® Kofman also indicates the extent to which Nietzsche attempts to avoid this process of petrifaction in his own work by employing a constantly shifting range of metaphors, such as tliose of the bee, the spider, the tree and the fortress to describe the production of meaning. I would
temper her assertions with the observation that Nietzsche also coins a new, post-metaphysical
If
vocabulary, where certain terms such as Becoming [Werden], Life [Leben], Interpretation 4
[Auslegung] and Falsehood [Luge] are privileged, consequently recurring throughout his writings.
This conflict could be interpreted as a recognition on Nietzsche’s part, of the necessity to employ a finite vocabulary to make any meaningful statements, while at the same time also being aware of the dangers of this repeated use of the same terms. This is a theme I discuss later in the main text. 9 On these shared characteristics of the thinking of John Searle and Jacques Derrida, see Manfred
Frank’s essay ‘Die Entropie der Sprache’ in his book Das Sagbare und das Unsagbare (Frankfurt a.
'9
40
!®Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity , trans. J. Snyder (London: Polity Press, 1988), and
also ‘Nihilism: Reactive and Active’ in Tom Darby, Béla Egyed & Ben Jones (eds.), Nietzsche and
the Rhetoric of Nihilism (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1989).
!!See Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Fish’s #
main claim is that any meaningful discourse has to relate to those practices and beliefs already maintained, from which he concludes that theoretical discourse has the choice of either assenting to what is already believed, or dissenting and consequently not being understood. For a powerful critique of Fish’s argument see Christopher Norris’ essay ‘Right you are (if you think so): Stanley
Fish and the Rhetoric of Assent’ in Norris, What’s Wrong with Postmodernism (London:
Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990).
^'^Critique of Pure Reason , B xi-xii. !3cf. ibid. B 432 - 595.
!^When writing about Nietzsche one has to be wary about the use of the notion of ideology, I
which of course cannot be set against some ‘true’ representation of the Real. Mark Warren has suggested ways in which it might be meaningful to talk in terms of a Nietzschean theory of
ideology. See Warren, ‘Nietzsche’s Concept of Ideology’, Theory and Society, 13 (1984).
!^See Gottlob Frege, Foundations o f Arithmetic , trans. J. Austin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1950) § 2. 16ibid., § 3.
l^Gottlob Frege, Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (Hildesheim: Georg 01ms Verlagsbuchhandlung,
1966) vol. I p. xvii.
! ^Gottlob Frege, Posthumous Writings , ed. P. Long and R. White (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1979) p. 7.
!^The main issue occupying Riemann, Poincaré and others such as Gauss, Lobatchevski or Helmholtz was the impossibility of proving Euclid’s fifth Axiom concerning parallel lines. For a
concise acount of the problem of the grounding of geometry from Kant onwards see Matthias 4
Schim, ‘Kants Theorie der geometrischen Erkenntnis und die nichteuklidische Geometric’ in Kant-
Studien 82 (1991). Although Gôdel regarded himself as a Realist, I mention him here because his famous sixth proposition represents a strong response to the problem identified by Frege, i.e. the inability of any formal system to provide its own foundation from within. Gôdel sums up his theorem thus, criticising the assumption that ‘axioms and rules of inference are . . . sufficient
to decide all mathematical questions which can be in any way at all expressed formally in the
systems concerned. It is shown below that this is not the case . . . there are in fact relatively simple problems in the theory of ordinary whole numbers which cannot be decided from the
axioms’. Cf. Kurt Gôdel, On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and
Related Systems , trans. B. Meltzer (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1962) pp. 37-8.
41
2®The myth that science (specifically technology) and theology represent mutually exclusive values is one that Heidegger, and more recently Vattimo, have been at pains to discredit. Vattimo
writes, ‘Even technology is a fable or Sage , a transmitted message: when seen in this light it is
stripped of all its (imgainary) claims to be able to constitute a new “strong” reality that could be
taken as self-evident’ (The End of Modernity , p. 29). Significantly, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus ,
despite its relentless reduction of meaning to logic, maintains a similar attachment to theology ^
through the notion of the mystical. See Tractatus § 6.522; ‘There are indeed things that cannot be
put into words [Unaussprechliches]. . . They are what is mystical [das Mystische].’ 2lNehemas, op. cit. p. 71.
22see Vattimo, ‘An Apology for Nihilism’ in The End of Modernity pp. 19-30. |
23gee, for example, Alan Schrift, Nietzsche and the Question of Interpretation (New York:
Routledge, 1990); Alexander Nehemas, op. cit.; Gunter Abel, Nietzsche. Die Dynamik der Willen
zur Macht und die ewige Wiederkehr (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1984); Johann Figl, Interpretation als Philosophisches Prinzip (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1982).
24see, for example, KSA 2 p. 387, or KSA 3 473. t
25see Schlegel’s Jena and Cologne Lectures of 1804-5, in vol. XII of the Friedrich Schlegel
Kritische Ausgabe hrsg. E. Behler, (Paderbom: Schôningh Verlag, 1967), especially pp. 37 ff and pp. 391 ff. For a concise account of Schlegel’s replacement of Being by Becoming as foundation
see Leonard Wessell, ‘The Antinomic Structure of Friedrich Schlegel’s Romanticism’ in Studies
in Romanticism , 12 (1973).
26Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche ed. D. Krell, et al. (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991), vols.
II & III. Figl, op. cit., pp. 73 ff. 22schrift, op. cit., p. 191.
^^Bernd Magnus, Nietzsche’s Existential Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1978).
29Nehemas, ‘Immanent and Transcendent Perspectivism’, Nietzsche Studien 12 (1983) pp. 486-7.
3®Critics such as Paul de Man consider language the key to Nietzsche’s critique. See de Man,
‘Nietzsche’s Theory of Rhetoric’, Symposium 28 (1974). In contrast, I would argue that
language, while important in the early writings, later constitutes only one of various weapons in the struggle to displace metaphysics.
3!Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton: Princeton %
University Press, 1974). Kaufmann writes, ‘Nietzsche’s central concern is with man, and power is 5
to him above all a state of human being’ 6). 420).
32Heidegger, Nietzsche , Vol. Ill, p. 212.