Polytropy

Sent out as an email, this post was called “Notes from Therapy,” because that’s actually where I live, most of the year: Tarabya in Turkish, Therapeia in Greek. Supposedly the name used to be Pharmakeia, because Medea the sorceress left a store of drugs here. There’s an herb shop here today, down near the marina, where I may buy things like black mustard seeds, honey, or poppy seed paste.

In his note on the phrase “blond beast” in § 11 of the First Essay of Genealogy, Kaufmann remarks,

Francis Golffing, in his free translation of the Genealogy, deletes the blond beast three times out of four; only where it appears the second time in the original text, he has “the blond Teutonic beast.” This helps to corroborate the myth that the blondness refers to the Teutons.

I infer that, if Nietzsche is misunderstood, the fault could be the translator’s. It could also be our fault, at least according to our author, since he starts the last section (§ 8) of his Preface by saying,

If this book is incomprehensible to anyone and jars on his ears, the fault, it seems to me, is not necessarily mine. It is clear enough, assuming, as I do assume, that one has first read my earlier writings and has not spared some trouble in doing so: for they are, indeed, not easy to penetrate.

I don’t know, Fred, perhaps a good writer would not need his readers to have read all of his other books. Is it our fault if you are not that writer?

We are assuming that you have something to tell us, and we are undertaking to figure out what it is. Are we nonetheless among those people whom your translator refers to as “the kind of reader and nonreader he [i.e. you, Nietzsche] despised”? This is in § 3 of Kaufmann’s own Editor’s Introduction to Genealogy.

At St John’s College in 1987, we read selections from The Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil, and Thus Spake Zarathustra. We discussed them for five seminars, at the rate of two seminars a week, except there was a break of three weeks in the middle for senior essay preparation. I’m reading this from the schedule I kept. I have almost no memory of reading or talking about Nietzsche in those days.

We had no lectures about what we were reading. I like to think we avoided some of what Kaufmann seems to be talking about, in the paragraph before the words of his that I just quoted:

As long as one knows about existentialism, one can talk about a large number of authors without having actually read their books.

Nietzsche diagnosed this disease in its early stages, long before it had reached its present proportions – yet wrote in a manner that insured his being misunderstood by the kind of reader and nonreader he despised. Why? He gave reasons more than once …

Kaufmann seems to do a lot of apologizing for the writer he is translating. Regarding the “blond beast,” that’s great if Nietzsche is alluding to a lion’s hair color, not a human’s. Is he doing the same in § 5 of that First Essay, when he says that the Celts “were definitely a blond race”? Does he mean only that they were leonine in spirit? He sure seems to be talking about human physiology:

The Celts, by the way, were definitely a blond race; it is wrong to associate traces of an essentially dark-haired people which appear on the more careful ethnographical maps of Germany with any sort of Celtic origin or blood-mixture, as Virchow still does: it is rather the pre-Aryan people of Germany who emerge in these places. (The same is true of virtually all Europe: the suppressed race has gradually recovered the upper hand again, in coloring, shortness of skull, perhaps even in the intellectual and social instincts: who can say whether modern democracy, even more modern anarchism and especially that inclination for “commune,” for the most primitive form of society, which is now shared by all the socialists of Europe, does not signify in the main a tremendous counterattack – and that the conqueror and master race, the Aryan, is not succumbing physiologically, too?

He talks about physiology too in the Note at the end of the First Essay:

I suggest the following question: it deserves the attention of philologists and historians as well as that of professional philosophers:

“What light does linguistics, and especially the study of etymology, throw on the history of the evolution of moral concepts?”

On the other hand, it is equally necessary to engage the interest of physiologists and doctors in these problems (of the value of existing evaluations) …

To me it is obvious that morality has nothing to do with physiology. Like any of us, physiologists need a morality to function properly (for example, No plagiarism, No fabrication of results); however, this morality is not an object of study of physiology as such.

Perhaps that is not obvious, but is rather axiomatic – or self-evident, as in what Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1776:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights …

I have heard this called a Noble Lie. I would say the Catherine Project respects a kind of equality – an analogue of equality before the law – in its Core Principles:

Anyone may study with us who wishes to learn and who has the basic skills necessary for serious reading and conversation … Excepting our subject tutorials, all of our courses are conducted by open-ended conversation. Readers are not directed toward particular conclusions, but are encouraged to bring their own live questions.

Martha Nussbaum wrote in “Inheriting Socrates” (The Point, January 3, 2010), concerning the person in her title (emphasis mine),

He questions everything, and he accepts only what survives reason’s demand for consistency, for clear definitions and for cogent explanations. This also means that Socrates and his interlocutor are equals: the fact that he is a philosopher gives him no special claim, no authority.

Nussbaum is writing about a documentary (featuring herself and others) that gives a misleading picture of philosophy, except:

One post-Enlightenment continental tradition does indeed portray the philosopher as a lonely thinker of profound thoughts. I’d mention Nietzsche and Heidegger as two sources of this view, which seems to animate the film. (Both, not coincidentally, preferred the pre-Socratic philosophers to Socrates.)

Meanwhile, it occurs to me that Nietzsche may have agreed with William Blake, who says at the bottom of plate 24 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,

One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression

I may suffer from the “democratic prejudice” mentioned by Nietzsche in § 4 of the First Essay:

The signpost to the right road was for me the question: what was the real etymological significance of the designations for “good” coined in the various languages? I found they all led back to the same conceptual transformation – that everywhere “noble,” “aristocratic” in the social sense, is the basic concept from which “good” in the sense of “with aristocratic soul,” “noble,” “with a soul of a high order,” “with a privileged soul” necessarily developed …

With regard to a moral genealogy this seems to me a fundamental insight; that it has been arrived at so late is the fault of the retarding influence exercised by the democratic prejudice in the modern world toward all questions of origin. And this is so even in the apparently quite objective domain of natural science and physiology, as I shall merely hint here.

Now we are back to physiology. Maybe it is all a joke. I mean that seriously. As there is Socratic irony, so presumably there is Nietzschean.

Meanwhile, if Nietzsche is going to expect his readers to have read other books, I wish they were Plato’s. It seems to me as if Nietzsche advocates what Thrasymachus espouses in Book I of the Republic: that justice is the advantage of the stronger. Socrates induces Thrasymachus to reconsider, but perhaps Nietzsche could have put up a better fight.

The Republic proposes a way to perfect humanity. It starts with getting rid of everybody over the age of ten. That’s in Book VII (540e–1a), just after Socrates suggests (as he has in Book V, at 473c–d, and Book VI, 499b–c) that his city in speech can be actualized, if philosophers will rule. Obviously that means the whole proposal is a joke, right? Unfortunately many people seem to have taken it seriously: people like the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, or the revolutionaries in Iran. I don’t know whether Pol Pot read Plato, but apparently this reading was done by the man who became Supreme Leader of Iran after the revolution; for, according to his 1989 obituary in The Washington Post,

Khomeini became an authority on Islamic law, but he also delved into Islamic mysticism, and his fascination with Western philosophy led him to claim that Plato’s “Republic” was part of his model for an Islamic republic.

Perhaps that doesn’t mean the regime in Iran is Plato’s fault.

Nietzsche writes in § 16 of the First Essay,

The Jews, on the contrary, were the priestly nation of ressentiment par excellence, in whom there dwelt an unequaled popular-moral genius: one only has to compare similarly gifted nations – the Chinese or the Germans, for instance – with the Jews, to sense which is of the first and which of the fifth rank.

Again, Kaufmann has to explain in a footnote:

Having said things that can easily be misconstrued as grist to the mill of the German anti-Semites, Nietzsche goes out of his way, as usual, to express his admiration for the Jews and his disdain for the Germans.

First of all, what about the Jewish Germans? Kaufmann was one, as he shows at the head of his essay, “The Faith of a Heretic” (Harper’s, February, 1959; you can also get the pdf file through a “website … for people who love Kaufmann,” or in html format as prepared by me):

WHEN I was eleven, I asked my father: “What really is the Holy Ghost?” The articles of faith taught us in school – in Berlin, Germany – affirmed belief in God, Christ, and the Holy Ghost, and I explained to my father: “I don’t believe that Jesus was God, and if I can’t believe in the Holy Ghost either, then I am really not a Christian.”

At twelve, I formally left the Protestant church to become a Jew. Having never heard of Uni­tarianism, I assumed that the religion for people who believed in God, but not in Christ or the Holy Ghost, was Judaism.

A few months after my conversation with my father, but before I left the church, Hitler came to power. Warned of the persecution that my decision might entail, I replied that one certainly could not change one’s mind for a reason like that. I did not realize until a little later that all four of my grandparents had been Jewish; and none of us knew that this, and not one’s own religion, would be decisive from the Nazis’ point of view. My decision had been made inde­pendently of my descent and of Nazism, on re­ligious grounds.

I took my new religion very seriously, explored it with enormous curiosity and growing love, and gradually became more and more orthodox. When I arrived in the United States in January 1939, I was planning to become a rabbi. A lot of things happened to me that winter, spring, and summer; and when the war broke out I had what, but for its contents, few would hesitate to call a mystical experience. In the most intense despair I suddenly saw that I had deceived myself for years: I had believed. At last the God of tradi­tion joined the Holy Ghost and Christ.

I wonder whether Kaufmann feels ressentiment for how Christianity and Judaism misled him in youth.

As for the comments of Nietzsche last quoted, were they expressing admiration for Jews, or suspicion? He has said in § 7,

The truly great haters in world history have always been priests; likewise the most ingenious haters: other kinds of spirit hardly come into consideration when compared with the spirit of priestly vengefulness.

I have figured he is talking about Jews here too. He could also be talking about himself.

There is Christian anti-Semitism, which can take inspiration from such Biblical sources as Matthew 27:

24 When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it.
25 Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.

Nietzsche seems to promote an anti-Christian anti-Semitism, whereby world domination through Christianity was all part of the clever plan of those Jews whom Pilate addressed.

Again in § 3 of the Editor’s Introduction, Kaufmann says,

There are many reasons for Nietzsche’s being one of the great scapegoats of all time. During World War I British intellectuals found it convenient to contribute to the war effort by denouncing a German intellectual of stature whom one could discuss in print without losing a lot of time reading him – and Nietzsche had said many nasty things about the British. Henceforth Nietzsche was a marked man, and World War II contributed its share to this type of disgraceful literature.

Was it disgraceful then, what R. G. Collingwood wrote in The New Leviathan in 1942? The book was Collingwood’s dying contribution to the fight against fascism, and it can continue to be a contribution (there was a revised edition in 1992):

12.4. Nietzsche, Germanically confusing a question of moral science with one of national hatred, expressed his opinion of utilitarianism by saying that no man wants to be happy; only Englishmen want to be happy; what a man wants is not happiness but power.

12.41. At Trafalgar and Waterloo Englishmen replied to the taunt ‘nation of shopkeepers’ by destroying the worshipper of force who had flung it in their teeth.

Evidently that worshipper of force was Napoleon, an example of the tyrant who comes to power in a democracy – as Shorey proposes in the old 1935 edition of the Republic in the Loeb Classical Library. Collingwood continues:

12.42. They may yet live down the more pitiful taunt of what his schoolfellows called ‘The Little Parson’.

So that’s Nietzsche. Again, when he said, “The truly great haters in world history have always been priests,” maybe he meant himself.

Before the paragraphs just quoted, Collingwood said,

12.37. John Stuart Mill tried to define happiness in terms of pleasure. ‘By happiness’, he says, ‘is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain and the privation of pleasure.’

12.38. The wording is odd. ‘Intended’ by whom? As the context shows, not by English-speakers but by the sect maintaining the ‘creed’ and talking the esoteric jargon of Benthamite utilitarianism.

12.39. Mill was not describing what the words in correct English actually mean; he was stating a theory in which that idea was reduced, careless of what was lost in the process, to terms of feeling.

If Mill was careless, so was Nietzsche, it seems to me, in reducing the idea of Christianity to a feeling – again, the feeling he calls ressentiment, apparently for lack of a German word.

It so happens that my wife and I have been reading the hundred tales of Boccaccio’s Decameron, one a day, and we are almost finished. A speech in the 92nd story seems relevant; here it is, in the translation of Guido Waldman (Oxford World’s Classics):

My lord abbot, if Ghino di Tacco has been forced to become a highwayman and an enemy to the court of Rome in order to safeguard his life and his prestige, he should have you know that it is not an evil disposition that has led him to it but his being a man of high birth and few means, driven from his home and faced with many powerful enemies. I, sir, am Ghino di Tacco. However, as you appear to me to be an upright man, and as I have cured you of your stomach complaint, I do not propose to treat you as I should treat anyone else falling into my hands, plundering his possessions at will …

It is only being a good man, in Nietzsche’s etymological sense, has led Ghino to do what are conventionally bad things. The abbot asks the Pope to pardon him.

In Boccaccio’s next story, a wealthy generous man is resentful that his neighbor, similarly wealthy, is even more generous. In Nietzschean fashion, we may note that the etymological meaning of “generous” is “nobly born”! However, the word that Waldman translates as “generosity” seems to be liberalità:

in Cathay there was once upon a time a man of noble stock and incomparable wealth called Nathan … He was of a generous, lavish disposition (avendo l’animo grande e liberale) … He reached a ripe old age, never wearying in his lavish hospitality, and eventually his fame reached the ears of a young man called Mithridanes.

Now Mithridanes, who lived no great distance away, recognized that he was quite as wealthy as Nathan and became jealous of Nathan’s reputation and sheer goodness; he determined to obliterate or at any rate overshadow such munificence by outdoing it.

As he couldn’t outdo it, he resolved to kill Nathan, who was then ready to commit the ultimate act of generosity – like Socrates and Jesus, I’ll suggest, though the story mentions neither.

How does that fit in Nietzsche’s scheme?

Regarding difficulties of interpretation, I want finally to note what David Bolotin says in Lecture 1 of On Plato’s Republic: The 1988 Lecture Notes (Toronto: Political Animal Press, 2026):

Cicero in his Republic (II.53) claimed, in a famous passage echoed by Thomas More at the end of his Utopia, that the Republic is not meant to present a possible best regime, but rather to show the nature, or the limits, of all justice.

I’m not sure about the reference to Cicero. In the Project Gutenberg version, I found this in II.XXX:

Plato described a state more to be desired, than to be hoped for upon the smallest scale. He did not constitute things as they might exist, but in such a manner as the nature of civil affairs might be considered.

The same passage from Book II is numbered also as 52 at Attalus. I don’t know what the Utopian passage is. In any case, Bolotin continues:

According to this view of the Republic, it is meant – appearances to the contrary – as an antidote to political idealism. Now, as some of you know, this is also the interpretation of Mr. Strauss and of those of his students, including myself, who share his opinion on this key point … Mr. Strauss’s position (and Cicero’s, etc.) implies that Plato was willing to deceive the bulk of his readers, i.e. that he didn’t think well enough of his average reader to want to share his thoughts with him. In other words, this interpretation of the Republic challenges the belief in human equality even more sharply than the obvious teaching of the dialogue itself …

… my opinion suffers from being the sophisticated opinion, the one that goes counter to Socrates’ own most explicit claims, his claims, namely, that the regime of the Republic is possible for human beings.

Mr Bolotin had been my tutor for senior laboratory at St John’s College in Santa Fe. He once recalled a time in his life when he wanted to do nothing but read Nietzsche, and it would have been the worst thing he could have done. At least, I recalled his saying this. When I asked him about it in the winter of 2016, he replied carefully:

I may have said that I once wanted to do nothing but read Nietzsche but that it would have been the worst thing in the world for me if I had done so. I certainly used to be enamored of reading Nietzsche, but if I made the remark that you remember, I was exaggerating, since I don’t think I ever wanted to do nothing else but read him, or even to read no one else but him. Though it’s true, I’m glad that I never did this.

Such words give me some motivation to see what the appeal of Nietzsche is.

I reread the Republic after the 2016 attempt at a coup d’état here in Turkey; I wanted to remind myself of the account by Plato’s Socrates of the degeneration of the state. It has perhaps been more fruitful to read the Republic yet again with others, in Catherine Project groups.

In reading Plato or Nietzsche or anybody else, perhaps the important question is not so much what they said as what they ought to be saying, as far as we can tell. Perhaps Strauss would disapprove of my attitude. My tutor wrote me also,

I have read Collingwood’s Autobiography and his The Idea of History, and I admire both books, especially the former. I agree with you that his thought is far superior to what prevailed, and what still prevails, in Anglo-American philosophy departments. Indeed, I think that it is the best expression of historicism ever written in English. But I do not ultimately think it is adequate, for reasons which are well expressed in my teacher Strauss’ review of The Idea of History, which appeared in the Review of Metaphysics in 1952 … To put my disagreement simply, I don’t think that Collingwood was enough of an “absolutist” about the possibility of trans-historical understanding …

Regarding Collingwood at least (I haven’t read Bernard Williams), I think I can agree with my friend James Connelly, who with Guiseppina D’Oro writes as follows – it has nothing in particular to do with Nietzsche, but it will wrap up the topic of the difficulty of interpretation:

This chapter explores Bernard Williams’s and R. G. Collingwood’s conception of what it takes to understand the past from a humanistic perspective and their commitment to the irreducibility of humanistic to scientific knowledge. It argues that their defence of humanistic understanding against the threat of scientism aimed to overcome the hegemony of scientific knowledge without endorsing a form of historicism that commits the reverse error of reducing all knowledge to humanistic knowledge. Unfortunately, their attempts to navigate the straits of scientism (the philosophical commitment to the view that all knowledge is at bottom scientific knowledge), and of historicism (the converse view that all knowledge is at bottom historical knowledge), were misunderstood: Williams was accused of identifying scientific knowledge with an ‘absolute’ conception of reality, while Collingwood was charged with relativizing all knowledge, including scientific knowledge. Their philosophical contribution lies precisely in outlining a path between scientism and historicism.

That’s from a draft of “The Sense of the Past: Williams and Collingwood on Humanistic and Scientific Knowledge”; Connelly gave a talk about it here in Istanbul in April.

Cheers, David