As a first time blogger (!) I am not exactly sure what will be useful, but am putting up my rather descriptive notes on part one of the reading (I must admit I’m only now starting the second part and this is already way lengthier than intended so will just proffer this for now). If my interpretations are too far off, don’t hesitate to correct me – as we learn from the preface, we women are not weighed down by the burdens of truth!... Bracketed numbers refer to passages in the Hollingdale translation...

As I see it, Part One serves as Nietzsche’s demonstration of an evaluative approach to truth, which asks, not ‘what is (the) truth?’ or even ‘what is the origin of the will to truth?’ but ‘what is the value of this will?’ – asked first in a general sense and then directed towards a method of diagnosing the values behind the will to truth and the impoverished psychology of those posing their unquestioning questions. Challenging the faith in antithetical values upon which dogmatic philosophy rests (eg. the idea that truth and falsity or illusion are opposed), Niet. invokes instead, as if to call into being, a ‘new species of philosopher’ bold enough to diagnose the necessary falsities of man and to recognise untruth as a condition of life. In passage 5 he gives the first indication of the meaning of the book’s title (a philosophy that ventures to recognise untruth as a condition of life ‘places itself, by that act alone, beyond good and evil’).

Continuing in his role as diagnostician of values, Niet. makes the claim that philosophy thus far has been a kind of ‘involuntary and unconscious memoir’ (6): beyond the drive to knowledge and the post-hoc rationalisations philosophers make (cf. Kant’s categorical imperative and Spinoza’s mathematics, which display the reactivity of a timid and vulnerable psychology) a moral drive can be discerned...as he puts it, in the order of the ranking of the drives, the philosopher’s morality is decisive. As a little detour, I was very pleased to see N’s brief mention of the indifference of nature (9) – something I’m especially interested in at the moment. For Nietzsche, this is really a lead into his statement of distaste for those who impose upon nature their own meagre moral ideals (as is the case in the Stoic’s (disavowed) imposition of his own self-tyranny over nature). This is the first of his short polemics against various classes of philosophical prejudice...

I have to say I struggled a bit with passage 10 – he sets out by denouncing as nihilists those who, as a matter of conscience, prefer certainty to the uncertainties and ‘beautiful possibilities’ of appearance... he then talks about those ‘stronger, livelier thinkers who are still thirsty for life’, suggesting that, while their critique of modern realism may well be motivated by nostalgia (by an attempt to recover from the vagueries of bodies and appearances the immortality of soul) they are nonetheless right to want to escape from the poverty of realism ... is he talking about Romanticism here? Next target is Kant... and Nietzsche makes it clear that ridicule is a more apt response than moral indignation to the widely accepted fiction of the faculty of synthetic judgment... he insists on the importance of inquiring into the necessity of such a fiction – again, I was a bit lost by his bit on the ‘noble idlers’, as charming as that slanderous term may be... Any thoughts on what/ who is he talking about here would be welcome!

Well, this is getting very lengthy, so I’ll try to speed up and make it a bit more general... After taking a brief stab at those who erroneously believe that self-preservation (as opposed to the will to power) is the dominant instinct in man, the ‘eternal, popular sensualism’ of physics, materialist atomism (though not necessarily the ‘soul hypothesis’ per se), the treatment of the organs as causal phenomena, the immediate certainty of the ‘I think’ and the dominant doctrine of the will are, in turn, rejected as mere exaggerations of popular prejudices. Throughout this little group of critiques, running from passage 12 through to 20 we get a sense of Nietzsche’s irritation with the confusion of event and interpretation, which lies at the heart of many of the philosophical prejudices he is outlining.

I was especially interested in some of the areas he explores in relation to the problem of the will. It is no surprise to find the word ‘affect’ following from his description of will in relation to a ‘plurality of sensations’, the sensations of the condition we leave and to which we go and of the transitions themselves, their accompanying ‘muscular sensations’ that tie will to habit, etc.... Here Niet. provides a very nice analogy to explain the erroneous confusion that seems to be constitutive of the will : like the ruling class that identifies itself with the successes of the commonwealth, the will identifies itself as cause of the successful executive agents. In some ways, this section acts as a demonstration of his earlier claims that a philosophy that is beyond good and evil will recognise untruth as a condition of life – the logic of cause and effect are deemed conventional fictions only mistakenly treated as material things (leading, in this case, to the erroneous positing of an opposition between free and unfree will).

In the course of his exploration of how it is that the will derives an appearance of power (freedom) from its constitutive confusion of will with action as such, Nietzsche comes up with what is one of the most provocative statements in Part One for me : ‘...for our body is only a social structure composed of many souls’ (19). In fact, I’m going to leave it there and if this use of the word soul spiked anyone else’s curiosity, I’d be interested to hear/ think more about it!

Maria