Beyond Good and Evil: Preface

Friedrich Nietzsche is presently under appreciated as a giant of intellectualism. Few people even know his name today, even fewer have any idea what he said and almost no one could say what he meant by any of it. Despite the difficulties, or perhaps because of the difficulties, I see no better place to start my explorations than with the text I am most indebted to for bringing me to life. 

The preface begins, in German, “Vorausgesetzt, daß die Wahrheit ein Weib ist-, wie?”¹ Which would literally come to “Provided, that truth is a woman-, how so?”. Now this is clunky nonsense in English and so it is typically rendered “Supposing that Truth is a woman – what then?”. For Nietzsche it is given that Truth is a woman, there is no supposition, it simply is feminine in the German tongue hence the feminine article “die”. This is a pedantic point even for me; however, the purpose of this explanation is to show that we are dealing with a particular world, a 19th century German one, and its aberrant inhabitant, our goat-legged hero. Now I can only ever explore texts with my own eyes, but these eyes have been conditioned by many forces to focus on particular hues and my hope is to draw out as many interesting details in my beloved books as I can. This won’t provide a functional reading or a distillation but a buffet for the indulgent mind.

This entire preface is one of the most dense and dizzying bits of prose to ever enter the Western imagination. It begins by outlining a view of Truth as a woman with various suiters and derides one class of suiters in particular, the dogmatists. The conceptual motivation for viewing Truth as a woman could be seen as part of Nietzsche’s overall project of demystifying our dearest notions. Instead of conceiving of Truth as a god, a product of our divine understanding or some other bit of magic he asks us to view it as the obscene product of our animal sensibilities, the object of a perverse mating ritual. The people that flirt most poorly are those that assume the most about the object of their lust, the ones that sit down their lover and “put her in her place” as opposed to dancing with her. These are the dogmatists that attract Nietzsche’s disgust. Incidentally, these dogmatists are also akin to Lacan’s perverts that see themselves as providing the other with the object of their desire. Now to launch into a full scale investigation of femininity here would be ludicrous, but a few remarks on Nietzsche’s relation to the problem may help us play with the metaphor. His views are very muddled on this topic but I think he generally holds what could be described as the chivalric stance on women, placing them on a pedestal that ultimately debases them by forcing them to either be divine or “subhuman” but never a peer. He says in The Gay Science, “women are doubly innocent” right before saying that their “attribute is willingness” and elsewhere, “The perfect woman is a higher type of humanity than the perfect man, and also something much rarer.”. Perhaps more strikingly in Twilight of the Idols he says “Women are considered deep – why? Because one can never discover any bottom to them. Women are not even shallow.“. This last quote is often taken as signifying a disturbing misogyny that disregards women as uniquely shallow, but I think if you understand Nietzsche then you understand that he doesn’t think anybody has depth just that women are better at producing the illusion of it. This is a long tangent to say that woman, in the case of the Truth metaphor, is likely meant to be the protean and seductive woman that plays games with men but never lets them win because she knows that what they seek isn’t in her but in their own childish folly.² From these few sentences alone we have been given the remarkable view of human beings as coquets insofar as we are philosophers and scientists and failures insofar as we are dogmatists.

We proceed to Nietzsche’s assessment of dogmatism and his hope for its demise. His most positive appraisal of dogmatism is to say that it may merely be a “noble puerilism and tyronism”. These terms are notably more obscure than Nietzsche’s original “Kinderei und Anfängerei” which are only unusual in their declension and not in their root; regardless, this simply means that we can hope that dogmatism was the childish attempt of novices to court Truth. The hope of this is that we can build something greater out of the corpses of these giants, this is possibly a minor allusion to his “revaluation of all values”. He then gives us a fantastic glimpse at his method of genealogy by asking about the obscured origins of these dogmatisms. He begins with the ever dubious “soul superstition”, which as he says, “has not yet ceased doing mischief”. Though he was referring to his own age and culture I can’t help but see this superstition as still being alive well into the 21st century around the world. He variously describes it as the “subject- and ego- superstition” but I would like to add the sovereign individual superstition to this list. Nietzsche would see this idea as an extension of our phylogenetic development, as brambles that we pick up as we traverse and emerge from our wooded history. It is easy to imagine, though difficult to precisely draw out, how this superstition developed and maintained life in the West through Christianity, Platonism, the Cartesian Cogito, enlightenment era notions such as Kant’s transcendental subjectivity or Fichte’s “I”, and lastly through the edifices of liberal democracy and capitalism. The next possible underpinning for dogmatism is some “deception on the part of grammar”, which can also be used to explain the soul superstition. There is a simple argument for this, we naturally develop terms in every language for self-reference, such as “I”, then we logically infer that there must be something coherent we are referring to by this term so we assume a cogent and complete self as a result. Another clear example of this comes in the form of predication where we assume that because we can say something about a thing that must be a property of that thing in some positive sense. We can “see” that this is not a valid inference in relation to color where whenever we say “x is red” we can only say that precisely because x is absorbing every color except for red. This makes things far more complicated than our ready-to-hand grammatical devices make things seem. Lastly he summarizes every possible basis for dogmatism with the simple formula of being produced by “very restricted, very personal, very human – all-too-human facts.”.

He then relates dogmatism to astrology and similar disciplines of the past that fascinated man for far longer than any “true science”. These are things that have been cathected with so much love and content throughout the centuries that lives and gold have been devalued and spent for them. This is the case with all world religions and many systems of philosophy. Nietzsche says “all great things have first to wander about the earth as enormous and awe-inspiring caricatures”, to my mind this provides a dual image of concepts as gods and gods as concepts. Next we get to glance at some of these concepts that have stomped about the earth for so long now as Nietzsche directly references the “dogmatist error” of “Plato’s invention of Pure Spirit and the Good in itself”. This is an obvious mockery of Plato and his philosophy as he saw himself as never inventing anything but merely remembering forms and developing the teachings of Socrates. Plato’s thought is nuanced and varied depending upon where you approach him from, but in the Meno dialogue he repeatedly uses his concept of anamnesis. This is the notion that what is known is merely recollected from a past life or existence of the soul. If we are keeping this aspect of Plato in mind then Nietzsche’s designation of him as an inventor is a slap in the face for the Grecian. Of course the insult doesn’t stop there because Nietzsche doesn’t just claim that Plato invented some books or arguments but that he invented the “Pure Spirit and the Good in itself”, Plato’s highest values. We then get the image of this dogmatism as a nightmare and Nietzsche’s contemporary Europe as being lifted into a “healthier sleep”. He does not want to say that we have here arrived at our destination but, in his typical fashion, pushes the metaphor one step further to say, “we, whose duty is wakefulness itself, are the heirs of all the strength which the struggle against this error has fostered.”. This is indicative of Zarathustra’s method of “untergehen” or “going under”, to climb out of the dream world of Platonic Ideals down to the “lower” world of brutes and bodies. This is further emphasized by his account of this particular dogmatism as an, “inversion of truth, and the denial of perspective”. There could also be an allusion to Schopenhauer read into this as Schopenhauer describes one of his main methods as introspection which Nietzsche may conceptualize as dreaming and oppose to wakefulness. He then describes Plato as suffering from a malady and gives one of the most famous quotes from his entire repertoire, “For Christianity is Platonism for the ‘people’”. There are many ways to qualify this claim, which makes it so brilliant, but the characteristically Nietzschean analysis is the recognition that both Christianity and Platonism invent and invert two worlds, one of semblance and one of truth. This is what he meant by a “denial of perspective”, both weltanshauung say that what we see around us is not what there really is but is just a lower emanation of something more divine. Next is a mildly confusing statement that this, “produced in Europe a magnificent tension of soul”, how could somebody that sees souls as a superstition say something like this? I see this as being the similar to how Buddhists can talk about the self without getting trapped into believing in it. He merely puts the concept to use without looking for the entity.

We have two attempts that were made to reduce the tension from dogmatism, Jesuitism and democratic enlightenment. These are both attempts to broaden perspectives as Jesuitism was the project of Ignatius of Loyola to intermingle Christian denominations and democratic enlightenment is the historical force that created the sovereign individual. This is where we catch one of many whiffs of Nietzsche’s underlying perspectivalism. This is why Nietzsche goes on to say that freedom of the press and newspaper printing might help the spirit feel less frequent distress. People will not need to look towards some beyond to gaze outside of themselves but instead will look to parallel perspectives keeping them from feeling the strain of attempting to comprehend two entirely different worlds. Then comes one of my favorite lines, “The Germans invented gunpowder – all credit to them! but they again made thing square – they invented printing.”, making up for the division created by war with the unity created by the media revolution. Once again Nietzsche goes on to suggest that his crowd isn’t any of the groups he was just discussing but something else, something more obscure, “we good Europeans, and free, very free spirits”. He suggests that here the tension of the bow is still felt and that perhaps they have, “the arrow, the duty, and, who knows? the goal to aim at”. Now in terms of his greater project the arrow may be the revaluation of all values, the duty may be Gerechtigkeit or justice and perhaps the goal is the Übermensch. This would look like launching the debasement of previous values off of their continued success in increasing tension and doing so because one feels the pull of duty. There are more Nietzschean themes that could be brought to bear on this, such as, the will to power and the eternal recurrence of the same, but for the sake of having more to say later I will spare you those analyses for now.

This has been a long winded way of demonstrating that Nietzsche says a lot in a small span of text. I hope to go through the entirety of Beyond Good and Evil and eventually all of his works to cultivate a better understanding of my infuriating friend.

1. I used the Walter Kaufmann translations of Beyond Good and Evil, The Gay Science and Twilight of the Idols for this post. I also used the Kindle edition of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Gesammelte Werke for German quotations. ↩︎
2. There is also an obvious parallel here with Lacan’s thought, particularly his assertion that Truth is ‘pas-tout’, not-all or (w)hole. This aligns Truth with Lacan’s notion of woman. ↩︎