Falsification

And now, the blog turns again to that guy with the mustache, Nietzsche. He has resigned from the professorship he'd held for a decade at Basel and has been living off of the pension writing books for a couple of years. He is about thirty seven years old and he is writing what he will later call his most personal work of philosophy, almost like a journal, called the Gay Science - cheerful, even silly at times, highly naturalistic, and right on the edge "of something incomparable" (according to Nietzsche later). It is made up of four major sections called "books," and the fourth book ends with the beginning of his favorite work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which he writes with such inspiration that he feels that Zarathustra "overtook" him. It is his first attempt at expressing his whole philosophy. The first two parts of Zarathustra were written the following winter and the summer, the third part the following year, and the fourth part (privately published and distributed to only seven friends) the year after. His next book is Beyond Good & Evil, his attempt to say "the same things as my Zarathustra, but differently...very differently", around the same time beginning to look back over, republish, and write new prefaces for his early books. This is the period on which I wrote my undergraduate thesis. He writes yet another book, Genealogy of Morals, as a clarification of Beyond Good & Evil, republishes with a new preface his third book, the Dawn, and finally, gets back to his fourth, the Gay Science, with which I started this post. This is when he publishes a second edition, not just with a new preface, but with an added fifth book, which instead of being like a journal has been popular among philosophers because its more argumentative and traditionally philosophic subject matter. The whole Gay Science hangs together, of course, but you can see what distance there is between the publishing of the first four books of it and its fifth! Three of his most famous works and a self-re-evaluation of all the books before it! Three huge attempts to communicate a philosophic world view that he hadn't had before! Zarathustra, Beyond Good & Evil, new prefaces to his previous works, and the Genealogy of Morals all lie in between the first four books and the fifth book of the Gay Science.
There's a point to all this, I swear. Skip ahead just over a century to a Nietzsche scholar named Maudemarie Clark, currently a professor at Colgate University. She was and still is regarded as one of Nietzsche's top scholars because of her highly acclaimed 1990 book, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, which was reportedly so good that it "continues to serve as the gold standard for studies of its kind." In this book, she argues that a huge strain of Nietzsche's thought - his apparent radical anti-realism and skepticism about logic, math, science and even everyday objects - can all be explained away as part of a "falsification thesis" that Nietzsche develops early in his career and later gives up. Whew! This means we can bring him into the fold a bit...though he did debunk the ridiculous notion of an otherworldly, metaphysical truth, he still believes in the more modest, everyday notion of limited, empirical truth that we all rely on. The only problem with this: the crux of her argument, the entire PROOF or TEXTUAL BASIS of her argument, relied on the mistake of thinking that the fifth book of the Gay Science, from which her main example of this early "falsification thesis" came from, was written and published BEFORE his main works in which he reached his mature philosophical thought (and to say it again, although the first four sections of the Gay Science came earlier, the fifth was undeniably written AFTER Zarathustra, Beyond Good & Evil, and the Genealogy of Morals - his "mature" thought). In fact, the very passage that Clark cites as her main evidence, as THE passage in which Nietzsche realizes that he must give the falsification thesis up, is in Beyond Good & Evil, written and published before her main example of the "early" and problematic "falsification thesis" of the 5th book of the Gay Science.
Can you imagine how incredulous I felt when I discovered this as a fresh-faced young undergraduate? That one of the top Nietzsche scholars in existence, in one of the most influential books on Nietzsche in recent times, in an extremely influential interpretation, argued that a "later" passage showed that he gave up the views of an "earlier" passage up...and got the order switched up? That the passage that she needed to come after actually and undeniably, as a matter of historical fact, came before?
And I lied when I said that this was the only problem...there were plenty others, including the fact (pointed out in an article by Prof. Nadeem Hussain, now at Stanford) that the supposedly early "falsification" claims seem to appear elsewhere in the same book, Beyond Good & Evil, in which he supposedly gives it up. Had she just not read the book? Did she just pick this one passage out of context and put it into her argument of what Nietzsche should have said were he smart, or, in Clark's terms, of reading Nietzsche "charitably"? Keep in mind, this is a scholar who ranks as co-translator on an edition of the Genealogy of Morals!!! Shouldn't she know the text? And her response to Hussain, in which she explained away two of the many instances of the falsification claims in that book (saying the others can be 'similarly' explained away by careful interpretation), also seemed to me to be full of bad interpretation, ignorant of context. I disagreed with her interpretation of the crucial passage itself, the one in which he supposedly gives up the falsification thesis. In fact, I thought she was wrong on basically every point and brought forth many arguments and close readings to show it.
I think it's pretty well established that going to a good school and doing well has the danger of giving yourself too much credit. On the basis of this single scholarly interpretation of Nietzsche and fueled by my moral indignation to the wrong it did Nietzsche, I more or less decided that the secondary literature was not worth much reading, and that I would just go back to Nietzsche's text itself and do it right, do it better. Looking back, my actions said, "you so-called scholars are not paying enough attention to what he's writing! You're not getting everything he's saying! Look at me, I'm going to pay so much attention to him that I'm going to spend all year interpreting only these first four passages, two of which you so badly bungled up, of Beyond Good & Evil." It didn't help that my thesis adviser happened to have barely read any Nietzsche, and not since his undergraduate days, so I was always a position of intellectual authority over my professor, who basically helped me by telling me where to clarify and asking questions.

Nowadays if I read some of the secondary literature on Nietzsche from the realm of academic philosophy, the effect is basically humbling. Like, why the hell didn't I read this when I was writing my thesis? For example, John Richardson's extremely well-written introduction the the Oxford Readings in Philosophy Volume easily dealt with some of the things I couldn't figure out how to get across that well in my thesis, especially about how to deal with the apparent antimony between Nietzsche's thought and scholarly/academic philosophy.
It still is a mystery to me, though, whether or not anyone has bothered to point out Clark's chronological mistake in Nietzsche On Truth & Philosophy. Paul Katsafanas (who recently finished his Harvard dissertation on Nietzsche's applications to constitutivism about practical reason in the philosophy of action and mind) deftly sidesteps the issue using a footnote in his "Consciousness and Conceptualization", even though he there provides a better explanation of Nietzsche's 'falsification' claims. Leiter is sympathetic to Clark's basic interpretation but shifts the chronology a bit in his summary of it, and Richardson does something similar in the article I mentioned. None of them gets into the specifics. Richardson also notes that Clark revises the chronology a bit in a later article which I admittedly haven't read, but her response to Hussain postdates that article, and in that response (which is co-authored by David Dudrick) she sticks to saying that Beyond Good & Evil 15 provides evidence that he gives the falsification thesis up. Even more baffling to me was that in that later article (2004) she recognizes in a footnote at the back of the article that the fifth book of the Gay Science postdates Beyond Good & Evil but makes no mention of the fact that this undermines her main evidence for the crux of her interpretation, that Nietzsche gives the falsification thesis up.
At any rate, I'm left wondering whether it is academic politics or politeness that prevented this error from being an academic embarrassment for Clark, or if it has been pointed out somewhere I'm not aware of, or if maybe just nobody really cares. Maybe scholars see it as a technicality, a detail, and still like having her view out there as a possibility in the landscape of possible interpretations of Nietzsche on truth. I guess given how nebulous a lot of philosophy seems to be, with no clear yes or no answers on a lot of things, it would be refreshing for an interpretation to just be refuted and killed. Especially if you're a strange little man who feels like this is important to more than academic Nietzsche specialists in their towers, that Nietzsche has something actually important to say about truth.