<i>Why Didn’t Nietzsche Get His Act Together?</i>

Although Elijah Millgram identifies analytic philosophers as his “tribe,” he doesn’t have much use for the analytically competent work that has sparked the widely recognized improvement of Nietzsche scholarship over the last several decades. Such work, he complains, tends not to recognize that Nietzsche “writes funny” (2). It reads him “straight,” reconstructing his books on the “deeply misguided” assumption that he actually had views or beliefs. Actually, almost all important Nietzsche scholars of recent vintage recognize that Nietzsche doesn’t write like the typical philosopher, giving straightforward arguments for clearly marked positions. And they usually offer an explanation. Millgram’s explanation is certainly new: Nietzsche doesn’t write in the standard way because he couldn’t, for the same reason that he couldn’t get his act together. He is a decadent, a disunified agent “coming apart at the seams,” whose apparent beliefs do not count as such because they are not the expressions of an integrated person. Yet what emerged from his disintegration was the brilliant way of writing philosophy exhibited in his later books. The way to read them, Millgram claims, extending Alexander Nehamas’s reading of Beyond Good and Evil (hereafter BGE), is to ask “who their authors are” (39). He finds a different author for each book, a different voice or perspective, each exhibiting a different side of the agent that Nietzsche could not pull together: the genealogist or intellectual in Genealogy (hereafter GM), the good European in BGE, the convalescent in The Gay Science (hereafter GS), the psychologist in Twilight of the Idols (hereafter TI), and so on. This sounds interesting, even exciting, and it might have been if Millgram had made much of a case for his way of reading Nietzsche.It is hardly news that Nietzsche did fall apart, collapsing in early 1890 and spending the last ten years of his life insane. It would not be surprising if books finished shortly before his collapse showed signs of the impending disaster. And they do, it seems to us. The works of 1888, including TI, present their ideas more straightforwardly and even crudely compared to BGE (1886) and GM (1887), which exhibit a tremendous power to organize complex ideas in artistic and subtle ways. And it’s possible that we may find in the 1888 books what Millgram calls “blurts,” words that are not under Nietzsche’s control but are simply blurted out. The question is whether these are unfortunate effects of Nietzsche’s degeneration, as we are inclined to think, or essential aspects of the philosophy he was doing in his later books, as Millgram claims. The evidence he presents for his view is that the same kind of blurts are found in GM and BGE. This is the crucial claim on which the plausibility of his whole interpretation rests.Millgram takes three elements from BGE—its theory of the soul as a collection of drives that may or may not be united into a fully integrated agent, its claim that Europeans are not fully integrated, and the occurrence of extended blurts in the text—from which he infers that BGE is presenting its author, “the good European,” as “a field of unregimented, quasi-independent drives successively seizing control of him for the duration of one or another ranting diatribe.” These rants express “misogynistic, antisemitic, and nationalistic excesses” that the good European goes on to disavow “on the elaborately theorized grounds that this personality was unable to anchor the full-fledged attribution of opinions, choices, and attitudes generally” (256–57). This is nonsense. First, the so-called diatribes do not read like rants. With the exception of the remarks on women, there is no vitriol in them, and they seem very much under Nietzsche’s control. But it does take some work to read them. The nationalistic “diatribe” begins with an over-the-top ode to Wagner’s overture to Meistersinger, but then changes tone, saying of Wagner’s overture, “no beauty, nothing of the south or of the southerly brightness of sky, nothing of gracefulness, no dance, hardly any will to logic” (Nietzsche [1886] 2003: 240). For anyone who knows Nietzsche’s views on music, this is clearly in Nietzsche’s own voice. It tells us what he wants from music and what Wagner’s music lacks. Contrary to Millgram’s reading, Nietzsche is referring not to this statement when he goes on to say “I have just given an example” of the “hearty fatherlandishness” that good Europeans may sometimes “permit themselves” for short periods, but only to the ode. Second, Nietzsche ([1886] 2003: 241) explicitly presents the ode’s nationalism as a “lapse into old loves and narrowness” and identifies overcoming “such atavistic attacks” as a “return to reason, that is to say, to good Europeanism.” So good Europeans may permit themselves patriotic feelings for a short period of time (think of cheering for one’s country at the Olympic Games), but only the overcoming of such narrow and outmoded feelings makes them good Europeans. Third, issues regarding unity and attributability (Millgram’s obsession, not Nietzsche’s) have nothing to do with Nietzsche’s disavowal of fatherlandishness. Rather, he is showing us what must be overcome to be a good European. In a good European patriotism is not an “unregimented” drive but rather a feeling that is “permitted” occasionally but has been put in its place. And it is perhaps a necessary feeling. If you don’t love your country, how are you going to learn to love less narrow communities?The so-called anti-Semitic tirade is even harder to read because instead of offering its perspectives consecutively, it goes back and forth between the one Nietzsche disavows and his own, making it impossible to discern which is which without carefully examining the content. Millgram doesn’t bother, finding the content “uninteresting” and “almost” what “you could have heard in pretty much any pub in Germany or Austro-Hungary” at the time. This is almost dishonest. Only in a footnote does Millgram explain the “almost,” acknowledging the suggestion at the end of Nietzsche “diatribe” that “it would perhaps be a good idea to eject the antisemitic ranters from the country” (251). That should certainly have led him to examine the content carefully to sort out the perspectives and see if it is really either anti-Semitic or a diatribe.BGE’s alleged misogynistic remarks are the only ones that even sound like a rant. One of us has written about this issue, arguing that these remarks are directed against “woman,” the social construction of womanhood (which a passage in GS [Nietzsche [1882/1887] 1974: 68] blames on men), and not against individual women who may not exemplify it (Clark 1994, 2015). Millgram lauds Clark’s article and accepts its view that the way Nietzsche frames his remarks suggest that they do not represent his beliefs about women but only his sentiments (302). But he disagrees with Clark’s view that Nietzsche is showing us how he overcame misogynist beliefs, even if some of the corresponding sentiments may remain. However, he does not acknowledge Clark’s argument (which is based on the wider framing of the relevant remarks, their presence in a chapter titled “Our Virtues,” and that chapter’s contents), much less provide any reason against it. He merely reiterates his account of Nietzsche’s alleged nationalistic and anti-Semitic rants. This might have some force if he had made plausible his account of these “rants,” but we have shown that he does not. In fact it is striking how unlike these “rants” his misogynistic comments are in tone and how difficult it is to see that Nietzsche’s own perspective differs from the one he disavows. It is as if Nietzsche is letting us know that he is still dealing with these feelings, unlike the nationalism and anti-Semitism he is way beyond.There is still hope for Millgram’s interpretation in his account of the author of GM as “prone to emotional outbursts that induced sudden swerves in his train of thought, and which made him unable to remain consistent over even short stretches of text” (256). That account provides the most detailed textual support for Millgram’s overall interpretation, and he appeals to it repeatedly to bolster weak interpretations of other books and to brush off any suggestion that Nietzsche’s “blurts” might be merely unfortunate effects of his impending collapse. If this account is plausible, we might grant that he needs weaker evidence for his account of the BGE “diatribes.” But it is not. Millgram’s claim is that Nietzsche obviously contradicts himself in GM; he is “standing up, waving a large, brightly colored flag, and practically shouting to the skies, ‘I am contradicting myself’” (17). The contradiction is supposed to be this: Nietzsche criticizes a theory on the grounds that forgetting is a lot harder than the theory supposes. Later, however, he claims that forgetting is the normal state for humans, so that severe punishment was required to “create a memory” in them. He even argues that forgetting is so easy that those who invented hell forgot that they invented it! And then “he rubs it in by later referring back to the discussion of his predecessors: ‘To say it again—or haven’t I said it yet? [i.e., I’ve already forgotten]—they are worthless’ (5:297/GM 2.4). And why worthless? Because they’ve forgotten the history of morality” (16). This is a terrible reading of the text.Nietzsche’s initial point about the difficulty of forgetting is directed against the “English psychologists,” those whose philosophical psychology is rooted in British empiricism. He sees them as trying to explain how human beings came to the idea that human qualities can be good in themselves, as opposed to simply useful or good for oneself. Kant’s account of the good will and the categorical imperative provides an answer, but he is no English psychologist; he is not attempting to fit morality into naturalistic picture of the world. Hume is trying to do so and therefore has a different answer, roughly that empathy moves us from an egoistic to a common perspective. Nietzsche does not accept either answer, but does not offer his objections when considering the answer of his naturalistic predecessors. This is because, apparently unbeknownst to Millgram, the predecessor he is most interested in is his own earlier self. He is criticizing and correcting his own theory from nine years earlier: that “one begins by calling actions good or bad … solely on account of their useful or harmful consequences” for oneself or those one cares about. “Soon, however, one forgets the origins of these designations and believes that the quality ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is inherent in the objects themselves” ([1878] 1996: 39). He criticizes his earlier view on multiple grounds, including the “psychological absurdity” of supposing that people come to consider a quality or resulting action good in itself (a virtue or virtuous action) simply by forgetting that they value it because of its usefulness to them, a “usefulness [that] has been the everyday experience in all ages, something therefore that was continually underscored anew; accordingly … could not help but impress itself upon consciousness with ever greater clarity” ([1887] 1998: I: 3). It is like explaining people’s pursuit of money as if it were good in itself by saying that they simply forget that they value it for what it can buy.Nietzsche’s criticism of his earlier and simplistic account in no way commits him to holding that forgetting is in general or always hard. It therefore in no way contradicts the claim that humans are naturally forgetful, by which he means that many of our mental processes are kept out of consciousness and that this is required for health. Nietzsche alleges forgetfulness made punishment necessary in order to keep five or six “I will nots” in consciousness. The problem was never that humans forgot what it was in their own interest to remember (and that may not even have required consciousness) but that they had a hard time remembering—or caring about—what was in the community interest. That’s why it was necessary to create a memory in them. Millgram rightly points out, as if it is a problem, that this “creation of a memory” presupposes the existence of memory. If you are not already able to remember the pain it causes, punishment can’t teach you to remember anything. But Nietzsche is talking about a specific kind of memory here, what he calls “a memory of the will,” a memory of promises one has made. That one must already have the kind of memory animals have in order to develop a memory of commitments in no way contradicts GM’s original claim regarding the psychological absurdity of arriving at the idea of something being good in itself by forgetting that one calls things “good” to indicate that they serve one’s own interests.Consider now Millgram’s claim that Nietzsche uses the ease of forgetting to make it seem plausible that slaves invented the idea of hell to get revenge against the nobles who were oppressing them. “But if the slaves have invented their revenge,” Millgram objects, “why don’t they know it’s imaginary? And if they do, how can they find it satisfying? The account only makes sense if the slaves have forgotten.” But Nietzsche never says that the slaves invent hell for the purpose of getting revenge against the masters. Millgram seems to picture the slaves sitting around wondering how to get revenge on the nobles until someone says, “I know, why don’t we invent the idea of hell and its everlasting torments?” To the extent that Nietzsche thinks the slave invented the idea of hell, the point is that their ressentiment against the nobles attracted them to believing in a place after death, the idea of which had been in place for some time and which was developed into a place of punishment by resentful priests. There is no reason to take Nietzsche to hold that the priests, much less the slaves, were ever aware of why they believed in hell, and so no reason to think they forgot. So none of this shows anything like an obvious contradiction. Perhaps Millgram’s best argument for his claim about Nietzsche’s forgetfulness concerns Nietzsche’s evidently throwaway line: “to say it again, or haven’t I said it yet?” Millgram may be right that Nietzsche is indicating that he is being forgetful, but that is completely consistent with his theory. Further, he may be alerting us to a distinction between forgetting what you said and forgetting what you think. Nietzsche knows what he thought, but wonders if he said it. Is that really the sign of a personality falling apart, or a prompt to figure out the different kinds of forgetting Nietzsche is talking about?Millgram has one final card, which is his attack on the Principle of Charity (POC). He would undoubtedly charge that our “smoothing out” of the contradictions in GM is made possible only by our acceptance of the POC, which “requires you not to impute contradictions to a text whenever that is at all avoidable” (24). Although “philosophers are trained to apply and invoke the Principle,” Millgram claims that they don’t know why; “if you ask almost any professional philosopher for a justification, you’ll get reiterated insistence, but not an argument.” And so he chastises his analytic colleagues: “We shouldn’t apply the methods we were taught in graduate school merely by reflex.” When Millgram courageously breaks from his tribe to ask, “Why be charitable?” he discovers that charity was “originally … warranted by a feature of the text [the Bible] that made it appropriate, namely, its divine authorship.” Likewise, his reading of Nietzsche’s texts is warranted by a feature of these texts, that they are constructed “to exhibit the tendency of a personality type to inconsistency.” But since such texts “should be expected to exhibit inconsistencies,” this makes objecting to an interpretation on the basis of Charity “a mistake.” In the case of Nietzsche’s texts, “bracketing the Principle is no more than respect for the text in front of us” (25). We are of course applying a modified version of the POC in our interpretation of GM. As with any interpretation, one must aim to make the most sense of what the author is claiming, and that cannot be done if one leaves simply leaves apparent contradictions in place without considering how they might be resolved. Millgram’s own interpretation of GM is based on the same modified version of the POC that we apply, in its implication that it makes no sense for Nietzsche to say the things he does unless he is trying to show us that he is contradicting himself. Are we supposed to simply take his word for this, or are we allowed to consider whether it actually makes the most sense of what Nietzsche says in GM? We have argued that it doesn’t even come close.We end on a note of agreement with Millgram’s evaluation of Nietzsche as “an impressive figure, a deep and powerful philosopher, and someone that you have to take completely seriously, even when you’re not about to sign onto one or another view or program. You owe it to yourself, as a philosopher, to think his ideas through, and more often than not, my own experience has it, doing so will change your mind about something you had thought was a settled matter” (263). We just wish his book had provided much evidence for this evaluation.