Читать книгу A Companion to Arthur C. Danto - Группа авторов - Страница 31

ROBERT GOODING-WILLIAMS

In the “Acknowledgements” to Nietzsche as Philosopher: Expanded Edition (2005), Arthur Danto explains that the book’s first edition grew out of an essay he wrote at the invitation of Paul Edwards to contribute an article on Nietzsche to A Critical History of Western Philosophy (1964), edited by D.J. O’Connor.² Danto penned the essay in Rome where, having just moved there from the south of France, he had completed a draft of his first major book, Analytical Philosophy of History (1965).³ In exchange for shortening his contribution to O’Connor’s volume, Edwards offered Danto a contract to write a monograph on Nietzsche. Danto finished the manuscript in the summer of 1964, and both Nietzsche as Philosopher and Analytical Philosophy of History were published the following year.

Lydia Goehr has remarked that “Nietzsche hardly makes an appearance” in Analytical Philosophy of History (Goehr 2007, xxxviii). It is true, however, that Danto’s philosophy of history “makes an appearance” in the initial edition of his Nietzsche book and in a series of essays on Nietzsche that he wrote between 1965 and 2005 – essays subsequently appended to the book’s “Expanded Edition.” Danto invokes his philosophy of history to authorize a reading of Nietzsche that, I shall argue, his philosophy of history nevertheless undermines.

In Danto’s view, Nietzsche’s books, no less than his thoughts and doctrines, have a disjointed, even disparate appearance that Danto attributes to Nietzsche’s aphoristic and essayistic literary style, as well as to an abrupt and impromptu method of composition that knew nothing of the “architectonic feeling for structure” evident, say, in Kant’s writings (Danto 2005, 1–4). This appearance notwithstanding, Danto purports to find in Nietzsche’s writing a coherent, systematic structure pivoting around the idea of philosophical nihilism – the thesis that there is in the world “neither order nor purpose, things nor facts, nothing there whatever to which our beliefs can correspond” (Danto 2005, 12, 15). The point of Nietzsche as Philosopher, he tells us, is to reconstruct that structure: to show how Nietzsche’s philosophical nihilism is linked to his other principal ideas, including his perspectivism, which holds that there are no facts, only interpretations; his religious psychology, which explains the origins of our now conventional morality; and his affirmations of life, which express his ideas about the Übermensch, the eternal recurrence, and amor fati. Danto imputes the structural coherence of Nietzsche’s thought to two factors.

One factor is the systematic, architectonic nature of philosophy as such, “which imposes an external regimen upon its least systematic practitioners … philosophers are systematic through the nature of their enterprise.” Danto’s point is not that Nietzsche “intended his work” to exhibit structural coherence – indeed, Danto claims that he could not have intended this, for “by his own admission” he was unaware of the system that his writings embodied. Rather Nietzsche’s writings exhibit a coherent structure because Nietzsche concerned himself with philosophical problems, and because “the problems of philosophy are so interconnected that the philosopher cannot solve, or start to solve, one of them without implicitly committing himself to solutions for all the rest.” Danto’s Nietzsche was a system builder, for, “if only tacitly,” he submitted his thinking to the demands of the philosophical “discipline,” “where there is no such thing as an isolated solution to an isolated problem” (Danto 2005, 6–7).

The second factor is “the retroactive unification that historical understanding imposes.” There is “doubtless continuity in any writer’s thought,” Danto proclaims, “but in part the continuity is to be attributed to his readers who look back to the early writings with the late ones in mind.” In consequence, his readers see his writings as the author himself “could not have seen them when he wrote them, for he could not have known his own unwritten volumes.” For Danto, according to his theory of narrative sentences, historical understanding is a retrospective reconstrual of earlier events in terms of later ones. Applied to the practice of textual interpretation, it is a retrospective reading of earlier texts in terms of later ones. Thus, had a writer’s “later writings been different, we should perhaps have been as forcibly struck by themes to which we are in fact blind as we are by those we find so impressively precocious.” In sum, Danto ascribes the structural coherence of Nietzsche’s writings no less to the unity-in-continuity established through historical understanding than to “systematizing dynamisms” that, he presumes, drive philosophical inquiry (Danto 2005, 7).

Before further considering the analysis of historical understanding Danto develops in his Analytical Philosophy of History, let me note a difference between his use of the idea of retrospective interpretation in his book on Nietzsche and that in the 1964 essay, “Nietzsche.” In the essay, Danto admits that, while “recent developments” in analytical philosophy have enabled us to appreciate much in Nietzsche’s philosophy that must have been obscure, “even to himself,” it would be “wrong,” from “the historical point of view,” to represent Nietzsche as a “dispassionate, careful analyst.” In other words, he grants that his attempt to reconstruct Nietzsche’s thought in the spirit of (then) contemporary analytical philosophy is open to the objection that his reading is likely to be anachronistic and thus to produce a misleading account of Nietzsche’s thinking. To answer this objection, and “to remedy, in some measure, whatever historical distortions a systematic treatment of [Nietzsche’s] thought might entail,” Danto proposes “to support [his] interpretations of Nietzsche’s thoughts, wherever possible, with his own words … by the device of ample quotation.” This approach differs sharply from what he does in his Nietzsche book, where, unlike in the essay, instead of flagging the concern that his interpretation was bound to falsify Nietzsche, he used the idea of retrospective reinterpretation to authorize – to justify – his claim to find structural coherence in Nietzsche’s thought. Reading the early Nietzsche with reference to the later Nietzsche is, Danto seemed to believe, unobjectionable, but reading him, early and late, with a view to the still later, mid-20th preoccupations of Anglo-American analytic philosophers invites the complaint of historical distortion (Danto 1964, 386).

Danto’s answer to this complaint – his proposal to ground his reading of Nietzsche in Nietzsche’s “own words” – finds an echo in the 1964 “Preface” to Nietzsche as Philosopher, when he argues that presenting Nietzsche as systematic and analytic thinker is a matter of “chart[ing] the changes in signification that his words sustain in their shifting from context to context and back.” By observing this methodological dictum, Danto expressly intends to treat Nietzsche as a philosopher, “whose thought merits examination on its own,” independently of both the “strange personality” that nurtured his reputation as an “intellectual hooligan” and the “special cultural circumstances” that occasioned his notoriety as the “semicanonized proto-ideologist of Nazism.” “Only now and again, when a special historical explanation is called for,” Danto remarks, “will I include biographical or historical information” (Danto 2005, xxiv–xxv).

By appealing to Nietzsche’s words and their significations, Danto purports to secure his reading of Nietzsche, first, against the possibility of mistaking contemporary philosophical preoccupations for Nietzsche’s philosophical thought (anachronism), and second, against the possibility of mistaking Nietzsche’s mental life and his use for political purposes (his personality and his semicanonization by the Nazis) for his philosophical thought. To avoid these “mistakings” and the confusions to which they might give rise, he resolves to record the philosophical content of Nietzsche’s thought “on its own,” apart from its psychological causes, its reception by the Third Reich, and the supposition that Nietzsche was an analytical philosopher avant la lettre. In both “Nietzsche” and his 1964 “Preface,” Danto eschews historical understanding and suggests that Nietzsche’s words and their meanings objectively fix the content of his thought. On Danto’s view, a philosophical reading of Nietzsche can grasp his thought, while avoiding historical distortion and omitting to consider his mental life and the impact of his ideas, by giving proper attention to those words and meanings.⁴

In his Analytical Philosophy of History, Danto invents a character he dubs “the Ideal Chronicler.” As Danto describes him, the Ideal Chronicler

knows whatever happens the moment it happens, even in other minds. He is also to have the gift of instantaneous transcription: everything that happens across the whole forward rim of the Past is set down by him, as it happens, the way it happens. The resultant running account I term the Ideal Chronicle (hereafter referred to as I.C.). Once E [an event] is safely in the past, its full description is in the I.C. (Danto 2007, 149).

The Ideal Chronicler is an ideal witness. Of any event, however, there is a class of descriptions, comprised of so-called “narrative sentences,” under which the event cannot be witnessed, even by an ideal witness. These descriptions, Danto writes, “are necessarily and systematically excluded from the I.C.” (Danto 2007, 151).

Occurring most typically in historical writing, narrative sentences “refer to two time separated events and describe the earlier with reference to the latter.” “Aristarchus anticipated in 270 B.C. the theory which Copernicus published in A.D. 1543” is a narrative sentence, for it describes Aristarchus’s accomplishment in terms of Copernicus’s accomplishment hundreds of years later. This sentence could not appear in the I.C., because the Ideal Chronicler, while possessing a perfect knowledge of what transpires, when it transpires, is blind to the future. Thus, he is incapable of grasping the significance that a past event acquires when an historian, or a biographer, describes it in terms of a later event with reference to which the past event could not have been described when it occurred (Danto 2007, 164, 156).

Danto’s notion of a narrative sentence clarifies his idea that historical understanding is retrospective; that it is a matter of assigning significance to earlier events in light of later ones – thus, a matter of placing earlier events within a story we wish to tell. The stories we tell, Danto emphasizes, vary with the “topical interests” of the storyteller – imagine, for example, a biographer of a scientist less eminent than Copernicus who described Aristarchus’s achievement as anticipating a theory the less eminent scientist had published. There is something inexpugnably “subjective” and “arbitrary” about the meaning historical description assigns to an event, for it depends on the storyteller’s decision to relate a past event to one rather than another set of later events. As Danto also recognizes, the storyteller can revise and complicate the significance she retrospectively assigns to a past event when the passing of time and the advent of new events affords her a new “temporal location” from which to write new narrative sentences that alter our understanding of the past (Danto 2007, 8–15, 142).

In the spirit of Kantian critique, Danto shows that historical understanding is epistemically tensed and limited. Because historical understanding “describes … past events with reference to other events which are future to them, but past to the historian,” it finds its limit in our ignorance of the future. To be sure, Danto’s “analytical” philosophy of history observes this constraint, but what he calls “substantive philosophy of history” ignores it. Substantive philosophies of history, like prophecy, presume a knowledge of the trajectory of history as a whole, in light of which they assign significance not only to past and present events, but to future events, which they treat as faits accomplis. Denying our ignorance of the future, the prophet and the substantive philosopher of history illegitimately claim to know what has happened before it has happened, which, Danto suggests, is like claiming to know how the plot of a novel will turn out, and hence what meaning retrospectively to assign to an early episode, before one finished reading the novel for the first time (Danto 2007, 8–16; see, too, Goehr 2007, xli–xlii).

As we have seen, Danto attributes the structural coherence of Nietzsche’s writings both to historical understanding and to the systematizing tendencies of philosophical inquiry. It is striking, however, that he never reckons with the possibility that these explanations are ill-matched, that they imply or support contradictory accounts of the structural coherence, philosophical content, and variability of Nietzsche’s writing.

First, Danto’s explanatory appeal to the tendencies of philosophical inquiry implies that Nietzsche’s writings enjoy a certain structural coherence due to the demands of philosophical discipline, whereas his appeal to the unity imposed by retrospective interpretation implies that such coherence belongs not to Nietzsche’s writings themselves but to Danto’s interpretation of them. In a second, related vein, the appeal to Nietzsche’s agency as a philosophically disciplined author supports the thesis that Nietzsche’s words and meanings fix the structurally coherent, philosophical content that Danto takes his writings to embody, while the appeal to historical understanding yet again invites the thought that, due to the anachronism of his interpretation, Danto has read that content into Nietzsche’s writings.

But perhaps Danto believed that the threat of anachronism, evident when we interpret Nietzsche’s writings, early and late, in light of the mid-20th preoccupations of Anglo-American analytic philosophers, was simply not present when he interpreted Nietzsche’s early writings in light of his later ones. Such a belief would have been questionable, however, for it would have begged the question at hand, presupposing a thematic continuity between Nietzsche’s “earlier” and “later” thought which, presumably, historical understanding is tasked to establish. Absent that assumption, we would be no less justified in entertaining the possibility that, for example, we risk distorting The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche’s first book, if we read it as contending with the perspectivist, epistemological concerns of Beyond Good and Evil, one of his late works, than if we read it as contending with themes external to Nietzsche’s oeuvre as a whole, for example, with issues central to the linguistic turn in modern analytic philosophy.

Consider a third and perhaps more serious conflict between Danto’s alternative explanations of structural coherence. On the one hand, Danto’s analysis of the systematizing tendencies of philosophical inquiry argues that these produced throughout Nietzsche’s writings one invariant thesis – philosophical nihilism, according to Danto – to which Nietzsche tacitly committed himself the moment he settled on a solution to a particular philosophical problem. On the other hand, his analysis of historical understanding argues that the philosophical content and continuity produced through the retrospective interpretation of Nietzsche’s writings varies with the topical interests and temporal location of the interpreter. A further examination of this third conflict will illuminate the central motivation driving Danto’s interpretation of Nietzsche.

Danto claims that reading an author’s earlier writings in light of his later efforts permits us to interpret the earlier writings as precocious – that is, as anticipating the later ones. In his essays on Human, All Too Human and Daybreak, Danto recurs to this claim. Regarding the former, he holds that “the great philosophy to come highlights its anticipatory passages for us,” allowing us to “read it as a first, tentative statement of one of the great philosophical visions” (Danto 2005, 242–3). Regarding the latter, he claims that “[t]he great Nietzschean formulations lay ahead: Eternal Recurrence, Will to Power, Superman, Antichrist…Without the structural benefits of the whole system, it would be difficult, as it would then have been impossible to appreciate [Daybreak] … as a contribution to moral theory” (Danto 2005, 247). Remarking on two of Nietzsche’s middle period books, Danto takes for granted that the point of reading these books in the perspective of Nietzsche’s later writings is to see how they fit into the structured system and vision that (he presumes) these later writings articulate, and so he neglects to consider the possibility that such a reading could have been prompted by a different concern, say, by an interest in cultivating a critique of the ideals shaping Nietzsche’s later thinking (see, e.g., Abbey 2000). Or, alternatively, by an interest in gauging the extent to which these or even earlier books anticipate the critique of modernity that Nietzsche advances in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil (see, e.g., Gooding-Williams 2001). It is all the more striking, then, that Danto’s account of historical understanding would have us acknowledge just this possibility – that reading Nietzsche’s middle period and early writings in light of his later ones, with topical interests different than Danto’s, will yield several alternative accounts of the philosophical content and continuity, or lack of continuity, characterizing Nietzsche’s thinking. Because historical understanding varies with topical interest, it will not produce a single, unvarying philosophical content of the sort that Danto attributes to the systematizing tendencies of philosophical inquiry.

In chapter 1 of Nietzsche as Philosopher, Danto tacitly entertains the thought that the retrospective interpretation of Nietzsche’s writings may vary with the temporal location of the interpreter. Specifically, he imagines that “texts so far undiscovered – may one day turn up which will quite invalidate … [his] interpretation.” Here, Danto seems to have in mind not only that writings written later than the works we presently possess could unexpectedly turn up, but also that previously unknown texts, dating from earlier phases of Nietzsche’s philosophical career, could suddenly come to light. Danto alludes to the first possibility when he adds that “here and there … we find sketches and projections for a final systematic statement of his [Nietzsche’s] philosophy. None of these, to present knowledge, materialized” (Danto 2005, 8). Suppose, then, that before his mental breakdown, but several days after he completed Nietzsche Contra Wagner, Nietzsche had also completed his final masterpiece, entitled A Revaluation of All Values, and that an enterprising archivist came across the manuscript text of this work in an attic somewhere. The publication of this new discovery would obviously invite reinterpretations of Nietzsche’s early, middle period, and post-Zarathustra writings, which would stem from their temporal location later than the temporal location Danto occupied when he wrote “Nietzsche” and Nietzsche as Philosopher; that is, later (indeed, last) in a timeline representing the chronology of the completion of Nietzsche’s published writings. As the temporal location of an interpreter changes, her historical understanding may change; thus, were the temporal location of an interpreter of Nietzsche’s writings to change, due to the discovery of a late magnum opus, her retrospective account of the philosophical content of those writings could very well diverge from an earlier retrospective account of that content. Because historical understanding tends to vary with temporal location, it cannot be expected to produce a single, unvarying philosophical content of the sort that Danto attributes to the systematizing tendencies of philosophical inquiry.

It is quite puzzling that Danto dismisses the possibility that the discovery of a late magnum opus could alter his interpretation of Nietzsche. For, again, he himself asserts that had Nietzsche’s “later writings been different” – if by hypothesis Nietzsche’s later writings were found to include a final masterpiece – “we should perhaps have been as forcibly struck by themes to which we are in fact blind as we are by those we find so impressively precocious” (Danto 2005, 7). Even more puzzling is Danto’s defense of his dismissiveness:

[Nietzsche’s] message appears over and over again, so much so that from any random sample of his writings the entirety of his philosophy can almost be reconstructed.

There is a theory that our memory is stored in protein molecules, of which in each of us there is an immense number. These molecules have the remarkable property of idempotency – of exactly reproducing themselves. According to the theory, the same messages are stored in various places throughout the body, so that, should one part be destroyed, the possibility remains that our memory will stand intact and will persist. The prodigality and idempotency of the protein molecules might almost be taken as a providential piece of insurance against the destruction of the self. Nietzsche’s extravagantly numerous, yet oddly repetitive aphorisms, dealing with the same problems in much the same way, seem to me to have had much the same result. New writings may be found and old ones restored, but it is difficult to suppose that they will furnish us with a philosophy different in any essential respect from the one we may find by carefully examining what we have (Danto 2005, 11–12, my emphasis).

Danto rejects the possibility that the discovery of a final masterpiece could prompt him to repudiate his account of the themes central to Nietzsche’s writing, arguing that just as the idempotency of protein molecules can be taken as a sort of providential guarantee – as a sort of insurance – against the destruction of the self, so too can the apparently endless repetition of the same message in the writings we presently possess be taken as a sort of providential guarantee against the possibility that any newly discovered text might express an essentially different message. Although providence, here, need not be divine, but simply the manifestation of good fortune, the effectively prophetic implication of Danto’s assured tone and diction is clear: we more or less know in advance the philosophical content of any newly discovered late writing, for that content is guaranteed, in advance, by Nietzsche’s “oddly repetitive aphorisms.” Danto denies that we can know how the plot of a novel will evolve before we finish reading it for the first time, and thus what meaning retrospectively to assign to earlier episodes, yet his idempotency argument suggests that we can confidently identify the basic philosophical content of a not yet discovered, not yet read late magnum opus, and thus know what significance retrospectively to assign, say, to Nietzsche’s middle period writings. Notice that, while the idempotency argument cuts against the proposition that the philosophical content of Nietzsche writings will vary with the temporal location of the interpreter, it is consistent with the thesis that the moment Nietzsche settled on a solution to some particular philosophical problem he committed himself to an unvarying philosophical content – a thesis Danto echoes when he writes “that from any random sample of his writings the entirety of his philosophy can almost be reconstructed.” Notice too that, contrary to his admission that retrospective interpretation altered his readings of Daybreak and Human, All Too Human, the idempotency argument implies that reading early or middle period writings in light of the late writings we presently possess can be no more illuminating than reading them in light of undiscovered, still to be read late writings whose content we presume, for the meaning we discover in any late writing in view of which we retrospectively interpret earlier work is destined to be but the reiterated, mirror image of what we had already found in earlier writings.

I have suggested that Danto’s “idempotency” argument rules out the possibility that the discovery of a late masterpiece by Nietzsche could yield a retrospective account of the philosophical content of his writings that diverged from Danto’s account. Danto means to persuade us that Nietzsche’s thought has an unvarying philosophical content. But why? What motivates Danto to press this thesis?

My answer draws from the “Preface” to Nietzsche as Philosopher: Expanded Edition. Recalling a group of Pearl River youths who, drawing inspiration from Nietzsche, went on “a rampage of murder and brutality,” Danto characterizes Nietzsche as an “intemperate prophet” and a “dangerous” moral voice – figuratively, as a “Minotaur.” He adds that, by reading Nietzsche as a philosopher, he means to turn Nietzsche’s arguments “against themselves, to blunt his language,” thus, to construct a philosophical “labyrinth,” in effect, an “anti-Nietzschean philosophy from within Nietzsche’s philosophy itself” that would serve to confine and “disarm” the “rabid” Minotaur and to neutralize the “vivid frightening images that have inspired sociopaths for over a century” (Danto 2005, xiii–xviii).

Danto’s containment strategy might work, but only if it is reasonable to regard Nietzsche’s writings as setting forth claims and arguments that have a fixed, unchanging, philosophical content that an interpreter can identify, target, and pen in without worrying that the animal he thinks he has trapped is to be found elsewhere, or, perhaps, in more than one place or time. If we suppose, however, that legitimate interpretations of Nietzsche’s writings can proceed by means of historical understanding, then the strategy makes no sense, for the philosophical content that historical understanding attributes to Nietzsche’s writing will vary with the topical interests and temporal location of the interpreter. Perhaps sensing this, and wanting to deny to Nietzsche the Ariadne’s thread that would lead his thought out of a constructed labyrinth of philosophical systematicity, Danto insists that Nietzsche’s writings must always be the same, bound to enact a recurrence of the same, in order to preclude the possibility of retrospective interpretations different than his own.⁵ Having adduced the idea of historical understanding to authorize his reading of Nietzsche, Danto implicitly concedes that, due to its variability, historical understanding is in principle a threat to the frozen picture of Nietzsche’s philosophical thought he wants to promote.