Dialogue with Nietzsche

By Gianni Vattimo

Translated by William McCuaig

Columbia University Press, 2006

Reviewed by Sonja Boos

Dialogue with Nietzsche is a collection of Gianni Vattimo’s essays that consider the critical import of Nietzschean philosophy, Vattimo’s long-time subject of investigation, for contemporary thought. Spanning 28 years, the essays weave an intricate dialogue between, on the one hand, Nietzsche and the Nietzschean tradition, which is mapped out along the postwar turn in Nietzsche scholarship, and, on the other hand, between these two and Vattimo himself, a philosopher who is profoundly influenced by Nietzsche’s postmetaphysical thought. In this way, Vattimo’s use of the notion of dialogue is indeed programmatic. Setting out the stakes of Nietzsche’s philosophy, Vattimo makes a case for the need “to receive Nietzsche’s ideas positively” as a “proposal with which to enter in dialogue,” and not as a mere symptom of the decline of western metaphysics (85-6). Despite his insistence on Nietzsche’s non-propositional way of doing philosophy, Vattimo regards Nietzsche as a constructive philosopher whose work is “charged with meaning for the future” (ix). Sensitive to the ways in which Nietzsche’s œuvre continually dissolves and defies the formal conventions of traditional philosophy, Vattimo nevertheless insists on reading it as a comprehensive and self-contained object of study, in which the mature thoughts are often contained in nuce in the youthful writings (56).

Yet Vattimo’s dialogical commitment also embodies the mark of Nietzschean scholarship in so far as he refrains from interpretation, if interpretation is understood as a strictly apodictic, indeed authoritative, act. In his view, understanding Nietzsche hinges on the possibility of a multidirectional engagement with the writings of both Nietzsche and his interpreters. Thus, one of the strengths of Vattimo’s dialogic, indeed relational, analyses lies precisely in the way in which Nietzsche’s work and its reception by a wide range of pre- and postwar philosophers are made to mutually elucidate each other. This is to say that as Vattimo approaches Nietzsche’s philosophy through, for instance, Heidegger’s interpretations, he also arrives at a new understanding of both Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s thought.

A collection of essays the majority of which have never before appeared in English, Dialogue with Nietzsche reveals Vattimo’s critical project as an enduring attempt to reframe the tradition of postmetaphysical philosophy and modern hermeneutics from a Nietzschean perspective. Profoundly aware of the manifold ambiguities that have accumulated over years of a steady reception of Nietzsche’s thought, Vattimo moves toward a more definite and consequential reading, claiming that by setting a limit to the idea of objective truth Nietzsche once and for all abandoned the metaphysical foundation of western thought. Such a line of argument structures Chapter 2 (“Nietzsche’s Vision of the World” 1967) in which Vattimo argues that as per Nietzsche’s negation of metaphysics the “real” world (meaning the world as such) has indeed “become a myth” (33). By performing a complete and unparalleled reversal of Platonism Nietzsche’s work not only contests the dichotomy between appearance and reality, but also collapses this very distinction.

In contrast to Nietzsche’s radical critique of the concept of truth as evidentness, Hegelianism and historicism, though effectively relativizing the concept of “truth,” still consider truth to be relative to its epoch, from which it follows that “History” emerges as a context giving meaning to the world (30). Nietzsche, however, countered the everyday notion of temporality with the concept of “eternal return,” which, as Vattimo points out, is hardly exhausted in the prevailing physio-cosmological and moral interpretations. In Chapter 3, (“The Problem of Historical Knowledge and the Formation of the Nietzschean Idea of Truth”—a key text from 1967 but previously unpublished in English), Vattimo explains why Nietzsche’s critique of truth could not have possibly resulted in a new philosophical system or definite genealogy. Taking important cues from the essays “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” “We Philologists,” and On the Utility and Liability of History for Life, Vattimo speaks to how Nietzsche’s philosophy of unmasking lead him to the claim that “the only true mode of knowing is interpreting” (55). Within these terms, it would be contradictory if the work of unmasking were then to impose a new, but equally illusory, structure (80). Vattimo finds Nietzsche’s insight that the world consists of a host of particular and provisional perspectives his most significant contribution to the history of philosophy. For in addition to constituting the theoretical core of his distinctive strain of nihilism, Nietzsche’s perspectivism also sets the framework for his conception of hermeneutics.

The theme of nihilism is taken up again in Chapter 9 (“The two senses of Nihilism in Nietzsche”), where Vattimo draws a distinction between two meanings of nihilism. The first nihilism is a “weak” and passive form, the other “strong” and active. Yet for Vattimo the distance between both forms of nihilism is not particularly significant, as they tend to merge in the figure of the artist who is able to transcend his interest of self-preservation while developing a hubristic, disinterested stance (140). Personifying the Nietzschean Übermensch, the artist, rather than remaining within an arbitrary and empty plurality of perspectives, is able to “organize freely, through a more or less conscious and explicit choice—in short, through an act of life” (55). In addition to illustrating the crux of Nietzsche’s “new way of understanding and doing philosophy” (34), this description of an act of choice also supports Vattimo’s claim that Nietzsche, albeit a deeply anti-foundational thinker, never fell under the spell of absolute nihilism. Like the tragic, Dionysian artist, the Nietzschean philosopher of the future neither resigns himself to a stagnant form of nihilism nor practices the kind of positivist, erudite philology Nietzsche criticized time and again. Instead, he is essentially a creator of “truth criteria” (i.e. values, 67). In an effort to avoid imposing another system (and thus contradict the rejection of identity and subjectivity from which he departed in the first place), Nietzsche’s new philosopher grasps history in its true nature as event. Vattimo maintains that by rejecting empiricist and positivist definitions of history, Nietzsche thought of history as an existential category, a circular fluxus that demands “a response, a choice, a form of ‘justice’” (58). By conceiving the end of metaphysics as a proposal for a breakthrough and not as a terminal point, Nietzsche envisioned (himself as) a philosopher who, rather than determining what things are, grasps Being by “entering—living—into relation with another event as a living event” (47). This, then, relates to Vattimo’s major proposition: Nietzsche belongs to the rise of ontological hermeneutics, “ontological” because he defines knowledge as an act of life and “hermeneutic” because rather than telling the truth Nietzsche examines why the faith in a “true” essence of reality has persisted well into the nineteenth century (74).

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Further establishing his argument concerning Nietzsche’s hermeneutics in Chapter 7 (“Nietzsche and Contemporary Hermeneutics” in a fresh, previously unpublished translation), Nietzsche’s philosophy “takes as its central theme the phenomenon of interpretation” (73). Thus, the two major traditions of Nietzsche scholarship to have emerged in the past decades (based either on the French “vitalistic” or “energetic” Nietzsche as conceived by Bataille, Deleuze, Foucault, or the Heideggerian “technological” Nietzsche) miss this fundamental connection between Nietzsche’s thought and the hermeneutic tradition. By bringing to the fore what he calls the “hermeneutic Nietzsche,” Vattimo complicates the established Franco-German binary with a third interpretative tradition that includes critics as diverse as Karl Löwith, Karl Jaspers, and Walter Kaufman who essentially all viewed Nietzsche as a “master of suspicion.” The only critics to bring the intrinsically hermeneutic character of Nietzsche’s thought into focus, they are able to account for more aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy than those who limit themselves to the “eternal return” or the “will to power” (75). At the same time, commentators who deliberate the hermeneutic dimension of Nietzsche’s thought have to confront some of its most problematic implications. Conscious of the manifold contradictions in Nietzsche’s philosophy, Vattimo thus places an explicit emphasis on the paradoxes inherent to his conception of hermeneutics. Notably, Vattimo points out that the negation of the concept of truth as objectivity in the end undermines Nietzsche’s definition of philosophy as an activity of unmasking, since there is no knowing and willing “subject” that could function as either agent or end product of the unmasking action of thought (80).

It follows that Vattimo considers Nietzsche’s (nihilistic) version of hermeneutics to be of great concern for a current of contemporary philosophy that Vattimo terms “ontological hermeneutics” (and that includes Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Jauss, Apel, Habermas, and Rorty). For once it has been touched by the magic wand of Nietzschean philosophy, ontological hermeneutics will inevitably result in nihilistic outcomes as well (77). Thus, the “hermeneutic turn” in modern philosophy has more radically nihilistic implications than is often realized (82). But as Vattimo demonstrates in his own works of philosophy, nihilism can take on positive significance, as when Vattimo, departing from Nietzsche’s rejection of identity, objective truth, and chronological priorities, seeks to replace totalitarian (strong and dominant) structures with a non-totalitarian, non-violent, and “weak” frame of reality that is likewise dialogical, event-like in character as well as ontologically committed.

Due to the book’s structure, which is a compilation of essays written to stand alone, it at times reads as slightly repetitive and redundant. The advantage, however, is that as readers we are time and again exposed to the extremely careful, lucid, and elegant readings, which provide a hugely informative documentation of the history of Nietzsche reception on the one hand, and the development of Vattimo’s own theoretical grasp of Nietzsche’s work on the other. Although he takes up a number of subjects (historicity, nihilism, hermeneutics, aesthetics, ontology) in more than a few essays, Vattimo places different emphases on these themes as they recur in the respective chapters. Within these terms and by way of conclusion, I would like to consider his article “Art and Identity: On the Relevance of Nietzsche’s Aesthetics” (1974) and his “Nietzsche, 1994” (1995). In the first text, Vattimo links aesthetic appearance to the Dionysian impulse to negate identity. Emerging as a discipline where the ancient struggle between the Dionysian and Apollonian forces lives on, aesthetics comes to embody the site where the philosopher may begin to explore the ramifications of Nietzsche’s particular form of nihilism. In the second text, Vattimo notes that the political reception of Nietzsche has largely fallen into oblivion and has been replaced by a more “literary” reception that views Nietzsche as the creator of a literary myth (and thus the creator of alternative worlds) rather than the prophet of a new humanity that is to be historically realized. Which is to say, if the 1974 essay presented aesthetics as the site where philosophical debate lives on under the guise of aesthetics, the later essay argues that Nietzsche’s work has itself become the site of an aesthetic “revolution” that, however, no longer seems to inspire political revolt (202). Vattimo explains this new development as part of the increasingly pragmatic and pessimistic cultural climate of the late 20th century, where the possibility of revolution is located in form and style—that is, in writing—rather than in action or speculative thought. Having shifted from the domain of the political and the historical context of ’68 to a strictly academic environment (the Aesthetics and Philosophy Departments of the university), the dialogue with Nietzsche nonetheless continues.

Reviewed by Sonja Boos

All Rights Reserved. © Sonja Boos - Nietzsche Circle, 2006.