Marco Normativo de las Contrataciones Estatales para las Compras

dominance of Christian values that once the thing in itself was no longer God for him, it had to be bad, stupid, absolutely reprehensible. He did not understand that there are infinite ways of being-other, even of being-God. Curse of that narrow­ minded dualism: good and evil’ (KSA 12: 9 [42] p. 355).

This is the cultural crisis Nietzsche is attempting to overcome; his project is not primarily a critique of metaphysics through an analysis of the semiotic nature of truth. Metaphysics will undermine itself and so save him the job. His project is rather to push through, past the passive Nihilism of Hume or Schopenhauer, on to an active Nihilism which cuts its remaining ties to metaphysics, one which fully absorbs the exposition of grammar dependent truth. The task is to establish how to become an active, or accomplished Nihilist [il nichilista compiuto], as Vattimo puts

it.22

Interpretation

We see in Nietzsche’s account of Nihilism a strongly dialectical structure, inasmuch as its meaning is the consequence of a dialectic of history which has yet to be fully completed. Reactive or passive Nihilism must be negated by its other, namely active Nihilism; the former is ‘only a transitional phase’ (KSA 13:11 [100] p. 50). Moreover in terms of content, too, we find a Hegelian structure organising Nietzsche’s discourse on Nihilism. For passive Nihilism represents a pure

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negativity, in terms of a feeling of complete meaninglessness accompanied by a state of inertia, of inactivity; Nietzsche regards Buddhism as the first historical expression of reactive Nihilism, and its themes of asceticism, of contemplative withdrawal from life are repeated in Christianity and metaphysics, most notably, of

course, in Schopenhauer’s ideal of the ascetic life. In contrast, however, Nietzsche 3

views active Nihilism as a determinate negativity, one which has learned to

overcome metaphysics by finding the right means. He attributes the continued presence of reactive Nihilism to the fact that ‘the productive powers are not yet strong enough or that décadence is still hesitating and has not yet invented its remedies [Hülfsmittel]’ (KSA 12: 9 [35] p. 351). Overcoming does not involve a mere moment of negativity, which amounts to mere passivity; active must also

consist in the positing of new values, not just overturning the old ones. It is my

contention that the notion of interpretation carries out precisely this function.

Until now I have deliberately skirted around the question of interpretation, 4

but I shall now bring the notion back into play. For Nietzsche’s idea of interpretation unites the reactive and active components of Nihilism. I have so far

concentrated on Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics, concentrating in particular on

his recognition of the derivative nature of truth. Bound up with this critique is his |

replacement of the ideas of knowledge and truth with that of interpretation, J

something I have not yet discussed. However, in addition interpretation also serves

as a model for the establishment of those new values required to complete the €

Nihilist project. In other words interpretation provides for the possibility of a non­ metaphysical normativity, for the establishment of an anti-foundational discourse

which nevertheless creates a space for some form of normative framework. |

Nietzsche’s contention that all cognitive acts are merely interpretations is

well known and has become the subject of a number of specialist studies.23 what I c#

am interested in is how the concept serves to provide some kind of post­ metaphysical normativity. To understand more fully how it can do this, we have to address two central questions. First, what is being interpreted ? In other words, if Nietzsche is going to abandon the correspondence theory of truth, how will he

describe the relation between the interpreter and their object. What is the status of

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this object ? Second, we must ask what criteria we might have for judging any interpretation. If we are to abandon the idea of truth, what is to prevent us from

slipping into absolute relativism, granting equal value to all interpretations ? Clearly |

Nietzsche does not remain a relativist in this sense, since he has very strong feelings as regards the value of metaphysics. I shall deal with each question in turn.

If we are to attribute some form of consistency to Nietzsche’s writings (and this is not to be confused with systematicity), then on the basis of the above discussion we are going to have to distance ourselves from any interpretation which

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sees Nietzsche as merely replacing the notion of knowledge with that of interpretation, while nevertheless still adhering to the metaphysical belief in a reality waiting to be interpreted, as if the metaphysical relation of subject and object remained undisturbed. Although Nietzsche frequently speaks of the privilege of

Becoming and Life over B e i n g2 4, this does not entitle us to conclude that Becoming

is the essence of existence, in the foundational sense of the Romantics, especially

Friedrich S c h l e g e l.2 5 Yet it is a feature of his writing which has tempted many

interpreters to read his work in this way. Most notably Heidegger was lured into putting Nietzsche at the culmination of metaphysics, understanding both will to power and Eternal Recurrence as expressions of a commitment to a particular ontology. More recently Figl, too, has regarded the use of Becoming over Being as one of mere substitution, with section headings such as ‘Becoming as the

foundational character of Being and Exegesis’, ‘Being as Becoming’, ‘Temporality 3

as Structure of Being’, and most significantly, ‘Becoming - the Mode of Being

[Seinsweise] of Quanta of P o w e r. ’ 2 6

Plainly, such readings clash with the Nietzsche of this thesis, for whom Becoming is just as much a sign as is Being. Nietzsche’s recurrent use of these terms, plus his use of others including ‘falsehood’, ‘instinct’, ‘appearance’ and

others should rather be read as signs of his concern with establishing some |

normative interpretative framework through the mediation of a certain vocabulary which might facilitate avoiding the descent into reactive Nihilism we have already witnessed. Hence Kofman’s reading which gives importance only to the figurai language in Nietzsche which displaces the conceptual structure of metaphysical

discourse, only accounts for half of the story. Were Nietzsche’s writing so earnest 1

in its efforts to elude the delusions of metaphysics, it would be difficult to explain Nietzsche’s repeated employment of the same terms.

Alan Schrift has recently suggested that it actually makes no sense to ask what is interpreted, for the process of interpretation ‘is not grounded in either the

subject or the object; it exists in the between, in the space which separates them.’2?

In other words, the interpreting process is a web of relations, as Nietzsche himself says; ‘If I remove all the relationships, all the properties, all the activities of a thing, the thing does not remain over; because thingness has only been invented by us’ (KSA 12: 10 [202] p. 580). Yet Schrift’s vocabulary still suggests the existence of subject and object between which there could be relation, and reminds us of the analogy drawn by Bernd Magnus between the world and the lost original of an ancient manuscript. The implication of Magnus’s account would be that if we get

the relationship right, we will then be in a position to restore the lost o r i g i n a l.2 8

Such accounts do not go far enough in stressing the constitutive role of interpretation. The web of relationships does not only exist in the space between

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subject and object, it also creates that space, and creates the subject and object

between which the space exists. In Beyond Good and Evil, for example, Nietzsche

asks, ‘Why might not the world which concerns us be a fiction ? And whoever then asks “but does an author belong to a fiction ?” - might he not be answered back with: Why ? Does not this “belong” belong to the fiction ?' (KSA 5 p. 54). In other words the interpretative fiction which constitutes the world also constitutes the subject of interpretation, and it is in this sense that Nietzsche asserts ‘One cannot ask “who is interpreting then ?” ’ (KSA 12: 2 [151] p. 140). Interpretation represents a creative act, and in formulating the problem thus, Nietzsche is pushing to an extreme the model of ‘knowing as making’ implicit in Kant, stripping it of its residual metaphysical attachments, such as the transcendence of the representing subject and all the accompanying humanist trappings of Kant’s moral theory.

We can see this view apparent in a NachlaB note written just before that quoted above, where Nietzsche writes ‘A thing would be described once all beings had asked “what is that ?” and had their questions answered. Supposing one single creature, with its own relationships and perspectives for all things, were missing, then the thing would not yet be “defined” ’ (KSA 12: 2 [149] p. 140). I take Nietzsche to be asserting here, too, that the character of a thing is determined by the character of the beings interpreting, that its existence is dependent upon the interpreting beings and the uses they have for it. Yet this description does not amount to a ‘definition’ of the thing, and Nietzsche’s use of quotation marks indicate the distance he wishes to retain towards this most Socratic of words. For the thing will always take on new characteristics according to the possibility of it being interpreted anew, hence there never can be some final, exhaustive definition. Yet as Alexander Nehemas argues, this is not to suggest merely that the world is a heterogeneous plenitude which our theories can never exhaust. Instead, Nehemas claims, ‘Though the world is always “more” than our theories, this is only because there can always be more theories, not because its essential nature remains untouched.’29

The mention of the idea of a plurality of theories introduces Nietzsche’s perspectivism, and with it also touches the second question which I claimed requires asking. Namely, if interpretation constitutes the object, can we meaningfully speak of better or worse interpretations ? Whence do we gather the criteria according to which we might judge competing or conflicting interpretations ? In answering this question I shall be making my boldest claims as to the proximity of Hegel to Nietzsche. Above all, Nietzsche’s grounding of the interpretative process in will to power imbues it with a Hegelian character, far from being a thinker of plurality, the affirmative thinker par excellence, Nietzsche’s theory of interpretation, I am claiming, is one which affirms a dialectical

understanding of knowing. It is a claim which goes against much current Nietzsche interpretation, yet it is not an untenable one, and moreover one which is central to Nietzsche’s re-assertion of some form of normativity after the crisis in legitimacy of the discourse of metaphysics.

Nietzsche’s mature theory of interpretation, inasmuch as it can be considered a full-blown theory, represents a widening and a deepening of the early, linguistic critique of knowledge carried out in ‘On Truth and Falsehood’. Nietzsche has not abandoned the notion of grammar-functional truth conditions so much as supplemented it with perspectivism.^® Truth is now no longer a function of merely of language so much of the human perspective in general, in other words, it is a function of all those aspects, be they linguistic, psychological or even

physiological, which distinguish the human form of life from other forms, for 4

example that of the bat, to use Nagel’s well-known case. In The Dawn , for

example, he writes ‘My eye, as strong or weak as it may be, can only encompass a certain portion [Stuck], and within this portion I weave and live . . . we spiders are in our web, and whatever we catch in it, we catch nothing unless it allows itself

to be caught in our web’ (KSA 3 p. 110), having already stated baldly in Human

All-too human some years earlier that ‘It is true that there might be a metaphysical

world; we can hardly dispute its absolute possibility. We see all things through the human head and cannot cut this head off; though the question remains what would there still be of the world, if we did cut it off’ (KSA 2 p. 29). We see Nietzsche here qualifying what initially seems an acceptance of the existence of a possible autonomous object of knowledge with doubts as to that autonomy and speculation on the dependence of this metaphysical world on the human perspective. It is a position which is maintained, indeed fortified throughout his career, resulting in bold assertions such as the following from 1887 that ‘We belong to the character of the world, there is no doubt’ (KSA 12: 1 [89] p. 33).

In this regard, one of the important innovations in Nietzsche’s thought is to

deprive the conscious subject of its transcendent role in the process of |

interpretation. Interpretation is not merely a function of consciousness, but also one Æ

of instinct, of the body. I do not wish to examine this topic in great depth at present, since that will be the task of the next chapter, yet it is important to observe that when Zarathustra says ‘Behind your thoughts and feelings stands . . . an un­ known sage - he is called Self. He lives in your body, he is your body’, adding that

‘There is more reason in your body than in your greatest wisdom’ (KSA 4 p. 40), he is accomplishing two things.

First, he is challenging the privilege accorded to the conscious intellect in 4

the metaphysical tradition from Plato onwards. Secondly he is allowing for the possibility of intentional activity taking place in spheres where it has traditionally

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been denied. We see this move taking place early in Nietzsche’s work, in aphorism

18 of Human All-too human . Here he writes, ‘For the plant all things are usually

still, eternal, every thing is identical to itself. From the period of lower organisms humans have inherited the belief that there exist identical things’ (KSA 2 p. 39). Later in the same aphorism he adds that ‘the belief in unconditional substances and in identical things is a similarly primary, similarly ancient mistake of all that is organic’ (ibid. p. 40), It is an atavistic argument which reminds us of his later claim that ‘Philosophising is a kind of atavism of the highest order’ (KSA 5 p. 34).

Nietzsche’s attribution of intentional activity to all forms of organic life allows him to introduce the notion of interpretation as will to power as a coherent thesis explaining interpretative activity. Clearly his view of interpretation as a process which both exceeds and constitutes the human representing subject means that one cannot possibly construe the idea of interpretation as will to power as an anthropocentric doctrine, as does Kaufmann, for example.^! Yet although we can confidently assert what interpretation as will to power is not, it is much more difficult to assert what it is.

The problem of the will to power still remains highly ambiguous. Obviously Nietzsche cannot intend, as Heidegger believes, that the will to power be

taken as 'what a being as such is, namely, what it is in its constitution,’32 The

problem of the will to power is rendered more complex by the fact that in Nietzsche's published works there are only two references to it, while his unpublished notes which refer to it seem more speculative in character than

anything else. Moreover Karl Schlechta has shown the ‘work’ entitled Will to

Power to be an arbitrary collection of notes, involving considerable editorial

violence to Nietzsche's note books.

If Nietzsche did have plans for a comprehensive final work, they remained at a very embryonic stage. In his notebooks from 1887 and 1888 there are numerous ‘plans’ for the ‘Will to Power’ most of which singularly fail to harmonise with each other. Hence it is difficult to treat the will to power as a fully articulated doctrine. Rather, it has the character of a large number of often contra­ dictory and uncoordinated ideas and jottings which lurk in the background to much his work, both published and unpublished, without being fully worked out. A good example of the difficulty in discussing the ‘doctrine’ of the will to power can

be seen in a passage from the Spring of 1888 included in the text of The Will to

Power (§ 689). Nietzsche writes of ‘The will to the accumulation of power as

peculiar to the phenomenon of life . . . could we not accept this will as the motivating force in Chemistry too ? and in the cosmic order ?’ (KSA 13: 14 [81] p. 261). By the end of the passage the reader is quite unsure how to interpret the will to power. Is it a feature of organic life, as Nietzsche seems to be at first suggesting.

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or is it a more basic ontological constitutive feature of all matter ? Nietzsche leaves the question open, ending instead with a number of unanswered questions. In proposing the following brief interpretation of what will to power might mean, I shall pursue a line broadly similar to that of Müller-Lauter in his essay 'Nietzsches Lehre vom Willen zur Macht'33, though I shall relate it to the specific theme of interpretation as I have already developed it.

The first habit we must rid ourselves of, according to Müller-Lauter, is that

of referring to the will to power, as if Nietzsche were some ontological monist.

Admittedly, in his early works clearly written under the influence of Schopenhauer,

he does speak of the will in such terms. However this precedes by some years the

development of his speculative ideas on will to power. The grounds for the above assertion are several. The first derives from Nietzsche's own statement that all notions of unity as the irreducible Being of beings are illusory, in the sense that numbers are themselves useful fictions. Significantly, while will to power rep­ resents a striving to increase the quantum of power, Nietzsche tends to prefer quality to quantity as a determining factor in his interpretative strategy. This inclina­ tion forms one of the main reasons for his critique of mechanistic world views. For example in 1886 he writes, ‘mechanistic conception: desires nothing but quantities: but power lies in quality: mechanism can only describe processes, not explain them’ (KSA 12: 2 [76] p. 96), while later that year he comments that ‘we