interpreting nietzsche: a reply to alan woolfolk

Interpreting Nietzsche: A Reply to Alan WoolfolkAuthor(s): Mark WarrenSource: Political Theory, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Nov., 1986), pp. 660-666Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/191284 .

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CRITICAL RESPONSE

INTERPRETING NIETZSCHE: A REPLY TO ALAN WOOLFOLK

MARK WARREN Northwestern University

WAS INTERESTED TO learn from Alan Woolfolk that my approach to Nietzsche ("Nietzsche and Political Philosophy," in the May 1985 issue of this journal) is symptomatic of "cultural revolu- tionaries" who fail to understand that they must make hard choices between Nietzsche and Marx-not to mention Max Weber. I Woolfolk's problem with the article is in part methodological. He claims that I have a "smorgasbord approach to theory" because I find that Marx and Weber knew things about modern societies that Nietzsche did not, and I suggest this might affect how one construes Nietzsche's problems. Woolfolk declares that this approach "will never work because all angles of vision begin to look alike." When a theorist lets the world views of others "sink deeply enough inside," only then do we understand that the intellectual world is so diverse that we must inevitably "make choices and play one theorist off against another" (p. 51).

On the surface Woolfolk's approach sounds tough-minded and profound. In fact it's a recipe for intellectual stagnation. The important issues have to do with how one synthesizes and whether the results are interesting, not whether one will do it in the first place. On Woolfolk's principle we would be forced to conclude that Marx's thought is undisciplined eclecticism because he did not ultimately feel compelled to choose between Hegel, the French socialists, and the English political economists, but instead synthesized them through a process of criticism and reconstruction. The point is that this kind of issue cannot be solved

POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 14 No. 4, November 1986 660-666 ? 1986 Sage Publications, Inc.

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Warren / INTERPRETING NIETZSCHE 661

by methodological declaration: what one makes of convergences and divergences between thinkers has to do with the nature of one's problem and their work. Unwarranted eclecticism comes from putting theories together that have different problems and different conceptual orien- tations without thinking through their inner connections. Creative synthesis involves an internal criticism of a body of thought such that its limitations point toward other bodies of thought. The former approach leads to bad theory; the latter to theoretical creativity.

A related methodological charge seems to be that I reconstructed Nietzsche (p. 54). Well, yes, I did do a little reconstruction. Perhaps if Nietzsche could know, he would find that I sheared off some of his 'more disturbing edges" (p. 51) in the process. But the charge does make me wonder what kind of business Woolfolk thinks political theory is. Intepretation of political thinkers necessarily involves reconstruction. The fact that I reconstructed Nietzsche is uninteresting. Again, what should be interesting are my claims for the comprehensiveness and validity of the reconstruction in terms of explaining the texts and apparent contradictions, together with its contemporary interest. It is too bad that Woolfolk did not choose to engage my article on these relevant issues rather than affecting a more direct (but actually quite spurious) access to Nietzsche himself.

That aside, Woolfolk is also distressed that my reconstructed version of Nietzsche is no longer "terrifying" and therefore no longer interesting! One of the hazards of the Nietzsche industry is that it attracts those who believe one has not really penetrated the authentic Nietzsche until he is made as terrifying as possible. In any case, Woolfolk is wrong that I ignore Nietzsche's "terrifying" aspects. Rather than assuming that these aspects come from his rejection of the correspondence theory of truth (as many commentators hold), I account for them by looking at his assumptions about modern society and his Lamarckian view of biological evolution. The argument is quite explicit in the article and- as with other arguments-should be engaged as such rather than being placed under suspicion of inauthenticity.

Where Woolfolk has substantial points to make, he is wrong about my article and wrong about Nietzsche. First, he claims that by "calling Nietzsche a cultural and biological reductionist," I have simply dismissed "the entire question of decisive cultural influences" (p. 52). I'm not sure what Woolfolk is responding to here, but it's certainly not what I wrote. I argued that Nietzsche mistakenly tried to account for modern nihilism solely in terms of cultural and biological causes, and that these same



662 POLITICAL THEORY / NOVEMBER 1986

problems can be explained in part by distinctively modern social organizations such as markets and bureaucracies. Does this mean that I dismissed the question of "decisive cultural influences"? Of course not. The major point of the article was to justify Nietzsche's approach to the study of power precisely because he, unlike most modern political thinkers (including Marx), has a concept ofpower that is intrinsically cultural. This is why I gave an account of the will to power showing how and why culture and language are intrinsic to the analysis of action that Nietzsche uses to underwrite the concept. Moreover, I used a brief sketch of the problem of nihilism to show why cultural determinations must figure into his concept of power. I concluded that Nietzsche's philosophy of power in fact allows for multiple levels of historical determination, some of which are cultural. Interestingly, his analyses of the ancient and early Christian worlds in On the Genealogy of Morals and The Antichrist make use of these multiple levels of determination. My problem with Nietzsche is that when he diagnoses the ills of the modern world, he sees everything in terms of cultural and biological causes to the exclusion of political and economic ones. His approach to modern nihilism is consistent neither with his analysis of premodern worlds nor with the methodological demands of his philosophy of power.2

Second, Woolfolk claims that I do not give "Nietzsche's vision of psychology as the queen of sciences ... a fair hearing" (p. 52). In fact the status of inner needs and experiences (what Nietzsche calls "psychology") was a major theoretical focus of the article. Since Woolfolk seems to have missed this, let me restate the key points. Nietzsche usually approaches psychology in phenomenological terms: as analysis of the conditions of subjectivity. I treated his philosophy of power as a framework for the analysis of humans as agents-that is, as beings whose actions involve intention and meaning. Psychological needs and experiences are the problems that focus his analyses of subjectivity. At the same time, Nietzsche's approach to subjectivity is interesting because he often deconstructs psychological categories. That is, he treats psychology as the locus at which more general conditions of life-situational, linguistic, and cultural-are organized into particular kinds of subjectivity. At his best, Nietzsche provides psychological analyses without psychological reductions: for example, he gives an account of the ressentiment psychology of slavery in terms of the historically specific relations between inner needs, social conditions, and cultural interpretations. In sum, psychological phenomena provide




Nietzsche with a set of problematics that opens toward culture and society. Although I disagree with many of Nietzsche's conclusions, I find that his psychological analyses are often sophisticated and exciting. I would have thought that my article made this quite clear.

Third, Woolfolk disagrees with my claim that there is a difference in Nietzsche between skepticism about the "reality of the world" and rejection of the correspondence theory of truth. I argued that Nietzsche rejected the correspondence theory of truth but was not a skeptic with respect to "the reality of the world." Woolfolk informs us that rejecting the correspondence theory of truth is skepticism in precisely this sense. Indeed, "Warren betrays his own skepticism regarding the reality of the world without a correspondence theory of truth" (p. 53). There are two issues here. The first has to do with whether Nietzsche considered himself a skeptic about the "reality of the world." If Woolfolk believes this to be so, he is simply wrong. Nietzsche not only distinguished between rejecting the correspondence theory of truth and skepticism, he also inversely related them: skepticism follows from holding the metaphysical presuppositions that underwrite the correspondence theory of truth. Nietzsche argues that when metaphysical founda- tionalists come to doubt their own precepts, no other account of reality seems possible. This leads to skepticism and eventually nihilism. The mistake of skeptics, he argues time and again, is that they equate the reality of the world as such with the "true world" as defined by an underlying metaphysical reality, while at the same time doubting its possibility.3 Skepticism can only emerge against the background of neo-Pltaonic and Christian metaphysics and for this reason is a mistaken position.

The other issue concerns whether Nietzsche's rejection of the correspondence theory of truth leads to skepticism regardless of what he thought. Woolfolk seems to think this so obvious that it need not be argued. Apparently, he is willing to ignore the history of philosophy since Kant. Many after Kant were critical of the correspondence theory of truth because of its close connection to metaphysical realism. They were skeptics about the existence of metaphysical entities but not about "the reality of the world." While Nietzsche also is skeptical about the reality of nonempirical, metaphysical entities (in precisely the same manner as Kant, who Nietzsche found too skeptical!4), he has no doubts about the world that we sensuously and symbolically inhabit, interpret, and make our lives in and within. There may be difficulties in developing criteria for authoritative interpretations of the world we inhabit, but the




attempt to do so is certainly not skepticism, nor does it necessarily lead to skepticism. If one interprets Nietzsche in good faith, one cannot avoid his many nonskeptical claims. One of his most important (but also most difficult) nonskeptical claims is that life is will to power. In recon- structing the concept of will to power, my intention was in part to suggest that Nietzsche builds criteria into the concept that allow one to evaluate the relative authority of statements about the world without a correspondence theory of truth.5 For Nietzsche all such criteria inhere in human practices: some are logical, some are cognitive, some are pragmatic. They all relate to characterizing conditions of existence such that the problem on nihilism might be seen to have a solution. Such a philosophy might be many things, and it might ultimately fail. But it is certainly not skepticism, and to argue this case is to misunderstand Nietzsche.

Woolfolk's other claims about Nietzsche suggest that his misunder- standings are related to some rather suspicious methodological al- legiances, namely, esoteric reading and psychological reduction. Con- sider the following: in my article I heighten the tension between the "gentle" and "bloody" Nietzsche to illustrate the contradiction prior to giving an account of it. Woolfolk suggests that my "ambivalent expression of wonder" at this conflict in Nietzsche is really quite naive: to explain the contradiction, one need only know that "too strong a denial points to the strength of what is negated." Nietzsche himself "cultivated the capacity for reversal as an expression of spiritual superiority." When Nietzsche writes that he wants "to proceed as Raphael and never paint another image of torture," Woolfolk explains, he means just the opposite-something that should be clear to anyone with a "sensitive Nietzschean ear" (p. 52). In his sensitivity Woolfolk discerns that not all of Nietzsche's reversals are signs of spiritual superiority. Some are symptoms of a deeply troubled mind. For example, Nietzsche often claims he would like to remove the cruelties of guilt and punishment from the world. Now to someone without Woolfolk's sensitive ears this might also sound like "gentle Nietzsche." But for those who know better, such claims are symptomatic of Nietzsche's own guilt for being a "radical skeptic" (pp. 53-54). How about Nietzsche's insanity? Syphilis maybe? Woolfolk has a better explanation: his insanity was a result of having failed to rid himself of this guilt! (p. 54)

The methodological problem is clear: if what a thinker says doesn't fit one's notion of what he ought to have said, then one looks at the text as the symptom of some more spiritual message or underlying disease. But




of course then interpretation becomes quite arbitrary. Would Woolfolk reverse the meaning of every example of the "gentle Nietzsche'? What else would he reverse? Certainly one courtesy a commentator owes a text is a face value reading, at least in the first instance. Only if all such attempts fail should one account for contradictions solely in terms of hidden intentions, biography, psychology, or context-that is, as symptoms of something that is unrelated to making truth claims, argumentation, and sincerity. Without this approach one undermines one 's own implicit demand to be taken seriously at this level.

Since Woolfolk has opened the door to esoteric and psychological readings, however, allow me to speculate on his hidden agena. I'l assume that this is what causes him to pass Nieztsche by at a textual level. Let me guess: Woolfolk is a cultural conservative, or maybe reactionary. He wants to account for the evils of the modern world in terms of a decline of metaphysically grounded conceptions of truth and morality that has been taking place since the Enlightenment. He desires a ".commanding conception of truth" in which "evil possibilities" are "forbidden" (p. 53). His attraction to Nietzsche is that Nietzsche understands that such "commanding conceptions" have lost their authority and talks about it in terms of something quite bad, viz, nihilism. But sadly, even though Nietzsche understands the symptoms, he doesn't understand the problem and ends up siding with the Devil. We know this because he rejects metaphysical foundationalism, the revival of which is the only possible solution to the crisis. Still, Nietzsche is important because he threatens us with a world of evil possibilities in which nothing is forbidden and "everything is permitted." Not under- standing the problem himself, Nietzsche wallowed tragically in this world of evil until he went mad.

Even if one were to accept this account of Nietzsche's place in modernity, another scandalous bit of logic is implied: giving up metaphysical foundationalism has terrifying consequences; therefore metaphysical foundationalism is true. In my article I dealt with some of the problems of this agenda as an approach to Nietzsche. I would have hoped that Woolfolk could have responded to the problems I discussed.

NOTES

I. Alan N. Woolfolk, "On Warren's 'Nietzsche and Political Philosophy,"' Political Theory (February 1986), 51-54.




2. For an extended analysis of the problem of nihilism along these lines, see my "The Politics of Nietzsche's Philosophy: Nihilism, Culture, and Power," Political Studies (Sept. 1985), 418-438.

3. See virtually the entire first section of The Will to Power. Cf. The Will to Power, 580. Relying on evidence from Nietzsche's early work as Woolfolk does (prior to The Gay Science) is misleading, since Nietzsche's later epistemological positions are quite different than his early "inverted Platonism."

4. The Will to Power, 95. 5. See also my "Nietzche's Concept of Ideology," Theory and Society (July 1984),

541-565.

Mark Warren teaches in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University. He has published articles on Nietzsche in Theory and Society, Political Studies, and the Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory. He has just completed a book entitled Nietzsche and Political Thought, and is now thinking about the relationship between Max Weber's interpretive social science and his political problematic.



interpreting nietzsche: a reply to alan woolfolk

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