Truth and Value in Nietzsche: A Study of his Metaethics and Epistemology (review)

490 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Truth and Value in Nietzsche: .4 Study of his Metaethics and Epistemology. By John T. Wilcox. With a Foreword by Walter Kaufmann. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974. Pp. xix q- 229. $9.00) In his Foreword to this study, Walter Kaufmann states that "John Wilcox has made a major contribution to the study of Nietzsche's philosophy" (vii), and that "henceforth all Nietzsche scholars . . . will have to take into account this book" (x). Both assertions are true; and the fact that they are made by Kaufmann--whose own treatment of Nietzsche differs rather considerably from Wilcox's---by itself says a good deal about the skill and persuasiveness with which Wilcox develops his interpretation of Nietzsche's thinking concerning "truth and value" (even though Kaufmann does stop short of expressing agreement with what Wilcox has to say). Wilcox's approach to Nietzsche resembles Danto's more than it does Kaufmann's (although it is perhaps closer in spirit to Morgan's than it is to either of theirs), in that he focuses on Nietzsche's discussion of certain specific issues with which analytic philosophers in the present century have been greatly concerned, and deals with Nietzsche's treatment of them in a way intended to attract attention to it and earn the respect for it of this part of the contemporary philosophical community in particular . His interpretation of Nietzsche's views on these (epistemological and metaethical ) issues contrasts markedly with Danto's, however; indeed, his book serves as a useful and needed corrective to Danto's, in which Nietzsche is portrayed as a "radical nihilist" in both his metaphysics and theory of knowledge and his theory of value. For while Wilcox goes to considerable lengths to do justice to the fact that Nietzsche says many things which would appear to support the interpretation of him as a philosophical "nihilist" (or "noncognitivist," in Wilcox's terms), devoting an entire chapter to the marshaling of them and the elaboration of the themes they seem to suggest, he is equally attentive to the fact that Nietzsche says a great many other things which seem to support the opposing interpretation of him as a "cognitivist" with respect to both the (attainability of knowledge o0 the nature of reality and the status of values. The main purpose of his book is to attempt to come to terms with these two fundamental and seemingly conflicting strains in Nietzsche's thought, by considering whether they can be reconciled, and if so, what the positions on these issues emerging from their reconciliation would look like. Thus, in his Introduction, he says, "What I will try to do, after revealing the magnitude of the problem, is to bring some order into what might otherwise appear a chaos" (p. 7). Wilcox's approach is thus the very opposite of that of Jaspers, who set out to show that Nietzsche not merely "seems to be on both sides of every fence," as Wilcox puts it (p. 6), but actually--and perhaps even deliberately--makes incompatible assertions with respect to virtually every issue he discusses (in order to redirect his readers' philosophizing away from the attempt to achieve knowledge and toward the task of "becoming who one is"). Wilcox acknowledges that Nietzsche "is not a tidy thinker," and "does not have a neat system" (p. 6); but he quite rightly suggests that, before concluding that Nietzsche is (either hopelessly or laudably) inconsistent to the point of cognitive incoherence, one would do well to undertake the experiment of seeing whether it is possible to interpret the various things he says in a way that both is plausible and renders them collectively consistent. There are two reasons why one would do well to undertake this experiment. First, it is a general principle of interpretation when dealing with a philosopher that consistency is to be assumed unless and until it proves impossible (or possible only at the cost of absurdity) to construe him to be consistent; and thus the resulting interpretation if the experiment were to prove successful--would have to be allowed to have at least a greater prima facie claim to soundness than that of alternatives to...