Reading Dangerously
In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche writes: “Whoever thinks words is an orator, not a thinker; he betrays that he does not think things, but only in respect of things.” You could say that Nietzsche is tracking his nemesis, Hegel: evoking thought that enters into the content, that refuses to stand outside it. There’s a little comedy here, because Nietzsche is a consummate orator: he’s out for conquest, with no rhetorical holds barred. But it raises a question: How best to read Nietzsche, and by implication, how best to read?
There’s a mode (more English than Continental) of “critical” reading that never soils itself with too much intimacy with the content. A steady and cautious distance is certain prophylactic against seduction. We stand with our inspector’s clipboard, checking the boxes: agree, disagree… Philosophy is reduced to a marketplace of opinions, a small court of claims and counter claims.
A different way of reading would be to risk falling so deep into the material we might never get out. To become another’s thought, as a novelist must become the protagonist (and all the other characters, too.) Or, to continue the literary analogy, to suspend our disbelief, as we are invited to in the theater or cinema. It strikes me that Nietzsche himself, for all the apparent pugilism, actually enters deeply into what he most abhors, so deeply that he actually fails, at a critical juncture, to extricate himself. The “ascetic ideal” represents everything he opposes, but his determination to get to the nub of it leads him to find himself an embodiment of that ideal (I refer to the section on the philosopher’s asceticism, which is surely pure self-description.)
I happen to “disagree” with Nietzsche on some quite fundamental “claims.” But I find my disagreement less interesting than my experience of Nietzsche, or my participation in Nietzsche’s own experience, such as he presents it.
What is that experience? The least compelling element is Nietzsche’s contrarianism, the impulse to shock, to reverse expectations. More absorbing is his historical sensibility, an experience of history as a series of masks (one might say: the present is always a lie about the past…). Also the philological sensitivity, awake to the historical load carried by every word we use. And then there’s a naked hunger for truthfulness. Not “truth” — the notorious object of Nietzsche’s skepticism, but an instincitve revulsion against phoniness, timidity, papering over. Lastly, for me, there’s Nietzsche’s energetics, embracing vitality as the ultimate arbiter — partly a propagandist construct or romantic gesture, but not only that. To my ear, there’s an authentic vigor in this writing which is intrinsic to its philosophical value.
I’m willing to risk falling a long way into Nietzsche’s thought, and while I’m not persuaded by many of its “positions”, I am find myself altered by the reading of it.