ABSTRACT
NIETZSCHE’S ARGUMENT Reading Nietzsche presents a great and obvious difficulty for one who has been reared in any of the many traditions which for over two thousand years have insisted that philosophy must live up to high standards of logical rigor. His books contain rather few passages in which he appears to be offering arguments for the opinions he expresses in them. The books from his hand that are most often taken seriously in the Anglo-American philosophical community are Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals, probably because it is in those two books that he most often comes close to arguing for what he says. People who admire those books above all his others must find it discouraging to know that their author regarded them as far less important than his Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a book that not only appears to contain virtually no arguments at all, but is not even written in prose. He says that in Zarathustra he accomplishes “the Yessaying part” of his task while the books he wrote later-including Beyond Good and Evil and the Genealogy-represent the “No-saying, No-doing part” (EH III JGB 1). That is, if we wish to know what Nietzsche was for we must go to Zarathustra; his other late works indicate mainly what he was against. It is understandable if one recoils at the thought of doing this. About Zarathustra, even more than the other works of his last period, one is sometimes tempted to repeat what he himself later says of his own first book: that it is “without the will to logical cleanliness, very convinced and therefore disdainful of proof, mistrustful even of the propriety of proof” (GT P 3).
