Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition (review)

With Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition, Jessica Berry sets out to a fill a gap in the secondary literature on Friedrich Nietzsche by showing how an understanding of ancient skepticism can shed light on central features of his philosophical project (5). Although she is right to emphasize the importance of the ancient Greeks for understanding Nietzsche's thought generally and to identify issues that, either directly or indirectly, point to the ancient skeptical tradition, her attempt to show that Pyrrhonian skepticism offers the best model for interpreting Nietzsche's project remains unconvincing.

Berry introduces her topic by noting that although skepticism is often associated with Nietzsche's thought, commentators usually employ the term in the colloquial sense of denying truth or knowledge (4). According to Berry, the mistake of such commentators is that they often fail to use this insight as an occasion for exploring Nietzsche's relationship to the ancient skeptical tradition, which Berry rightly distinguishes from a modern variant of skepticism that has emerged from Descartes' Meditations.¹ Whereas Berry sees the conclusions of the modern variant as either unsustainable or trivial (7), she sees in the ancient form a rich tradition that links the suspension of belief, or epochê, to the quest for psychological health in the form of ataraxia, or freedom from disturbance (14).

Berry devotes the first two chapters to laying the foundations of her argument. In the first, she provides evidence for Nietzsche's familiarity with ancient skepticism and outlines the fundamentals of the philosophy. Although Nietzsche's corpus reflects his general interest in ancient philosophy and poetry, the evidence Berry presents attesting to Nietzsche's specific interest in ancient skepticism is relatively sparse and often indirect. Here she points to Nietzsche's familiarity with Pyrrhonian skepticism through his work on Diogenes Laertius's Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, his acquaintance with Sextus Empiricus through his work on Democritus, and his late reading (1888) of Victor Brochard's Les sceptiques grecs (28-29). Nevertheless, there does seem to be some significant connection between Nietzsche's project and ancient skepticism because, as we know from the preface of Beyond Good and Evil and as Berry makes clear in her introductory discussion, both oppose dogmatism. According to Berry, dogmatists are those who "make a professional habit of forming theories and beliefs (dogmata) and who subsequently stop investigating" (34). In contrast, the skeptic remains open to inquiry and strives for psychological health by suspending belief about theoretical issues and the customs that have emerged from dogmatic truth claims.

In the second chapter, Berry turns to Nietzsche's unpublished essay "On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense" to discuss skepticism in his early work. In contrast to commentators who think that Nietzsche denies truth in the essay, Berry contends that the text gives expression to an early version of Nietzsche's skepticism. Here, two features of her reading stand out. First, Berry claims that Nietzsche is like the skeptic in insisting that we cannot be sure whether the world as it appears to us corresponds to the true essence of things. Second, Nietzsche follows the skeptic in pointing out that different species perceive the world in radically different ways and then by insisting that there is no available criterion for determining which perception is correct (63ff.). Although Nietzsche seems to conclude from this fact that all perceptions are false, Berry defends a skeptical reading of the passage whereby Nietzsche is interpreted as suggesting that perceptions cannot be assessed for their truth content.

Berry's argument thus far is not terribly controversial. However, the difficulty of sustaining her skeptical reading increases as she ventures beyond "On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense." On the one hand, she notes the incommensurability between Nietzsche's skepticism in the essay and his metaphysical speculations in his other works of the time. She resolves this issue by pointing to Nietzsche's antimetaphysical turn in Human, All Too Human and its...