Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy

by Maudemarie Clark

Book Overview

Friedrich Nietzsche haunts the modern world. His elusive writings with their characteristic combination of trenchant analysis of the modern predicament and suggestive but ambiguous proposals for dealing with it have fascinated generations of artists, scholars, critics, philosophers, and ordinary readers. Maudemarie Clark's highly original study gives a lucid and penetrating analytical account of all the central topics of Nietzsche's epistemology and...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0521348501
• ISBN13: 9780521348508
• Release Date: February 1991
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 316 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

A book whose failings are as provocative as it's successes

I began this book with no small trepidation. I am not generally fond of Nietzsche, but have recently felt that he at least deserved to be engaged with systematically. I have been reading his works and I picked up this book on an off chance, knowing little about it except that Clark sought to systematically present Nietzsche as an anti-metaphysical author. And in doing this, she highlights his strengths and weaknesses.I appreciate her sophisticated rebuttal of much current and past Nietzsche scholarship, especially the mis-reading of him by the so-called 'post-structuralists'/'deconstructionists'. Her critique of their absolute relativism, and Nietzsche's eventual rejection of that in favor of a radical perspectivism, which at bottom is founded on a kind of neo-Kantianism, won me over to the value of the book. And that kind of thing is necessary when you slog through the first two chapters, which may be necessary, but which are also ponderous.The failure I find most interesting, however, ultimately undermines her own argument and releases Nietzsche from any kind of coherence in relation to truth. She basically premises her reading of Nietzsche at a key point contra Magnus on the question of whether Nietzsche is arguing against 'truth as the whole'. She argues that he is not and that Nietzsche was familiar with no philosopher who would have argued as such. It is here that I must reject her argument, for Hegel very much championed this notion of 'truth is the whole' and Nietzsche seems, contrary to Clark's otherwise well-thought out scholarship, not only familiar with Hegel, but also in debate with Hegel throughout much of his work. Hegel is the hidden text to Nietzsche as Aristotle is the hidden text to Hegel's Philosophy of Right.In recognizing this, not only does Clark's reading of Nietzsche unravel, but, IMO since Clark is largely right in her reading of Nietzsche as a neo-Kantian, Nietzsche unravels.Now, Nietzsche was infamously hostile to 'the craving for consistency' as a mark of the weak person, so the Nietzscheans out there will have a back door through which to escape. But that is their problem.Secondarily, I think that this unraveling causes problems for Clark's argument that Will to Power and Eternal Recurrence are non-metaphysical, or at least consistently so. However, I appreciate the thoughtfulness of the argument, even when she is obliged to engage in gymanastics to sustain it.Finally, this work really convinced me that the appropriation of Nietzsche by Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, etc. is not based upon Nietzsche's philosophical heritage, since they stop at his earliest work and effectively gloss over the rest of what Nietzsche writes. Rather, Nietzsche provides a radical re-affirmation of the role of intellectuals as privileged specialists. But Guy Debord knew the value of such people better than most, and the obnoxious politics which follow from such self-glamorization of the would-be revaluers of values.

Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy by Maudemarie Clark

This is possibly the best overall book ever written about Nietzsche. Several others have brilliant insights such as Martin Heidegger's Nietzsche which gives a powerful interpretation of art as the only purpose and meaning of life, and debunks the pseudo-concept of the 'superman' as the modern CEO of world technology, but completely misses Nietzsche's joke, which Clark does not, about the 'will to power' especially as a cosmological doctrine (something he toyed with seriously ONLY in the notebooks for years). Maudemarie Clark shows he made it into a trick upon the reader (amongst many!) in BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL (pp.218-227, esp.221-2, of her book). She starts her book by destroying the French deconstructionist 'irrationalist' version of Nietzsche by demonstrating that he dropped this irrationalism early starting with HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN (originally dedicated to Voltaire), and coming to a completely rational stance in THE GENEOLOGY OF MORALS. She makes the brilliantly obvious point (so obvious it makes you feel stupid, but definitely goes against the major trend of Nietzsche interpretation)that THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA was a novel, not a philosophical treatise or religious tract. Walter Kaufman implicitely made this same point by comparing it to ULYSSES and FINNEGAN'S WAKE. This essentially puts a logical question mark on 'eternal recurrence', 'will to power', and the 'superman' as distinct philosophical ideas and actually makes them literary concepts, a distinction postmodernists may entirely miss. She also, after having undermined most American commentators -- NOT Walter Kaufman --on Nietzsche by destroying the basic tenant of the French through applying the unimpeacheable arguments against scepticism and cynicism (essentially, as the Cretan philosopher said, "All Cretans are liars", one must step somehow into a higher order of reality for that to be judged true or false)against Nehamas'perspectivism and Danto's, Schacht's, and Rorty's ultimately meaningless relativism. Nietzsche was in no way a relativist. But one must apprize from that something very different Hegel's systematic absolutism. He knew the validity of reason and reality as an absolutely alone individual (singulare tantum)very much like Heidegger. Maudemarie Clark has essentially brought Nietzsche back into the question mark he deliberately placed himself. But it is a meaningful question that is rational. Maudemarie Clark makes part of this point explicitely clear when she states that on the one hand Neitszche says he is an immoralist and 'means' it, but on the other hand quotes him as saying, "Honesty is the only virtue". Honesty presupposes consistency. Consistency presupposes rationality. To end on an interesting sidenote Ayn Rand also went through a similar evolution to Nietzsche's. In her first edition of WE THE LIVING she preaches a populist version of Nietzsche's 'immoralism', then renounces him later on as an irrationalist when she takes