Anderson - Nietzsche On Truth, Illusion, and Redemption

Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption
R. Lanier Anderson
Truth is the first and most basic part of virtue. It must be loved for its own sake. Montaigne, On Presumption But the depressive and self-wounding ego. . . rebuts: . . . illusion of the senses and of the mind holds us prisoner always. Calvino, Mr. Palomar As Bernard Williams lately observed (2002: 119), the reception of Nietzsches thought has prompted sharp controversy about truth. Some readers highlight Nietzsches widespread and provocative remarks dismissing the value or even the possibility of truth and science. Against these deniers, Williams identifies a party of common sense (2002: 57), whose adherents stress the ubiquity of ordinary truths in our practical and scientific projects. As they note, Nietzsche himself adduces such truths in his withering attacks against traditional metaphysical and religious pieties, and even the debunking claims of the very deniers are motivated by a spirit of critiquea devotion to truthfulness exempting nothing from the purview of its suspicion. The puzzle about this controversy is that both deniers and common-sensers have gotten important things right about Nietzsche. This paper aims to explain how that could be. I offer a reading of Nietzsche on truth and illusion which saves the insights on both sides, reconciles the tensions among the texts, and accounts for the importance of both truth and illusion in his thought overall. It is worth noting, first, the broad array of positions available to either side. Quite different theses may be denied or affirmed about truth. Deniers have ranged from Hans Vaihinger (1905, 1986 [1927]), who took Nietzsche as a forerunner of his own fictionalist strategy for saving science and other practices, to an essentially skeptical post-modernist reception that tends to dismiss science in favor of art, in which precisely the lie sanctifies itself (GM III, 25).1 On the pro-truth side, as well, a wide variety of readers have found Nietzsche of substantial aid, whether through frankly metaphysical system-building (Heidegger 1979 [1961], Richardson 1996), or in the service of more empiricist-minded philosophical programs (Kaufmann 1974 [1950], Schacht 1983). Perhaps the staunchest recent defenders of Nietzsches commitment to truth have been Maudemarie Clark (1990, 1997) and Brian Leiter (2002), who seek to acquit Nietzsche entirely of any global falsification thesis (Clark 1990: 14, 95). On philosophical grounds, they claim that he could not coherently maintain the view: it would be at odds with his many specific truth claims, and it seems selfEuropean Journal of Philosophy 13:2 ISSN 0966-8373 pp. 185225 r Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
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refuting. On textual grounds, Clark (1990) deploys a developmental reading to disarm falsificationist texts.2 A good indication of the depth of the difficulties here can be gleaned from Peter Poellner. His meticulous assessment of the texts exposes serious skeptical (Poellner 1995: 2978) and anti-essentialist (Poellner 1995: 79111) lines of thought, which motivate radical-sounding falsification claims. At the same time, he shares the philosophical concerns of Clark and Leiter (Poellner 2001: 85n), and he stresses the many truth claims essential to Nietzsches own views about moral psychology, the will to power, etc. For him, these different strands simply remain in irreconcilable tension,3 so his view, in effect, is that the conflicts raging in the recent secondary literature began already within the body of Nietzsches own beliefs! The controversies show no signs of abating, and Poellners conscientious handling of the texts reveals a clear reason why. There is simply too much textual evidence available to each side.4 Just as Clark and Leiter insist, Nietzsche does commonly assert the truth of his views, and more, he appeals to that truth as the basis for their superiority to the deceptions of traditional religion and metaphysics. Still, post-modernist readers like Alan Schrift (1990) can just as easily point to texts which dismiss all truth claims, or even laugh at the way in which precisely the best science seeks most to keep us in this. . . suitably falsified world (BGE 24). Nor is it plausible that Nietzsche was merely undecided or forgetful here: in too many cases, suggestions of falsification and claims to truth occur together in the space of a single paragraph, or even one sentence.5 Clearly, then, the real exegetical burden we must face is to explain how Nietzsche could have thought himself entitled to both kinds of claim at once. It is that burden I aim to assume. Unlike Poellner, I believe it is possible to outline a consistent and genuinely Nietzschean position on truth and falsification. Section 1 brings together ideas I developed in earlier work to provide a specific and tenable sense to Nietzsches falsification claims. It avoids self-referential paradox by making room for another sense of true and false (separate from the one involved in the falsification claim), thereby affording Nietzsche the resources to defend his substantive views on epistemic grounds.6 If such a reading is correct, then Nietzsches denials of the existence of truth (in one sense) are compatible with his claims to truth (in another). But a further question remains. In many key passages contributing to our textual dilemma, Nietzsches direct concern is not the existence or possibility of truth and knowledge, but their value.7 Therefore, an adequate interpretation must not only outline a background view that reconciles positive truth claims with some global falsification thesis (sec 1.A.). It must also show how Nietzsche can place such value on science and knowledge, and simultaneously praise illusion, or mere appearance (sec. 1.B.). That is, a satisfactory reading must explain how Nietzsche thought these two apparently conflicting values could function together, and why both were so important to him that he was willing to court misunderstanding by praising each in a way that seems to exclude the other. As it turns out, a proper understanding of truth and illusion in Nietzsche cuts to the core of his philosophy, because their value is essential to his conception of a
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good life. In section 2, I sketch the role of Nietzsches thought of eternal recurrence in articulating that conception of the good. I then argue that, rightly understood, affirming the eternal recurrence of ones life requires both a core commitment to truth and a far reaching willingness to create and endorse illusions. Only with both commitments in place can a person hope to attain redemption in Nietzsches sensewhich redemption alone, he thinks, can make it possible for us to lead satisfactory lives as measured by the thought of recurrence. This conclusion indicates the broader importance of truth and illusion in Nietzsche, but it only sharpens the problem of how they can be reconciled. Section 3 suggests the shape of Nietzsches solution, which treats the demands of honesty and artistry as regulative ideals. By connecting the resulting account of artistry to Nietzsches claim that we sometimes need saving illusions, I suggest the proper place of fictionalism and the creation of values within his philosophy. The result also clarifies the real differences between the type of redemption Nietzsche sought to provide through the thought of recurrence, and (what he takes to be) the false redemption offered by Christianity. 1. Truth and Illusion in Nietzsche: Posing the Textual Dilemma Before turning to Nietzsches ideas about recurrence and redemption, it is important to get the textual dilemma about truth and illusion firmly in view. I have already noted two key axes of the puzzle. First, Nietzsche apparently vacillates between the denial of truth and its affirmation. In addition, Nietzsches remarksboth denials and affirmationsare divided between those that speak to truths existence or possibility, and those that worry instead about its value. A. On the Possibility of Truth The tension in the texts is most obvious when we consider the existence or possibility of truth. On the pro-truth side, Nietzsche routinely takes particular theses as true, or condemns others as false.8 It is not convincing to treat such claims as mere rhetoric designed to convey what are officially non-cognitive preferences on Nietzsches part, because he supplements his particular truth claims with sweeping general pronouncements on the existence of truthsas in his praise for psychologists who sacrifice all desirability to truth, every truth, even plain, harsh, ugly, repellent, unchristian, immoral truthFor there are such truths. (GM I, 1). Of even more consequence is the critical thought behind the last passage, which may be the single most characteristic stance of Nietzsches intellectual conscience. The attitude is best expressed by his rejection of the biblical proof of strength [Beweis der Kraft] (see GS 347, WP 17, 452). According to that idea, it would count as evidence of a doctrines truth that it brings contentment, blessedness, or peace of soul to the one who believes it. Nietzsche counters with a blunt antithesis: Nobody is very likely to consider a doctrine true merely because it makes people happy or virtuous. . . Happiness and virtue are no arguments (BGE 39). Or, in a still stronger key,
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R. Lanier Anderson We knowers have gradually come to mistrust all kinds of believers. . . . We, too, do not deny that faith makes blessed: precisely for that reason we deny that faith proves anythinga strong faith that makes blessed raises suspicion against what is believed; it does not establish truth, it establishes a certain probabilityof deception. [GM III, 24]
The practice of adopting beliefs because they make you happy or blessed is a worthy target of suspicion precisely because such motivated or interested believing aims at blessedness rather than truthand potentially, or even typically, at the expense of truth. As the many related texts show, Nietzsche here relies on the traditional assumption that cognitive judgment ought to aim at truth, even where the truth violates our hearts desire (see BGE 229).9 At the same time, though, Nietzsche often provides comfort to truth deniers by asserting that our cognitive representations are subject to some great, thoroughgoing. . . falsification (GS 354), or even a whole system of fundamental falsification (WP 584). He is attracted to the idea throughout his writings,10 and recent efforts to disarm such texts, however heroic, remain unsuccessful. For example, inaugurating his mature period in The Gay Science, Nietzsche speaks of the insight into general untruth and mendaciousness that is now given to us through sciencethe insight into delusion and error as a condition of cognitive and sensible existence (GS 107), and he claims, citing basic ideas of his epistemology, that the essence of phenomenalism and perspectivism as I understand them entails that all becoming conscious is bound up with a great, thoroughgoing corruption, falsification, superficialization, and generalization (GS 354). Leiter (2002: 1718n) notes that such passages simultaneously advance specific truth claimsfor instance, claims about consciousness in GS 354, or about the scientific results that identify error as a condition of cognitive and sensory life in GS 107but so far from removing evidence of a falsification thesis, this observation just sharpens the central interpretive problem. That problem, again, is how to reconcile such apparent truth claims with the ideaequally well attested in the textsthat there must be some deceptive principle in the essence of things , since the erroneousness of the world in which we believe we live is the surest and firmest thing we can lay our eyes on (BGE 34). It will not do to insist that error is supposed to be limited to the excesses of metaphysics, morality, or other suspect branches of thought, for Nietzsche is also willing to claim that precisely the best science seeks most to keep us in this simplified, through and through artificial, suitably composed, suitably falsified world (BGE 24; first ital. mine). The underlying motivation for these claims about systematic falsification is what I will call a subtraction argument, which is derived from Nietzsches perspectivism. On this view, cognition always depends on some particular perspective, so that the ideal of some direct cognitive graspor interest-free intuition that captures perspective-independent objects is incoherent: it would demand an eye that can by no means be thought, an eye that is supposed to have absolutely no direction, in which the active and interpreting forces, through which after all seeing first becomes seeing something, are supposed to be
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cut off, or lacking (GM III, 12). Nietzsches rejection of interest-free intuition suggests that perspectives are ultimately rooted in values, drives, and affects; they represent the world in the service of our practical needs and interests (WP 567). But the immediate mechanisms through which perspectives function are the concepts we use to order our experience. These organizing representations carry content of their own by means of which they structure our experience, and they add that positive content to experience in a way that shapes our world-picture.11 The falsification argument then seems to be this: Strictly true representation would have to capture the way the world is independentlyit would represent the world after the subtraction of any perspectival content superadded in cognition; But subtraction is impossible, since perspectives are a necessary condition of cognitive representation (As if a world would still remain over after one had subtracted the perspective! (WP 567)); Thus, cognitive representation systematically falsifies (WP 584, GS 354).12 This emphasis on the falsifying effect of added perspectival content is widespread in Nietzsches notes.13 In the published works, too, Nietzsche writes (against the sober realist), That mountain there! That cloud there! What, then, is real in that? Subtract for once the phantasm and the whole human addition from it, you sober ones! Yes, if you can do that!. . . There is no reality for us and not for you either, you sober ones (GS 57). Clearly, then, cognition is supposed to falsify because subjective perspectives have a positive influence on the content of our representations which cannot be subtracted out. Equally clearly, there are difficulties with Nietzsches picture. We can well wonder to what our perspectives are supposed to be added, and why that content has some special claim to represent truth, so that its transformation via perspective counts as distortion. From this standpoint, the very claim that perspective cannot be subtracted out already raises worries about the inference to falsification. The influence of perspective was supposed to be ineliminable, recall, because it helps to constitute the very content we represent: it is only through the active and interpreting forces of a perspective that seeing becomes seeing something (GM III, 12). The same idea motivated Nietzsche to reject the thing in itself: That things possess a constitution in themselves quite apart from interpretation and subjectivity is a completely idle hypothesis: it would presuppose that interpretation and being subjective were not essential (WP 560). In light of these points, some will insist (with Clark) that Nietzsches claims about subtraction and falsification must be confused, or at least overstated. If it makes no sense to speak of things apart from our human addition, then the things our theories purport to describe can only be empirical objects as constituted via our perspectives. Our representation of those objects should be perfectly accurate, because they are the very objects we experiencebefore any subtraction. As long as we do not posit a separate true world of things in themselves behind the empirical world, there is no justification for stigmatizing our representations as merely apparent, or otherwise defective.14 But despite rejecting the thing in itself and the true world as early as The Gay Science, Nietzsche nonetheless continues to the end to speak of some systematic
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falsification through the basic concepts of reason and logic. Of course, his denial of any underlying true world only sharpens our question about what it is that our perspectival concepts are supposed to falsify. In my view, Nietzsches answer to these puzzles emerges in a telling 1887 note: 1. . . . The material of the senses organized by the understanding, reduced to rough outlines . . . Thus, the indistinctness and chaos of sense impressions are as it were logicized; 2. . . . the world of phenomena is the organized world which we sense to be real. The reality lies in the . . . recurrence of like, familiar, related things in their logicized character . . . 3. . . . the antithesis of this phenomenal world is not the true world, but the formless unformulable world of the chaos of sensationstherefore another kind of phenomenal world, a kind unknowable for us; . . . [WP 569] The same note goes on to reject things in themselves as well, because Thingness is first created by us as part of our logicizing activity (WP 569). That is, precisely because there are no things in themselves, Nietzsche concludes that the only kinds of reality are phenomenal. Cognition is thus restricted to an apparent world, and in that sense falsifies our beliefs, but the falsification arises not because perspectives cut us off from independent things in themselves. Falsification is supposed to follow rather because cognition transforms the material of the senses.15 Some careful reconstruction is needed to make solid philosophical sense out of Nietzsches suggestion. In particular, we need to know how the chaos of sense impressions is supposed to form another world whose transformation amounts to falsification, and in what sense that world can be phenomenal. In my view, Nietzsches idea was to apply the subtraction argument to experience from within. That is, Nietzsche does not begin his argument from the distinction between an independent world and our representations of it, construed along the lines of our present-day realist conventional wisdom. Rather, he starts (in a loosely Kantian vein) from the content of cognitive experience itself, understood as the joint product of the material of the senses and the subjects logicizing conceptual schemata. The question is whether such experience counts as true. Nietzsche answers in the negative because the logicizing schema transforms the sensory material, so that what we represent is a phenomenal world whose content differs from what is given independently (the raw sensory material).16 The key point is this: on the present view, the underlying domain that gets falsified by perspectival transformation is not a world of independent objects, with a determinate constitution in themselves (WP 560), but another kind of phenomenal world (WP 569), constituted by contents provided from the chaos of sensations. Given that the argument has started from within experience, these sensations are not to be understood in terms of their reference to some further, mind independent objects. They do carry content, which we organize in
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representing the world we experience, and for all its formless character, that content clearly must present things in a certain way, so as to contribute something to our logicized representations of the world. But such contents are not taken to represent some further world of objects beyond the sensations; on the contrary, they constitute the second phenomenal world. Since Nietzsche abstemiously swears off all talk of metaphysically more substantial things referred to, he must be construing this world as merely intentional (or in the representation), in a way reminiscent of Ernst Machs treatment of the contents carried by his sensory elements of experience.17 Still, despite Nietzsches refusal to posit an independent world in itself, the raw material of sense still has a claim to present what is distinctively real in our experience because its contents are ultimately responsible for the resistance to willing and thinking through which the world can frustrate and surprise us, and which we rightly associate with the reality of things. At the same time, Nietzsches construal of the underlying sensory world as phenomenal is justified by the thought that its denizens, qua sensations, present their content only from some point of view, and vary from one cognitive agent to another.18 Note, finally, that the ultimate sensory contents are not available to direct awareness. All cognition, even conscious sensory experience, already involves the operation of a value-laden perspective, which alters the radically independent, but unknowable (WP 569), material of sense. Therefore, Nietzsche assigns the ultimate sensory content to unconscious sense impressions, modelled on Leibnizs petites perceptions (GS 354, 357)and that is why consciousness by itself is already supposed to have a falsifying effect (GS 354).19 We can now sum up. In order to give sense to a plausible falsification claim, what Nietzsche needs is a clean distinction between the way the world appears to a cognitive subject, and the content that appears. The subtraction argument could then warrant our treating the underlying content as true, in the sense of being undistorted, or independent from the appearance-generating influence of perspective. When Nietzsche runs the subtraction argument from within, however, he arrives at an unusual version of the appearance/reality distinction. Rather than distinguishing between representations and objects, or between two worlds of appearance and thing-in-itself, Nietzsche gets what he needs by contrasting two kinds of representations: he separates the way things appear in consciousness from the underlying content of unconscious petites perceptions. He can thereby justify talk of appearance, and even falsification, without positing a separate true world of objects. Cognition falsifies in that it captures a realm of appearance, represented in conscious experience and ordered in accordance with our needs (WP 568), which differs from the content given independently.20 There is one final, and critical, point to notice. The subtraction argument for falsification is strikingly similar to Nietzsches inference against the proof of strengthwhich we saw above as a frequent occasion for his positive appeals to truth. In that case, recall, Nietzsche insisted that the fact that some judgment accords with a believers needs is no reason for its truth. On the contrary, it provides grounds for suspicion against it. The present application of the subtraction argument makes a parallel point. The fact that our basic concepts (e.g.
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ocause4,osubstance4,othing4, etc.) make experience tractable, and organize a world for ourselves in which our existence is made possible (WP 521), is not evidence of their truth; on the contrary, it raises the suspicion that they are deceptive (WP 513). That is, for the very reason that our perspectives are so useful for organizing and manipulating our experience, Nietzsche suggests that they are not to be taken as true representations of how the world is, independently of our needs. Strikingly, then, Nietzsches claims about systematic falsification turn out to appeal to the same line of thought that generates many of his claims to truth! B. On the Value of Truth We are now in a position to face worries about the value of truth squarely. From the present standpoint, it becomes clear why a genuinely scientific spirit which subordinates other commitments to a thoroughgoing will to truth might tend toward asceticism. A global falsification thesis would be troubling enough by itself, but we have also seen that cognitions are supposed to falsify precisely because they organize a world for ourselves in which our existence is made possible (WP 521). That is, an unfettered will to truth threatens to undermine the believability of the very representations that serve to make our existence bearable. It is therefore plain why: The faith in science . . . cannot have originated from such a calculus of utility, but rather despite the fact that the disutility and dangerousness of the will to truth, of truth at any price is proved to it continually. . . . Ask yourself carefully, Why do you not want to deceive?, especially if it should appearand it does appear!as if life aimed at appearanceI mean at error, deception, delusion, and self-delusion . . . . Charitably interpreted, such a resolve might be a quixotism, a small fantastical conceit; but it might also be something worse, namely, a principle that is hostile to life and destructive.Will to truththat might be a concealed will to death. [GS 344] Life itself aims at error and self-delusion, in that it uses cognitive representation not to secure the truest beliefs, but to organize a world for ourselves in which our existence is made possible (WP 521). So the attempt to deploy cognition differentlyto explode error and secure truth instead of arranging the world convenientlynot only courts self-flagellation, but even risks degenerating into the vain wish that things were radically otherwise with the world and our cognitive faculties. That, ultimately, would be a wish that we ourselves were otherwisethat we had different cognitive abilities, or at least were inhabitants of a world better suited to our powers. In that case, the will to truth would be merely another version of the ascetics incarnate desire to be otherwise, to be elsewhere (GM III, 13). It is important to be clear about what Nietzsche is, and is not, committed to regarding the pursuit of truth. The subtraction argument claims that cognitive
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representations are false in a specific sense: they organize the given material of sense in a way that transforms and distorts the mind-independent part of the content of experience. But some kind of pursuit of truth can still make sense, for the same picture affords a straightforward sense in which some perspectives may be cognitively superior to others: they may be more adequate to the underlying sensory contents, or organize them in a way that better satisfies distinctively cognitive values like simplicity or explanatory power. Granted, for Nietzsche no univocal empirically adequate theory can be expected, since he recognizes the possibility of instability, or even inconsistency, among contents within the underlying chaos of sensations.21 But all that just means that the account of cognitive superiority must include a second parta demand that we make the variety of perspectives and affective interpretations useful in the service of knowledge (GM III, 12), so as to reveal different aspects of the content of sensation. Each perspective exposes some limitations of others, and this cognitive strategy therefore promises representations that are more responsive to the range of sensory contents and less limited by the peculiarities of any one perspective. Perspectives, again, are responsible for the merely apparent character of our representations, so to the extent our beliefs are made more independent from perspective in these respects, they will also be less apparent, or truer (see BGE 34). Thus, even though the world with which we are concerned is false in one sense, still every elevation of the human brings with it the overcoming of narrower interpretations, and thus truer representation, in the sense of cognitive improvement (WP 616). When Nietzsche offers assertions as truths, I submit, he means to lay claim to comparative truth or objectivity, in a theory-internal sense filled out by this notion of cognitive superiority.22 Such superiority is compatible with a representations being party to the systematic falsification of experience, in the distinct sense of false assumed in the subtraction argument. Thus, as Schacht has long urged (1983, 1984, 1995), the paradoxes generated by Nietzsches denials of the possibility of truth are to be resolved by distinguishing different senses of true and false.23 But if my account of Nietzsches epistemology is right, the same strategy for reconciliation does not extend cleanly to his worries about the value of truth. Suppose we take talk of truth internally or perspectivally in the proposed sense. Then the will to truth amounts to a search for representations arising from the interplay of a variety of perspectives, which are thereby relatively more independent from any one and for just that reason less apparent, or truer. This does not commit us to things with a constitution in themselves completely apart from interpretation (WP 560), but we are enjoined to seek representations that are more and more perspective-independent. After all, what does the real work to make a representation truer is not the mere fact that it is accessible from multiple perspectives, but the independence from the peculiarities of any one viewpoint that goes with its having a role in more, broader, and better perspectives. This means that the focus imaginarius guiding the asymptotic progression through everbroadening perspectives is an ideal of fully perspective-independent, or
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aperspectival, representation. As a result, even if the possibility of attaining aperspectival knowledge is rejected, attributing value to the will to truth still commits us to valuing just such interest-free intuition . Note, it is perfectly coherent, albeit pessimistic, to value what is in fact unattainable. In that case, the impossibility of aperspectival representations simply highlights the risk that the will to truth is ascetic. We can now pose the textual dilemma about the value of truth sharply. On the negative side, we have seen reasons to suspect that valuing truth is a version of asceticism. Nietzsche himself raises the worry (GM III, 24; GS 344), pointing out the venerable philosophers abstinence implied in any pursuit of truth, since it involves a: renunciation of interpretation altogether (of forcing, adjusting, abbreviating, omitting, padding, inventing, falsifying, and whatever else belongs to the essence of all interpreting)24considered in the large, all this expresses just as good an asceticism of virtue as any denial of sensuality. . . [GM III, 24] To oppose asceticism, moreover, Nietzsche turns to Art. . . in which precisely the lie sanctifies itself, in which the will to deception has good conscience on its side (GM III, 25). The move is prominent already in Birth of Tragedy, where art provides saving illusions by which we cope with tragic insight into the truth of a metaphysically grounded pessimism inherited from Schopenhauer.25 While Nietzsche later rejected Schopenhauers metaphysics and his pessimism, he never abandoned the idea that art is valuable because it creates illusions, and gets us to endorse them: Now our honesty has a counterforce which helps us to avoid [its bad] consequences: art as the good will to appearance (GS 107; cf. GM III, 25); or again, what we learn from artists is how to make things beautiful, attractive, and desirable for ourselves when they are not (GS 299, my italics). Such praise of mere appearance stands in clear tension with the value of truth, so it is tempting to view this strand as the entering wedge for a wholesale dismissal of truths value, a program apparently advanced in the ringing finale of GM III, 24: The will to truth requires a critiquelet us thus define our own taskthe value of truth is for once to be experimentally called into question. Still, on the positive side, few virtues or projects get as much unqualified endorsement in the Nietzschean corpus as honesty and pursuit of truth. Intellectual honesty is so deeply built into Nietzsches scheme of values that he can hardly even comprehend that most people do not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and live accordingly, without previously making themselves aware of the final and most certain reasons pro and con (GS 2). The same virtue of truthfulness, we saw, underwrites his central criticisms of the proof of strength type argument. Perhaps most striking of all, though, is that Nietzsche praises honesty even while stressing its ascetic tendencies. One typical account introduces honesty as our virtue, the only one left to us (BGE 227), and then goes on to claim that it is a palpable truth (BGE 229) that such honesty rests on
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cruelty against oneself (BGE 22930). Honesty is cruel because it denies the basic will of the spirit which unceasingly strives for the apparent and superficial (BGE 229)the sublime inclination of the knower works against that basic will to superficial appearances, so that the knower takes and wants to take things deeply, multifariously, fundamentally, as a kind of cruelty of intellectual conscience (BGE 230). Nietzsches apparent endorsement of a fully ascetic will to truth culminates in the following passage: How much truth does a spirit endure, how much truth does it dare? More and more that became for me the real measure of value. Error (faith in the ideal) is not blindness, error is cowardice. Every attainment, every step forward in knowledge, follows from courage, from hardness against oneself, from cleanliness toward oneself. [EH P, 3; cf. A 50] What is asceticism, after all, if not hardness against oneself, . . . cleanliness toward oneself? And here that counts as the real measure of value. Our puzzle is now in clear relief: Nietzsche attributes apparently unqualified value to both artistry and honesty, but each virtue seems to compromise the other. On the one side, artistrys importance is rooted in its capacity to generate illusions and get us to endorse them. But, we must ask, why is that not simply faith in the ideal, and thus cowardice (EH P, 3) of the same ilk as the condemned proof of strength? On the other side, Nietzsche demands a virtue of honesty that would explode such ideals. But, we must also ask, why is that not, as he himself suggests (GM III, 237), just another version of the self-defeating ascetic ideal, whose effectwhose very aimis to condemn the world and render it unbearably ugly (see GS 130)? The clue for addressing this quandary emerges from closer consideration of Nietzsches famous call for a critique of the will to truth in GM III, 24: The will to truth requires a critiquelet us thus define our own taskthe value of truth is for once to be experimentally called into question. The first point to note is that a critique is not a denial of value, but an assessment of its sources and validity.26 Any inference by truth deniers that Nietzsche must be against truth simpliciter is thus too quick. Once this is noticed, a second curious question surfaces: in what sense is truths value to be assessed experimentally? What sort of experiment could Nietzsche have in mind? An answer is suggested in The Gay Science 110, which traces the origin of knowledge back to the basic errors we use to order experience. At first, these errors were accepted solely as a condition of life. Gradually, though, it emerged that competing claims might be compatible with both experience and the basic errors, and only then does the pursuit of knowledge arise, as another possible goal of cognitive life, helping us to choose among those claims. By and by, the striving for the true finally arrayed itself as a need among other needs, and: Thus knowledge became a piece of life itself, and . . . finally knowledge and those primeval basic errors butted up against one another: two lives, two powers, both in the same human being. The thinker: that is now that
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R. Lanier Anderson being in whom the drive to truth and those life-preserving errors clash for their first fight . . . . Compared to the significance of this fight, everything else is a matter of indifference: the ultimate question about the conditions of life has been posed here, and the first attempt has been made here to answer this question by experiment. To what extent can truth endure incorporation? That is the question; that is the experiment. [GS 110, my italics]
Nietzsches experiment, then, must be the life of the thinker. And the question to be answered, beside which everything else is a matter of indifference, is at bottom the very one still gripping him in the Genealogy, viz., What is the value of truth? (cf. also BGE 1). We are to explore the issue by considering what kind of life a truth-seeking thinker would have, and asking whether it is good. If so, then the will to truth may hold value for life. Assessing the value of truth thus means assessing the value of a type of life, and the role of truthfulness in it.27 For Nietzsche, all such assessments are made by coming to grips with the thought of eternal recurrence.
2. Eternal Recurrence and the Value of a Life Nietzsche sees the doctrine of eternal recurrence as his most important thought (EH P, 4; also III, Z, 1, 6, 8). It has often been read as a cosmological hypothesis that time has a circular structure, so that all events of world history endlessly repeat themselves in the same sequence. In recent years, though, philosophers with doubts about the plausibility of such a theory have contended that the view should rather be taken as a device for assessing the value of a lifeless a theoretical doctrine than a practical thought experiment. Nietzsche asks us to imagine that our lives will return over and over, and our reaction to the prospect is supposed to show something about how good they are. While some arguments from the notebooks purport to prove the doctrine in its full cosmological form, the most important of these have been shown to fail.28 A practical reading makes that failure less consequential for Nietzsches philosophy, since the thought of recurrence could still be useful for provoking reflective self-assessment even if the hypothesis that life recurs is false, or outright impossible (see Clark 1990: 26670). Such readings by no means remove all difficulties, however. On some treatments, the practical function of the thought of recurrence still depends on striking metaphysical thesesfor example, that every property of a person is equally essential to her identity.29 Moreover, different versions of the practical reading offer competing answers to key questions about it: Exactly what are we to imagine about the return of events? Must we actually believe in a realistic recurrence for the doctrine to have its intended practical effect? Just how does the thought experiment serve as a criterion for assessing a life? I will not try to address all the debates.30 Instead, I will sketch a relatively minimal version of the practical interpretation, which can do at least a significant part of the work Nietzsche
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assigned to the doctrine. The minimal account is enough to indicate the relevance of the values of truth and illusion to recurrence, so for present purposes we need not decide which further commitments Nietzsche in fact assumes, or can defend. The minimal reading takes its cue from Nietzsches first introduction of the recurrence idea at the end of The Gay Science (1st ed.): The greatest weight.What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every pleasure and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence . . . Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon . . .? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you could have answered him: You are god, and I have never heard anything more divine!. If this thought gained dominion over you it would change you, as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more? would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to wish for nothing more than for this eternal confirmation and seal? [GS 341] This is the formulation of the doctrine that Nietzsche later counted as the basic thought of Zarathustra, and even of his philosophy more broadly (EH III, Z, 1, 8). It clearly offers a practical thought experiment applied to an individual life: one is to imagine that This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more. In the minimal version, then, the recurrence idea is applied to the events that make up a persons life, along with any others so closely tied to them that she could not be the same without them.31 Nietzsches thought experiment then invites the person to consider the endless recurrence of that life, with every detail the same. It is not important that the agent believe her life will or even could actually recur; she simply imagines its return so as to elicit her response to it.32 A reaction of joy is supposed to indicate that the life was good, whereas sorrow, regret, and the like show it to have been wanting. For reasons that will become clear, it does matter even for the minimal reading that what she imagines is the endless repetition of the very same life that she has lived; the notions of eternity and sameness give the Nietzschean assessment its distinctive content. Two characteristic features of the proposed test should be noted from the outset. First, its standards of assessment are not specified independently, but are just the ones endorsed by the person. Those are the standards engaged by appealing to her own reaction when imagining her lifes return.33 Second, the idea of recurrence blocks a natural, but dubious, tendency of self-assessments that would promote positive judgmentsa propensity to underweight the unchanger
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able past, relative to the future, which we might still be able to affect. It is easier for me to think of my life as going well if I focus on plans for a more glorious future, and minimize the importance of regrettable parts of my past. Temptations to such thinking are strong enough to have worked their way into conventional expressions of consolation (Well, at least thats behind you now; What a relief! Ill never have to live through that again!). Construed as attempts at encouragement or self-motivation, these responses are unimpeachable, but if what is wanted is a cold, clear-eyed assessment of whether a life has been good, taking consolation from the mere fact that a regrettable event lies in the past is self-deception. Its being past in no way removes it from the life itselfa fact made manifest by the thought of lifes recurrence. In this respect, Nietzsches test bears comparison to another common piece of wisdom: in thinking through a difficult decision, one is often well advised to imagine ones life under the alternatives, assessing what each would be like through off-line simulation (think of Kunderas Tomas, trying to decide what to do by alternately living out in imagination his life with Tereza and without Tereza). That procedure can be a better gauge of overall preferences than conscious deliberation alone, which may neglect, or even actively suppress, considerations that one must admit in retrospect were important. The thought of recurrence puts ones entire life imaginatively into the future. In that way, it both encourages a genuine assessment (making it a live question), and permits a judgment engaging all the values that actually move useven ones we might fail to notice, or admit to. With these ideas in place, we can begin to appreciate the distinctive force of Nietzsches thought experiment. Bernard Reginster points out that many readings have difficulty explaining why it should be important that we imagine our return over and over, eternallyas opposed, say, to our being willing to accept its repetition once.34 Reginster addresses this problem of eternality by building an emotion of joy into the very notion of affirmation sought by the test; willing eternal repetition is supposed to pick out a genuinely joyful reaction. He offers an impressive philosophical analysis of joy to back up the textual evidence for the proposal, and some interpretation along these lines may well be correct. But there are also more minimal grounds for the demand that we will lifes eternal return. At least part of its motivation, I submit, is the thought experiments function of blocking the sort of unjustified consolation taken from the mere pastness of events described above. If the recurrence to be imagined is eternal, then I can never look forward to a time when I can pretend to be thoroughly finished with an event, and the salience of its belonging to my life is thereby set squarely before me. Versions of an afterlife that came to an end, or else advanced to some eternal stage very different from my actual life (as in the typical Christian conception) would lose this clarifying, rationalizing feature of the Nietzschean assessment.35 Beyond Reginsters problem of eternality, three key questions remain for even minimal versions of the doctrine: 1) Why should we accept a persons own reaction to the thought of recurrence as a significant or correct judgment on the value of her life?; 2) Why does it matter to Nietzsche that every event in the life is imagined
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to recur unchanged (this is the problem of sameness, alluded to above)?; and 3) What practical effect is the thought experiment supposed to have, and how? The first question raises broad and difficult issues. One obvious objection to Nietzsches thought is that its conception of the good is radically incomplete. It seems unconstrained by the most conspicuous form of value usually supposed to attach to lives, moral value. A life might be as desirable as one likes for the person herselfand thereby be a paradigm candidate of a good life from the standpoint of recurrencewhile unacceptably violating or ignoring the interests of others. Nietzsche frankly courts such objections by his lavish praise of morally troubling figures like Napoleon (e.g. GM I, 16),36 but the complaint would surely not worry him. The thought behind his notorious immoralism is that moral evaluations have deeply corrupted our judgments about whether a life is good, so for him, the fact that recurrence gives them no necessary role would appear not as a bug, but as a feature. Such immoralism is likely to attract resistance today, but I do not have space to pursue the serious issues it raises. I mention just one point in the neighborhood. By de-emphasizing morality per se, Nietzsche intends to recall our attention to the broad question of ancient ethics, which asked whether a life was good overall. That is, like many ancient followers of Socrates, Nietzsche resists any simple equation of the good life with the virtuous or moral life; such an equivalence would have to be established by a special and non-trivial argument, which the ancients sought, but Nietzsche doubts can be delivered. Another worry is that Nietzsches conception is so formal as to be empty, because all it assays is the compatibility of a persons life with values she already has. But once the ethical question is conceived in the broad ancient sense just broached, it becomes clear that Nietzsches test does identify a substantively important part of what makes a life goodviz., a deep-going consistency between the agents avowed values and her actual life. In order for an agent to affirm recurrence, the events of her life must escape condemnation under the values she endorses, since those are the ones engaged by the thought experiment. An agent who fails the test condemns her own life, and to that extent, turns against herself: the part of her that sets standards and judges is set against the part that actually lived the unaffirmable events. Avoiding such inconsistency or division within the person is deeply important to Nietzsche. It is also related to a very old ideal for human lifeone that used to be given names like harmony of soul.37 We can now begin to address the second question as well, seeing why Nietzsche thought it important that every event in the persons life be supposed to recur (everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return). If the life whose recurrence I affirm omits some events that really happened to me, then my managing the affirmation is by no means sufficient to establish the kind of harmony between my life and values that Nietzsche intends to emphasize. Affirmation could easily be made compatible with quite serious disharmony between my values and my actual life, as long as I take care to exclude from the recurring events exactly those that are troubling from the point of view of my values. Thus, if affirmation is to count as a genuine test of harmony, I must include every event of my life as part of the sequence imagined to recur.
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But of course, no one has a life free of any regrettable feature, and in that respect, the thought of recurrence seems to advance a conception of the good that is utterly out of step with the human predicament. This is a serious worry. Given the incongruity of these desiderata with our actual condition, how could it be at all reasonable to assess our lives by Nietzsches test? We now face the central problem Nietzsche means to address by his thought experimentthe problem of redemption.38 For Nietzsche, the crucial task of philosophy was to say Yes to the point of justifying, to the point of redeeming even all the past (EH III, Z, 8). He explores the relevant conception in Zarathustras chapter On Redemption, which evokes the issue of harmony of soul by lamenting the inverse cripples so common in the worldpeople in whom the hypertrophy of one capacity or character trait has left their lives completely out of balance. Such people need a strategy to make themselves whole, and that is the task of redemption, which Zarathustra characterizes as a product of willing and creating. One must: create and carry into One what is fragment and riddle and dreadful accident. . . . To redeem those who lived in the past, and to recreate all it was into a thus I willed itthat alone should I call redemption. . . . All it was is a fragment, a riddle, a dreadful accidentuntil the creative will says to it, But thus I willed it. Until the will says to it, But thus I will it; thus I shall will it. [Z II, Redemption] The suggestion is that fragmentary, accidental, puzzling, or regrettable aspects of a persons life or character can be redeemed by being brought into a whole that the person can affirm. Thus, we can go beyond the earlier suggestion that recurrence is a device for self-assessment by off-line simulation. The thought of an events recurrence not only forces a serious recognition of its relevance to the value of my life, but also opens the possibility of my taking a specific new attitude toward it, which redeems it by changing its import in my life. If I can tell my life story in such a way that I will the whole, then I can likewise affirm each event within it, in virtue of its essential contribution to the meaning of the whole story.39 Thus, events that were, considered by themselves, regrettable (fragment, riddle, dreadful accident) may be affirmed nonetheless. I thereby bring my life into greater harmony with my values, and thus improve it in the dimension of Nietzsches concern. To get a sense of the issue, consider Jimmy Carter, whose crushing 1980 defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan poses the problem of redemption in sharp fashion. Carter had suffered earlier setbacks in politics, but nothing had prepared him for the level of disappointment attending his loss of the Presidency (J. & R. Carter 1987: 410). It not only ended service projects of great importance to him, but also represented a sweeping repudiation of his core values and accomplishments. Perhaps most troubling, it threatened to mark the end of his career, and define it as a failure. The lossespecially this last aspect of itwas so bitter for Rosalynn Carter that her only consolation was the thought that Carter would run again and
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win, thereby changing the end of the story (J. & R. Carter 1987: 8, 9). President Carter himself had no stomach for another race, but that stance did little to ease his disappointment.40 On the contrary, it only sharpened the question of how to prevent the defeats circumscribing his public life as a whole, defining it as a failed political career. If Rosalynns dream of a new campaign was not realistic, her idea about what Jimmy needed was nonetheless on target: he needed the redemption of the defeat, in just Nietzsches sensea way of turning it from a debilitating setback into something that could be acceptedeven willed. The idea for organizing a life of meaningful work after his Presidency came to Carter in the middle of the night. Here is how Rosalynn Carter describes it: One night I woke up and Jimmy was sitting straight up in bed. He always sleeps so soundly that I thought he must be sick. Whats the matter? I asked. I know what we can do at the library, he said. We can develop a place to help people who want to resolve disputes. Theres no place like that now. . . If there had been. . ., I wouldnt have had to take Begin and Sadat to Camp David. . . . A center to settle disputes. For the first time since we moved back to Plains, I saw Jimmy excited about plans for the future. [J. & R. Carter 1987: 31] Jimmy Carter was not sick; he was beginning his convalescence.41 With the idea of transforming his Presidential library into the Carter Center, he saw his way forward to a new project, allowing him to do work that was rewarding for him, and usefuleven importantfor the world. At the time, he could hardly have imagined how successful the Centers work would eventually become, not only in contributions to dispute mediation, but also in broader projects of disease eradication, human rights protection, and poverty alleviation. In the event, Carter attained a kind of credibility as a moral leader that no other twentieth century exPresident has even approachedleadership ultimately recognized by former adversaries and allies alike, culminating in the 2002 Nobel Prize for Peace. It is fair to argue (and is now commonly observed) that Carter built the greatest U.S. Ex-Presidency ever. The final and crucial point to note is this: it is not at all likely that the Carter exPresidency would have been as accomplished had he won re-election in 1980. The range of his activities has gone so far beyond the normal course of elder statesman politics that it is hard to imagine his even conceiving the project, let alone implementing it so energetically, without the need for redemption posed by the stinging 1980 defeat. In that sense, to wish for such an ex-Presidency is also to wish for the defeat, and precisely that fact allows the later successes to redeem the earlier failure. Of course, Carter could not have guaranteed success back in 1981, or even envisioned exactly what it would look like (and this will turn out to be important), but he did have in view something very like the ideal of redemption found in Nietzsche. Long before the full extent of his achievement was apparent, back in 1987, he wrote of having conceived the Carter Center with the thought, Who knows what we can do if we set our goals high? We may even be able to do
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more than if we had won the election in 1980! (J. & R. Carter 1987: 32). Thus, what the Carters write of Chuck Colson, their collaborator in Habitat for Humanity, applies equally to themselves: Sometimes an unpleasant or even catastrophic event can transform ones life and reveal opportunities that could never have been envisioned [otherwise] (J. & R. Carter 1987: 114).42 Carters success required good moral luck, and Nietzsche is aware that having a good life in his sense often depends on luck. But it was not merely luck that effected Carters redemption. He also had to do something that would change the meaning of his life from the story of a failed political career into a narrative of moral leadership. That lesson provides the practical upshot of Nietzsches thought experiment, thereby addressing our third question. Recurrence is supposed to place the greatest weight on events in our lives, and change us (GS 341). The context of redemption reveals the sort of weight and the sort of change at issue. We saw that the thought of recurrence is meant to show the limits of coping with difficulties by simply waiting for them to slip into the past. Merely enduring troubles may be preferable to the alternative (if the alternative is not enduring!), but it does nothing to make the troubles themselves any less troubling. We saw that imagining their recurrence highlights the weight they really have, past or not, and thereby sharpens the problem of redeeming what is accidental or dreadful in our lives. The same thought, however, also provides a practical recommendation for taking arms against our troublesthe construction of a unifying, redemptive story rendering the life meaningful and affirmable, a story that carr[ies] into One what is fragment and riddle and dreadful accident. . . [so as to] say to it, But thus I will it; thus I shall will it (Z II, Redemption). Such a narrative itself alters the life, especially in the dimension of what it means. First, the narrative adds to the weight of each event, enhancing its significance by tying it to the whole. Second, a new overall story can also change the character of an events meaningand thereby even its valuein the way Carters life exemplifies. If genuinely successful, in fact, such a narrative will work its way seamlessly into the life itself. It becomes crucial to the agents selfunderstanding, and in that form it is one causal factor helping to shape the course of new events in the life, which events, in turn, serve as the indispensable mechanism through which the larger narrative shapes the meaning of the past. In the end, Nietzsche hopes, the story and the life interpenetrate so fully they can no longer be cleanly distinguished, and endorsing the story can then make a person well-disposed to her life, thereby promoting the consistency between her life and values for which the recurrence test assays: How could I not be grateful to my whole life?and so I tell my life to myself (EH F).43 It is crucial here that a new narrative for my life can not only alter the significance, or relative importance, of an event in my life, but can also change its meaning for me, and thereby also whether (and in what degree and character) it was good or bad for me.44 Carters later projects altered the meaning of his defeat (e.g. qua the end of his public life), and so substantially changed its value within his life overall. The point is important because it helps mark out a key contrast
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between mere compensation, and genuine redemption in Nietzsches sense. Later goods can certainly be balanced against earlier evils, and can compensate me in part for bad things that have happened to me, but such compensation alone by no means redeems the bad things themselves. The recurrence test makes the point vivid, since the imagined return of past evils invites comparison of my life with its share of evils and compensating goods to an alternative life containing the goods without the evils. The latter life will surely seem preferable to me unless the evils themselves are redeemed by some narrative that actually alters their meaning and value within my life. This contrast sharply separates Nietzsches notion of redemption from the Christian one. For Nietzsche, what needs redeeming is not a person or soul, somehow detached from the actual events of her life, but the lifes troubling events themselves. From this standpoint, it is a major flaw of Christian redemption that it offers mere compensation, leaving the actual troubling events of life unredeemed, even condemned, along with everything that is merely world. Otherworldly redemption thus fails to make a persons actual life (here and now) better by one whit. In fact, the case is worse. It is a positive precondition on admission to redemption in its Christian form that we reject many events of our lives, in our considered view. We are all sinners, and redemption requires repentance for sin.45 In sharp contrast to all demands for confession and repentance, Nietzsches counter-ideal is rather To commit no cowardice against ones actions! Not to leave them in the lurch afterwards! (TI I, 10). It therefore emerges that Nietzsche has purely practical reasons to insist on the return of a life that is the same in every detail. For him, it is the particular troubling events that really need redeeming. Thus, a life-story counts as redemptive only insofar as it incorporates each of the very same events in the life and gives it a significance that can be affirmed, rather than leaving it mired in regret.46 Now that we have sketched the task of redemption, we can return to the role of virtues of honesty and artistry in affirming recurrence, and to the problems raised by the relation of the two values to one another.
3. Honesty and Artistry as Regulative Ideals in the Quest for Redemption I might do or suffer all manner of dreadful accidents (Z II, Redemption) that set my life in tension with my values. The thought of recurrence is supposed to test for such accidents, and teach me how to redeem them, by creating (Z II, Redemption) a narrative organization for my life, in which they are carried into One (Z II, Redemption) and affirmed in the whole, even under the condition that the same life comes back ever again. As it turns out, each of the apparently contradictory virtues sketched in section 1.B.honesty and artistryis essential to successful redemption, so understood. Consider first the demand for honesty. Without any constraint of truthfulness, I might tell my life to myself (EH F) as a pretty story indeed. But if the life-story I affirm is mere fiction, I will not have approved my life at all, and its troubling
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events remain unredeemed. As long as I manage to accept my life only by pretending it was something else, the problem of redemption is not solved, but ducked. As Nietzsche is well aware, any self-assessment that is at all deep-going involves serious temptations to such self-deception. It is in this vein that we should hear his claims about the intimate relation between honesty and strength: the strength of a spirit should be measured according to how much of the truth one could still barely endureor more distinctly, to what extent one would require it to be thinned down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, falsified (BGE 39). While the most obvious deceptions distort the plain facts of our individual lives, those are merely the crude cases. More subtle versions indulge in false global stories about the world (say, of a religious, moral, or metaphysical sort), which tend to magnify the importance of human beings, and by extension ourselves. It is in this dimension that the de-deification of nature (GS 109) of which Nietzsche counts himself an heir is so striking: We have become hard-boiled, cold and hard in the insight that . . . the world in which we live is ungodly, immoral, inhuman; we interpreted it far too long in a false and mendacious way, in accordance with the wishes of our reverence, that is, according to our needs (GS 346). In fact, then, we first lay hold of the real problem about redemption only in light of an honest overall account of the world: the issue is not, as the Christian conception of redemption would suggest, to replace a hopelessly fallen world with another, better life, but to make this very life, honestly described, into something we can affirm. Without a forthright account of what needs redeeming, the very problem cannot even become visible. But now we return to our difficulties: the same rigorous, courageous, (ascetic?) honesty that reveals the problem of redemption threatens to make it insoluble. After all (if we are honest with ourselves), we all commit stupidities and endure trials that must be counted as dreadful, or worse. Accepting them at all, much less affirming their endless repetition, would seem to require either that we pretend they were not bad for us (as they really were), or else that we adjust our values ad hoc so as to count them as good when they were not. On either approach, it seems, we will have compromised the virtue of honesty. To make matters worse, when Nietzsche himself sketches the strategy for redemption, he appears to endorse just such subversions of the truth. On his conception, again, artistic illusions are just as essential for redemption as honest self-assessment. We are supposed to create an organizing narrative under which to affirm our lives (Z II, Redemption), and the key lessons about creation come from artists, who show us not only how to make things beautiful, but also how we could endorse something frankly illusory: What one should learn from artists.What means do we have to make things beautiful, attractive, desirable for us when they are not? And I think that in themselves they never are. Here we have something to learn from . . . artists, who are really continually trying to bring off such inventions and feats. Moving away from things until there is much of them that one no longer sees and much that one must see into them, in
Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption order still to see them; or seeing things around a corner and as cut out and framed; or placing them so that they partially obstruct one another and allow only perspectival glimpses through; or looking at them through colored glass or in the light of the sunset; or giving them a surface and skin that is not fully transparentall this we should learn from artists while being wiser than they are in other things. For with them, this subtle power usually comes to an end where art ends and life begins; but we want to be the poets of our life . . . . [GS 299; see also GS 78]
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The artistic lesson is twofold: we learn how to make things beautifulbut also how to acknowledge their beauty, even and especially when they are not beautiful in themselves. That is, we assimilate our attitude to that of art as the good will to appearance (GS 107), so as to clear our conscience about endorsing illusions. The specific tactics of beautification described in GS 299 make the fictionalizing implications of Nietzsches position increasingly clear. Artists do sometimes work by abstracting away from flaws, omitting features, or simplifying (all of which would be compatible with the truth, albeit partial, of the content that remained). But even when their inventions and feats use such subtractive means, the devices still depend on representing things so that there is much that one must see into [hinzusehen] things (my italics) in order to see them at all, and thus an additive alteration remains essential to the effect. Often, too, as Nietzsche notes, the method is positively to obscure, obstruct, cover over, or alter the color of what is represented. By all these means, artistic representation glorifies its object by depicting it as other than it is. And lest we think falsification is supposed to apply only within a fictional world, Nietzsche drives home his point at the end, insisting that while artists may concern themselves with mere fictions and not real life, we want to be the poets of our life. Thus, there is no avoiding the conclusion that the artistic redemption Nietzsche seeks, and relies upon as the genuine opponent of the ascetic ideal (GM III, 25), is in fact, just as he describes it, a counterforce against our honesty (GS 107). Our earlier problem, then, is sharpened. Not only does Nietzsche claim to value both honesty and artistry in a way that sets them into tension, but he is driven to that stance by his most basic evaluative commitments. For him, the goodness of a life is measured by the possibility of affirming its recurrence, and any such affirmation requires both a thoroughgoing will to truth and a kind of artistry that serves as a counterforce opposing that honesty. The very idea just broached, however, suggests a way to do justice to both sidesbalancing the demand for truth against the need for illusions, as counterforces. Though the two stand in tension, there is no contradiction. Truthfulness and artistry and could each be goods for us, just as sweet and sour are both good in sauces. Clearly, moreover, Nietzsche holds that the two key virtues can be balanced in a single life, just as the flavors might be in a single sauce. In a telling section of The Gay Science (113), he takes up the hypothesis that the different virtues involved in scientific excellence were separately acquired, and that in their original, isolated form (as the doubting drive, the negating
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drive, the waiting drive, the collecting drive, the dissolving drive) they were by no means unproblematic, and were sometimes frankly poisons for their possessors. What interests Nietzsche, though, is not so much the happy outcome that these drives are now combined as functions of one organizing power intellectual consciencebut the even grander prospect that the resulting scientific conscience itself might take its place within a still broader virtue. He looks forward to the day when scientific thinking will find its way to join with the artistic forces and the practical wisdom of life to form a higher organic system in relation to which the scholars, physicians, artists, and legislators as we know them at present would have to look like paltry relics of ancient times (GS 113). That is, Nietzsches ideal is precisely a virtue in which the honesty of scientific thinking is synthesized with illusion-generating artistic forces, plus the practical wisdom to deploy both in the service of perfecting human life.47 Is he deceived, or might such a synthesis be achieved? The basic notion needed to get beyond the metaphorical appeal to balancing and carry out the wanted unification in philosophical detail has been well known since Kantit is the notion of a regulative principle. Regulative principles are contrasted to constitutive ones, which are objectively valid or strictly binding for their domains. The name constitutive is derived from the Kantian explanation of that validity, which treats the valid principle as a rule according to which experience is constituted, guaranteeing that objects in the domain conform to it. By contrast, merely regulative principles do not constitute objects, but simply govern our attempts to manage the domain; they have subjective, rather than objective validity. In the first instance, that is, they bind our own practical or theoretical efforts, not the actions or objects we think about. As a result, they make no claim about how things must be in detail, but merely lay out an ideal to which we should approximate. Precisely for that reason, two regulative principles with opposing tendencies can still be valid simultaneously, and it is routine for a pair of regulative principles to be balanced against each other.48 Just such mutual limitation, in fact, is a feature of the general conception of perfection Kant inherits from Leibniz and bequeaths to Nietzsche maximal unity amid maximal variety. We need not find any particular degree of unity, but are enjoined to seek as much unity as possible, compatible with the requisite variety, and as much variety, given the needed unity.49 The suggestion, then, is that in the recurrence thought experiment, honesty and artistry are mutually limiting regulative ideals. We are to tell our lives to ourselves in the most beautiful way possible consistent with the demands of honesty, and as honestly as we can, given that they must be attractive enough to affirm. To develop the idea, though, we must examine the detailed interaction between the demand for truth and our need for illusions. On the side of honesty, it turns out to be quite natural to understand will to truth in terms of a regulative ideal, given Nietzsches views. For him, intellectual conscience cannot require an account of things capturing their constitution in themselves quite apart from interpretation, since it is a completely idle hypothesis that things even have such a constitution (WP 560). Instead, we saw, honesty
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demands an awareness of the final and most certain reasons pro and con (GS 2), so as to attain the sort of objectivity available within the limits of perspectivism. For that, we need not interest-free intuition, but the capacity. . .to make the variety of perspectives. . .useful in the service of knowledge (GM III, 12), thereby obtaining cognitive representations that are truer, or cognitively superior, in a sense specified via empirical adequacy plus defensibility across the broadest possible range of perspectives. For Nietzsche, such cognitive superiority serves as a regulative ideal governing belief formation.50 This is so not only in theoretical contexts, but also in the narrower (but immediately salient) case of assessing ones life through the thought of its recurrence.51 As we saw, the thought experiment crucially depends on a constraint of empirical adequacy, in that the life story I affirm must include all the facts of my actual life, at least under some description. Significantly, the raw facts of my life may well admit of different descriptions, under which they would assume different meanings. It is important to be honest no less about what the facts of my life mean than about what they are, and the potential range (and variation) of meanings complicates the task. Thus, here too it is essential, beyond empirical adequacy, to use a variety of perspectives (GM III, 12) to explore the potential meanings, and test how much sense they make of my life overall. Still, I cannot hope for a uniquely true life story. The open-endedness of my life, and the potential for different endings to affect the meanings of earlier events (shown in Carters case), means that the facts to date will always leave room open for differing interpretations of their significance. Some might take that plurality of potential interpretations by itself as sufficient to explain the role of artistic fictions in Nietzsche as well, citing his hyperbolic claim, precisely facts do not exist, only interpretations (WP 481). But this underestimates the real tension between the honesty he demands and the illusions he thinks we need. Even if we cannot capture a lifes constitution in [itself] quite apart from interpretation and subjectivity (WP 561), some lifestories can nonetheless satisfy our cognitive norms to a high degree, and thus be relatively truer than their competitors. The genuine worry, then, is that to affirm our lives we might need stories that were not honest in this sensefictions that would require us, in telling our lives to ourselves, either to fabricate outright, or to endorse utterly implausible stories impossible to square with even a regulative will to truth. Several commentators have proposed that Nietzsche takes truthfulness to be sufficiently satisfied if only our illusions themselves are honest, or lucid, ones, in that we know that this is what they are.52 On this reading, what we learn from artists is first and foremost a certain stance, a way of taking things: we see something as an F, though we know that in reality it is no such thing, just as we might see some patches of color on canvas as a boy in the grip of a seizure. For present purposes, the thought would be that art teaches me how to create value in my life, and so to affirm it, even where the lifes features are intrinsically meaningless or frankly bad for me. It does this by showing me how to see my life as valuable, despite its ultimate meaninglessness or regrettable character. By
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providing a sense that my actions are worthwhile, such illusions could be quite useful, or even necessary to support my practical engagement in the world.53 The appearance of value or purpose could be a psychological condition of effective action despite my knowledge that it is only appearance, just as feelings of pain and fear serve as psychological devices to help me avoid danger, even though I know they are only features of my phenomenal experience. As Hussain (forthcoming) puts it, we would get a fictionalist simulacrum of valuing that saves the phenomenal role of valuing in practical life.54 At the same time, artistrys fictional illusions avoid all conflict with the demands of honesty: the illusion does its work to make life bearable (GS 107; cf. BT 4, 24) while being recognized as a fiction, and thus, we need not, indeed should not, actually believe that the life is any different from what the cruelest will to truth would suggest about it. A fictionalist reading of Nietzsches talk of creating values has a distinguished ancestry (see Vaihinger 1986 [1911], 77190), and surely there is something to it. Nietzsche is attracted to art partly because it is especially honest in recognizing its illusions as such. But I doubt that fictionalist simulacra can do all the work Nietzsche needs on questions of recurrence and redemption. Seeing why suggests a better account of the place of illusions in his thought. Consider again Carters 1980 defeat. The problem he faces, made conspicuous by the idea of the defeats recurrence, is that of reshaping his life into something acceptable, despite the fact that it now includes that intensely disappointing setback. Entertaining the lucid illusion that his life is still worthwhile fails to address the difficulty, precisely because it does not change him. It does nothing to make his life any better. As we just saw, it would not even dislodge his own belief that it is rightly (honestly) to be viewed as a failure. To put the point in starkest terms, pretending to be redeemed is no redemption. If pretense, fiction, and simulacra are all we learn from artistry, then it does not balance or limit our honesty, but is just an expression of itthe expression that forces us to admit, sadly, that all redemptive thoughts about our life must be ruthlessly confined to the realm of Isnt it pretty to think so?. In that case, we still lack an antidote for the ascetic tendencies of the will to truth, and the artistic redemption Nietzsche touts turns out to be a false promise. It succumbs to the same objection as the Christian redemption he condemns: it does nothing to make our actual, honestly described, lives any better, but offers only a makebelieve redemption, in which we palliate ourselves by pretending things are otherwise than they are. Nietzsche himself sees the point, for he does not limit the artistic lesson to the insight that honest illusions, or self-conscious fictions, are possible. On the contrary, artists also teach us positively how to make things beautiful (GS 299; my italics), how to create values (BGE 211), how to make something that was not already there: the whole eternally growing world of valuations, colors, accents, perspectives, scales, affirmations, and negations (GS 301; cf. GS 58, 143, 2767, 290). Note, once an object of artistic attention has been made beautiful, it is no longer necessary to pretend that it is beautiful. If the artistry was successful, it is beautiful (now).
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To insist that acknowledging this beauty is a mere pretense misplaces the role of pretending in aesthetic experience, even on a pretense account of mimesis.55 Consider BT 4, where Nietzsche takes up Raphaels Transfiguration as his example of artistic redemption. Nietzsche takes the painting to represent the art impulse itself: its official content is merely a symbol for the real messageviz., the redemption of life through art. The possessed boy, confused disciples, and general chaos in the lower half of the painting stand for the troubling aspects of existence which need redeeming, while the glowing vision of Christs transfiguration at the top points the way to redemption. But for Nietzsche, the real vision, and the real redemption, is not the Christian promise but Raphaels artistic one. The beauteous vision of Christs transfiguration depicted in the painting symbolizes the experience of viewing the painting itself, whose actual splendor does the real work of transfiguring the possessed boy, bewildered disciples, and the rest, into something that is, unquestionably, beautiful.56 Note the right place of pretense in the story. In viewing the painting, we pretend that certain patches of color are a possessed boy in the grip of a seizure, but we do not pretend that he and his companions have been beautified. If we have to pretend that the painting is beautiful, then the artwork has failed, and nothing is redeemed. The real lesson of art for Nietzsche, then, is not only to teach us the attitude of pretense, but to show us a way that things might be really made beautiful, and thereby redeemed. So, against outright fictionalism about value in Nietzsche, the present reading insists that once something is made valuable by artistic intervention, thenceforth it really has value (pending further transformation). Such a potential to bestow actual value is crucial to the role of artistry in redemption.57 Nevertheless, there remains an important role for pretense or illusion in artistry, as well. Think again of Carter: to give his life a new, redemptive ending, he had to embark on an exPresidency capable of doing more than if we had won in 1980! (J. & R. Carter 1987: 32). More, he had to do so at a time when, as a matter of fact, his life was defined by defeat in the shape, failed political career. Plausibly, it was a psychological requirement on Carters ability to identify with his new project, find it worthwhile, and carry it off, that he not think of himself under the description that was then true of him: failed politician at the end of a career. To redeem himself, he had to act under a different self-conception, thereby pretending to be someone he was not (yet)a voice of world moral leadership. The last claim will seem too strong to some, but I think it can be defended in a sense strong enough to provide a basis for Nietzsches continuing insistence on the need for saving illusions. All of us face the problem of redemption: there is plenty of frustration to go around, which is the moment of truth in Schopenhauers pessimism.58 In any serious case, moreover, redemption requires a change in the meaning of some defining event of the life, transforming it in the eyes of the agent from dreadful accident into something valuable. In this sense, the process involves an alteration in central self-regarding beliefsa change of self-conception. Carter had to stop viewing himself as a failed politician to reimagine himself as a moral leader. When the needed alterations are deep-going
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enough, an illusion becomes inevitable because the change of belief is essentially prospectivethe new self-conception is itself a means involved in my selftransformation, so it must run out in advance of the actual facts about my life. Therefore, given the need for a substantial degree of change, it will misrepresent the meaning of my life now. In real redemption, I transform myself into a new kind of person, of whom some new, redemptive self-conception will be true. But for the project to seem feasible, worthwhile, and meaningful to me, I must think of myself as the sort of person who can carry it out. That is, really, I must think of myself as the new person. Who else could meaningfully carry out the project of being him?! I need an illusion, then, so as to act under the new self-conception when it is not yet true of me. Redemption demands living in the future perfect believing that after my success (if I have it) I will have been a certain kind of person, even though right now I am not. If I were, then of course I would not need redeeming.59 Naturally, there is no guarantee that my efforts will meet with success. If they do not, then the new self-conception I invented will remain nothing but the fiction it was when I started. But, Nietzsche would insist, the possibility that such a fiction might be realized should not blind us to the fact that it began as fictive, any more than it should tempt us into pious, self-deceived hopes that real redemption is available through mere faith, mere belief in a fiction, when in fact it demands works, tooactual, hard-won achievements that change the meaning of my life.60 It is still tempting, however, to think that I might get by without illusion, through the weaker (and perhaps true) prospective belief that I am possibly the new sort of person. From Nietzsches standpoint, though, the weaker claim will not suffice. He famously doubts the justification of any belief that one could be otherwise than one is. Even aside from that theoretical skepticism, it is hard to see how mere belief in possibilities could play the needed practical role sustaining self-transformation. Wherever the problem of redemption is sharp, there is serious incompatibility between my lifes meaning now and the one it would have under a redemptive self-conceptionand there is therefore also a real question about whether I am entitled to the new self-understanding. I need to act in the ways appropriate to the new self-conception, but in the face of what my life really means (and is) now, a belief that I might be such a person is mere wishful thinking. For example, the thought that I might be a better hitter and finally make the majors (despite my slow bat speed and .150 average hitherto) is unlikely to sustain me hacking away in Class A baseball; what I need to believe is that I am a better hitter than that, deep down.61 Similarly, to act as a voice of moral leadership, Carter needs to regard himself not as someone who might someday be something other than a failed politician, but as someone who is that person now.62 The needed illusion is analogous to Raphaels. We imagine a shape the world might have, but does not have, and then believe in it as part of an attempt to bring it about. One needs to see the beautiful form in the stone, like Michelangelo, in order to call it forth. But at least in the case of Nietzschean
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poesy of ones life (if not in the other arts), we ought to admit from the point of view of cold-hearted honesty that such artistic visions are illusory. The beautiful form there turns out to have been in Carters life up to 1981 was not there all along. It was achieved made, not foundalong with the successes of the exPresidency. To set about achieving it, Carter needed a saving illusion; he had to pretend to be something other than the failed politician he was. Saving illusions of this sort, unlike fully honest illusions, lucidly recognized as such in the bright light of consciousness, do put a limit on the regulative ideal of honesty. They prevent the will to truth from fixating us on the (real) badness of the bad things in life (see GS 78), which would cut us off from the spiritual or psychological resources we need to imagine things otherwise and effect redeeming change in the life stories we tell ourselves. On Nietzsches view, of course, no story is perfect, and the quest for better ones is never ending. The artistry involved in being a poet of ones life, like honesty, is a regulative ideal we can only approximate. Conversely, though, just as the need for illusion limits the claim of honesty, the demand for truth limits pursuit of the perfect story. If I never discharge the illusion by realizing my imagined self-conception through changes in my life, then there is only illusion, and no redemption. Absent the constraint of honesty, our stories have no bearing on ourselves, and so cannot redeem the actual facts of our lives, any more than the false Christian redemption. From this side, too, pretending to be redeemed is no redemption. Thus, honesty and artistry serve as mutually limiting regulative ideals, each equally needed in our quest for redemption, and thereby necessary to the good as Nietzsche sees it.
4. Conclusions I have attempted to resolve textual and philosophical dilemmas surrounding Nietzsches position on truth and illusion. The real interpretive burden posed by the texts is more challenging than recent writers suggest. We must explain how Nietzsche thought it possible both to affirm and to deny the existence of truths, and moreover, why he risked misunderstanding by praising the value of both truth and illusion in ways that appear to conflict. I suggested an interpretation of the falsification thesis (via the subtraction argument) which is compatible with claims to truth in a separate, specific sense (constituted by a notion of cognitive superiority). In addition, I contended that Nietzsches core argument for falsification is motivated by the very critical stancerejecting the proof of strength as dishonestwhich also serves to underwrite many of his truth claims. Potential conflict between the values of truth and illusion, however, is not obviated by my distinction between senses of true and false. I argued that the tension between these values must be removed by treating them as mutually limiting regulative ideals necessary in the pursuit of a certain conception of the good, characterized in terms of the ability to affirm the recurrence of ones life. The fact that honesty and artistry are essential to the good life explains their great
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importance for Nietzsche, which plausibly led to the extravagant and sometimes unqualified praise that generates the appearance of contradiction. Finally, fixing the roles of honesty and illusion in affirming lifes recurrence also determines the proper place of fictionalism in Nietzsche, and illuminates his doctrine of the creation of value. Fictions are (often if not always) necessary for us to frame and pursue the projects of creating value that allow us to redeem the dreadful accidents of life. In the end, however, those projects aim not to pretend that life has value, but to make it so in fact. When successful, the imagined fiction of my better self is a ladder kicked away. Success as a poet of ones life involves living up to the ideal well enough to make the life story of ones better self come true.63 R. Lanier Anderson Department of Philosophy Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305-2155 USA lanier@turing.stanford.edu NOTES
(Nietzsches works are cited by the abbreviations listed in the references. I have made use of the translations listed there, but I often depart from them in the interest of greater literalness.) Opponents of the deniers (e.g. Leiter 2002) do not always distinguish among the different versions of the view they reject, but there are at least three substantially distinct pro-falsification approaches in the recent literature: fictionalism, post-modernism, and anti-essentialism. On fictionalism, see Vaihinger (1986 [1911]: 77190), Miklowitz (1998), Landy (2002, 2004), and Hussain (forthcoming). The skeptical post-modernist and textualist approach finds expression in Kofman (1993 [1972]), Derrida (1979), de Man (1979), Shapiro (1989), and Schrift (1990), and by contrast, Grimm (1977), Abel (1984), Nehamas (1985: 42105), and Poellner (1995: 79111) explore versions of anti-essentialism which (contra skepticism) defend substantive metaphysical claims. Other prominent readers have also emphasized themes similar to the post-modernist strand, but out of philosophical assumptions incompatible with it (e.g. Danto 1980 [1965], Bittner 1987). 2 Specifically, she argues that while the early Nietzsche rejected the possibility of truth, he later abandoned metaphysical tenets crucial to his ideas about falsification (notably the posit of things in themselves), and finally overcame his former denial of truth. Clarks reading is controversial (see Poellner 1995: 224; Anderson 1996), but her discussion deserves much credit for clarifying the debate. Indeed, Williams own talk about deniers of truth seems indebted to her formulations about Nietzsches denial of truth (Clark 1990: 14 et passim; cf. Williams 2002: 1214). 3 See Poellner (1995: 1378, 1623, 1913, 196200, 266, 276305, et passim). 4 I canvass the evidence in some detail in section 1 below, since the charged character of recent debate has prompted many readers to minimize its full range. Discussion has become so divisive, in fact, that one can now conduct polemics largely by mere
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classification of an adversary into the opposing camp, thereby tarring him/her with the (real or imagined) liabilities of its standpoint on truth. Some seeking to accommodate the manifest textual pull in both directions, like Nehamas (1985), have therefore become tempting targets from both sides. Leiter, for example, attacks alleged postmodernist, or anti-truth, elements of Nehamass interpretation with a somewhat single-minded fervor (Leiter 2002: 2n, 38, 712, 834n, 967, 11516n, 207n, 291), while Shapiro (1989: 24, 869) criticizes Nehamass conception of interpretation because it is too much restricted by traditional philosophical concerns about securing truth and the unity of the text. 5 Millgram (forthcoming) attempts to explain away Nietzsches apparent inconsistency by creative and sophisticated appeal to a rhetorical strategy of forgetting. But such a line is hard to believe in the face of sentences like these: the erroneousness of the world in which we believe we live is the surest and firmest thing we can lay our eyes on (BGE 34); or again, Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of living being could not live (WP 493). The ring of paradox obtainable by combining claims to truth and claims of systematic falsification within a single thought was clearly part of the attraction for Nietzsche the rhetorician. 6 The elements of the strategy I propose in section 1 were initially developed and defended in Anderson (1996), Anderson (1998), and Anderson (2002). The general approach of distinguishing different senses of truth is also prominently defended by Schacht (1983: 52117) and Richardson (1996: 22090). 7 See thought-provoking papers by Gemes (1992), and Pippin (1997a and 1997b). 8 In light of the attention often garnered by the texts suggesting a global falsification thesis, it is worth emphasizing that ordinary truth claims really are completely routine in Nietzsche. For a selection of remarks, consider the claims to truth, accuracy, or correctness in GS 107, 354, 360; BGE 39, 186, 202, 229, 253, 259; GM I, 4; II, 11; TI V, 1; VI, 1, 4, 6, 8; VII, 1, 5; and VIII, 6; A 501; and EH P, 3. Conversely, in the following passages Nietzsche charges that some view he opposes is false, erroneous, or mendacious, and should be rejected for that reason: GS 29, 37, 99, 109, 126, 138, 326, 335, 345, 346, 355; BGE 11, 12, 16, 17, 19, 22, 38, 48, 53; GM I, 3, 14; II, 11; III 15, 19, 20; TI II, 11; V, 5; VI, 18; A (entire!); and EH P, 2. 9 On this point, see GS 344, 347; BGE 48, 59, 210; TI VI, 5; A 501; EH P, 3; WP 171, 452, 455. Occasionally, Nietzsche even claims (hyperbolically) that making blessed actually entails the falsehood of a belief: Faith makes blessed: consequently it lies (A 50). This widespread line of thought in Nietzsche tells conclusively against the attribution of any pragmatic theory of truth, which would define truth as a property of beliefs or judgments that work, in the sense of conveying happiness, satisfaction, or practical benefit onto their holders. (Danto (1980 [1965]: 72, 7980, 130) famously claimed to find a pragmatist theory of truth in Nietzsche, and Rorty (1982: 205) defends the attribution in fully unqualified form.) 10 Paul de Man (1979) emphasizes a pithy early expression of the falsification view: Truths are illusions about which we have forgotten that this is what they are (TL 84). Similar comments abound in Nietzsches notebooks right through to the end of his productive life (see, e.g. WP 493, 517, 535, 540, 584). In his published works, Nietzsches criticisms of truth are sometimes more oblique, but many texts strongly suggest the system of fundamental falsification (WP 584) advocated in the notebooks. Consider, for example, GS 57, 107, 112, 121, 301, 344, and 354; BGE 4, 11, 16, 24, 34, 22930, and 289; GM III, 12 and 24; TI, III, 2, 5; VIII, 78; and the Epilogue of CW. 11 From a contemporary point of view, it might be thought that the interests involved in cognition could serve to reveal things as they really are, rather than separating us from the world by a distorting effect. But Nietzsches opposite view does have serious
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philosophical motivations, based on his conception of the actual mechanism through which interests shape our world-views. Like many of his contemporaries, Nietzsche worked within the (broadly) Kantian assumption that the organizing structure of experience comes from certain concepts that serve to order our other representations (e.g. unity, identity, permanence, substance, cause, thinghood, being (TI, III, 5; cf. TI III, 2, GS 11011), or again, bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content (GS 121)). Such concepts do their work by means of their own representational content, which must be added to that of the representations they organize, thereby transforming the content of experience overall. See Anderson (1996) and (1998) for detailed textual evidence of Nietzsches commitments along these lines, and defense of the intrinsic plausibility of views with this general shape. In Anderson (2002), I showed why the relevant organizing concepts must (for Nietzsche) add positive content beyond what is already included in the sense perceptions they organize. The argument turns on Nietzsches rejection of an empiricist semantics for metaphysical concepts (BGE 20), which entails that the meaning of those concepts is not exhausted by the sensory data to which they apply. The (broadly) Kantian aspects of Nietzsches epistemological views were also recognized and developed by Clark (1990: 12758), and they have recently been explored by Hill (2003), as well. (An anonymous reviewer for EJP helpfully pressed me to become clearer on these points.) 12 One striking feature of Nietzsches argument is the sweeping generality of its falsification claims; the argument purports to cover all cognitive representation as such. To my mind, that unqualified generality tells against an otherwise attractive strategy of coping with Nietzsches falsification claimsdeveloped most systematically by Richardson (1996: 22090)which attempts to avoid paradox by limiting the scope attributed to the influence of perspective. On such accounts, the merely perspectival status of most representations is supposed to be established on the basis of substantive truths of Nietzsches own metaphysics or logic, which are not themselves perspectival (or not merely perspectival), and which therefore fall outside the scope of the falsifying effects of perspective. Other interesting versions of this basic strategy have been defended by Schacht (1983: 95117), and by Hales and Welshon (1994, 2000), and Hales (1996). 13 The relevant passages are far too numerous to quote, but consider, for example, WP 521: One should not understand this compulsion to fashion concepts, species, forms, purposes, laws. . . as if we were thereby to fix in place the true world; but as a compulsion to organize a world for ourselves in which our existence is made possiblewe thereby create a world which is calculable, simplified, understandable, etc., for us. Along similar lines, see also WP 503, 512, 513, 515, 517, 568, 569, 583, 584; and cf. the published GS 354, BGE 24, 34. 14 For the argument that Nietzsche eventually rejected the falsification thesis based on just this reasoning, see Clark (1990: 95158, esp. 10917). Elsewhere (Anderson 1996: 319 21), I dispute Clarks reading of the central passages she cites to defend her suggestion that Nietzsche changed his mind about falsification. Further considerations against Clarks interpretation may be found in the surrounding paper, and also in Poellner (1995: 224). 15 Wilcox (1974) also identifies this idea in Nietzsche. 16 As Nietzsche insists in the note under discussion, all questions how the things in themselves may be apart from our sense receptivity and the activity of our understanding must be rebutted with the question: how could we know that there are things? Thingness was first created by us (WP 569). That is, the realist version of the question about whether our cognitions can be strictly true of the world (of things in themselves) is flatly refused as a legitimate question from the outset, based on an argument against the coherence of a realist notion of independent things (see Anderson 1998 for discussion). Instead, Nietzsche focuses on experience (sense receptivity plus the activity of our understanding), whose
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content represents a world as we experience it. The procedure is to ask of this represented content (in abstraction from any thought of experience-independent objects) whether it, or any part or aspect of it, justifiably counts as real or true in a philosophically important sense. This is the force of the move I described in the text as beginning the argument from within . 17 Mach (1910 [1886]) is the locus classicus for discussion of this doctrine of elements, which are officially characterized as neither subjective mental sensations, nor objective sensible things, but rather as neutral sensory contents out of which experience (whether subjectively or objectively understood) is composed. For an extremely intriguing and thought-provoking argument that Nietzsche was actually influenced by Machs doctrine of the elements, and adopted a positivist view in more or less the Machian sense, see Hussain (2004). For the isolation of some important differences between Nietzsche and Mach on questions related to falsification and to neutral monism sensu Mach, see Anderson (2002). 18 Thus, the sense in which these contents are phenomenal is not that of contemporary philosophy of mind, which often explains the phenomenal by paradigmatic appeal to conscious sensory qualia, but instead by reference to the common nineteenth century philosophical sense of phenomena as the objects of appearance. The sensory materials are here supposed to be Erscheinungen in a sense descended from the use of that term in Kant, Schopenhauer, the Idealists, etc. and that is why Nietzsche talks so easily in these contexts of phenomenal worlds. 19 Thus, we cannot directly access the ultimate sensory matter, but only postulate it, by imagining the subtraction of its perspectival form. Sensory content can play its role in cognition only after being transformed by a (falsifying) perspective: This same compulsion [to organize the world conveniently] occurs in the sense activities that support reasonthis simplification, coarsening, emphasizing, and elaborating . . . (WP 521; see also 505, 532). Some philosophers and Nietzsche scholarsnotably Poellner (1995: 21823)have doubted the very intelligibility of unconscious mental representations like those envisioned here. Space forbids full discussion, but I remain unmoved by such skepticism. Certainly the Cartesian thesis that consciousness is the essence of the mental has a distinguished history. Nevertheless, as a textual matter such Cartesianism was clearly rejected by Nietzsche, who explicitly sides with Leibniz in favor of unconscious representationsincluding sensory representations (see GS 354, 357, and for discussion of additional textual evidence, Anderson 2002). I think it likely that Nietzsche and Leibniz have right on their side. The posit of unconscious sensory representations is a commonplace of going theories in cognitive science (e.g. the Marr theory of vision). Moreover, many everyday human achievements (e.g. hitting a major league pitch; reacting in time to a fly ball) are all but impossible to understand absent the supposition that the agent represented something about the world (and did so by means of the senses) in a way that did not rise to the level of consciousness. (That said, it is worth noting that in this context Nietzsches unconscious sensations (like the Leibnizian petites perceptions) must be understood broadly as representational states contributing to sensory cognition. As a result, they might not count as sensations construed more narrowlye.g. for philosophers who restrict the term sensation to essentially conscious qualia states in which the notions of representation and the act-object distinction have no place.) 20 Thanks to Alexander Nehamas, John Richardson, Robert Pippin, Alison Simmons, and an anonymous referee for EJP for comments that helped me to clarify the thoughts in the previous three paragraphs.
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It is striking that Nietzsche does not assume that all contents included in the chaos of sensations are consistent with one another (see GS 109, WP 508, 515, 516, 517, 530, 535). The possibility of contradictions here is part of what makes the chaos chaotic. Nietzsche concludes that knowledge requires the use of different perspectives so as to capture (serially) the conflicting aspects of the chaos of sensations and thereby do justice to the world. He does think we should make every effort to reconcile incompatible perspectives, but this norm is understood as a demand on us, not as a constraint on the character of the sensory contents themselves: We are unable to affirm and deny one and the same thing: this is a subjective empirical law; no necessity expresses itself thereby, only an incapacity (WP 516). Thus, the laws of logic, including the principle of contradiction, are not cognitions at all! they are rather regulative articles of belief! (WP 530). Nietzsches approach bears interesting parallels to recent efforts to employ paraconsistent logics in modelling certain domains of representations (e.g. a persons actual beliefs) which must be allowed to contain contradictions, if the model is to be accurate. Paraconsistent logics employ various devices to block the explosive character of classical logic, which allows anything at all to be inferred from a contradiction, and thus trivializes contradictory systems. (Brown (2002) classifies such logics according to their strategies for blocking explosion.) Although Nietzsche does not conceive of the problem in a sophisticated technical way, his appeal to perspective difference seems to play a similar explosion-blocking role. The relative isolation of two perspectives prevents triviality-generating inferential explosion, and permits us to treat potentially contradictory aspects of the chaos of sensations serially. (Thanks to Darko Sarenac for exchanges that led to this note.) 22 See Anderson (1998) for discussion and textual defense of this claim. 23 That is, truth can be understood, on one hand, as correspondence to something radically independent (call this the metaphysical sense; it is the one assumed in the subtraction argument). Or on the other hand, it can be taken as cognitive superiority according to the epistemic norms governing some theoretical tradition or context (call this the theory-internal, or epistemic sense). The contrast can then be exploited to state Nietzsches falsification thesis itself without paradox: the falsification thesis could be true in the epistemic sense (i.e. a superior account of the operations of cognition), while remaining a conceptual organization and transformation of the relevant sensory contents like any other theory, and thus false in the metaphysical sense. Indeed, this is just the sort of view Nietzsche suggests when he insists that the insight into delusion and error as a condition of cognitive and sensible existence has now been given to us through science (GS 107; my italics). 24 The worry here about the potential asceticism of the will to truth is quite a bit sharper than Leiter (2002: 26479) allows, and is related to Nietzsches falsification thesis in ways he is at pains not to acknowledge. The problem is sharp because 1) all knowledge involves interpretation (GM III, 12), and 2) falsifying is of the essence of all interpreting (GM III, 24). Thus, we must worry that the conditions for true knowledge are unsatisfiable for us, which is what makes the pursuit of truth a form of self-flagellation. The falsification thesis is inescapable in grasping Nietzsches concerns here: it is only because the practice of interpretation is falsifying that the will to truth must renounce interpretation, and thus comes to count as abstinence (GM III 24). Leiter (2002: 1718n) has objected to my reading GM III, 24 along these lines, but his reasoning is unpersuasive. The quoted remark at GM III, 24 is not a limited criticism of an idiosyncratic positivist brand of fact-worship, as Leiter suggests, but a perfectly general claim that the essence of interpreting involves falsification. Leiter might still want to claim that such (essentially falsifying) interpretation is not necessary to
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our cognition, but again, it is impossible to understand why renouncing interpretation would be ascetic in the first place, unless we needed it as a essential part of our efforts to know. The fact that the claim is parenthetical, noted by Leiter, is immaterial as far as I can see. 25 For Nietzsches early conception of redemptive artistic illusions, see BT 1, 3, 4, 7, 15, 25. Pippin (1997a) offers helpful discussion of the relevant issues. 26 Nietzsches deployment of the notion evokes its use in Kant, whose demand for a critique of metaphysics was not a suspicious rejection of all claims to metaphysical knowledge, but rather a call for a court of justice, which issues a decision about the possibility or impossibility of metaphysics in general, and the determination of its sources, as well as its extent and boundaries (Kant, KrV, A xixii). 27 It is implausible to construe the wanted experiment as a straightforward scientific trial. The surrounding discussion resists any simple assumption of the value or appropriateness of scientific procedures themselves: Science itself henceforth requires a justification (which is not to say that there is such a thing for it) (GM III 24). Instead, I am proposing, we should read Nietzsches demand that the value of truth is for once to be experimentally called into question (GM III 24) as a call for the sort of experiments in living he envisions at GS 110. Such experiments are fundamentally practical in a way that separates them from more narrowly scientific experiments. Nietzsche means to try out a kind of life (the life of the thinker), which he hopes can make him a better person. If he can improves himself by leading a theoretical life, then the will to truth would receive some genuinely independent justification of its value, and to that extent pass muster before the tribunal of the proposed critique. Probably a person would also have learned some things of a theoretical nature along the path of such a life, but they are not what justifies the will to truth. On the contrary, any value those answers might possess would itself have to rest on the prior assumption that truths have value. 28 Nietzsches main argument defending a cosmological recurrence is based on the thought that the finite number of centers of force in the world must, in infinite time, exhaust all possible combinations and repeat their cycle. The argument is vulnerable to a classic counterexample, due to Simmel (1920 [1907], 2501n), who gives a method for generating an infinite number of combined states from the motion of only three rotating elements. Even more salient, though, is the fact that Nietzsches argument has a clear historical antecedent in Lucretius (1975: 255; DRN III, 8548), of which he must have been aware (even if Nietzsche did not consult Lucretius in the Latin during the 1880s, the relevant point is clear in the German translation he owned (Lucretius 1865)). In the Lucretian context, it becomes obvious that atomism (which Nietzsche rejects) is essential to the proof: without indivisible atoms, the finitude of the overall universe does not entail a finite number of centers of force. Thus, the argument is bound to fail on Nietzsches own terms, even aside from Simmels example. It therefore seems likely that Nietzsche never published a proof because he knew his ideas were inadequate. Consequently, the cosmological theory of recurrence could hardly have been the central feature of the doctrine for him. (Kaufmann 1974: 327, Nehamas 1985: 14169, and Reginster, forthcoming, all reach similar conclusions.) 29 Nehamas (1985: 74105, 14199) is the locus classicus for treating Nietzsche as (what I will call) an inverse superessentialist, holding that every property of a person or thing is equally essential. Other commentators have found this view implausible, but there is strong evidence that Nietzsche held itparticularly from texts expressing his version of fatalism (see e.g. GM I, 13; or TI V, 6 and VI, 8). I call Nietzsches view inverse superessentialism by comparison to a parallel doctrine in Leibniz, who holds that an
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individual like Adam has a complete conceptual essence, which contains all Adams properties. Given that concept, every property of Adam is essential. Nietzsche arrives at a similar result via converse reasoning. Precisely because there is no essence of a thing separate from its properties and effects, the thing is nothing but their collection (WP 551, 557; GM I, 13). But then each property is essential in a sense, because without it the collection would be different. Whereas Leibnizs superessentialism derives from the existence of a conceptual essence containing all the properties, Nietzsches inverse version arises from the lack of a conceptual essence which could preserve identity across a change in properties. 30 Among the more notable treatments in the literature are Simmel (1920), Lo with (1997 [1931]), Soll (1973), Nehamas (1985), Clark (1990), and Reginster (forthcoming). 31 Nietzsche sometimes suggests a stronger version of the thought, according to which all the events in the course of the world are repeated (see, e.g. GS 109, 233; Z III, Vision, 2; BGE 56). Nehamas (1985: 1547, ff.) argues that superessentialism (see note 29) could make this thought relevant to the practical question about my life, since my identity is so deeply enmeshed in the nexus of the universe that any changes in it would bring about changes in me. Even here, though, what is crucial is that I myself return, so what matters for Nietzsche is just the demand that I endorse my own individual life (however its identity is constituted). 32 In this sense, my minimal reading follows Clarks (1990: 26670) enormously fruitful suggestion that we are meant to construe the practical thought experiment unrealisticallysomewhat along the lines of the thought called for by a persons query whether her spouse would want to marry her again if you had it to do all over. 33 The fact that the agents values are the ones engaged as standards of assessment in the thought experiment is not meant to make them immune from revision through it. The thought of recurrence is supposed to force the agent to confront the life she has really lived with the values she endorses, and vice-versa. In case of conflict, the agent may side with features of the life and against some of her hitherto avowed values, so the experiment may force a change of values (see WP 1059). The best way to understand such cases, I think, is that the thought experiment exposes a latent conflict within the agents value set, part of which drives her recognition that the given feature of her life is good, despite its condemnation by another part of her value set. In this sense, the thought of recurrence serves as a kind of coherence or consistency test. Still, since the persons avowed values are vulnerable to revision through the thought experiment, a coherence test of this sort avoids the charge of emptiness leveled against formal accounts of the recurrence idea by Reginster (forthcoming, ch. 5). (Thanks to Robert Pippin and to Bernard Reginster for forcing me to become clearer on this point.) 34 See Reginster (forthcoming, ch. 5). To motivate the point, Reginster observes that a person might well be willing to marry her spouse again (or several more times), without necessarily welcoming the prospect of infinite repetitions, or preferring that prospect over some variety in spousal arrangements over eternity. Kundera (in Immortality) again offers a striking exploration of the thought, when he has Agnes reflect on the meaning of a dream in which she rejected the chance to be married to Paul again. (In short, she thinks it was fine the first time, but shed just rather try something else the next time round; notice, a slightly more positive version of Agnes might well have chosen to do it one more time, but not again after thatthe way one might rewatch a movie that was pretty good, but not classic.) 35 Helpful comments from Bernard Reginster and an anonymous referee for EJP contributed to this paragraph.

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For a thoughtful discussion of these issues for Nietzsches view, see Nehamas (1999). 37 In note 33, I mentioned one important way that inconsistency between ones life and values can lead directly to questions about harmony among the agents attitudes: when she sides with her life against some avowed value(s), this is best understood as exposing latent conflict among values. Note now that the very feature of Nietzsches thought experiment responsible for its immoralist implicationsthe restriction of standards of assessment to those endorsed by the agentis essential to its ability to capture the value of self-consistency he envisions. While formal in an important sense, such harmony among the parts, aspects, drives, or attitudes of the self is nevertheless a substantive ideal: one can fail to attain it, and such failures are pretty clearly a bad thing for a person. Nietzsches criticisms of the resulting forms of inner conflicte.g. the treatment of Socrates at TI II, 9 12, his attacks on weakness of will (TI V, 12), on guilt (GM II; TI VI, 78), on asceticism (GM III, et passim), and on ressentiment (GM I, III; and Reginster 1997)are all central to his praise of this ideal, under which a persons greatness consists in wholeness in manifoldness (BGE 212). Crucially, the harmony of character Nietzsche advocates must not exclude being rich in internal opposition (TI V, 3); the idea is simply that oppositions should be successfully harmonized (TI V, 3; see also IX, 38, 41; BGE 12, 19, 21). (Thanks to Robert Pippin, Bernard Reginster, and Elijah Millgram for discussion.) 38 Pippin (1997a, b) also notices the centrality of this issue. 39 The locus classicus for the development of the broad approach to the recurrence doctrine defended here is Nehamas (1985: 14199), but cf. also Nehamas (1980, 1983). 40 To add difficulty to disappointment, the Carters business also faced major financial difficulties when they returned to it from public office (J. & R. Carter 1987: 1011, 15), threatening the business success they had achieved, just as the Reagan victory marked the failure of their political projects. 41 Cf., of course, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, III, The Convalescent, which offers one of the main treatments of the recurrence idea. 42 Chuck Colson attained fame as an especially ruthless political operative in the Nixon White House. While in prison for Watergate related crimes, he became born again as a Christian. The Carters report having been dubious about his conversion before they actually worked with him through Habitat. 43 The discussion in this paragraph benefitted from exchanges with Alexander Nehamas. 44 For a contrary view, see Reginster (forthcoming, ch. 5). 45 This is true even on conceptions which emphasize some fortunate aspects of our sinful condition (usually the fact that the sin of the human race is needed as the opportunity for Gods act of grace, which redeems us through the sacrifice of Christ). Thus, notions of a Happy Fall (as found in Milton, in Mormonism, etc.) still would not permit honest affirmation of an eternal recurrence of the same particular life. Adams Fall might be viewed as fortunate or providential in the limited sense of providing Gods opportunity for grace, and that thought might be some consolation. But such thoughts are by no means genuinely redemptive in Nietzsches sense, precisely because it remains crucial to the Christian doctrine that sin is an evil state, and the particulars of our condition are by no means to be willed as such. On the contrary, they must be renounced in full repentance if we are even to be worthy of Gods grace. (Penetrating comments from an anonymous reviewer for EJP forced me to become clearer about this issue.) 46 These practical reasons for insisting on the return of every event are fully independent from theoretical considerations tied to Nietzsches superessentialism. The
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present interpretation thus advocates a more fully practical understanding of the recurrence test than that of Nehamas (1985: 14169). 47 The thought of an ideal somehow based on the mutually limiting combination of virtues drawn from art and science clearly gripped Nietzsche deeply. The thought informs his idea of a gay science in later works, but its prominence goes all the way back to The Birth of Tragedy, where it appears in metaphorical form in his call for the development of a psychological type answering to the music playing Socrates (BT 15; cf. also GS 340, which brings out Nietzsches allusion to Alcibiades speech in Platos Symposium, and thus the seductive, captivating aspects of Socrates qua music player). 48 Kant writes that If merely regulative principles are considered as constitutive, then as objective principles they can be in conflict; but if one considers them merely as maxims, then it is not a true conflict but it is merely a difference of interest of reason. . . and a reciprocal limitation of methods satisfying this interest (KrV, A 666/B 694; my italics). See also A 660/B 688, A 644/B 672. 49 For Leibnizs version of the principle, see Monadology 58, And this is the way of obtaining as much variety as possible, but with the greatest order possible, that is, it is the way of obtaining as much perfection as possible (AG 220), echoed by Kant (A 644/B 672) and by Nietzsches definition of greatness as wholeness in manifoldness (BGE 212). (It is controversial whether Leibnizs own understanding of perfection should be understood as a balancing of two desiderata in tension, or rather as the maximization of two mutually reinforcing desiderata. For discussion, see Rutherford (1995: 2245). I need not take a position on Leibniz interpretation here; for my purposes, it is sufficient that Nietzsche (like Kant) definitely envisions a situation of trade-off, not mutual reinforcement.) 50 A contrary account of the virtue of honesty may be found in Wood (2002: 188, et passim), who defends a Cliffordian ethics of belief, according to which it is always wrongindeed, immoralto believe out of strict proportion to the evidence. From Woods point of view, the demotion of truthfulness from an absolute demand to a merely regulative ideal already amounts to a violation of honesty, which he takes to be a moral demand trumping all non-moral considerations. Nietzsche, of course, is keen to resist just this claimed trumping force of traditional morality in general. In particular, moreover, his views on systematic falsification provide some support for his efforts to work out a regulative conception of honesty. If Nietzsche is right, we cannot even hope for beliefs that are true simpliciter in the metaphysical sense, but must content ourselves with improving the satisfaction of our cognitive values over time. In this context, it is reasonable to balance the demands of cognitive values with those of other values in constructing an overall life, as long as we are not asked to adopt settled beliefs that stand in clear violation of cognitive norms. This is just what we can expect from a merely regulative commitment to honesty. There are further complexities here, but I defer their exploration to another occasion. 51 Pippin (1997a, b) points out that Nietzsche also sometimes takes up the problem of truths value for the affirmation of life in a broader context, investigating the basic cultural conditions under which life can be affirmed. 52 Perhaps the most detailed exposition of such a fictionalist reading of Nietzsche is to be found in Hussain (forthcoming). Intriguing proposals along similar lines, as well as worthwhile historical connections, may be found in Miklowitz (1998) and Landy (2002), see also 2001 and 2004). The term honest illusion is Hussains usual formulation, while Landy speaks of lucid illusions. 53 Nietzsche claims that something very like this idea is the true lesson to be drawn from the case of Hamlet (see BT 7).

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Hussain is primarily concerned with metaethical questions about the status of value judgments, and his fictionalist simulacrum is meant to capture the phenomenology of valuing in the context of a global error theory of value he attributes to Nietzsche. On this theory, no value judgments are ever true, so the role of valuing in our lives must be filled by fictions. For reasons that will become apparent, I do not accept the error theoretic aspects of Hussains account. 55 For discussion of the variety of pretense accounts of fiction, and the sustained development of his own powerful make believe theory of fictionality, see Walton (1990), where chapters 13 are of special interest on the point. 56 The same basic idea first broached in BT clearly still guides Nietzsches later thinking about the artistic role in the redemption of life. Compare GS 78 on artistic transfiguration: What should win our gratitude.Only artists . . . have given men eyes and ears to see and hear with some pleasure what each man is himself, experiences himself, desires himself; only they have taught us to esteem the hero that is concealed in everyday characters; only they have taught us the art of viewing ourselves as heroesfrom a distance, and as it were, simplified and transfigured . . . . Only in this way can we deal with some base details in ourselves. Without this art, we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were terribly vast, and reality itself. 57 Notice, the point is not that we can make something good or beautiful merely by thinking it so. Raphael had to carry off the painting to place the possessed boy in a beautiful light, just as Carter had to build a life of moral leadership in order to make the 1980 defeat into a moment of opportunity, rather than failure. In neither case does mere thinking make it so. Value creation in the sense defended here does involve certain subjective attitudes to the valued object, as necessary conditions of its coming to have value (which is why in themselves they never are [beautiful]; GS 299, my italics), but the mere adoption of the relevant attitudes is not sufficient to create the value. That takes actual artistic success. 58 In fact, Nietzsches own confidence on the point seems to rest on ideas very closely related to Schopenhauer. His doctrine that the world is will to power commits him to the thesis that different drives, or centers of power, interact by attempting to incorporate or overwhelm one another, so that the boundary of influence of a given drive will be set at the point where some other drive resists, and successfully frustrates, its activity. From this point of view, it seems impossibleeven self-defeatingto avoid frustration altogether, and this is one reason Nietzsche is so suspicious of ideals that seek the total elimination of suffering. See Reginster (forthcoming, ch. 3) for a compelling account of these aspects of the will to power doctrine, which traces the clear connections to Schopenhauer (e.g. to his argument that suffering is omnipresent due to the inevitable frustration of the striving will, which underlies all phenomena). 59 The description living in the future perfect is due to Landy (2001: 1203, et passim), who helpfully describes the phenomenon in Proust. Interested readers should also consult Landy (2004) for expanded discussion. The key point for us is that future perfect claims like Later on, I will have been a writer, and so this life will have been all to the good . . . require a certain fiction: right now, when I make the claim, I am not a writer, but the future perfect statement insists that later on I will have been so (now). To my mind, in fact, at the time of the claim I am not even a future writer, since if I fail to become a writer, the right judgment is not that I lost my former property of being a future writer, but that I was never a future writer. I only had (unrealistic) dreams of being a writer. Compare a child who tries on different careers under the rubric when I grow up. In a sense, she is by turns future
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farmer, future physicist, future fire chief, etc. but surely at the time this is all pretense, all fiction. Only much later, if at all, can any of these become true. 60 Future perfect believing is always done at our risk, since if my project fails, then my believing will likewise be condemned under the regulative demands of honesty. 61 To see the point in stark terms, notice that all kinds of things could make it true that I might be a better hitter than I have yet shown, including many that would do nothing to sustain my efforts. Surely, for example, there are possible worlds where my counterpart is stronger, taller, has a better eye and superior bat speed, but the thought of that will hardly be enabling for me. Likewise for possible worlds where the pitching is substantially worse. The kind of thing I need to believe, of course, is that deep within me is a capacity to be a great hittera capacity which has yet to show itself in my results. But this is no longer the belief that I might be a hitter, but that I am one, deep down. Note the striking similarity, in fact, between this belief and the illusion Nietzsche attributes to the lambs at GM I, 13, who convince themselves that what really matters is not what one accomplishes, but the character of ones neutral, independent subject, who always might be radically otherwise than ones achievements suggest. Nietzsches recognition of the importance of such belief in oneself provides the force behind his remark that for the noble type of person he admires, It is not the works, it is the faith that is decisive here, that here decides, that here determines the order of rank. . . some fundamental certainty that a noble soul has about itself (BGE 287). For Nietzsche, there is simply no nobility of character without (at least relatively) wholehearted belief in oneself. There are deep and interesting connections here to the Kantian notion of practical faith, but exploring those must await a future occasion. 62 For another approach to the idea, recall the recognition, central to the thought of recurrence, that the past has serious weight in my life. The same reasons that make it possible for my future actions to have redemptive effects on the meaning of my past, conversely give the fragments and accidents of the past real weight, real power over the meaning of my life and identity now. To pursue redemption, I must break free of that power, imagine my life differently, and act as if my life did not have the meaning that past assigns to it. That distance from what I am is just what my fictive self-conception delivers. 63 For helpful conversations and comments, I am indebted to Karen Bennett, Simon Blackburn, Sarah Darby, Peter Godfrey Smith, Charles L. Griswold, Nadeem Hussain, Paul Katsafanas, Joshua Landy, Brian Leiter, Elijah Millgram, Alexander Nehamas, Robert Pippin, Katherine Preston, Bernard Reginster, John Richardson, Darko Sarenac, Richard Schacht, Alison Simmons, Allen Wood, and an anonymous referee for EJP. Thanks also to Meng Xi and Sarah Darby for research assistance. Some ideas for the paper were developed during a fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center, which I gratefully acknowledge.
REFERENCES
Works by Nietzsche For Nietzsches German, I used Nietzsche 1980 ff. (KSA). I made use of the following translations, cited by abbreviations, though I occasionally depart from them without notice, in the interest of literalness. Date of first publication appears at the end of each reference. Parenthetical citations in the text refer to Nietzsches section numbers, which are the same in all editions.
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KSA Nietzsche, F.W.: 1980 ff. Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari, W. de Gruyter, Berlin. BT The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann. Vintage: New York, 1966 (1872). TL On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, in D. Breazeale, ed. and trans., Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsches notebooks of the Early 1870s. New Jersey: Humanities Press (1979). HH Human All-too-Human, trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986 (18789). D Daybreak, trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982 (1881). GS The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann. Vintage: New York, (1974) (1882, 1887). Z Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann. Viking: New York, 1954 (18835). BGE Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann. Vintage: New York, 1966 (1886). GM On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann. Vintage: New York, 1968 (1887). GM On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. M. Clark and A. Swensen. Hackett: Indianapolis, 1998 (1887). TI Twilight of the Idols, trans. Walter Kaufmann. Viking: New York, 1954 (1888). A The Antichrist, trans. Walter Kaufmann. Viking: New York, 1954 (1888). CW The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann. Vintage: New York, 1966 (1888). EH Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann, Vintage, New York 1968 (1888). Nietzsches unpublished notes are cited by the section numbers of the postumous collection The Will to Power (WP), trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, Vintage, New York (1967 [1911]), if they appear there. Otherwise, reference is to the Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA), against which I checked Kaufmanns translations. Works by other authors Abel, Gu nther (1984), Nietzsche: die Dynamik der Willen zur Macht und die ewige Wiederkehr. Berlin: de Gruyter. Anderson, R. Lanier (1996), Overcoming Charity: the Case of Maudemarie Clarks Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, Nietzsche-Studien, 25: 30741. (1998), Truth and Objectivity in Perspectivism, Synthese, 115: 132. (2002), Sensualism and Unconscious Representations in Nietzsches Account of Knowledge, International Studies in Philosophy, 343: 95117. Bittner, Ru diger (1987), Nietzsches Begriff der Wahrheit, Nietzsche-Studien, 16: 7090. Brown, Bryson (2002), On Paraconsistency, entry 39, in D. Jaquette (ed.), A Companion to Philosophical Logic. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 62850. Blondel, Eric (1991 [1986]), Nietzsche, the Body and Culture: Philosophy as a Philosophical Genealogy, trans. S. Hand. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Calvino, Italo (1985), Mr. Palomar, trans. W. Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace. Carter, Jimmy and Rosalynn (1987), Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life. New York: Random House. Clark, Maudemarie (1990), Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (1997), On Knowledge, Truth, and Value: Nietzsches Debt to Schopenhauer and the Development of his Empiricism, in C. Janaway (ed.), Willing and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsches Educator. Oxford: Clarendon, pp. 3778. Danto, Arthur (1980 [1965]), Nietzsche as Philosopher, 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press. de Man, Paul (1979), Allegories of Reading. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
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Derrida, Jacques (1979), Spurs: Nietzsches Styles, trans. B. Harlow, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gemes, Ken (1992), Nietzsches Critique of Truth, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 52: 4765. Reprinted in Richardson and Leiter, eds. (2001). Grimm, Ruediger H. (1977), Nietzsches Theory of Knowledge. Berlin: W. de Gruyter. Hales, Steven (1996), Nietzsche on Logic, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 56: 81935. Hales, Steven and Welshon, Rex (1994), Truth, Paradox, and Nietzschean Perspectivism, History of Philosophy Quarterly, 11: 10119. (2000), Nietzsches Perspectivism. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Heidegger, Martin (1979 ff. [1961]), Nietzsche, trans. D. F. Krell. New York: Harper and Row. Hill, R. Kevin (2003), Nietzsche Critiques: the Kantian Foundations of his Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hussain, Nadeem J. Z. (2004), Nietzsches Positivism, European Journal of Philosophy, 12: 32668. (forthcoming), Honest Illusions, in B. Leiter and N. Sinhababu (eds.) Nietzsche and Morality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kant, Immanuel (KrV, 1781 (A); 2nd, rev. ed. 1787 (B)) Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Riga: Hartknoch. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (1998). Kaufmann, Walter (1974 [1950]), Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kofman, Sarah (1993 [1972]), Nietzsche and Metaphor, trans. D. Large. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kundera, Milan (1984), The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. M. H. Heim. New York: Harper and Row. Kundera, Milan (1991), Immortality, trans. P. Kussi. New York: Harper Collins. Landy, Joshua (2001), Les Moi en Moi: The Proustian Self in Philosophical Perspective, New Literary History, 32: 91132. (2002), Nietzsche, Proust and Will to Ignorance, Philosophy and Literature, 26: 123. (2004), Philosophy, as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lange, F. A. (1902 [1876]), Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart, 7th, following the 2nd, ed. H. Cohen. Leipzig: J. Baedeker. Leibniz, G. W. (AG; 1989), Philosophical Essays, ed. and trans. R. Ariew and D. Garber. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Leiter, Brian (2002), Nietzsche on Morality. London: Routledge. Lo with, Karl (1997 [1931]), Nietzsches Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. J. H. Lomax. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lucretius, (1975), On the Nature of the Universe, trans. W. H. D. Rouse, rev. M. F. Smith. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (Loeb Classical Library). (1865), Das Wesen der Dinge, trans. G. Bossart-Oerden. Berlin: G. Reimer. Mach, Ernst 1910 [1886], The Analysis of Sensations, and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical, trans. C. M. Williams. Chicago: Open Court. Magnus, Bernd (1978), Nietzsches Existential Imperative. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
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Anderson - Nietzsche On Truth, Illusion, and Redemption

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Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

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