history, like prophecy, presume a knowledge of the trajectory of history as a whole, in light of which they assign significance not only to past and present events, but to future events, which they treat as faits accomplis. Denying our ignorance of the future, the prophet and the substantive philosopher of history illegitimately claim to know what has happened before it has happened, which, Danto suggests, is like claiming to know how the plot of a novel will turn out, and hence what meaning retrospectively to assign to an early episode, before one finished reading the novel for the first time (Danto 2007, 8–16; see, too, Goehr 2007, xli–xlii).
As we have seen, Danto attributes the structural coherence of Nietzsche’s writings both to historical understanding and to the systematizing tendencies of philosophical inquiry. It is striking, however, that he never reckons with the possibility that these explanations are ill-matched, that they imply or support contradictory accounts of the structural coherence, philosophical content, and variability of Nietzsche’s writing.
First, Danto’s explanatory appeal to the tendencies of philosophical inquiry implies that Nietzsche’s writings enjoy a certain structural coherence due to the demands of philosophical discipline, whereas his appeal to the unity imposed by retrospective interpretation implies that such coherence belongs not to Nietzsche’s writings themselves but to Danto’s interpretation of them. In a second, related vein, the appeal to Nietzsche’s agency as a philosophically disciplined author supports the thesis that Nietzsche’s words and meanings fix the structurally coherent, philosophical content that Danto takes his writings to embody, while the appeal to historical understanding yet again invites the thought that, due to the anachronism of his interpretation, Danto has read that content into Nietzsche’s writings.
But perhaps Danto believed that the threat of anachronism, evident when we interpret Nietzsche’s writings, early and late, in light of the mid-20th preoccupations of Anglo-American analytic philosophers, was simply not present when he interpreted Nietzsche’s early writings in light of his later ones. Such a belief would have been questionable, however, for it would have begged the question at hand, presupposing a thematic continuity between Nietzsche’s “earlier” and “later” thought which, presumably, historical understanding is tasked to establish. Absent that assumption, we would be no less justified in entertaining the possibility that, for example, we risk distorting The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche’s first book, if we read it as contending with the perspectivist, epistemological concerns of Beyond Good and Evil, one of his late works, than if we read it as contending with themes external to Nietzsche’s oeuvre as a whole, for example, with issues central to the linguistic turn in modern analytic philosophy.
Consider a third and perhaps more serious conflict between Danto’s alternative explanations of structural coherence. On the one hand, Danto’s analysis of the systematizing tendencies of philosophical inquiry argues that these produced throughout Nietzsche’s writings one invariant thesis – philosophical nihilism, according to Danto – to which Nietzsche tacitly committed himself the moment he settled on a solution to a particular philosophical problem. On the other hand, his analysis of historical understanding argues that the philosophical content and continuity produced through the retrospective interpretation of Nietzsche’s writings varies with the topical interests and temporal location of the interpreter. A further examination of this third conflict will illuminate the central motivation driving Danto’s interpretation of Nietzsche.
Danto claims that reading an author’s earlier writings in light of his later efforts permits us to interpret the earlier writings as precocious – that is, as anticipating the later ones. In his essays on Human, All Too Human and Daybreak, Danto recurs to this claim. Regarding the former, he holds that “the great philosophy to come highlights its anticipatory passages for us,” allowing us to “read it as a first, tentative statement of one of the great philosophical visions” (Danto 2005, 242–3). Regarding the latter, he claims that “[t]he great Nietzschean formulations lay ahead: Eternal Recurrence, Will to Power, Superman, Antichrist…Without the structural benefits of the whole system, it would be difficult, as it would then have been impossible to appreciate [Daybreak] … as a contribution to moral theory” (Danto 2005, 247). Remarking on two of Nietzsche’s middle period books, Danto takes for granted that the point of reading these books in the perspective of Nietzsche’s later writings is to see how they fit into the structured system and vision that (he presumes) these later writings articulate, and so he neglects to consider the possibility that such a reading could have been prompted by a different concern, say, by an interest in cultivating a critique of the ideals shaping Nietzsche’s later thinking (see, e.g., Abbey 2000). Or, alternatively, by an interest in gauging the extent to which these or even earlier books anticipate the critique of modernity that Nietzsche advances in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil (see, e.g., Gooding-Williams 2001). It is all the more striking, then, that Danto’s account of historical understanding would have us acknowledge just this possibility – that reading Nietzsche’s middle period and early writings in light of his later ones, with topical interests different than Danto’s, will yield several alternative accounts of the philosophical content and continuity, or lack of continuity, characterizing Nietzsche’s thinking. Because historical understanding varies with topical interest, it will not produce a single, unvarying philosophical content of the sort that Danto attributes to the systematizing tendencies of philosophical inquiry.
In chapter 1 of Nietzsche as Philosopher, Danto tacitly entertains the thought that the retrospective interpretation of Nietzsche’s writings may vary with the temporal location of the interpreter. Specifically, he imagines that “texts so far undiscovered – may one day turn up which will quite invalidate … [his] interpretation.” Here, Danto seems to have in mind not only that writings written later than the works we presently possess could unexpectedly turn up, but also that previously unknown texts, dating from earlier phases of Nietzsche’s philosophical career, could suddenly come to light. Danto alludes to the first possibility when he adds that “here and there … we find sketches and projections for a final systematic statement of his [Nietzsche’s] philosophy. None of these, to present knowledge, materialized” (Danto 2005, 8). Suppose, then, that before his mental breakdown, but several days after he completed Nietzsche Contra Wagner, Nietzsche had also completed his final masterpiece, entitled A Revaluation of All Values, and that an enterprising archivist came across the manuscript text of this work in an attic somewhere. The publication of this new discovery would obviously invite reinterpretations of Nietzsche’s early, middle period, and post-Zarathustra writings, which would stem from their temporal location later than the temporal location Danto occupied when he wrote “Nietzsche” and Nietzsche as Philosopher; that is, later (indeed, last) in a timeline representing the chronology of the completion of Nietzsche’s published writings. As the temporal location of an interpreter changes, her historical understanding may change; thus, were the temporal location of an interpreter of Nietzsche’s writings to change, due to the discovery of a late magnum opus, her retrospective account of the philosophical content of those writings could very well diverge from an earlier retrospective account of that content. Because historical understanding tends to vary with temporal location, it cannot be expected to produce a single, unvarying philosophical content of the sort that Danto attributes to the systematizing tendencies of philosophical inquiry.
It is quite puzzling that Danto dismisses the possibility that the discovery of a late magnum opus could alter his interpretation of Nietzsche. For, again, he himself asserts that had Nietzsche’s “later writings been different” – if by hypothesis Nietzsche’s later writings were found to include a final masterpiece – “we should perhaps have been as forcibly struck by themes to which we are in fact blind as we are by those we find so impressively precocious” (Danto 2005, 7). Even more puzzling is Danto’s defense of his dismissiveness:
[Nietzsche’s] message appears over and over again, so much so that from any random sample of his writings the entirety of his philosophy can almost be reconstructed.
There
