PHILOSOPHY

As far as Nietzsche is concerned, if there is one feature of philosophy that generally stands out it is that philosophy is not what it usually takes itself to be. This view is plain enough even in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy. Philosophy here is presented as the opposite of the Greek tragic psyche, exemplified by the antagonism between the gods Apollo and Dionysus. Where tragedy is the epitome of Greek cultural achievement, philosophy (specifically in its Socratic form) emerges as the destroyer of all that is to be affirmed in the pessimism of the ancient world. Philosophy in the form that Socratic thought and Platonism present it seeks to render reality in terms of narrow rationalistic principles. The victory of this approach signals both the emergence of metaphysics and the demise of ancient Greek culture. In its rejection of this view, The Birth of Tragedy reveals itself as a work of anti-philosophy: it enacts the wholesale rejection of metaphysics in favour of a sensibility that favours the aesthetic over the rational. Nietzsche’s anti-philosophical stance does not last long. Only a few years later, in the Untimely Meditations, philosophy is opposed positively to contemporary social trends, not least the burgeoning marketplace culture of mass consumption and capitalism. For Nietzsche, a philosophy that ‘wears rags’ (Daybreak, §206) is far superior to the greed fostered by the contemporary commercial world of modernity. Human, All Too Human initiates Nietzsche’s turn to embracing science with its developing of the idea of ‘historical philosophy’ (see knowledge), an approach that enacts a specifically anti-metaphysical rejection of dogmatic philosophical attitudes in favour of an embracing of becoming, history and development. Here, a more modest conception of knowledge than that of the metaphysician’s is affirmed: modest truths matter, not grand ones. Clearly Nietzsche is not opposed to philosophy but rather to a specific form of it – namely, the metaphysics epitomised by Platonism and Christianity. It is this form of thought, however, which Nietzsche holds to have dominated throughout the history of the West. And, in this guise at least, philosophy is prone to being beset by error and illusion. For instance, it takes contingent concepts and categories (consciousness, logic, cause and effect, being) and elevates them without warrant to the authoritative status of holding the key to grasping the fundamental nature of reality. Later texts, such as Twilight of the Idols, pursue this view in polemical guise, portraying philosophy as beset by phantasms, as a conceptual fetishism bent on elevating the least concrete of notions to the level of measure of objective reality. Such is the degree of the metaphysical addiction

of philosophers, says Nietzsche, that they are only happy when reality is drained of its inherently changing properties and frozen into a timeless form (‘being’). Philosophy of this kind is likened by Nietzsche to conceptual mummification (Twilight of the Idols, ‘“Reason” in Philosophy’, §1). Such philosophy is also clumsy and inept – witness the image of the philosopher as poor seducer of truth in the Preface to Beyond Good and Evil. Consider also the subsequent claim in that text that all that every great philosophy has really been is an unconscious memoir, an unwitting confession on the part of the author of their dominant drives and prejudices (Beyond Good and Evil, §6). Philosophers may be lovers of knowledge but they are also always prey to being as unaware of their own constitution, motives and genuine aims as everyone else generally is (see On the Genealogy of Morality, Preface, §1). Nevertheless, philosophy remains for Nietzsche something that is pregnant with possibility and futurity. So, it is certainly to be esteemed (see Essay III of the Genealogy) as a form of resistance to the power of dominant norms and as the inspirer of critical thought. The philosopher may look like a creature of asceticism, but, it turns out, this was merely a means to an altogether more ambitious end. Philosophy, in this regard, is capable of exemplifying human potential. The ‘philosophers of the future’ extolled in §42 of Beyond Good and Evil encapsulate this positive vision. Such beings represent a new kind of philosopher, which Nietzsche ventures to baptise with the name ‘attempters’. Such a characterisation implies many things. Primarily, it presupposes that the future thinkers can be characterised by virtue of having some kind of task: an attempt toward something can be made only in the light of some kind of purpose that already justifies it. This desire for justification through purpose is, Nietzsche comments in Twilight of the Idols, something that frames the bounds of his ‘happiness’. Such happiness is achieved by way of a formula: one proceeds via affirmation and negation to create a sense of direction culminating in a destination that signals the end of a journey (see Twilight of the Idols, ‘Maxims and Arrows’, §44). Philosophers of the future, being attempters, are also differentiated from other kinds. They are, above all, new philosophers (Beyond Good and Evil, §44). Philosophers of the future are defined by their relation to what has gone before them. Thus, the realms of history and prehistory that for Nietzsche made us the kind of beings we are speak through them no less than they do through the rest of humankind. The philosopher of the future stands upon the achievements of his or her forebears but at the same time stands apart from them because of their experimental daring.