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If there is a common theme in Nietzsche’s thought, it could be said to be Nietzsche’s yearning to desecrate the metaphysical sanctuaries of philosophy, science and religion. Relativism, the primacy of the will, and immorality are introduced into Nietzsche’s thought to counteract static and time-worn metaphysical concepts; hence, the overcoming of metaphysics could be said to be Nietzsche’s most general thesis.

Following this line of reasoning, Nietzsche’s procedure fi rst seeks to over-come the eternal truths of metaphysics. Truth, for Nietzsche, involves an error embedded in the history of metaphysics.

Belief in unconditioned substances and in identical things is likewise a primary, ancient error committed by everything organic. Insofar, however, as all metaphysics has had principally to do with substance and freedom of the will, one may designate it the science that treats of the fundamental errors of mankind – but does so as though they were fundamental truths.¹

Metaphysical truths, which have hitherto now served as foundational truths, are nothing more than illusions created by an ancient obsession with the origin of things. Rather than prescribing the origin of things in immanent nature, the duality inherent in metaphysical belief generates origins from

‘above’ or through a ‘mysterious thing in itself’.² Bowie has described Nietzsche in the context of the assault on Enlightenment rationalism and natural sciences that dominated German thought of the nineteenth century.³ Nietzsche’s early works, particularly The Birth of Tragedy, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense and On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, perhaps propose one major theme:⁴

What . . . if all foundational concepts, including regulative ideas, are just fi ctions, ‘noble lies’ which are used to conceal the fact that there is nothing ultimately to back up the demand to think and act in terms of them?⁵

Nietzsche’s allegation states that fundamental truths, which claim an essential insight into the nature of the world, are merely ‘stories’ that account for origins. The truth stories enable human beings to prepare themselves for life within a sanitized or sanctifi ed whole. As Bowie suggests, Nietzsche’s claim against truth destabilizes foundational concepts by appearing to claim a privileged insight into ‘meaninglessness’ as the ultimate ‘non-foundation’ of human existence. That is, if there is nothing inherent in foundational theory to warrant the term foundation, then the nothing that lies behind them becomes a free play of meaning: meaninglessness as foundation. Nietzsche is concerned with truth and the status that truth has been historically accorded in the sciences. In order to subvert what he sees as unjustifi able theorizing, his tech-nique is to read traditional metaphysical concepts as functional implements that pose a confused utility:

What then is truth? A moveable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensifi ed, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fi xed, canonical, and binding.

Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.⁶

In Nietzsche’s hands, truth loses its rational prejudice and acquires a literary or metaphorical usage. Truth serves as a chronicle of fi nite human relations.

It is a narrative or sensuous relationship that one has with life rather than being a fi xed position around which human existence must assemble. Truth is drained of meaning when it is confi ned to a rational standpoint that imagines it has uncovered a fi xed objective truth. For Nietzsche, there is no fi xed position from which to assert universal validity; any such a position is ‘illusory’. The con-sequence of this argument is to suggest that there are only transient sites from which to launch validity claims. Those claims are thus not ‘universal’ in an objective, atemporal sense. A universal, scientifi c truth and method is, for Nietzsche, a denial of the sensuous force of truth: it severs the relation one has to life in favour of a neutral relation between concepts. Neutral relations are considered to be errors. Nietzsche’s truth becomes perspectival and no longer functions as a foundational concept. Nietzsche’s ‘truth-from-a-particular- perspective’ allows him to adopt a specialized standpoint against the claims of reason. One can observe how Nietzsche’s opposition to traditional truth theory is augmented by an unusual argument that alleges that truth can be ‘life- enhancing’ or ‘life-denying’. He is offering an alternative usage for truth con-trary to a rational convention, which describes truth as a neutral concept to be uncovered or brought into accord with itself. Once Nietzsche denies a rational conception of truth, truth is transformed through thinking it in terms of relations to life. Hence, truth can be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for life. It suggests that truth is a ‘relation’ and not a ‘thing’, ‘concept’ or ‘principle’. This transformation implies that truth is set by somewhat more pragmatic concerns than Platonic Ideals. It is set by life-enhancing practices that presuppose a form of ‘will’ for life. What is not life-enhancing is life-denying and hence nihilistic: a will to nothingness. However, the exact meaning of will and its relation to nihilism is the cause of much dispute, as will become apparent.

Nietzsche’s investigations cause him to question the foundation of truth.

Through philological and historical exploration, he hypothesizes that meta-physical truth is linked to a dogma that wishes to assert a life-denying system of truth. On the Genealogy of Morals associates metaphysics with the rise of religion and religious truth. Here Nietzsche investigates the origin of morality in terms of an ‘ascetic ideal’ formed by means of Christian thought and practice. The story that Nietzsche tells is one of the subjugation of an earlier life-affi rming morality by a subsequent life-denying morality. We shall deal more closely with the genealogical methodology below; however, the main task of his genealogy is to demonstrate that life-affi rming values can be dominated by life-denying values, which terminates in the disbelieve of values altogether: the condition known as nihilism. Nietzsche’s skill is his ability to think through the con-sequences of a fundamental change in truth relations. As he muses regarding the ‘death of God’, ‘now that this faith has been undermined, how much must collapse because it was built on this faith’.⁷ That is, how far do metaphysical

conceptions of truth support all forms of beliefs? What is more, if metaphysical support is withdrawn from belief, then how much must be rebuilt on new life-enhancing foundations? This could be considered as the centre of Nietzsche’s philosophy if viewed from his double defi nition of nihilism as comprising both a ‘decline and recession of the power of the spirit’ and an ‘increased power of the spirit’.⁸ Thinking through to the ‘ground’ of nihilism permits Nietzsche to play the physician who distinguishes symptom from cause. Consequently, his life-based distinction allows him to expose the processes that disguise a basic ontology or ideology of life-denial:

[I]t is an error to consider ‘social distress’ or ‘physiological degeneration’ or, worse, corruption, as the cause of nihilism. Ours is the most decent and com-passionate age. Distress, whether of the soul, body or intellect, cannot of itself give birth to nihilism (i.e. the radical repudiation of value, meaning and desirability). Such distress always permits a variety of interpretations. Rather:

it is in one particular interpretation, the Christian-moral one, that nihilism is rooted.⁹

Once the malignant ideology has been exposed as the ‘true cause’ of the social problem, Nietzsche can turn towards his corrective: active nihilism or life deprived of its life-denying shackles. Therefore, the rethinking of meta-physics and Christian morality is necessarily a ‘revaluation’. Any revalu ation of belief systems remains, for Nietzsche, nihilistic in that it must be conscious of the lack of metaphysical ideals that underpin its thought. Nietzsche’s attempt to think ideals by way of an entirely different directive is personifi ed by his con-struction of Zarathustra as a character that struggles against the old metaphysi-cal world. Zarathustra’s journey commences in a ‘going down’ and ends with the words, ‘This is my morning, my day beginneth: arise now, arise, thou great noontide!’¹⁰ The transformation of ideals entails training or creating ‘higher men’, the Übermensch, who fi nally rid themselves of Christian-metaphysical beliefs.¹¹ Nietzsche’s task is, ‘to translate man back into nature’ and then re-describe him as a creature of health, ‘deaf to the lure of the old metaphysical bird-catchers who have been whistling to him for far too long: “You are more! You are higher!

You have a different origin!” ’¹²

The methods by which Nietzsche hopes to transform philosophy and bring human life back to health are deceptive. The force of his writing often masks a more philosophical position that he occupies. However, many scholars have argued that the means of exposing the roots of nihilism and transforming the nature of philosophy is performed not only in the content of his thought but also in the form and style of Nietzsche’s texts. Both Deleuze and Sarah Kofman testify to the essential role of the aphorism in Nietzsche’s method. It is consid-ered the ‘form of pluralist thought’ that claims to ‘articulate and formulate a sense’, which only an aphorism is capable of achieving.¹³ As Nietzsche confesses, an aphorism requires exegesis.¹⁴ Nietzsche’s penchant for the aphorism is

therefore read as an intentional desire for transformative interaction on the part of the reader and the text. The text acts on the reader and ‘cultivates’ him or her through an exegetic process.

A new reading/writing destroys the traditional categories of the book as a closed totality containing a defi nitive meaning, the author’s; in such a way it deconstructs the idea of the author as master of the meaning of the work and immortalizes himself through it. The aphorism, by its discontinuous charac-ter, disseminates meaning and appeals to the pluralism of interpretations and their renewal: only movement is immortal.¹⁵

As Deming notes, ‘Reading, then, becomes properly understood as action and not merely passive reception.’¹⁶ In this case, both reader and text are forced to change, to ‘mature’, rather than remain stationary and unaffected. As Kofman appears to state regarding immortality, texts and readers are literally

‘carried through time’ by the methodology and style of performative textual reading. However, it is pertinent to question the extent of the novelty involved in this analysis. While this may appear new to some commentators, the aph-oristic style has existed in German Romanticism since at least Schlegel, as has the opposition to epistemology with non-rational forms of thinking.¹⁷ Moreover, the hermeneutic tradition of commentary and the continual devel-opment of the text has been a central feature of the Jewish oral tradition for over 3000 years and of the written tradition for approximately 1800 years.¹⁸ Nevertheless, the innovative element in post-structuralist interpretations of Nietzsche’s infl uence is the extension of hermeneutic practices to include all texts and all language. Nietzsche’s signifi cance results from his tireless endeavour to undermine exclusive authorities and regulative principles in Western thought in favour of performative action. Therefore, his methodology is considered central to a new form of textual reading.

Contrary to pluralistic readings of Nietzsche, Berkowitz contests what is now considered the new orthodoxy and emphasizes the confl ict in Nietzsche’s oeuvre between the overcoming of metaphysics, on the one hand, and the establishment of a new but intelligible cosmic order, on the other. Nietzsche does not simply expel truth, knowledge and virtue; rather he re-directs them in the service of life endeavouring to ennoble human being.¹⁹ Truth, knowledge and virtue have not been laid down and forgotten; they have endured a trans-formation. Of the weaponry in Nietzsche’s arsenal, post-structural interpreters tend to de-emphasize Nietzsche’s reliance on history and the historical analyses that facilitate his transformations. From his early work, The Birth of Tragedy, to his mature period, The Genealogy of Morals and The Antichrist, Nietzsche investigated time in the form of history and the historical conditions that underpin value and human creativity.²⁰ Nietzsche uses a particular kind of historical analysis that at times borders on poetry; however, there are objective lesson to be drawn from Nietzsche’s historical work and I will now turn to a

brief analysis of genealogy as one of Nietzsche’s most celebrated contributions to philosophy.²¹

Genealogy

Why does Nietzsche turn to genealogy? Nietzsche initiates a genealogical survey into morality because it specifi cally questions the supremacy of traditional metaphysical concepts through an examination of history. Historical analysis provides Nietzsche with many of the tools required for a confrontation with metaphysics.

Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals is concerned with the origin of moral prejudice. Nietzsche asks, ‘under what conditions did man devise the value judgements good and evil?’²² To answer this question Nietzsche begins a histo-rio-philosophical enquiry that examines the development of morality without the aid of theological revelation or metaphysical principles. Nietzsche’s genealogy is developed in opposition to other forms of historical enquiry. His critique of moral values attacks both the values themselves and their manner of development. Therefore theological teleologies, historical evolutionary theory and ‘English psychology’, which places the origin of morality at the level of molecular interaction, are all rejected in favour of a genealogical approach.²³ For Nietzsche, such theories are predisposed to a mechanized, and therefore passive, interpretation of moral development. English psychological theories are particularly singled out for their desire to designate ‘utility’ and ‘pragmatic function’ as the origin of moral sensations.²⁴ Nietzsche regards this type of investigation as thoroughly ‘unhistorical’, and begins to inquire into the

‘historical’ development of morals as the active decisions of individuals. Hence, we are obliged to ask after the nature of Nietzsche’s genealogical enquiry.

On the Genealogy of Morals is an enquiry into the nature of valuation in history.

As Deleuze notes, Nietzsche’s thesis is a critique of the values and principles that are used to estimate morals, but it is also the critique of ‘the value of values, of the evaluation from which their value arises, thus the problem of their creation’.²⁵ The values in question are not to be judged separately from their creation and the individuals or ‘types’ creating the evaluation. For example, Kant’s ‘conditions of possibility’ are values and evaluative principles that have, to paraphrase Nietzsche, forgotten they are values. Nietzsche hopes to read moral development in a similar manner to a Husserlian or Heideggerian theory of intentionality, that is, the individual elements in a relation cannot be separated and judged in isolation: they must be read as a whole. However, as Michel Foucault affi rms, the investigation that Nietzsche initiates opposes a conventional search for metaphysical or theological origins: ‘What is found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of the origin; it is the dissension of other things. It is disparity.’²⁶ Devotees to Nietzsche’s cause embrace the contest that genealogy brings to homogeneous identities

and origins. The historical character of their enquires attempt to employ history against itself with a view to ‘dispel[ling] the chimeras of origins’.²⁷ This is the sense of ‘origin’ that Nietzsche elicits in his genealogy:

Genealogy means both the value of origins and the origins of values.

Genealogy is as opposed to absolute values as it is to relative or utilitarian ones. Genealogy signifi es the differential element of values from which their value itself derives.²⁸

The historical nature of genealogy is intrinsic to Nietzsche’s critical method, but the origins that are disclosed are considered to be ‘differential’ or ‘dis-cordant’. By this, Deleuze and Foucault largely mean that Nietzsche’s enquiry investigates morality in terms of ‘hieroglyphics’ or signs that are ‘documented’

in historical existence.²⁹ However, the judgements passed on historical ‘facts’

are used to undermine standardized versions of moral progress, which have been recounted in Western societies in the form of theological hypotheses and tales of national origins since their formation.

Nietzsche dramatically illustrates the genealogical method by way of his theory of moral origins in On the Genealogy of Morals. His thesis states that the crisis in Western morality is due to a ‘slave revolt in morality’.³⁰ The ‘slave revolt in morality’ is set against a version of Christian morality that portrays itself as a morally superior and divinely inspired universal truth: ‘I negate a type of moral-ity that has become prevalent and predominant as moralmoral-ity itself – the moralmoral-ity of decadence or, more concretely, Christian morality.’³¹ Nietzsche asserts that Christian morality is born of resentment against former aristocratic rulers or

‘masters’. The rise of Christian morality is due to a slave insurrection against a master morality: it is reactive rather than active. However, the position of slave and master is not dependent upon the position that individuals or groups occupy in the social order. The spiritual or moral state of the individual deter-mines the character of master or slave. In keeping with his life-affi rming prin-ciple, Nietzsche explains that slave morality is the result of having to turn life-affi rming passions inwardly where they are unable to disseminate them-selves and are hence converted into ressentiment.³² ‘All instincts that do no discharge themselves outwardly turn inward – this is what I call the internalisation of man.’³³ Resentment allows values to be inversed: bad becomes good, meek-ness becomes strength and strength and nobility are scorned as attributes of evil. Once resentment has been institutionalized into a system of slave morality, then the long process of bad conscience, decadence and nihilism is set in train.³⁴ In this fashion, Nietzsche is illustrating how morality is created by the actions and inactions of human beings. Actions and judgements are system-atized to a moral code, which is then regarded as invulnerable. Nietzsche’s self-appointed task is to unveil moral origins as historic origins in time and there-fore expose their fi nite, contingent nature. Subsequently, he begins to counter moral decadence and bad conscience with another history that will lead to the

externalization of instincts and thus attempt to realize the happiness and health of human kind.

To an extent, Nietzsche’s insights are conditioned by his view of history and the problems inherent in certain historical synopses. Alexander Nehamas provides a link between Nietzsche’s early work On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life and On the Genealogy of Morals, suggesting that the fundamental

To an extent, Nietzsche’s insights are conditioned by his view of history and the problems inherent in certain historical synopses. Alexander Nehamas provides a link between Nietzsche’s early work On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life and On the Genealogy of Morals, suggesting that the fundamental