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Reviewed by:
  • Nietzsche as Philosopher
  • Jonathan R. Cohen
Arthur Danto . Nietzsche as Philosopher. Expanded ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 267 pp. + index. ISBN 978-0-231-13518-4. Cloth, $80.00. Paper, $28.00.

What makes this, the third edition of Nietzsche as Philosopher, count as "expanded" is that Danto has added six short, recent writings on Nietzsche. Three of these—Danto's introduction to the second edition of the Faber translation of Human, All-Too-Human, his review of Hollingdale's translation of Daybreak, and his contribution to Richard Schacht's anthology on On the Genealogy of Morals —have appeared elsewhere and so will not be discussed here. A fourth piece, "A Comment on Nietzsche's Artistic Metaphysics," was apparently newly written for this volume; however, since it focuses exclusively on "On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense"—an early writing not published by Nietzsche himself—it seems a waste of Danto's time, as if he had pulled something out of Nietzsche's wastebasket.

The most valuable expansions, then, are a pair of pieces that initially appeared in 1998 in the German-language edition of Nietzsche as Philosopher. One is an essay entitled "The Tongues of Angels and Men: Nietzsche as Semantical Nihilist." Danto takes inspiration from a Donald Barthelme passage about the angels' confusion at the death of God; the angels' essence is to praise, but now the object of their praise is no more. Danto finds a perfect analogy with Nietzsche's analysis of the effect of the death of God on humans: We speak languages whose grammar includes a presumption of metaphysical substance, but after the death of God we can no longer believe in the existence of such a metaphysical substance. Our response, unlike that of the angels, is not confusion but repetition of the error: We can remove God, but inevitably something else will fill God's place and the same mistakes will be made. Danto then reads Nietzsche as attacking language in an attempt to keep metaphysical worship from ever happening again. The analogy with Wittgenstein is obvious, and Danto draws it.

However, both the initial analogy and Danto's way of construing Nietzsche's response to it are inapt. The angels' essence is to praise, but humankind has no essence, according to Nietzsche. It's true that we cannot live without valuing and, necessarily, some values will have to be highest. But Nietzsche's response to the death of God is not to make valuing impossible but to make it self-aware of its transitoriness. Thus he does not, as Danto would have him, try to keep humanity from using transitive verbs that require objects whose metaphysical reality in some sense is assumed by the very use of the verbs; rather, he urges us to substitute for God a different ideal—Übermensch—whose very definition is to be ever-striving and thus ever-changing. Language's weaknesses are not raised by Nietzsche in order to discard it but, rather, to break the hold of the metaphysical assumptions that have heretofore lain unnoticed in it. Now that we see them and, more importantly, their arbitrariness, we can continue to use language in the artistic, impermanent spirit appropriate to it.

The final and most interesting new contribution of the expanded edition is the preface, which features Danto's reflections on the four decades of growth of Nietzsche studies the initial publication of his book in 1964 helped spark. Danto had opened a previous preface (to the Morningside edition of 1979) with a rueful citation of the entry devoted to him in the (in)famous Daniel Dennett Lexicon, in which "arthurdantist" is defined as the professional who straightened little Friedrich's teeth so that his bite was not so frightening. In the new preface, the rue is gone: On the contrary, [End Page 81] Danto finds renewed urgency for this project in (what was then) the recent news of the Pearl City massacre, an atrocity committed by teenagers inspired by their reading of Nietzsche. Danto asserts that Nietzsche must be interpreted in such a way that he comes out defanged, and he outlines the twofold strategy he used in Nietzsche...

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