2
Rosalyn Diprose
This chapter elaborates the connection Nietzsche makes between responsibility and honesty for the purposes of explaining the importance of upholding truth in politics. It may be counter-intuitive to turn to Nietzsche for guidance on the problem of truth in politics. After all, he is critical of doctrines of absolute truth (moral and epistemological), his mature epistemology of perspectivism at best renders truth relative to particular sociopolitical and historical contexts, and his explicit references to politics consist, not in a call to cleanse it of lies and corruption, but in debunking all forms of government from the tyrannical to the democratic. That said, Nietzsche’s revised concept of responsibility and his idea of the creative, corporeal self provide the basis for a political ontology that relies on a form of ‘honesty’ in politics. Equally, elaborating this link between responsibility and honesty in politics goes some way towards reconciling what to some is Nietzsche’s contradictory approach to truth.1
1 The problem of truth in politics
Given the multifarious complaints about the lack of political integrity in contemporary liberal democracies, I begin by clarifying what I mean by the problem of truth in politics. It is not so much the private conduct of individual politicians and their reporting of the same that is at issue in this analysis. Nor am I concerned here with broken election promises (a practice that is often mistakenly equated with lying). The veracity of politicians’ reporting of their role in past affairs of government is of some concern, especially if it entails not accepting responsibility for decisions or policies that did involve lying at the time they were implemented or that turned out badly in the end. But, such lying by individuals and its morality is only of secondary importance. The political mendacity of primary concern to me here is something more general: what Hannah Arendt has called ‘organised lying’ characteristic of totalizing government.2 By ‘organised lying’ she means public, systematic and sometimes government-sponsored propaganda campaigns, such as those of the National Socialists against the Jews in Germany in the 1930s. More generally we can take ‘organised lying’ to mean the way national governments systematically misrepresent a state of affairs, explicitly or by obfuscation, in order to justify a controversial policy that may otherwise go against majority public opinion or that seems to reverse liberal values regarding the just treatment of people. Contemporary examples might include when government representatives implied or claimed the presence of ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ (WMDs) in Iraq in 2003 to justify entering into war with that State or, in Australia, the way senior politicians have implied since early 2001 that asylum seekers are disreputable and possibly dangerous in order to justify policies of mandatory detention and offshore processing of those arriving by boat. This lying on the part of politicians and public officials may be blatant or it may be a disguised, but deliberate, practice of creating a false impression of a situation over a period of time so that the general public takes the impression to be fact. The motivation behind this kind of lying in politics is hard to fathom. Often it seems to be part of a strategy for gaining or maintaining political power and it usually involves nationalist sentiments among political leaders and strong convictions about the need to preserve community ‘values,’ whatever they may be. Of course, a certain amount of ‘lying’ of this kind, usually by omission and in the name of ‘national security’ or judicious protection of privacy, has seemingly always been part and parcel of legitimate democratic government. Martin Jay, in his comprehensive account of The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics (2010), traces philosophical justifications of political mendacity from Plato’s ‘noble lie’ to Machiavelli’s politics of knowing pretence and Hitler’s ironic description of the ‘big lie’ (Jay 2010).3 Notwithstanding the ubiquity of political mendacity, Arendt, in what Jay considers ‘the most profound considerations of the question’ of truth in politics produced so far (Jay 2010, p. 157), points to the harmful consequences of some forms of public ‘lying’ and she argues against the ‘noble lie’ in any form. Her approach, therefore, is helpful in framing the problem, especially given her stated debt to Nietzsche’s philosophy.
Arendt raises the issue of truth in politics in the following terms: while agreeing with Nietzsche that rejection of moral truth (or absolutism) is crucial for maintaining the plurality of human existence, she is concerned with how organized political mendacity is as harmful as moral absolutism is to the pluralist fabric of community and to human existence in general. In order to make the case for the importance of maintaining some kind of truth in politics, Arendt argues for understanding ‘political action’ ontologically rather than instrumentally (i.e. ‘in terms of means-end category’) and she distinguishes between ‘rational’ (or moral) truth and ‘factual truth’ (1993, p. 230). ‘Rational’ truth is moral truth of Plato’s sort, which involves individual ‘thinking’ (an internal dialogue with oneself) that generates principles for the conduct of one’s life (ibid.).4 This kind of truth has no place in politics (or collective life) because imposing such individually-generated principles on the conduct of others would involve force. By politicsArendt means public life, which for her is characterized by community of ‘potentiality’ and plurality generated through public dialogue (‘speech’) and action (1998, pp. 175–81, 199–207). ‘Factual’ truth, in contrast to rational or moral truth, ‘is political by nature’ (Arendt 1993, p. 238) – it is truth generated through the witnessing and reporting of events within the public realm of communal speech and action. Factual truth is subject to ongoing communal debate and agreement (Arendt 1972, p. 6). While facts are open to interpretation and perspectival embellishment, there is nevertheless, according to Arendt, a bedrock of facts built up over time upon which interpretation and political community are based. So, it is not ‘rational’ (moral) truth that is at stake in organized lying because moral truth is a private matter. Rather it is ‘factual truth,’ and the communal fabric that supports it and vice versa, that is damaged by organized lying in politics: ‘the result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is . . . that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world – and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end – is being destroyed’ (Arendt 1993, p. 257). Organized lying destroys the plurality of the public sphere, the social fabric of togetherness, and it disorientates the individuals who are embedded in that sphere.
Nietzsche would not hold to Arendt’s definition and defence of ‘factual truth.’ At least, he would reject the idea of a bedrock of pure fact, uncontaminated by moral evaluation and interpretation. For Nietzsche, there is no ‘“contemplation without interest” (which is a nonsensical absurdity)’ (GM III: 12) and ‘perspectivity’ is the ‘basic condition of all life’ (BGE P).5 Yet, for all his dismissing of truth as ‘error’ and ‘dissimulation,’ Nietzsche values ‘honesty’ and is aware of the harm done to community by some kinds of lying. What I will argue is that Nietzsche, like Arendt, objects to what she calls ‘organised lying’ in politics, but that he would consider this kind of lying to consist, not so much in misrepresenting or denying ‘factual truth,’ but in perpetuating one perspective dogmatically in the form of moral ‘truth.’ This points to a different political ontology arising from Nietzsche’s perspectivism and from his notion of the corporeal self, a political ontology that includes his revised concepts of responsibility and honesty. In drawing out these ideas from Nietzsche’s philosophy I aim to show how he addresses the issue of truth in politics without resorting to the distinctions between ethics and politics, moral truth and factual truth that underscore Arendt’s account.
2 From truth to a political ontology of perspectival honesty
An alternative political ontology arises from Nietzsche’s idea that perspectivity, rather than a bedrock of facts, is the fundamental condition of life. In addressing what political ontology this might be, I begin from Daniel Conway’s suggestion that Nietzsche’s political thinking returns us to ‘the very ground of politics itself’ (Conway 1997, p. 2). While Conway views this ground to be the founding question of politics – ‘what ought humankind become?’ (ibid., p. 3) – I take the ground of politics to be the more fundamental ontological question of the very nature of the human existence that politics addresses. Specifically I start where, for Nietzsche, the political and the epistemological intersect: at the level of human experience of social and material worlds and Nietzsche’s revisions of notions of experience.
The first point to note about Nietzsche’s claim that perspectivity is a condition of life, is that he does not abandon truth with this claim. Rather, as early as ‘On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense’ he suggests that truth is culturally specific, tied to language, and is about denoting perceptual experience rather than things or events themselves. Even though Nietzsche says here that truth is ‘a uniformly valid and binding designation . . . invented for things’ (OTL, p. 81; KSA 1, p. 877), if we take into consideration his account in ‘On Truth and Lies . . .’ of the metaphoric transfer of a nerve stimulus into an imagistic impression and from the image into a word, the word is a designation invented for a perceptual experience, rather than for a thing (OTL, p. 82; KSA 1, p. 879; and also see BGE 268). Moreover, a word evolves into a concept through repetition and common usage and it takes on the status of truth when the history of its invention is forgotten.
From his early work Nietzsche implicitly associates this fabricated truth with the experience of politics where politics is understood in its general sense of activities and decision-making processes comprising society and public life, including those of government and public institutions geared towards the organization of society.6 Even though truth is a fabrication, it plays a crucial social role in binding us to public life, to a society of shared values and a world view. What binds us to truth, says Nietzsche, are the ‘pleasant, life-preserving consequences of truth’ (OTL, p. 81; KSA 1, p. 878). Truth is more about the necessity of sociality than it is about ‘adequate expression: otherwise there would not be so many languages’ (OTL, p. 82; KSA 1, p. 879). Truth is relative, not to an individual but to the concepts or linguistic conventions that a culture embodies through its members, their activities and institutions. Language gives us truth and a world by facilitating understanding between members of a social group, by giving a measure of common meaning to experience (BGE 268). And linguistic concepts are ‘conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and communication – not for explanation’ (BGE 21).
In his later accounts of the relation between truth and the sociopolitical existence, Nietzsche dispenses with the naïve idea, apparent in ‘On Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense,’ that truth is a kind of social contract constituted by explicit agreement between individuals, as if individuals have a choice whether to agree with convention or to get carried away by their own intuitive first impressions. In his later work Nietzsche seems to grant that all experience is already informed by linguistic concepts and any moral values and social norms these carry; there is no ‘pure’ experience. And, in another departure from ‘On Truth and Lies. . .,’ the degree to which convention can be disrupted hinges on factors other than ‘intuition.’ I will address this issue of breaking with convention shortly. What emerges more strongly in Nietzsche’s later perspectivism, and why he would reject Arendt’s distinction between ‘rational’ (moral) and ‘factual’ truth, is the idea that, while every experience is an interpretation, every interpretation is also an evaluation. Moral norms and their causal interpretations of pleasures and pains are incorporated through discipline, punishment and habit (e.g. GM II: 3 and TI ‘Four Great Errors’ 4). That cultural convention includes ‘valuations’ that are ‘expressions of the needs of a community’ (GS 116) and that these valuations precede and inform experience is why Nietzsche says in his later work, not only that ‘everything of which we become conscious is arranged, simplified, schematized, interpreted through and through’ (WP 477; KSA 13, 11 [113]), but also that ‘[a]ll experiences are moral experiences even in the realm of sense perception’ (GS 114).
Unlike Arendt then, Nietzsche is not interested in a politics that would preserve what is taken as ‘factual truth’ – interpretations subjected to public witness and debate – because, for him, this includes the conventions that are embedded in and necessary to socially-bound (shared) experience in the manner just discussed. Moreover, for Nietzsche, once an action or experience is raised to the level of consciousness and public debate, or to what Arendt would call communal speech and action, it is deprived of its character of being ‘incomparably personal, unique’ (GS 354). On the other hand, Nietzsche is not really troubled by the way we necessarily reproduce convention to some extent in our perceptions and their communication. Yet he would oppose the public propaganda campaigns with the same vehemence as Arendt, but for different reasons. What is of more concern to him is moral dogmatism in any form and that includes activities where a government, a ruler or the ‘herd’ presents one perspective as universal and the only possibility. As I will go on to argue, Nietzsche’s political ontology allows for truth in the form of ‘honesty’ while rejecting epistemological and moral dogmatism and absolutism that disallows the expression of uniqueness and creativity. This idea of ‘honesty’ involves granting the influence of convention on one’s perceptual experience while also avoiding dogmatism.
Nietzsche often mentions ‘honesty’ and ‘good conscience’ together approvingly and at the same time as denouncing dogmatism (e.g. GM III: 25; BGE 5). In unravelling what he means by ‘honesty’ it is important to note, first, that with Nietzsche’s perspectivism, even though we incorporate moral norms and habitual perspectives by virtue of belonging to a particular culture, there is essentially a multiplicity of different perspectives, even within the same culture (e.g. BGE 374). This is not because we have different views of the same reality. My account so far should indicate that, for Nietzsche, there is no distinction between reality and a perspective. Rather, as we perceive and live through our reality we are in the process of transforming its meaning and value such that every experience carries an element of novelty. I will return to the politics of this creativity that underscores plurality. The second point to note in addressing what Nietzsche means by ‘honesty’ is that one’s perspective is corporeal and affective. Holding a perspective is not about representing the meaning of one’s experience, either to oneself or to others. Instead, the meaning of the experience is expressed as it is experienced. Not that a perspective is prior to culture, but its expression is at once cultural and natural, that is, it is fabricated but embodied. This inseparability of nature and culture, materiality and ideality, is why Nietzsche talks of the ‘reality’ of our ‘drives and passions’ while defining ‘thinking’ as ‘the relationship of these drives to one another’ (BGE 36). That perspectives are fabricated but also corporeal and affective is also why he describes philosophy and the generation of knowledge in terms of an ‘involuntary and unconscious memoir’ whereby one’s values and ‘morality’ are interpreted into the world as one’s ‘drives’ are thereby reordered (BGE 6). In other words, Nietzsche seems to locate the possibility of creativity or the disruption and transformation of perspectives in the corporeal and affective dimension of perspectivity.
‘Honesty’ then, for Nietzsche, seems to consist in expressing what one believes to be true but doing this in ‘good conscience,’ that is, in full recognition and acknowledgement that this truth is perspectival, a fabrication partly inherited from a historical and cultural context, but also involving an element of uniqueness, ‘a desire of the heart sifted and made abstract’; it is my memoir, my ‘prejudice,’ my truth that is, at the same time, being inspired beyond itself (BGE 5). After all, asks Nietzsche, is ‘living not valuating’ and, hence, a matter of ‘preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different?’ (BGE 9). This idea of honesty makes sense of Nietzsche’s occasional reference to a new ‘objectivity,’ understood as:
the ability to control one’s Pro and Con and to dispose of them, so that one knows how to employ a variety of perspectives and affective interpretations in the service of knowledge. [. . .T]he more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity,” be. (GM III: 12)
This ‘objectivity’ is not about mixing as many various perspectives as possible to reach agreement about the ‘thing.’ That would not only introduce the distinction between perspective and the thing-in-itself that Nietzsche explicitly rejects, but also it would be to feign disinterest, which Nietzsche explicitly rejects in the same passage. ‘Objectivity,’ rather, is about embracing the interestedness and desire inherent in my perspective, taking up the creative, dynamic plasticity of perspectivity, and taking this to the limit to open up new perspectives.
Nietzsche explicitly extends this ideal of ‘honesty’ and ‘objectivity’ to politics in Beyond Good and Evil #211: The art of perceiving with ‘manifold eyes and a manifold conscience,’ and celebrating this, is the precondition to enacting the ‘duty’ of ‘creat[ing] values,’ not just in science, but also in the ‘realm of logic or of politics (morals) or of art’ (BGE 211). Creating values in politics is not about making up claims that devalue particular groups of people, nation-states or political opponents in order to justify policies that are either unpopular or that reverse ethical norms. Creating values in politics is about subjecting ‘everything that is or has been,’ especially perspectives that have settled as truths, to thoroughgoing critique. Now, it is significant that Nietzsche equates politics with morality in this passage – the duty of revaluation is extended to ‘politics (morality)’ (ibid.). In equating the two he is not suggesting that politics does or should uphold a moral code; on the contrary, he is proposing that politics is necessarily value-bound. Hence, honesty in politics, as with honesty in epistemology, should not work against this value-laden and perspectival aspect of social life, but against self-deception and dogmatism. Nietzsche’s ‘great method of knowing’ (which he eventually calls ‘genealogy’) consists in embracing the revelation that there are ‘only perspectival evaluations’ combined with attentively ‘feeling’ the many contradictions or ‘pros and cons’ that one embodies. This is the means by which the ‘wisest’ raise themselves up ‘to justice – to comprehension beyond the valuation of good and evil’ (WP 259; KSA 11, 26 [119]). And, for Nietzsche, this justice in the sociopolitical realm is the same as justice in the epistemological and interpersonal realms: Justice is about all relevant parties having a say in the construction and exchange of evaluations rather than applying a fixed, universal law equally to all (e.g. GM II: 8).
In contrast to the pluralist ‘objectivity’ of perspectivism, dogmatism in politics (as in morality and epistemology) involves taking one perspective as absolute truth and/or universalizing one perspective and imposing it on all. In Human, All Too Human #25 Nietzsche claims it is ‘thoroughly undesirable that all men act identically’ and humanity will destroy ‘itself by such a conscious overall government.’ Moreover, if having similar ‘value standards’ rather than perspectivism were a ‘fundamental principle of society,’ this would be ‘the will to the denial of life’ (BGE 259). Similarly, Nietzsche’s well-known objections to democracy and its doctrine of equality are primarily based on his rejection of tenet that democracy inherits from Christianity (BGE 202): ‘what is good and right for one is good for all’ (e.g. BGE 228). In On the Genealogy of Morals he goes so far as to suggest that sociopolitical organization itself, the desire to congregate in communities, arises from an inability to cope alone with the feelings of contradictory drives and their evaluations (e.g. GM II: 18). ‘Political organization’ is at its most dishonest if its raison d’être becomes the protection of itself against the free reign of these multiple, contradictory ‘instincts’ (GM II: 16).
Dogmatism is one thing, but what Nietzsche particularly deplores in politics is the hypocrisy and dishonesty of political leaders cloaking a particular tablet of values in the ‘will of the people’ as if it were shared (D 189). It seems to be precisely on these grounds that Nietzsche objects to nationalism, to statesmen and states narrowing ‘taste’ to the ‘national’ by whipping up nationalist sentiments in the populace (BGE 241).7 This kind of politics involves turning expressions of novelty into a flaw; it converts the ‘desire to stand aside into a stigma’; and it turns any ‘secret infiniteness into a fault,’ where the ‘new infinite’ refers to ‘infinite interpretations’ (GS 374). Dogmatic politics devalues ‘heartfelt sentiments’ and reverses the ‘conscience’ of such sentiments (BGE 241). Nietzsche finds the origins of racism, including against the Jews, in this nationalism and similar modes of political repression of perspectivity (e.g. HH 475; GS 377; BGE 242).8 Moreover, he suggests that the resultant homogenization within democratic nation states deprives the individual of their capacity to create values (e.g. Z I: 11 ‘On the New Idol’) and this climate of dependence provides ripe conditions for the emergence of ‘tyrants’ who preside over a bureaucratic form of ‘slavery’ (BGE 242).
To reiterate what political dogmatism has to do with truth: central to the kind of ‘herd organization’ that upholds nationalism and suppresses multiplicity and the ‘feeling of life’ is the ‘dishonest mendaciousness’ with which I began (GM III: 19). In the third essay of On The Genealogy of Morals #19, Nietzsche differentiates between the honest and dishonest lie. Both involve political repression of affective multifarious interpretations. The difference is that the ‘honest’ political liar is aware that he/she is pushing one perspective as truth and Nietzsche cites Plato as the exemplar (GM III: 19).9 By the ‘dishonest’ liar, Nietzsche seems to mean those who have simply internalized convention without awareness (‘they are one and all moralized to the very depths’) such that they blindly accept their society’s values without question (ibid.). It is to the different kinds of lying involved in nationalistic or homogenizing democratic politics that I now turn before also considering Nietzsche’s ‘solution’ to political mendacity.
3 From political mendacity to genuine responsibility
Telling the truth matters in public life not simply because it sets the record straight, but because ‘honesty’ is central to the preservation of pluralism and perspectivity in the self and in culture. On Nietzsche’s model of truth, the error of dogmatic politics, including nationalism, is not so much that it is based on false perceptions and evaluations, but that it is based on the belief that these perceptions belong to a truth that is ‘found’ rather than fabricated and that this truth is universal and eternal rather than socially and historically specific (e.g. HH 11). To build a way of life upon the basis of the assumption that truth is found, eternal and universal involves lying. But not all lying is a problem for Nietzsche. It is the lying that characterizes hypocritical, totalizing and dogmatic politics that is harmful. When such lying becomes widespread in public affairs (or becomes ‘organized,’ to use Arendt’s terminology) and when this lying includes demonizing minority or ‘foreign’ ways of life, it indicates the degree to which plurality is being suppressed.
On the basis of a Nietzschean model of truth, there are three kinds of lying, two of which he addresses in ‘On Truth and Lies. . . .’10 The first is unconscious lying ‘according to fixed convention’ (OTL, p. 84; KSA 1, p. 881; see also BGE 192). This kind of lying is central to all forms of truth. Being bound to truth involves lying in the sense already discussed – where convention informs experience by universalizing different perceptions under a single concept and giving the expressed perception the status of truth involves forgetting that truth is constructed. But insofar as this kind of lying is ‘unconscious,’ it may actually be ‘honest’ although, if the truth-claim denies other perspectives then it would be honesty without ‘good conscience.’ Nevertheless, this kind of lying proceeds through conventions that one has inherited and if preservation of social life is the consequence of truth then, Nietzsche concedes, one would have a social duty to lie unconsciously in this way to some extent (OTL, p. 84; KSA 1, p. 881), providing public life remains open to critique. This caveat points to the second kind of lying: ‘misus[ing] fixed conventions by means of arbitrary substitutions or reversals of names’ (OTL, p. 81; KSA 1, pp. 877–8). Again this countering of convention can be ‘honest,’ being a matter of perceiving things differently to the majority because one’s experience is informed by different conventions or is in some other way uncommon. The person who can break with customary lying (i.e. lying according to convention) and admit the unique and ‘uncommon experience’ would be a source of cultural renewal (BGE 192). The views of dissenting citizens protesting the treatment of asylum seekers or whistle-blowers reporting on the lack of evidence of WMDs in Iraq, would fall under this kind of ‘lying’ insofar as the views they are disputing with their counter-perspectives are held up as ‘truth’ (convention). Or misuse of convention may be deliberate misreporting of one’s experience.
The third kind of lying is the ‘dishonest mendacity’ of dogmatism that Nietzsche targets assiduously in his later work: this is wilful lying in order to preserve one set of values as universally true. With regard to politics, this is a kind of lying and dishonesty perpetuated by governments, even those democratically elected, that wish to push policies that favour and perpetuate one way of life, one set of values, or the ‘common good.’ But precisely because the good is not common, truth is not universal and eternal, such ‘dishonest mendacity’ is as destructive of culture and society as any ‘misuse of convention’ or the expression of ‘uncommon experience.’ Celebrating the perspectivity of life, that is, expressing ‘uncommon experience,’ undermines nationalism and the values upheld by a totalizing government. But dishonest mendacity, wilful lying in the service of upholding a myth of absolute truth, erodes the pluralism and potentiality that should characterize a robust democracy. Nietzsche finds this kind of lying far more harmful, ‘life-denying,’ and nihilistic than the destabilization brought about by expressing unique and uncommon experience. The impact of political mendacity on those who are reviled, demonized and excluded by the perspective or policies that this lying serves to uphold is perhaps obvious. Less obvious, but of particular interest to Nietzsche, is the impact of dishonest mendacity on the culture and/or life of those who practice it.
The life-denying impact of political mendacity lies in the way that the dogmatic morality and epistemology it serves weakens the cultural fabric by dampening the creativity and cultural innovation inherent to perspectivity. And this brings us to Nietzsche’s ‘solution’ to dishonest politics: his understanding of how perspectivity transforms convention, that is, his ideas of the historicity of the self and genuine responsibility.11 Nietzsche’s overarching claim about the impact of dogmatism is that it is destructive because it forecloses genuine responsibility and, with this, futurity. First, the issue of futurity, or what Arendt might refer to as the ‘potentiality’ of public collective life. Any set of ideas or ‘legal order thought of as sovereign and universal . . . would be a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man’ (GM II: 11).12 The ‘last man,’ for example, is the embodiment of a single socially prescribed ‘good,’ a national identity for instance, and, as such, is the future actualized as a lie (‘Good men never speak the truth’).13 But, if such an ideal could be realized, those who embody it would be ‘unable to create,’ unable to respond to elements and influences of concrete existence, including its ‘terrible aspects,’ in a way that keeps the self and culture open to a different future (EH ‘Why I am Destiny’ 4). As I have argued elsewhere, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra III ‘On the Vision and the Riddle,’ Nietzsche ties the revaluation of value to futurity by harnessing self-overcoming to a particular notion of temporality (Diprose 2008). Through his idea of the ‘moment’ Nietzsche proposes a self-relation involving a kind of temporality where the self neither escapes the past (which would imply linear time) nor simply repeats it (cyclic time). Instead, in any experience, the self reinterprets the past that constitutes the present in such a way as to open a (contradictory) future as potential rather than as a predetermined actuality. This process of reinterpretation or revaluation involves the dual operation of memory and forgetting that Nietzsche first outlined in his Untimely Meditation ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’ and that culminates in his notion of genealogy. But this idea of revaluation of value that keeps the future open is most graphically encapsulated in Nietzsche’s figure of genuine responsibility, which, as I go on to argue, underscores the need for honesty in politics.14
Nietzsche’s figure of the sovereign individual who is genuinely responsible is also an image of pure ‘honesty’ and ‘good conscience.’ It is an ideal, therefore, that points to what kind of politics might be preferable to the nationalism and homogenizing democracy that relies on political mendacity and hypocrisy. In outlining his idea of responsibility, Nietzsche debunks the way Kant ties conscience and moral judgement to practical reason (e.g. in GS 335) and, like Arendt, he refutes any moral theory that bases conscience on existing moral norms or laws (GM II: 2). In the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche describes the genuinely responsible sovereign individual as unique (‘like only to himself’), having his own measure of value, who is thus ‘autonomous’ and ‘liberated again from the morality of custom,’ and in whom a consciousness of this power and freedom has ‘become flesh’ (GM II: 2). Conscience (the capacity to judge the difference between right and wrong for oneself) consists in this ‘proud awareness of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom’ (ibid.). This ‘good conscience’ is linked to the experience of futurity, by which I mean the condition of being caught between a past and an undetermined and open future. And this experience of futurity rests on the way that the process of revaluation of value (rather than one’s own set of revalued values or norms) has become flesh. Even though this individual will have incorporated cultural conventions and traditional values through punishment and habit, the capacity to critique and transform these values rests on what I have elsewhere described as ‘somatic reflexivity’ – a corporeal, affective self-relation that critically revises the values and norms that constitute it (Diprose, 2008).15 This constitutive and transformative relation between a self and social norms involves feeling, or the harnessing of affect into unique action and critical thought (genealogy). The sovereign individual is irresponsible in the sense that she will not necessarily uphold a moral code or political ideals of national identity that would secure a particular future as they shape her. But she is responsible in the sense that, in responding to, and either affirming or contesting, those norms, she sacrifices an enduring image of herself to keep the future open; she ‘goes under’ while taking responsibility for her destiny.
Nietzsche’s revised idea of responsibility is not without its problems. For instance, it is for the most part aggressively individualistic – there is no obvious limit to the expansionism that comes of this operation of will to power. Nevertheless, a politics of ‘expanded responsibility’ does seem to be Nietzsche’s preferred solution to the racism, nihilism and cultural stagnation that accompanies democratic nationalism and the mendacity that upholds it. He is clear that the overriding duty of critiquing existing ‘truths’ and creating values is not a task confined to epistemology and morality. In Ecce Homo, for instance, he puts the ‘revaluation of all value’ at the core of his concept of ‘great politics’: the ‘concept of politics will have merged entirely with the war of spirits; all power structures of the old society will have been exploded – all of them based on lies’ (EH ‘Why I am Destiny’ 1). Admittedly the aggression returns in the way Nietzsche equates ‘great politics’ with ‘war’ (ibid.) and in describing these philosophers of the future as ‘commanders and law-givers’ (BGE 211). Still, he cannot mean a lawgiver of the tyrannical kind who would impose his/her will and truth upon all – this would contradict everything else he says about truth, honesty and perspectivity. He clarifies the point in Beyond Good and Evil #212 where he ponders how far philosophers of the future could extend their responsibility. The philosopher of the future:
would be compelled to see the greatness in man, the concept of “greatness”, precisely in his speciousness and multiplicity, in his wholeness in diversity: he would determine value and rank according to how much and how many things one could endure and take upon oneself, how far one could extend one’s responsibility. (BGE 212)
Providing the expansionist rhetoric that accompanies Nietzsche’s revised idea of politics is not an essential condition, the ideals of responsibility and honesty that underscore it provide a welcome diagnosis of, and alternative to, the political mendacity that seems endemic in some contemporary liberal democracies.
In conclusion, there are two further points to be made in considering ‘how far one could extend one’s responsibility’ in politics. The first is that Nietzsche’s criticisms of political hypocrisy apply equally well to a specific kind of lying in politics that is all too familiar in the contemporary world: where governments and political leaders retrospectively claim ignorance of the reality of a past situation after the consequences of the policies they implemented through political mendacity have turned out badly (e.g. we didn’t know there weren’t any WMDs in Iraq). On Nietzsche’s account, this claim of ignorance is tantamount to irresponsibility in the sense that it disavows the judgments and evaluations that underscored the policy or rhetoric that the claimant seemed to push so stridently at the time. The second concluding point is about the personal responsibility of citizens who embrace (or at least tolerate) the ‘organized lying’ and dishonesty of political leaders of totalizing governments. Nietzsche shows much insight about this. He is just as disdainful of those who blame the ‘system’ when things turn out badly as he is of the political leader who cloaks his ‘crimes in the good conscience of his people’ (D 189). If citizens can be so greatly deceived by dishonest dogmatic government, says Nietzsche, it is because ‘they are always seeking a deceiver,’ they desire leaders who can stimulate their senses and ‘intoxicate’ (D 188). Nietzsche describes this ‘mob taste’ in terms of a populace that willingly obeys because they lack responsibility themselves. They enthusiastically accept the falsehoods of a dogmatic and totalizing government because they lack or abdicate the capacity to evaluate and judge right and wrong for themselves. Political responsibility is intertwined with personal responsibility for Nietzsche, not only in the sense that dishonest and dogmatic government can have a flow-on effect of producing dishonest and dogmatic citizens, but also, conversely, a citizenry of a democratic society that willingly abdicates responsibility for evaluation and critique gets the government that it deserves.
Notes
1 To do this I leave aside the empiricist and cognitivist approach taken to Nietzsche’s epistemology in the wake of Maudemarie Clark’s argument, in Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (1990), that Nietzsche perspectivism does not entail ‘falsificationism’. For a recent critical assessment of this approach to Nietzsche’s epistemology see R. Lanier Anderson (2005). The alternative approach I take here acknowledges the relationship between Nietzsche’s epistemology and his revisionist ontology, especially his revised notion of self. See, for instance, Tracy Strong’s influential discussion of the importance of heeding this connection (Strong 1985). Acknowledging the relation between epistemology and ontology reveals that Nietzsche is neither an empiricist nor a cognitivist and to read his perspectivism in that way is to miss too much of his thinking. Proponents of this ‘holistic’ approach to reading Nietzsche are too many and varied to mention, but particularly salient for the analysis here is Sarah Kofman’s account of Nietzsche’s idea of truth as involving corporeally-based metaphoric activity (Kofman 1993, especially ch. III). Equally, commentators who have provided rich readings of Nietzsche’s political philosophy argue that his approach to politics is inseparable from his understanding of truth, history, and/or culture (Ansell-Pearson 1994, pp. 1–3, for example).
2 Arendt makes this her focus in two papers: ‘Truth in Politics’ (1967), reprinted as chapter 7 of Between Past and Future (Arendt 1993); and ‘Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers’ (1969) published in Crisis of the Republic (Arendt 1972).
3 As Jay points out, while the ‘big lie’ is usually identified with Nazi propaganda against Jews, it was actually a term Hitler used when accusing Jews and others of claiming, falsely in Hitler’s opinion, that Germany lost WWI ‘in the field’ rather than because of what Hitler saw as treasonous domestic politics (Jay 2010, p. 2).
4 For a detailed discussion of Arendt’s distinction between individual thinking and public action see Dana R. Villa’s ‘Thinking and Judging’, Chapter 4 of Politics, Philosophy, Terror (Villa 1999).
5 When quoting from Nietzsche’s works I use translations by Walter Kaufmann for EH, GM, GS and Z; I use translations by R. J. Hollingdale for BGE, D and TI; and I use Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann’s translation of HH (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984). While page references to quotes from Nietzsche’s unpublished notes and essays are to the KGW or KSA, I use David Breazeale’s translation of ‘On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense’ (published in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s. New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979) and Kaufmann and Hollingdale’s translations of Nietzsche’s notebooks compiled under the title Will to Power (New York: Vintage, 1968).
6 He makes this connection between truth (and lies) and politics explicitly in his later work. In EH ‘Why I am so Clever’ #10, for instance, he states: ‘All the problems of politics, of social organization, and of education have been falsified through and through’, although the point he goes on to make there is different from the general point I am making here.
7 Robert Gooding-Williams provides an interesting analysis of Nietzsche’s approach to Nationalism that is consistent with, although beyond the scope of, my argument here (see Gooding-Williams 2001, especially ch. 3). Gooding-Williams’ focus is on BT and Z and he argues that the Dionysian experience of ‘going under’, as per his reading of Z, amounts to a process of ‘passionate’ value-creation that replaces the national body-politic as the medium of cultural formation (p. 102).
8 For a more detailed reading of Nietzsche’s discussion of nationalism and European politics in the chapter of BGE entitled ‘Peoples and Fatherlands’ see Laurence Lampert 1999.
9 Plato discusses ‘medicinal lying’ in the Republic 382a–e and 459d–60c and what is called the ‘noble lie’ in the Republic 414b–15c.
10 Elsewhere I have discussed in more detail Nietzsche’s approach to lying in these terms, but in relation to the specifics of decolonization and Australian indigenous politics (Diprose 2002, ch. 8).
11 Some of what I go on to say in discussing Nietzsche’s idea of responsibility is borrowed from a more detailed comparative analysis in Diprose 2008.
12 Similarly, those that embody a pre-ordained future prevail ‘at the expense of the future’; in sacrificing ‘the future to themselves – they sacrifice all man’s future’ (EH ‘Why I am a Destiny’ 4).
13 Nietzsche describes the ‘last man’ in Z, especially the Prologue, and as a summary in EH ‘Why I am a Destiny’ 4.
14 In her interesting account of ‘Nietzsche and the recovery of responsibility’, Bonnie Honig, while similarly linking responsibility to the transformative power of revaluation of value, goes further than I would in emphasizing the self-affirmative response to the idea of ‘eternal recurrence’, which she sees as central to Nietzsche’s ‘new responsibility’ (Honig 1993, ch. 3).
15 This is one way to understand ‘will to power’. It is also consistent with Nietzsche’s descriptions of the contradictory and competing drives that make up the bodily self (e.g. in BGE 19).
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