anderson - nietzsche on truth, illusion, and redemption

Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption

R. Lanier Anderson

Truth is the first and most basic part of virtue. It must be loved for itsown sake.

Montaigne, On Presumption

But the depressive and self-wounding ego. . . rebuts: . . . ‘illusion of thesenses and of the mind holds us prisoner always’.

Calvino, Mr. Palomar

As Bernard Williams lately observed (2002: 1–19), the reception of Nietzsche’sthought has prompted sharp controversy about truth. Some readers highlightNietzsche’s widespread and provocative remarks dismissing the value or eventhe possibility of truth and science. Against these ‘deniers’, Williams identifies a‘party of common sense’ (2002: 5–7), whose adherents stress the ubiquity ofordinary truths in our practical and scientific projects. As they note, Nietzschehimself adduces such truths in his withering attacks against traditionalmetaphysical and religious pieties, and even the debunking claims of the verydeniers are motivated by a spirit of critique—a devotion to truthfulnessexempting nothing from the purview of its suspicion. The puzzle about thiscontroversy is that both ‘deniers’ and ‘common-sensers’ have gotten importantthings right about Nietzsche. This paper aims to explain how that could be. I offera reading of Nietzsche on truth and illusion which saves the insights on bothsides, reconciles the tensions among the texts, and accounts for the importance ofboth truth and illusion in his thought overall.

It is worth noting, first, the broad array of positions available to either side.Quite different theses may be denied or affirmed about truth. ‘Deniers’ haveranged from Hans Vaihinger (1905, 1986 [1927]), who took Nietzsche as aforerunner of his own fictionalist strategy for saving science and other practices,to an essentially skeptical ‘post-modernist’ reception that tends to dismiss sciencein favor of art, in which ‘precisely the lie sanctifies itself’ (GM III, 25).1 On the‘pro-truth’ side, as well, a wide variety of readers have found Nietzsche ofsubstantial aid, whether through frankly metaphysical system-building (Hei-degger 1979 [1961], Richardson 1996), or in the service of more empiricist-mindedphilosophical programs (Kaufmann 1974 [1950], Schacht 1983). Perhaps thestaunchest recent defenders of Nietzsche’s commitment to truth have beenMaudemarie Clark (1990, 1997) and Brian Leiter (2002), who seek to acquitNietzsche entirely of any global ‘falsification thesis’ (Clark 1990: 1–4, 95). Onphilosophical grounds, they claim that he could not coherently maintain theview: it would be at odds with his many specific truth claims, and it seems self-

European Journal of Philosophy 13:2 ISSN 0966-8373 pp. 185–225 r Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005. 9600 Garsington Road,Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

refuting. On textual grounds, Clark (1990) deploys a developmental reading todisarm falsificationist texts.2 A good indication of the depth of the difficultieshere can be gleaned from Peter Poellner. His meticulous assessment of the textsexposes serious skeptical (Poellner 1995: 29–78) and anti-essentialist (Poellner1995: 79–111) lines of thought, which motivate radical-sounding falsificationclaims. At the same time, he shares the philosophical concerns of Clark and Leiter(Poellner 2001: 85n), and he stresses the many truth claims essential toNietzsche’s own views about moral psychology, the will to power, etc. Forhim, these different strands simply remain in irreconcilable tension,3 so his view,in effect, is that the conflicts raging in the recent secondary literature beganalready within the body of Nietzsche’s own beliefs!

The controversies show no signs of abating, and Poellner’s conscientioushandling of the texts reveals a clear reason why. There is simply too much textualevidence available to each side.4 Just as Clark and Leiter insist, Nietzsche doescommonly assert the truth of his views, and more, he appeals to that truth as thebasis for their superiority to the deceptions of traditional religion andmetaphysics. Still, post-modernist readers like Alan Schrift (1990) can just aseasily point to texts which dismiss all truth claims, or even ‘laugh at the way inwhich precisely the best science seeks most to keep us in this. . . suitably falsifiedworld’ (BGE 24). Nor is it plausible that Nietzsche was merely undecided orforgetful here: in too many cases, suggestions of falsification and claims to truthoccur together in the space of a single paragraph, or even one sentence.5

Clearly, then, the real exegetical burden we must face is to explain howNietzsche could have thought himself entitled to both kinds of claim at once. It isthat burden I aim to assume. Unlike Poellner, I believe it is possible to outline aconsistent and genuinely Nietzschean position on truth and falsification. Section1 brings together ideas I developed in earlier work to provide a specific andtenable sense to Nietzsche’s falsification claims. It avoids self-referential paradoxby making room for another sense of ‘true’ and ‘false’ (separate from the oneinvolved in the falsification claim), thereby affording Nietzsche the resources todefend his substantive views on epistemic grounds.6 If such a reading is correct,then Nietzsche’s denials of the existence of truth (in one sense) are compatiblewith his claims to truth (in another).

But a further question remains. In many key passages contributing to ourtextual dilemma, Nietzsche’s direct concern is not the existence or possibility oftruth and knowledge, but their value.7 Therefore, an adequate interpretation mustnot only outline a background view that reconciles positive truth claims withsome global falsification thesis (sec 1.A.). It must also show how Nietzsche canplace such value on science and knowledge, and simultaneously praise illusion,or mere appearance (sec. 1.B.). That is, a satisfactory reading must explain howNietzsche thought these two apparently conflicting values could functiontogether, and why both were so important to him that he was willing to courtmisunderstanding by praising each in a way that seems to exclude the other.

As it turns out, a proper understanding of truth and illusion in Nietzsche cutsto the core of his philosophy, because their value is essential to his conception of a

186 R. Lanier Anderson

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good life. In section 2, I sketch the role of Nietzsche’s thought of eternalrecurrence in articulating that conception of the good. I then argue that, rightlyunderstood, affirming the eternal recurrence of one’s life requires both a corecommitment to truth and a far reaching willingness to create and endorseillusions. Only with both commitments in place can a person hope to attainredemption in Nietzsche’s sense—which redemption alone, he thinks, can make itpossible for us to lead satisfactory lives as measured by the thought of recurrence.

This conclusion indicates the broader importance of truth and illusion inNietzsche, but it only sharpens the problem of how they can be reconciled.Section 3 suggests the shape of Nietzsche’s solution, which treats the demands ofhonesty and artistry as regulative ideals. By connecting the resulting account ofartistry to Nietzsche’s claim that we sometimes need ‘saving illusions’, I suggestthe proper place of ‘fictionalism’ and the ‘creation of values’ within hisphilosophy. The result also clarifies the real differences between the type ofredemption Nietzsche sought to provide through the thought of recurrence, and(what he takes to be) the false redemption offered by Christianity.

1. Truth and Illusion in Nietzsche: Posing the Textual Dilemma

Before turning to Nietzsche’s ideas about recurrence and redemption, it isimportant to get the textual dilemma about truth and illusion firmly in view. Ihave already noted two key axes of the puzzle. First, Nietzsche apparentlyvacillates between the denial of truth and its affirmation. In addition, Nietzsche’sremarks—both denials and affirmations—are divided between those that speakto truth’s existence or possibility, and those that worry instead about its value.

A. On the Possibility of Truth

The tension in the texts is most obvious when we consider the existence orpossibility of truth. On the ‘pro-truth’ side, Nietzsche routinely takes particulartheses as true, or condemns others as false.8 It is not convincing to treat suchclaims as mere rhetoric designed to convey what are officially non-cognitivepreferences on Nietzsche’s part, because he supplements his particular truthclaims with sweeping general pronouncements on the existence of truths—as inhis praise for psychologists who ‘sacrifice all desirability to truth, every truth,even plain, harsh, ugly, repellent, unchristian, immoral truth—For there are suchtruths.—’ (GM I, 1). Of even more consequence is the critical thought behind thelast passage, which may be the single most characteristic stance of Nietzsche’sintellectual conscience. The attitude is best expressed by his rejection of thebiblical ‘proof of strength [Beweis der Kraft]’ (see GS 347, WP 17, 452). Accordingto that idea, it would count as evidence of a doctrine’s truth that it bringscontentment, blessedness, or peace of soul to the one who believes it. Nietzschecounters with a blunt antithesis: ‘Nobody is very likely to consider a doctrine truemerely because it makes people happy or virtuous. . . Happiness and virtue areno arguments’ (BGE 39). Or, in a still stronger key,

Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption 187


We ‘knowers’ have gradually come to mistrust all kinds of believers. . . .We, too, do not deny that faith ‘makes blessed’: precisely for that reason wedeny that faith proves anything—a strong faith that makes blessed raisessuspicion against what is believed; it does not establish ‘truth’, itestablishes a certain probability—of deception. [GM III, 24]

The practice of adopting beliefs because they make you happy or blessed is aworthy target of suspicion precisely because such ‘motivated’ or ‘interested’believing aims at blessedness rather than truth—and potentially, or even typically,at the expense of truth. As the many related texts show, Nietzsche here relies onthe traditional assumption that cognitive judgment ought to aim at truth, evenwhere the truth violates our ‘heart’s desire’ (see BGE 229).9

At the same time, though, Nietzsche often provides comfort to ‘truth deniers’ byasserting that our cognitive representations are subject to some ‘great, thorough-going. . . falsification’ (GS 354), or even a whole ‘system of fundamental falsification’(WP 584). He is attracted to the idea throughout his writings,10 and recent efforts todisarm such texts, however heroic, remain unsuccessful. For example, inaugurat-ing his mature period in The Gay Science, Nietzsche speaks of ‘the insight intogeneral untruth and mendaciousness that is now given to us through science—theinsight into delusion and error as a condition of cognitive and sensible existence’(GS 107), and he claims, citing basic ideas of his epistemology, that the ‘essence ofphenomenalism and perspectivism as I understand them’ entails that ‘allbecoming conscious is bound up with a great, thoroughgoing corruption,falsification, superficialization, and generalization’ (GS 354). Leiter (2002: 17–18n)notes that such passages simultaneously advance specific truth claims—forinstance, claims about consciousness in GS 354, or about the scientific results thatidentify error as a condition of cognitive and sensory life in GS 107—but so farfrom removing evidence of a falsification thesis, this observation just sharpens thecentral interpretive problem. That problem, again, is how to reconcile suchapparent truth claims with the idea—equally well attested in the texts—that theremust be some ‘deceptive principle in ‘‘the essence of things’’ ’, since ‘theerroneousness of the world in which we believe we live is the surest and firmestthing we can lay our eyes on’ (BGE 34). It will not do to insist that error is supposedto be limited to the excesses of metaphysics, morality, or other suspect branches ofthought, for Nietzsche is also willing to claim that ‘precisely the best science seeksmost to keep us in this simplified, through and through artificial, suitablycomposed, suitably falsified world’ (BGE 24; first ital. mine).

The underlying motivation for these claims about systematic falsification iswhat I will call a ‘subtraction argument’, which is derived from Nietzsche’sperspectivism. On this view, cognition always depends on some particularperspective, so that the ideal of some direct cognitive grasp—or ‘ ‘‘interest-freeintuition’’ ’—that captures perspective-independent objects is incoherent: itwould demand ‘an eye that can by no means be thought, an eye that is supposedto have absolutely no direction, in which the active and interpreting forces,through which after all seeing first becomes seeing something, are supposed to be



cut off, or lacking’ (GM III, 12). Nietzsche’s rejection of ‘ ‘‘interest-free intuition’’ ’suggests that perspectives are ultimately rooted in values, drives, and affects;they represent the world in the service of our practical needs and interests (WP567). But the immediate mechanisms through which perspectives function are theconcepts we use to order our experience. These organizing representations carrycontent of their own by means of which they structure our experience, and theyadd that positive content to experience in a way that shapes our world-picture.11

The falsification argument then seems to be this: Strictly true representationwould have to capture the way the world is independently—it would representthe world after the subtraction of any perspectival content superadded incognition; But subtraction is impossible, since perspectives are a necessarycondition of cognitive representation (‘As if a world would still remain over afterone had subtracted the perspective!’ (WP 567)); Thus, cognitive representationsystematically falsifies (WP 584, GS 354).12

This emphasis on the falsifying effect of ‘added’ perspectival content iswidespread in Nietzsche’s notes.13 In the published works, too, Nietzsche writes(against the sober realist), ‘That mountain there! That cloud there! What, then, is‘‘real’’ in that? Subtract for once the phantasm and the whole human additionfrom it, you sober ones! Yes, if you can do that!. . . There is no ‘‘reality’’ for us—and not for you either, you sober ones’ (GS 57). Clearly, then, cognition issupposed to falsify because subjective perspectives have a positive influence onthe content of our representations which cannot be subtracted out.

Equally clearly, there are difficulties with Nietzsche’s picture. We can wellwonder to what our perspectives are supposed to be ‘added’, and why thatcontent has some special claim to represent truth, so that its transformation viaperspective counts as distortion. From this standpoint, the very claim thatperspective cannot be ‘subtracted out’ already raises worries about the inferenceto falsification. The influence of perspective was supposed to be ineliminable,recall, because it helps to constitute the very content we represent: it is onlythrough the ‘active and interpreting forces’ of a perspective that ‘seeing becomesseeing something’ (GM III, 12). The same idea motivated Nietzsche to reject thething in itself: ‘That things possess a constitution in themselves quite apart frominterpretation and subjectivity is a completely idle hypothesis: it would presupposethat interpretation and being subjective were not essential’ (WP 560). In light of thesepoints, some will insist (with Clark) that Nietzsche’s claims about ‘subtraction’and falsification must be confused, or at least overstated. If it makes no sense tospeak of things apart from our ‘human addition’, then the things our theoriespurport to describe can only be empirical objects as constituted via ourperspectives. Our representation of those objects should be perfectly accurate,because they are the very objects we experience—before any ‘subtraction’. As longas we do not posit a separate ‘true world’ of things in themselves behind theempirical world, there is no justification for stigmatizing our representations as‘merely apparent’, or otherwise defective.14

But despite rejecting the thing in itself and the ‘true world’ as early as The GayScience, Nietzsche nonetheless continues to the end to speak of some systematic



falsification through the basic concepts of reason and logic. Of course, his denialof any underlying ‘true world’ only sharpens our question about what it is thatour perspectival concepts are supposed to falsify. In my view, Nietzsche’s answerto these puzzles emerges in a telling 1887 note:

1. . . . The material of the senses organized by the understanding, reducedto rough outlines . . . Thus, the indistinctness and chaos of senseimpressions are as it were logicized;2. . . . the world of ‘phenomena’ is the organized world which we sense tobe real. The ‘reality’ lies in the . . . recurrence of like, familiar, relatedthings in their logicized character . . .3. . . . the antithesis of this phenomenal world is not ‘the true world’, butthe formless unformulable world of the chaos of sensations—thereforeanother kind of phenomenal world, a kind ‘unknowable’ for us; . . . [WP569]

The same note goes on to reject ‘things in themselves’ as well, because‘ ‘‘Thingness’’ is first created by us’ as part of our ‘logicizing’ activity (WP 569).That is, precisely because there are no things in themselves, Nietzsche concludesthat the only kinds of reality are phenomenal. Cognition is thus restricted to anapparent world, and in that sense falsifies our beliefs, but the falsification arisesnot because perspectives cut us off from independent things in themselves.Falsification is supposed to follow rather because cognition transforms the‘material of the senses’.15

Some careful reconstruction is needed to make solid philosophical sense out ofNietzsche’s suggestion. In particular, we need to know how ‘the chaos of senseimpressions’ is supposed to form ‘another world’ whose transformation amountsto falsification, and in what sense that world can be ‘phenomenal’. In my view,Nietzsche’s idea was to apply the subtraction argument to experience ‘fromwithin’. That is, Nietzsche does not begin his argument from the distinctionbetween an independent world and our representations of it, construed along thelines of our present-day realist conventional wisdom. Rather, he starts (in aloosely Kantian vein) from the content of cognitive experience itself, understood asthe joint product of ‘the material of the senses’ and the subject’s ‘logicizing’conceptual schemata. The question is whether such experience counts as true.Nietzsche answers in the negative because the logicizing schema transforms thesensory material, so that what we represent is a ‘phenomenal world’ whosecontent differs from what is given independently (the raw sensory ‘material’).16

The key point is this: on the present view, the underlying domain that gets‘falsified’ by perspectival transformation is not a world of independent objects,with a determinate ‘constitution in themselves’ (WP 560), but ‘another kind ofphenomenal world’ (WP 569), constituted by contents provided from the ‘chaos ofsensations’. Given that the argument has started from within experience, thesesensations are not to be understood in terms of their reference to some further,mind independent objects. They do carry content, which we organize in



representing the world we experience, and for all its ‘formless’ character, thatcontent clearly must present things in a certain way, so as to contribute somethingto our ‘logicized’ representations of the world. But such contentsare not taken to represent some further world of objects beyond the sensations; onthe contrary, they constitute the second ‘phenomenal world’. Since Nietzscheabstemiously swears off all talk of metaphysically more substantial ‘thingsreferred to’, he must be construing this world as merely intentional (or ‘in therepresentation’), in a way reminiscent of Ernst Mach’s treatment of the contentscarried by his sensory ‘elements’ of experience.17 Still, despite Nietzsche’s refusalto posit an independent world ‘in itself’, the raw material of sense still has a claimto present what is distinctively real in our experience because its contents areultimately responsible for the resistance to willing and thinking through which theworld can frustrate and surprise us, and which we rightly associate with thereality of things. At the same time, Nietzsche’s construal of the underlying sensoryworld as ‘phenomenal’ is justified by the thought that its denizens, qua sensations,present their content only from some point of view, and vary from one cognitiveagent to another.18 Note, finally, that the ultimate sensory contents are not availableto direct awareness. All cognition, even conscious sensory experience, alreadyinvolves the operation of a value-laden perspective, which alters the radicallyindependent, but ‘ ‘‘unknowable’’ ’ (WP 569), material of sense. Therefore,Nietzsche assigns the ultimate sensory content to unconscious sense impressions,modelled on Leibniz’s petites perceptions (GS 354, 357)—and that is whyconsciousness by itself is already supposed to have a falsifying effect (GS 354).19

We can now sum up. In order to give sense to a plausible falsification claim,what Nietzsche needs is a clean distinction between the way the world appears toa cognitive subject, and the content that appears. The subtraction argument couldthen warrant our treating the underlying content as ‘true’, in the sense of beingundistorted, or independent from the appearance-generating influence ofperspective. When Nietzsche runs the subtraction argument ‘from within’,however, he arrives at an unusual version of the appearance/reality distinction.Rather than distinguishing between representations and objects, or between two‘worlds’ of appearance and thing-in-itself, Nietzsche gets what he needs bycontrasting two kinds of representations: he separates the way things appear inconsciousness from the underlying content of unconscious petites perceptions. He canthereby justify talk of ‘appearance’, and even falsification, without positing aseparate ‘true world’ of objects. Cognition falsifies in that it captures a realm ofappearance, represented in conscious experience and ordered in accordance withour needs (WP 568), which differs from the content given independently.20

There is one final, and critical, point to notice. The subtraction argument forfalsification is strikingly similar to Nietzsche’s inference against the ‘proof ofstrength’—which we saw above as a frequent occasion for his positive appeals totruth. In that case, recall, Nietzsche insisted that the fact that some judgmentaccords with a believer’s needs is no reason for its truth. On the contrary, itprovides grounds for suspicion against it. The present application of thesubtraction argument makes a parallel point. The fact that our basic concepts (e.g.



ocause4,osubstance4,othing4, etc.) make experience tractable, and ‘orga-nize a world for ourselves in which our existence is made possible’ (WP 521), isnot evidence of their truth; on the contrary, it raises the suspicion that they aredeceptive (WP 513). That is, for the very reason that our perspectives are so usefulfor organizing and manipulating our experience, Nietzsche suggests that they arenot to be taken as true representations of how the world is, independently of ourneeds. Strikingly, then, Nietzsche’s claims about systematic falsification turn outto appeal to the same line of thought that generates many of his claims to truth!

B. On the Value of Truth

We are now in a position to face worries about the value of truth squarely. Fromthe present standpoint, it becomes clear why a genuinely scientific spirit whichsubordinates other commitments to a thoroughgoing ‘will to truth’ might tendtoward asceticism. A global falsification thesis would be troubling enough byitself, but we have also seen that cognitions are supposed to falsify preciselybecause they ‘organize a world for ourselves in which our existence is madepossible’ (WP 521). That is, an unfettered will to truth threatens to undermine thebelievability of the very representations that serve to make our existencebearable. It is therefore plain why:

The faith in science . . . cannot have originated from such a calculus ofutility, but rather despite the fact that the disutility and dangerousness of‘the will to truth’, of ‘truth at any price’ is proved to it continually. . . . Askyourself carefully, ‘Why do you not want to deceive?’, especially if itshould appear—and it does appear!—as if life aimed at appearance—Imean at error, deception, delusion, and self-delusion . . . . Charitablyinterpreted, such a resolve might be a quixotism, a small fantasticalconceit; but it might also be something worse, namely, a principle that ishostile to life and destructive.—‘Will to truth’—that might be a concealedwill to death. [GS 344]

Life itself aims at error and self-delusion, in that it uses cognitive representationnot to secure the truest beliefs, but to ‘organize a world for ourselves in which ourexistence is made possible’ (WP 521). So the attempt to deploy cognitiondifferently—to explode error and secure truth instead of arranging the worldconveniently—not only courts self-flagellation, but even risks degenerating intothe vain wish that things were radically otherwise with the world and ourcognitive faculties. That, ultimately, would be a wish that we ourselves wereotherwise—that we had different cognitive abilities, or at least were inhabitantsof a world better suited to our powers. In that case, the will to truth would bemerely another version of the ascetic’s ‘incarnate desire to be otherwise, to beelsewhere’ (GM III, 13).

It is important to be clear about what Nietzsche is, and is not, committed toregarding the pursuit of truth. The subtraction argument claims that cognitive



representations are false in a specific sense: they organize the given ‘material ofsense’ in a way that transforms and distorts the mind-independent part of thecontent of experience. But some kind of pursuit of truth can still make sense, forthe same picture affords a straightforward sense in which some perspectives maybe cognitively superior to others: they may be more adequate to the underlyingsensory contents, or organize them in a way that better satisfies distinctivelycognitive values like simplicity or explanatory power. Granted, for Nietzsche nounivocal empirically adequate theory can be expected, since he recognizes thepossibility of instability, or even inconsistency, among contents within theunderlying ‘chaos of sensations’.21 But all that just means that the account ofcognitive superiority must include a second part—a demand that we ‘make thevariety of perspectives and affective interpretations useful in the service ofknowledge’ (GM III, 12), so as to reveal different aspects of the content ofsensation. Each perspective exposes some limitations of others, and this cognitivestrategy therefore promises representations that are more responsive to the rangeof sensory contents and less limited by the peculiarities of any one perspective.Perspectives, again, are responsible for the ‘merely apparent’ character of ourrepresentations, so to the extent our beliefs are made more independent fromperspective in these respects, they will also be ‘less apparent’, or ‘truer’ (see BGE34). Thus, even though ‘the world with which we are concerned is false’ in onesense, still ‘every elevation of the human brings with it the overcoming of narrowerinterpretations’, and thus truer representation, in the sense of cognitiveimprovement (WP 616).

When Nietzsche offers assertions as truths, I submit, he means to lay claim tocomparative truth or objectivity, in a ‘theory-internal’ sense filled out by thisnotion of cognitive superiority.22 Such superiority is compatible with arepresentation’s being party to the systematic falsification of experience, in thedistinct sense of ‘false’ assumed in the subtraction argument. Thus, as Schacht haslong urged (1983, 1984, 1995), the paradoxes generated by Nietzsche’s denials ofthe possibility of truth are to be resolved by distinguishing different senses of‘true’ and ‘false’.23

But if my account of Nietzsche’s epistemology is right, the same strategy forreconciliation does not extend cleanly to his worries about the value of truth.Suppose we take talk of truth ‘internally’ or ‘perspectivally’ in the proposedsense. Then the will to truth amounts to a search for representations arising fromthe interplay of a ‘variety of perspectives’, which are thereby relatively moreindependent from any one and for just that reason ‘less apparent’, or ‘truer’. Thisdoes not commit us to ‘things’ with a ‘constitution in themselves completely apartfrom interpretation’ (WP 560), but we are enjoined to seek representations that aremore and more perspective-independent. After all, what does the real work tomake a representation truer is not the mere fact that it is accessible from multipleperspectives, but the independence from the peculiarities of any one viewpoint thatgoes with its having a role in more, broader, and better perspectives. This meansthat the focus imaginarius guiding the asymptotic progression through ever-broadening perspectives is an ideal of fully perspective-independent, or



aperspectival, representation. As a result, even if the possibility of attainingaperspectival knowledge is rejected, attributing value to the will to truth stillcommits us to valuing just such ‘ ‘‘interest-free intuition’’ ’. Note, it is perfectlycoherent, albeit pessimistic, to value what is in fact unattainable. In that case, theimpossibility of aperspectival representations simply highlights the risk that thewill to truth is ascetic.

We can now pose the textual dilemma about the value of truth sharply. On thenegative side, we have seen reasons to suspect that valuing truth is a version ofasceticism. Nietzsche himself raises the worry (GM III, 24; GS 344), pointing outthe ‘venerable philosopher’s abstinence’ implied in any pursuit of truth, since itinvolves a:

renunciation of interpretation altogether (of forcing, adjusting, abbreviat-ing, omitting, padding, inventing, falsifying, and whatever else belongsto the essence of all interpreting)24—considered in the large, all thisexpresses just as good an asceticism of virtue as any denial ofsensuality. . . [GM III, 24]

To oppose asceticism, moreover, Nietzsche turns to ‘Art. . . in which precisely thelie sanctifies itself, in which the will to deception has good conscience on its side’(GM III, 25). The move is prominent already in Birth of Tragedy, where artprovides ‘saving illusions’ by which we cope with tragic insight into the truth ofa metaphysically grounded pessimism inherited from Schopenhauer.25 WhileNietzsche later rejected Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and his pessimism, henever abandoned the idea that art is valuable because it creates illusions, and getsus to endorse them: ‘Now our honesty has a counterforce which helps us to avoid[its bad] consequences: art as the good will to appearance’ (GS 107; cf. GM III, 25);or again, what we learn from artists is how to ‘make things beautiful, attractive,and desirable for ourselves when they are not’ (GS 299, my italics). Such praise ofmere appearance stands in clear tension with the value of truth, so it is temptingto view this strand as the entering wedge for a wholesale dismissal of truth’svalue, a program apparently advanced in the ringing finale of GM III, 24: ‘Thewill to truth requires a critique—let us thus define our own task—the value oftruth is for once to be experimentally called into question’.

Still, on the positive side, few virtues or projects get as much unqualifiedendorsement in the Nietzschean corpus as honesty and pursuit of truth.Intellectual honesty is so deeply built into Nietzsche’s scheme of values that hecan hardly even comprehend that most people ‘do not consider it contemptible tobelieve this or that and live accordingly, without previously making themselvesaware of the final and most certain reasons pro and con’ (GS 2). The same virtueof truthfulness, we saw, underwrites his central criticisms of the ‘proof ofstrength’ type argument. Perhaps most striking of all, though, is that Nietzschepraises honesty even while stressing its ascetic tendencies. One typical accountintroduces honesty as ‘our virtue, the only one left to us’ (BGE 227), and then goeson to claim that it is a ‘palpable truth’ (BGE 229) that such honesty rests on



cruelty against oneself (BGE 229–30). Honesty is cruel because it denies ‘the basicwill of the spirit which unceasingly strives for the apparent and superficial’ (BGE229)—the ‘sublime inclination of the knower works against’ that basic will tosuperficial appearances, so that the knower ‘takes and wants to take thingsdeeply, multifariously, fundamentally, as a kind of cruelty of intellectualconscience’ (BGE 230). Nietzsche’s apparent endorsement of a fully ascetic willto truth culminates in the following passage:

How much truth does a spirit endure, how much truth does it dare? Moreand more that became for me the real measure of value. Error (—faith inthe ideal—) is not blindness, error is cowardice. Every attainment, everystep forward in knowledge, follows from courage, from hardness againstoneself, from cleanliness toward oneself. [EH P, 3; cf. A 50]

What is asceticism, after all, if not ‘hardness against oneself, . . . cleanlinesstoward oneself’? And here that counts as ‘the real measure of value’.

Our puzzle is now in clear relief: Nietzsche attributes apparently unqualifiedvalue to both artistry and honesty, but each virtue seems to compromise theother. On the one side, artistry’s importance is rooted in its capacity to generateillusions and get us to endorse them. But, we must ask, why is that not simply‘faith in the ideal’, and thus ‘cowardice’ (EH P, 3) of the same ilk as the condemned‘proof of strength’? On the other side, Nietzsche demands a virtue of honesty thatwould explode such ideals. But, we must also ask, why is that not, as he himselfsuggests (GM III, 23–7), just another version of the self-defeating ascetic ideal,whose effect—whose very aim—is to condemn the world and render itunbearably ugly (see GS 130)?

The clue for addressing this quandary emerges from closer consideration ofNietzsche’s famous call for a critique of the will to truth in GM III, 24: ‘The will totruth requires a critique—let us thus define our own task—the value of truth is foronce to be experimentally called into question’. The first point to note is that a‘critique’ is not a denial of value, but an assessment of its sources and validity.26

Any inference by truth ‘deniers’ that Nietzsche must be ‘against’ truth simpliciteris thus too quick. Once this is noticed, a second curious question surfaces: in whatsense is truth’s value to be assessed experimentally? What sort of ‘experiment’could Nietzsche have in mind? An answer is suggested in The Gay Science 110,which traces the origin of knowledge back to the ‘basic errors’ we use to orderexperience. At first, these errors were accepted solely ‘as a condition of life’.Gradually, though, it emerged that competing claims might be compatible withboth experience and the basic errors, and only then does the pursuit ofknowledge arise, as another possible goal of cognitive life, helping us to chooseamong those claims. By and by, ‘the striving for the true finally arrayed itself as aneed among other needs’, and:

Thus knowledge became a piece of life itself, and . . . finally knowledgeand those primeval basic errors butted up against one another: two lives,two powers, both in the same human being. The thinker: that is now that



being in whom the drive to truth and those life-preserving errors clashfor their first fight . . . . Compared to the significance of this fight,everything else is a matter of indifference: the ultimate question about theconditions of life has been posed here, and the first attempt has beenmade here to answer this question by experiment. To what extent can truthendure incorporation? That is the question; that is the experiment. [GS 110, myitalics]

Nietzsche’s experiment, then, must be the life of the thinker. And the question to beanswered, beside which ‘everything else is a matter of indifference’, is at bottomthe very one still gripping him in the Genealogy, viz., ‘What is the value of truth?’(cf. also BGE 1). We are to explore the issue by considering what kind of life atruth-seeking thinker would have, and asking whether it is good. If so, then thewill to truth may hold ‘value for life’. Assessing the value of truth thus meansassessing the value of a type of life, and the role of truthfulness in it.27 ForNietzsche, all such assessments are made by coming to grips with the thought ofeternal recurrence.

2. Eternal Recurrence and the Value of a Life

Nietzsche sees the doctrine of eternal recurrence as his most important thought(EH P, 4; also III, ‘Z’, 1, 6, 8). It has often been read as a cosmological hypothesisthat time has a circular structure, so that all events of world history endlesslyrepeat themselves in the same sequence. In recent years, though, philosophers withdoubts about the plausibility of such a theory have contended that the view shouldrather be taken as a device for assessing the value of a life—less a theoreticaldoctrine than a practical thought experiment. Nietzsche asks us to imagine that ourlives will return over and over, and our reaction to the prospect is supposed toshow something about how good they are. While some arguments from thenotebooks purport to prove the doctrine in its full cosmological form, the mostimportant of these have been shown to fail.28 A practical reading makes that failureless consequential for Nietzsche’s philosophy, since the thought of recurrence couldstill be useful for provoking reflective self-assessment even if the hypothesis thatlife recurs is false, or outright impossible (see Clark 1990: 266–70).

Such readings by no means remove all difficulties, however. On sometreatments, the practical function of the thought of recurrence still depends onstriking metaphysical theses—for example, that every property of a person isequally essential to her identity.29 Moreover, different versions of the practicalreading offer competing answers to key questions about it: Exactly what are we toimagine about the return of events? Must we actually believe in a ‘realistic’recurrence for the doctrine to have its intended practical effect? Just how does thethought experiment serve as a criterion for assessing a life? I will not try to addressall the debates.30 Instead, I will sketch a relatively minimal version of the practicalinterpretation, which can do at least a significant part of the work Nietzsche



assigned to the doctrine. The minimal account is enough to indicate the relevanceof the values of truth and illusion to recurrence, so for present purposes we neednot decide which further commitments Nietzsche in fact assumes, or can defend.

The minimal reading takes its cue from Nietzsche’s first introduction of therecurrence idea at the end of The Gay Science (1st ed.):

The greatest weight.—What if some day or night a demon were to stealafter you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as younow live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more andinnumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but everypain and every pleasure and every thought and sigh and everythingunutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in thesame succession and sequence . . .’ Would you not throw yourself downand gnash your teeth and curse the demon . . .? Or have you onceexperienced a tremendous moment when you could have answered him:‘You are god, and I have never heard anything more divine!’. If thisthought gained dominion over you it would change you, as you are, orperhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you desirethis once more and innumerable times more?’ would lie upon youractions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have tobecome to yourself and to life to wish for nothing more than for this eternalconfirmation and seal? [GS 341]

This is the formulation of the doctrine that Nietzsche later counted as ‘the basicthought of Zarathustra’, and even of his philosophy more broadly (EH III, ‘Z,’ 1,8). It clearly offers a practical thought experiment applied to an individual life:one is to imagine that ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will haveto live once more and innumerable times more’.

In the minimal version, then, the recurrence idea is applied to the events thatmake up a person’s life, along with any others so closely tied to them that shecould not be the same without them.31 Nietzsche’s thought experiment theninvites the person to consider the endless recurrence of that life, with every detailthe same. It is not important that the agent believe her life will or even couldactually recur; she simply imagines its return so as to elicit her response to it.32 Areaction of joy is supposed to indicate that the life was good, whereas sorrow,regret, and the like show it to have been wanting. For reasons that will becomeclear, it does matter even for the minimal reading that what she imagines is theendless repetition of the very same life that she has lived; the notions of eternityand sameness give the Nietzschean assessment its distinctive content.

Two characteristic features of the proposed test should be noted from theoutset. First, its standards of assessment are not specified independently, but arejust the ones endorsed by the person. Those are the standards engaged byappealing to her own reaction when imagining her life’s return.33 Second, theidea of recurrence blocks a natural, but dubious, tendency of self-assessments thatwould promote positive judgments—a propensity to underweight the unchange-



able past, relative to the future, which we might still be able to affect. It is easierfor me to think of my life as going well if I focus on plans for a more gloriousfuture, and minimize the importance of regrettable parts of my past. Temptationsto such thinking are strong enough to have worked their way into conventionalexpressions of consolation (‘Well, at least that’s behind you now’; ‘What a relief!I’ll never have to live through that again!’). Construed as attempts atencouragement or self-motivation, these responses are unimpeachable, but ifwhat is wanted is a cold, clear-eyed assessment of whether a life has been good,taking consolation from the mere fact that a regrettable event lies in the past isself-deception. Its being past in no way removes it from the life itself—a fact mademanifest by the thought of life’s recurrence. In this respect, Nietzsche’s test bearscomparison to another common piece of wisdom: in thinking through a difficultdecision, one is often well advised to imagine one’s life under the alternatives,assessing what each would be like through ‘off-line simulation’ (think ofKundera’s Tomas, trying to decide what to do by alternately living out inimagination his life with Tereza and without Tereza). That procedure can be abetter gauge of overall preferences than conscious deliberation alone, which mayneglect, or even actively suppress, considerations that one must admit inretrospect were important. The thought of recurrence puts one’s entire lifeimaginatively into the future. In that way, it both encourages a genuineassessment (making it a ‘live question’), and permits a judgment engaging allthe values that actually move us—even ones we might fail to notice, or admit to.

With these ideas in place, we can begin to appreciate the distinctive force ofNietzsche’s thought experiment. Bernard Reginster points out that manyreadings have difficulty explaining why it should be important that we imagineour return over and over, eternally—as opposed, say, to our being willing toaccept its repetition once.34 Reginster addresses this problem of eternality bybuilding an emotion of joy into the very notion of affirmation sought by the test;willing eternal repetition is supposed to pick out a genuinely joyful reaction. Heoffers an impressive philosophical analysis of joy to back up the textual evidencefor the proposal, and some interpretation along these lines may well be correct.But there are also more minimal grounds for the demand that we will life’seternal return. At least part of its motivation, I submit, is the thoughtexperiment’s function of blocking the sort of unjustified consolation taken fromthe mere pastness of events described above. If the recurrence to be imagined iseternal, then I can never look forward to a time when I can pretend to bethoroughly ‘finished’ with an event, and the salience of its belonging to my life isthereby set squarely before me. Versions of an afterlife that came to an end, or elseadvanced to some eternal stage very different from my actual life (as in thetypical Christian conception) would lose this clarifying, rationalizing feature ofthe Nietzschean assessment.35

Beyond Reginster’s problem of eternality, three key questions remain for evenminimal versions of the doctrine: 1) Why should we accept a person’s own reactionto the thought of recurrence as a significant or correct judgment on the value ofher life?; 2) Why does it matter to Nietzsche that every event in the life is imagined



to recur unchanged (this is the problem of sameness, alluded to above)?; and 3)What practical effect is the thought experiment supposed to have, and how?

The first question raises broad and difficult issues. One obvious objection toNietzsche’s thought is that its conception of the good is radically incomplete. Itseems unconstrained by the most conspicuous form of value usually supposed toattach to lives, moral value. A life might be as desirable as one likes for the personherself—and thereby be a paradigm candidate of a good life from the standpointof recurrence—while unacceptably violating or ignoring the interests of others.Nietzsche frankly courts such objections by his lavish praise of morally troublingfigures like Napoleon (e.g. GM I, 16),36 but the complaint would surely not worryhim. The thought behind his notorious ‘immoralism’ is that moral evaluationshave deeply corrupted our judgments about whether a life is good, so for him,the fact that recurrence gives them no necessary role would appear not as a bug,but as a feature. Such immoralism is likely to attract resistance today, but I do nothave space to pursue the serious issues it raises. I mention just one point in theneighborhood. By de-emphasizing morality per se, Nietzsche intends to recall ourattention to the broad question of ancient ethics, which asked whether a life wasgood overall. That is, like many ancient followers of Socrates, Nietzsche resistsany simple equation of the good life with the virtuous or moral life; such anequivalence would have to be established by a special and non-trivial argument,which the ancients sought, but Nietzsche doubts can be delivered.

Another worry is that Nietzsche’s conception is so formal as to be empty, becauseall it assays is the compatibility of a person’s life with values she already has. Butonce the ethical question is conceived in the broad ancient sense just broached, itbecomes clear that Nietzsche’s test does identify a substantively important part ofwhat makes a life good—viz., a deep-going consistency between the agent’savowed values and her actual life. In order for an agent to affirm recurrence, theevents of her life must escape condemnation under the values she endorses, sincethose are the ones engaged by the thought experiment. An agent who fails the testcondemns her own life, and to that extent, turns against herself: the part of her thatsets standards and judges is set against the part that actually lived the unaffirmableevents. Avoiding such inconsistency or division within the person is deeplyimportant to Nietzsche. It is also related to a very old ideal for human life—onethat used to be given names like ‘harmony of soul’.37

We can now begin to address the second question as well, seeing whyNietzsche thought it important that every event in the person’s life be supposed torecur (‘everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return’). Ifthe life whose recurrence I affirm omits some events that really happened to me,then my managing the affirmation is by no means sufficient to establish the kindof harmony between my life and values that Nietzsche intends to emphasize.Affirmation could easily be made compatible with quite serious disharmonybetween my values and my actual life, as long as I take care to exclude from therecurring events exactly those that are troubling from the point of view of myvalues. Thus, if affirmation is to count as a genuine test of harmony, I mustinclude every event of my life as part of the sequence imagined to recur.



But of course, no one has a life free of any regrettable feature, and in thatrespect, the thought of recurrence seems to advance a conception of the good thatis utterly out of step with the human predicament. This is a serious worry. Giventhe incongruity of these desiderata with our actual condition, how could it be atall reasonable to assess our lives by Nietzsche’s test?

We now face the central problem Nietzsche means to address by his thoughtexperiment—the problem of redemption.38 For Nietzsche, the crucial ‘task’ ofphilosophy was to ‘say Yes to the point of justifying, to the point of redeemingeven all the past’ (EH III, ‘Z,’ 8). He explores the relevant conception inZarathustra’s chapter ‘On Redemption’, which evokes the issue of harmony ofsoul by lamenting the ‘inverse cripples’ so common in the world—people inwhom the hypertrophy of one capacity or character trait has left their livescompletely out of balance. Such people need a strategy to make themselveswhole, and that is the task of redemption, which Zarathustra characterizes as aproduct of ‘willing’ and ‘creating’. One must:

create and carry into One what is fragment and riddle and dreadfulaccident. . . . To redeem those who lived in the past, and to recreate all ‘itwas’ into a ‘thus I willed it’—that alone should I call redemption. . . . All‘it was’ is a fragment, a riddle, a dreadful accident—until the creativewill says to it, ‘But thus I willed it’. Until the will says to it, ‘But thus Iwill it; thus I shall will it’. [Z II, ‘Redemption’]

The suggestion is that fragmentary, accidental, puzzling, or regrettable aspects ofa person’s life or character can be redeemed by being brought into a whole thatthe person can affirm. Thus, we can go beyond the earlier suggestion thatrecurrence is a device for self-assessment by ‘off-line simulation’. The thought ofan event’s recurrence not only forces a serious recognition of its relevance to thevalue of my life, but also opens the possibility of my taking a specific newattitude toward it, which redeems it by changing its import in my life. If I can tellmy life story in such a way that I will the whole, then I can likewise affirm eachevent within it, in virtue of its essential contribution to the meaning of the wholestory.39 Thus, events that were, considered by themselves, regrettable (‘fragment,riddle, dreadful accident’) may be affirmed nonetheless. I thereby bring my lifeinto greater harmony with my values, and thus improve it in the dimension ofNietzsche’s concern.

To get a sense of the issue, consider Jimmy Carter, whose crushing 1980 defeatat the hands of Ronald Reagan poses the problem of redemption in sharp fashion.Carter had suffered earlier setbacks in politics, but nothing had prepared him forthe level of disappointment attending his loss of the Presidency (J. & R. Carter1987: 4–10). It not only ended service projects of great importance to him, but alsorepresented a sweeping repudiation of his core values and accomplishments.Perhaps most troubling, it threatened to mark the end of his career, and define itas a failure. The loss—especially this last aspect of it—was so bitter for RosalynnCarter that her only consolation was the thought that Carter would run again and



win, thereby changing the end of the story (J. & R. Carter 1987: 8, 9). PresidentCarter himself had no stomach for another race, but that stance did little to easehis disappointment.40 On the contrary, it only sharpened the question of how toprevent the defeat’s circumscribing his public life as a whole, defining it as afailed political career. If Rosalynn’s dream of a new campaign was not realistic,her idea about what Jimmy needed was nonetheless on target: he needed theredemption of the defeat, in just Nietzsche’s sense—a way of turning it from adebilitating setback into something that could be accepted—even willed.

The idea for organizing a life of meaningful work after his Presidency came toCarter in the middle of the night. Here is how Rosalynn Carter describes it:

One night I woke up and Jimmy was sitting straight up in bed. Healways sleeps so soundly that I thought he must be sick. ‘What’s thematter?’ I asked. ‘I know what we can do at the library’, he said. ‘We candevelop a place to help people who want to resolve disputes. There’s noplace like that now. . . If there had been. . ., I wouldn’t have had to takeBegin and Sadat to Camp David’. . . . A center to settle disputes. For thefirst time since we moved back to Plains, I saw Jimmy excited aboutplans for the future. [J. & R. Carter 1987: 31]

Jimmy Carter was not sick; he was beginning his convalescence.41 With the ideaof transforming his Presidential library into the Carter Center, he saw his wayforward to a new project, allowing him to do work that was rewarding for him,and useful—even important—for the world. At the time, he could hardly haveimagined how successful the Center’s work would eventually become, not onlyin contributions to dispute mediation, but also in broader projects of diseaseeradication, human rights protection, and poverty alleviation. In the event, Carterattained a kind of credibility as a moral leader that no other twentieth century ex-President has even approached—leadership ultimately recognized by formeradversaries and allies alike, culminating in the 2002 Nobel Prize for Peace. It isfair to argue (and is now commonly observed) that Carter built the greatest U.S.Ex-Presidency ever.

The final and crucial point to note is this: it is not at all likely that the Carter ex-Presidency would have been as accomplished had he won re-election in 1980. Therange of his activities has gone so far beyond the normal course of ‘elderstatesman’ politics that it is hard to imagine his even conceiving the project, letalone implementing it so energetically, without the need for redemption posed bythe stinging 1980 defeat. In that sense, to wish for such an ex-Presidency is also towish for the defeat, and precisely that fact allows the later successes to redeem theearlier failure. Of course, Carter could not have guaranteed success back in 1981,or even envisioned exactly what it would look like (and this will turn out to beimportant), but he did have in view something very like the ideal of redemptionfound in Nietzsche. Long before the full extent of his achievement was apparent,back in 1987, he wrote of having conceived the Carter Center with the thought,‘Who knows what we can do if we set our goals high? We may even be able to do



more than if we had won the election in 1980!’ (J. & R. Carter 1987: 32). Thus, whatthe Carters write of Chuck Colson, their collaborator in Habitat for Humanity,applies equally to themselves: ‘Sometimes an unpleasant or even catastrophicevent can transform one’s life and reveal opportunities that could never have beenenvisioned [otherwise]’ (J. & R. Carter 1987: 114).42

Carter’s success required good moral luck, and Nietzsche is aware that havinga good life in his sense often depends on luck. But it was not merely luck thateffected Carter’s redemption. He also had to do something that would change themeaning of his life from the story of a failed political career into a narrative ofmoral leadership. That lesson provides the practical upshot of Nietzsche’sthought experiment, thereby addressing our third question.

Recurrence is supposed to place ‘the greatest weight’ on events in our lives,and ‘change’ us (GS 341). The context of redemption reveals the sort of weightand the sort of change at issue. We saw that the thought of recurrence is meant toshow the limits of coping with difficulties by simply waiting for them to slip intothe past. Merely enduring troubles may be preferable to the alternative (if thealternative is not enduring!), but it does nothing to make the troubles themselvesany less troubling. We saw that imagining their recurrence highlights the ‘weight’they really have, past or not, and thereby sharpens the problem of redeemingwhat is accidental or dreadful in our lives. The same thought, however, alsoprovides a practical recommendation for taking arms against our troubles—theconstruction of a unifying, redemptive story rendering the life meaningful andaffirmable, a story that ‘carr[ies] into One what is fragment and riddle anddreadful accident. . . [so as to] say to it, ‘‘But thus I will it; thus I shall will it’’ ’(Z II, ‘Redemption’).

Such a narrative itself alters the life, especially in the dimension of what itmeans. First, the narrative adds to the ‘weight’ of each event, enhancing itssignificance by tying it to the whole. Second, a new overall story can also changethe character of an event’s meaning—and thereby even its value—in the wayCarter’s life exemplifies. If genuinely successful, in fact, such a narrative willwork its way seamlessly into the life itself. It becomes crucial to the agent’s self-understanding, and in that form it is one causal factor helping to shape the courseof new events in the life, which events, in turn, serve as the indispensablemechanism through which the larger narrative shapes the meaning of the past. Inthe end, Nietzsche hopes, the story and the life interpenetrate so fully they can nolonger be cleanly distinguished, and endorsing the story can then make a personwell-disposed to her life, thereby promoting the consistency between her life andvalues for which the recurrence test assays: ‘How could I not be grateful to my wholelife?—and so I tell my life to myself’ (EH F).43

It is crucial here that a new narrative for my life can not only alter thesignificance, or relative importance, of an event in my life, but can also change itsmeaning for me, and thereby also whether (and in what degree and character) itwas good or bad for me.44 Carter’s later projects altered the meaning of his defeat(e.g. qua the end of his public life), and so substantially changed its value withinhis life overall. The point is important because it helps mark out a key contrast



between mere compensation, and genuine redemption in Nietzsche’s sense. Latergoods can certainly be balanced against earlier evils, and can compensate me inpart for bad things that have happened to me, but such compensation alone byno means redeems the bad things themselves. The recurrence test makes thepoint vivid, since the imagined return of past evils invites comparison of my lifewith its share of evils and compensating goods to an alternative life containingthe goods without the evils. The latter life will surely seem preferable to meunless the evils themselves are redeemed by some narrative that actually alterstheir meaning and value within my life.

This contrast sharply separates Nietzsche’s notion of redemption from theChristian one. For Nietzsche, what needs redeeming is not a person or soul,somehow detached from the actual events of her life, but the life’s troublingevents themselves. From this standpoint, it is a major flaw of Christianredemption that it offers mere compensation, leaving the actual troubling eventsof life unredeemed, even condemned, along with everything that is merely ‘world’.Otherworldly redemption thus fails to make a person’s actual life (here and now)better by one whit. In fact, the case is worse. It is a positive precondition onadmission to redemption in its Christian form that we reject many events of ourlives, in our considered view. We are all sinners, and redemption requiresrepentance for sin.45 In sharp contrast to all demands for confession andrepentance, Nietzsche’s counter-ideal is rather ‘To commit no cowardice againstone’s actions! Not to leave them in the lurch afterwards!’ (TI I, 10). It thereforeemerges that Nietzsche has purely practical reasons to insist on the return of a lifethat is the same in every detail. For him, it is the particular troubling events thatreally need redeeming. Thus, a life-story counts as redemptive only insofar as itincorporates each of the very same events in the life and gives it a significancethat can be affirmed, rather than leaving it mired in regret.46 Now that we havesketched the task of redemption, we can return to the role of virtues of honestyand artistry in affirming recurrence, and to the problems raised by the relation ofthe two values to one another.

3. Honesty and Artistry as Regulative Ideals in the Quest for Redemption

I might do or suffer all manner of ‘dreadful accidents’ (Z II, ‘Redemption’) thatset my life in tension with my values. The thought of recurrence is supposed totest for such accidents, and teach me how to redeem them, by ‘creating’ (Z II,‘Redemption’) a narrative organization for my life, in which they are ‘carried intoOne’ (Z II, ‘Redemption’) and affirmed in the whole, even under the conditionthat the same life comes back ever again. As it turns out, each of the apparentlycontradictory virtues sketched in section 1.B.—honesty and artistry—is essentialto successful redemption, so understood.

Consider first the demand for honesty. Without any constraint of truthfulness,I might ‘tell my life to myself’ (EH F) as a pretty story indeed. But if the life-storyI affirm is mere fiction, I will not have approved my life at all, and its troubling



events remain unredeemed. As long as I manage to accept my life only bypretending it was something else, the problem of redemption is not solved, butducked. As Nietzsche is well aware, any self-assessment that is at all deep-goinginvolves serious temptations to such self-deception. It is in this vein that weshould hear his claims about the intimate relation between honesty and strength:‘the strength of a spirit should be measured according to how much of the ‘truth’one could still barely endure—or more distinctly, to what extent one wouldrequire it to be thinned down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, falsified’ (BGE 39).While the most obvious deceptions distort the plain facts of our individual lives,those are merely the crude cases. More subtle versions indulge in false globalstories about the world (say, of a religious, moral, or metaphysical sort), whichtend to magnify the importance of human beings, and by extension ourselves. Itis in this dimension that the ‘de-deification of nature’ (GS 109) of which Nietzschecounts himself an heir is so striking: ‘We have become hard-boiled, cold and hardin the insight that . . . the world in which we live is ungodly, immoral,‘‘inhuman’’; —we interpreted it far too long in a false and mendacious way, inaccordance with the wishes of our reverence, that is, according to our needs’ (GS346). In fact, then, we first lay hold of the real problem about redemption only inlight of an honest overall account of the world: the issue is not, as the Christianconception of redemption would suggest, to replace a hopelessly ‘fallen’ worldwith another, better life, but to make this very life, honestly described, intosomething we can affirm. Without a forthright account of what needs redeeming,the very problem cannot even become visible.

But now we return to our difficulties: the same rigorous, courageous, (ascetic?)honesty that reveals the problem of redemption threatens to make it insoluble.After all (if we are honest with ourselves), we all commit stupidities and enduretrials that must be counted as ‘dreadful’, or worse. Accepting them at all, muchless affirming their endless repetition, would seem to require either that wepretend they were not bad for us (as they really were), or else that we adjust ourvalues ad hoc so as to count them as good when they were not. On eitherapproach, it seems, we will have compromised the virtue of honesty. To makematters worse, when Nietzsche himself sketches the strategy for redemption, heappears to endorse just such subversions of the truth.

On his conception, again, artistic illusions are just as essential for redemptionas honest self-assessment. We are supposed to create an organizing narrativeunder which to affirm our lives (Z II, ‘Redemption’), and the key lessons aboutcreation come from artists, who show us not only how to make things beautiful,but also how we could endorse something frankly illusory:

What one should learn from artists.—What means do we have to makethings beautiful, attractive, desirable for us when they are not? And Ithink that in themselves they never are. Here we have something to learnfrom . . . artists, who are really continually trying to bring off suchinventions and feats. Moving away from things until there is much ofthem that one no longer sees and much that one must ‘see into’ them, in



order still to see them; or seeing things around a corner and as cut out andframed; or placing them so that they partially obstruct one another andallow only perspectival glimpses through; or looking at them throughcolored glass or in the light of the sunset; or giving them a surface andskin that is not fully transparent—all this we should learn from artistswhile being wiser than they are in other things. For with them, this subtlepower usually comes to an end where art ends and life begins; but wewant to be the poets of our life . . . . [GS 299; see also GS 78]

The artistic lesson is twofold: we learn how to ‘make things beautiful’—butalso how to acknowledge their beauty, even and especially ‘when they are not’beautiful ‘in themselves’. That is, we assimilate our attitude to that of ‘art as thegood will to appearance’ (GS 107), so as to clear our conscience about endorsingillusions. The specific tactics of beautification described in GS 299 make thefictionalizing implications of Nietzsche’s position increasingly clear. Artists dosometimes work by abstracting away from flaws, omitting features, orsimplifying (all of which would be compatible with the truth, albeit partial, ofthe content that remained). But even when their ‘inventions and feats’ use suchsubtractive means, the devices still depend on representing things so that there is‘much that one must see into [hinzusehen]’ things (my italics) in order to see themat all, and thus an additive alteration remains essential to the effect. Often, too, asNietzsche notes, the method is positively to obscure, ‘obstruct’, cover over, oralter the ‘color’ of what is represented. By all these means, artistic representationglorifies its object by depicting it as other than it is. And lest we think falsificationis supposed to apply only within a fictional world, Nietzsche drives home hispoint at the end, insisting that while artists may concern themselves with merefictions and not real life, ‘we want to be the poets of our life’. Thus, there is noavoiding the conclusion that the artistic redemption Nietzsche seeks, and reliesupon as the genuine opponent of the ascetic ideal (GM III, 25), is in fact, just as hedescribes it, a ‘counterforce’ against our honesty (GS 107).

Our earlier problem, then, is sharpened. Not only does Nietzsche claim tovalue both honesty and artistry in a way that sets them into tension, but he isdriven to that stance by his most basic evaluative commitments. For him, thegoodness of a life is measured by the possibility of affirming its recurrence, andany such affirmation requires both a thoroughgoing will to truth and a kind ofartistry that serves as a ‘counterforce’ opposing that honesty.

The very idea just broached, however, suggests a way to do justice to bothsides—balancing the demand for truth against the need for illusions, as‘counterforces’. Though the two stand in tension, there is no contradiction.Truthfulness and artistry and could each be goods for us, just as sweet and sourare both good in sauces. Clearly, moreover, Nietzsche holds that the two keyvirtues can be balanced in a single life, just as the flavors might be in a singlesauce. In a telling section of The Gay Science (113), he takes up the hypothesis thatthe different virtues involved in scientific excellence were separately acquired,and that in their original, isolated form (as ‘the doubting drive, the negating



drive, the waiting drive, the collecting drive, the dissolving drive’) they were byno means unproblematic, and were sometimes frankly ‘poisons’ for theirpossessors. What interests Nietzsche, though, is not so much the happy outcomethat these drives are now combined as ‘functions of one organizing power’—intellectual conscience—but the even grander prospect that the resultingscientific conscience itself might take its place within a still broader virtue. Helooks forward to the day ‘when scientific thinking will find its way to join withthe artistic forces and the practical wisdom of life to form a higher organic systemin relation to which the scholars, physicians, artists, and legislators as we knowthem at present would have to look like paltry relics of ancient times’ (GS 113).That is, Nietzsche’s ideal is precisely a virtue in which the honesty of ‘scientificthinking’ is synthesized with illusion-generating ‘artistic forces’, plus the practicalwisdom to deploy both in the service of perfecting human life.47 Is he deceived,or might such a synthesis be achieved?

The basic notion needed to get beyond the metaphorical appeal to ‘balancing’and carry out the wanted unification in philosophical detail has been well knownsince Kant—it is the notion of a regulative principle. Regulative principles arecontrasted to constitutive ones, which are ‘objectively valid’ or strictly bindingfor their domains. The name ‘constitutive’ is derived from the Kantianexplanation of that validity, which treats the valid principle as a rule accordingto which experience is constituted, guaranteeing that objects in the domainconform to it. By contrast, merely regulative principles do not constitute objects,but simply govern our attempts to manage the domain; they have subjective,rather than objective validity. In the first instance, that is, they bind our ownpractical or theoretical efforts, not the actions or objects we think about. As aresult, they make no claim about how things must be in detail, but merely lay outan ideal to which we should approximate. Precisely for that reason, tworegulative principles with opposing tendencies can still be valid simultaneously,and it is routine for a pair of regulative principles to be balanced against eachother.48 Just such mutual limitation, in fact, is a feature of the general conceptionof perfection Kant inherits from Leibniz and bequeaths to Nietzsche— maximalunity amid maximal variety. We need not find any particular degree of unity, butare enjoined to seek as much unity as possible, compatible with the requisitevariety, and as much variety, given the needed unity.49

The suggestion, then, is that in the recurrence thought experiment, honestyand artistry are mutually limiting regulative ideals. We are to tell our lives toourselves in the most beautiful way possible consistent with the demands ofhonesty, and as honestly as we can, given that they must be attractive enough toaffirm. To develop the idea, though, we must examine the detailed interactionbetween the demand for truth and our need for illusions.

On the side of honesty, it turns out to be quite natural to understand will totruth in terms of a regulative ideal, given Nietzsche’s views. For him, intellectualconscience cannot require an account of things capturing their ‘constitution inthemselves quite apart from interpretation,’ since it is ‘a completely idle hypothesis’that things even have such a constitution (WP 560). Instead, we saw, honesty



demands an awareness of ‘the final and most certain reasons pro and con’ (GS 2),so as to attain the sort of objectivity available within the limits of perspectivism.For that, we need not ‘interest-free intuition’, but ‘the capacity. . .to make thevariety of perspectives. . .useful in the service of knowledge’ (GM III, 12), therebyobtaining cognitive representations that are truer, or cognitively superior, in asense specified via empirical adequacy plus defensibility across the broadestpossible range of perspectives. For Nietzsche, such cognitive superiority servesas a regulative ideal governing belief formation.50

This is so not only in theoretical contexts, but also in the narrower (butimmediately salient) case of assessing one’s life through the thought of itsrecurrence.51 As we saw, the thought experiment crucially depends on aconstraint of empirical adequacy, in that the life story I affirm must include all thefacts of my actual life, at least under some description. Significantly, the raw factsof my life may well admit of different descriptions, under which they wouldassume different meanings. It is important to be honest no less about what thefacts of my life mean than about what they are, and the potential range (andvariation) of meanings complicates the task. Thus, here too it is essential, beyondempirical adequacy, to use a ‘variety of perspectives’ (GM III, 12) to explore thepotential meanings, and test how much sense they make of my life overall. Still, Icannot hope for a uniquely true life story. The open-endedness of my life, and thepotential for different ‘endings’ to affect the meanings of earlier events (shown inCarter’s case), means that the facts to date will always leave room open fordiffering interpretations of their significance.

Some might take that plurality of potential interpretations by itself as sufficientto explain the role of artistic fictions in Nietzsche as well, citing his hyperbolicclaim, ‘precisely facts do not exist, only interpretations’ (WP 481). But thisunderestimates the real tension between the honesty he demands and theillusions he thinks we need. Even if we cannot capture a life’s ‘constitution in[itself] quite apart from interpretation and subjectivity’ (WP 561), some life-stories can nonetheless satisfy our cognitive norms to a high degree, and thus berelatively truer than their competitors. The genuine worry, then, is that to affirmour lives we might need stories that were not honest in this sense—fictions thatwould require us, in telling our lives to ourselves, either to fabricate outright, orto endorse utterly implausible stories impossible to square with even a regulativewill to truth.

Several commentators have proposed that Nietzsche takes truthfulness to besufficiently satisfied if only our illusions themselves are honest, or lucid, ones, inthat we know that this is what they are.52 On this reading, what we learn fromartists is first and foremost a certain stance, a way of taking things: we seesomething as an F, though we know that in reality it is no such thing, just as wemight see some patches of color on canvas as a boy in the grip of a seizure. Forpresent purposes, the thought would be that art teaches me how to create valuein my life, and so to affirm it, even where the life’s features are intrinsicallymeaningless or frankly bad for me. It does this by showing me how to see my lifeas valuable, despite its ultimate meaninglessness or regrettable character. By



providing a sense that my actions are worthwhile, such illusions could be quiteuseful, or even necessary to support my practical engagement in the world.53 Theappearance of value or purpose could be a psychological condition of effectiveaction despite my knowledge that it is only appearance, just as feelings of painand fear serve as psychological devices to help me avoid danger, even though Iknow they are only features of my phenomenal experience. As Hussain(forthcoming) puts it, we would get a ‘fictionalist simulacrum of valuing’ thatsaves the phenomenal role of valuing in practical life.54 At the same time, artistry’sfictional illusions avoid all conflict with the demands of honesty: the illusion doesits work to make life ‘bearable’ (GS 107; cf. BT 4, 24) while being recognized as afiction, and thus, we need not, indeed should not, actually believe that the life isany different from what the cruelest will to truth would suggest about it.

A fictionalist reading of Nietzsche’s talk of creating values has a distinguishedancestry (see Vaihinger 1986 [1911], 771–90), and surely there is something to it.Nietzsche is attracted to art partly because it is especially honest in recognizingits illusions as such. But I doubt that fictionalist simulacra can do all the workNietzsche needs on questions of recurrence and redemption. Seeing whysuggests a better account of the place of illusions in his thought. Consider againCarter’s 1980 defeat. The problem he faces, made conspicuous by the idea of thedefeat’s recurrence, is that of reshaping his life into something acceptable, despitethe fact that it now includes that intensely disappointing setback. Entertainingthe lucid illusion that his life is still worthwhile fails to address the difficulty,precisely because it does not change him. It does nothing to make his life anybetter. As we just saw, it would not even dislodge his own belief that it is rightly(honestly) to be viewed as a failure. To put the point in starkest terms, pretendingto be redeemed is no redemption.

If pretense, fiction, and simulacra are all we learn from artistry, then it does notbalance or limit our honesty, but is just an expression of it—the expression thatforces us to admit, sadly, that all redemptive thoughts about our life must beruthlessly confined to the realm of ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’. In that case, westill lack an antidote for the ascetic tendencies of the will to truth, and the artisticredemption Nietzsche touts turns out to be a false promise. It succumbs to thesame objection as the Christian redemption he condemns: it does nothing tomake our actual, honestly described, lives any better, but offers only a make-believe redemption, in which we palliate ourselves by pretending things areotherwise than they are.

Nietzsche himself sees the point, for he does not limit the artistic lesson to theinsight that honest illusions, or self-conscious fictions, are possible. On thecontrary, artists also teach us positively ‘how to make things beautiful’ (GS 299;my italics), how to ‘create values’ (BGE 211), how to ‘make something that was notalready there: the whole eternally growing world of valuations, colors, accents,perspectives, scales, affirmations, and negations’ (GS 301; cf. GS 58, 143, 276–7,290). Note, once an object of artistic attention has been made beautiful, it is nolonger necessary to pretend that it is beautiful. If the artistry was successful, it isbeautiful (now).



To insist that acknowledging this beauty is a mere pretense misplaces the roleof pretending in aesthetic experience, even on a pretense account of mimesis.55

Consider BT 4, where Nietzsche takes up Raphael’s Transfiguration as his exampleof artistic redemption. Nietzsche takes the painting to represent the art impulseitself: its official content is merely a symbol for the real message—viz., theredemption of life through art. The possessed boy, confused disciples, andgeneral chaos in the lower half of the painting stand for the troubling aspects ofexistence which need redeeming, while the glowing vision of Christ’stransfiguration at the top points the way to redemption. But for Nietzsche, thereal vision, and the real redemption, is not the Christian promise but Raphael’sartistic one. The beauteous vision of Christ’s transfiguration depicted in thepainting symbolizes the experience of viewing the painting itself, whose actualsplendor does the real work of transfiguring the possessed boy, bewildereddisciples, and the rest, into something that is, unquestionably, beautiful.56 Notethe right place of pretense in the story. In viewing the painting, we pretend thatcertain patches of color are a possessed boy in the grip of a seizure, but we do notpretend that he and his companions have been beautified. If we have to pretendthat the painting is beautiful, then the artwork has failed, and nothing isredeemed. The real lesson of art for Nietzsche, then, is not only to teach us theattitude of pretense, but to show us a way that things might be really madebeautiful, and thereby redeemed.

So, against outright fictionalism about value in Nietzsche, the present readinginsists that once something is made valuable by artistic intervention, thenceforth itreally has value (pending further transformation). Such a potential to bestowactual value is crucial to the role of artistry in redemption.57 Nevertheless, thereremains an important role for pretense or illusion in artistry, as well. Think againof Carter: to give his life a new, redemptive ending, he had to embark on an ex-Presidency capable of ‘doing more than if we had won in 1980!’ (J. & R. Carter1987: 32). More, he had to do so at a time when, as a matter of fact, his life wasdefined by defeat in the shape, ‘failed political career’. Plausibly, it was apsychological requirement on Carter’s ability to identify with his new project,find it worthwhile, and carry it off, that he not think of himself under thedescription that was then true of him: ‘failed politician at the end of a career’. Toredeem himself, he had to act under a different self-conception, therebypretending to be someone he was not (yet)—a voice of world moral leadership.

The last claim will seem too strong to some, but I think it can be defended in asense strong enough to provide a basis for Nietzsche’s continuing insistence onthe need for ‘saving illusions’. All of us face the problem of redemption: there isplenty of frustration to go around, which is the moment of truth inSchopenhauer’s pessimism.58 In any serious case, moreover, redemption requiresa change in the meaning of some defining event of the life, transforming it in theeyes of the agent from ‘dreadful accident’ into something valuable. In this sense,the process involves an alteration in central self-regarding beliefs—a change ofself-conception. Carter had to stop viewing himself as a failed politician to re-imagine himself as a moral leader. When the needed alterations are deep-going



enough, an illusion becomes inevitable because the change of belief is essentiallyprospective—the new self-conception is itself a means involved in my self-transformation, so it must run out in advance of the actual facts about my life.Therefore, given the need for a substantial degree of change, it will misrepresentthe meaning of my life now. In real redemption, I transform myself into a newkind of person, of whom some new, redemptive self-conception will be true. Butfor the project to seem feasible, worthwhile, and meaningful to me, I must thinkof myself as the sort of person who can carry it out. That is, really, I must think ofmyself as the new person. Who else could meaningfully carry out the project ofbeing him?! I need an illusion, then, so as to act under the new self-conceptionwhen it is not yet true of me. Redemption demands ‘living in the future perfect’—believing that after my success (if I have it) I will have been a certain kind ofperson, even though right now I am not. If I were, then of course I would notneed redeeming.59

Naturally, there is no guarantee that my efforts will meet with success. If theydo not, then the new self-conception I invented will remain nothing but thefiction it was when I started. But, Nietzsche would insist, the possibility that sucha fiction might be realized should not blind us to the fact that it began as fictive,any more than it should tempt us into pious, self-deceived hopes that realredemption is available through mere faith, mere belief in a fiction, when in fact itdemands works, too—actual, hard-won achievements that change the meaningof my life.60

It is still tempting, however, to think that I might get by without illusion,through the weaker (and perhaps true) prospective belief that I am possibly thenew sort of person. From Nietzsche’s standpoint, though, the weaker claim willnot suffice. He famously doubts the justification of any belief that one could beotherwise than one is. Even aside from that theoretical skepticism, it is hard to seehow mere belief in possibilities could play the needed practical role sustainingself-transformation. Wherever the problem of redemption is sharp, there isserious incompatibility between my life’s meaning now and the one it wouldhave under a redemptive self-conception—and there is therefore also a realquestion about whether I am entitled to the new self-understanding. I need toact in the ways appropriate to the new self-conception, but in the face of what mylife really means (and is) now, a belief that I might be such a person is merewishful thinking. For example, the thought that I might be a better hitter andfinally make the majors (despite my slow bat speed and .150 average hitherto) isunlikely to sustain me hacking away in Class A baseball; what I need to believeis that I am a better hitter than that, deep down.61 Similarly, to act as a voice ofmoral leadership, Carter needs to regard himself not as someone who mightsomeday be something other than a failed politician, but as someone who is thatperson now.62

The needed illusion is analogous to Raphael’s. We imagine a shape the worldmight have, but does not have, and then believe in it as part of an attempt tobring it about. One needs to see the beautiful form in the stone, likeMichelangelo, in order to call it forth. But at least in the case of Nietzschean



‘poesy of one’s life’ (if not in the other arts), we ought to admit from the point ofview of cold-hearted honesty that such artistic visions are illusory. The beautifulform there turns out to have been in Carter’s life up to 1981 was not there allalong. It was achieved— made, not found—along with the successes of the ex-Presidency. To set about achieving it, Carter needed a saving illusion; he had topretend to be something other than the failed politician he was.

Saving illusions of this sort, unlike fully honest illusions, lucidly recognized assuch in the bright light of consciousness, do put a limit on the regulative ideal ofhonesty. They prevent the will to truth from fixating us on the (real) badness ofthe bad things in life (see GS 78), which would cut us off from the spiritual orpsychological resources we need to imagine things otherwise and effectredeeming change in the life stories we tell ourselves. On Nietzsche’s view, ofcourse, no story is perfect, and the quest for better ones is never ending. Theartistry involved in being a ‘poet of one’s life,’ like honesty, is a regulative idealwe can only approximate. Conversely, though, just as the need for illusion limitsthe claim of honesty, the demand for truth limits pursuit of the perfect story. If Inever discharge the illusion by realizing my imagined self-conception throughchanges in my life, then there is only illusion, and no redemption. Absent theconstraint of honesty, our stories have no bearing on ourselves, and so cannotredeem the actual facts of our lives, any more than the false Christianredemption. From this side, too, pretending to be redeemed is no redemption.Thus, honesty and artistry serve as mutually limiting regulative ideals, eachequally needed in our quest for redemption, and thereby necessary to the good asNietzsche sees it.

4. Conclusions

I have attempted to resolve textual and philosophical dilemmas surroundingNietzsche’s position on truth and illusion. The real interpretive burden posed bythe texts is more challenging than recent writers suggest. We must explain howNietzsche thought it possible both to affirm and to deny the existence of truths,and moreover, why he risked misunderstanding by praising the value of bothtruth and illusion in ways that appear to conflict. I suggested an interpretation ofthe falsification thesis (via the subtraction argument) which is compatible withclaims to truth in a separate, specific sense (constituted by a notion of cognitivesuperiority). In addition, I contended that Nietzsche’s core argument forfalsification is motivated by the very critical stance—rejecting the ‘proof ofstrength’ as dishonest—which also serves to underwrite many of his truth claims.Potential conflict between the values of truth and illusion, however, is notobviated by my distinction between senses of ‘true’ and ‘false’. I argued that thetension between these values must be removed by treating them as mutuallylimiting regulative ideals necessary in the pursuit of a certain conception of thegood, characterized in terms of the ability to affirm the recurrence of one’s life.The fact that honesty and artistry are essential to the good life explains their great



importance for Nietzsche, which plausibly led to the extravagant and sometimesunqualified praise that generates the appearance of contradiction.

Finally, fixing the roles of honesty and illusion in affirming life’s recurrencealso determines the proper place of fictionalism in Nietzsche, and illuminateshis doctrine of the creation of value. Fictions are (often if not always) necessaryfor us to frame and pursue the projects of creating value that allow us to redeemthe dreadful accidents of life. In the end, however, those projects aim not topretend that life has value, but to make it so in fact. When successful, theimagined fiction of my better self is a ladder kicked away. Success as a ‘poet ofone’s life’ involves living up to the ideal well enough to make the life story of one’sbetter self come true.63

R. Lanier AndersonDepartment of PhilosophyStanford UniversityStanford, CA [email protected]

NOTES

1 (Nietzsche’s works are cited by the abbreviations listed in the references. I have madeuse of the translations listed there, but I often depart from them in the interest of greaterliteralness.)

Opponents of the deniers (e.g. Leiter 2002) do not always distinguish among thedifferent versions of the view they reject, but there are at least three substantially distinct‘pro-falsification’ approaches in the recent literature: fictionalism, post-modernism, andanti-essentialism. On fictionalism, see Vaihinger (1986 [1911]: 771–90), Miklowitz (1998),Landy (2002, 2004), and Hussain (forthcoming). The skeptical post-modernist andtextualist approach finds expression in Kofman (1993 [1972]), Derrida (1979), de Man(1979), Shapiro (1989), and Schrift (1990), and by contrast, Grimm (1977), Abel (1984),Nehamas (1985: 42–105), and Poellner (1995: 79–111) explore versions of anti-essentialismwhich (contra skepticism) defend substantive metaphysical claims. Other prominentreaders have also emphasized themes similar to the post-modernist strand, but out ofphilosophical assumptions incompatible with it (e.g. Danto 1980 [1965], Bittner 1987).

2 Specifically, she argues that while the early Nietzsche rejected the possibility of truth,he later abandoned metaphysical tenets crucial to his ideas about falsification (notably theposit of things in themselves), and finally overcame his former denial of truth. Clark’sreading is controversial (see Poellner 1995: 22–4; Anderson 1996), but her discussiondeserves much credit for clarifying the debate. Indeed, Williams’ own talk about ‘deniers’of truth seems indebted to her formulations about Nietzsche’s ‘denial of truth’ (Clark 1990:1–4 et passim; cf. Williams 2002: 12–14).

3 See Poellner (1995: 137–8, 162–3, 191–3, 196–200, 266, 276–305, et passim).4 I canvass the evidence in some detail in section 1 below, since the charged character

of recent debate has prompted many readers to minimize its full range. Discussion hasbecome so divisive, in fact, that one can now conduct polemics largely by mere



classification of an adversary into the opposing camp, thereby tarring him/her with the(real or imagined) liabilities of its standpoint on truth. Some seeking to accommodate themanifest textual pull in both directions, like Nehamas (1985), have therefore becometempting targets from both sides. Leiter, for example, attacks alleged ‘postmodernist’, or‘anti-truth’, elements of Nehamas’s interpretation with a somewhat single-minded fervor(Leiter 2002: 2n, 38, 71–2, 83–4n, 96–7, 115–16n, 207n, 291), while Shapiro (1989: 24, 86–9)criticizes Nehamas’s conception of interpretation because it is too much restricted bytraditional philosophical concerns about securing truth and the unity of the text.

5 Millgram (forthcoming) attempts to explain away Nietzsche’s apparent inconsis-tency by creative and sophisticated appeal to a rhetorical strategy of forgetting. But such aline is hard to believe in the face of sentences like these: ‘the erroneousness of the world inwhich we believe we live is the surest and firmest thing we can lay our eyes on’ (BGE 34);or again, ‘Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of living being couldnot live’ (WP 493). The ring of paradox obtainable by combining claims to truth and claimsof systematic falsification within a single thought was clearly part of the attraction forNietzsche the rhetorician.

6 The elements of the strategy I propose in section 1 were initially developed anddefended in Anderson (1996), Anderson (1998), and Anderson (2002). The generalapproach of distinguishing different senses of truth is also prominently defended bySchacht (1983: 52–117) and Richardson (1996: 220–90).

7 See thought-provoking papers by Gemes (1992), and Pippin (1997a and 1997b).8 In light of the attention often garnered by the texts suggesting a global falsification

thesis, it is worth emphasizing that ordinary truth claims really are completely routine inNietzsche. For a selection of remarks, consider the claims to truth, accuracy, or correctnessin GS 107, 354, 360; BGE 39, 186, 202, 229, 253, 259; GM I, 4; II, 11; TI V, 1; VI, 1, 4, 6, 8; VII, 1,5; and VIII, 6; A 50–1; and EH P, 3. Conversely, in the following passages Nietzsche chargesthat some view he opposes is false, erroneous, or mendacious, and should be rejected forthat reason: GS 29, 37, 99, 109, 126, 138, 326, 335, 345, 346, 355; BGE 11, 12, 16, 17, 19, 22, 38,48, 53; GM I, 3, 14; II, 11; III 15, 19, 20; TI II, 11; V, 5; VI, 1–8; A (entire!); and EH P, 2.

9 On this point, see GS 344, 347; BGE 48, 59, 210; TI VI, 5; A 50–1; EH P, 3; WP 171, 452,455. Occasionally, Nietzsche even claims (hyperbolically) that ‘making blessed’ actuallyentails the falsehood of a belief: ‘Faith makes blessed: consequently it lies’ (A 50).

This widespread line of thought in Nietzsche tells conclusively against the attributionof any ‘pragmatic theory of truth’, which would define truth as a property of beliefs orjudgments that ‘work’, in the sense of conveying happiness, satisfaction, or practicalbenefit onto their holders. (Danto (1980 [1965]: 72, 79–80, 130) famously claimed to find apragmatist theory of truth in Nietzsche, and Rorty (1982: 205) defends the attribution infully unqualified form.)

10 Paul de Man (1979) emphasizes a pithy early expression of the falsification view:‘Truths are illusions about which we have forgotten that this is what they are’ (TL 84).Similar comments abound in Nietzsche’s notebooks right through to the end of hisproductive life (see, e.g. WP 493, 517, 535, 540, 584). In his published works, Nietzsche’scriticisms of truth are sometimes more oblique, but many texts strongly suggest the ‘systemof fundamental falsification’ (WP 584) advocated in the notebooks. Consider, for example, GS57, 107, 112, 121, 301, 344, and 354; BGE 4, 11, 16, 24, 34, 229–30, and 289; GM III, 12 and 24;TI, III, 2, 5; VIII, 7–8; and the Epilogue of CW.

11 From a contemporary point of view, it might be thought that the interests involvedin cognition could serve to reveal things as they really are, rather than separating us fromthe world by a distorting effect. But Nietzsche’s opposite view does have serious



philosophical motivations, based on his conception of the actual mechanism through whichinterests shape our world-views. Like many of his contemporaries, Nietzsche workedwithin the (broadly) Kantian assumption that the organizing structure of experience comesfrom certain concepts that serve to order our other representations (e.g. ‘unity, identity,permanence, substance, cause, thinghood, being’ (TI, III, 5; cf. TI III, 2, GS 110–11), oragain,’ ‘bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content’ (GS121)). Such concepts do their work by means of their own representational content, whichmust be added to that of the representations they organize, thereby transforming thecontent of experience overall. See Anderson (1996) and (1998) for detailed textual evidenceof Nietzsche’s commitments along these lines, and defense of the intrinsic plausibility ofviews with this general shape. In Anderson (2002), I showed why the relevant organizingconcepts must (for Nietzsche) add positive content beyond what is already included in thesense perceptions they organize. The argument turns on Nietzsche’s rejection of anempiricist semantics for metaphysical concepts (BGE 20), which entails that the meaning ofthose concepts is not exhausted by the sensory data to which they apply. The (broadly)Kantian aspects of Nietzsche’s epistemological views were also recognized and developedby Clark (1990: 127–58), and they have recently been explored by Hill (2003), as well. (Ananonymous reviewer for EJP helpfully pressed me to become clearer on these points.)

12 One striking feature of Nietzsche’s argument is the sweeping generality of itsfalsification claims; the argument purports to cover all cognitive representation as such. Tomy mind, that unqualified generality tells against an otherwise attractive strategy ofcoping with Nietzsche’s falsification claims—developed most systematically by Richard-son (1996: 220–90)—which attempts to avoid paradox by limiting the scope attributed tothe influence of perspective. On such accounts, the merely perspectival status of mostrepresentations is supposed to be established on the basis of substantive truths ofNietzsche’s own metaphysics or logic, which are not themselves perspectival (or not‘merely’ perspectival), and which therefore fall outside the scope of the falsifying effects ofperspective. Other interesting versions of this basic strategy have been defended bySchacht (1983: 95–117), and by Hales and Welshon (1994, 2000), and Hales (1996).

13 The relevant passages are far too numerous to quote, but consider, for example,WP 521: ‘One should not understand this compulsion to fashion concepts, species, forms,purposes, laws. . . as if we were thereby to fix in place the true world; but as a compulsionto organize a world for ourselves in which our existence is made possible—we thereby createa world which is calculable, simplified, understandable, etc., for us.’ Along similar lines, seealso WP 503, 512, 513, 515, 517, 568, 569, 583, 584; and cf. the published GS 354, BGE 24, 34.

14 For the argument that Nietzsche eventually rejected the falsification thesis based onjust this reasoning, see Clark (1990: 95–158, esp. 109–17). Elsewhere (Anderson 1996: 319–21), I dispute Clark’s reading of the central passages she cites to defend her suggestion thatNietzsche changed his mind about falsification. Further considerations against Clark’sinterpretation may be found in the surrounding paper, and also in Poellner (1995: 22–4).

15 Wilcox (1974) also identifies this idea in Nietzsche.16 As Nietzsche insists in the note under discussion, all ‘questions how the ‘‘things in

themselves’’ may be apart from our sense receptivity and the activity of our understandingmust be rebutted with the question: how could we know that there are things? ‘‘Thingness’’was first created by us’ (WP 569). That is, the realist version of the question about whetherour cognitions can be strictly true of the world (of ‘things in themselves’) is flatly refusedas a legitimate question from the outset, based on an argument against the coherence of arealist notion of independent things (see Anderson 1998 for discussion). Instead, Nietzschefocuses on experience (‘sense receptivity’ plus ‘the activity of our understanding’), whose



content represents a world ‘as we experience it’. The procedure is to ask of this representedcontent (in abstraction from any thought of experience-independent objects) whether it, orany part or aspect of it, justifiably counts as real or true in a philosophically importantsense. This is the force of the move I described in the text as ‘beginning the argument‘‘from within’’ ’.

17 Mach (1910 [1886]) is the locus classicus for discussion of this doctrine of elements,which are officially characterized as neither subjective mental sensations, nor objectivesensible things, but rather as neutral sensory contents out of which experience (whethersubjectively or objectively understood) is composed. For an extremely intriguing andthought-provoking argument that Nietzsche was actually influenced by Mach’s doctrineof the elements, and adopted a positivist view in more or less the Machian sense, seeHussain (2004). For the isolation of some important differences between Nietzsche andMach on questions related to falsification and to ‘neutral monism’ sensu Mach, seeAnderson (2002).

18 Thus, the sense in which these contents are ‘phenomenal’ is not that ofcontemporary philosophy of mind, which often explains the phenomenal by paradigmaticappeal to conscious sensory qualia, but instead by reference to the common nineteenthcentury philosophical sense of ‘phenomena’ as the ‘objects of appearance’. The sensorymaterials are here supposed to be Erscheinungen in a sense descended from the use of thatterm in Kant, Schopenhauer, the Idealists, etc. and that is why Nietzsche talks so easily inthese contexts of ‘phenomenal worlds’.

19 Thus, we cannot directly access the ultimate sensory ‘matter’, but only postulateit, by imagining the subtraction of its perspectival ‘form’. Sensory content can play its rolein cognition only after being transformed by a (falsifying) perspective: ‘This samecompulsion [to organize the world conveniently] occurs in the sense activities that supportreason—this simplification, coarsening, emphasizing, and elaborating . . .’ (WP 521; seealso 505, 532).

Some philosophers and Nietzsche scholars—notably Poellner (1995: 218–23)—havedoubted the very intelligibility of unconscious mental representations like thoseenvisioned here. Space forbids full discussion, but I remain unmoved by such skepticism.Certainly the Cartesian thesis that consciousness is the essence of the mental has adistinguished history. Nevertheless, as a textual matter such Cartesianism was clearlyrejected by Nietzsche, who explicitly sides with Leibniz in favor of unconsciousrepresentations—including sensory representations (see GS 354, 357, and for discussionof additional textual evidence, Anderson 2002). I think it likely that Nietzsche and Leibnizhave right on their side. The posit of unconscious sensory representations is acommonplace of going theories in cognitive science (e.g. the Marr theory of vision).Moreover, many everyday human achievements (e.g. hitting a major league pitch; reactingin time to a fly ball) are all but impossible to understand absent the supposition that theagent represented something about the world (and did so by means of the senses) in a waythat did not rise to the level of consciousness. (That said, it is worth noting that in thiscontext Nietzsche’s ‘unconscious sensations’ (like the Leibnizian petites perceptions) mustbe understood broadly as representational states contributing to sensory cognition. As aresult, they might not count as sensations construed more narrowly—e.g. for philosopherswho restrict the term ‘sensation’ to essentially conscious qualia states in which the notionsof representation and the act-object distinction have no place.)

20 Thanks to Alexander Nehamas, John Richardson, Robert Pippin, Alison Simmons,and an anonymous referee for EJP for comments that helped me to clarify the thoughts inthe previous three paragraphs.



21 It is striking that Nietzsche does not assume that all contents included in the ‘chaosof sensations’ are consistent with one another (see GS 109, WP 508, 515, 516, 517, 530, 535).The possibility of contradictions here is part of what makes the chaos chaotic. Nietzscheconcludes that knowledge requires the use of different perspectives so as to capture(serially) the conflicting aspects of the ‘chaos of sensations’ and thereby do justice to theworld. He does think we should make every effort to reconcile incompatible perspectives,but this norm is understood as a demand on us, not as a constraint on the character of thesensory contents themselves: ‘We are unable to affirm and deny one and the same thing:this is a subjective empirical law; no ‘‘necessity’’ expresses itself thereby, only an incapacity’(WP 516). Thus, the laws of logic, including the principle of contradiction, are ‘notcognitions at all! they are rather regulative articles of belief!’ (WP 530). Nietzsche’s approachbears interesting parallels to recent efforts to employ paraconsistent logics in modellingcertain domains of representations (e.g. a person’s actual beliefs) which must be allowed tocontain contradictions, if the model is to be accurate. Paraconsistent logics employ variousdevices to block the ‘explosive’ character of classical logic, which allows anything at all tobe inferred from a contradiction, and thus trivializes contradictory systems. (Brown (2002)classifies such logics according to their strategies for blocking explosion.) AlthoughNietzsche does not conceive of the problem in a sophisticated technical way, his appeal toperspective difference seems to play a similar explosion-blocking role. The relativeisolation of two perspectives prevents triviality-generating inferential explosion, andpermits us to treat potentially contradictory aspects of the ‘chaos of sensations’ serially.(Thanks to Darko Sarenac for exchanges that led to this note.)

22 See Anderson (1998) for discussion and textual defense of this claim.23 That is, truth can be understood, on one hand, as correspondence to something

radically independent (call this the metaphysical sense; it is the one assumed in thesubtraction argument). Or on the other hand, it can be taken as cognitive superiorityaccording to the epistemic norms governing some theoretical tradition or context (call thisthe theory-internal, or epistemic sense). The contrast can then be exploited to state Nietzsche’sfalsification thesis itself without paradox: the falsification thesis could be true in theepistemic sense (i.e. a superior account of the operations of cognition), while remaining aconceptual organization and transformation of the relevant sensory contents like any othertheory, and thus false in the metaphysical sense. Indeed, this is just the sort of viewNietzsche suggests when he insists that the ‘insight into delusion and error as a conditionof cognitive and sensible existence’ has ‘now been given to us through science’ (GS 107; myitalics).

24 The worry here about the potential asceticism of the will to truth is quite a bitsharper than Leiter (2002: 264–79) allows, and is related to Nietzsche’s falsification thesisin ways he is at pains not to acknowledge. The problem is sharp because 1) all knowledgeinvolves interpretation (GM III, 12), and 2) ‘falsifying’ is ‘of the essence of all interpreting’(GM III, 24). Thus, we must worry that the conditions for true knowledge are unsatisfiablefor us, which is what makes the pursuit of truth a form of self-flagellation. The falsificationthesis is inescapable in grasping Nietzsche’s concerns here: it is only because the practiceof interpretation is falsifying that the will to truth must renounce interpretation, and thuscomes to count as ‘abstinence’ (GM III 24).

Leiter (2002: 17–18n) has objected to my reading GM III, 24 along these lines,but his reasoning is unpersuasive. The quoted remark at GM III, 24 is not a limitedcriticism of an idiosyncratic positivist brand of fact-worship, as Leiter suggests, but aperfectly general claim that the ‘essence’ of interpreting involves falsification. Leitermight still want to claim that such (essentially falsifying) interpretation is not necessary to



our cognition, but again, it is impossible to understand why renouncing interpretationwould be ascetic in the first place, unless we needed it as a essential part of our effortsto know. The fact that the claim is parenthetical, noted by Leiter, is immaterial as far as Ican see.

25 For Nietzsche’s early conception of redemptive artistic illusions, see BT 1, 3, 4, 7, 15,25. Pippin (1997a) offers helpful discussion of the relevant issues.

26 Nietzsche’s deployment of the notion evokes its use in Kant, whose demand for acritique of metaphysics was not a suspicious rejection of all claims to metaphysicalknowledge, but rather a call for a ‘court of justice’, which issues a ‘decision about thepossibility or impossibility of metaphysics in general, and the determination of its sources,as well as its extent and boundaries’ (Kant, KrV, A xi–xii).

27 It is implausible to construe the wanted experiment as a straightforward scientifictrial. The surrounding discussion resists any simple assumption of the value orappropriateness of scientific procedures themselves: ‘Science itself henceforth requires ajustification (which is not to say that there is such a thing for it)’ (GM III 24). Instead, I amproposing, we should read Nietzsche’s demand that ‘the value of truth is for once to beexperimentally called into question’ (GM III 24) as a call for the sort of experiments in living heenvisions at GS 110. Such experiments are fundamentally practical in a way that separatesthem from more narrowly scientific experiments. Nietzsche means to try out a kind of life(the life of the thinker), which he hopes can make him a better person. If he can improveshimself by leading a theoretical life, then the will to truth would receive some genuinelyindependent justification of its value, and to that extent pass muster before the tribunal ofthe proposed critique. Probably a person would also have learned some things of atheoretical nature along the path of such a life, but they are not what justifies the will totruth. On the contrary, any value those answers might possess would itself have to rest onthe prior assumption that truths have value.

28 Nietzsche’s main argument defending a cosmological recurrence is based on thethought that the finite number of centers of force in the world must, in infinite time,exhaust all possible combinations and repeat their cycle. The argument is vulnerable to aclassic counterexample, due to Simmel (1920 [1907], 250–1n), who gives a method forgenerating an infinite number of combined states from the motion of only three rotatingelements. Even more salient, though, is the fact that Nietzsche’s argument has a clearhistorical antecedent in Lucretius (1975: 255; DRN III, 854–8), of which he must have beenaware (even if Nietzsche did not consult Lucretius in the Latin during the 1880s, therelevant point is clear in the German translation he owned (Lucretius 1865)). In theLucretian context, it becomes obvious that atomism (which Nietzsche rejects) is essential tothe proof: without indivisible atoms, the finitude of the overall universe does not entail afinite number of ‘centers of force’. Thus, the argument is bound to fail on Nietzsche’s ownterms, even aside from Simmel’s example. It therefore seems likely that Nietzsche neverpublished a proof because he knew his ideas were inadequate. Consequently, thecosmological theory of recurrence could hardly have been the central feature of thedoctrine for him. (Kaufmann 1974: 327, Nehamas 1985: 141–69, and Reginster, forth-coming, all reach similar conclusions.)

29 Nehamas (1985: 74–105, 141–99) is the locus classicus for treating Nietzsche as (what Iwill call) an ‘inverse superessentialist’, holding that every property of a person or thing isequally essential. Other commentators have found this view implausible, but there isstrong evidence that Nietzsche held it—particularly from texts expressing his version offatalism (see e.g. GM I, 13; or TI V, 6 and VI, 8). I call Nietzsche’s view ‘inversesuperessentialism’ by comparison to a parallel doctrine in Leibniz, who holds that an



individual like Adam has a complete conceptual essence, which ‘contains’ all Adam’sproperties. Given that concept, every property of Adam is essential. Nietzsche arrives at asimilar result via converse reasoning. Precisely because there is no essence of a thingseparate from its properties and effects, the thing is nothing but their collection (WP 551,557; GM I, 13). But then each property is essential in a sense, because without it thecollection would be different. Whereas Leibniz’s superessentialism derives from theexistence of a conceptual essence containing all the properties, Nietzsche’s ‘inverse’version arises from the lack of a conceptual essence which could preserve identity across achange in properties.

30 Among the more notable treatments in the literature are Simmel (1920), Lowith(1997 [1931]), Soll (1973), Nehamas (1985), Clark (1990), and Reginster (forthcoming).

31 Nietzsche sometimes suggests a stronger version of the thought, according to whichall the events in the course of the world are repeated (see, e.g. GS 109, 233; Z III, ‘Vision,’ 2;BGE 56). Nehamas (1985: 154–7, ff.) argues that superessentialism (see note 29) could makethis thought relevant to the practical question about my life, since my identity is so deeplyenmeshed in the nexus of the universe that any changes in it would bring about changes inme. Even here, though, what is crucial is that I myself return, so what matters for Nietzscheis just the demand that I endorse my own individual life (however its identity isconstituted).

32 In this sense, my minimal reading follows Clark’s (1990: 266–70) enormouslyfruitful suggestion that we are meant to construe the practical thought experiment‘unrealistically’—somewhat along the lines of the thought called for by a person’s querywhether her spouse would want to marry her again ‘if you had it to do all over’.

33 The fact that the agent’s values are the ones engaged as standards of assessment inthe thought experiment is not meant to make them immune from revision through it. Thethought of recurrence is supposed to force the agent to confront the life she has really livedwith the values she endorses, and vice-versa. In case of conflict, the agent may side withfeatures of the life and against some of her hitherto avowed values, so the experiment mayforce a change of values (see WP 1059). The best way to understand such cases, I think, isthat the thought experiment exposes a latent conflict within the agent’s value set, part ofwhich drives her recognition that the given feature of her life is good, despite itscondemnation by another part of her value set. In this sense, the thought of recurrenceserves as a kind of coherence or consistency test. Still, since the person’s avowed values arevulnerable to revision through the thought experiment, a coherence test of this sort avoidsthe charge of emptiness leveled against ‘formal’ accounts of the recurrence idea byReginster (forthcoming, ch. 5). (Thanks to Robert Pippin and to Bernard Reginster forforcing me to become clearer on this point.)

34 See Reginster (forthcoming, ch. 5). To motivate the point, Reginster observesthat a person might well be willing to marry her spouse again (or several more times),without necessarily welcoming the prospect of infinite repetitions, or preferring thatprospect over some variety in spousal arrangements over eternity. Kundera (in Immortality)again offers a striking exploration of the thought, when he has Agnes reflect on the meaningof a dream in which she rejected the chance to be married to Paul again. (In short, she thinksit was fine the first time, but she’d just rather try something else the next time round; notice,a slightly more positive version of Agnes might well have chosen to do it one moretime, but not again after that—the way one might rewatch a movie that was pretty good, butnot classic.)

35 Helpful comments from Bernard Reginster and an anonymous referee for EJPcontributed to this paragraph.



36 For a thoughtful discussion of these issues for Nietzsche’s view, see Nehamas(1999).

37 In note 33, I mentioned one important way that inconsistency between one’s life andvalues can lead directly to questions about harmony among the agent’s attitudes: whenshe sides with her life against some avowed value(s), this is best understood as exposinglatent conflict among values. Note now that the very feature of Nietzsche’s thoughtexperiment responsible for its immoralist implications—the restriction of standards ofassessment to those endorsed by the agent—is essential to its ability to capture the value ofself-consistency he envisions. While ‘formal’ in an important sense, such harmony amongthe parts, aspects, drives, or attitudes of the self is nevertheless a substantive ideal: one canfail to attain it, and such failures are pretty clearly a bad thing for a person. Nietzsche’scriticisms of the resulting forms of inner conflict—e.g. the treatment of Socrates at TI II, 9–12, his attacks on weakness of will (TI V, 1–2), on guilt (GM II; TI VI, 7–8), on asceticism(GM III, et passim), and on ressentiment (GM I, III; and Reginster 1997)—are all central tohis praise of this ideal, under which a person’s greatness consists in ‘wholeness inmanifoldness’ (BGE 212). Crucially, the harmony of character Nietzsche advocates mustnot exclude being ‘rich in internal opposition’ (TI V, 3); the idea is simply that oppositionsshould be successfully harmonized (TI V, 3; see also IX, 38, 41; BGE 12, 19, 21). (Thanks toRobert Pippin, Bernard Reginster, and Elijah Millgram for discussion.)

38 Pippin (1997a, b) also notices the centrality of this issue.39 The locus classicus for the development of the broad approach to the recurrence

doctrine defended here is Nehamas (1985: 141–99), but cf. also Nehamas (1980, 1983).40 To add difficulty to disappointment, the Carters’ business also faced major financial

difficulties when they returned to it from public office (J. & R. Carter 1987: 10–11, 15),threatening the business success they had achieved, just as the Reagan victory marked thefailure of their political projects.

41 Cf., of course, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, III, ‘The Convalescent’, which offers one of themain treatments of the recurrence idea.

42 Chuck Colson attained fame as an especially ruthless political operative in theNixon White House. While in prison for Watergate related crimes, he became born againas a Christian. The Carters report having been dubious about his conversion before theyactually worked with him through Habitat.

43 The discussion in this paragraph benefitted from exchanges with AlexanderNehamas.

44 For a contrary view, see Reginster (forthcoming, ch. 5).45 This is true even on conceptions which emphasize some fortunate aspects of our

sinful condition (usually the fact that the sin of the human race is needed as theopportunity for God’s act of grace, which redeems us through the sacrifice of Christ).Thus, notions of a ‘Happy Fall’ (as found in Milton, in Mormonism, etc.) still would notpermit honest affirmation of an eternal recurrence of the same particular life. Adam’s Fallmight be viewed as fortunate or providential in the limited sense of providing God’sopportunity for grace, and that thought might be some consolation. But such thoughts areby no means genuinely redemptive in Nietzsche’s sense, precisely because it remains crucialto the Christian doctrine that sin is an evil state, and the particulars of our condition are byno means to be willed as such. On the contrary, they must be renounced in full repentanceif we are even to be worthy of God’s grace. (Penetrating comments from an anonymousreviewer for EJP forced me to become clearer about this issue.)

46 These practical reasons for insisting on the return of every event are fullyindependent from theoretical considerations tied to Nietzsche’s superessentialism. The



present interpretation thus advocates a more fully practical understanding of therecurrence test than that of Nehamas (1985: 141–69).

47 The thought of an ideal somehow based on the mutually limiting combination ofvirtues drawn from art and science clearly gripped Nietzsche deeply. The thought informshis idea of a ‘gay science’ in later works, but its prominence goes all the way back to TheBirth of Tragedy, where it appears in metaphorical form in his call for the development of apsychological type answering to the ‘music playing Socrates’ (BT 15; cf. also GS 340, whichbrings out Nietzsche’s allusion to Alcibiades’ speech in Plato’s Symposium, and thus theseductive, captivating aspects of Socrates qua music player).

48 Kant writes that ‘If merely regulative principles are considered as constitutive, thenas objective principles they can be in conflict; but if one considers them merely as maxims,then it is not a true conflict but it is merely a difference of interest of reason. . . and areciprocal limitation of methods satisfying this interest’ (KrV, A 666/B 694; my italics). Seealso A 660/B 688, A 644/B 672.

49 For Leibniz’s version of the principle, see Monadology 58, ‘And this is theway of obtaining as much variety as possible, but with the greatest order possible, thatis, it is the way of obtaining as much perfection as possible’ (AG 220), echoed by Kant(A 644/B 672) and by Nietzsche’s definition of greatness as ‘wholeness in manifoldness’(BGE 212). (It is controversial whether Leibniz’s own understanding of perfection shouldbe understood as a balancing of two desiderata in tension, or rather as the maximization oftwo mutually reinforcing desiderata. For discussion, see Rutherford (1995: 22–45). I neednot take a position on Leibniz interpretation here; for my purposes, it is sufficientthat Nietzsche (like Kant) definitely envisions a situation of trade-off, not mutualreinforcement.)

50 A contrary account of the virtue of honesty may be found in Wood (2002: 1–88,et passim), who defends a Cliffordian ethics of belief, according to which it is alwayswrong—indeed, immoral—to believe out of strict proportion to the evidence. From Wood’spoint of view, the demotion of truthfulness from an absolute demand to a merelyregulative ideal already amounts to a violation of honesty, which he takes to be a moraldemand trumping all non-moral considerations. Nietzsche, of course, is keen to resist justthis claimed ‘trumping’ force of traditional morality in general. In particular, moreover, hisviews on systematic falsification provide some support for his efforts to work out aregulative conception of honesty. If Nietzsche is right, we cannot even hope for beliefs thatare true simpliciter in the metaphysical sense, but must content ourselves with improvingthe satisfaction of our cognitive values over time. In this context, it is reasonable to balancethe demands of cognitive values with those of other values in constructing an overall life,as long as we are not asked to adopt settled beliefs that stand in clear violation of cognitivenorms. This is just what we can expect from a merely regulative commitment to honesty.There are further complexities here, but I defer their exploration to another occasion.

51 Pippin (1997a, b) points out that Nietzsche also sometimes takes up the problem oftruth’s value for the affirmation of life in a broader context, investigating the basic culturalconditions under which life can be affirmed.

52 Perhaps the most detailed exposition of such a fictionalist reading of Nietzsche is tobe found in Hussain (forthcoming). Intriguing proposals along similar lines, as well asworthwhile historical connections, may be found in Miklowitz (1998) and Landy (2002),see also 2001 and 2004). The term ‘honest illusion’ is Hussain’s usual formulation, whileLandy speaks of ‘lucid illusions’.

53 Nietzsche claims that something very like this idea is the true lesson to be drawnfrom the case of Hamlet (see BT 7).



54 Hussain is primarily concerned with metaethical questions about the status of valuejudgments, and his ‘fictionalist simulacrum’ is meant to capture the phenomenology ofvaluing in the context of a global error theory of value he attributes to Nietzsche. On thistheory, no value judgments are ever true, so the role of valuing in our lives must be filledby fictions. For reasons that will become apparent, I do not accept the error theoreticaspects of Hussain’s account.

55 For discussion of the variety of pretense accounts of fiction, and the sustaineddevelopment of his own powerful ‘make believe’ theory of fictionality, see Walton (1990),where chapters 1–3 are of special interest on the point.

56 The same basic idea first broached in BT clearly still guides Nietzsche’s laterthinking about the artistic role in the redemption of life. Compare GS 78 on artistictransfiguration: ‘What should win our gratitude.—Only artists . . . have given men eyes andears to see and hear with some pleasure what each man is himself, experiences himself,desires himself; only they have taught us to esteem the hero that is concealed in everydaycharacters; only they have taught us the art of viewing ourselves as heroes—from adistance, and as it were, simplified and transfigured . . . . Only in this way can we dealwith some base details in ourselves. Without this art, we would be nothing but foregroundand live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand andmost vulgar appear as if it were terribly vast, and reality itself’.

57 Notice, the point is not that we can make something good or beautiful merely bythinking it so. Raphael had to carry off the painting to place the possessed boy in abeautiful light, just as Carter had to build a life of moral leadership in order to make the1980 defeat into a moment of opportunity, rather than failure. In neither case does merethinking make it so. Value creation in the sense defended here does involve certainsubjective attitudes to the valued object, as necessary conditions of its coming to havevalue (which is why ‘in themselves they never are [beautiful]’; GS 299, my italics), but themere adoption of the relevant attitudes is not sufficient to create the value. That takes actualartistic success.

58 In fact, Nietzsche’s own confidence on the point seems to rest on ideas very closelyrelated to Schopenhauer. His doctrine that the world is will to power commits him to thethesis that different drives, or centers of power, interact by attempting to incorporate oroverwhelm one another, so that the boundary of influence of a given drive will be set at thepoint where some other drive resists, and successfully frustrates, its activity. From thispoint of view, it seems impossible—even self-defeating—to avoid frustration altogether,and this is one reason Nietzsche is so suspicious of ideals that seek the total elimination ofsuffering. See Reginster (forthcoming, ch. 3) for a compelling account of these aspects ofthe will to power doctrine, which traces the clear connections to Schopenhauer (e.g. to hisargument that suffering is omnipresent due to the inevitable frustration of the strivingwill, which underlies all phenomena).

59 The description ‘living in the future perfect’ is due to Landy (2001: 120–3, et passim),who helpfully describes the phenomenon in Proust. Interested readers should also consultLandy (2004) for expanded discussion. The key point for us is that future perfect claimslike ‘Later on, I will have been a writer, and so this life will have been all to the good . . .’require a certain fiction: right now, when I make the claim, I am not a writer, but the futureperfect statement insists that later on I will have been so (now). To my mind, in fact, at thetime of the claim I am not even a ‘future writer’, since if I fail to become a writer, the rightjudgment is not that I lost my former property of being a future writer, but that I was nevera future writer. I only had (unrealistic) dreams of being a writer. Compare a child who trieson different careers under the rubric ‘when I grow up’. In a sense, she is by turns future



farmer, future physicist, future fire chief, etc. but surely at the time this is all pretense, allfiction. Only much later, if at all, can any of these become true.

60 ‘Future perfect’ believing is always done at our risk, since if my project fails, thenmy believing will likewise be condemned under the regulative demands of honesty.

61 To see the point in stark terms, notice that all kinds of things could make it true thatI might be a better hitter than I have yet shown, including many that would do nothing tosustain my efforts. Surely, for example, there are possible worlds where my counterpart isstronger, taller, has a better eye and superior bat speed, but the thought of that will hardlybe enabling for me. Likewise for possible worlds where the pitching is substantially worse.The kind of thing I need to believe, of course, is that deep within me is a capacity to be agreat hitter—a capacity which has yet to show itself in my results. But this is no longer thebelief that I might be a hitter, but that I am one, deep down. Note the striking similarity, infact, between this belief and the illusion Nietzsche attributes to the lambs at GM I, 13, whoconvince themselves that what really matters is not what one accomplishes, but thecharacter of one’s ‘neutral, independent ‘‘subject’’’, who always might be radicallyotherwise than one’s achievements suggest.

Nietzsche’s recognition of the importance of such ‘belief in oneself’ provides the forcebehind his remark that for the noble type of person he admires, ‘It is not the works, it is thefaith that is decisive here, that here decides, that here determines the order of rank. . . somefundamental certainty that a noble soul has about itself’ (BGE 287). For Nietzsche, there issimply no nobility of character without (at least relatively) wholehearted belief in oneself.There are deep and interesting connections here to the Kantian notion of practical faith, butexploring those must await a future occasion.

62 For another approach to the idea, recall the recognition, central to the thought ofrecurrence, that the past has serious weight in my life. The same reasons that make itpossible for my future actions to have redemptive effects on the meaning of my past,conversely give the ‘fragments’ and ‘accidents’ of the past real ‘weight’, real power overthe meaning of my life and identity now. To pursue redemption, I must break free of thatpower, imagine my life differently, and act as if my life did not have the meaning that pastassigns to it. That distance from what I am is just what my fictive self-conception delivers.

63 For helpful conversations and comments, I am indebted to Karen Bennett, SimonBlackburn, Sarah Darby, Peter Godfrey Smith, Charles L. Griswold, Nadeem Hussain, PaulKatsafanas, Joshua Landy, Brian Leiter, Elijah Millgram, Alexander Nehamas, RobertPippin, Katherine Preston, Bernard Reginster, John Richardson, Darko Sarenac, RichardSchacht, Alison Simmons, Allen Wood, and an anonymous referee for EJP. Thanks also toMeng Xi and Sarah Darby for research assistance. Some ideas for the paper weredeveloped during a fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center, which I gratefullyacknowledge.

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