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236 13 appearance and Values Nietzsche and an Ethics of Life lawrence J. hatab if we take phenomenology in a general sense to be concerned with “appearance,” Nietzsche’s philosophy offers a wealth of pertinent material. yet the meaning of appearance in Nietzsche’s texts is not always easy to fathom. in this chapter i want to explore a “phenomenology of values” by coordinating Nietzsche’s complex approach to appearance with his critique of morality.1 For heidegger, Nietzsche represents the culmination of Western metaphysics and nihilism, particularly with his thinking on will to power and eternal recurrence. Presumably Nietzsche remains within the orbit of metaphysics by simply reversing metaphysical binaries (e.g., becoming over being, appearance over truth).2 Nevertheless i believe that Nietzsche’s philosophy, and especially his central concept of will to power, cannot be understood in this manner, and that his approach to appearance is not simply a reversal of traditional realism and models of truth. First of all, will to power is conceived specifically as a rejection of binary opposites, because it names a process of overcoming something, in which overcoming and otherness are structurally related to each other. second, the meaning of “appearance” is complicated in Nietzsche’s thinking . often he will use appearance as a rhetorical weapon against metaphysical conceptions , calling them “apparent” rather than “real.” at other times he will use appearance in a more positive sense to designate the way a world of becoming is given to us, as an “appearing” flux. he recognizes that a rejection of metaphysical “reality” also dismisses a deficient sense of “mere” appearance.3 This is the problem: Nietzsche is happy to bank on deficient senses of appearance (error, lie, fiction, etc.) to characterize human thinking as an ungrounded process of interpretation, but these senses cannot Appearance and Values | 237 be taken in their traditional connotations because there are no “true” conditions by which we could measure them as “false.” metaphysics and Will to Power We can begin with Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics. according to Nietzsche, “the fundamental faith of the metaphysicians is the faith in opposite values.”4 The Western tradition has operated by dividing reality into a set of binary opposites, such as constancy and change, eternity and time, good and evil, truth and appearance—opposites that can be organized around the concepts of being and becoming. The motivation behind such divisional thinking is as follows: Becoming names the negative and unstable conditions of existence that undermine our interest in grasping, controlling, and preserving life; being, as opposite to becoming, permits the governance or exclusion of negative conditions and thus the attainment of various models of stability. Nietzsche wants to challenge the priority of being in the tradition, so much so that he is often read as simply reversing this scheme by extolling sheer becoming and all its correlates. This is not the case, even though Nietzsche often celebrates negative terms rhetorically to unsettle convictions. in fact he exchanges oppositional exclusion for a sense of reciprocal tension, where the differing conditions in question are not exclusive of each other but structurally related. he suggests that “what constitutes the value of these good and revered things is precisely that they are insidiously related, tied to, and involved with these wicked, seemingly opposite things” (Bge §2). Rather than fixed contraries, Nietzsche prefers “differences of degree” and “transitions.”5 even the idea of sheer becoming cannot be maintained, according to Nietzsche; discernment of such becoming can arise only once an imaginary counterworld of being is placed against it.6 Becoming, for Nietzsche, cannot simply be understood as a world of change. movements are always related to other movements, and the relational structure is expressive not simply of differences but also of resistances and tensional conflicts,7 something captured in his concept of will to power (Bge §36). Will to power depicts in dynamic terms the idea that any affirmation is also a negation, that any condition or assertion of meaning must overcome some “other,” some obstacle or counterforce. Nietzsche also says that “will to power can manifest itself only against resistances; therefore it seeks that which resists it” (WP §656, my emphasis). a similar formation is declared in Ecce Homo in reference to a warlike nature: “it needs objects of resistance; hence it looks for what resists.”8 my reading of this is as follows: since power can involve only resistance, then one’s power to overcome is essentially related to a counterpower; if resistance were...

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