In the second half of Part Two of Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche takes up two major themes:
perspectivism and the use of masks, and the character of the philosopher of the future
and its relation to the free spirit philosophers of today, including Nietzsche.
In section 34 Nietzsche introduces us to his doctrine of perspectivism, although he does
not use that word or define it explicitly.
Perspectivism is something like Nietzsche’s epistemological doctrine that all claims are
perspectival, there is no objective knowledge, there is no objective world against which
we could measure different truth claims, there is no thing in itself, there is no world of
Platonic forms, there is no objective material world which will somehow give us the truth
and let us sort out the true from the false among our claims.
He spends most of this section, I think, attacking the metaphysicians, again without naming them.
He attacks the view that the apparent world is some kind of error that we need to get behind.
And he makes a half ironic observation at the beginning of this section that people
who blame our minds for our errors may be giving themselves a basis for doubting the
very process and authority of thinking itself.
He becomes more serious then and attacks the naiveté of the metaphysicians, who are in
a position of asking reality to please show itself behind appearances.
Metaphysical philosophers, Nietzsche thinks, are in the position of begging the appearances
to go away, to find what is truly real behind them.
Nietzsche’s going to take a very different approach to the question of reality and truth
and deception.
Nietzsche notes that the metaphysicians have an almost touching faith in immediate certainties:
these are things like the cogito or sense impressions, those things about which we cannot
possibly be mistaken.
For many modern philosophers these are the sorts of epistemic authorities that are going
to finally allow us to get behind the deceptive array of appearances to what's truly real
out there.
Nietzsche contrasts this naive faith with the free spirit philosophers who have a duty
to universal suspicion.
They have a duty of interrogating and viewing virtually every truth claim with a certain
kind of suspicion.
Nietzsche announces here also that he thinks very differently about deceiving and being deceived.
The view that he rejects, I think, is the view of the metaphysicians, who want not to
be deceived: what they want is to have the truth, they want to move from a state of being
uncertain or mistaken about the world to a state of being correct about the world.
And Nietzsche asks: why?
Why would one want the truth and not rather something other than the truth?
The view that truth is more important and better than appearance, he says, is merely
a moral prejudice.
He calls it “the worst proved assumption in the world.”
Nietzsche tells us in this section that life itself depends upon appearance and perspective.
The whole idea of getting away from or beyond or behind appearance he thinks is a mistake.
Nietzsche here I think is arguing against the polarity of true and false: this is faith
in these opposed values.
Instead he proposes different degrees of apparentness, like shades of light and dark in painting,
about which painters also use the term “value.”
Nietzsche asks: what if it turns out that our world is in fact a fiction, and even the
supposed need for an author of that fiction is itself part of the fiction?
He suggests here at the end of this section that we adopt an attitude of irony about the
subject as well as the object and the predicate of our propositions, that we be ironic about
the cogito, about the “I” of philosophical inquiry, about we ourselves, the ones doing
the inquiry.
And this raises for me an important question that we will carry forward: What would it
be like for us as philosophers to live “beyond true and false,” to adapt the title of this
work a little bit?
In section 36 Nietzsche gives us a thought experiment: what if it were the case that
our desires passions and drives were the only reality to which we had access, there were
no higher or other reality, either spiritual and material, that we could know?
Even thinking, he says, would be a relation of these drives to each other, even our thinking
about this problem, then, is really something connected to these drives.
Would it then be possible to reduce all reality to different manifestations of these drives?
And would such a reduction be itself a satisfactory explanation of the material world and the
world that we live in?
Not, he notes, as a deception or an illusion, as some philosophers have claimed, but as
the basic reality.
This is what the ground-level reality of the world is like, it's a relation of these drives.
This would amount to reducing all causality to a single cause.
I think we can contrast Nietzsche here helpfully with later neo-Darwinian thinkers who may
do something similar with natural selection and the passing on of genes.
Nietzsche goes on to claim that all life is will to power: all of these drives and instincts
flow from the will to power, and this is the sense in which Nietzsche will say all reality
and all life is will to power.
The intelligible character of the world itself is nothing other than will to power.
Our thought and our truth claims, what we're doing right now, it's all will to power.
Nietzsche in section 39 also notes the divergence of truth from happiness, except for certain
naive metaphysicians who go on about the good, the true, and the beautiful.
Truth, Nietzsche notes, does not lead to happiness.
Truth in fact can be dangerous, and too much truth, he says, can kill us.
And if that's the case then we might be able to measure each individual's strength of spirit
by how much truth he's able to endure.
Lower level spirits, weaker people, would be able to endure less.
The more of the truth of things you can face, the stronger spiritually you are.
This is an important point to keep in mind for later in the work.
In section 40 Nietzsche turns famously to the question of masks.
He notes that profound spirits wear masks and even have masks growing around them constantly
because of the false and shallow interpretations of their work by others, especially by their
inferiors, by people who are destined as it were to misunderstand them.
Kaufmann, the translator, thinks this is quite a significant section because here Nietzsche
hints that there are many layers to his work and many different reactions which he anticipates,
not all of which are equally revealing of Nietzsche's true thought and true intentions.
So I ask: How, if this is the case, can we unravel Nietzsche's writings to find his true
opinions and his core doctrines?
He's not going to tell them to us straight but only ironically: he'll tell the truth
but tell it slant.
Here we might think of Nietzsche as being similar as an ironist to Socrates, to Plato’s Socrates.
We will take up that contrast more later on as well.
The last three sections of Part Two turn to the character of the new philosophers,
the philosophers of the future.
In section 42 Nietzsche makes an elaborate triple pun in German which I'll explain briefly
before moving on.
Nietzsche refers to these new philosophers, he says, I will give them a new name, I will
call them “Versucher,” which I will translate here as being “tempter-experimenters.”
The term really means both of those.
The German word “Versuch” means experiment; it could also mean attempt, as Kaufman explains
in a footnote.
“Versuchung” means temptation, and “Versucher,” a person who does these things,
is either an experimenter or a tempter.
And Nietzsche as it were means both of these meanings simultaneously: the philosophers
of the future will attempt new things, they will make experiments that are also temptations,
and these will be temptations both for themselves and for us and for other people.
In section 43 Nietzsche discusses the relation of these new philosophers to truth.
He notes that they will have truth, as all philosophers have had their truths, but they
will be nondogmatic about it.
Truth will be something of a personal possession, almost like a coat of arms for a royal house.
Truth will be reserved for the elite who can endure it.
They may say, “My judgment is *my* judgment,” and that's because no one else is worthy of it.
One has to prove oneself my equal before they can share in my judgment.
The idea of my making truth claims that would somehow be binding for everyone is no longer
an assumption that Nietzsche will employ.
So we have great things for the great, and Nietzsche says what is common always has little value.
He's pointing here towards another core teaching of his: the necessity of an order of rank
in the realm of the spirit.
He makes here his famous observation that there is a certain bad taste of wanting to
agree with many people.
And I'll note in passing that this is primarily an aesthetic judgment about wanting to agree
with many: it's in poor taste, it's something one just ought not to do because it's a low,
base, shameful thing to do.
In section 44, the final section of this part, Nietzsche discusses the relationship between
three different types of philosophers: the philosophers of the future, these new men
that are coming, who are thoroughly different from anything that is on the earth now.
Nietzsche refers to them as “very free spirits” at one point.
Contrasted with these are the free spirits of the present age, including Nietzsche himself.
These people are the heralds and precursors of the philosophers of the future.
So Nietzsche is casting himself here not so much as a messiah as as a precursor; he doesn't
have a Messiah Complex so much as he has a John the Baptist complex.
And the third group are the pseudo free spirits of today, Nietzsche's contemporaries, who
he thinks claim falsely to be free spirits, and he criticizes them witheringly in this section.
He contrasts “we free spirits” with the so-called free spirits of today.
These are the free thinkers, the levelers.
Nietzsche calls them slaves of democratic taste.
They cannot practice solitude, their thought is ridiculously superficial, and what they
want is the opposite of what the free spirits want.
They want herd-happiness, they want utilitarian benefit for all, they want equality, sympathy.
They want to abolish suffering.
They blame the societies of the past for being engines of suffering, and Nietzsche says this
is close to the opposite of the truth.
Nietzsche refers to himself and his fellow free spirits as “opposite men,” and notes
that the advancement of the type man can come through struggle and suffering as well as
through happiness.
And this explains the silence of the free spirits: they are opposed to this modern antipathy
to suffering and they realize their opposition may be dangerous.
Nietzsche ends this section and this part with a long encomium to the free spirit, also
hinting that the future philosophers will be similar to this.
These free spirits are independent, they are grateful for some of their suffering, they are curious,
cruel, impenetrable, and solitary.
I'll conclude this video by reading from this final paragraph of Part Two.
“At home, or at least having been guests, in many countries of the spirit; having escaped
again and again from the musty agreeable nooks into which preference and prejudice, youth,
origin, the accidents of people and books or even exhaustion from wandering seemed to
have banished us; full of malice against the lures of dependence that lie hidden in honors,
or money, or offices, or enthusiasms of the senses; grateful even to need and vacillating
sickness because they always rid us from some rule and its “prejudice,” grateful to
god, devil, sheep, and worm in us; curious to a vice, investigators to the point of cruelty,
with uninhibited fingers for the unfathomable, with teeth and stomachs for the most indigestible,
ready for every feat that requires a sense of acuteness and acute senses, ready for every
venture, thanks to an excess of “free will,” with fore- and back-souls into whose ultimate
intentions nobody can look so easily, with fore- and backgrounds which no foot is likely
to explore to the end; concealed under cloaks of light, conquerors even if we look like
heirs and prodigals, arrangers and collectors from morning to late, misers of our riches
and our crammed drawers, economical in learning and forgetting, inventive in schemas occasionally
proud of tables of categories, occasionally pedants, occasionally night owls of work even
in broad daylight; yes, when it is necessary even scarecrows--and today it is necessary;
namely, insofar as we are born, sworn, jealous friends of *solitude*, of our own most profound,
most midnightly, most midaily solitude: that is the type of man we are, we free spirits!
And perhaps *you* have something of this, too, you that are coming? you *new* philosophers?”
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