NIETZSCHE ON THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN KNOWLEDGE AND WISDOM

Transcription

1 NIETZSCHE ON THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN KNOWLEDGE AND WISDOM

2 Also by Keith M. May OUT OF THE MAELSTROM: PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NOVEL IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY CHARACTERS OF WOMEN IN NARRATIVE LITERATURE msen AND SHAW NIETZSCHE AND MODERN LITERATURE NIETZSCHE AND THE SPIRIT OF TRAGEDY

3 Nietzsche on the Struggle between Knowledge and WisdolD KeithM. May M Palgrave Macmillan

4 Keith M. May 1993 Softcover reprint of the hardcover I st edition 1993 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WIP 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published in Great Britain 1993 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / First published in the United States of America 1993 by Scholarly and Reference Division, ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y ISBN Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data May, Keith M. Nietzsche on the struggle between knowledge and wisdom / Keith M. May. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, Methodology. I. Title. II. Title: Knowledge and wisdom. B3318.M54M dc CIP

5 To Thomas

6 Further, every substance is like an entire world and like a mirror of God, or of the whole universe, which each one expresses in its own way, very much as one and the same town is variously represented in accordance with different positions of the observer. Leibniz, 'Discourse on Metaphysics'

7 Contents Acknowledgements Preface viii x 1 Knowledge and Wisdom in the Tragic Age 1 2 Socrates and Dialectic 30 3 Plato's 'Real World' 55 4 The Legacy of Euripides 80 5 Aristotle's 'Being' and Nietzsche's 'Will to Power' Ariadne and the Labyrinth Overcoming the Greeks 151 ~~ 1~ Bibliography 186 Index 191 vii

8 Acknow ledgements Appreciation is gratefully expressed for the opportunity to make use of the following editions of Nietzsche's works: Beyond Good and Evil - Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, translated with a commentary by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, 1966); The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, translated with commentary by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, 1967); Daybreak - Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, introduction by Michael Tanner (Cambridge University Press, 1982); Dithyrambs of Dionysus, Bilingual Edition, translated and introduced by R. J. Hollingdale (Anvil Press Poetry, 1984); The Gay Science, translated with a commentary by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, 1974); On the Genealogy of Morals, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale and Ecce Homo, translated with a commentary by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, 1967); Human, All Too Human - A Book for Free Spirits, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, introduction by Erich Heller (Cambridge University Press, 1986); Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, translated with an introduction by Marianne Cowan (Chicago: A Gateway Edition, Regnery Gateway, 1962); Thus Spoke Zarathustra - A Book for Everyone and No One, translated with an introduction by R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1980); Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, translated with an introduction and commentary by R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1978); Untimely Meditations, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, introduction by J. P. Stern (Cambridge University Press, 1983); The Will to Power, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdak edited with an introduction by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, 1968). Gratitude is also expressed for the opportunity to use the following works: The Complete Works of Aristotle, edited by Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984); Heidegger, Martin, Early Greek Thinking, translated by David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (San Fransisco: Harper & Row, 1984); viii

9 Acknowledgements ix Guthrie, W. K. c., A History of Greek Philosophy, Volumes I and II (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1962 and 1965); The Collected Dialogues of Plato including the Letters, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntingdon Cairns, Bollinger Series LXXI (Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1961), and The Presocratic Philosophers, a critical history by G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven and M. Schofield (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988).

10 Preface In a note of 1875 Nietzsche refers to ''The Struggle between Science and Wisdom exhibited in the ancient Greek Philosophers'. By 'science' (Wissenschaft) he means every form of systematic learning, while by 'wisdom' (Weisheit) he means the activity which the first philosophers distinctively loved. This activity or quality has never been satisfactorily defined. Among the Presocratics it was keenly apprehended but they never thought to delineate it and from about the time of Plato it has scarcely found expression in any cultural form. Whatever this wisdom was, it cannot have been what we think of as sagacity, prudence, reasonableness, or any of the other rough synonyms for wisdom, since it is unthinkable that Heraclitus or Parmenides would have regarded himself in such a way. 'Enlightenment' is the nearest, perhaps, though that is still only a word which does not, moreover, convey anything of the hauteur and sheer audacity of these early thinkers. But Nietzsche, a classical philologist who had given courses on the ancient Greek philosophers, knew what he meant by 'wisdom'. He gained his idea from his studies and concluded that wisdom once essentially took part in a struggle with knowledge. Anyone reading Nietzsche's notes cannot at first be clear what he is driving at, and the groundplan, though far from the whole, of the following chapters is an exposition of his meaning. One thing is clear from Nietzsche's published works: in his view wisdom ought once again to challenge knowledge - honourably and with the respect one shows to a worthy opponent. Long before Nietzsche's assimilation of knowledge to will to power, and no doubt before his youthful reading of Schopenhauer (for otherwise he would not have seized on Schopenhauer so eagerly), he understood knowledge to be other than discovery of the world around us. To that extent he was a Kantian, in effect. But our appreciation of this should not lead us to believe that human beings have always sought or produced knowledge; for knowledge, in Nietzsche's (normal and time-honoured) usage, is not to be identified with learning by imitation. Such learning is utterly natural and biologically necessary, whereas the human race managed perfectly well without knowledge until the sixth century x

11 Preface xi BC Thus the naturalness of knowledge is merely the naturalness of whatever historically develops as opposed to that of biological necessity. True to his genius for psychology, Nietzsche tries to work out what might have suddenly caused the Greeks to cultivate the faculty of knowledge. He is sure this must have been a psychical development, not chiefly the result of material changes. He makes four suggestions as follows: knowledge grows as and when the gods are ceasing to be good; it springs from the egoism of individuals seeking their fortunes (for example, through navigation); it is elaborated as a variety of aristocratic amusement; and finally the urge to know arises in those who, becoming tired of the ebb and flow of popular opinion, want something solid to cling to. These all seem shrewd suggestions but what matters is Nietzsche's assumption that knowledge-seeking originated in something other than the mere desire to know. It is not pure. Nevertheless, the best kind of knowledge, namely psychological knowledge, should take precedence over every other kind because we cannot get ' further back' than psychology. Today we are encouraged to believe, for instance, that physics lies behind everything, or that biology is the fundamental description of life-processes, but to Nietzsche such sciences are psychological data and thus, in turn, part of the source-material for philosophy. The reason for something or other, though it can never be satisfactorily and finally found, should always be hunted in what Nietzsche calls 'proper physio-psychology'. This is true of the reasons offered in modern physics. This field of study is of great importance, but not as the means of disclosing the cosmos to us. Rather it is a means of disciplining our observations and of showing us how, in an old, late stage of human development, our species confronts the extra-human world. At the end of his career Nietzsche confidently demands that 'psychology shall be recognised again as the queen of the sciences, for whose service and preparation the other sciences exist'. He continues by saying that 'psychology is now again the path to the fundamental problems' - which are of course the problems proper to philosophy.! The word 'again' is picked up by Kaufmann in his translation of the work in which they occur, Beyond Good and Evil. He suggests that no one before Nietzsche seems to have regarded psychology as the path to the fundamental problems. But this is to overlook Nietzsche's reading of the Presocratics to the effect that these ancient thinkers referred

12 xii Preface everything back to the human mind or soul. Having very little notion of 'objectivity', they were already on the right lines. Despite Nietzsche's respectful subordination of the departments of knowledge (the sciences) to psychology, he rates 'Knowledge', in another sense of the word, exceedingly highly. Such knowledge is no longer compartmentalised, specialised, authoritative, or even, in the usual way, progressive. It is eclectic, and non-professional. Nietzsche regards life itself as the means to such knowledge (see The Gay Science, No. 324) but, needless to say, such an attitude requires an experimental response to both knowledge and life. Such superior knowledge is, once again, psychological, and is not the sort that once conflicted with wisdom. In the way outlined above, Nietzsche turns knowledge against itself, or one kind of knowledge against another. Knowledge as we commonly use the term ceases to be what it has long pretended to be - certainty or, at least, the route towards certainty - and becomes instead a purely adventurous way of life. Familiar problems now crop up. If knowledge is purely an adventure, it will be used crudely by the crude, childishly by the childish, in general according to people's inclinations. Artists, anyway, have always adapted knowledge to suit their own convenience. Notwithstanding his aversion to such antics, Nietzsche appraises the procedures foreshadowed in the sixth and fifth centuries BC as a grand, creative expedient for perpetuating the species. Seen in this light, knowledge must lose its authority, in the sense that one does not normally bow before one's own creations. And such created items and fields of knowledge can no longer be guided by virtue or the moral law, since these are themselves merely matter of (psychological) investigation. On the face of it, we have arrived at a strictly anarchic position; there seems to be no controlling principle. But this is not so, since Nietzsche proposes another arche, another dominant foundation which was possibly sensed, but not brought to light, before the time of Socrates. This arche is Nietzsche's response to the nihilism which he himself has adumbrated. At present, in the late twentieth century, we are presumably in a phase of transition with reference to this very question of knowledge. Consider the opposed attitudes we adopt according to circumstances. On the one hand, all knowledge is good in being preferable to ignorance and perhaps it is absolutely good in itself. Not to know something one might know can be almost intolerable for one who is not overborne by fear or weariness. On the other

13 Preface xiii hand, some knowledge is bad when it militates against something held to be good (for example, genetic research as against the good of family life). There is, further, the assumption that we already understand what must be good for the human race, specifically cooperation and the elimination of suffering. So whatever we light upon which checks or reverses our advance towards these goods is suspect and conceivably' diabolical'. Such examples emphasise that we are now midway between grasping knowledge as a product of our will and, contrariwise, apprehending it as sovereign over us. For if it is not sovereign, it no longer seems to be 'knowledge'. The crux is this: when knowledge controls us, the ground shifts beneath our feet, but to the extent that we control knowledge, we begin to lose the sense of our own worth. Nietzsche saw the beginnings of this modern development among the Greeks from Thales to Anaxagoras - the buddings of that which has since grown to monstrous proportions. Those were the ones who so estimably started to 'think for themselves'. At first they recognised a need to discover (uncover, by conceptual as opposed to empirical means) the origins of the universe which had hitherto been explained by the myths. The gods, powerful and sublime though they were, evidently could not reason these matters out; the gods controlled the world but could not understand it. Thus for the first time Thales explained cosmic origins, or rather, being a Greek and the first philosopher, he declared the origins to be such and such. How could they be other than what he conceived them to be? At this point it may be as well to insert a brief comment upon the distinction between Nietzsche's psychological interpretation of all creative work (science no less than art) and our contemporary activity of deconstruction. If deconstruction is concerned with what is unobtrusively taking place in a text or other medium, Nietzsche sets out to trace back from the available signs in both the work and the life of the creator, for instance Thales, to an irreducible core which is an individual will. So while the one engaged in deconstruction is liable to end up with fragments or at most an unordered picture, Nietzsche always aims to reach a clear image. We tend to distrust such images; the less clarity, the less falsehood: that is the unacknowledged contemporary prejudice. Conversely, Nietzsche assumes that the will of the creative being is both discoverable and coherent. It is plainly true that whatever will Nietzsche discovers, in

14 xiv Preface Thales for example, is strictly an invention; there can be no external measure of Nietzsche's discovery. We cannot, anyway, postulate a real will in Thales other than the one we hit upon. In certain situations the temptation, therefore, is to allow such ignorance to lead one to refrain so far as possible from the act of positive interpretation which Nietzsche, following Schopenhauer, held to be the very procedure of nature at every level. Nietzsche's own post-kantianism is a decisive step beyond Kant in that Nietzsche was sure not merely of the unknowability of the thing-in-itself but even of its existence. Everything thus becomes a matter of interpretation, not of 'mere' interpretation but of interpretation as a resolute act. Nietzsche's own resolution should cause us, not to stray in the direction of weak nihilism but to find out what his foundation consisted of. On what could such a doubter and psychologist found anything? The aim is to uncover the class of Nietzsche's founding notions and see how this class might hold sway over other people also. What, then, is the measure or the legislator who, for purposes of creation as well as survival (or rather, for survival as creation), provides a base upon which one's creative deeds take place? This legislative force is what it always was, the soul itself, understood, however, in a radically different way from that of Plato. This particular question is considered in Chapter 6, on Ariadne. Nietzsche follows Plato in regarding the soul as immortal, but not in likening its condition to that of the sea god crushed and marred by the waves - not, in other words, as preternaturally pure and unchanging beneath its surface disfigurements. The soul, in Nietzsche, evolves and even (or especially) suffers. As in Plato, the soul still lies above and beyond knowledge. Therefore it cannot be known by the usual procedures of knowledge. Nevertheless it can be intuited and will assume the form of an image. According to Nietzsche, the Socratics started to take the soul seriously, but this was by no means an unambiguously healthy advance in human responses to the world. At the initial stage, taking the soul seriously involved the decadent distinction between the human capacity for questioning and all natural forces other than this capacity. Prior to such Socratic behaviour our rebellious-innovative genius had found its expression in the figure of Prometheus chained by Zeus. But Prometheus was not yet primarily a questioner and of course this agonised Titan had not the slightest notion of a pain-free life. The dialectic as practised by Socrates was indeed understood to

15 Preface xv be a natural force, yet somehow it led or pointed to a sphere beyond nature. It is widely appreciated that Nietzsche's task was to find a way by which human beings might avowedly re-affiliate themselves with the natural world to which they are in any case affiliated. This task required a pincer movement, as it were, on the Western tradition, at least back to Socrates. One arm of the pincers must reappraise knowledge, appreciating the creativity of knowledge (as indeed the quantum theorists are now doing in physics), while the other arm attempts what must surely turn out to be harder, that is, to understand and value the soul afresh. The latter movement makes use of wisdom, or is wisdom, and as such must be in conflict with knowledge of the systematic progressive sort. Another point should perhaps be added, as follows. Despite Nietzsche's attacks on what he scornfully calls 'metaphysics', meaning Platonic metaphysics, the standpoint here and, for that matter, the standpoint from which alone Nietzsche can be interpreted, is metaphysical in the Kantian sense. This means simply but decisively that physis, or nature, obviously cannot be approached by human beings except through meta-physics, or, as Kant puts it, metaphysics is 'a natural disposition of the human mind (metaphysica naturalis).2 Nietzsche retained both a theoretical and a direct, 'unphilosophical' awareness of an infinitely larger, Dionysian reality. It will immediately be seen that to deal philosophically with something held to be unphilosophical (basically unworded) is a major problem, but it need not be a quixotic enterprise. In the argument set out below, and especially in considerations of Heraclitus, we come up against the problem of thought-free understanding (as distinct from mysticism). Will to power is seen as a development from Aristotelian metaphysics, thus itself a metaphysical conception. There is also, incidentally, a tacit belief that the celebrated 'last man' is no more than a grossly inferior metaphysician. On this same metaphysical basis, Nietzsche himself' circles back', as it were, to certain predecessors and contemporaries of Socrates, notably Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles and Democritus. It is not that he does much in the way of interpreting these figures but that he unearths their long-forgotten quality of wisdom. Even so, the quality remains more or less buried for us, and the question behind the following chapters is how it can be resurrected and brought back into a combative relation with knowledge.