Clark and Dudrick’s New Nietzsche

Some analytic philosophers like to make “twin earth” thought-experiments, in which a second earth is imagined that is like this one in every respect but one. Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick (henceforth C&D), in their long-awaited recent book on Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (BGE¹)—punningly entitled The Soul of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil²—(henceforth ‘Soul’), in effect present us with such an experiment. On each earth there was a Nietzsche, who wrote exactly the same things as the other one did. The single relevant difference between the two earths is that on one of them the Nietzsche—call him ‘exo-Nietzsche’ (as in ‘exoteric’)—actually meant the things he said in what he wrote and published, at least when he wrote and published them (even if sometimes subject to qualifications that he does not bother to state); whereas on the other (otherwise twin) earth the Nietzsche—call him ‘eso-Nietzsche’ (as in ‘esoteric’)—did not mean a good bit of it. That Nietzsche expected the kind of reader he cared about and hoped for to read between the lines, pick up on subtle cues, and discern that he often does not subscribe to (and sometimes actually rejects) what he is seemingly asserting.

Most readers and interpreters of Nietzsche inhabit the earth of exo-Nietzsche—that is, they read Nietzsche “exoterically,” in C&D’s manner of speaking, taking him at his word. C&D are on a different planet: the twin earth of eso-Nietzsche, on which those who take him at his word are being taken for a ride. C&D themselves undertake to read and interpret their Nietzsche accordingly—that is, as they say, “esoterically”—trying to be true not to what his sentences say but to what they suppose to be his actual (but masked) positions and intentions in composing the texts in which these sentences appear. “Everything profound loves masks,” says Nietzsche (BGE 40); and C&D suppose that quip to apply to the author of BGE himself, in spades, in that very book. They take much of his apparent philosophical boat-rocking and naturalistic sea-changing in it to be masks that he dons, thereby concealing his real identity and intentions.

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At heart, C&D contend, the Nietzsche of BGE (and later writings) actually was as philosophically mainstream as can be. Their Nietzsche was in effect a Great Pretender, whose masks misled everyone for well over a century—even Arthur Danto (Soul, 229)! The ‘soul’ of eso-Nietzsche and his BGE is not at all that of a radical challenger of many of the basic tenets of the philosophical tradition and its contemporary analytic extension, and herald and pioneer of a new and different “philosophy of the future” (as BGE’s subtitle suggests). Rather, it is the soul of an ardent adherent of those very tenets, doing his utmost to defend and advance them, albeit in a very unusual sort of way.

Eso-Nietzsche is not Nietzsche-Leit (as one might call Brian Leiter’s scientisticnaturalistic version of our subject³); for, C&D write, “contrary to Brian Leiter’s influential reading of Nietzsche as a naturalist, he does not claim that philosophy should follow the methods of the sciences” (Soul, 9)—at least where certain special aspects of human reality are concerned. Rather, their version of his “philosophy of the future” turns out to be basically what philosophy actually came to be in the century following Nietzsche’s collapse and demise—on our side of the English Channel: good, solid analytic philosophy, unwavering in its commitment to “our most basic principles” such as “the principles of logic,” and to the fundamental soundness and authoritativeness of “our cognitive practices” (Soul, 55; 104).

And that is not all. What is distinctive about eso-Nietzsche’s philosophical sensibility, on C&D’s account, setting him apart from that of a good many other analytic philosophers, is its deep fidelity to a further central strand of the philosophical tradition. C&D’s Nietzsche “does not turn his back on the normative aspirations of traditional philosophy” (Soul...