Nietzsche as Postmodernist

Robert C. Holub

Department of German
University of California Berkeley
<rcholub@garnet.berkeley.edu>

 

Clayton Koelb, ed. Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Contra. Albany: SUNY P, 1990.

 

Since his death in 1900, Friedrich Nietzsche has been associated with almost every major movement in the twentieth century. No other writer has succeeded as well as Nietzsche in impressing such an array of subsequent thinkers. Putatively opposing ideologies have competed for his patronage; traditions that otherwise admit nothing in common find Nietzsche an ally in their endeavors. On the political front he has been considered a promoter of anarchism, fascism, libertarianism, and–despite his pointed polemics against the most modern manifestation of slave morality– socialism. In the realm of culture he has been viewed as an inspiration for aestheticism, impressionism, expressionism, modernism, dadaism, and surrealism. In philosophical circles he has allegedly influenced phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction. This remarkable record of affinities and effects may be less a tribute to the fecundity of Nietzsche’s actual oeuvre than to the resourcefulness of his various interpreters. Nietzsche touched on a wide variety of topics over the two decades in which he wrote, and the manner in which he expressed himself, the elusively suggestive and vibrant style in his mostly aphoristic oeuvre, has been obviously seductive for succeeding generations of intellectuals. Postmodernism is thus only the latest movement to claim Nietzsche as its spiritual progenitor, and it is to the credit of Clayton Koelb that in the volume under review here he has collected fourteen contributions that explore various and often antagonistic aspects of this possible affiliation.

 

Actually, most of the essays in Nietzsche as Postmodernist have less to do with postmodernism as an artistic or general cultural phenomenon than with “postmodern theory,” i.e., contemporary philosophical and theoretical tendencies generally subsumed under the rubric of poststructuralism. In this regard there are three recurrent strategies for connecting Nietzsche with recent French and Francophilic tendencies. The first of these is heavily reliant on Paul de Man’s essay on Nietzsche and rhetoric found in Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale, 1979, 103-18). De Man focuses his attention on a particular phase in Nietzsche’s career when the young classical philologist at Basel was preparing a course on rhetoric for the winter semester in 1872-73. Citing fragmentary lecture notes for this course (which had only two students in attendance) and the unpublished essay “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” which was likely composed at about the same time, de Man presents us with a Nietzsche sensitive to the undecidabilities of language. The instability of all linguistic utterance becomes for the deManized Nietzsche his seminal philosophical insight. Since according to de Man Nietzsche establishes that all language is inextricably bound to figures and tropes, the traditional notions of the philosophical heritage–identity, truth, causality, objectivity, subjectivity–can no longer be trusted. As de Man writes, “the key to Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics . . . lies in the rhetorical model of the trope, or, if one prefers to call it that way, in literature as language most explicitly grounded in rhetoric” (109). This reading thus situates Nietzsche at the source of a deconstructive enterprise culminating in the work of Derrida and de Man.

 

The problem with interpreting Nietzsche’s philosophy in as “postmodernist” is that it compels us to valorize one small portion of his work over almost everything else that he wrote and then to ignore most of his mature philosophical work. Indeed, as Maudemaire Clark demonstrates in her essay “Language and Deconstruction: Nietzsche, de Man, and Postmodernism” (75-90), de Man’s notions about language and rhetoric were not Nietzsche’s, and if in his early writings Nietzsche did in fact flirt with such propositions, he quickly abandoned them as unsatisfactory. Clark argues convincingly that de Man’s assertion that all language is figural is incoherent, and that his confusion of literal meaning with word-for-word translation leads to an unnecessary divorce of truth from all utterance. Relying on Donald Davidson’s holistic view of language and meaning, she shows that de Man’s appreciation of the “inscrutability of reference” is not accompanied by a sufficiently developed notion of truth conditions. Unlike Nietzsche, therefore, whose early views were supplanted by more mature reflections, de Man remains fixated on a simplistic, skeptical conception of language as metaphor. What is perhaps more astounding than de Man’s obsession, however, is that his thesis about Nietzsche (and about language in general) has gained such widespread currency in recent years. That Nietzsche found it inadequate over a century ago is clearly indicated by his suppression of the essay on “Truth and Lie,” as well as his abandoning of such a linguistically oriented concept of truth and values in his subsequent work. In short, this de Man-inspired contention about Nietzsche’s views on language, rhetoric, and truth, despite its currency among deconstructive acolytes, provides no firm connection between Nietzsche and “postmodernism.”

 

A second and frequently cited aspect of the “postmodern” Nietzsche is a bequest from the work of Michel Foucault, in particular from Foucault’s influential essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (cited below from Language, Counter-Memory, Practice [Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977]). Foucault’s central concern is to delineate two different ways to conduct historical research. Traditional historiography is identified with the search for origins (Ursprung), while Nietzsche’s genealogical approach prefers the examination of emergence (Entstehung), lineage (Herkunft), birth (Geburt), and descent (Abkunft). This neat distinction is then elaborated in subsequent discussion: genealogy, we are told, depends “on a vast accumulation of source material” LCP, 140), eschews essences and identities, explores discontinuities, “attaches itself to the body” LCP, 147), and “seeks to reestablish the various systems of subjection, . . . the hazardous play of dominations” LCP, 148). Without objections or criticism, Foucault’s claims have been well received by contemporary critics. Thus it is not surprising that Gary Shapiro, in his essay on “Foucault, Derrida, and The Genealogy of Morals,” adopts these putatively Nietzschean distinctions and clarifies as follows:

 

To be concerned with Ursprung, or origin, is to be a philosophical historian who would trace morality--or any other subject matter-- back to an original principle that can be clarified and recuperated. The genealogist will, however, be concerned with the complex web of ancestry and affiliations that are called Herkunft, those alliances that form part of actual family trees, with all their gaps, incestuous transgressions, and odd combinations. (39-55)

 

It is unimportant that Shapiro will try to show that Derrida is a more consistent genealogist than Foucault; what is significant is that Foucault’s version of Nietzsche has become a staple of postmodern theory.

 

If we look at Foucault’s essay critically, however, we find without much effort that most of the views he imputes to Nietzsche are not supported by what Nietzsche actually professed. In the first place the distinction between Ursprung and Herkunft, even in the preface to the Genealogy of Morals (where Foucault claims the distinction is most pronounced), is not maintained consistently. Moreover, not only does Nietzsche never discuss the difference between Ursprung and Herkunft, he obviously uses the words interchangeably. For example, at the beginning of the second paragraph he states that his topic is the heritage (Herkunft) of our moral prejudices, while in the third paragraph he writes about the origin (Ursprung) of our notions of good and evil; the fourth paragraph begins with a statement about his “hypothesis about the origin (Ursprung) of morality.” Perhaps more importantly, the various characteristics Foucault assigns to Nietzschean genealogy do not actually describe it. In the Genealogy Nietzsche does not collect a great deal of source material, but proceeds primarily on the basis of psychological observations, intuition, and a few scattered philological clues. Nietzschean genealogy does not prefer discontinuities; in fact, Nietzsche is at pains to show that slave morality has continuously manifested itself from Socrates in the Greek world, through the various “priests” of the Judeo-Christian tradition, to its latest manifestations in democratic and socialist political movements. Foucault’s putatively Nietzschean approach to history is transparently Foucauldian and at best tangentially Nietzschean. The concern with the body, with domination, and with archives are all characteristics of Foucault’s archaeological phase. Like de Man’s “postmodern” Nietzsche, who was compelled to parrot de Man’s own obsession with rhetoric, Foucault’s “postmodern” Nietzsche is a ventriloquist’s dummy through whom Foucault himself speaks.

 

The third commonly cited connection between Nietzsche and postmodern thought involves the philosopher’s notion of perspectivism. While six of the contributions mention “perspectivism” (Nietzsche, by the way, used the term only twice according to Schlechta’s index), Debra Bergoffen’s essay “Nietzsche’s Madman: Perspectivism without Nihilism” is perhaps the most interesting treatment of perspectivism as a philosophical issue. Bergoffen contends that perspectivism should be separated from the related doctrine of relativism and from the implied stances of nihilism and anarchism. She argues that our traditional understanding of perspectivism has been falsified because we have approached it as “centered subject[s] in a metaphysically anchored world.” Nietzsche, she claims, does not propound perspectivism as truth, but maintains rather “that decentered perspectivism is less repressive than the absolute perspective of the center” (57). Using Lacanian theory, which Nietzsche anticipates (62), she interprets the madman passage from Joyful Wisdom to be a proclamation of a “polytheistic pluralism” in which there is “no longing for the lost absolute” (68). “The philosophy of perspectivism,” Bergoffen concludes, “is a philosophy of pluralist textuality. In replacing Kierkegaard’s either/or with his own either . . . or, Nietzsche rejects the logic of exclusive disjunction for a logic which affirms dejoined [sic] terms” (70).

 

Once again, however, we have a series of contentions which, no matter how we may judge their logical rigor, have little basis in Nietzsche’s own works. The passage that Bergoffen cites from the third book of Joyful Wisdom (aphorism 125) contains absolutely no mention of the perspectival or of perspectivism: the word “perspective” is totally absent. It deals solely with the death of god, and although it is plausible that one can relate the death of god to Nietzschean perspectivism, Nietzsche does not specifically do so here, nor, as far as I can tell, anywhere else. How Bergoffen can cite a passage from the middle of this particular aphorism and then abruptly proclaim that “With these words Nietzsche introduces us to his doctrine of perspectivism” (68) remains a (philo)logical mystery. If we actually examine passages in which Nietzsche himself writes about perspectivism or the perspectival we find that, for him, perspectivism involves not the demise of the theocentric universe, but rather issues of epistemology. In the fifth book of Joyful Wisdom, for example, Nietzsche suggests strongly that “perspectivism” (Perspektivismus) is synonymous with what he calls “phenomenalism” (Phenomenalismus); both involve the notion that although perception may be conceived as individual, once it is made conscious, it becomes generalized and thus in some sense falsified, flattened, superficial, and corrupted. From this passage we can conclude that consciousness for Nietzsche is not an individual possession, but part of our herd mentality. At other points, of course, Nietzsche writes of perspectival seeing and the impossibility of achieving an objective stance for cognition. In these passages he affirms a multiplicity of meanings and interpretations, usually viewed as supraindividual and often serving the preservation of a supraindividual entity. (In both cases the point is that there is no single, higher, hidden, Platonic reality or meaning behind the phenomenological world.) These latter discussions of “perspectivism” come closer to Bergoffen’s notion of a pluralistic, decentered, benign relativism, but even if we take this to be what Nietzsche really meant with the term, it would be inaccurate to ascribe to Nietzsche himself the tolerance and eclecticism that reside in Bergoffen’s discussion. From at least Zarathustra on, Nietzsche was a “dogmatic” philosopher, maintaining, at least implicitly, that some ethical values were superior to others. Who can read the Genealogy and still believe that Nietzsche does not consider the slave morality of good and evil inferior to the good-and-bad value system of the blond beasts? As Robert Solomon, a more careful and judicious reader of Nietzsche, correctly notes, the “mature Nietzsche was no perspectivist, not much of a pluralist, and consequently not much of a postmodernist either” (276).

 

The three most popular accounts of Nietzsche as postmodernist all fail, therefore, because their advocates are too quick to attribute their own views to Nietzsche. Although some evidence can be mounted for each case of postmodern affiliation, the readings, when examined closely, are too selective, too partial (in both senses of the word), and too inaccurate to secure a connection. This does not mean, of course, that there are no other possible aspects of Nietzsche’s works that one can identify with the protean term “postmodern,” nor does it mean that Nietzsche cannot be solicited as an analyst of what we call postmodernism. In perhaps the most provocative essay in the volume, “Nietzsche, Postmodernism, and Resentment” (267-293), Solomon suggests that we might understand academic postmodernism and its attendant theories as varieties of Nietzschean ressentiment. In this view, “postmodernism” would be regarded as a symptomatic reaction on the part of those who are outside of the mainstream of society. The theorists of postmodernism thus have something in common with the zealots of the New Right, who are similarly estranged from the centers of culture. It does not matter that these two groupings are politically and ideologically antagonistic, Solomon argues; Nietzsche himself has shown how contradictory phenomena issue from a common source. Of course, if we conceive of postmodernism as “the resentful projection of too many self-important smart people feeling slighted by the Zeitgeist” (289), then Nietzsche could very well be an example, as well as a diagnostician, of the postmodern. Indeed, Nietzsche was perfectly capable of analyzing a decadent feature of contemporary society and then labeling himself its most extreme proponent.

 

Ultimately, however, Solomon opts for discarding the entire issue of Nietzsche’s connection with postmodernism. In answer to the question that informs the entire volume (“Is there a postmodern Nietzsche?”), he replies: “I think our answer should be that this question is neither important nor interesting” (293). He may be correct, and not simply because of his contention that what Nietzsche had to say is intrinsically so important that we should return to the “texts.” The notion of Nietzsche as postmodernist, like the most of the vast American scholarship on Nietzsche’s thought, has tended to place him and his works everywhere except where he was historically situated: in nineteenth- century Germany. Failure to mention the names, places, movements, themes, and relationships to which Nietzsche responded and in which he was involved characterizes much Nietzsche scholarship, but is particularly evident in this collection. This volume unfortunately reinforces the tendency to regard Nietzsche as the great anticipator of later movements, the untimely philosopher whose genius could only be understood by those living in a wiser and more welcoming epoch. Most contributions buy into the self-fashioned image of the lonely, solitary thinker who, like Zarathustra, is compelled to offer his revelatory pronouncements to uncomprehending and unworthy disciples. No thinker, however, is ahead of his or her times– although quite a few are behind them. If we could learn to ignore Nietzsche’s own rhetoric and consider him as, in large part, the product of seminal discourses in nineteenth-century Europe, then we might come a lot closer to answering one of the questions Koelb posits in his introduction: “What is `Nietzsche’?” And in responding to this query with greater historical sensitivity than has traditionally been the case in American Nietzsche criticism, we could then disregard Koelb’s other question–“What is `postmodernism’?”–as an irrelevance that is itself the product of a misguided effort in scholarship.