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PDF FormatThe idea is that truth changes. We are accustomed to the claim that all truth is relative, and might therefore be tempted to assimilate Nietzsche’s philosophizing gods, and their changing truth, into that more familiar idea. The two are far from the same, however. Classical relativism claims, in one form or another, that human perspectives differ essentially and says further that there are no means for deciding on an absolute perspective beyond them. Accordingly, truth at any given place and time is relative to some individual man. The truth of the philosophizing gods is something else entirely. It is a changing absolute.
It is not by chance that the idea is expressed in a metaphor, for a changing absolute is a classical absurdity which even modern philosophers hesitate to admit. If the standard of measure for all things were to change, there would be no means of measuring that change, except another standard of measure which was indeed absolute.12 If an absolute changes, provided only it be a true absolute, that change can have no meaning nor can it even so much as be detected, for if the measure of truth changes, truth changes with it. Previous truths are lost for all eternity.
Classical relativism was prepared to make peace with this fact. According to it “man is the measure of all things,” and since no man has the ability to remain exactly the same from one moment to the next, even personal truths must fade eternally in a slowly evaporating trail. Classical relativism was thus in the broadest sense anti-philosophical. In contrast, Nietzsche’s doctrine of the changing absolute permits him to raise philosophy to an unprecedented state of exaltation. Truth, rather than sinking into the abyss of relativism, is lifted by an ingenious stratagem into a higher eternity. This is accomplished by means of the Eternal Return, Nietzsche’s doctrine that reality has and will repeat itself forever.
The eternity which is filled out by the repetition of a finite reality is a realm in which an absolute may change without being utterly lost, because all the forms of the changing absolute are also preserved. The recurrence transplants all change and the temporal world into eternity. It had been Hegel’s great ambition to preserve those truths, once considered absolutes, which the passage of time had falsified.13 To do so, he posited a moving absolute toward which all history aims by dialectical stages. Nietzsche’s incredulous genius was not able to offer him the comfort of this particular faith in a universal progress that saves the truths of the past by swallowing them up in the Absolute Truth to come. All that was left to him was the Eternal Return and the sort of peace and quiet which hover above a realm of endless struggle. Nietzsche’s comfort was not the progress of history, in which he disbelieved, but an eternity holding the Complete Collected Works of all the gods’ philosophizing.
Starting from gods who philosophize, the changing nature of truth is a necessary conclusion, and the Eternal Return serves as ballast against a riotous Kingdom of Heaven. Taken together, they are the outline of a complete system which answers to the classical theologies of religion in many respects, but which is essentially new and altered. What emerges around Nietzsche’s philosophizing gods is more than a new system, it is a new religiosity marked by a new type of god. With it lies a tortured path to him and his riddle of self-knowledge. For even though this man can never be wholly known, something of him surely speaks in the object of his ironic worship: The philosophizing host of heaven.
V
The matter at hand is Nietzsche’s conclusion that the gods philosophize, a conclusion he says pressed itself upon him often. What was it that drew the philosopher to this? What logic or experience lent it philosophical force? Here, the answer may precede its proof, for there is testimony of only one thing in all the annals of Nietzsche’s spiritual autobiography which could have fertilized his mind for the new relativism. The historical sense, or the nineteenth century’s “sixth sense,” is Nietzsche’s name for that thing, and perhaps it is a fitting name for all that fascinates and repels in his vision.14 There is a brief attempt at its definition:
The ability quickly to guess the rank order of the valuations that a people, a society, an individual has lived by, the “divinatory instinct” for the connections between these valuations, for the relationship between the authority of values and the authority of effective forces….15
This is the historical sense in a few words. It is an ability, says Nietzsche, to guess quickly at the valuations a people has lived by, at the “relationship between the authority of values and the authority of effective forces.” Translated into more familiar language this refers to the relationship between the dominant cultural values, or the inner history of a period (“the authority of values”), and the acts of its men (“the authority of effective forces”). It is a mobile sense for the soul of people, above and beyond, perhaps, even what they know of themselves.
Nietzsche believed that the gods philosophize. In order to penetrate a divine dialectic, one would have to be able to guess at the nature of the gods’ philosophizing from the manifold circumstances of the world. In other words, from the known and intelligible world, it would have to be possible to divine the “rank order of valuations” embodied in the philosophy of the gods. The transition from the historical sense as described in the aphorism to the conclusion that truth changes is a mere shifting of the dependent variable. Rather than inferring from men to their secret or cultural souls, the inference is from those same newly discovered souls to a posture of divine philosophy able to grant them meaning. When men are seen to act, the historical sense suggests the soul in which their action is wrought, e.g., the soul of Athenian or Roman man. But once those world-souls have been made intelligible, it is able to build again on its gains and guess what must be the philosophical assumptions of a universe thus populated. The object of knowledge is equally the gods as seen by the Greeks and the Greeks as seen by the gods.
Though much in Hegel makes similar claims, Nietzsche liberates the historical sense to infinite applicability. He arrives at an entirely new species of relativism, a relativism made possible by the historical sense and based on neither sense perception nor the individual man. Instead, the new relativism of the historical sense is based on superhuman agencies, entities whose very existence is obscure. “The gods philosophize,” says Nietzsche, and adds, “I have been told that you do not like believing in God and gods these days.”16 The gods have been rediscovered by means of their changing truth. They philosophize, therefore they are.
And these freshly discovered gods have a much more stubborn claim to existence than is first apparent. The greater part of our philosophy approaches truth and reality by means of changing divine forces: ‘Cultural,’ ‘linguistic,’ ‘historical,’ and ‘psychological’--gods, indeed, in everything but name. Nietzsche’s polytheistic relativism, separated from his idiosyncrasies, is nothing short of a fundamental ontological point of departure for modern thought.
In all places the historical sense and its gods serve as the demarcation of modernity. They are a cornerstone of our received thought. While in later thinkers the divine relativism never again reaches the same plastic virtuosity it has in Nietzsche, neither is it ever again absent. With it, we move a step closer to the riddle of self-knowledge, and to the core of modern philosophy.
VI
The historical sense is the soil of a once new species of relativism, now grown unobtrusively familiar. What is the true nature of the “sixth sense” which, much distinguished from the canonical five, is able to resurrect gods and arrive at a changing absolute? The historical sense is a faculty which appears at a particular juncture of history. It is the nineteenth century which considers it a sixth sense, and its origin, according to Nietzsche, is the “democratic mixing of the classes and races.” This explanation, though likely not without its truth, is very far indeed from putting the matter to rest. Can Nietzsche have forgotten to ask how an individual comes to possess the historical sense?
