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PDF FormatEven a philosopher is entitled to remain agnostic as to the relation between philosophy and life. But when modern man and philosophy combine so happily, as if by design, against a philosophy of human nature, it is hard to see only a great coincidence of events. At least this much cannot be denied, that a philosophical perplexity regarding truth, identity, and human nature has seeped into daily life, so that modern man’s crisis involves a deep if unconsidered philosophical malaise.
What Hegel expresses, however, is only a bad opinion of human nature and its philosophical worth. The causes of his opinion are more clearly seen elsewhere in German philosophy. With Hegel is indeed an early trace of modern man’s condition, or, more precisely, an oracle concerning the unresolivability of his crisis. But it is only in Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy that the same disinclination for self-knowledge became a matter for philosophy to consider directly and with urgency.
Nietzsche is our point of departure because he is the first and last of the great philosophers to question his own aversion to self-knowledge. But there are also more general considerations drawing us to him. Hegel’s was a closed system and its optimism no longer reflects our intellectual orientation. Nietzsche, anxious and unsatisfied, is the first of the philosophers to belong fully to modernity. His work provides many of the loose threads of reality which have been pulled by successive generations. In him is found not only our ambivalence for the study of human nature, but also a recognizable form of our dream of freedom. We begin by asking this first and greatest representative of modernity: What of self-knowledge?
III
Nietzsche’s statements on self-knowledge are scattered throughout his writings, recorded in a tone of unusually persistent puzzlement and riddling. A soliloquy deep in the labyrinths of Beyond Good and Evil serves as an introduction.
Will anyone believe me? But I insist on being believed: I have never been good at thinking about myself, and do so only on very rare occasions, only when forced, without any desire to pursue “the matter”…. This whole state of affairs might be the most certain thing I do know about myself. I must have a kind of revulsion against believing anything definite about myself. Could there be a riddle here? Probably; but fortunately not one for my teeth. —Could this reveal what species I belong to?—But not to me: Which is just how I want it to be.4
Not everything in Nietzsche is to be taken at face value. The philosopher contradicts himself, he lies and he riddles. Even so there is much to speak for this particular declaration’s sincerity. Nietzsche is found directly confessing his unrepentant distaste for the pursuit of self-knowledge, and musing that his revulsion is a mysterious sign of something else. The confusion only thickens with the addition of different voices elsewhere in his writing.
Someone else with a more subtle thirst for possession will say to himself, “One should not deceive where one wants to possess”—He becomes irritated and impatient at the thought that a mask of himself rules the hearts of people: “Which is why I have to let myself be known, and above all know myself!”5
Nietzsche insists that the quest for self-knowledge leaves him cold and indifferent. He also lets it be known that the desire to possess, in subtle natures, demands self-knowledge. This contradiction, as will become apparent, forms near the core of his thought and twines about its deepest fabric. It is Nietzsche’s riddle of self-knowledge.
It would not be difficult to conjure up an apparent solution to the riddle.6 Yet what speaks here is manifestly not another of the riddles which Nietzsche sets for his disciples. Rather, it is the central riddle implicit in the philosophy and the man himself. As if by way of confession, a peculiar tone of flat perplexity is never far from any aphorism touching the subject.
An issue that has been resolved stops mattering to us. —What did that god who counseled, “Know thyself!” really mean? Was it perhaps: “Stop letting anything matter to you! Become objective!”—And Socrates?—And the “scientific man”?7
What complicates matters is that this riddle of self-knowledge belongs not to any philosopher, but to a philosopher tormented, above all other things, precisely by a sudden and unbearable presentiment of self-knowledge. Standing “beyond good and evil” requires knowing what exactly one’s good and evil were. “Self-overcoming” is an idea which could hardly occur to a man without any very clear idea who he is. The man who believes he has killed his God cannot escape also being the man who believes his God was all along a part of himself. This is the same Nietzsche that, according to Sigmund Freud, “had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who ever lived or was likely to live.”8
The riddle stands thus: Self-knowledge is not to be pursued, cannot be pursued, even as everything seems to demand it. Modernity’s struggles with identity are versions of this riddle. When Nietzsche, a master of self-knowledge, turns first in conscious bewilderment and then in disgust from self-examination, it is not arbitrary. After him, many others and much of philosophy will follow. The riddle of self-knowledge is at the foundation of a new tradition pressing onward through his existentialist disciples. In Heidegger, Sartre, and their followers, for instance, the true self will appear (or disappear) as something unknowable; something perpetually receding, or merely potential. But a potential self that creates the personal past was not what we sought. We sought modern man, mind and soul, flesh and blood.
IV
The riddle of self-knowledge reflects the confusion of a modernity struggling to “find itself.” A solution to this riddle can never come from the man occupied in looking for himself: Such a man is himself the riddle. Nietzsche, however, is an exception. He experiences the riddle in terms of the wish to be lost to himself. What for us is an affliction, for him was an end. In the prophetic tangle of philosophy and poetry that marks his work, there are no doubt many roads leading back to the riddle and its causes. Ours will be paved by the cunning of proverbial wisdom according to which “to know a man is to know his God.”
Nietzsche is usually remembered as the man who declared that God is dead, but he speaks also of other gods who are quite alive and lively enough to engage in debate. More than once he states simply and emphatically that “the gods philosophize.”9 His meaning, though not immediately clear, can be deciphered. The gods, philosophizing or not, are the highest intelligent powers in or above the world. They are also responsible for the world, whether as creators or as overseers, and are the final authority on matters of truth. Philosophy, on the other hand, is a search and an interminable contention over truth. A man’s philosophy may change precisely while the world remains the same, for it matters little to the world whether it be grasped or merely groped. But should the gods’ truth change, then the world would have little choice but to follow suit.
“The gods philosophize” means truth changes, and it changes by virtue of philosophizing. No wonder, then, that this proclamation is “something that might arouse mistrust precisely among philosophers….”10 And when Nietzsche says of his idea that it “seems to me like something new and not without its dangers,” tragic tones of understatement are heard.11 But is all this not genuinely mad caprice? What is meant by picturing gods as striving against one another toward uncertain issue and dragging the world along with them? For Nietzsche, at least, the idea is neither arbitrary nor fanciful. He states that it is “a conclusion I have been drawn to many times.” For him, at least, it carries the allure of necessity which all great philosophical ideas, true or false, must possess.
