Interpretation in Nietzsche’s Second Untimely Meditation and in On the Genealogy of Mordlsb
In coming to terms with our past, Nietzsche writes, “The best we can do is to confront our inherited and hereditary nature... , combat our inborn heritage and implant in ourselves a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that our first nature withers away. It is an attempt to give oneself, as it were a posteriori, a past in which one would like to originate in opposition to that in which one did originate.’” But a contrary current in Nietzsche’s thought is manifested by his going on to claim that “here and there a victory is nonetheless achieved, and for the combatants, for those who employ critical history for the sake of life, there is even a noteworthy consolation: that of knowing that this first nature was once a second nature and that every victorious second nature will become a first” (HL 3).
This intriguing passage seems to cast doubt on the solidity of the distinction between “first” and “second” nature. It suggests that there is no such thing as an absolutely first nature, that everything seemingly fixed has been at some point introduced into history and that the distinction between first and second nature is at best provisional—between a second nature that has been long accepted and one that is still new. And this of course casts doubt on the idea of a second nature as well. What Nietzsche here calls “critical” history begins to appear as the unearthing of an infinite chain of second natures with no necessary first link.
Here, then, we have one of the elements out of which genealogy eventually emerges. For genealogy is a process of interpretation that reveals that what has been taken for granted is the product of specific historical conditions, an expression of a particular and partial attitude toward the world, history, or a text that has been taken as incontrovertible.
In On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life, Nietzsche also prefigures another element of genealogy:
To what end the “world” exists, to what end “mankind” exists, ought not to concern us at all for the moment except as objects of humour: for the presumptuousness of the little human worm is the funniest thing at present on the world’s stage; on the other hand, do ask yourself why you, the individual, exist, and if you can get no other answer try for once to justify your existence as it were a posteriori by setting before you an aim, a goal, a “to this end,” an exalted and noble “to this end.” Perish in pursuit of this and only this—I know of no better aim in life than that of perishing, animae magnae prodigus, in pursuit of the great and the impossible. (HL 9)
Here as well two conflicting ideas are conjoined. If there is to be a purpose in life, Nietzsche claims, it will have to be a purpose constructed by each particular individual and capable of redeeming the life that was lived, and perhaps lost, for its sake. But such a purpose can never be fully achieved, insofar as it aims to effect a real change in the wortd—hence Nietzsche’s description of it as “impossible.”
It is out of these two sets of conflicts, I would now like to suggest, that Nietzsche eventually develops the view of interpretation and of our relationship to our past that characterizes On the Genealogy of Morals. The step most crucial to this development was his coming to give up the view that the causal description of objects and events in the world corresponds to their true nature. He therefore no longer had to believe that interpretation or reinterpretation, which cannot really affect such causal sequences, cannot possibly change the events in question and thus introduce something genuinely new into the universe. If the causal description of the world is not a description of its real nature, if in fact there is no such thing as the world’s real nature, then reinterpretation need not be, as Nietzsche had believed when he composed his earlier works, falsification.1
The Genealogy contains a sustained effort on Nietzsche’s part to show that morality is a subject fit for interpretation, that we can ask of it, as we usually put the point, “What does it mean?” This is in fact the very question Nietzsche asks of the asceticism, the denial of the common pleasures, that has been traditionally associated with philosophy. Traditionally, the fact that philosophers have tended toward asceticism has been considered natural. Nietzsche, instead, sees it as a question. “What does that mean?” he asks, and continues: “For this fact has to be interpreted: in itself it just stands there, stuipid to all eternity, like every ‘thing in itself”’ (GM III:7).
The great accomplishment of GM is the demonstration that morality in general and asceticism in particular are indeed subjects of interpretation, that they can be added to our interpretative universe. Now, how is it, in general, that we can show that something can in fact be interpreted? In the first instance, we can only show it by actually offering an interpretation. That is, in order to establish a new subject of interpretation, we must produce an actual interpretation of that subject: we must in fact establish it as such a subject by means, moreover, of an interpretation that makes some sort of claim to the attention of others.
Nietzsche, I believe, offers such an interpretation of morality. The first and perhaps the most important feature of that interpretation is that, as Nietzsche emphasizes throughout this work, morality itself is an interpretation to begin with. And this establishes at least a partial connection between genealogy and the discussion of history in the second Untimely Meditation: morality, that is, something that we have considered so far as absolutely basic, solid, foundational, is shown to be a particular reaction to a preexisting set of phenomena; a first nature, as it were, is shown to be a second nature whose status has been concealed.
The notion that morality is an interpretation is absolutely central to Nietzsche. “There are altogether no moral facts,” he writes, for example, in Twilight of the Idols; “morality is merely an interpretation of certain phenomena—more precisely, a misinterpretation” (TI “Improvers” 1). Where others had previously seen merely a natural development of natural human needs, desires, and relationships, where others had “taken the value of [moral] values as given, as factual, as beyond question” (GM P:6), Nietzsche saw instead what he described as a system of signs. Such a system, naturally, like all systems of signs, remains incomprehensible until we know what its signs are signs of and signs for. In order, then, to show that morality can be interpreted, Nietzsche actually interprets it; and his interpretation involves a demonstration that morality itself is an interpretation to begin with.
We have just seen that Nietzsche considers that morality is a misinterpretation. He is therefore obliged to offer an alternative account of the phenomena morality has misconstrued, or (as he would prefer to put it), has construed in a manner that suits it. This account depends crucially on his view that one of the most important features of the moral interpretation of phenomena is the fact that its status as an interpretation has been consistently concealed:
Morality in Europe today is herd animal morality—in other words, as we understand it, merely one type of human morality beside which, before which, and after which many other types, above all higher moralities, are, or ought to be, possible. But this morality resists such a “possibility,” such an “ought,” with all its power: it says stubbornly and inexorably, “I am morality itself and nothing besides is morality.” (BGE 202)
Let us then suppose (a considerable supposition!) that morality is an interpretation. What is it an interpretation of? Nietzsche’s general answer is that it is an interpretation of the phenomenon to which he refers as “human suffering.” His own attitude toward this phenomenon is very complex. In one mood, he debunks it. He attributes it not to a divine cause (as, we shall see, he claims that morality does), not even to anything serious but to the lowest and crudest physiological causes. Such a cause, he writes,
may perhaps lie in some disease of the nervus sympathicus, or in an excessive secretion of bile, or in a deficiency in potassium sulfate and phosphate in the blood, or in an obstruction in the abdomen which impedes the blood circulation, or in degeneration of the ovaries and the like. (GM III:15)
For years, I have considered this as one of those horribly embarrassing passages that Nietzsche’s readers inevitably have to put up with in defensive silence. Then I realized that Nietzsche was actually making a joke, that he was reducing one of the “highest” expressions of being human—our capacity for suffering—to one of the “lowest.” And, having seen the passage as a joke, I realized that it was after all serious or, at least, that it was a complex joke with a point to make. For the list of ailments Nietzsche produces is not haphazard. A disease of the (nonexistent) nervus sympathicus could well be supposed to be the physiological analogue of the excess, even of the existence, of pity—the sentiment that is the central target of the Genealogy, which takes “the problem of the value of pity and the morality of pity” (GM P:6) to be its originating concern. “Excessive secretion of bile,” of course, traditionally has been associated with malice and envy, which are precisely the feelings those to whom the Genealogy refers to as “the weak” have always had for those who are “strong,” while weakness and, in general, lassitude and the inability to act are in fact a direct effect of potassium deficiency. Impediments to the circulation of the blood are correlated with the coldness, ill will, and lack of sexual potency Nietzsche associates with the ascetic priests, and such impotence, along with infertility whose spiritual analogue would be the absence of any creativity, may well be the physiological/ moral correlate of ovarian degeneration (whatever that is).
In another mood, Nietzsche attributes the suffering to which we are all inescapably subject to necessary social arrangements:
I regard the bad conscience [this is one of his terms for referring to suffering] as the serious illness that human beings were bound to contract under the stress of the most fundamental change they ever experienced—that change which occurred when they found themselves finally enclosed within the walls of society and of peace.... All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward—this is what I call the internalization of human beings: thus it was that we first developed what was later called our “soul.” (GM II:16)
It is very important to note at this point that Nietzsche, though he offers in this work an interpretation of morality according to which morality is an interpretation of suffering, never characterizes his own accounts of suffering as themselves interpretations. Only the moral approach to suffering, but none of the explanations he offers, is an interpretation:
Human beings, the bravest of animals and those most accustomed to suffering, do not repudiate suffering as such; they desire it, they even seek it out, provided they are shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far—and the ascetic ideal offered them meaning.... In it, suffering was interpreted. (GM III:28)
What is it, then, that makes the moral account of suffering, but not Nietzsche’s own, an interpretation? My own answer, in general terms, is the following. According to Nietzsche, the ascetic priests take the fact of suffering, the existence of the bad conscience which he considers as “a piece of animal psychology, no more,” and claim that it is prompted by, perhaps equivalent to, a sense of guilt produced by sin. “Sin,” Nietzsche writes, “is the priestly name for the animal’s ‘bad conscience’ (cruelty directed backward).” Convinced by the priests to see their suffering in such terms, Nietzsche continues, human beings
receive a hint, they receive from their sorcerer, the ascetic priest, the first hint as the “cause” of their suffering: they must seek it in themselves, in some guilt, in a piece of the past, they must understand their suffering as a punishment. (GM III:20)
Nietzsche’s introduction of the idea of “a piece of the past” here is crucial for our purposes. For it is connected with the search for a meaning that is thought to inhere in history—in our own history in this case—and which is there to be discovered by us if we go about it in the right way. This piece of the past, according to Nietzsche, is nothing other than our inevitable engagement in acts and immersion in desires all of which—sensual, ambitious, self-serving, egoistic—are, as he believes, characteristically human and which, therefore, we cannot possibly avoid.
Yet morality, interpreting such desires and actions as sinful, enjoins us to distance ourselves from them as much as is humanly possible. Its effect is twofold. In the first instance, it offers suffering a meaning—it is God’s punishment for the fact that we are (there is no other word for it) human. Morality therefore makes suffering, to the extent that it accounts for it, tolerable. In the second instance, however, and in the very same process, it “brings fresh suffering with it, deeper, more inward, more poisonous, more life-destructive suffering” (GM III:28).
This, in turn, is brought about in two ways. First, because the forbidden desires, impulses, and actions can be fought against only by the same sort of desires, impulses, and actions, we can curtail our cruelty toward ourselves only by acting cruelly toward ourselves. The effort to curtail them, therefore, secures their own perpetuation: it guarantees that suffering will continue. Second, because if this sort of behavior is, as Nietzsche believes, essentially human, then the effort to avoid it and not to give expression to the (equally essential) impulses on which it depends perpetuates the suffering caused by any obstacle to the tendency of instinct to be “directed outward.” In a classic case of the double bind, the moral approach to suf fering, in its interpretation of it as sin, creates more suffering the more successfully it fights it and the more tolerable it makes it.
Now the reason why morality is for Nietzsche an interpretation of suffering is that it gives suffering a meaning and a reason (“reasons relieve”) and accounts for its persistence by means of attributing it to some agent. “Every sufferer,” Nietzsche claims,
instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering; more exactly, an agent, still more specifically, a guilty agent who is susceptible to suffering—in short, some living thing upon which one can, on some pretext or other, vent his affects, actually or in effigy.
Suffering is taken as the result of someone’s actions. Whose actions? Here is the answer to this question:
“I suffer: someone must be to blame for it”—thus thinks every sickly sheep. But the shepherd, the ascetic priest, replies: “Quite so, my sheep! Someone must be to blame for it: but you yourself are this someone, you alone are to blame for it—you alone are to blame for yourself!” (GM III:15).
This moral account of suffering, in contrast to Nietzsche’s explanations, is an interpretation, I now want to claim, because it appeals to intentional vocabulary, because it construes suffering as the product or result of someone’s actions—in this case, of the actions of the sufferers themselves and of God’s—because it says, in effect, “What you feel is as it is because of who you are and of what you have done.”
In my opinion, what is essential to interpretation is to construe a particular phenomenon as an action and thus to attribute to it some agent whose features account for the features of that action.2 And if I am right in claiming that the connection between interpretation and intention is essential, then Nietzsche’s account of human suffering—at least what we have seen of it so far—is not interpretative. The reason is that Nietzsche is careful to avoid the description of suffering as a general phenomenon in intentional terms. We have seen that, in general, he attributes it to physiological or social causes and that he believes that, at least in one sense of that term, suffering is meaningless. There is no reason, no agent, no purpose, no “For the sake of what?” in it.
This allows me to return to my discussion of HL. For it may be tempting to suppose that just as in that earlier work Nietzsche believed that in reality history is meaningless, so in the Genealogy he believes that suffering is meaningless and that this is a brute fact with which we shall simply have to live from now on. This is actually the view of Arthur C. Danto, who has argued that the main point of the GM is the idea that “suffering really is meaningless, there is no point to it, and the amount of suffering caused by giving it a meaning chills the blood to contemplate.” Danto continues:
The final aphorism of the Genealogy, “man would rather will the nothing than not will,” does not so much heroize mankind, after all: what it does is restate the instinct of ressentiment: man would rather his suffering be meaningful, hence would rather will meaning onto it, than acquiesce in the meaninglessness of it. It goes against this instinct to believe what is essentially the most liberating thought imaginable, that life is without meaning. In a way, the deep affliction from which he seeks to relieve us is what today we think of as hermeneutics: the method of interpretation primarily of suffering.3
This is in many ways a wonderful interpretation. The meaning it attributes to the Genealogy, that exemplary book of interpretation, is that there is no meaning anywhere for anyone. Danto’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s interpretation of the moral interpretation of suffering says, in effect, “Stop interpreting immediately; don’t even begin.” But since, of course, Danto’s view is an interpretation, it does just what it says we shouldn’t do, and thus instantiates, in a manner Nietzsche would have been only too happy to acknowledge, the execution of the impossible task it proscribes. In addition, by attributing to Nietzsche the view that only the uninterpreted (or unexamined) life is worth living for a human being, it establishes him in yet another dimension as Socrates’ antipodes. The trouble, however, is that ultimately this interpretation will not stand.
I agree with Danto that Nietzsche believes that suffering has no meaning—it has, after all, only causes, social or physiological. But this is a view to the effect that no one has already given suffering a meaning, a point (say, as punishment for sin) which is the same for everyone and there for us to discover and live with. In itself, suffering has no meaning—in itself, as we have seen in connection with every thing in itself, it just stands there, stupid to all eternity. But the consequence that follows from this is not necessarily the idea that since in reality there is no meaning, we should give up the goal of trying to create meaning altogether. This would be the view of The Birth of Tragedy and of the second Untimely Meditation minus Nietzsche’s insistence that we should still try to accomplish something with our lives despite the knowledge that nothing is thereby accomplished. It would be to hold the metaphysics of those works without the aesthetic justification of life they demand.
But what separates these works from the Genealogy is Nietzsche’s realization that the fact that suffering or history is meaningless in itself does not force the conclusion that any attempt to give it a meaning would necessarily falsify it. Instead, it implies that in themselves both suffering and history are irrelevant to us. And this is precisely what allows the conclusion that if one were to succeed in making something out of one’s own suffering or one’s own history (and, on my reading, Nietzsche offers himself as his favorite example4), then the suffering that that individual life, like every life, is bound to have contained will also thereby have acquired a meaning.
This meaning will be its contribution to the whole of which it will have then become a part—and this is true, in my opinion, not only of life but of all meaning, particularly of the meaning of texts. In this way, if a life has had a point, if it has made a difference, if it has changed something, then everything in it, everything that happens or has happened to the person whose life it is becomes significant. It becomes part of a work whose author is the person in question and, as we should have expected, it becomes something we can describe in intentional terms. It becomes something for which one is willing, “a posteriori,” to accept responsibility, something that one in a very serious sense of the term is. This idea, that even events in our past can in this manner become things we did and therefore things we are, becomes explicit in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where it is applied specifically to suffering and punishment:
“No deed can be annihilated: how could it be undone by punishment? This, this is what is eternal in the punishment called existence, that existence must eternally become deed and guilt again. Unless the will should at last redeem itself and willing should become not willing.” [This is the aim of asceticism.] But my brothers, you know this fable of madness.
I led you away from this madness when I taught you, “The will is a creator.” All “It was” is a fragment, a riddle, a dreadful accident [it is meaningless]—until the creative will says to it: “But thus I willed it.” Until the creative will says to it, “But thus I will it; thus I shall will it.” (Z:II “On Redemption”)
This passage shows that Nietzsche cannot possibly be the enemy of hermeneutics Danro describes. He is, however, a relentless enemy of the view that the significance of the events in a life, of the components of history, of the parts of a text, is given to them antecedently, that it inheres in them, and that it is therefore the same for everyone. If, indeed, we want to find out what anything means to everyone, the answer is bound to be “nothing,” and the inference we may be tempted to draw from it will be that nothing is meaningful in itself, or in reality, and that all meaning is therefore illusory. This is not unlike Nietzsche’s early view. In the late works, when he no longer believes in anything in itself, when history is all there is, he comes to believe that what the events in each life mean differs according to what, if anything, one makes of one’s life. This, in turn, can be seen to be connected with his turn away from the effort directly to influence the culture of his time.5 Whereas the second Untimely Meditation seems to envisage that all the “young” have the ability to accomplish something great and different, the later works start from the observation that most people are not at all capable of anything remotely like this. Since, then, most people do not succeed in making a difference, the events in most people’s s lives turn out not to mean very much at all—in which case, people might as well believe that they are a punishment: Christianity is not to be abolished, and a new culture is no longer called for. It is difficult enough to organize “the chaos one is” for oneself,
The crucial difference, then, between Nietzsche’s early and late works on the question of our relationship to our past and of its interpretation is that in the Genealogy Nietzsche does not believe that the establishment of meaning must falsify history or the text. There is no order of events in themselves which do, or do not, have a significance of their own. Only what is incorporated into a specific whole has a meaning, and its meaning is nothing other than its contribution to that whole. How the value of that whole is to be in turn established is a question as difficult to answer as it is independent of the view of interpretation put forward here.
Ed. note—Translations of Nietzsche are drawn from Hollingdale’s HL; Kaufmann and Hollingdale’s GM; and Kaufmann’s BGE and Z.
I have made an argument for this claim in my essay, “Writer, Text, Work, Author,” in Literature and the Question of Philosophy, ed. Anthony J. Cascardi (Bahimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 267–91.
Arthur C. Danto, “Some Remarks on The Genealogy of Morals,” International Studies in Philosophy 18 (1986): 13.
This is the central thesis of my Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).
An interesting connection between Nietzsche’s and Franz Overbeck’s attitude toward this issue is established in Lionel Gossman’s “Antitnodernism in Nineteenth-Century Basle,” Interpretation 16 (1989): 359–89.