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  • Unsystematic Reason in Nietzsche
  • Stanley Rosen

Stated as simply as possible, Loeb wishes to introduce what he regards as a methodological innovation in the study of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The innovation is required in order to rectify a scandalous situation in Nietzsche studies that has obtained up to the present time.

Actually, there seem to be two main points to Loeb's argument. These points are expressed on the first two pages of his exposition. First, "[t]o paraphrase Kant, it remains a scandal to Nietzsche scholarship that we are obliged to assume the centrality of his doctrine of eternal recurrence but we are not able to give a satisfactory reply to anyone who may claim to refute this doctrine." A satisfactory rebuttal to an alleged refutation is itself a refutation. In other words, Loeb claims that, prior to himself, no one has understood Nietzsche's teaching as a whole. Therefore no one could possibly have explained it to another. I note a crucial characteristic of Loeb's enterprise. He intends to prove not the truth of Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal recurrence (hereafter ER) but its logical possibility. Strictly speaking, the argument for the truth of ER could be absurd without violating logic. There are many other reasons for rejecting a postulated doctrine than its invalidity. To employ Loeb's terms, we are dealing here with the refutation of doctrines. And "doctrines" refers to conceptual analysis in the traditional sense of the term.

To summarize, we are considering three methods: doctrinal, narrative, and all the rest. This is awkward, since so far as I can see, what Loeb wants is a pair of mutually exclusive methods called doctrinal and narrative. Am I splitting hairs here? I do not think so, because there is an intrinsic connection between methods and the objects they study. The object of doctrine is a concept, a logically coherent argument, but not a poem. So, too, the object of narrative is a narration or story and so not a poem or rhetorical chant. What, then, are we to conclude about all the other methods?

Loeb's work on Nietzsche is substantial, and I am in no sense trying to refute it. What I claim is that this story is no better and at best no worse than many other stories about Nietzsche. How could it be otherwise, and why should we not revert to Kant, in order to rescue ourselves from the triumph of reason over [End Page 65] often perfervid poetry? So let Loeb have his day in court, despite my belief that it begins at dusk. It is nevertheless my view that Loeb suffers from an excessive faith in methodology. His attempt to rescue Nietzsche from inadequate criticism is laudable, but it cannot succeed unless Loeb is in a position to show that every possible interpretation leading to the contradiction or repudiation of Z is itself inherently self-contradictory. I myself have an argument that I claim shows the impossibility of deriving any rational, wholly consistent doctrine from Nietzschean first principles and premises.

Here it is: According to Nietzsche, Being (= a world order) is essentially chaos. Any world, including that of modern science, is a creation of human power. Therefore, poetry triumphs over all doctrines and narratives. This is especially easy to see in the case of the myth of the ER, Nietzsche's self-styled fundamental thought, which can mean virtually anything the clever hermeneut wishes it to mean. To anticipate, it is not Nietzsche but Loeb who practices the narrative method. Nietzsche is not a systematic thinker but an urbane prophet. I am, however, getting ahead of myself. What we seem to have instead is not ER but proofs that certain alleged refutations of ER, or what look like fatal weaknesses and lacunae in the text, can themselves be refuted or supplied. But there is a deeper problem. As I have just noted, when Loeb takes it upon himself to defend Nietzsche against the charge of invalidity and reliance upon defective argumentation, he treats ER as itself a logical construction. At the same time, he tells us that he will follow an alternative method to that which places primary emphasis...

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