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  • A More Laudable Truthfulness
  • Barry Allen (bio)

When Hilary Putnam wrote in eulogy of his late colleague W. V. O. Quine, he began by asking what it was that made Quine an important philosopher.1 He went on to talk about two kinds of philosophers, those whose arguments were plausible and those whose arguments were and have ever been unbelievable. He counts Quine among the unbelievable (Berkeley is another). If you think you agree with Quine—if you think ontology is relative, translation indeterminate, and that words and sentences have no meaning—you don't really understand what he's saying. If you understand it, you see it's crazy, despite Quine's elegant arguments. Putnam says Richard Rorty is the only philosopher he knows who both understands and believes Quine's unbelievable arguments.

I am struck by the quick move from "important philosopher" to a discussion on the relative merits of an argument. In the sciences, a personal name (Gödel, Darwin) is often shorthand for a proof or theory. Putnam implies that it's that way in philosophy too. An important philosopher is an important argument. Important doesn't mean true; it doesn't even have to be plausible, just important. I wonder if Putnam is right, though, to tie the value of a philosopher's work to an argument. Is philosophy so committed to dialectics? What if a philosopher [End Page 193] poses a question about dialectics itself? The question cannot be forbidden! It also cannot be advanced or decided dialectically. So either such questions cannot be "important," or there is more to philosophy than dialectics, and more to an important philosopher than an important argument.

Another conception of accomplishment in philosophy is possible. Quine may be remembered for his arguments, but Nietzsche is remembered for his books. Consistently interesting and spectacularly well written, they are nothing less than philosophical works of art. They pose questions about life, truth, morality, and knowledge that earlier Western thought never asked. Whether readers "agree" or "believe" is not important. That is true of poetry, too; but poetic philosophy is different. Persuasion, agreement, or belief are irrelevant because Nietzsche, as philosophical author, isn't seriously "teaching" or even "arguing" anything that he believes to be the truth. Of course, Zarathustra appears, and he teaches the Übermensch. But that isn't Nietzsche teaching. It's an essay in poetic philosophy. Its value depends on what you, as a reader, a philosopher, make of it. I think that's why many analytic philosophers can't bear Nietzsche. He makes them feel dumb.

Despite the artistry, reading Nietzsche is not much like reading a poem or novel. You are addressed in a different way. You understand that the work is not fictive. The address is not to the part of you that likes a good story, willing to suspend disbelief, but to the part that cares for truth and thinks about what to believe. I compare Nietzsche's work to the performative philosophy of Diogenes the Cynic. In an image Nietzsche put to dramatic new use, it was Diogenes who lit a lantern in broad day and walked the streets of Athens "looking for a true man." Diogenes's work is performative; he is in the people's face (he is also said to have masturbated in public; "if only I could satisfy my hunger by rubbing my stomach!" he told anyone who asked). He is not acting, he does not wink, and that makes you think, addressing the part of you that wonders what's true. Nietzsche's performance is of course textual, his voice or presence very imaginary. But his laughter and lucid cheerfulness also make you think, and think about what you think—what you think, for instance, about the truth of his textual performance.

A prominent example of Nietzsche's new questions concerns the value of truth, the good of it, the point of caring for what's true. He advances the first new idea about this since Christian antiquity. For the Christians, as for the Platonists, truth is something Other, Out There, an Objective Object that you open yourself to, heart and mind. The best and purest part of...

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