Nietzsche the thinker/Chapter V

by William Mackintire Salter

 

CHAPTER V

ULTIMATE ANALYSIS OF THE WORLD

In trying to reach the last elements of the world, Nietzsche manifests two tendencies in the writings of the first period. One is in the direction of metaphysics proper, the other in the direction of positivism or phenomenalism. Probably the metaphysical tendency came first, and he appears to have only gradually worked himself out of it.^[1] I shall begin by considering it.

 

I

Nietzsche was never a materialist. He followed Kant and Schopenhauer in holding that what we call the material world is sensational in nature and subjective. ^a He criticises Strauss for his superficial treatment of Kant, and for his use of the language of crude realism.^{[2] b} On the other hand, as against the total obscurity in which Kant had left the nature of ultimate reality, Nietzsche thought that he found light in Schopenhauer. Kant had said, summing up the results of his criticism, that the things we perceive are not what we take them to be, that if we make abstraction of ourselves as knowing subjects, or even only of our senses, all the qualities and relations of objects in space and time, yes, space and time themselves, disappear, that as phenomena they can only exist in us—hence what things are independently of us remains wholly unknown. Such an outcome, when it is really taken to heart and not left as an incident in an abstract logical process, is extremely depressing. If one cannot accept Kant's counterbalancing ethical reasonings, one is left in total gloom—unless, indeed, one becomes a complete idealist and gives up the idea of extra-mental reality altogether. The depressing influence of Kant's criticism was felt to the full by Heinrich von Kleist—Nietzsche quotes a moving passage from him.^[3] He himself, however, escaped it by the help of Schopenhauer. Ultimate reality proved, indeed, to be very different from what he had been brought up to believe, but he could at least make out its outline, could see his own place in the general framework and find a meaning for his life. To quote the substance of his language, Schopenhauer was a guide to lead him from skeptical depression and criticising renunciation up to the heights of the tragic view, with the heavens and unnumbered stars overhead; once more he obtained the sense of life as a whole and learned where consolation was to be found for one's individual limitations and pain, namely, in sacrificing egoism and surrendering oneself to noble aims, above all those of justice and pity.^[4]

I need not here repeat the fundamental propositions of Schopenhauer's metaphysics which Nietzsche adopted. ^c The reality lying back of the world of sensations, and also of ourselves (to the extent we are distinguishable from sensations), is will—one will, indeed, since space and time, the conditions of multiplicity, are regarded as subjective forms. ^d The will simply appears in many objects, simply appears in the form of many wills—change, alternate life and death, the general evanescence of things are all but appearance. The view had so far a consoling and elevating effect on Nietzsche: as against the whole realm of the transitory and fugitive, he was able to assert an abiding, eternal energy that was real. ^e But how, it may be asked, under ultimate conditions such as these do appearances ever arise? How does it come to pass that the Primal Unity (das Ur-Eine) gives birth to them? At this point Nietzsche is speculative and venturesome even beyond his master, who had only spoken vaguely of a fall (Abfall), and developes a view which stands in marked contrast to theistic, or at least Christian, metaphysics. He premises that the Primal Will, like its human counterpart, of which it is indeed only the inmost essence, is a striving will, that is, something unsatisfied, something that suffers. The dissatisfaction and suffering are that which urge it on.^[5] Schopenhauer once tells of the way in which as a youth he had sought now and then to look at himself and his doings as things apart from him, to make a picture of them—he supposes with the idea of finding them more enjoyable;^[6] perhaps the experience has not been his alone. Well, Nietzsche dares suggest that the World-Will is in an essentially similar situation, that it too is led to make a picture, an object of itself, to thus project itself in the form of a vision or dream—and that it is this vision or dream which we and the world are. We and the world are the Eternal One, only not as he exists in himself, but as spread out in space and time for his contemplation—for all objectification requires these forms, at least the form of space, as a condition. "In the dream of the God, we are figures who divine what he dreams." And yet because the vision is a result, is ever being projected and never is, a certain inconstancy and change belong to the world's essential nature—it and all its parts are ever arising, ever passing away, ever freshly arising; there is birth, death, rebirth in it without end. ^f

A fanciful metaphysics, we say, and Nietzsche himself thought so later—and yet, perhaps, not much more fanciful than some other species of the genus. It has points of contact with Fichte's—the World-Will might be called an Absolute Ego who creates all things out of himself; and yet it is essentially different from Fichte's, or any moral metaphysics, and for something at all like it we may have to go back as far as Heraclitus. It might be described as an æsthetic metaphysics (Nietzsche spoke of it afterward as an Artisten-Metaphysik).^[7] The world is there because of an æsthetic need of its creator; and the way in which we in turn must justify it (if we justify it at all) is by conceiving of it æsthetically, converting it into a picture ourselves, repeating thus in principle the act of its creator, experiencing anew his pain and his creative joy. ^g For we cannot give a rational justification to the world—it did not originate in reason and shows no rational order in its ceaseless play of change and destruction. As little can we give it a moral justification—life lives off life, immorality is an essential part of its constitution. But take it as an æsthetic phenomenon, look at it as a picture, and you may see some sense in it. Regard its creator not as a Supreme Reason or a Moral Governor, but as a supreme Artist, and you get some real insight into its make-up. For the world is a kind of play, a ceaseless producing and destroying like that of a child making and unmaking his piles of sand for the pleasure of the game, or that of an artist who creates and has ever to create anew. In some such way Heraclitus seems to have viewed the world. The Æon, the eternal child Zeus, was there at play, παὶς παὶζων. If, says Nietzsche, Heraclitus had been asked, why the fire did not remain fire, why it was now fire, now water, now earth, he could only have answered, "It is a play—don't take it too pathetically, and above all not morally!"^{[8] h}

 

II

Such was one current of Nietzsche's thinking. But there was another, perhaps at the start simply running alongside of it, but later becoming the main stream. This was in the direction of a renunciation of metaphysics altogether. The turning-point for Nietzsche was as to whether there was actually first-hand knowledge of the will. Schopenhauer had said that while in general we know things only as they appear, we know the will as it is (or at least as mediated through the mere forms of space and time)—know it immediately, by direct self-feeling. But Nietzsche becomes more and more dubious on this point. He asks whether it is not mere ideas, pictures (Vorstellungen), which we have here as everywhere else. He thinks that when we look closely within us, we realize that the life of our impulses, the play of our feelings, affects, acts of will, is known to us only through pictures which we form of them, not in their own nature.^[9] He hesitates when he comes to pain, but he concludes that here too we have only an image.^{[10] i} Hence we have direct knowledge of reality nowhere. Schopenhauer's "will," while it may be more elementary than other phenomena, is still phenomenal, "the most general phenomenal form of something that is otherwise entirely undecipherable."^[11]

Thus the basis for a metaphysical construction fails altogether, and Nietzsche really falls back into the purely negative attitude that is the outcome of Kant's criticism, from which Schopenhauer had temporarily delivered him. It is likely that some time was required for this anti-metaphysical attitude to establish itself definitively. He had read as a student at Leipzig Lange's History of Materialism—read it twice over, and thoroughly absorbed its leading ideas. One of the characteristic points of view of this remarkable book is that, granting that man cannot know ultimate reality, he may lawfully exercise his imagination upon it in order to satisfy the needs of his heart (Gemüth)—may poetize about it. We find Nietzsche sometimes speaking of philosophy, accordingly, as art rather than knowledge, as kindred to poetry and religion. The essentially Schopenhauerian metaphysics, which has just been described, may have been held by him as poetry in this way, after he had ceased to believe in it literally—as philosophers sometimes do now with the religious beliefs of their youth. There is a fragment belonging to this time, entitled "Critique of the Schopenhauerian philosophy," in which, after asserting that Schopenhauer as little as his predecessors had reached the final reality of things, he says that his system has the value of a poetic intuition rather than of a logical argumentation.^j Indeed, it is possible to hold that Nietzsche never took the Schopenhauerian metaphysics literally, and that his special variety of it, Artisten-Metaphysik, was but a poetic play. The question is one of literary interpretation. The probability seems to me to be that he cherished the belief originally and then felt obliged to modify it, and at last to give it up altogether.^k In the succeeding period of his life we do not hear of it even as poetry.

 

III

In turning away from metaphysics proper, Nietzsche developes interesting, if not absolutely novel, views of the sensible world itself.^[12] They look in the direction of an extreme phenomenalism—one might almost call them, in contrast with our common-sense realistic views, illusionism.

What is the relation of a sensation, say a color sensation, to the object that calls it forth? Nietzsche occupies himself much with the question. He does not doubt that there is an object, i.e., something or other which exists independently of ourselves—his question is simply, does the sensation reveal it, present it as it is? His reasoning is somewhat as follows: Mediately, we have a certain stimulation of the nerve-centers;^[13] when this has taken place, somehow the sensation, color, arises. No one supposes that the color has any special resemblance to the brain-tremors that occasion it—what reason, then, is there for supposing that it resembles the still more remote inciting cause?^l We give the sensation a name, i.e., we describe it to ourselves or to one another by a certain sound, but what resemblance has a sound to an actual color? The two things belong to disparate spheres—all we can say is that the sound is a sign, symbol, or metaphor for the color. But if this is so, why may not the color itself be a sign, symbol, or metaphor for the ultimate object rather than anything else—these two things also belonging to disparate sphere? ^m Sometimes we imagine that we come nearer objective truth, when instead of mere sensations of things we form concepts of them—we think that we thus leave aside their secondary and accidental features and reach their real essence. But what is a concept? It is something we form when, taking a number of comparatively like experience—sensible or sensational experiences in this case—we fasten our attention on their points of resemblance, leave out of account their differences, and make the resemblances stand out as a quasi-whole by themselves; this then we say they all share in alike, this is their essential idea and the essential being of each particular one. But is this being or idea anything that goes back of the experiences and explains them? Is it not itself something sensational in nature, though the sensations are now pictured, thought, rather than immediately felt?—is it more than an attenuated schema of them? Yet if this is so, how do concepts bring us in the slightest degree nearer the objective reality of which we are in search? So far as they are related to it, is it not a poorer, more beggarly relation than the individual sensible experience itself, since they are constituted just by leaving all that made the experience individual and distinct out of account?

What then does our so-called knowing amount to? To speak of literal correctness, as of a picture to its original, is out of the question. "First a nervous stimulus turned into an image [e.g., a color]. Metaphor number one. Then the image transformed into a sound. Metaphor number two. And each time, a complete leaping from one sphere into an entirely different one." "We think that we know something about things, when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers, and in truth we have nothing but metaphors which have no correspondence whatever to the original realities." As for a concept, it is little better than a "residuum" of a metaphor—it is more a skeleton or a ghost, than a real thing; once Nietzsche describes it as the "burial place" of the living experience. Of course, the various concepts in which the varied experiences of men are summed up, may be put in order, and they may make an imposing array, but it is the array of a "Roman columbarium." [One thinks involuntarily, or, shall I say? maliciously, of a Logic like Hegel's.ⁿ]

In other words, and speaking perhaps with offensive plainness, our "knowledge" is illusion, falsehood. We stand in an essentially æsthetic relation rather than any other to reality—we are primarily poets, builders, creators. Nietzsche sometimes uses the word "falsehood" (Lüge), sometimes "play" (Spiel)—the thought in both experiences is the same.^[14] Our "truth" is a "mobile throng of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a lot of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically heightened, translated, adorned, and after long use seem to a people fixed, canonical, and binding: truths are illusions, the origin and nature of which have been forgotten, metaphors that have no longer the moving effect of metaphors, coins that have lost their image and superscription and now are looked upon as metal, no more as coin." Concepts have, if not their mother, then their grandmother, in these illusory images. Even "being," which Nietzsche thinks originally meant "breathing," comes from a metaphor.^[15] We do not even know the real nature of our own bodies, nature "has thrown the key away"—we only play or fumble on the surface of things here as everywhere else.

 

IV

What then is the human intellect for, if truth is beyond its power? Nietzsche's answer in brief is that it is to give us practical guidance in life. It is a useful tool to this end; it did not arise to serve theoretic purposes. It observes how things affect us, noting particularly whether they harm or help us, and draws up from this very personal angle of vision a picture or scheme of things, by the help of which we can thread our way through life's mazes a little more assuredly—conceptualizing and logicizing the material, so that we may handle it more easily. There would be nothing to say against this pictured, logicized world, did we not proceed to take it for what it is not. We think that it is something independent of us, something that would be here in all its particulars just the same whether we were here or not. Color, sound, sweet and sour, hard and soft, heavy and light, we think that we simply find,—that we have no hand in constituting them. I have known people to grow angry when it was suggested that a sound they hear is not something altogether apart from them—so instinctive has the view become. That is, we believe what is not true, we are deceived. It is not deception that is practised upon us—we deceive ourselves; ultimately it is the intellect that is the deceiving party. It does its work so thoroughly that we are not aware, unless we critically examine ourselves, that there is any deception in the matter.

What conclusion is to be drawn? Is the deception therefore to be rejected? By no means. The intellect has worked in the interests of life. It is easier for men to live, when they project their experience outside themselves; they feel that they have thereby something to steady themselves by and to lean upon. Indeed, a tendency to deception exists more or less in life in general. We have all heard of the various protective devices of the lower forms of life; sometimes they are the finest forms of defense, and quite take the place of weapons like horns or poisonous fangs. But the most perfect kind of deception would be that practised by a being on itself,—the real nature of the process being either unrealized, or if realized, soon obscured to the mind. This is the deception which man practises on himself in relation to the sensible and conceptual world. It is all in the interests of life—most men could hardly live without it; and it has as much right to be as truth—indeed more right to be, in the particular circumstances envisaged. Illusion, deception, as part of the life-process and legitimate—such is Nietzsche's point of view at the present time: argument to this effect makes the substance of the pregnant fragment, "On Truth and Falsehood in the Extra-moral [i.e., theoretic] Sense." ^o

Indeed he has now such a sense of the function of illusion in the world, that he defends it in connections where many of us would feel the sole imperative of truth. For example, in discussing the use and harm of history for life, he questions the benefit for men in general of pushing historical study to its last extremes. If reality is made to stand out in all its nakedness, if illusions are totally banished, reverence and the power of joyful activity suffer. He has in mind particularly the study of religious origins. He speaks of the dissolving influence of the new historical theology—here is perhaps a subsidiary reason for the attack on Strauss. A religion that is turned into a piece of historical knowledge simply is, he thinks, at the end of its way. A loving constructive spirit should go along with all destruction. He is even critical toward modern science in the same spirit. The doctrines of change as a sovereign law, of the fluidity of all types and species, of the absence of all cardinal distinction between man and animal, he calls "true, but deadly"; and he thinks that life ruled by science may possibly be far less life and far less assured of the future, than life controlled by instincts and powerful illusions. If it came to the worst, if a choice had to be made between knowledge at the expense of life and life at the expense of knowledge, he would not hesitate to give life the higher place—a knowledge that worked destructively on life would indeed in the end destroy itself.^[16]

The foregoing considerations relate to truth in the theoretic sense. Truth in the moral sense is a different matter. Its origin is utility. Men live in society—have to, to live at all. They must then understand one another; to this extent at least they must put an end to the bellum omnium contra omnes. That is, they must use words in the same senses. When one person says "green" or "loud" or "cow" or "horse," he must mean what others mean by the same words. To speak "truly" is to agree with others, to conform to the general conventions. Language gave the first laws of truth; here the contrast between truth and falsehood first arose. But the conventions of speech have little or nothing to do with truth in the sense first mentioned—they had their origin in other than theoretic considerations. Speaking "truly" to one's fellow-man involves nothing as to giving a true, i.e., faithfully objective, report of things. German speech attributes a male gender to the tree and a female gender to the plant—how unwarrantable to draw theoretic conclusions therefrom! In fact truth in the moral (social) sense is entirely compatible with falsehood in the other sense; it means nothing more than that one faithfully uses the customary metaphors, i.e. (speaking now in more ultimate terms), that one falsifies as the flock does in a way recognized as binding upon all.

Yes, the needs of the flock not only cover up theoretic falsehood of the sort described, but they breed, or have bred, illusions on their own account. I have just used the phrase "binding upon all." But anything "binding" naturally brings along with it the idea that those who are bound can heed the obligation, that it is in their power to comply with it, whether they actually do or not—and this idea, when further developed and connected with obedience to the standards of the flock in general, becomes the notion of free-will and responsibility, which plays so large a part in the spiritual economy of early communities. Free-will is an illusory notion to Nietzsche, and indeed to most thinkers of the first rank in recent times (William James being a rare and brilliant exception), yet society for its successful working had to proceed as if it were true. On the basis of it praise and blame, reward and punishment were distributed and men's characters shaped (to the extent they were shaped at all), men's own efforts for the better going on the assumption of its truth also. When Nietzsche speaks of morality as necessary falsehood (Nothlüge), and says that without the errors connected with it man would have remained on the animal level, he has this error particularly in mind.^[17]

The field of illusion is thus wide, and the question may be raised, What matters it? If men have ideas to live by, and perhaps grow better by, is that not enough? Well, perhaps it is enough for most of us—we have no impulses urging us to go further, and if we had them, should perhaps only perplex ourselves needlessly in yielding to them, since we have scarcely the leisure or the ability to push our inquiries to a finish. ^p But there are others who have imperious needs in this direction—they must ask questions, and irrespective of any assurance that they can live by the truth they find: in short, they have the philosophical impulse. Now, whether for his weal or woe, Nietzsche belonged to the latter class—and the only wonder is how he could have the impulse, consistently with his theory of the origin and purpose of the intellect which has just been referred to. There is the same difficulty for us in studying Schopenhauer, whose view here Nietzsche repeats (on which I have commented elsewhere).^[18] In almost every direction we find him seeking the true, irrespective of any advantage to be gained, save the satisfaction of the knowing impulse itself. Particularly does he wrestle—twist and turn—in trying to make out the truth as to the external world. We find him, for instance, considering the fact that a certain sensation or image always follows a certain stimulus, that this may hold of one generation after another, that it may be true of all mankind—it may seem conclusive proof that the image faithfully represents the object it stands for; and yet he is forced to ask whether a metaphor ceases to be a metaphor because it is indefinitely repeated, and whether, for all that men agree so widely in using it, it is the only possible metaphor in the circumstances. He considers also the argument from the omnipresence and unvarying character of the laws of nature, namely, that since everything in the world, no matter how great or how small, is fixed, certain, law-abiding, fantasy can have nothing to do with it, since if it had, the marks of its arbitrary hand would be somewhere discernible. He admits the plausibility of the argument, and yet suppose, he says, that we could experience variously, each of us having our own type of sensation, or suppose that we could perceive now as a bird does and now as a worm and now as a plant, or that where one responded to a stimulus with "red," another did with "blue" and still another with a sound, how then—where then would the uniformity and law-abidingness of nature be? ^q Would there not be a variety of worlds—and where would be the world? Is it a wonder that beings of one physiological type have one type of world, and does the present uniform common world prove more than that we human beings are of one type? Does it in the least prove that our responses to stimuli are the right responses, i.e., rightly represent the object? Indeed, what is the meaning of "right" (richtig) in such a connection?—since we have no originals with which to compare them. In going from object to subject, we pass, for all we know, from one sphere of being to another, and there is as little propriety in speaking of a right sensation or image, as of a right sound for a color—we cannot go beyond symbols, metaphors under such conditions. All sensations and images, no matter how varying or even contradictory they might be, may be right for the type that makes them, i.e., may serve its special life-needs, and none be right in any final sense. Moreover, the fixity and order of things in our world are a fixity and order in space and time, and Nietzsche holds now (after Kant and Schopenhauer) that these are not independent realities, but forms of our own minds—no wonder then that things appear more or less definitely here and there, now and then; how otherwise could they appear at all? Unquestionably there is a spatial and temporal order, but we ourselves bring the ideas to things that make the order possible.^[19]

 

V

The outcome of all this criticism is, so far as the question of ultimate truth goes, purely negative. At least, after becoming skeptical in regard to Schopenhauer's view that we have a real, first-hand knowledge of ourselves as will, Nietzsche is unable to advance any positive idea of reality at all. All that we are accustomed to call by this name is appearance, illusion. And yet a tentative speculation he does venture upon. It is a kind of panpsychism. We know indeed only our own sensations and thoughts and feelings—but what if the whole world is of this nature? May not the things outside us [Nietzsche never doubts that there are such things—he is never solipsist or thoroughgoing idealist] be themselves in some sense "centers of sensation"? Even so they might affect one another (each being conceived as a spring of energy). They might get habits by acting and reacting (ultimately from motives of pleasure and pain). They might even be called will. Causality is perhaps an idea formed from the action of the will, particularly as it reacts to stimuli. Space and time in turn hang on causality. And so might arise in general the sort of world we know.^[20] It is entirely a speculation—and confused and fragmentary at that; but perhaps it. should be mentioned in qualification of the sweeping negative language which I have just used. In some ways it is similar to a view which we shall find developed at length in the latter part of his life.

1. As we shall see, he returns to a modified form of metaphysics in his last period.
2. "David Strauss etc.," sect. 6.
3. "Schopenhauer etc.," sect. 3.
4. Ibid., sect. 3.
5. Cf. The Birth of Tragedy, sects. 4, 5; Werke, IX, 153; also a later reference to the early view in Zarathustra, I, iii.
6. Schopenhauer's Werke (Frauenstädt ed.), III, 425.
7. "Attempt at Self-Criticism," § 5, prefixed to later editions of The Birth of Tragedy.
8. "Philosophy in the Tragic Period of the Greeks," sect. 7. Cf. a later reference, Will to Power, § 797.
9. Werke, IX, 214; cf. XII, 25, § 43.
10. Ibid., IX, 189, § 129; cf. p. 197.
11. Ibid., IX, 214. Cf. ibid., IX, 108, § 65; 204, § 147; 194, § 137 ("the whole world is phenomenon, through and through, atom on atom, without interval").
12. Some of them appear in the fragment, "On Truth and Falsehood in the Extra-moral Sense" (Werke, X, 189-207); statements in the text are based on this, when not credited to other sources.
13. Nietzsche here uses the customary physiological datum—as to the qualifications needed from a more ultimate point of view, see note b to this chapter (at the end of the book).
14. R. M. Meyer remarks that Nietzsche's use of the word Lüge recalls one of Herder's "genialsten" writings, "Ueber die dem Menschen angeborene Lüge."
15. "Philosophy in the Tragic Period etc.," sect. 11.
16. "The Use and Harm of History for Life," sects. 7, 9, 10.
17. The view is more distinctly stated in the writings of the second period (cf. Human, All-too-Human, § 40; The Wanderer and his Shadow, § 12), but it was of earlier formation (cf. Werke, IX, 188, § 129).
18. Article on "Schopenhauer's Contact with Pragmatism," in the Philosophical Review, March, 1910 (see pp. 140-4).
19. This paragraph, too, bases itself on the fragment, "On Truth and Falsehood in the Extra-moral Sense."
20. Werke, X, 150-4.