaching.
I will understand nihilism as the central concept of Nietzsche's philosophy, and through nihilism I will try to show a completely systematic connection between these extraordinary doctrines, otherwise they would appear so palely in the surrounding aphorisms and crazy ancillary discourses. I will even try to show that these ancillary statements are neither the surface of the views that Nietzsche had to say nor the essence of the views that Nietzsche had to say, but rather the many illustrations and the application of certain universal principles to special situations. Finally, I wish to determine the place of these universal principles in the main philosophical tradition as Nietzsche's answer to some of the same questions that are of greatest concern to philosophers of all ages.
A man who constructs his philosophy like a beaver,
Necessarily not aware of his own philosophy
I would have seen Nietzsche's philosophy in advance as a system that did not appear somewhere in Nietzsche's work. This is due in part to Nietzsche's particular lack of organizational talent, which he was unable to display not only in his philosophical works, but also in his musical compositions. Nietzsche had a certain talent for improvisation of the piano, and he had a high opinion of his status as a composer. The honor shared by Nietzsche and Rousseau is that both have their place in the history of philosophy and the history of musical composition.
But, according to one critic, Nietzsche's musical works have a major flaw in that they show themselves "lack any definition of true harmony, or lack melodic coherence despite the motives for reproduction." His fugue "After the gorgeous opening ... Soon degenerated into a simpler structure, he repeatedly violated the principles of voice writing without any irresistible reasons." Even in ambitious late works, "brief motives dominate, completely lacking broader melodies or engaging logical structures, musical fragments that never gain sufficient motivation to make themselves convincing". These critical evaluations of Nietzsche's music may also appeal to Nietzsche's literary products. None of these literary products is organized with extraordinary intellect, nothing has a sense of structure of the system of knowledge, for example, they do not exhibit such a sense of structure outside the scope of the work of the duty, as Kant's work does. In fact, they are like improvisations on many marginal philosophical themes, improvisations that burst forth suddenly.
In addition to this incompetence, it is reasonable to speculate that even Nietzsche never fully understood the system itself in his own consciousness; or that even if Nietzsche was conscious of the system, he was busy with other plans as his creation was nearing its end, unaware that he himself might not have had time to write it down clearly. In Nietzsche's late period, a letter addressed to Georg Brandes, who was the first scholar to give a lecture on Nietzsche's thought, appears to have been written during the exceptionally sunny period of Nietzsche's life, in which Nietzsche said that for a whole week he had been able to enjoy the feeling of energy for several hours a day, which allowed him to examine my whole idea from beginning to end, with many huge and complex questions. They are prominently located in clear outlines, and it can be said that the idea expands below me. It takes a power to reach its maximum limit, and I hardly expect myself to have that power anymore. It has been on the right path for many years, and now it is all coherent, and a man who constructs his philosophy like a beaver must not know his own philosophy.
Stills from the movie Horse of Turin (2011).
In philosophy, almost no author constructs their system bit by bit, and great writers are even less likely to do so, and Nietzsche's metaphor may rightly imply that he did just that. In general, a philosophical system does not grow by accumulating. However, it is possible for a philosophical thinker to analyze many subjects in a piecemeal manner over a period of time without realizing that they are related, and for solutions that he does not yet know, he does not realize that they support each other or even depend on each other. Next, through painstaking effort, he obtained a system that was not open to himself, unless, as Nietzsche indicated, the man was allowed to look at the whole picture at some point and reveal the unity of his thought during that time. Thus, like a bystander to his own actions, he discovers a systematic necessity between different statements that he has been approaching from beginning to end but has never been able to discern before.
Of course, we cannot infer from the fact that he was unaware that he had created a system, just as we sometimes naturally think of certain problems that are deeply rooted in the writer's subconscious, hidden in the hidden depths of this creative mind, until it is finally revealed. Instead, I believe that we can explain these achievements by resorting to two exact facts.
The first fact is the systematic nature of philosophy itself. The discipline of philosophy is characterized by the absence of isolated solutions to isolated questions. The interconnectedness of many philosophical questions has reached such a close degree that it is impossible for a philosopher to solve or begin to solve a single problem in them without implicitly committing himself to solving all of them. In a genuine sense, every philosophical problem must be solved simultaneously. Only within the system that he accepts (if only explicitly) leads his research will it be possible to carry out piecemeal research on isolated problems.
Nevertheless, if what he offers from the outset proves to be a new answer in philosophy, then a certain distortion is introduced into its conceptual framework, and these tensions must sooner or later be felt by some sensitive mind. Nietzsche's work is dominated by philosophical questions, and it is difficult to determine the order in which he raised them. Nietzsche's lack of structural ability made it difficult for him to think about a problem for a long time or to fix a problem in his mind until a corresponding solution was formed. However, it is still true that this philosophy is intellectually systematic, and that it imposes an external systemization on its most unsystematic practitioner, and that philosophers are therefore systematic by virtue of the nature of their causes. This was found to be repeatedly exemplified in pre-Socratic philosophy.
Readers familiar with the grand outline of an author's thought may turn to the work of that author's youth and find surprising omens there. He will encounter many words and ideas that foreshadow the themes contained in his mature works, and if the author never writes mature works, the reader will discard these juvenile works without interest. In fact, for us, without the existence of these later anthologies, we may never have found that the things that we recognize so impressively in the later documents already exist in this young mind.
The same is true for Nietzsche. In his works from the early 1870s, we occasionally find many ideas that resonate with his entire later works, as if they were already contained in them. In fact, it is precisely these late works that reverberate to the early works. There is no doubt that there is continuity in the mind of any author, but this continuity should be attributed in part to his readers, who recall the early works with late works in their minds. What they can see is something that the author could not have seen when writing the early works, because he could not have known those that he himself had not yet written. We cannot think of a life that is not unified, and if it is in this sense, a person's life has unity.
This brings us to the second fact. We tend to attribute knowledge that is actually our own to the author's subconscious, when in fact the author cannot be conscious of such knowledge, because of the fact that they are not in the depths of the author's mind, but in the future. If his late works were different, it might make us think forcefully that while we were so impressed with what we felt were so advanced, we were in fact ignoring a number of themes. They have not received attention because of the retroactive uniformity imposed by historical understanding. Thus, the unifying forces of historical intelligence and the systematic and forceful action of philosophical thought form a coherent structure in many of the author's works (although not including his literary style and method of creation), which is nothing to say to himself or anyone else.
To show that the system I wish to discuss is indeed Nietzsche's, it raises some complex questions about the honesty of the history of philosophy. Nietzsche did not join us in admitting that this was his own system, nor did he (perhaps because he could not) give us the coherent and inherently inevitable view he had told Georg Brandeis. Nietzsche himself admits, however, that he was certainly unaware of this supposed system, which is being revealed through the accumulation of many aphorisms, and therefore could not have intended for his work to adopt this form for all periods of his life.
The system I have offered needs to be understood as a reconstruction, it must be understood in the same way that any theory is necessarily understood; that is, as a means of unifying and explaining certain phenomenal fields— in this case, the field constituted by the many works of the individual. I will use these texts as observations for scientific theorists—in order to confirm my theories from different points of view. I am fairly convinced that, at least in a loose sense, the theory has some kind of predictive power; in other words, it will more or less let us know what Nietzsche is going to say. It allows us to figure out our way through this realm where it is meant to give order, or at least I hope so.
Of course, there are always other theories that are not compatible with this theory, but are fully compatible with all the same facts that seem to support my theory. Next, my theory will be shown to be merely an alternative system, and I would be delighted if someone showed another such system that had the same coherence as the one I thought I had already discovered. Since this would acquiesce to the systematic nature of Nietzsche's philosophy (whichever system we attribute to Nietzsche), the position thus expressed would oppose the idea that Nietzsche should be understood as some kind of more naïve and irrational alternative thinker.
Of course, there is a further possibility that one day there may be unknown facts (e.g., certain hitherto undiscovered texts) that will prove that my interpretation is completely invalid. One must take this risk not only in the process of creating scientific theories, but also in the process of creating philosophical theories. We find everywhere that Nietzsche, in addition to mentioning his system, also made many overviews and plans for the final systematic statement of his philosophy. The conclusion drawn from current knowledge is that nothing of them has been realized.
Nietzsche fell into madness in 1889, and he has not written anything since; in the twilight years before death in his physical sense, he lived a life of silence for the remaining eleven years. But the sheer scale of his posthumous work (i.e., the Manuscript), and the seeming inability of him to impose any form on his work other than the most external, almost guarantees that, even if Nietzsche remained mentally sound, he would not have systematically integrated it. The breadth of the Manuscript and the scale of the published works ensured that he did not integrate and systematize certain other works.
Once Nietzsche fell into a state of helplessness due to insanity, his people, his works, and his reputation were all left in the care of his sister. She and others have abused their editorial freedom to deal with unpublished works (and even some that have already been published), and their editorial work has become scandalous. "Nietzsche's life and writings suffered the worst forgery in the history of modern literature and thought." Distortions, omissions, deceptive additions, and false structures have greatly inferiored the anthology; it is only now that they have been improved through the most patient philological work, and many texts, letters, and even Nietzsche's chronology of life have been restored to their true order. One must admit that this is an atrocity, and according to academic opinion, these forgeries are completely immoral.
I believe, however, that these restorations will have little effect on philosophies that we may find in Nietzsche's current treatises or in the treatises that have been cleared of fallacies. Elizabeth Nietzsche made inducing alterations primarily in the parts concerning her relationship with her brother; the image she sought for herself was Nietzsche's confidant and the first to understand Nietzsche's darkest thoughts. She falsified Nietzsche's texts everywhere in order to save her brother's good reputation in a way she understood, which from time to time made Nietzsche appear to be advocating doctrines that he actually despised. What she tampered with was never the doctrine of philosophy; in fact, she had only a childlike understanding of philosophical ideas, and she did not know anyone who knew how to distort philosophy. Even though her interventions in the text (along with Peter Gast and others) were greater than we now imagine, the consequences of them in interpreting Nietzsche's philosophy were almost negligible. It is in this respect that these loosely combined maxims, fragments, and essays are at least favorable to Nietzsche in this respect. His thematic ideas have been so repeated that almost any sample randomly selected from his work can reconstruct his philosophy as a whole.
There is a theory that our memories are stored in protein molecules, and that these protein molecules are present in each of our bodies in large numbers. These molecules have a striking idempotency, i.e., an attribute that precisely replicates itself. According to this theory, the same information is stored in various places throughout the body, so even if one part is destroyed, our memory may still be intact, and we will continue to integrate it with ourselves. The richness and idempotency of this protein molecule can almost be seen as a guarantee that organisms happen to create to avoid self-destruction. Nietzsche's over-enough, yet oddly repetitive maxims, deal with the same problems in the same way, and it seems to me that they produce the same result. New works may be discovered, old works may be restored, but it is difficult to imagine that they will provide us with a philosophy that is different in any essential respect from the philosophy we can discover by carefully examining the existing Nietzsche texts.
Original author 丨 [American] Arthur Danto
Excerpt 丨 He Ye
Editor 丨 Shen Chan
Introduction Proofreading 丨 Chen Diyan