In the autumn of 1865, a twenty-one-year-old Friedrich Nietzsche was browsing a secondhand bookshop in Leipzig when he pulled a volume from a shelf almost at random. It was Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, and Nietzsche, who had no particular reason to open it, opened it anyway and read through the night. He later described the experience as one of the most decisive of his life: here was a philosopher who told the truth about human existence without consolation, without the comforting fictions of religion or progress or rational order, staring into the abyss with an honesty that Nietzsche found both devastating and strangely exhilarating. He spent the next several years in Schopenhauer's intellectual grip before breaking free and forging something entirely his own, but the Leipzig bookshop encounter had set the direction. Nietzsche would spend his career doing for his own generation what Schopenhauer had done for him: stripping away the illusions by which comfortable people arranged their comfortable lives, and asking what remained when the props were removed.
German philosopher of the late nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) boldly challenged the foundations of Christianity, traditional morality, and the prevalent social mores of his time. At the forefront of movements that would come to be associated with existentialism, perspectivism, and nihilism, he emphasized the importance of human individuality and freedom, insisted that truth could only be approached through the lens of our own perceptions and interpretations, and mounted a sustained assault on the religious and moral doctrines he believed were stifling the human spirit. His influence spread far beyond philosophy, shaping literature, psychology, political thought, and the cultural imagination of the twentieth century in ways that were not always what he intended and not always what he would have welcomed.
Few philosophers have brought to Nietzsche's work both the critical sharpness and the breadth of humanistic learning that Arthur Coleman Danto possessed. Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University, Danto was best known as the influential long-time art critic for The Nation and for his landmark contributions to philosophical aesthetics and the philosophy of history, though his intellectual reach extended across thought, feeling, theories of representation, philosophical psychology, and the work of Hegel, Merleau-Ponty, and Schopenhauer. It was a range of interests that made him uniquely equipped to engage with a philosopher who refused to stay inside any single discipline's boundaries.
In the conversation that follows, Danto guides us into Nietzsche's world with the precision of a philosopher and the sensibility of a critic, illuminating a thinker whose provocations have never lost their power to disturb, and whose central question, what do we do when the foundations give way, has never been more urgently relevant than it is today.
Charles Carlini: Nietzsche has been one of the most misinterpreted and unfairly maligned intellectual figures of the last two centuries. Even today, they often miscarry his views. Can you tell us why?
Arthur Danto: Mostly, I think, because of the way he dismissed what we think of as morality as slave-morality. He had no use for pity; he claimed that God is dead, he felt that the weak should not be helped, that the strong alone have a right to survive, that women were and ought to be subservient, etc., etc. His awful sister did not help, telling Hitler that her brother thought that he was just the ticket.
CC: Your book, Nietzsche As Philosopher, published in 1965, sought to rehabilitate Nietzsche’s reputation as a first-rate thinker who, despite claims to the contrary, had a systematic and coherent philosophy. How has that mission held up some 45 years later?
AD: My book was the first to draw attention to his singular thoughts on language, truth, and logic, and on philosophy itself. I admired the clarity of his writing, even if I felt we had to confront the ferocity of his critiques. For a pre-modern, he was strikingly post-modernist.
I have seen no reason to change anything in my book, though I am daunted by how popular he has become. The thing about Nietzsche is that almost everyone who reads him feels that he is on their side.
CC: Some scholars have viewed Nietzsche as attempting to reorient philosophical thinking, while others have interpreted him as repudiating the philosophical enterprise altogether. What is your view?
AD: Well, he did say that all philosophical systems were a form of autobiography, which makes his readers wonder why his philosophy should be any different. It is just that his autobiography often seems to be your own autobiography, your own way of thinking.
CC: The philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer influenced Nietzsche significantly. What did he draw from him? And what did he discard?
AD: I think his basic debt to Schopenhauer was the latter’s idea of the world as will, which he transformed into the will-as-power. But he admired Schopenhauer’s views on music and art, causality, and women.
CC: What did Nietzsche mean when he proclaimed “God is dead”?
AD: Basically, that his commandments have no power over us any longer. We have to create our own worlds.
CC: Nietzsche adopted an unorthodox view on the nature of truth and knowledge. Can you tell us what it was?
AD: He thought that there were no facts, only interpretations. His views in this respect are rather like those of Richard Rorty. Truth is whatever enables us to flourish.
CC: One of the most discussed aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy is his notion of the “Über-mensch” or Superman. Can you briefly explain what he meant by this?
AD: He did write a book called Human, All Too Human. I think the Superman would be someone who was human, but not human all too human. That is, our humanity is too often used as an excusing condition for weaknesses of various sorts.
CC: Nietzsche’s notion of the “Über-mensch” was misappropriated by the Nazis and used for their propaganda campaigns. Can you tell us how this developed?
AD: Well, I think they thought they were a superior race of men. Since others were inferior, they had a natural right to overrun us, to make room for them and their superior offspring.
CC: Which work do you consider to be Nietzsche’s most important? And why?
AD: I like Twilight of the Idols. It is a wonderful piece of philosophy. It is a critique of many of the thoughts and beliefs that those who hold them are diminished by.
CC: How would you suggest approaching Nietzsche’s works? Where would one start?
AD: I think one might begin with Twilight of the Idols, or Beyond Good and Evil, and fight them all the way. I think that would make us independent thinkers, which is what he after all wanted. He has a nice aphorism—"I listened for an echo and heard only applause."
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