Hand Me That Horsewhip, Will You?

Here it is, folks, live on center stage, the Dionysian fury of a philosopher losing his marbles. C. S. Lewis, in his brilliant Preface to Paradise Lost, pointed out that the line Milton gives Satan in the poem, 'Evil be thou my good', necessarily includes 'Nonsense be thou my sense'; and the Nietzschean incantation (and this is mumbo-jumbo, after all, not rigorous, analytic, logical thought, of which Nietzsche was ever incapable) of the transvaluation of values is an object lesson in that nonsense.

This is of course the same Nietzsche who, in Also Sprach Zarathustra, coined the aphorism, 'Goest thou to Woman? Forget not thy whip'; and just as the Germans are the only people around whom it would have been proper, ironically, to commit genocide upon before they could commit it upon others (all right, I'm a military historian, and that was exaggerated for effect), so too would little Friedrich have been none the worse for a sound horsewhipping himself.

But let us turn the dispassionate eye of right reason upon the work at hand. Nietzsche intended this, more or less, as his capstone work, a sort of Summa Atheologica (the problem of the extent to which other hands were involved in what was eventually published, which is far more complex than any problem of Wittgensteinian scholarship, is beyond the scope of this review).

It is fundamentally nominalist and therefore positivist in its major premisses (not that Nietzsche ever presents a valid syllogism). Its nominalist and positivist theses, by denying the existence of meaningful relationships between linguistic signifiers and universal, subsisting referents, and by therefore concluding that values and terms of moral approbation (or indeed epistemological labels such as true, false, logically valid, or fallacious) are simply posited by people for personal gain (yes, this is what the deconstructionists, Wommyn's Historians, postmodernists, and such small deer are teaching your college-aged children), necessarily result in a lowest common denominator of unwindowed monadry, a subjectivism in which only solipsism, a debased Berkeleyan idealism, and Leibnizian monadism survive.

In other words (cheers and relieved applause), by contending that language, particularly ethical language, is merely a power tool, and has no meaningful connexion to or correspondence with an external reality, Nietzsche - inadvertently, because it recoils upon him - has foreclosed the possibility of communication between any two persons - including, if he had only thought it through, himself and his readers.

To adopt his conclusions one has to agree that one cannot truly know of the objective existence of anyone other than one's self and that even if others exist there can be no meaningful interaction with them - but in that case, how can one adopt the conclusions of another?

And this reductio ad absurdum applies to the entire work. It is in Wittgensteinian terms one long meaningless noise. In formal Scholastic terms, it is a primer in every logical fallacy known to man: far too many to detail.

And what of it? Ah. Here is where your friendly local historian has his say. Look again, pray, at Nietzsche's subtitle. What was his future is our present. And sure enough, positivism, subjectivism, and nominalism are the order of the day. Why, though, ought we care about the stupidities of others? Well, if for no other reason, review what happened with the Nietzsche cult over the past century. While one cannot directly blame Nietzsche for the fact that he and Hegel became the official philosophers of Hitler's NSDAP, the Nazi Party, it is instructive.

Futurism, from Richard Strauss, a rabid Nietzschean, to Ezra Pound, has been the handmaiden of tyranny for a hundred years; Nietzsche, with Plato, rightly heads Karl Popper's Most Wanted List of statists and despots. (I commend to you the writings of Modris Ecksteins on this point of intellectual history).

It is always dangerous when the gift of a compelling prose talent is allied to an inferior and indeed pernicious logical faculty. Nietzsche, like Plato, Marx, Ayn Rand, and Macchiavelli, among others, is such a danger. As an antidote, allow me to prescribe The Abolition of Man, the Summa, Wittgenstein's Notebooks and Tractatus, and various works of Hayek, Popper, and Kreeft.