Nietzsche's Philosophy in 1888: The Will to Power and the Übermensch

Nietzsche's Philosophy in 1888" The Will to Power and the (JbermenscU BERND MAGNUS 1. THE PROBLEM ANYONE WHO ~AS read very much Nietzsche commentary is surely struck by the failure of any semblance of agreement about what Nietzsche's philosophy is, whether he really had one, whether he intended to have one, and if so in what sense, or--indeed--whether he wished to show that no one ought to have one. To be sure, disagreement surrounds all philosophical commentary ---otherwise there would be nothing left for us to say--but it does seem to me that disagreement is more basic and more acute in the Nietzsche case than in any other case with which I am well acquainted. Think for a moment of the Nietzsche who leaps from the pen of a Martin Heidegger, a Karl Jaspers, or a Jacques Derrida, all quite different Nietzsches certainly; but then compound that difference by comparing and contrasting these Nietzsche portraits with those provided by, say, Arthur Danto or Richard Scl~acht. I sometimes think that disagreements about, say, Kant's first Cr/t /que, disagreements which distinguish Aquila's recent commentary from Allison 's recent one or Bennett's older one, for example, are more like the quite different renderings of a putatively identical French landscape by Barbizon School or Impressionist painters; while disagreements about Nietzsche ' A previous version of this paper was delivered as an invited address under a different title to the Nietzsche Society on October 18, 1984 in Atlanta, at its annual meeting held in conjuction with the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. I especially appreciate the invitation extended by the Society's program committee--Daniel Breazeale, John Sallis, and Michaeal Platt. A still earlier version was delivered at a symposium of the American Philosophical Association's Western Division, in April 1984, on "Nietzsche and Schacht's Nietzsche ." I want to take this opportunity as well, therefore, to thank the APA's program committee for its kind invitation. [79] 80 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 24." 1 JANUARY a986 are rather more like Rembrandt, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol depicting the same subject. In the Barbizon-Impressionist case we can still make out the same subject, however faintly. In the Rembrandt-Pollock-Warhol case identity seems to dissolve altogether. Sometimes nothing is recognizable. I wish I could be convinced that, deep down, this more acute difference in Nietzsche studies reduced to a difference either between analytic and nonanalytic treatments or to the question of situating him within the philosophical tradition as distinct from reading him out of it entirely. Unfortunately for me, however, I take the analytic/continental divide to be superficial and unhelpful generally--Frege and Wittgenstein as well as Carnap and Schlick, for example, were all continental Europeans. It seems to me that that parochial distinction could more usefully be replaced by distinguishing familiar paradigms and discourse from unfamiliar ones instead. In addition, I regard Nietzsche's place in the philosophy curriculum as reasonably secure . Few argue any longer, for example, that Nietzsche belongs to the history of some discipline other than philosophy; and when such debates occur they are typically reducible--in principle at least--either to debates about library cataloging recommendations, or to debates about which department has the right to teach him, or more characteristically to arguments about what statu,¢ ought to be assigned to Nietzsche in one's favored discipline . Sometimes debates about Nietzsche as philosopher turn unintentionally comical resembling a state of affairs not unlike the one recently bemoaned by Arthur Danto in his Presidental address to the American Philosophical Association's Eastern Division: A lot of what I have read on Plato reads much as though he to whom the whole of subsequent philosophy since is said to be so many footnotes, were in effect a footnote to himself, and being coached to get a paper accepted by The PhilosophicalReview. And a good bit of the writing on Descartes is by way of chivying his argumentation into notations we are certain he would have adopted had he lived to appreciate their advantages, since it is now so clear where he went wrong. But in both cases it...