Nietzsche and the Principle of Charity

ABSTRACT

Nietzsche’s ambiguous and allusive style of writing creates special problems for the principle of charity, the idea that we should work to understand philosophic statements in the way that will yield the strongest and generally most convincing arguments. We want to reconstruct Nietzsche’s philosophy in the best way, but too much charity may distort his actual beliefs in important ways. In the first section of the article I address the relation between Nietzsche’s statements and our contemporary sense of what would now make for the most cogent philosophy. I discuss different ways that Nietzsche’s thought can be interpreted in the light of such developments and how to do so consistently. In the second section I consider whether Nietzsche rejects the principle of non-contradiction and so the entire logical, philosophical, and scientific edifice built upon it. I consider two ways in which he might do so, and conclude that there are problems with using either as an interpretive key to his writing.

KEYWORDS:

• Nietzsche
• principle of charity
• interpretation
• philosophy
• history of philosophy

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. References to Nietzsche’s works use standard abbreviations and refer to section numbers, and, where appropriate, chapter titles.

2. Stern, “‘Some Third Thing,’” 298–99. Stern further discusses some of these questions in “Must We Choose.” See also Janaway, “More Modesty, Less Charity”; Huddleston, “Why (And How) We Read Nietzsche,” 236–40; and, for an earlier discussion of the same themes, Anderson, “Overcoming Charity.” Anderson was responding to Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, which marked something of a turning point in Anglophone academic interpretations of Nietzsche, on this question and others.

3. Stern, “‘Some Third Thing’,” 300.

4. Ibid., 293–94.

5. Ibid., 289–90.

6. “Reasonable people” could refer to almost anyone, from Nietzsche’s contemporaries to previous philosophers he takes seriously (e.g., Plato or Schopenhauer) to earlier generations of Nietzsche’s readers, academic or otherwise. In practice, however, and as noted above, it usually refers to the commentator’s academic peers.

7. For examples of commentators taking Nietzsche’s stronger claims about the will to power seriously, see Janaway, Beyond Selflessness, 150–64; Müller-Lauter, Nietzsche, 122–82; Richardson, “Nietzsche’s Value Monism,” 90–91; Welshon, “Nietzsche, Consciousness, and Dynamic Cognitive Neuroscience,” 122–23; Loeb, “Will to Power and Panpsychism”; and Miller “Nietzsche on Individuation and Purposiveness in Nature,” 68–73. For examples of skepticism, see Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, 258–61; and Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, 205–27.

8. Leiter, “Nietzsche’s Theory of the Will,” 123.

9. Stern, “‘Some Third Thing’,” 297.

10. Leiter, “Nietzsche’s Theory of the Will,” 2–9.

11. Leiter’s particular approach, however, may attribute too much significance in the interpretation of Nietzsche to what currently seems to be our best empirical theories of human thought and behavior (or, a somewhat different point, may overestimate the extent to which “evidence” exists independently of particular theories). Think of the countless academic orthodoxies in the behavioral sciences that have come and gone since Nietzsche’s day. Though interpreting past thinkers in the light of present concerns is to some extent inevitable, little would have been gained by turning Nietzsche into, e.g., a behaviorist.

12. For an example of work that makes this kind of argument for Aristotle’s philosophy (though it has little to do with adjudicating between different interpretations of him), see Groff and Greco, Powers and Capacities in Philosophy which includes discussions of the importance of Aristotle for modern empirical science (e.g., Cartwright and Pemberton, “Aristotelian Powers”).

13. Hussain, “Nietzsche's Metaethical Stance,” 412; cf. Huddleston, “Nietzsche’s Meta-Axiology,” 339–40.

14. I am referring to knowledge in this passage for the sake of simplicity, but in fact these discussions usually turn on which theories seem most convincing rather than on actual factual discoveries or refutations.

15. Nietzsche read widely in the sciences, especially biology, and had at least a strong layman’s understanding of various scientific theories of his day. His attitude toward the sciences, however, was somewhat more complicated than using them as either props to support his ideas or as an authority to which he submitted them for testing. The result of his reading seems rather to have been a dynamic interplay between his own ideas and what he learned, in which he was genuinely influenced by his reading but also incorporated it into his own thought. Moreover, his reading was dictated in part by his other interests, rather than an attempt to acquire a systematic knowledge of the sciences, and his interest in science, and biology in particular, was deeply informed by the larger intellectual and social questions with which he was grappling (an approach shared by his contemporaries, including many of the scientific authors he read). For details of Nietzsche’s scientific reading, see, among others, Moore, Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor; Brobjer, “Nietzsche’s Reading and Knowledge of Natural Science”; Emden, Nietzsche’s Naturalism; and Müller-Lauter, Nietzsche, 161–82.

16. Stern, “‘Some Third Thing’,” 293–94.

17. For an argument that Nietzsche accepts something like the weak version, see Remhof, “Scientific Fictionalism.” For arguments that he embraces the strong version, see Müller-Lauter, Nietzsche, 7–22 and passim; and Acampora, “Naturalism and Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology,” esp. 318–21. A third possibility is that Nietzsche’s apparent embrace of conflicting positions represents not a metaphysical position on essences and contradiction but rather a protreptic restoration of ancient skepticism (see Berry, Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition, esp. chaps. 3 and 4). Some of the arguments against the strong and weak versions also apply to this third approach, but it raises further interpretive questions that cannot be discussed here. On the general subject of Nietzsche and the principle of non-contradiction, see also Meyer, Reading Nietzsche Through the Ancients, and Sorgner, Metaphysics without Truth, both of which also discuss how Nietzsche’s philosophic views of this question relate to his style of writing. As this list shows, the discussion above is barely scratching the surface of this question, though I hope it does say something about whether we are justified in charitably ascribing the desire to be consistent to Nietzsche.

18. See the previous note for discussions of this latter question.

19. MacIntyre, Review of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 710.

20. Hatab, Nietzsche’s “On the Genealogy of Morality,” 27.

21. Ibid., 16; 8–21 and passim.

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Notes on contributors

Jeffrey Metzger

Jeffrey Metzger is professor of government at Cameron University, USA. He is the author of The Rise of Politics and Morality in Nietzsche’s Genealogy: From Chaos to Conscience (2019), the co-editor of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky: Philosophy, Morality, Tragedy (2016), and the editor of Nietzsche, Nihilism and the Philosophy of the Future (2009). He has published articles and book chapters on Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Richard Rorty, and The Wire.