Babette E. Babich
Although Nietzsche’s role in contemporary hermeneutics tends on balance to be neglected, it is very nearly omnipresent. Nietzsche’s importance for the development of twentieth-century hermeneutics can be traced through Martin Heidegger as well as Hans-Georg Gadamer1 in addition, quite famously, to Paul Ricoeur’s nomination of Nietzsche, alongside Marx and Freud, as a “master of suspicion,”2 precisely posed in the context of Nietzsche’s unmasking of the text and its truths, and is thus both patent and political.3 To the well-known constellation of power and truth, more properly associated with Foucault,4 there must also be added a review of the relationship in Ricoeur’s reading between Freud and Nietzsche as indeed, so the argument can be made, between Nietzsche and Lacan.5 To these names we should add Gianni Vattimo,6 who explicitly undertakes to include Nietzsche within contemporary hermeneutics7 as well as Werner Hamacher,8 not to mention Jacob Taubes,9 Eugen Biser,10 Johann Figl writing both with Werner Stegmaier and in his own voice,11 along with a co-authored study with Jörg Salaquarda (1987, 490–497), in addition to Günter Figal (2000, 1–11), among others.12
For Nietzsche himself, hermeneutics frames his formation as a classical philologist—an archetypically hermeneutic discipline Nietzsche shared with Gadamer. Indeed, Nietzsche’s first academic lecture proclaims the hermeneutic side of classical philology, arguing (in a reversal of Seneca’s claim for the primacy of literary philology, namely, that philosophy should be attuned to philology) for the primacy of philosophy in philology, writing: “philosophia facta est quae philologia fuit” [What was philology has now been made into philosophy] (Nietzsche 1994 [1869]), 305), and thereby invoking a philosophical hermeneutics of classical philology’s historical textual tradition.13 In addition, of course, to Friedrich August Wolf, who is famously said to have “invented” philology,14 Nietzsche’s philological background drew upon Auguste Boeckh’s hermeneutics, including Boeck’s invention of the so-called hermeneutic circle in addition to concerns of method.15
Between the further influences of his own teachers, Otto Jahn and Friedrich Ritschl, it is clear that the broad range of what we today call hermeneutics is central to Nietzsche’s late nineteenth-century world.16 Nietzsche’s classical textual work in philology centered on the second-century Diogenes Laertius in addition to his path-breaking work on rhythm and meter.17 Nietzsche’s own study of Diogenes Laertius18 along with his discussion of the “contest” between Homer and Hesiod,19 which would have grown into a doctoral dissertation, had he needed to write one (as he in fact did not), was elaborated in the exact doxographical context that would be established by Hermann Diels’ Doxographi Graeci, setting Nietzsche’s approach within the specific context of Ritschl’s comparative textual approach to philology.20 In a hermeneutic context, the relevance of Nietzsche’s formation and its productivity is striking. Hence, Jaap Mansfeld and David Runia, in a context clarifying the broader meaning of “synoptic” (including a reference to Calvin), note that Diels knew Nietzsche’s work and they call attention to Nietzsche’s sophisticated “use of the Lachmannian stemmatic method,”21 pointing out that “as young student at Bonn [Nietzsche] had become acquainted with the latest developments in New Testament criticism.”22 If it is important to add that Nietzsche was originally to have worked with Diels, as Nietzsche’s work on Diogenes Laertius made him a likely candidate for the project, Nietzsche’s own life-trajectory took him in different ways. Here, it should be noted that the Lachmannian method goes far beyond biblical hermeneutics, as the present author has elsewhere explored,23 as it also plays a role in scientific classification. Hence Darwin himself refers to language and thereby to this method in order to illustrate his view of the evolutionary classification or origin of species, and in this same context of language and classification, Nietzsche refers to Darwin (1864, 367) in his own notes. For historians of science, the study of language turns out to provide the muster for cladistics (a branched system of phylogenetic groupings in evolutionary biology),24 and in this spirit the historian, Carlo Ginzberg (2004, 537–556), explores the parallel metaphor of “family resemblances”/“family trees.”
As Nietzsche observes, “Philology is part natural science, part history, part art, in the end, method. Art inasmuch as it aspires to a clarified comprehension of antiquity.”25 But given this comprehensive tripartite ambition, Nietzsche goes on to offer a hermeneutic reading of classical philology beyond what he calls the mechanical or “automatic” notion of history,26 including a sustained discussion of the “natural scientific elements” in philology, complete with a reference to Darwin in this unpublished listing:
In addition, Nietzsche offers a discussion of the interpretive logic of questioning, anticipating Heidegger’s own hermeneutic reflection on questioning in Being and Time (Heidegger 1962), but which in Nietzsche emphasizes a reflection on whether one is disposed to raising questions as such or is disposed, by contrast, to answering them instead,28 emphasizing that it would behoove the scholar “not merely to give answers but to pose the questions”29 such that others might be drawn to see that “there is here a question: we would like an answer.”30 The problem, however, and this is also the negative hermeneutic tendency that some find disquieting in Nietzsche, is that, as Nietzsche himself observes: “By nature, the art of questioning well is much rarer than the art of answering well.”31 The same Nietzsche who makes this claim also insists that “the will to truth requires a critique” and indeed that “the value of truth must for once be experimentally called into question” (Nietzsche 1969, 153).
What Nietzsche calls his “experiment” with truth is, of course, directly related to what Ricoeur calls “suspicion.” And this is Nietzsche’s hermeneutics of hermeneutics as it were. To this extent, Nietzsche’s own hermeneutic practice, a patently “double hermeneutics,” cuts between two different approaches to hermeneutics. The more truth-convicted or -convinced approach, as it were, seeks the “thing,” the “Sache,” of the text itself, whether the text is the Bible, or, in the case of legal hermeneutics, a constitution or a contract. Ricoeur is closer to this truth-convinced approach, whereas the Heideggerian Gadamer’s hermeneutics,32 with his insistence that to understand is always to understand otherwise, is a more creative, arguably more “Protestant” (despite Ricoeur’s own religious orientation as confessionally protestant himself) hermeneutics, and in this continuum Nietzsche is more radical still. Thus, in an aphorism in his Beyond Good and Evil, speaking of the French Revolution (and so the traditional heart of the matter) and alluding to Kant’s What is Enlightenment as well as to Hegel, Nietzsche (1967, 49) contends that the thing itself, the text itself, finally “disappears beneath the interpretation.” Nietzsche is not speaking metaphorically in this context, and indeed in an earlier aphorism he had accused “the physicists” themselves of “bad philology,” lacking hermeneutic sensibility, meaning thereby a failure to distinguish between interpretation, that is, the framework we impose upon the object of study, in the case of the natural sciences the object of natural science qua scientific object or phenomenon, and the object qua thing in itself. From such a perspective, Nietzsche raises the question of the sheer applicability of our categories at all, especially the notion of “nature’s conformity to law,” which very notion, as he argues, is not read out of nature but dragged in, imposed, as it were, on the basis of the physicist’s own scientific “interpretation and philology,” which means that it is a non-reflected hermeneutic and “not a fact, not a ‘ text,’ but rather only a naïve humanitarian adjustment and distortion of meaning by which you go more than halfway to meet the democratic instincts of the modern soul.”33
Declaring that “nature’s conformity to law” is no fact, Nietzsche challenges nothing less than the very dogmatic possibility of scientific progress. Thus, he opposes the truth-convicted, and hence logically circular, tendency inherent in science to proclaim that it “has” the truth in favor of the enlightened possibility that one might well read “of the same nature”—nota bene: saving the phenomena all the way down and all the way up to the heights of contemporary physics—a scientific world schema with all the necessity and calculability one would wish on the basis of the strongest empirical contingency, “not because laws prevail in it but because laws are absolutely lacking and every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment.”34 In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche goes on to criticize the ultimate tendency of the interpreter (and there is already a trace of this argument in his inaugural lecture in Basel) simply to “discover in things only that which he put into them.”35 Nietzsche thus meant the observation that he makes “against positivism,” which was, of course, the most contemporary philosophical and scientific trend of his day, and its attempt to “stop at phenomena” with the cry as well known in Nietzsche as the same claim is to this day, “‘there are only facts’,” to which Nietzsche responded, “No, exactly facts are nonexistent [giebt es nicht], only interpretations.”36 Where some scholars, especially those interested in Nietzsche and science or indeed Nietzsche and truth are inclined to wave away the point, Nietzsche says: “We cannot establish anything like a fact, in itself: perhaps it is nonsense to seek to do so.”37
Much of this insight derived from Nietzsche’s knowledge of the psychology of sensations, a cognitive discipline as popular in his day as in ours, invoking the illusory experience (shades of Descartes’ putative automata) of “mistaking” a tree for a child.38 But for Nietzsche, the hermeneutic element was constantly at stake, and he drew upon his own philological orientation to reflect that “understanding is an astoundingly fast reciprocal fantasy and conjecture: from two words we take the sentence (in reading): from a vowel and 2 consonants a word in listening, indeed many words we fail to hear yet imagine having heard them.”39 For the philologist Nietzsche—and he could have been speaking to his Homer experts—“I would hazard to say, that we see only what we know.”40 Yet Nietzsche takes the prejudices he bluntly describes as consequent on what he called our “habituation to lying,”41 to the quite sociable level of what we imagine our conversation partners as saying as well as with respect to the impact we likewise fantasize ourselves as having on them. Famously nearsighted, Nietzsche uses a personally hermeneutic phenomenological reflection to make this point:
In a lively conversation I at times see the face of the person with whom I am speaking so clearly and subtly determined by the thought he is expressing or which I believe has been called up in him that this degree of clarity for me far surpasses the power of my eyesight—so that the play of the muscles and the expression of the eyes must have been invented by me. Probably the person was making a quite different face or none whatever.42
It is in this inexorably interpretive or radically hermeneutic sense that Nietzsche is the paramount thinker of the relation between the text or nature or object of perception and the interpretive incursions of interpretation along with language and metaphor.43 This means that Nietzsche’s hermeneutics is inherently doubled, inherently reflexive, and to this extent it is arguably Nietzsche who inspires Martin Heidegger’s hermeneutic transformation of phenomenology44 as it also inspires Max Scheler’s hermeneutic interpretation of sociality and obligation (or what called Nietzsche ressentiment) in social philosophical theory (Scheler 1994). There is also a further connection, well afield of Scheler, in Nietzsche’s reflection on the nature of kinship, friendship, and the gift as this inspired the tradition of Marcel Mauss, especially in Charles Andler45 and reflected in Georges Bataille,46 Jacques Derrida, and so on.
Yet despite the foregoing emphasis on the importance of classical philology, most discussions of Nietzsche and interpretation, certainly most discussions of Nietzsche and rhetoric, manage to fail to consider Nietzsche’s background as a classical philologist and in this practical or applied and indeed experimental sense, as a student of word and tone, that is to say of prosody in ancient Greek, as Nietzsche spoke of it as “music and word.” If Nietzsche’s discovery of the pitch ictus serves as the basis for contemporary pronunciation of ancient Greek, Nietzsche does not usually get the credit for this save at the footnote and sub-footnote level.47 This point concerning Nietzsche’s technical discovery of the pitch (as opposed to the stress) ictus illuminates the rather non-metaphorical force of the self-critique Nietzsche writes of his first book on tragedy, sie hätte singen sollen, “it should have sung.”48 In this later-written reflection, Nietzsche recounts his own project as a specifically twofold hermeneutic: “a problem with horns,”49 which was for him nothing less than “the problem of science itself, science considered for the first time as a problem.”50 But, and this is the doubled hermeneutic reflection on this hermeneutic reflection, to write as a scholar, that is: as a “scientific thinker” to undertake to engage the problem of science “as a problem,” cannot but take one, as Nietzsche emphasizes, to “the limits of communication.”51
To observe that Nietzsche is perhaps the supreme philosopher of interpretation and style, the philosopher who, par excellence, thinks the relationship between interpretation and text, as indeed, as seen earlier, between interpretation and consciousness as well as the relation between interpretation and sense perception, in addition to interpretation and the order of moral and political values, interpretation and nature,52 and ultimately between interpretation and science as such, means that studies of Nietzsche and epistemology as well as the most critical and rigorous readings of his philosophy of science53 are anything but incidental to understanding both his thought and his hermeneutics. As Nietzsche writes of the importance of raising the question of foundations, one cannot but have recourse to art when it comes to issues of science just or simply because “the question of science cannot be recognized on the ground of science.”54
Mindful of Nietzsche’s relationship to the tradition of interpretation, of texts, of ideas, not to mention culture and science itself, as indeed of the history of philosophy (as what he calls the “history of an error”), scholars have sought to distinguish between a “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Hübner 2008, 115–138), beginning with Paul Ricoeur as has already been noted and continuing, in Richard Palmer’s terms, with the notion of a “postmodern” hermeneutics (Palmer 1986–1987, 3–19). At the same time, a traditional fear regarding the threat of nihilism is inevitable in the same connection. Nietzsche, seemingly, takes interpretation too far, and Christoph Cox (1999, 139) notes that “for Nietzsche, interpretation goes all the way down and all the way up.” If Cox’s concern is the analytically limited notion of “perspectivism” (the current author prefers the double-hermeneutic force of perspectivalism, as Nietzsche’s perspective on perspective, as it were) and the still more limited notion of naturalism, the worry in hermeneutics concerns the anxieties associated with postmodernism, a term that very few, apart from Jean-François Lyotard (and practicing architects) would wish to impose upon themselves. Hence, if Gary Brent Madison has shown the relevance of Nietzsche in a study devoted to the Hermeneutics of Postmodernity (Madison 1990), and elsewhere (Madison 2001, 13–36), his even-keeled insights cannot contain the always haunting specter of an association with nihilism. This threat, nailed down by none other than Georg Lukàcs, was already articulated in Karl Löwith’s study From Hegel to Nietzsche (and it will do to underline here that Löwith’s book includes a foreword to its 1991 English edition by Hans-Georg Gadamer).55 To this historical sensibility must be added the attunement to the threat of nihilism resonant in mainstream Anglophone moral philosophy with Alasdair MacIntyre’s fulcrum of choice “Nietzsche or Aristotle?”—and, as the ninth chapter, this disjunction forms the productive center of After Virtue.56
Accordingly and in just the reactive spirit Nietzsche analyzed (to understand which reactive spirit requires the hermeneutic sensibility of a Gilles Deleuze),57 some scholars have undertaken to attempt to shore up a “strong” Gadamerian hermeneutics that would function to effectively diminish allusions to Nietzsche.58 Such efforts stand in contrast to Vattimo’s weaker tactics of thinking and doing hermeneutics.59 By the same token, Nietzsche can serve as a weather vane indicating hermeneutic sophistication and tracking the ongoing questioning Heidegger called thinking. Thus, Nietzsche tends to be ordered (and quite often to be dismissed) by conservatively minded hermeneutic thinkers as postmodern. If one can make the argument that the postmodern has yet to be anything we have ever been, as Bruno Latour says with respect to the modern as such (and here I allude to Umberto Eco’s illustration of the weakness of the terminology of the postmodern per se) (Eco 1984), Vattimo (2009, 20–23) has shown how far a declaredly “weaker” hermeneutics can work as the heart of hermeneutics proper (as Derrida might have said), and to just this extent, so-called “weaker” hermeneutics tends to be more consummate than the so-called strong hermeneutics which aspires to stop, as the Canadian Thomist, Bernard Lonergan, once put it, when it attains an “invulnerable act of understanding,” which is also, of course, the key to Lonergan’s book Insight: “when there are no further questions to be asked” (Lonergan 1978 [1957], 284).
This moment of “no further questions” (which may for some err on the dogmatic side of judgment) is opposed to the idea of a Heideggerian questioning or a Nietzschean radicalization of the Cartesian doubt60 as well as of the Kantian critique, taking insights as Nietzsche argues to their “furthest consequences.”61 Thus, in the context of Nietzsche’s Antichrist, Josef Simon, without invoking Lonergan’s emphasis to be sure, foregrounds a hermeneutic context highlighting the nature of the judgment regarding judgment (this is itself a double hermeneutic) on the matter of the viability of further questions, as so judged. If Simon emphasized that this judgment itself would always be subject to further judgment, the point is that that judgment would be made as either binding (“no further questions”) or as provisional or needing (still) further review.62
In sum, Nietzsche can only be approached hermeneutically. Thus, Manfred Riedel interprets Nietzsche’s thinking in the hermeneutic tradition that goes beyond both Heidegger and Gadamer but at the same time also goes back to antiquity itself in Riedel’s study of listening, hearing language, and the acroamatic dimension of hermeneutics, which last is doubly attuned with respect to Plato’s own critique of writing and philosophical interpretation in antiquity.63 The focus on prejudice and presupposition is thus foregrounded in a book-length study of Nietzsche from the perspective of advance judgments and convictions reminiscent of Simon’s reflections in Riedel’s edited book collection Jedes Wort ist ein Vorurteil [Every word is a prejudgment] (Riedel 1999). For his own part, Riedel reads Nietzsche as a thinker of suspicion as well as sophistry and reflective critique and an even more critically insightful account may be found in Reinhard Löw’s study of Nietzsche as educator and sophist (Löw 1984), a conjunction repeated with a classically cynical turn, in Peter Sloterdijk’s more recently popular Critique of Cynical Reason.64
It is a hermeneutic given, or it ought to be, that Nietzsche himself does not literally use the term hermeneutics as we use it today in the scholarly tradition that has grown up after Schleiermacher, Boeckh, and Dilthey as well as most signally for us today, after Gadamer and Ricoeur, and so on.65 Instead we find that Nietzsche speaks of interpretation and laying out, that is explication or articulation [Auslegung], and hence there is a tradition of reading Nietzsche on language use as such66 or on rhetoric67 and including studies of metaphor68 and again rhythm (Marietti 1992). Thus, apart from deploying the term hermeneutics as modern students of hermeneutics do (and here I set aside the question of whose hermeneutics? and which interpretation?), nearly everything in Nietzsche’s thinking is hermeneutic, thematically and, above all, philosophically so.
Contextualized in this way, Nietzsche’s importance for the explicitly philosophical traditions of hermeneutics (rather than philological and certainly rather than theological—although there is hardly a shortage of theological readings of Nietzsche, including explicitly hermeneutic studies69—just as there are many discussions of Nietzsche and legal traditions70) is well attested at the beginning of the twentieth century, and it turns out to include explicitly phenomenological elements. Thus, Heidegger’s almost trademark reading of phenomenology, drawing out the attunement to the word as such and understood as articulation, as Auslegung in Being and Time, shows Nietzsche’s influence. This runs throughout Heidegger’s thought, especially in his Nietzsche lectures in the 1930s and 1940s, particularly Heidegger’s Nietzschean hermeneutic “Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?”71
Here, it is important to add in Heidegger’s lineage, Eugen Fink’s hermeneutic phenomenological study of Nietzsche’s thinking through the pre-Platonic thinkers and lived and experienced time.72 Importantly, a similar reflection on the rhythms of the cosmos and time also recurs in Luce Irigaray’s complex reflections on the child,73 as she herself traces a profoundly existential and stylizedly feminist hermeneutic of divine natality and incarnality in Nietzsche.
Thus, in addition to the classic studies with which we began, examining Nietzsche’s relation to Wolf,74 Schleiermacher (Rupp 1982, 225–267), and Dilthey75 in the philological tradition of hermeneutics, Nietzsche’s signal contribution advances the specifically philosophical tradition of hermeneutics.76 If we have also noted in passing, although these rubrics deserve an extended discussion of their own, studies of Nietzsche and metaphor77 and rhetoric,78 together with the complex history of the relationship between Gustav Gerber’s “art of language”79 and Nietzsche’s discussion of the same art, there is also the Diltheyan point of connection with which we end, and that is Nietzsche’s philosophical hermeneutics of history precisely conceived, as the philologist Nietzsche always conceived history, as a science. This last focus is evident in Rudolf Boehme’s invocation of Nietzsche in his own hermeneutic phenomenology of history80—all for the sake of the multifarious dimensionality of hermeneutics in Nietzsche’s philosophy.