Nietzsche and Freud were influenced by many of the same currents of nineteenth-century thought. Both were interested in ancient civilization, particularly Greek culture. Both were interested in Greek tragedy (and debates about catharsis), both particularly drawn to the figure of Oedipus. Both were interested in and attracted to heroic figures and regarded themselves as such. Both held Goethe in the highest regard, of course. They were influenced by Darwin, evolutionary theory, contemporary theories of energy, anthropology and studies of the origins of civilization. They were influenced by earlier psychological writings, including, possibly those of Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893). They were also influenced by a basic historical sense, ‘the sense of development and change that was now permeating thinking in nearly every sphere.’ They wanted to understand, so to speak, the animal in the human and, as unmaskers, were concerned with matters pertaining to the relation between instinct and reason, conscious and unconscious, rational and irrational, appearance and reality, surface and depth. Both attempted to understand the origins and power of religion and morality, They were influenced by the Enlightenment and the hopes for reason and science while at the same time being influenced d by Romanticism’s preoccupations with the unconscious and irrational. While beginning their career’s in other fields, both came to regard themselves, among other things, as depth psychologists.

All the same, one has to keep in mind the extent to which Nietzsche and Freud were both influenced by forces at work in the German-speaking world of the latter part of the nineteenth century and the extent to which similarities in their thought might be attributed to such factors rathe that Nietzsche having a direct influence upon Freud.

For example, both Nietzsche and Freud were interested in anthropology, both read Sir John Lubbock (1834-1913) and Edward Tylor (1832-1917) and both were influence by the authors. However, an examination of the similarities between Nietzsche and Freud would seem to indicate that there is also the direct influence of Nietzsche upon Freud, so that Wallace, while till writes of Nietzsche’s anticipation of and influence upon Freud. Also, Thatcher, while writing of Nietzsche’s debt to Lubbock, writes specifically of Nietzsche’s, not Lubbock’s, ‘remarkable’ anticipation of an idea central to Freud‘s Future’s of an Illusion.

One can also note Nietzsche’s inclinations to use medical terminology in relation to psychological observation and ‘dissection’‘: At its present state as a specific individual science the awakening of moral observation has become necessary and humans can no longer be spared the cruel sight of the moral dissection table and its knives and forceps. For here the ruled that science that asks after the origin and history of the so-called sensations.

Freud wrote of analysts modelling themselves on the surgeon ‘who untied all feeling, even his human sympathy, and concentrates hid metal forces on the single aim of performing the operation as skilfully as possible.’:The most successful cases are those in which on process, as it was, without any purpose in view, allows itself to be taken by surprise by any new turn in them, and always supported with an open mind, free from any presuppositions.’

In regard to broad cultural change and paradigm changes Nietzsche was one of the thinkers that herald the effectuality about such changes. In the book on Freud’s social thought, Berliner rites of the changes in intellectual orientation that occurred around 1885, stating that such changes were ‘reflected in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. Beliner, goes on to mention some of Nietzsche’s contributions to understanding the human mind, conscience and civilisation’s origin his being representative of ‘uncovering’ or ‘unmasking’ psychology. Berliner concludes, as have other, that: That generation of his [Freud’s] young maturity was permeated with the thought of Nietzsche.’

Nevertheless, although Feud expressed admiration for Nietzsche on a number of occasions, acknowledged his ‘intuitive’ grasp on the concepts anticipating psychoanalysis, placed him among a few of persons he considered great and stated in 1908 that ‘the degree of introspection achieved by Nietzsche had never been achieved by anyone, nor is it likely ever to be reached again,’ he never acknowledges studying specific works of Nietzsche at any length or in any detail what his own thoughts was in regard to specific works or ideas of Nietzsche.

Since whenever an idea of Nietzsche’s that may have influenced Freud is discussed without tracing the influence and development in Nietzsche, and it possibly appearing as if it is being suggested that Nietzsche formulated his ideas without the great help of his forerunners, perhaps taking note of the following words of Stephen Jay Gould regarding our discomfort with evolutionary explanations would be useful at this point: ‘one reason must reside in our social and psychic attraction to creation myths in it preferences to the evolutionary assemblage for creative myths-. . . identify heroes and sacred places, while evolutionary assemblage provides no palpable particularity, objects as symbols for reverence, worship or patriotism.’ Or as Nietzsche put it . . . ‘Whenever one can see the act of becoming [in contrast to ‘present completeness and perfection’] one grows comparatively cool.

It may, perhaps, be that the imbuing of myth within our lives, in this instance the myth. of the hero (with implications for our relationship to Nietzsche and Freud, the relationships themselves a heroes and Freud’s relationship to Nietzsche), is not so readily relinquished even in the realm of scholarly pursuits, a notion Nietzsche elaborated upon on a number of occasions.

Nietzsche discusses the origins of Greek tragedy in the creative integration of what he refers to as Dionysian and Apollonian forces, named for the representation in the gods Apollo and Dionysus. Apollo is associated with law, with beauty and order, with reason, with self-control and self-knowledge, with the sun and light. Dionysus is associated with orgiastic rites, music, dance and later drama. He is the god of divinity, whom of which is ripped into pieces, dismembered (representing individuation), and whose rebirth is awaiting (the end of individuation) religious rituals associated with him enact and celebrate death, rebirth and rituals associated with crops, including the grape (and wine and intoxication), and with sexuality. Frenzied, ecstatic female worshippers (maenads) ae central to the rituals and celebration. Both gods have a home in Delphi, Dionysus reigning in the winter when his dances are performed there.

In a note from The Will to Power Nietzsche defines the Apollonian and to Dionysian: The word ‘Dionysia’ mean: An urge to unity, a reaching out beyond personality, the every day, social, reality, across the abysmal transitoriness, a passionate-painful overflowing into darker, fuller more floating states, . . . the feeling of the necessary unity of creation and destruction. One contemporary classical scholar writes of ‘the unity of salvation and destruction, . . . [as] a characteristic feature of all that is tragic.

The word ‘Apollinian’ means: The urge to perfect self-sufficiency, to the typical ‘individuality’ to all that simplified distinguishing, makes strong, closer, unambiguous, typical freedom under the law.

Nietzsche announces, that with admirable frankness that he is no longer a Christian, but he does not wish to disturb anyone’s piece of mind. Nietzsche writes of Strauss’ view of a new scientific man and his ‘faith’ that ‘the heir of but a few hours, he is ringed around with frightful abysses, and every gaiting step taken ought to make him ask: ‘Where? From what place. Or to what end? However, rather than facing such frightful questions, Strauss’ scientific man seems to be permitted to such a life on questions whose answer could a bottom be of consequence only to someone assured of eternity. Perhaps in knowing, it, also tended to encourage the belief that, as once put, that in all men dance to the tune of an invisible piper, least of mention, many things must be taken to consider that all things must be known, in that the stray consequences of studying them will disturb the status quo, which can never therefore be discovered. History is not and cannot be determined. The supposed causes may only produce the consequences we expect.

Perhaps of even a grater importance resides of Human, All Too Human. We have already commented of sublimation, however, to explicate upon a definite definition of such rights to or for sublimation it seems implicitly proper to state that sublimation would modify the natural expression of (a primitive, instinctual impulse) in a socially acceptable manner, and thus to divert the energy associated with (an unacceptable impulse or drive) into a personally and socially acceptable activity. It is nonetheless, as Young points out, that Nietzsche heralds a new methodology. He contrasts metaphysical philosophy with his historical [later genealogical] philosophy. His is a methodology for philosophical inquiry into the origins of human psychology, a methodology to be separated with natural sciences. This inquiry ‘can no longer be separated from natural science,’ and as he will do on other occasions, he offers a call to those who might have the ears to hear: ‘Will there be many who desire to purse such researchers? People likes to put questions of origins and beginnings out of its mind, must one not be almost inhuman to detect in oneself a contrary inclination?

Nietzsche writes of the anti-nature of the ascetic ideal, how it relates to a disgust with itself, its continuing destructive effect upon the health of Europeans, and how it related to the realm of ‘subterranean revenge’ and ressentiment. Nietzsche writes of the repression of instincts (though not specifically of impulses toward sexual perversions) and of their bring turned inward against the self, ‘instinct for freedom forcibly made latently . . . this instinct for freedom-pushed back and repressed.’ Also, ‘this hatred of the human, and even more is the animal, yet, and, still of the material.’ Zarathustra also speaks of the tyranny of the holy or sacred’: He once loved ‘thou shalt’ as most sacred, now he mut finds illusion and caprice even in the most sacred, that freedom from his love may become his prey, the lion is needed for such prey. It would appear that while Freud’s formation as it pertains to sexual perversions and that incest is most explicitly not driven from Nietzsche (although along different line incest was an important factor in Nietzsche’ understanding of Oedipus), the relating of the idea of the holy to the sacrifice or repression of instinctual freedom was very possibly influenced by Nietzsche, particularly in light of Freud’s reference to the ‘holy’ as well as to the ‘overman’. These issues were also explored in The Antichrist that hd been published just to years earlier. In addition, Freud wrote, and, perhaps for the first time, of sublimation: ‘In have gained a sure inking of the structure of hysteria. Everything goes back to the reproduction of scenes. Some can be obtained directly, other ways by fantasies are weighed up in front of them. The fantasies stem from things that have been heard but understood subsequently, and all their material is of course genuine. They are protective structures, sublimation’s of the fact, embellishment of them, and at the same time serve for self-relief.’

Nietzsche had written of sublimation and he specifically wrote of the sublimation of sexual drives in the Genealogy. Freud’s use of the term differs slightly from his later and more Nietzschean usage such as in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, but as Kaufmann notes, while ‘the word is older an either Freud or Nietzsche . . . it was Nietzsche who first gave it the specific connotation it has today.’ Kaufmann regards the concept of sublimation as one of the most important concepts in Nietzsche’s entire philosophy. Furthermore, Freud wrote that a ‘presentiment’ tells him, ‘I shall very soon uncover the source of morality’, this is the very subject of Nietzsche’s Genealogy.

At a later time in his life Freud claimed he could not read more than a few passages of Nietzsche due to being overwhelmed by the wealth of ideas. This claim might be supported by the fact that Freud demonstrates only a limited understanding of certain of Nietzsche’s concepts. For example, his reference to the ‘overman’ to which demonstrates a lack of understanding of the overman as a being of the future whose freedom involves creative self-overcoming and sublimation, not simply freely gratified primitive instincts. Later in life, in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Freud demonstrates a similar misunderstanding in his equating the overman with the tyrannical father of the primal horde. Perhaps Freud confused the overman with the ‘master’ whose morality is contrasted with that of ‘slave’ morality in the Genealogy and Beyond Good and Evil. The conquering master more freely gratifies instinct and affirms himself, his world and his values as good. The conquering slave, unable to express himself freely, creates a negating, resentful, vengeful morality glorifying his own crippled, alienate condition, and he creates a division not between good (noble) and bad (contemptible), but between good (undangerous) and evil (wicked and powerful-dangerous slave moralities’ at times . . . occur within a singe soul).

Although Nietzsche never gave dreams anything like the attention and analysis given by Freud, he was definitely not one of, ‘the dark forest of authors who do not see the trees, hopefulessly lost on wrong tracks.’ Yet, where he is reviewing the literature on dream, as well as throughout his life, Freud will not, in specific and detailed terms, discuss Nietzsche’s ideas as they pertain to psychoanalysis, just as he will never state exactly when he read or did not read Nietzsche or what he did or did not read. We may never know which of Nietzsche’s passages on dreams Freud may have read or heard of or read of as he was working on The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud’s May 31, 1897, a letter to Fliess includes reference to the overman, contrasting this figure with the saintly or holy which is (as is civilization) connected to instinctual renunciation, particularly incest and sexual perversion. Freud also writes that he has a presentiment that he shall ‘soon uncover the source of morality,’ the subject of Nietzsche’s Genealogy. Earlier, he made what may have been his first reference to sublimation, a concept explored and developed by Nietzsche. We have also pointed to the possible, perhaps even likely, allusions to Nietzsche in letters of September and November 1897 which refer respectively to Nietzsche’s notion of a revaluation or transvaluations of all values and Nietzsche’s idea of his relationship of our turning our nose away from what disgust us, our own filth, to our civilized condition, our becoming ‘angles.’ Nonetheless, Freud adds specifically that so too consciousness turns away from memory: ‘This is repression.’ Then there is Nietzsche’s passage on dreams in which he refers to Oedipus and to the exact passage that Freud refers to in The Interpretation of Dreams. One author has referred to Nietzsche’s idea as coming ‘preternaturally close to Freud.’ At a later point we see that in Freud’s remarks in The Interpretation of Dreams on the distinctiveness of psychoanalysis and his achievements regarding the understanding of the unconscious (his unconscious versus the unconscious of philosophers), Nietzsche is perhaps made present through his very absence.

These ideas of Nietzsche’s on dreams are not merely of interest in regard to the ways in which they anticipate Freud. They are very much related to more recent therapeutic approaches to the understanding of dreams: Nietzsche values dreaming states over waking states regarding the dream’s closeness to the ‘ground of our being,’ the dream ‘informs’ us of feelings and thoughts that ‘we do not know or feel precisely while awake,’ in dreams ‘there is nothing unimportant or superfluous,’ the language of dreams entails ‘chains of symbolical scenes’ and images in place of [and akin to] the language of poetic narration, content, form, duration, performer, spectator-in these comedies you are all of this yourself (and these comedies include the ‘abominable’). Recent life experiences and tensions, ‘the absence of nourishment during the day, gives rise to these dream inventions which ‘give scope and discharge to our drives.’

The self, as in its manifestations in constructing dreams, may be an aspect of our psychic lives that knows things that our waking of ‘I’ or ego may not know an may not wish to know, and a relationship may be developed between these aspects of our psychic lives in which the later opens itself creatively to the communications of the former. Zarathustra states: ‘Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there stands a mighty ruler, an unknown sage-whose name is self. In your body he dwells, he is your body.’ However, Nietzsche’s self cannot be understood as a replacement for an all-knowing God to whom the ‘I’ or, ego appeals for its wisdom, commandments, guidance and the like. To open onself to another aspect oneself that is wiser (‘an unknown sage’) in the sense that new information can be derived from it, does not necessarily entail that this ‘wiser’ component of one’s psychic life has God-like knowledge and commandments which if one (one’s ‘I’) interprets and opens correctly a will set one on the straight path. It is true though that what Nietzsche writes of the self as ‘a mighty ruler and unknown sage’ he does open himself to such an interpretation and even to the possibility that this ‘ruler’: is unreachable, unapproachable for the ‘I?’ However, the context of the passage (Nietzsche/Zarathustra redeeming the body) and the two sections thereafter are ‘On the Despisers of the Body’ make it clear that there are aspects of our psychic selves that interpret the body, that mediate its direction, ideally in ways that do not deny the body but that aid in the body doing ‘what it would do above all else, to create beyond itself.

Nietzsche explored the ideas of psychic energy and drives pressing for discharge. His sublimation typically implies an understanding of drives in just such a sense as does his idea that dreams provide for discharge of drives. However, he did not relegate all that is derived from instinct and the body to this realm. While for Nietzsche there is no stable, enduring true self awaiting discovery and liberation, the body and the self (in the broadest sense of the term, including what is unconscious and may be at work in dreams as Rycroft describes it) may offer up potential communication and direction to the ‘I’ or ego. However, at times Nietzsche describes of the ‘I’ or ego as having very little, if any, idea as to how it is being lived by the ‘it.’

Nietzsche like Fred, describes two types’ mental processes, on which ‘binds’ [man’s] life to reason and it concept in order not to be swept away by the current and to lose himself, the other, pertaining to the world of myth, art an the dream, ‘constantly showing the desire to shape the existing world of the wide-a-wake person to be variegatedly irregular and disinterestedly incoherent, exciting and eternally new, as the world of dreams.’ Art may function as a ‘middle sphere’ and middle faculty (transitional sphere and faculty) between a more primitive ‘metaphor-world’: of impressions and the forms of uniform abstract concepts.

All the same, understanding what Freud could mean by not reading Nietzsche in his later years is difficult as well as to determine if his is acknowledged of having read Nietzsche in earlier years. Freud never tells us exactly what he read of Nietzsche and never tells us exactly which years were those during which he avoided Nietzsche. We do know of course, that a few years earlier, in 1908. Freud has read and discussed Nietzsche, including a work of direct relevance to his own anthropological explorations as well as to ideas pertaining to the relationship between repression of instinct and the development of the inner world and conscience. We have also seen that lectures, articles and discussions on Nietzsche continue around Freud. It does seem though that Freud demonstrates a readiness to ‘forgo all claims to priority’ regarding the psychological observations of Nietzsche and others that the science of psychoanalysis has confirmed.

Nevertheless, Nietzsche recognized the aggressive instinct and will to power in various forms and manifestations, including sublimated mastery, all of which are prominent in Freud’s writings.

We can also take note with which the work Freud ascribed of the power and importance of rational thinking and scientific laws. Freud writes that the World-View erected upon science conceals the ‘submission to the truth and rejection of illusions.’ He writes, quoting Goethe, of ‘Reason and Science, the highest strength possessed by man,’ and of ‘the bright world governed by relentless laws which has been constructed for us by science.’ However, he also writes discipline, and a resistance stirs within us against the relentlessness nd monotony of the laws of thought and against the demands of reality-testing. Reason becomes the enemy which withholds from us so many possibilities of pleasure.

However, bright the world of science is and however much reason and science represent ‘the highest strength possessed by man,’ this world, these laws, these faculties, require from us ‘submission’ to a withholding enemy that imposes ‘strict discipline’ with ‘relentlessness and monotony.’ However much this language pertains to a description of universal problems in human development, one may wonder it does not reflect Freud’s own experience of the call of reason as a relentless (labouriously) submission.

There is no reason that empirical research cannot be of help in determining what kinds of ‘self-description’ or narratives (as well as, of course, many other aspects of the therapeutic process) may be effective for different kinds of persons with different kinds of difficulties in different kinds of situations. From a Nietzschean perspective, while it is obvious and desirable that the therapist will influence the patient’s or client ‘s self-description and narratives, and the converse as well, a high value will be placed, however, much it is a joint creation of a shared reality, on encouraging the individual to fashion a self-understanding, self-description or narrative that is to a significant extent of his or her own creation. That on has been creative in this way (and hopefully can go on creating) will be a very different experience than having the therapist narrative is simply replacing the original narrative brought to therapy can be thought of and the individual’s increase capacity for playful creative application of a perspectivist approach to his or her life experience and history, though this approach, as any other, would be understood as detached most significantly and related to the sublimation of drives as an aspect of the pursuit of truth. This does not entail that one that one searches with the understanding that what one finds was not uncovered like an archeological find.

Both Freud and Nietzsche are engaged in a redefinition of the root of subjectivity, a redefinition that replaces the moral problematic of selfishness with the economic problematic of what Freud would call narcissism . . . [Freud and Nietzsche elaborate upon] the whole field of libidinal economy: The transit of libido through other selves, aggression, infliction and reception of pain, and something very much like death (the total evacuations of the entire quantum of excitation with which the organism is charged.)

The id, ego and superego effort to clarify the bewildering number of interrelated observations uncovered by psychoanalytic exploration led to the development of a model of the structure of the psychic system. Three functional systems are distinguished that are conveniently designated as the id, ego, and superego.

The first system refers to the sexual and aggressive tendencies that arise from the body, as distinguished from the mind. Freud called these tendencies ‘Triebe’, which literally means ‘drives,’ but which is often inaccurately translated as ‘instincts’ to indicate their innate character. These inherent drives claim immediate satisfaction, which is experienced as pleasurable; the id thus is dominated by the pleasure principle. In his later writings, Freud tended more toward psychological rather than biological conceptualization of the drives.

How the conditions for satisfaction are to be brought about is the task of the second system, the ego, which is the domain of such functions as perception, thinking, and motor control that can accurately assess environmental conditions. In order to fulfill its function of adaptation, or reality testing, the ego must be capable of enforcing the postponement of satisfaction of the instinctual impulses originating in the id. To defend itself against unacceptable impulses, the ego develops specific psychic means, known as defence mechanisms. These include repression, the exclusion of impulses from conscious awareness; projection, the process of ascribing to others one's own unacknowledged desires; and reaction formation, the establishments of a pattern of behaviour directly opposed to a strong unconscious need. Such defence mechanisms are put into operation whenever anxiety signals a danger that the original unacceptable impulses may reemerge.

An id impulse becomes unacceptable, not only as a result of a temporary need for postponing its satisfaction until suitable reality conditions can be found, but more often because of a prohibition imposed on the individual by others, originally the parents. The totality of these demands and prohibitions constitutes the major content of the third system, the superego, the function of which is to control the ego in accordance with the internalized standards of parental figures. If the demands of the superego are not fulfilled, the person may feel shame or guilt. Because the superego, in Freudian theory, originates in the struggle to overcome the Oedipal conflict, it has a power akin to an instinctual drive, is in part unconscious, and can give rise to feelings of guilt not justified by any conscious transgression. The ego, having to mediate among the demands of the id, the superego, and the outside world, may not be strong enough to reconcile these conflicting forces. The more the ego is impeded in its development because of being enmeshed in its earlier conflicts, called fixations or complexes, or the more it reverts to earlier satisfactions and archaic modes of functioning, known as regression, the greater is the likelihood of succumbing to these pressures. Unable to function normally, it can maintain its limited control and integrity only at the price of symptom formation, in which the tensions are expressed in neurotic symptoms.

Nietzsche suggests that in our concern for the other, in our sacrifice for the other, we are concerned with ourselves, one part of ourselves represented by the other. That for which we sacrifice ourselves is unconsciously related to as another part of us. In relating to the other we are in fact relating to a part of ourselves and we are concerned with our own pleasure and pain and our own expression of will to power. In one analysis of pity Nietzsche states that, we are, to be sure, not consciously thinking of ourselves tat it is primarily our own pleasure and pain that we are concerned about and that feelings an reactions that ensue are concerned about and that feelings and reactions that ensue are multi-determined.

Nietzsche has divided nature and that we respond to others in part on the basis of projecting and identifying with aspects of ourselves in them. From Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche writes to a deception in love-We forget a great deal of our own past and deliberately banish it from our minds . . . we want the image of ourselves that shines upon us out of the past to deceive us and flatter our self-conceit-we are engaged continually on this self-deception. Do you think, you who speak so much of ‘self-forgetfulness in love’, of ‘the merging of the ego in the other person’, and laud it so highly, do you think this is anything essentially differently? We shatter the mirror, impose our self upon someone we admire, and then enjoy our ego’s new image, even though we may call it by that other person’s name.

It is commonplace that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, but all the same, we valuably talk of the beauty of a thing and people as if they are identifiable real properties which they possess. Projectivism denotes any view which sees us similarly projecting upon the world what is in fact modulations of our own minds. According to this view, sensations are displaced from their rightful place in the mind when we think of the world as coloured or noisy. Other examples of the idea involve things other than sensations, and do not consist of any literal displacement. One is that all contingency is a projection of our ignorance, another is that the causal order of events in a projection of our mental confidences in the way they follow from one another. However, the most common application of the idea is in ethics and aesthetics, where man writers have held that talk of the value or beauty of things is a projection of the attitudes we take toward them and the pleasure we take in them.

It is natural to associate Projectivism with the idea that we make some kind of mistake in talking and thinking as if the world contained the various features we describe it as having, when in reality it does not. Only, that the view that we make is no mistake, but simply adopt efficient linguistic expression for necessary ways of thinking, is also held.

Nonetheless, in the Dawn, Nietzsche describes man, in the person of the ascetic, as ‘split asunder into a sufferer and a spectator’, enduring and enjoying within (as a consequence of his drive for ‘distinction’, his will to power) that which the barbarian imposes on others. As Staten points out, Nietzsche asks if the basic disposition of the ascetic and of the pitying god who creates suffering humans can be held simultaneously, an that one would do ‘hurt to others in order thereby to hurt oneself, in order then to triumph over oneself and one’s pity and revel in an extremity of power. Nietzsche appears to be suggesting that in hurting the other In may, through identification, be tempting to hurt one part of myself, so that whatever my triumph over the other, In may be as concerned with one part of my self-triumphing over that par of myself In identify within the other as well as there by overcoming pity and in consequence ‘revel in an extremity of power.’ (Or in a variation of such dynamics, as Michel Hulin has put it, the individual may be ‘tempted to play both roles at once, contriving to torture himself in order to enjoy all the more his own capacity for overcoming suffering’.)

In addition to Nietzsche’s writing specifically of the sublimation of the libidinous drive, the will to power and it vicissitudes are described at times in ways related to sexually as well as aggressive drives, particularly in the form of appropriation and incorporation. As Staten points out, this notion of the primitive will to power is similar to Freud’s idea in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego according to which, ‘identification [is] the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person . . . It behaves like a derivation of the first oral phase of the organization of the libido, in which the object that we long for and prize is assimilated by eating. It would appear that Nietzsche goes a step further than Freud in one of his notes when he writes: ‘Nourishment -is only derivative, the original phenomenon is, to desire to incorporate everything’. Staten also concludes that, ‘if Freudian libido contains a strong element of aggression and destructiveness, Nietzschean will to power never takes place without a pleasurable excitation that there is no reason not to call erotic. However, that of ‘enigma and cruelty’, that it is only imposed on the beloved object and increases in proposition to the love . . . Cruel people being always masochist also, the whole thing is inseparable from bisexuality: One can only imagine how far Nietzsche and to what extent he would expand of insights other than Freud.

Freud’s new orientation was preceded by his collaborative work on hysteria with the Viennese physician Josef Breuer. The work was presented in 1893 in a preliminary paper and two years later in an expanded form under the title Studies on Hysteria. In this work the symptoms of hysteria were ascribed to manifestations of undischarged emotional energy associated with forgotten psychic traumas. The therapeutic procedure involved the use of a hypnotic state in which the patient was led to recall and reenact the traumatic experience, thus discharging by catharsis the emotions causing the symptoms. The publication of this work marked the beginning of psychoanalytic theory formulated based on clinical observations.

From 1895 to 1900 Freud developed many concepts that were later incorporated into psychoanalytic practice and doctrine. Soon after publishing the studies on hysteria he abandoned the use of hypnosis as a cathartic procedure and substituted the investigation of the patient’s spontaneous flow of thoughts, called free association, to reveal the unconscious mental processes at the root of the neurotic disturbance.

Nietzsche discusses the origins of Greek tragedy in the creative integration of what he calls Dionysian and Apollonian forces. Apollo is associated with law, with pounding order, with reason with containing knowledge, with the sun and light. Dionysus is associated with orgastic rites, music, dance and later drama. Religious rituals associated with him enact and celebrate death, rebirth and fertility. He is also associated with crops, including the grape (and the wine of intoxication), and with sexuality. Frenzied, ecstatic female worshippers (maenads) are central to the rituals and celebrations.

In a note from The Will to Power Nietzsche brings to light the Apollonian and the Dionysian as: The word ‘Dionysian’ is meant of an urge to unity, a reaching out beyond personality, the every day, society, reality, across the abyss of transitoriness: A passionate-painful overflowing into dark, Nietzsche more floating stats, . . . the feeling of the necessary unity of creation and destruction. [One contemporary classical scholar writes of ‘the unity of salvation and destruction . . . (as) a characteristic feature of all that is tragic.]

The word ‘Apollinian’ is meant, among other things, as the urge to perfect -sufficiency, to the typical ‘individual’, to all that simplifies, distinguishes, makes strong, clear, unambiguous, typical, and freedom under the law. Apollo is described as a dream interpreter.

Yet, all the same, we might discern Nietzsche’s influence in an important paper of this period, the 1914 paper ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction. In this paper, Freud explores, among other things, the effects of his finding of an original libidinal cathexis of the ego, from which some is later given off to objects, which fundamentally persists and is related to the object-cathexes much as the body of an amoeba is related to the pseudopodia out which it puts.

The development of the ego consists in a departure from the primary narcissism and results in a vigorous attempt to recover that state. Means of the displacement cause this departure of the libido onto an ego-ideal imposed from without, and satisfaction is caused from fulfilling this ideal. Simultaneously, the ego has sent out the libidinal object-cathexes. It becomes impoverished in favour of these cathexes, just as it does in favour of the ego-ideal, and it enriches it again from it satisfaction in respect of the object, just as it does by fulfilling its ideal.

Freud considers the implications of these findings for his dual instinct theory that divides instincts into the duality of ego instincts and libidinal instincts. Freud questions this division, but does not definitely abandon it, which he will later do in, Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

As indicated, one of Freud’s important points is that the ego tries to recover its state of primary narcissism. This is related to important theme s running through Nietzsche’s writings. Nietzsche is aware of ho we relate to others based on projections of idealized images of ourselves, and he is consistently looking for the way in which we are loving ourselves and aggrandizing ourselves in activities that reflect contrary motivations.

Nietzsche attempts to show that Greek culture and drama had accomplished the great achievement of recognising and creatively integrating the substratum of the Dionysian with the Apollonian. As Siegfried Mandel construed to suggest, Nietzsche destroyed widely held aesthetic views, inspired in 1755 by the archaeologist-historian Johann Winckelmann, about the ‘noble simplicity, calm grandeur’, ‘sweetness and light’, harmony and cheerfulness of the ancient Greeks and posed instead the dark Dionysia force’s that had to be harnessed to makes possible the birth of tragedy.

It is also important to consider that it is through the dream’s Apollonian images that the Dionysian reality can be manifested and known, as it is through the individuated actors on stage that the underlying Dionysian reality is manifested in Greek tragedy. As it is most creative, the Apollonian can allow an infusion of the harnesses in the Dionysian, but we should also note that Nietzsche is quite explicit that when the splendour of the Apollonian impulse is stood before an art that in it frenzies, rapture and excess ‘spoke the truth -. Excess revealed it as truth’. The Dionysian, and . , . . against this new power the Apollonia rose to the austere majesty of Doric art and the Doric view of the world. For Nietzsche, ‘Dionysian and the Apollonian, in new births ever following and mutually augmenting of one, another, controls led the Hellenic genius.’

Nietzsche is unchallenged as the most sightful and powerful critics of the moral climate of the 19th century (and of what remains in ours). His exploration of bringing forth an acknowledged unconscious motivation, and the conflict of opposing forces within the mindful purposes of possibilities of creative integration. Nietzsche distinguishes between two types of mental processes and is aware of the conflict between unconscious instinctual impulses and wishes and inhibiting or repressing forces. Both Freud and Nietzsche are engaged in a redefinition of the root of subjectivity, a redefinition that replaces the moral problem of issues concerning the economic problem of what Freud would call narcissism, . . . Freud and Nietzsche elaborate upon the whole field of libidinal economy: The transit of the libido through other selves, aggression, infliction and reception of pain, and something very much like death, the total evacuation of the entire quantum of excitation that the organism is charged.

The real world is flux and change for Nietzsche, but in his later works there is no ‘unknowable true world.’ Also, the splits between a surface, apparent world and an unknowable but a true world of the things-in-themselves were, as is well known, a view Nietzsche rejected. For one thing, as Mary Warnock points out, Nietzsche was attempting to get across the point that there is only one world, not two. She also suggests that for Nietzsche, if we contribute anything to the world, it be the idea of a ‘thing,’ and in Nietzsche’s words, ‘the psychological origin of the belief in things forbids us to speak of things-in-themselves.’

Nietzsche holds that there is an extra-mental world to which we are related and with which we have some kind of fixation. For him, even as knowledge develops in the service of-preservation and power, to be effective, a conception of reality will have a tendency to grasp (but only) a certain amount of, or aspect of, reality. However much Nietzsche may at times see (the truth of) artistic creation and dissimulation (out of chaos) as paradigmatic for science (which will not recognize it as such), in arriving art this position Nietzsche assumes the truth of scientifically based beliefs as a foundation for many of his arguments, including those regarding the origin, development and nature of perception, consciousness and-consciousness and what this entails for our knowledge of and falsification of the external and inner world. In fact, to some extent the form-providing, affirmative, this-world healing of art is a response to the terrifying, nausea-inducing truths revealed by science that by it had no treatment for the underlying cause of the nausea. Although Nietzsche also writes of the horrifying existential truths, against which science can attempt a [falsifying] defence. Nevertheless, while there is a real world to which we are affiliated, there is no sensible way to speak of a nature or constitution or eternal essence of the world by it apart from description and perceptive. Also, states of affairs to which our interpretations are to fit are established within human perspectives and reflect (but not only) our interests, concerns, needs for calculability. While such relations (and perhaps as meta-commentary on the grounds of our knowing) Nietzsche is quite willing to write of the truth, the constitution of reality, and facts of the case. There appears of no restricted will to power, nor the privilege of absolute truth. To expect a pure desire for a pure truth is to expect an impossible desire for an illusory ideal.

In the articulation comes to rule supreme in oblivion, either in the individual’s forgetfulness or in those long stretches of the collective past that have never been and will never be called forth into the necessarily incomplete articulations of history, the record of human existence that is profusely interspersed with dark passages. This accounts for the continuous questing of archeology, palaeontology, anthropology, geology, and accounts, too, for Nietzsche’s warning against the ‘insomnia’ of historicisms. As for the individual, the same drive is behind the modern fascination with the unconscious and, thus, with dreams, and it was Nietzsche who, before Freud, spoke of forgetting as an activity of the mind. At the beginning of his, Genealogy of Morals, he claims, in defiance of all psychological ‘shallowness,’ that the lacunae of memory are not merely ‘passive’ but the outcome of an active and positive ‘screening,’ preventing us from remembering what would upset our equilibrium. Nietzsche is the first discoverer of successful ‘repression,’ the burying of potential experience in the articulation, that is, as moderately when the enemy territory is for him.

Still, he is notorious for stressing the ‘will to power’ that is the basis of human nature, the ‘resentment’ that comes once it is denied of its basis in action, and the corruptions of human nature encouraged by religions, such as Christianity, that feed on such resentment. Yet the powerful human being who escapes all this, the ‘Übermensch’, is not the ‘blood beast’ of later fascism: It is a human being who has mastered passion, risen above the senseless flux, and given creative style of his or her character. Nietzsche’s free spirits recognize themselves by their joyful attitude to eternal return. He frequently presents the creative artist than the world warlord as his best exemplar of the type, but the disquieting fact remains that he seems to leave him no words to condemn any uncaged beast of prey who vests finds their style by exerting repulsive power over others. Nietzsche’s frequently expressed misogyny does not help this problem, although in such matters the interpretation of his many-layered and ironic writing is not always straightforward. Similarly, such anti-Semitism, as found in his work is in an equally balanced way as intensified denouncements of anti-Semitism, and an equal or greater contempt of the German character of his time.

Nietzsche’s current influence derives not only from his celebration of the will, but more deeply from his scepticism about the notions of truth and fact. In particular, he anticipated many central tenets of postmodernism: An aesthetic attitude toward the world that sees it as a ‘text’, the denial of facts: The denial of essences, the celebration of the plurality of interpretations and of the fragmented and political discourse all for which are waiting their rediscovery in the late 20th century. Nietzsche also has the incomparable advantage over his followers of being a wonderful stylist, and his perspectives are echoed in the shifting array of literary devices-humour, irony, exaggeration, aphorisms, verse, dialogue, parody with which he explores human life and history.

All the same, Nietzsche is openly pessimistic about the possibility of knowledge: ‘We simply lack any organ for knowledge, for ‘truth’: We ‘know’ (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd, the species, and perhaps precisely that most calamitous stupidity of which we shall perish some day’ (The Gay Science).

Nonetheless, that refutation assumes that if a view, as perspectivism it, is an interpretation, it is by that very fact wrong. This is not so, however, an interpretation is to say that it can be wrong, which is true of all views, and that is not a sufficient refutation. To show the perspectivism is really false producing another view superior to it on specific epistemological grounds is necessary.

Perspectivism does not deny that particular views can be true. Like some versions of contemporary anti-realism, it attributes to specific approaches’ truth in relation to facts themselves. Still, it refused to envisage a single independent set of facts, and accounted for by all theories. Thus, Nietzsche grants the truth of specific scientific theories: He does, however, deny that a scientific interpretation can possibly be ‘the only justifiable interpretation of the world’: Neither the fact’s science addresses nor the methods serve the purposes for which they have been devised: Nonetheless, these have no priority over the many others’ purposes of human life.

Every schoolchild learns eventually that Nietzsche was the author of the shocking slogan, ‘God is dead.’ However, what makes that statements possible are another claim, even more shocking in its implications: ‘Only that which has no history can be defined’ (Genealogy of Morals). Since Nietzsche was the heir to seventy-five years of German historical scholarship, he knew that there was no such thing as something that has no history. Darwin had, as Dewey points out that effectively shows that searching for a true definition of a species is not only futile but unnecessary (since the definition of a species is something temporary, something that changes over time, without any permanent lasting and stable reality). Nietzsche dedicates his philosophical work to doing the same for all cultural values.

Reflecting it for a moment on the full implications of this claim is important. Its study of moral philosophy with dialectic exchange that explores the question ‘What is virtue?’ That takes a firm withstanding until we can settle that of the issue with a definition that eludes all cultural qualification. What virtue is, that we cannot effectively deal with morality, accept through divine dispensation, unexamined reliance on traditions, skepticism, or relativism (the position of Thrasymachus). The full exploration of what deals with that question of definition might require takes’ place in the Republic.

Many texts we read subsequently took up Plato's challenge, seeking to discover, through reason, a permanent basis for understanding knowledge claims and moral values. No matter what the method, as Nietzsche points out in his first section, the belief was always that grounding knowledge and morality in truth was possible and valuable, that the activity of seeking to ground morality was conducive to a fuller good life, individually and communally.

To use a favourite metaphor of Nietzsche's, we can say that previous systems of thought had sought to provide a true transcript of the book of nature. They made claims about the authority of one true text. Nietzsche insists repeatedly that there be no single canonical text; There are only interpretations. So, there is no appeal to some definitive version of Truth (whether we search in philosophy, religion, or science). Thus the Socratic quest for some way to tie morality down to the ground, so that it does not fly away, is (and has always been) futile, although the long history of attempts to do so has disciplined the European mind so that we, or a few of us, are ready to move into dangerous new territory where we can situate the most basic assumptions about the need for conventional morality to the test and move on ‘Beyond Good and Evil,’ that is, to a place where we do not take the universalizing concerns and claims of traditional morality seriously.

Nietzsche begins his critique here by challenging that fundamental assumption: Who says that seeking the truth is better for human beings? How do we know an untruth is not better? What is truth anyway? In doing so, he challenges the sense of purpose basic to the traditional philosophical endeavour. Philosophers, he points out early, may be proud of the way they begin by challenging and doubting received ideas. However, they never challenge or doubt the key notion they all start with, namely, that there is such a thing as the Truth and that it is something valuable for human beings (surely much more valuable than its opposite).

In other words, just as the development of the new science had gradually and for many painfully and rudely emptied nature of any certainty about a final purpose, about the possibilities for ever agreeing of the ultimate value of scientific knowledge, so Nietzsche is, with the aid of new historical science (and the proto-science of psychology) emptying all sources of cultural certainty of their traditional purposiveness and claims to permanent truth, and therefore of their value, as we traditionally understood that of the term. There is thus no antagonism between good and evil, since all versions of equal are equally fictive (although some may be more useful for the purposes of living than others).

At this lodging within space and time, In really do not want to analyse the various ways Nietzsche deals with this question. Nevertheless, In do want to insist upon the devastating nature of his historical critique on all previous systems that have claimed to ground knowledge and morality on a clearly defined truth of things. For Nietzsche's genius rests not only on his adopting the historical critique and applying to new areas but much more on his astonishing perspicuity in seeing just how extensive and flexible the historical method might be.

For example, Nietzsche, like some of those before him, insists that value systems are culturally determined they arise, he insists, as often as not form or in reaction to conventional folk wisdom. Yet to this he adds something that to us, after Freud, may be well accepted, but in Nietzsche's hands become something as shocking: Understanding of a system of value is, he claims, requires us more than anything else to see it as the product of a particular individual's psychological history, a uniquely personal confession. Relationship to something called the ‘Truth’ has nothing to do with the ‘meaning’ of a moral system; as an alternative we seek its coherence in the psychology of the philosopher who produced it.

Gradually, in having grown into a greater clarity of what every great philosophy has endearingly become, as staying in the main theme of personal confessions, under which a kind of involuntary and an unconscious memoir and largely that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy formed the real germ of life from which the whole plant had grown.

A concentration has here unmasked claims to ‘truth’ upon the history of the life of the person proposing the particular ‘truth’ this time. Systems offering us a route to the Truth are simply psychologically produced fictions that serve the deep (often unconscious) purposes of the individual proposing them. Therefore they are what Nietzsche calls ‘foreground’ truths. They do not penetrate into the deep reality of nature, and, yet, to fail to see this is to lack ‘perspective.’

Even more devastating is Nietzsche's extension of the historical critique to language it. Since philosophical systems deliver themselves to us in language, that language shapes them and by the history of that language. Our Western preoccupation with the inner for which perceivable determinates, wills, and so forth, Nietzsche can place a value on as, in large part, the product of grammar, the result of a language that builds its statements around a subject and a predicate. Without that historical accident, Nietzsche affirms, we would not have committed an error into mistaking for the truth something that is a by-product of our particular culturally determined language system.

He makes the point, for example, that our faith in consciousness is just an accident. If instead of saying ‘In think,’ we were to say ‘Thinking is going on in my body,’ then we would not be tempted to give the ‘In,’ some independent existence, (e.g., in the mind) and make large claims about the ego or the inner. The reason we do search for such an entity stem from the accidental construction of our language, which encourages us to use a subject (the personal pronoun) and a verb. The same false confidence in language also makes it easy for us to think that we know clearly what key things like ‘thinking’ and ‘willing’ are; Whereas, if we were to engage in even a little reflection, we would quickly realize that the inner processes neatly summed up by these apparently clear terms is anything but clear. His emphasis on the importance of psychology as queen of the sciences underscores his sense of how we need to understand more fully just how complex these activities are, particularly the emotional appetites, before we talk about them so simplistically, the philosophers that concurrently have most recently done.

This remarkable insight enables Nietzsche, for example, at one blow and with cutting contempt devastatingly to dismiss as ‘trivial’ the system Descartes had set up so carefully in the Meditations. Descartes's triviality consists in failing to recognize how the language he imprisons, shapes his philosophical system as an educated European, using and by his facile treatment of what thinking is in the first place. The famous Cartesian dualism is not a central philosophical problem but an accidental by-product of grammar designed to serve Descartes' own particular psychological needs. Similarly Kant's discovery of ‘new faculties’ Nietzsche derides as just a trick of language-a way of providing what looks like an explanation and is, in fact, as ridiculous as the old notions about medicines putting people to sleep because they have the sleeping virtue.

It should be clear from examples like this (and the others throughout), which there is very little capability of surviving Nietzsche's onslaught, for what are there to which we can points to which did not have a history or deliver it to us in a historically developing system of language? After all, our scientific enquiries in all areas of human experience teach us that nothing is ever, for everything is always becoming.

Nietzsche had written that with repression of instincts and their turn inward, ‘the entire inner worlds, originally as thin as if it were stretched between two membranes, expanded and extended it, acquired depth, breadth, and heighten the same writing of a ’bad conscience’ . . . [as] the womb of all ideal nd imaginative phenomena . . . an abundance of strange new beauty and affirmation and perhaps beauty it.

The developments in the finding of an original libidinal cathexis of the ego, from which some is later given off to object but fundamentally persists and is related to the object-cathexes much as the body of an amoeba is related to the pseudopodia in which it puts out.

The development of the ego consists in a departure from the primary narcissism and result in a vigorous attempt to recover that state. This departure is caused by means of the displacement of the libido onto an ego-ideal imposed from without, and satisfaction is caused from fulfilling this ideal.

While the ego has sent out the libidinal object-cathexes, it becomes impoverished in favour of these cathexes’ it again from its satisfactions in respect of the object, just as it does by fulfilling its ideal.

Freud considers the implications of such finds for his dual instinct Theory that divides instincts into the duality of ego instinct and libidinal instincts. Freud questions this division, but does not definitely abandon it, which he will do in beyond the Pleasure Principle.

As indicted, one of Freud’s important points is that the ego attempts to recover its state of primary narcissism. This is related to important themes we relate to others based on projections of idealized images we are loving ourselves and aggrandizing ourselves in activities that reflect contrary motivations.

As a mother gives to her child that of which she deprives her . . . is it does not clear that in [such] instances man loves something of him . . . more than something else of themselves . . . the inclinations for something (wishes, impulse, desire) is present in all [such] instances to give in to it, with all the consequences, are in any even not ‘unegoistic’.

As Freud is entering his study of the destructive instincts-the death instinct and its manifestations outward as aggression a well as its secondary turn back inward upon it-might wonder if Nietzsche, who had explored the vicissitude’s of aggression and was famous for his concept of will to power, was among the ‘all kinds of things’ Freud was reading. At least Freud clearly had the ‘recurrence of the same’ on his mind during his period, while pessimism and relevance on pleasure during this period. While Freud’s through release of or discharge of and decreases of tension have strong affinities with Schopenhauer, there is the comparatively different ‘pleasure ‘of Eros’.

One point to be made is that Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power was an attempt to go beyond the pleasure principle and beyond good and evil. A principle of which, as for Nietzsche the primary drives to ward-off its primitive and more sublimated manifestations. All the same, pain is an essential ingredient since it is not a state attained at the end of suffering but the process of overcoming it (as of obstacles and suffering) that the central factor in the experience of an increase of power and joy.

Freud writes of as no other kind or level of mastery, the binding of instinctual impulses that is a preparatory act. Although this binding and the replacement of primary process with the secondary process operate before and without necessary regard for ‘the development of unpleasure, the transformation occurs on behalf of the pleasure principle, the binding is the preparatory act that introduces and assures the dominance of the pleasure principle’ . . . The binding . . . [is] designed to preparatory excitement for its final elimination in the pleasure of discharge.

For the individual who suffers this repeated and frustrated effect of pleasure, it is not only the object of the past that cannot be recovered, nor the relation that cannot be restored or reconstructed. Nevertheless, it is time it that resists the human ill and proves is unyielding. Between pleasure and satisfaction, a prohibition or negation of pleasure is enacted which necessitates the endless repetition and proliferation of thwarted pleasures. The repetition is a vain effort to stay, or to reverse time, such repetition reveals a rancor against the present that feeds upon it.

However at this point we might be tempted, as many have been, to point to the new natural science as a counter-instance that typifies the dulling of natural science of a progressive realization of the truth of the world, or at least a closer and closer approximation to that truth? In fact, it is interesting to think about just how closely Kuhn and Nietzsche might be linked in their views about the relationship between science and the truth of things or to what extent modern science might not provide the most promising refutation of Nietzsche's assertion that there is no privileged access to a final truth of things (a hotly disputed topic in the last decade or more). It tells us say here that for Nietzsche science is just another ‘foreground’ way of interpreting nature. It has no privileged access to the Truth, although he does concede that, compared with other beliefs, it has the advantage of being based on sense experience and therefore is more useful for modern times.

There is one important point to stress in this review of the critical power of Nietzsche's project. Noting that Nietzsche is not calling us to a task for having beliefs is essential. We have to have beliefs. Human life must be the affirmation of values; Otherwise, it is not life. Nonetheless, Nietzsche is centrally concerned to mock us for believing that our belief systems are True, are fixed, are somehow eternally right by a grounded standard of knowledge. Human life, in its highest forms, must be lived in the full acceptance that the values we create for ourselves are fictions. We, or the best of us, have to have the courage to face the fact that there is no ‘Truth’ upon which to ground anything in which we believe; we must in the full view of that harsh insight, but affirm ourselves with joy. The Truth is not accessible to our attempts at discovery; What thinking human beings characteristically do, in their pursuit of the Truth, is creating their own truths.

Now, this last point, like the others, has profound implications for how we think of ourselves, for our conception of the human. Because human individuals, like human cultures, also have a history. Each of us has a personal history, and thus we ourselves cannot be defined; we, too, are in a constant process of becoming, of transcending the person we have been into something new. We may like to think of ourselves as defined by some essential rational quality, but in fact we are not. In stressing this, of course, Nietzsche links him with certain strains of Romanticism, especially (from the point of view of our curriculum) with William Blake.

This tradition of Romanticism holds up a view of life that is radically individualistic, -created,-generated. ‘In must create my own system or become enslaved by another man's’ Blake wrote. It is also thoroughly aristocratic, with little room for traditional altruism, charity, or egalitarianism. Our lives to realize their highest potential should be lived in solitude from others, except perhaps those few we recognize as kindred souls, and our life's efforts must be a spiritually demanding but joyful affirmation of the process by which we maintain the vital development of our imaginative conceptions of ourselves.

Contrasting this view of a constantly developing entity might be appropriate, but without essential permanence, with Marx's view. Marx, too, insists on the process of transformation of ideas but for him, the material forces control the transformation of production, and these in turn are driven by the logic of history. It is not something that the individual takes charge of by an act of individual will, because individual consciousness, like everything else, emerges form and is dependent upon the particular historical and material circumstances, the stage in the development of production, of the social environment in which the individual finds him or her.

Nietzsche, like Marx, and unlike later Existentialists, de Beauvoir, for example, recognizes that the individual inherits particular things from the historical moment of the culture (e.g., the prevailing ideas and, particularly, the language and ruling metaphors). Thus, for Nietzsche the individual is not totally free of all context. However, the appropriate response to this is not, as in Marx, the development of class consciousness, a solidarity with other citizens and an imperative to help history along by committing one to the class war alongside other proletarians, but in the best and brightest spirits, a call for a heightened sense of an individuality, of one's radical separation from the herd, of one's final responsibility to one's own most fecund creativity.

Because Nietzsche and the earlier Romantics are not simply saying, we should do what we like is vital. They all have a sense that-creation of the sort they recommend requires immense spiritual and emotional discipline-the discipline of the artist shaping his most important original creation following the stringent demands of his creative imagination. These demands may not be rational, but they are not permissively relativistic in that 1960's sense (‘If it feels good, do it’). Permissiveness may have often been attributed to this Romantic tradition, a sort of 1960's ‘shop til you drop’ ethic, but that is not what any of them had in mind. For Nietzsche that would simply be a herd response to a popularized and bastardized version of a much higher call to a solitary life lived with the most intense but personal joy, suffering, insight, courage, and imaginative discipline.

This aspect of Nietzsche's thought represents the fullest nineteenth-century European affirmation of a Romantic vision of the as radically individualistic (at the opposite end of the spectrum from Marx's views of the social and economically determined). A profound and lasting effect in the twentieth century as we become ever more uncertain about coherent social identities and thus increasingly inclined to look for some personal way to take full charge of our own identities without answering to anyone but ourselves.

Much of the energy and much of the humour in Nietzsche's prose comes from the urgency with which he sees such creative-affirmation as essential if the human species is not going to continue to degenerate. For Nietzsche, human beings are, primarily, biological creatures with certain instinctual drives. The best forms of humanity are those of whom most excellently express the most important of these biological drives, the ‘will to power,’ by which he means the individual will to assume of one and create what he or she needs, to live most fully. Such a ‘will to power’ is beyond morality, because it does not answer to anyone's system of what makes up good and bad conduct. The best and strongest human beings are those of whom create a better quality in values for themselves, live by them, and refuse to acknowledge their common links with anyone else, other than other strong people who do the same and are thus their peers.

His surveys of world history have convinced Nietzsche that the development of systems has turned this basic human drive against human beings of morality favouring the weak, the suffering, the sick, the criminal, and the incompetent (all of whom he lumps together in that famous phrase ‘the herd’). He salutes the genius of those who could accomplish this feat (especially the Jews and Christians), which he sees as the revenge of the slaves against their natural masters. From this century-long acts of revenge, human beings are now filled with feelings of guilt, inadequacy, jealousy, and mediocrity, a condition alleviated, if at all, by dreams of being helpful to others and of an ever-expanding democracy, an agenda powerfully served by modern science (which serves to bring everything and everyone down to the same level). Fortunately, however, this ordeal has trained our minds splendidly, so that the best and brightest (the new philosophers, the free spirits) can move beyond the traditional boundaries of morality, that is, ‘beyond good and evil’ (his favourite metaphor for this condition is the tensely arched bow ready to shoot off an arrow).

Stressing it is important, which upon Nietzsche does not believe that becoming such a ‘philosopher of the future’ is easy or for everyone. It is, by contrast, an extraordinarily demanding call, and those few capable of responding to it might have to live solitary lives without recognition of any sort. He is demanding an intense spiritual and intellectual discipline that will enable the new spirit to move into territory no philosopher has ever roamed before, a displacing medium where there are no comfortable moral resting places and where the individual will probably (almost unquestionably) has to pursue of a profoundly lonely and perhaps dangerous existence (so the importance of another favourite metaphor of his, the mask). Nevertheless, this is the only way we can counter the increasing degeneration of European man into a practical, democratic, technocratic, altruistic herd animal.

By way of a further introduction to Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, it would only offer an extended analogy, Still, to extend some remarks into directions that have not yet been explored.

Before placing the analogy on the table, however, In wish to issue a caveat. Analogies may really help to clarify, but they can also influence us by some unduly persuasive influences of misleading proportions. In hope that the analogy In offer will provide such clarity, but not at the price of oversimplifying. So, as you listen to this analogy, you need to address the questions: To what extent does this analogy not hold? To what extent does it reduce the complexity of what Nietzsche is saying into a simpler form?

The analogy put to put on the table is the comparison of human culture to a huge recreational complex in which several different games are going on. Outside people are playing soccer on one field, rugby on another, American football on another, and Australian football on another, and so on. In the club house different groups of people are playing chess, dominoes, poker, and so on. There are coaches, spectators, trainers, and managers involved in each game. Surrounding the recreation complex is wilderness.

These games we might use to characterize different cultural groups: French Catholics, German Protestants, scientists, Enlightenment rationalists, European socialists, liberal humanitarians, American democrats, free thinkers, or what possesses you. The variety represents the rich diversity of intellectual, ethnic, political, and other activities.

The situation is not static of course. Some games have far fewer players and fans, and the popularity is shrinking; Some are gaining popularity rapidly and increasingly taking over parts of the territory available. Thus, the traditional sport of Aboriginal lacrosse is but a small remnant of what it was before contact. However, the Democratic capitalist game of baseball is growing exponentially, as is the materialistic science game of archery. They might combine their efforts to create a new game or merge their leagues.

When Nietzsche looks at Europe historically, what he sees is that different games have been going on like this for centuries. He further sees that many participants in anyone game has been aggressively convinced that their game is the ‘true’ game, which it corresponds with the essence of games or is a close match to the wider game they imagine going on in the natural world, in the wilderness beyond the playing fields. So they have spent much time producing their rule books and coaches' manuals and making claims about how the principles of their game copy or reveal or approximate the laws of nature. This has promoted and still promotes a good deal of bad feeling and fierce arguments. Therefore, in addition anyone game it, within the group pursuing it there has always been all sorts of sub-games debating the nature of the activity, refining the rules, arguing over the correct version of the rule book or about how to educate the referees and coaches, and so on.

Nietzsche's first goal is to attack this dogmatic claim about the truth of the rules of any particular game. He does this, in part, by appealing to the tradition of historical scholarship that shows that these games are not eternally true, but have a history. Rugby began when a soccer player broke the rules and picked up the ball and ran with it. American football developed out of rugby and has changed and is still changing. Basketball had a precise origin that can be historically found.

Rule books are written in languages that have a history by people with a deep psychological point to prove: The games are an unconscious expression of the particular desires of inventive game’s people at a very particular historical moment; these rule writers are called Plato, Augustine, Socrates, Kant, Schopenhauer, Descartes, Galileo, and so on. For various reasons they believe, or claim to believe, that the rules they come up with reveals something about the world beyond the playing field and are therefore ‘true’ in a way that other rule books are not; they have, as it was, privileged access to reality and thus record, to use a favourite metaphor of Nietzsche's, the text of the wilderness.

In attacking such claims, Nietzsche points out, the wilderness bears no relationship at all to any human invention like a rule book; He points out that nature is ‘wasteful beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain simultaneously: Imagine malaise of its power-how could you live according to this indifference. Living-is that not precisely wanting to be other than this nature.’ Because there is no connection with what nature truly is, such rule books are mere ‘foreground’ pictures, fictions dreamed up, reinforced, altered, and discarded for contingent historical reasons. Moreover, the rule manuals often bear a suspicious resemblance to the rules of grammar of a culture, thus, for example, the notion of an ego as a thinking subject, Nietzsche points out, is closely tied to the rules of European languages that insist on a subject and verb construction as an essential part of any statement.

So how do we know what we have is the truth? Why do we want the truth, anyway? People seem to need to believe that their games are true, but why? Might they not be better if they accepted that their games were false, were fictions, deal with the reality of nature beyond the recreational complex? If they understood the fact that everything they believe in has a history and that, as he says in the Genealogy of Morals, ‘only that which has no history can be defined,’ they would understand that all this proud history of searching for the truth is something quite different from what philosophers who have written rule books proclaim.

Furthermore these historical changes and developments occur accidentally, for contingent reasons, and have nothing to do with the games, or anyone game, shaping it according to any ultimate game or any given rule book of games given by the wilderness, which is indifferent to what is going on. There is no basis for the belief that, if we look at the history of the development of these games, we discover some progressive evolution of games toward some higher type. We may be able, like Darwin, to trace historical genealogies, to construct a narrative, but that narrative does not reveal any clear direction or any final goal or any progressive development. The genealogy of games suggests that history be a record of contingent change. The assertion that there is such a thing as progress is simply another game, another rule added by inventive minds (who need to believe in progress); it bears no relationship to nature beyond the sports complex.

While one is playing on a team, one follows the rules and thus has a sense of what form right and wrong or good and evil conduct in the game. All those carrying out the same endeavour share this awareness. To pick up the ball in soccer is evil (unless you are the goalie), and to punt the ball while running in American football is permissible but stupid; in Australian football both actions are essential and right. In other words, different cultural communities have different standards of right and wrong conduct. The artificial inventions have determined these called rule books, one for each game. These rule books have developed the rules historically; Thus, they have no permanent status and no claim to privileged access.

Now, at this point you might be thinking about the other occasion in which of Aristotle's Ethics, acknowledges that different political systems have different rules of conduct. Still, Aristotle believes that an examination of different political communities will enable one to derive certain principles common to them all, bottom-up generalizations that will then provide the basis for reliable rational judgment on which game is being played better, on what was good play in any particular game, on whether or not a particular game is being conducted well or not.

In other words, Aristotle maintains that there is a way of discovering and appealing to some authority outside any particular game to adjudicate moral and knowledge claims that arise in particular games or in conflicts between different games. Plato, of course, also believed in the existence of such a standard, but proposed a different route to discovering it.

Now Nietzsche emphatically denies this possibility. Anyone who tries to do what Aristotle recommends is simply inventing another game (we can call it Super-sport) and is not discovering anything true about the real nature of games because they do not organize reality (that has the wilderness surrounding us) as a game. In fact, he argues, that we have created this recreational complex and all the activities that go on in it to protect themselves from nature (which is indifferent to what we do with our lives), not to copy some recreational rule book that wilderness reveals. Human culture exists as an affirmation of our opposition or to contrast with nature, not as an extension of rules that include both human culture and nature. That is why falsehoods about nature might be a lot more useful than truths, if they enable us to live more fully human lives.

If we think of the wilderness as a text about reality, as the truth about nature, then, Nietzsche claims, we have no access at all to that text. What we do have accessed to conflicting interpretations, none of them based on privileged access to a ‘true’ text. Thus, the soccer players may think them and their game is superior to rugby and the rugby players, because soccer more closely represents the surrounding wilderness, but such statements about better and worse are irrelevant. There is nothing a rule bound outside the games themselves. Therefore, all dogmatic claims about the truth of all games or any particular game are false.

Now, how did this situation come about? Well, there was a time when all Europeans played almost the same game and had done so for many years. Having little-to-no historical knowledge and sharing the same head coach in the Vatican and the same rule book, they believed that the game was the only one possible and had been around for ever. So they naturally believed that their game was true. They shored up that belief with appeals to scripture or to eternal forms, or universal principles or to rationality or science or whatever. There were many quarrels about the nature of ultimate truth, that is, about just how one should tinker with the rule book, about what provided access to God's rules, but there was agreement that such excess must exist.

Take, for example, the offside rule in soccer. Without that the game could not continue in its traditional way. Therefore, soccer players see the offside rule as an essential part of their reality, and since soccer is the only game in town and we have no idea of its history (which might, for example, tell us about the invention of the off-side rule), then the offside rule is easy to interpret as a universal, a requirement for social activity, and we will find and endorse scriptural texts that reinforce that belief. Our scientists will devote their time to linking the offside rule with the mysterious rumblings that come from the forest. From this, one might be led to conclude that the offside rule is a Law of Nature, something that extends far beyond the realms of our particular game into all possible games and, beyond those, into the realm of the wilderness it.

Of course, there were powerful social and political forces (the coach and trainers and owners of the team) who made sure that people had lots of reasons for believing in the unchanging verity of present arrangements. So it is not surprising that we find plenty of learned books, training manuals, and locker room exhortations urging everyone to remember the offside rule and to castigate as ‘bad’ those who routinely forget that part of the game. We will also worship those who died in defence of the offside rule. Naturally any new game that did not recognize the offside rule would be a bad game, an immoral way to conduct one. So if some group tried to start a game with a different offside rule, that group would be attacked because they had violated a rule of nature and were thus immoral.

However, for contingent historical reasons, Nietzsche argues, that situation of one game in town did not last. The recreational unity of the area divides the developments in historical scholarships into past demonstrations, in that all too clearly there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that all the various attempts to show that one specific game was exempted over any of all other true games, as they are false, dogmatic, trivial, deceiving, and so on.

For science has revealed that the notion of a necessary connection between the rules of any game and the wider purposes of the wilderness is simply an ungrounded assertion. There is no way in which we can make the connections between the historically derived fictions in the rule book and the mysterious and ultimately unknowable directions of irrational nature. To conform of science, we have to believe in causes and effects, but there is no way we can prove that this is a true belief and there is a danger for us if we simply ignore that fact. Therefore, we cannot prove a link between the game and anything outside it. History has shown us, just as Darwin's natural history has proved, that all apparently eternal issues have a story, a line of development, a genealogy. Thus, notions, like species, have no reality-they are temporary fiction imposed for the sake of defending a particular arrangement.

So, God is dead. There is no eternal truth anymore, no rule book in the sky, no ultimate referee or international Olympic committee chair. Nietzsche did not kill God; History and the new science did. Nietzsche is only the most passionate and irritating messenger, announcing over the intercom system to anyone who will listen that an appeal to a system can defend someone like Kant or Descartes or Newton who thinks that what he or she is doing grounded in the truth of nature has simply been mistaken.

This insight is obvious to Nietzsche, and he is troubled that no one is worried about it or even to have noticed it. So he has moved to call the matter to our attention as stridently as possible, because he thinks that this realization requires a fundamental shift in how we live our lives.

For Nietzsche Europe is in crisis. It has a growing power to make life comfortable and an enormous energy. However, people seem to want to channel that energy into arguing about what amounts to competing fictions and to force everyone to follow particular fictions.

Why is this insight so worrying? Well, one point is that dogmatists get aggressive. Soccer players and rugby players who forget what Nietzsche is pointing out can start killing each other over questions that admit of no answer, namely, question about which group has the true game, which ordering has a privileged accountability to the truth. Nietzsche senses that dogmatism is going to lead to warfare, and he predicts that the twentieth century will see an unparalleled extension of warfare in the name of competing dogmatic truths. Part of his project is to wake up the people who are intelligent enough to respond to what he is talking about so that they can recognize the stupidity of killing each other for an illusion that they misunderstand for some ‘truth.’

Besides that, Nietzsche, like Mill (although, in a very different way), is seriously concerned about the possibilities for human excellence in a culture where the herd mentality is taking over, where Europe is developing into competing herds-a situation that is either sweeping up the best and the brightest or stifling them entirely. Nietzsche, like Mill and the ancient pre-

Socratic Greeks to whom he constantly refers, is an elitist. He wants the potential for individual human excellence to be liberated from the harnesses of conformity and group competition and conventional morality. Otherwise, human beings are going to become destructive, lazy, conforming herd animals, using technology to divert them from the greatest joys in life, which come only from individual striving and creativity, activities that require one to release one's instincts without keeping them eternally subjugated to controlling historical consciousness or a conventional morality of good and evil.

What makes this particularly a problem for Nietzsche is that he sees that a certain form of game is gaining popularity: Democratic volleyball. In this game, the rule book insists that all players be treated equally, that there be no natural authority given to the best players or to those who understand the nature of quality play. Therefore the mass of inferior players is taking over, the quality of the play is deteriorating, and there are fewer and fewer good volleyball players. This process is being encouraged both by the traditional ethic of ‘help your neighbour,’ now often in a socialist uniform and by modern science. As the mass of more many inferior players takes over the sport, the mindless violence of their desires to attack other players and take over their games increases, as does their hostility to those who are uniquely excellent (who may need a mask to prevent themselves being recognized).

The hopes for any change in this development are not good. In fact, things might be getting worse. For when Nietzsche looks at all these games going on he notices certain groups of people, and the prospect is not totally reassuring.

First there remain the overwhelming majority of people: the players and the spectators, those caught up in their particular sport. These people are, for the most part, continuing as before without reflecting or caring about what they do. They may be vaguely troubled about rumours they hear that their game is not the best, they may be bored with the endless repetition in the schedule, and they have essentially reconciled them that they are not the only game going on, but they had rather not thought about it. Or else, stupidly confident that what they are doing is what really matters about human life, is true, they preoccupy themselves with tinkering with the rules, using the new technology to get better balls, more comfortable seats, louder whistles, more brightly painted side lines, more trendy uniforms, tastier Gatorade-all in the name of progress.

Increasing numbers of people are moving into the stands or participating through the newspaper or the television sets. Most people are thus, in increasing numbers, losing touch with themselves and their potential as instinctual human beings. They are the herd, the last men, preoccupied with the trivial, unreflectingly conformist because they think, to the extent they think at all, that what they do will bring them something called ‘happiness.’ Yet they are not happy: They are in a permanent state of narcotized anxiety, seeking new ways to entertain themselves with the steady stream of marketed distractions that the forces of the market produce: Technological toys, popular entertainment, college education, Wagner's operas, academic jargon.

This group, of course, includes all the experts in the game, the cheerleaders whose job it is to keep us focussed on the seriousness of the activity, the sports commentators and pundits, whose life is bound up with interpreting, reporting, and classifying players and contests. These sportscasters are, in effect, the academics and government experts, the John Maddens and Larry Kings and Mike Wallaces of society, those demigods of the herd, whose authority derives from the false notion that what they are dealing with is something other than a social-fiction.

There is a second group of people, who have accepted the ultimate meaninglessness of the game in which they were. They have moved to the sidelines, not as spectators or fans, but as critics, as cynics or nihilists, dismissing out of hand all the pretensions of the players and fans, but not affirming anything themselves. These are the souls who, having nothing to will (because they have seen through the fiction of the game and have therefore no motive to play any more), prefer to will nothing in a state of paralysed skepticism. Nietzsche has a certain admiration for these people, but maintains that a life like this, the nihilist on the sidelines, is not a human life.

For, Nietzsche insists, to live as a human being, is to play a game. Only in playing a game can one affirm one's identity, can one create values, can one truly exist. Games are the expression of our instinctual human energies, our living drives, what Nietzsche calls our ‘will to power.’ So the nihilistic stance, though understandable and, in a sense, courageous, is sterile. For we are born to play, and if we do not, then we are not fulfilling a worthy human function. Also, we have to recognize that all games are equally fictions, invented human constructions without any connections to the reality of things.

So we arrive at the position of the need to affirm a belief (invent a rule book) which we know to have been invented, to be divorced from the truth of things. To play the best game is to live by rules that we invent for ourselves as an assertion of our instinctual drives and to accept that the rules are fictions: they matter, we accept them as binding, we judge ourselves and others by them, and yet we know they are artificial. Just as in real life a normal soccer player derives a sense of meaning during the game, affirms his or her value in the game, without ever once believing that the rules of soccer have organized the universe or that those rules have any universal validity, so we must commit ourselves to epistemological and moral rules that enable us to live our lives as players, while simultaneously recognizing that these rules have no universal validity.

The nihilists have discovered half this insight, but, because they cannot live the full awareness, they are very limited human beings.

The third group of people, that small minority that includes Nietzsche himself, who of which are those who accept the game’s metaphor, see the fictive nature of all systems of knowledge and morality, and accept the challenge that to be most fully human is to create a new game, to live a life governed by rules imposed by the dictates of one's own creative nature. To base one's life on the creative tensions of the artist engaged with creating a game that meets most eloquently and uncompromisingly the demand of one's own irrational nature-one's wish-is to be most fully free, most fully human.

This call to live the -created life, affirming one in a game of one's own devising, necessarily condemns the highest spirits to loneliness, doubt, insecurity, emotional suffering, because most people will mock the new game or be actively hostile to it or refuse to notice it, and so on; Alternatively, they will accept the challenge but misinterpret what it means and settle for some marketed easy game, like floating down the Mississippi smoking a pipe. Nevertheless, a generated game also brings with-it the most intense joy, the most playful and creative affirmation of what is most important in our human nature.

Noting here that one’s freedom to create is important one's own game is limited. In that sense, Nietzsche is no existentialist maintaining that we have a duty and an unlimited freedom to be whatever we want to be. For the resources at our disposable parts of the field still available and the recreational material lying around in the club house-are determined by the present state of our culture. Furthermore, the rules In devise and the language In frame them in will ordinarily owe a good deal to the present state of the rules of other games and the state of the language in which those are expressed. Although in changing the rules of my game, let it be known that my starting point, or the rules have the availability to change, and are given to me by my moment in history. So in moving forward, in creating something that will transcend the past, In am using the materials of the past. Existing games are the materials out of which In fashion my new game.

Thus, the new philosopher will transcend the limitations of the existing games and will extend the catalogue of games with the invention of new ones, but that new creative spirit faces certain historical limitations. If this is relativistic, it is not totally so.

The value of this endeavour is not to be measured by what other people think of the newly created game; Nor does its value lie in fame, material rewards, or service to the group. Its value comes from the way it enables the individual to manifest certain human qualities, especially the will to power. Nonetheless, it seems that whether or not the game attracts other people and becomes a permanent fixture on the sporting calendar, something later citizens can derive enjoyment from or even remember, that is irrelevant. For only the accidents of history determination of whether the game invented is for my-own attractions in other people, that is, becomes a source of value for them.

Nietzsche claims that the time is right for such a radically individualistic endeavour to create new games, new metaphors for my life. For, wrongheaded as many traditional games may have been, like Plato's metaphysical soccer or Kant's version of eight balls, or Marx's materialist chess tournament, or Christianity's stoical snakes and ladders, they have splendidly trained us for the much more difficult work of creating values in a spirit of radical uncertainty. The exertions have trained our imaginations and intelligence in useful ways. So, although those dogmatists were unsound, an immersion in their systems has done much to refine those capacities we most need to rise above the nihilists and the herd.

Now, putting its analogy on the table for our consecrations to consider and clarify by some central points about Nietzsche. However, the metaphor is not so arbitrary as it may appear, because this very notion of systems of meanings as invented games is a central metaphor of the twentieth century thought and those who insist upon it as often as not point to Nietzsche as their authority.

So, for example, when certain postmodernists insist that the major reason for engaging in artistic creativity or literary criticism or any form of cultural life be to awaken the spirit of creative play that is far more central than any traditional sense of meaning or rationality or even coherence, we can see the spirit of Nietzsche at work.

Earlier in this century, as we will see in the discussions of early modern art, a central concern was the possibility of recovering some sense of meaning or of recreating or discovering a sense of ‘truth’ of the sort we had in earlier centuries. Marxists were determined to assist history in producing the true meaning toward which we were inexorably heading. To the extent that we can characterize post-modernism simply at all, we might say that it marks a turning away from such responses to the modern condition and an embrace, for better or worse, of Nietzsche, joyful -affirmation in a spirit of the irrationality of the world and the fictive qualities of all that we create to deal with life.

One group we can quickly identify is those who have embraced Nietzsche's critique, who appeal to his writing to endorse their view that the search to ground our knowledge and moral claims in Truth are futile, and that we must therefore recognize the imperative Nietzsche laid before us to -create our own lives, to come up with new -descriptions affirming the irrational basis of our individual humanity. This position has been loosely termed Antifoundationalism. Two of its most prominent and popular spokespersons in recent years have been Richard Rorty and Camille Paglia. Within Humanities departments the Deconstructionists (with Derrida as their guru) head the Nietzschean charge.

Antifoundationalists supportively link Nietzsche closely with Kuhn and with Dewey (whose essay on Darwin we read) and sometimes with Wittgenstein and take central aim at anyone who would claim that some form of enquiry, like science, rational ethics, Marxism, or traditional religion has any form of privileged access to reality or the truth. The political stance of the Antifoundationalists tends to be radically romantic or pragmatic. Since we cannot ground our faith in any public morality or political creed, politics becomes something far less important than personal development or else we have to conduct our political life simply on a pragmatic basis, following the rules we can agree on, without according those rules any universal status or grounding in eternal principles. If mechanistic science is something we find, for accidental reasons of history, something useful, then we will believe it for now. Thus, Galileo's system became adopted, not because it was true or closer to the truth that what it replaced, but simply because the vocabulary he introduced inside our descriptions was something we found agreeable and practically helpful. When it ceases to fulfill our pragmatic requirements, we will gradually change to another vocabulary, another metaphor, another version of a game. History shows that such a change will occur, but how and when it will take place or what the new vocabulary might be-these questions will be determined by the accidents of history.

Similarly, human rights are important, not because there is any rational non-circular proof that we ought to act according to these principles, but simply because we have agreed, for accidental historical reasons, that these principles are useful. Such pragmatic agreements are all we have for public life, because, as Nietzsche insists, we cannot justify any moral claims by appeals to the truth. So we can agree about a schedule for the various games and distributing the budget between them and we can, as a matter of convenience, set certain rules for our discussions, but only as a practical requirement of our historical situation, least of mention, not by any divine or rationality that of any system contributes of its distributive cause.

A second response is to reject the Antifoundationalist and Nietzschean claim that no language has privileged contact to the reality of things, to assert, that is, that Nietzsche is wrong in his critique of the Enlightenment. Plato's project is not dead, as Nietzsche claimed, but alive and well, especially in the scientific enterprise. We are discovering ever more about the nature of reality. There may still be a long way to go, and nature might be turning out to be much more complex than the early theories suggested, but we are making progress. By improving the rule book we will modify our games so that they more closely approximate the truth of the wilderness.

To many scientists, for example, the Antifoundationalist position is either irrelevant or just plain wrong, an indication that social scientists and humanity’s types do not understand the nature of science or are suffering a bad attack of sour grapes because of the prestige the scientific disciplines enjoy in the academy. The failure of the social scientists (after generations of trying) to come up with anything approaching a reliable law (like, say, Newton's laws of motion) has shown the pseudoscientific basis of the disciplines, and unmasks their turn to Nietzschean Antifoundationalism as a feeble attempt to justify their presence in the modern research university.

Similarly, Marxists would reject Antifoundationalism as a remnant of aristocratic bourgeois capitalism, an ideology designed to take intellectuals' minds off the realities of history, the truth of things. There is a truth grounded in a materialist view of history, fostering, that only in diverting philosophers away from social injustice. No wonder the most ardent Nietzscheans in the university have no trouble getting support from the big corporate interests to and their bureaucratic subordinates: The Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Within the universities and many humanities and legal journals, some liveliest debates go on between the Antifoundationalists allied and the Deconstructionists under the banner of Nietzsche and the historical materialists and many feminists under the banner of Marx.

Meanwhile, there has been a revival of interest in Aristotle. The neo-Aristotelians agree with Nietzsche's critique of the Enlightenment rational project-that we are never going to be able to derive a sense of human purpose from scientific reason-but assert that sources of value and knowledge are not simply a contingent but arise from communities and that what we need to sort out our moral confusion is a reassertion of Aristotle's emphasis on human beings, not as radically individual with an identity before their political and social environment, but moderate political animals, whose purpose and value are deeply and essentially rooted in their community. A leading representative for this position is Alisdair McIntyre.

Opposing such a communitarian emphasis, a good deal of the modern Liberal tradition points out that such a revival of traditions simply will not work. The break down of the traditional communities and the widespread perception of the endemic injustice of inherited ways is something that cannot be reversed (appeals to Hobbes here are common). So we need to place our faith in the rational liberal Enlightenment tradition, and look for universal rational principles, human rights, rules of international morality, justice based on an analysis of the social contract, and so on. An important recent example such a view is Rawls' famous book Social Justice.

Finally, there are those who again agree with Nietzsche's analysis of the Enlightenment and thus reject the optimistic hopes of rational progress, but who deny Nietzsche's proffered solution. To see life as irrational chaos that we must embrace and such joyous affirmation as the value-generating activity in our human lives, while recognizing its ultimate meaninglessness to the individual, too many people seem like a prescription for insanity. What we, as human beings, must have to live a fulfilled human life is an image of eternal meaning. This we can derive only from religion, which provides for us, as it always has, a transcendent sense of order, something that answers to our essential human nature far more deeply than either the Enlightenment faith in scientific rationality or Nietzsche's call to a life of constantly metaphorical -definition.

To read the modern debates over literary interpretation, legal theory, human rights issues, education curriculums, feminist issues, ethnic rights, communitarian politics, or a host of other similar issues is to come repeatedly across the clash of these different positions (and others). To use the analogy In started with, activities on the playing fields are going on more energetically than ever. Right in the middle of most of these debates and generously scattered throughout the footnotes and bibliographies, Nietzsche's writings are alive and well. To that extent, his ideas are still something to be reckoned with. He may have started by shouting over the loud speaker system, in a way no to which one bothered attending; now on many playing fields, the participants and fans are considering and reacting to his analysis of their activities. So Nietzsche today is, probably more than ever before in this century, right in the centre of some vital debates over cultural questions.

You may recall how, in Book X of the Republic, Plato talks about the ‘ancient war between poetry and philosophy.’ What this seems to mean from the argument is an ongoing antagonism between different uses of language, between language that seeks above all, denotative clarity the language of exact definitions and precise logical relationships and language whose major quality is its ambiguous emotional richness, between, that is, the language of geometry and the language of poetry (or, simply put, between Euclid and Homer)

Another way of characterizing this dichotomy is to describe it as the intensive force between a language appropriates and discovering the truth and one appropriate to creating it, between, that is, a language that sets it up as an exact description of a given order (or as exactly presently available) and a language that sets it up as an ambiguous poetic vision of or an analogy to a natural or cosmic order.

Plato, in much of what we studied, seems clearly committed to a language of the former sort. Central to his course of studies that will produce guardian rulers is mathematics, which is based upon the most exact denotative language we know. Therefore, the famous inscription over the door of the Academy: ‘Let no one enter here who has not studied geometry.’ Underlying Plato's remarkable suspicion of a great deal of poetry, and particularly of Homer, is this attitude to language: Poetic language is suspect because, being based on metaphors (figurative comparisons or word pictures), it is a third remove from the truth. In addition, it speaks too strongly to the emotions and thus may unbalance the often tense equilibrium needed to keep the soul in a healthy state.

One needs to remember, however, that Plato's attitude to language is very ambiguous, because, in spite of his obvious endorsement of the language of philosophy and mathematics, in his own style he is often a poet, a creator of metaphor. In other words, there is a conflict between his strictures on metaphor and his adoption of so many metaphors (the central one of some dramatic dialogues is only the most obvious). Many famous and influential passages from the Republic, for example, are not arguments but poetic images or fictional narratives: The Allegory of the Cave, the image of the Sun, the Myth of Er.

Plato, in fact, has always struck me as someone who was deeply suspicious about poetry and metaphor because he responded to it so strongly. Underlying his sometimes harsh treatment of Homer may be the imagination of someone who is all too responsive to it (conversely, and Aristotle’s more lenient view of poetry may stem from the fact that he did not really feel its effects so strongly). If we were inclined to adopt Nietzsche's interpretation of philosophy, we might be tempted to see in Plato's treatment of Homer and his stress on the dangers of poetic language his own ‘confession’ of weakness. His work is, in part, an attempt to fight his own strong inclinations to prefer metaphoric language.

Nietzsche is unchallenged as the most sightful and powerful critics of the moral climate of the 19th century (and of what remains in ours). His exploration of bringing forth an acknowledged unconscious motivation, and the conflict of opposing forces within the mindful purposes of possibilities of creative integration. . . . Freud and Nietzsche elaborate upon the whole field of libidinal economy: The transit of the libido through other selves, aggression, infliction and reception of pain, and something very much like death, the total evacuation of the entire quantum of excitation that the organism is charged.

Nietzsche suggests that in our concern for the other, in our sacrifice for the other, we are concerned with ourselves, one part of ourselves represented by the other. That for which we sacrifice ourselves is unconsciously related to as another part of us. In relating to the other we are in fact also relating to a part of ourselves and we are concerned with our own pleasure and pain and our own expression of will to power. In one analysis of pity, Nietzsche states that, ‘we are, to be sure, not consciously thinking of ourselves but are doing so strongly unconsciously.’ He goes on to suggest that it be primarily our own pleasure and pain that we are concerned about and that the feelings and reactions that follow are multi-determined: ‘We never do anything of this kind out of one motive.’

The real world is flux and change for Nietzsche, but in his later works

there is no ‘unknowable true world.’ Also, the splits between a surface, apparent world and an unknowable but a true world of the things-in-themselves were, as is well known, a view Nietzsche rejected. For one thing, as Mary Warnock points out, Nietzsche was attempting to get across the point that there is only one world, not two. She also suggests that for Nietzsche, if we contribute anything to the world, it be the idea of a ‘thing,’ and in Nietzsche’s words, ‘the psychological origin of the belief in things forbids us to speak of things-in-themselves.’

Nietzsche holds that there is an extra-mental world to which we are related and with which we have some kind of fit. For him, even as knowledge develops in the service of -preservation and power, to be effective, a conception of reality will have a tendency to grasp (but only) a certain amount of, or aspect of, reality. However much of Nietzsche may at times (the truth of) artistic creation and dissimulation (out of chaos) as paradigmatic for science (which will not recognize it as such), in arriving art this position Nietzsche assumes the truth of scientifically based beliefs as foundation for many of his arguments, including those regarding the origin, development and nature of perception, consciousness and consciousness and what this entails for our knowledge of and falsification of the external and inner world. In fact, to some extent the form-providing, affirmative, this-world healing of art is a response to the terrifying, nausea-inducing truths revealed by science that by it had no treatment for the underlying cause of the nausea. Although Nietzsche also writes of the horrifying existential truths, against which science can attempt a [falsifying] defence. Nevertheless, while there is a real world to which we are affiliated, there is no sensible way to speak of a nature or constitution or eternal essence of the world in and of it apart from description and perceptive. Also, states of affairs to which our interpretations are to fit are established within human perspectives and reflect (but not only) our interests, concerns, needs for calculability. While such relations (and perhaps as meta-commentary on the grounds of our knowing) Nietzsche is quite willing to write of the truth, the constitution of reality, and facts of the case. There appears of no restricted will to power, nor the privilege of absolute truth. To expect a pure desire for a pure truth is to expect an impossible desire for an illusory ideal.

The inarticulate come to rule supreme in oblivion, either in the individual’s forgetfulness or in those long stretches of the collective past that have never been and will never be called forth into the necessarily incomplete articulations of history, the record of human existence that is profusely interspersed with dark passages. This accounts for the continuous questing of archeology, palaeontology, anthropology, geology, and accounts, too, for Nietzsche’s warning against the ‘insomnia’ of historicisms. As for the individual, the same drive is behind the modern fascination with the unconscious and, thus, with dreams, and it was Nietzsche who, before Freud, spoke of forgetting as an activity of the mind. At the beginning of his, Genealogy of Morals, he claims, in defiance of all psychological ‘shallowness,’ that the lacunae of memory are not merely ‘passive’ but the outcome of an active and positive ‘screening,’ preventing us from remembering what would upset our equilibrium. Nietzsche is the first discoverer of successful ‘repression,’ the burying of potential experience in the unarticulated that is, as moderately when the enemy territory is for him.

Still, he is notorious for stressing the ‘will to power’ that is the basis of human nature, the ‘resentment’ that comes once it is denied of its basis in action, and the corruptions of human nature encouraged by religions, such as Christianity, that feed on such resentment. Yet the powerful human being who escapes all this, the ‘Übermensch’, is not the ‘blood beast’ of later fascism: It is a human being who has mastered passion, risen above the senseless flux, and given creative style of his or her character. Nietzsche’s free spirits recognize themselves by their joyful attitude to eternal return. He frequently presents the creative artist than the world warlord as his best exemplar of the type, but the disquieting fact remains that he seems to leave him no words to condemn any uncaged beast of prey who vests finds their style by exerting repulsive power over others. Nietzsche’s frequently expressed misogyny does not help this problem, although in such matters the interpretation of his many-layered and ironic writing is not always straightforward. Similarly, such anti-Semitism, as found in his work is in an equally balanced way as intensified denouncements of anti-Semitism, and an equal or greater contempt of the German character of his time.

Nietzsche’s current influence derives not only from his celebration of the will, but more deeply from his scepticism about the notions of truth and fact. In particular, he anticipated many central tenets of postmodernism: An aesthetic attitude toward the world that sees it as a ‘text’, the denial of facts: The denial of essences, the celebration of the plurality of interpretations and of the fragmented and political discourse all for which are waiting their rediscovery in the late 20th century. Nietzsche also has the incomparable advantage over his followers of being a wonderful stylist, and his perspectives are echoed in the shifting array of literary devices-humour, irony, exaggeration, aphorisms, verse, dialogue, parody with which he explores human life and history.

All the same, Nietzsche is openly pessimistic about the possibility of knowledge: ‘We simply lack any organ for knowledge, for ‘truth’: We ‘know’ (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd, the species, and perhaps precisely that most calamitous stupidity of which we shall perish some day’ (The Gay Science).

This position is very radical for Nietzsche does not simply deny that knowledge, construed as the adequate representation of the world by the intellect, exists. He also refuses the pragmatist identification: He writes that we think truth with usefulness: he writes that we think we know what we think is useful, and that we can be quit e wrong about the latter.

Nietzsche’s view, his ‘perspectivism’, depends on his claim that there is no sensible conception of a world independent of human interpretation and to which interpretations would correspond if they were to make up knowledge. He sums up this highly controversial position in The Will to Power: ‘Facts and precisely what there is not, only interpretations’.

It is often maintained that the affirmation within perspectivism is -undermined, in that if the thesis that all views are interpretations is true then, it is argued for, that a compound view is not an interpretation. If, on the other hand, the thesis is it an interpretation, perhaps, on that point is no reason to believe that it is true, and it follows again that not every view is an interpretation.

Nonetheless, this refutation assumes that if a view, as perspectivism it, is an interpretation, it is by that very fact wrong. This is not so, however, an interpretation is to say that it can be wrong, which is true of all views, and that is not a sufficient refutation. To show the perspectivism is really false in producing another view superior to it that on specific epistemological grounds it is necessary.

Perspectivism does not deny that particular views can be true. Like some versions of contemporary anti-realism, it attributes to specific approaches’ truth in relation to facts themselves. Still, it refused to envisage a single independent set of facts, and accounted for by all theories. Thus, Nietzsche grants the truth of specific scientific theories: He does, however, deny that a scientific interpretation can possibly be ‘the only justifiable interpretation of the world’ (The Gay Science): The fact’s have to neither be addressed through science nor are the methods that serve the purposes for which they have been devise: Regardless, these have no priority over the many others’ purposes of human life.

The existence of many purposes and needs for which the measure of theoretic possibilities is established -other crucial elements evolving perspectivism is sometimes thought to imply of a prevailing-over upon relativism, according to which no standards for evaluating purposes and theories can be devised. This is correct only in that Nietzsche denies the existence of a single set of standards for determining epistemic value. However, he holds that specific views can be compared with and evaluated in relation to one another. The ability to use criteria acceptable in particular circumstances does not presuppose the existence of criteria applicable in it. Agreement is therefore not always possible, since individuals may sometimes differ over the most fundamental issue dividing them.

Nonetheless, this fact would not trouble Nietzsche, which his opponents too also have to confront only, as he would argue, to suppress it by insisting on the hope that all disagreements are in principal eliminable even if our practice falls woefully short of the ideal. Nietzsche abandons that ideal, but he considers irresoluble disagreement an essential part of human life.

Nature is the most apparent display of the will to power at work. It is wholly unconscious and acts solely out of necessity, such that no morality is involved. We are a part of this frightening chaos where anything can happen anytime. However, this requires far too much intelligence for us to realize and rightly accept it totally. So we invent reasons for things that have no reason. We believe in our own falsification of nature. We produce art, and delight in the perfection that is unnatural. All of the same time, we are to dwell along within nature, and, still, nature is fooling it. Nietzsche accentuates that of all human actions are remnant fragments of those yielding of an acceptable appearance corresponded by surrendering to some part of nature, is without much difficulty accomplished out of necessity. They are instincts we have developed for our own preservation. He believes the natural state is the best state, even in all its wantonness, and he calls people to open their ears to the purity of a nature without design. ‘The universe's music box repeats eternally its tune, which can never be called for as a melody’.

The Gay Science explains the problems with man humanizing nature. It is a fitting departure point because, through criticism, it states Nietzsche's regard for the unconsciousness of the will to power in nature. He fills this section with warning: ‘Let us beware of thinking that the universe is a living being,’ he says. ‘Where should it expand?’ ‘On what should it feed?’ The universe lacks its own will to power. We can in no way identify with the universe, despite all our efforts.’We should not make it something essential, universal, and eternal’. Nietzsche is dispelling the notion that there is meaning in existence. He is saying that when all is said and done and gone, our universe does not matter. After all, it will destroy and create it into eternity. It does not have a purpose, like a machine. Humans seek honour in the universe and we find honour in spite of any purposive inclusion. So tricking ourselves is easy as we have become conceited into believing that we are the purposes of the universe. All the power in the universe working toward producing our species of mammals. Yet let us be reasonable. Nietzsche calls the organic an ‘exception of exceptions.’ Where matter it is an exception: We are not the secret aim, but a byproduct of unusual circumstances. It is an error to assume that all of the space behaves in the manner of that which immediately surrounds us. We cannot be sure of this uniformity. Nietzsche uses our surrounding stars as an example. He asserts that stars may very well exist whose orbits are not at all what we suppose? ‘Let us beware of attributing it to heartlessness and unreason and their opposites’. There is no intent, as there is no such accident, because this requires a purpose. All these things are disguises man has given the universe. They are false, but why should we beware? Nietzsche emphasizes our weakness as animals. We are the only animals that live against our natural inclinations. By suppressing our instincts, we become less and less equipped to exist as part of nature. If we continue living against our surroundings, we will be removed, not out of God's anger, but out of necessity.

Nietzsche reminds us that the total character of the world is in all eternity chaos. The only structure responsible for the necessity that reigns in nature is the will to power. The will to power begins in chaos. We find it unpleasant to think of our lives in these terms, because, stronger than our urge to deify nature is usually our urge to deify ourselves. We are merely living things. Let us beware of saying that death is opposed to life. The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type. There is no opposition, only will to power. The living and the dead are both made of the same basic materials. The difference is that when something is alive, its molecules reproduce. Again, Nietzsche focuses on the exceptions.

When will all these shadows of God cease to darken our minds? When will we complete our de-veneration of nature? When may we begin to ‘naturalize’ humanity through a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?

Nietzsche divides human beings according to their creative power. The higher, creative humans see and hear more than the lower, who concern themselves with matters of man. This is a pattern found throughout nature: the higher animals experience more. In humans, the higher become at once happier and unhappier, because they are feeling more. Nietzsche calls these people the ‘poets’ who are creating the lives on stage, while the non-creative are exasperated ‘actors’. The actors could be better understood as spectators of the poets' performance. Poets’ think and feel harmoniously, matched with time; he is able continually to fashion something that did not previously exist. He created the entire world of valuations, colours, accents, perspectives, scales, affirmations, and negations' studied by the actor. In our society, the actor is called practical, when it is the poet who is responsible for any value we place. By this, Nietzsche means that, since nothing has any meaning or value by nature, the poets are responsible because they are the ones who produce beauty. They are responsible for everything in the world that concerns man. They fail to recognize this, however, and remain unaware of their best power. We are neither as proud nor as happy as we might be.

Our poets produce art. Art is the expression of perfect beauty that does not occur naturally. Human hands have given and conceived it by human minds; it is human nature. We are separate from the rest of the animal kingdom in our deviation from nature. Our instincts led us to delight in art as it distinguished it and its creators as supernatural. We must wonder at nature becoming bored with ourselves, to create something better and, perhaps, slightly as perfect than it can become. What does nature know of perfection? It is the will to power, but a facet only exhibited in humans. All the same, in that it seems that art is meant to be as far removed from everything as naturally possible. Nietzsche uses the Greeks as an example of this pure art. They did not want fear and pity. To prevent these human emotions from interfering in the presentation of a writer's work, the Greeks would confine actors to narrow stages and restrict their facial expressions. The object was beautiful speech, with the presentation only meant to do the words justice, not to distract with dramatic interpretation. A more modern example is the opera. Nietzsche points out the insignificance of the words versus the music. What is the loss in not understanding an opera singer? In the present, art has degenerated so that its purpose is often to remind us of our humanity, much less to express that which is perfect. We listen for words that shackle us to the land in a medium that can elevate us above the rest. Art gives human life reason, purpose, and all the things we have attributed from God, but Art is true. It is the only meaning in life, because it is unnatural.

An examining consideration as arranged of human autonomy has of it the designed particularity of interests, in that for Nietzsche conveys the predisposition for which it finds the preservation of the species. It is the oldest and strongest of our instincts, and it is the essence of the herd. Why should we care about the survival of our race? It is not in our interest as individuals. Yet we cannot avoid it. Nietzsche points out that even the most harmful men aid preservation by instilling instincts in the rest of us that a necessary for our survival. In that way they are largely responsible for it, but according to Nietzsche, we are no longer capable of ‘living badly’. That is, living in a way that goes against preservation of the human race: 'Above all, perish', you will contribute to humanity.

Nietzsche reflected back to the contributions achieved through the afforded endeavours attributively generated of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and, by comparison and consistence in their according attitude with their sense of nature. The seventeenth century was a time when humans lived closer to their instincts. An artist of that time would attempt to capture all that he could in art, removing him as much as possible. In the eighteenth century, Nietzsche says that artists took the focus away from nature and put it on themselves. Art became social propaganda. It became more human. We are missing ‘the hatred of the lack of a sense of nature that was present in the seventeenth century. Nietzsche writes of the nineteenth century with hope. He says people have become more concrete, more fearless. They are putting the 'health of the body ahead of the health of the soul'. It would appear that they are making a return to nature, except that if they reach it, it will be for the first time.

‘There has never yet been of a foremost advance in natural humanity. That is a humanity living according to their nature. Nietzsche stresses that we have become far too unnatural in our social and technical evolution. Humans have tried to exist above nature, condemning their own world (in fact, themselves) as if they were the only ones alive by the grace of God. This is an obvious contradiction for Nietzsche. He believes first that, since human beings share the same relationship with nature as any other animal, we ought to live according to our instincts. We ought to do what comes naturally to us that which most reflects the will to power. He uses two examples of natural human behaviour (human instinct) to clarify. The first example is the search for knowledge, which is naturally occurring in all humans, whether they are conscious of it or not. The second is the way we perceive our rights in society. This is an example of humans living according to necessity. We act according to that which can be enforced. Punishment is our only deterrent. In that respect, we live naturally, but that is in resignation that we meet a superficial nature. If we could live in accord with that which governs our fellow creatures, we would discover our true selves, and realize our full potential as artists.

Nietzsche regards the evolution of human nature as a journey from the age of morality into the age of consciousness, or the age of ridicule. He saw humanity of his time still living according to teachers of remorse, their so-called ‘heroes.’ These men inspired our faith in life, and our fear of death. They gave us false reasons for our existence, disguising it with the invention of a ‘teacher of the purpose of existence’. Nietzsche believes that the idea of God came about because it distracted people from their insignificance. What does one person count for in relation to the whole of society? Nothing, the preservation of the species is all that matter. We are mammals like any other. If by force or some orderly enforcement was to gain power and leadership for themselves, the ‘heroes’ taught us that we were significant in the eyes of God. They taught us to take ourselves seriously; that life is worth living because of this 'teacher of purpose'. We cling to this safety blanket that protects us from seeing us at eye level with the rest of the natural world because we cannot handle the true nature of the human race as a herd.

Nietzsche predicts that humans will evolve to the point where they can comprehend the true nature of their species. This realization brings ridicule to our lives. Nothing has been meaning that it is all random functioning at the hands of the will to power. We can no longer be solemn in our work, for how are we to take ourselves seriously when we have given up our blanket? It seems that we had lost our direction to the madness of nature and reason. We must remember that unreason is also essential for the preservation of the species.

In his writings (Essays on Aesthetics, Untimely Meditations the Gay Science and others) Nietzsche wishes to be considered by his readers and viewed in and by history as a psychologist who practice’s psychology who asserts attention by unitizing contingently prescribed studies as a curriculum can quickly bind and serve as for his time must be accredited of it, embracing willfully a ‘new system for psychology?’

In fact, several authors view many expressions as voiced in the aspects of Nietzsche’s work, for instance, Kaufmann and Golomb, as psychological ones, a fact disregarded by many authors who regard Nietzsche as a mere anti philosopher and a writer of short beautiful verse. Surely, while being a young, frustrated, physically and mentally ill, retired professors of Philology, who has viciously attacked his colleagues, the state, society and the establishment and wrote provocative verses and notes, Nietzsche has also sought to bring the nature of man, the unconscious, the conscious, conscious, analysis, relationships with other individuals, the inner state (emotions, sensations, feelings and the like), irrational sources of man's power and greatness with his morbidity and -destructiveness into the scope of existence.

Further, in his many writings Nietzsche also talks of the mind, the mental, instincts, reflexes, reflexive movements, the brain, symbolic representations, images, views, metaphors, language, experiences, innate and hereditary psychological elements, defence, protective, mechanism, repression, suppression, overcoming, an overall battle, struggle and conflict between individuals etc., As an illustration, Nietzsche describes how blocked instinctual powers turn within the individual into resentment, -hatred, hostility and aggression. Moreover, Nietzsche strives to analyse human being, his crisis, his despair and his existence in the world and to find means to alleviate human crises and despair.

These aspects of Nietzsche's work elicit a tendency to compare Nietzsche's doctrine with that of Freud and psychoanalysis and to argue that the Freudian doctrine and school (the psychoanalytic theory of human personality on which the psychotherapeutic technique of psychoanalysis is based). Nietzsche’s has influenced and affected methods of treatment (psychoanalysis) by Nietzsche's philosophy and work and the Nietzschean doctrine. As a demonstration from the relevant literature, according to Golomb's (1987) thesis, the theoretical core of psychoanalysis is already part and parcel of Nietzsche's philosophy, insofar as it is based on ideas that are both displayed in it and developed by it-ideas such as the unconscious, repression, sublimation, the id, the superego, primary and secondary processes and interpretations of dreams.

Nonetheless, the actual situation in the domains of psychotherapy, psychiatry and clinical psychology are not in passing over, but collectively strict and well-set determination for each general standard aligns itself to an assailing mortality. While the two savants (Nietzsche and Freud) endeavour to understand man, to develop the healthy power that is still present in the individual and the neurotic patient to overcome and suppress the psychological boundaries that repress his vitality and inhibit his ability to function freely and creatively and attain truth, the difference between the psychodynamic school, approach, movement and method of treatment, usually psychoanalysis, in particular, and the existential approach to psychotherapy, the existential movement and the existential humanistic school of psychology and method of treatment stemmed from the doctrines and views of Freud. Nietzsche is profound and significant, for the actual psychotherapeutic treatment. The reason as for this difference lie in the variation in the two savants' view and definition of man and human existence, the nature and character of man and his relationship with the world and the environment, and in the variation in the intellectual soil, that nourished and nurtured the two giant savants' views, doctrines (that is, the scholarly academic savants' philosophical and historical roots and influences) and the manners according to which they have been devised and designed.

Before anything else, the question of Nietzsche's historical critique, as might that we will recall of how one featuring narrative has been drawn from the texts, was a rapidly developing interest in and used for the enormously powerful historical criticism developed by Enlightenment thinkers. It is a way of undermining the authority of traditional power structures and the fundamental beliefs that sustain them.

We saw, for example, how in Descartes's Discourse on Method, Descartes offers a hypothetical historical narrative to undermine the authority of the Aristotelians and a faith in an eternal unchanging natural order. Then, we discussed how in the Discourse on Inequality, based on an imaginative reconstruction of the history of human society, Rousseau, following Descartes's lead but extending it to other areas (and much more aggressively), can encourage in the mind of the reader the view that evil in life is the product of social injustice (than, say, the result of Original Sin or the lack of virtue in the lower orders). We have in addition of reading Kant, Marx, and Darwin how a historical understanding applied to particular phenomena undercut traditional notions of eternal truths enshrined in any particular beliefs (whether in species, in religious values, or in final purposes).

Nonetheless, this is a crucial point, the Enlightenment thinker, particularly Kant and Rousseau and Marx, do not allow history to undermine all sources of meaning; For them, beyond its unanswerable power to dissolve traditional authority, history holds out the promise of a new grounding for rational meaning, in the growing power of human societies to become rational, to, and in one word, progress. Thus, history, beyond revealing the inadequacies of many traditional power structures and sources of meaning, had also become the best hope and proof for firm faith in a new eternal order: The faith in progressive reform or revolution. This, too, is clearly something Wollstonecraft pins her hopes on (although, as we saw, how radical her emplacements continue as of a matter to debate).

On this point, as we also saw, Darwin, at least in the Origin of Species, is ambiguous-almost as if, knowing he is on very slippery ground, he doesn't want his readers to recognize the full metaphysical and epistemological implications of his theory of the history of life. Because of this probably deliberate ambiguities that we variously interpreted Darwin as offering either a ‘progressive’ view of evolution, something that we could adapt to the Enlightenment's faith in rational progress or, alternatively, as presenting a contingent view of the history of life, a story without progress or final goal or overall purposes.

Well, in Nietzsche (as in the view of Darwin) there is no such ambiguity. Darwin made his theory public for the first time in a paper delivered to the Linnean Society in 1858. The paper begins, ‘All nature is at war, one organism with another, or with external natures.’ In the Origins of Species, Darwin is more specific about the character of this war, ‘There must be in every species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life.’ All these assumptions are apparent in Darwin’s definition of natural selection: If under changing conditions of life organic beings present individual differences in almost every part of their structure, and this cannot be disputed, if there be, owing to their geometrical rate of an increase, a severe struggle for life at some age, season, or year, and this cannot be disputed, as then, considering the infinite complexity of the relations of all organic beings to each other and to their condition of life . . . this will tend to produce offspring similarly characterized. This principle of preservation, or the survival of the fittest is so called the Natural Selection.

Similarly, clusters of distributed brain areas undertake individual linguistic symbols and are not produced in a particular area. The specific sound patterns of words may be produced in dedicated regions. Nevertheless, the symbolic and referential relationship between words is generated through a convergence of neural code and decoded from different and independent brain regions. The processes of words comprehension and retrieval result from combinations of simpler associative processes in several separate brain regions that require an active role from other regions. The symbol meaning of words, like the grammar that is essential for the construction of meaningful relationships between strings of words, is an emergent property from the complex interaction of several brain parts.

If we could, for example, define all of the neural mechanisms involved in generating a particular word symbol, this would reveal nothing about the experience of the word symbol as an idea in human consciousness. Conversely, the experience of the word symbol as an idea would reveal nothing more about, the neuronal processes applied therein. While one mode of understanding the situation necessarily displaces the other, both are required to achieve a complete understanding of the situation.

With that, let us include two aspects of biological reality, its more complex order in biological reality may be associated with the emergence of new wholes that are greater than the parts, and the entire biosphere is a whole that displays regulating behaviour that is greater than the sum of its parts (the attributive view that all organisms (parts) are emergent aspects of the organizing process of life (whole), and that the proper way to understand the parts is to examine their embedded relations to the whole). If this is the case, the emergence of a symbolic universe based on a complex language system could be viewed as another stage in the evolution of more complex systems marked by the appearance of a new profound complementary relationship between parts and wholes. This does not allow us to assume that human consciousness was in any sense preordained or predestined by natural process. Nonetheless, it does make it possible, in philosophical terms at least, to argue that this consciousness is an emergent aspect of the organizing properties of biological life.

Another aspect of the evolution of a brain that allowed us to construct symbolic universes based on complex language systems that are particularly relevant for our purposes concerns consciousness of. Consciousness of as an independent agency or actor is predicted on a fundamental distinction or dichotomy between this and other selves. As it is constructed in human subjective reality, is perceived as having an independent existence and a -referential character in a mental realm as separately distinct from the material realm. It was, moreover the assumed separation between these realms that led Descartes to posit his dualism to understand the nature of consciousness in the mechanistic classical universe.

Every schoolchild learns eventually that Nietzsche was the author of the shocking slogan, ‘God is dead.’ However, what makes that statements possible are another claim, even more shocking in its implications: ‘Only that which has no history can be defined’ (Genealogy of Morals). Since Nietzsche was the heir to seventy-five years of German historical scholarship, he knew that there was no such thing as something that has no history. Darwin had, as Dewey points out that essay we examined, effectively shown that searching for a true definition of a species is not only futile but unnecessary (since the definition of a species is something temporary, something that changes over time, without any permanent lasting and stable reality). Nietzsche dedicates his philosophical work to doing the same for all cultural values.

Reflecting it for a moment on the full implications of this claim our study of moral philosophy with the dialectic exchange with which explores the question ‘What is virtue?’ That takes a firm withstanding until we can settle that of the issue with a definition that eludes all cultural qualification. What virtue is, that we cannot effectively deal with morality, accept through divine dispensation, unexamined reliance on traditions, skepticism, or relativism (the position of Thrasymachus). The full exploration of what dealing with that question of definition might require takes’ place in the Republic.

Many texts we read subsequently took up Plato's challenge, seeking to discover, through reason, a permanent basis for understanding knowledge claims and moral values. No matter what the method, as Nietzsche points out in his first section, the belief was always that grounding knowledge and morality in truth was possible and valuable, that the activity of seeking to ground morality was conducive to a fuller good life, individually and communally.

To use a favourite metaphor of Nietzsche's, we can say that previous systems of thought had sought to provide a true transcript of the book of nature. They made claims about the authority of one true text. Nietzsche insists repeatedly that there be no single canonical text; There are only interpretations. So, there is no appeal to some definitive version of Truth (whether we search in philosophy, religion, or science). Thus the Socratic quest for some way to tie morality down to the ground, so that it does not fly away, is (and has always been) futile, although the long history of attempts to do so has disciplined the European mind so that we, or a few of us, are ready to move into dangerous new territory where we can situate the most basic assumptions about the need for conventional morality to the test and move on ‘Beyond Good and Evil,’ that is, to a place where we do not take the universalizing concerns and claims of traditional morality seriously.

Nietzsche begins his critique here by challenging that fundamental assumption: Who says that seeking the truth is better for human beings? How do we know an untruth is not better? What is truth anyway? In doing so, he challenges the sense of purpose basic to the traditional philosophical endeavour. Philosophers, he points out early, may be proud of the way they begin by challenging and doubting received ideas. However, they never challenge or doubt the key notion they all start with, namely, that there is such a thing as the Truth and that it is something valuable for human beings (surely much more valuable than its opposite).

In other words, just as the development of the new science had gradually and for many painfully and rudely emptied nature of any certainty about a final purpose, about the possibilities for ever agreeing of the ultimate value of scientific knowledge, so Nietzsche is, with the aid of new historical science (and the proto-science of psychology) emptying all sources of cultural certainty of their traditional purposiveness and claims to permanent truth, and therefore of their value, as we traditionally understood that of the term. There is thus no antagonism between good and evil, since all versions of equal are equally fictive (although some may be more useful for the purposes of living than others).

At this lodging within space and time, In really do not want to analyse the various ways Nietzsche deals with this question. Nevertheless, In do want to insist upon the devastating nature of his historical critique on all previous systems that have claimed to ground knowledge and morality on a clearly defined truth of things. For Nietzsche's genius rests not only on his adopting the historical critique and applying to new areas but much more on his astonishing perspicuity in seeing just how extensive and flexible the historical method might be.

For example, Nietzsche, like some of those before him, insists that value systems are culturally determined. they arise, he insists, as often as not form or in reaction to conventional folk wisdom. Yet to this he adds something that to us, after Freud, may be well accepted, but in Nietzsche's hands become something as shocking: Understanding of a system of value is, he claims, requires us more than anything else to see it as the product of a particular individual's psychological history, a uniquely personal confession. Relationship to something called the ‘Truth’ has nothing to do with the ‘meaning’ of a moral system; as an alternative we seek its coherence in the psychology of the philosopher who produced it.

Gradually, in having grown into a greater clarity of what every great philosophy has endearingly become, as staying in the main theme of personal confessions, under which a kind of involuntary and an unconscious memoir and largely that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy formed the real germ of life from which the whole plant had grown.

A concentration has here unmasked claims to ‘truth’ upon the history of the life of the person proposing the particular ‘truth’ this time. Systems offering us a route to the Truth are simply psychologically produced fictions that serve the deep (often unconscious) purposes of the individual proposing them. Therefore they are what Nietzsche calls ‘foreground’ truths. They do not penetrate into the deep reality of nature, and, yet, to fail to see this is to lack ‘perspective.’

Even more devastating is Nietzsche's extension of the historical critique to language it. Since philosophical systems deliver themselves to us in language, that language shapes them and by the history of that language. Our Western preoccupation with the inner for which perceivable determinates, wills, and so forth, Nietzsche can place a value on as, in large part, the product of grammar, the result of a language that builds its statements around a subject and a predicate. Without that historical accident, Nietzsche affirms, we would not have committed an error into mistaking for the truth something that is a by-product of our particular culturally determined language system.

He makes the point, for example, that our faith in consciousness is just an accident. If instead of saying ‘In think,’ we were to say ‘Thinking is going on in my body,’ then we would not be tempted to give the ‘I’ some independent existence (e.g., in the mind) and make large claims about the ego or the inner. The reason we do search for such an entity stem from the accidental construction of our language, which encourages us to use a subject (the personal pronoun) and a verb. The same false confidence in language also makes it easy for us to think that we know clearly what key things like ‘thinking’ and ‘willing’ are; Whereas, if we were to engage in even a little reflection, we would quickly realize that the inner processes neatly summed up by these apparently clear terms is anything but clear. His emphasis on the importance of psychology as queen of the sciences underscores his sense of how we need to understand more fully just how complex these activities are, particularly the emotional appetites, before we talk about them so simplistically, the philosophers that concurrently have most recently done.

This remarkable insight enables Nietzsche, for example, at one blow and with cutting contempt devastatingly to dismiss as ‘trivial’ the system Descartes had set up so carefully in the Meditations. Descartes's triviality consists in failing to recognize how the language he imprisons, shapes his philosophical system as an educated European, using and by his facile treatment of what thinking is in the first place. The famous Cartesian dualism is not a central philosophical problem but an accidental by-product of grammar designed to serve Descartes' own particular psychological needs. Similarly Kant's discovery of ‘new faculties’ Nietzsche derides as just a trick of language-a way of providing what looks like an explanation and is, in fact, as ridiculous as the old notions about medicines putting people to sleep because they have the sleeping virtue.

It should be clear from examples that there is very little capability of surviving Nietzsche's onslaught, for what are there to which we can points to which did not have a history or deliver it to us in a historically developing system of language? After all, our scientific enquiries in all areas of human experience teach us that nothing is ever, for everything is always becoming.

We might be tempted, as many have been, to point to the new natural science as a counter-instance that typifies the dulling of natural science of a progressive realization of the truth of the world, or at least a closer and closer approximation to that truth? In fact, it is interesting to think about just how closely Kuhn and Nietzsche might be linked in their views about the relationship between science and the truth of things or to what extent modern science might not provide the most promising refutation of Nietzsche's assertion that there is no privileged access to a final truth of things (a hotly disputed topic in the last decade or more). It is say here that for Nietzsche science is just another ‘foreground’ way of interpreting nature. It has no privileged access to the Truth, although he does concede that, compared with other beliefs, it has the advantage of being based on sense experience and therefore is more useful for modern times.

There is one important point to stress in this review of the critical power of Nietzsche's project. Noting that Nietzsche is not calling us to a task for having beliefs is essential. We have to have beliefs. Human life must be the affirmation of values; Otherwise, it is not life. Nonetheless, Nietzsche is centrally concerned to mock us for believing that our belief systems are True, are fixed, are somehow eternally right by a grounded standard of knowledge. Human life, in its highest forms, must be lived in the full acceptance that the values we create for ourselves are fictions. We, or the best of us, have to have the courage to face the fact that there is no ‘Truth’ upon which to ground anything in which we believe; we must in the full view of that harsh insight, but affirm ourselves with joy. The Truth is not accessible to our attempts at discovery; What thinking human beings characteristically do, in their pursuit of the Truth, is creating their own truths.

Now, this last point, like the others, has profound implications for how we think of ourselves, for our conception of the human. Because human individuals, like human cultures, also have a history. Each of us has a personal history, and thus we ourselves cannot be defined; we, too, are in a constant process of becoming, of transcending the person we have been into something new. We may like to think of ourselves as defined by some essential rational quality, but in fact we are not. In stressing this, of course, Nietzsche links him with certain strains of Romanticism, especially with William Blake and with Emerson and Thoreau.

This tradition of Romanticism holds up a view of life that is radically individualistic, -created, -generated. ‘In must create my own system or become enslaved by another man's’ Blake wrote. It is also thoroughly aristocratic, with little room for traditional altruism, charity, or egalitarianism. Our lives to realize their highest potential should be lived in solitude from others, except perhaps those few we recognize as kindred souls, and our life's efforts must be a spiritually demanding but joyful affirmation of the process by which we maintain the vital development of our imaginative conceptions of ourselves.

Contrasting this view of the as a constantly developing entity might be appropriate here, without essential permanence, with Marx's view. Marx, too, insists on the process of transformation of the and ideas of the, but for him, as we discussed, the material forces control the transformation of production, and these in turn are driven by the logic of history. It is not something that the individual takes charge of by an act of individual will, because individual consciousness, like everything else, emerges from and is dependent upon the particular historical and material circumstances, the stage in the development of production, of the social environment in which the individual finds him or her.

Nietzsche, like Marx, and unlike later Existentialists, de Beauvoir, for example, recognizes that the individual inherits particular things from the historical moment of the culture (e.g., the prevailing ideas and, particularly, the language and ruling metaphors). Thus, for Nietzsche the individual is not totally free of all context. However, the appropriate response to this is not, as in Marx, the development of class consciousness, a solidarity with other citizens and an imperative to help history along by committing one to the class war alongside other proletarians, but in the best and brightest spirits, a call for a heightened sense of an individuality, of one's radical separation from the herd, of one's final responsibility to one's own most fecund creativity.

Because Nietzsche and the earlier Romantics are not simply saying, we should do what we like is vital. They all have a sense that -creation of the sort they recommend requires immense spiritual and emotional discipline -the discipline of the artist shaping his most important original creation following the stringent demands of his creative imagination. These demands may not be rational, but they are not permissively relativistic in that 1960's sense (‘If it feels good, do it’). Permissiveness may have often been attributed to this Romantic tradition, a sort of 1960's ‘Boogie til you drop’ ethic, but that is not what any of them had in mind. For Nietzsche that would simply be a herd response to a popularized and bastardized version of a much higher call to a solitary life lived with the most intense but personal joy, suffering, insight, courage, and imaginative discipline.

This aspect of Nietzsche's thought represents the fullest nineteenth-century European affirmation of a Romantic vision of the as radically individualistic (at the opposite end of the spectrum from Marx's views of the as socially and economically determined). It has had, a profound and lasting effect in the twentieth century as we become ever more uncertain about coherent social identities and thus increasingly inclined to look for some personal way to take full charge of our own identities without answering to anyone but ourselves.

Much of the energy and much of the humour in Nietzsche's prose comes from the urgency with which he sees such creative -affirmation as essential if the human species is not going to continue to degenerate. For Nietzsche, human beings are, primarily, biological creatures with certain instinctual drives. The best forms of humanity are those of whom most excellently express the most important of these biological drives, the ‘will to power,’ by which he means the individual will to assume of one and create what he or she needs, to live most fully. Such a ‘will to power’ is beyond morality, because it does not answer to anyone's system of what makes up good and bad conduct. The best and strongest human beings are those of whom create a better quality in values for themselves, live by them, and refuse to acknowledge their common links with anyone else, other than other strong people who do the same and are thus their peers.

His surveys of world history have convinced Nietzsche that the development of systems has turned this basic human drive against human beings of morality favouring the weak, the suffering, the sick, the criminal, and the incompetent (all of whom he lumps together in that famous phrase ‘the herd’). He salutes the genius of those who could accomplish this feat (especially the Jews and Christians), which he sees as the revenge of the slaves against their natural masters. From this century -long acts of revenge, human beings are now filled with feelings of guilt, inadequacy, jealousy, and mediocrity, a condition alleviated, if at all, by dreams of being helpful to others and of an ever-expanding democracy, an agenda powerfully served by modern science (which serves to bring everything and everyone down to the same level). Fortunately, however, this ordeal has trained our minds splendidly, so that the best and brightest (the new philosophers, the free spirits) can move beyond the traditional boundaries of morality, that is, ‘beyond good and evil’ (his favourite metaphor for this condition is the tensely arched bow ready to shoot off an arrow).

Stressing it is important, as In mentioned above, that Nietzsche does not believe that becoming such a ‘philosopher of the future’ is easy or for everyone. It is, by contrast, an extraordinarily demanding call, and those few capable of responding to it might have to live solitary lives without recognition of any sort. He is demanding an intense spiritual and intellectual discipline that will enable the new spirit to move into territory no philosopher has ever roamed before, a displacing medium where there are no comfortable moral resting places and where the individual will probably (almost unquestionably) has to pursue of a profoundly lonely and perhaps dangerous existence (so the importance of another favourite metaphor of his, the mask). Nevertheless, this is the only way we can counter the increasing degeneration of European man into a practical, democratic, technocratic, altruistic herd animal.

Placing the analogy on the table, however, In wish to issue a caveat. Analogies may really help to clarify, but they can also influence us by some unduly persuasive influences of misleading proportions. In hope that the analogy In offer will provide such clarity, but not at the price of oversimplifying. So, as you listen to this analogy, you need to address the questions: To what extent does this analogy not hold? To what extent does it reduce the complexity of what Nietzsche is saying into a simpler form?

The analogy In want to put on the table is the comparison of human culture to a huge recreational complex in which several different games are going on. Outside people are playing soccer on one field, rugby on another, American football on another, and Australian football on another, and so on. In the club house different groups of people are playing chess, dominoes, poker, and so on. There are coaches, spectators, trainers, and managers involved in each game. Surrounding the recreation complex is wilderness.

These games we might use to characterize different cultural groups: French Catholics, German Protestants, scientists, Enlightenment rationalists, European socialists, liberal humanitarians, American democrats, free thinkers, or what possesses you. The variety represents the rich diversity of intellectual, ethnic, political, and other activities.

The situation is not static of course. Some games have far fewer players and fans, and the popularity is shrinking; Some are gaining popularity rapidly and increasingly taking over parts of the territory available. Thus, the traditional sport of Aboriginal lacrosse is but a small remnant of what it was before contact. However, the Democratic capitalist game of baseball is growing exponentially, as is the materialistic science game of archery. They might combine their efforts to create a new game or merge their leagues.

When Nietzsche looks at Europe historically, what he sees is that different games have been going on like this for centuries. He further sees that many participants in anyone game has been aggressively convinced that their game is the ‘true’ game, which it corresponds with the essence of games or is a close match to the wider game they imagine going on in the natural world, in the wilderness beyond the playing fields. So they have spent much time producing their rule books and coaches' manuals and making claims about how the principles of their game copy or reveal or approximate the laws of nature. This has promoted and still promotes a good deal of bad feeling and fierce arguments. Therefore, in addition anyone game it, within the group pursuing it there has always been all sorts of sub-games debating the nature of the activity, refining the rules, arguing over the correct version of the rule book or about how to educate the referees and coaches, and so on.

Nietzsche's first goal is to attack this dogmatic claim about the truth of the rules of any particular game. He does this, in part, by appealing to the tradition of historical scholarship that shows that these games are not eternally true, but have a history. Rugby began when a soccer player broke the rules and picked up the ball and ran with it. American football developed out of rugby and has changed and is still changing. Basketball had a precise origin that can be historically found.

Rule books are written in languages that have a history by people with a deep psychological point to prove: The games are an unconscious expression of the particular desires of inventive game’s people at a very particular historical moment; these rule writers are called Plato, Augustine, Socrates, Kant, Schopenhauer, Descartes, Galileo, and so on. For various reasons they believe, or claim to believe, that the rules they come up with reveals something about the world beyond the playing field and are therefore ‘true’ in a way that other rule books are not; they have, as it was, privileged access to reality and thus record, to use a favourite metaphor of Nietzsche's, the text of the wilderness.

In attacking such claims, Nietzsche points out, the wilderness bears no relationship at all to any human invention like a rule book; He points out that nature is ‘wasteful beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain simultaneously: Imagine indifference it as a power -how could you live according to this indifference. Living-is that not precisely wanting to be other than this nature.’ Because there is no connection with what nature truly is, such rule books are mere ‘foreground’ pictures, fictions dreamed up, reinforced, altered, and discarded for contingent historical reasons. Moreover, the rule manuals often bear a suspicious resemblance to the rules of grammar of a culture, thus, for example, the notion of an ego as a thinking subject, Nietzsche points out, is closely tied to the rules of European languages that insist on a subject and verb construction as an essential part of any statement.

So how do we know what we have is the truth? Why do we want the truth, anyway? People seem to need to believe that their games are true, but why? Might they not be better if they accepted that their games were false, were fictions, deal with the reality of nature beyond the recreational complex? If they understood the fact that everything they believe in has a history and that, as he says in the Genealogy of Morals, ‘only that which has no history can be defined,’ they would understand that all this proud history of searching for the truth is something quite different from what philosophers who have written rule books proclaim.

Furthermore these historical changes and developments occur accidentally, for contingent reasons, and have nothing to do with the games, or anyone game, shaping it according to any ultimate game or any given rule book of games given by the wilderness, which is indifferent to what is going on. There is no basis for the belief that, if we look at the history of the development of these games, we discover some progressive evolution of games toward some higher type. We may be able, like Darwin, to trace historical genealogies, to construct a narrative, but that narrative does not reveal any clear direction or any final goal or any progressive development. The genealogy of games suggests that history be a record of contingent change. The assertion that there is such a thing as progress is simply another game, another rule added by inventive minds (who need to believe in progress); it bears no relationship to nature beyond the sports complex.

While one is playing on a team, one follows the rules and thus has a sense of what form right and wrong or good and evil conduct in the game. All those carrying out the same endeavour share this awareness. To pick up the ball in soccer is evil (unless you are the goalie), and to punt the ball while running in American football is permissible but stupid; in Australian football both actions are essential and right. In other words, different cultural communities have different standards of right and wrong conduct. The artificial inventions have determined these called rule books, one for each game. These rule books have developed the rules historically; Thus, they have no permanent status and no claim to privileged access.

Now, at this point you might be thinking about the other occasion in which In introduced a game analogy, namely, in the discussions of Aristotle's Ethics. For Aristotle also acknowledges that different political systems have different rules of conduct. Still, Aristotle believes that an examination of different political communities will enable one to derive certain principles common to them all, bottom-up generalizations that will then provide the basis for reliable rational judgment on which game is being played better, on what was good play in any particular game, on whether or not a particular game is being conducted well or not.

In other words, Aristotle maintains that there is a way of discovering and appealing to some authority outside any particular game to adjudicate moral and knowledge claims that arise in particular games or in conflicts between different games. Plato, of course, also believed in the existence of such a standard, but proposed a different route to discovering it.

Now Nietzsche emphatically denies this possibility. Anyone who tries to do what Aristotle recommends is simply inventing another game (we can call it Super-sport) and is not discovering anything true about the real nature of games because they do not organize reality (that has the wilderness surrounding us) as a game. In fact, he argues, that we have created this recreational complex and all the activities that go on in it to protect themselves from nature (which is indifferent to what we do with our lives), not to copy some recreational rule book that wilderness reveals. Human culture exists as an affirmation of our opposition or to contrast with nature, not as an extension of rules that include both human culture and nature. That is why falsehoods about nature might be a lot more useful than truths, if they enable us to live more fully human lives.

If we think of the wilderness as a text about reality, as the truth about nature, then, Nietzsche claims, we have no access at all to that text. What we do have accessed to conflicting interpretations, none of them based on privileged access to a ‘true’ text. Thus, the soccer players may think them and their game is superior to rugby and the rugby players, because soccer more closely represents the surrounding wilderness, but such statements about better and worse are irrelevant. There is nothing a rule bound outside the games themselves. Therefore, all dogmatic claims about the truth of all games or any particular game are false.

Now, how did this situation come about? Well, there was a time when all Europeans played almost the same game and had done so for many years. Having little-to-no historical knowledge and sharing the same head coach in the Vatican and the same rule book, they believed that the game was the only one possible and had been around for ever. So they naturally believed that their game was true. They shored up that belief with appeals to scripture or to eternal forms, or universal principles or to rationality or science or whatever. There were many quarrels about the nature of ultimate truth, that is, about just how one should tinker with the rule book, about what provided access to God's rules, but there was agreement that such excess must exist.

Take, for example, the offside rule in soccer. Without that the game could not continue in its traditional way. Therefore, soccer players see the offside rule as an essential part of their reality, and since soccer is the only game in town and we have no idea of its history (which might, for example, tell us about the invention of the off-side rule), then the offside rule is easy to interpret as a universal, a requirement for social activity, and we will find and endorse scriptural texts that reinforce that belief. Our scientists will devote their time to linking the offside rule with the mysterious rumblings that come from the forest. From this, one might be led to conclude that the offside rule is a Law of Nature, something that extends far beyond the realms of our particular game into all possible games and, beyond those, into the realm of the wilderness it.

Of course, there were powerful social and political forces (the coach and trainers and owners of the team) who made sure that people had lots of reasons for believing in the unchanging verity of present arrangements. So it is not surprising that we find plenty of learned books, training manuals, and locker room exhortations urging everyone to remember the offside rule and to castigate as ‘bad’ those who routinely forget that part of the game. We will also worship those who died in defence of the offside rule. Naturally any new game that did not recognize the offside rule would be a bad game, an immoral way to conduct one. So if some group tried to start a game with a different offside rule, that group would be attacked because they had violated a rule of nature and were thus immoral.

However, for contingent historical reasons, Nietzsche argues, that situation of one game in town did not last. The recreational unity of the area divides the developments in historical scholarships into past demonstrations, in that all too clearly there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that all the various attempts to show that one specific game was exempted over any of all other true games, as they are false, dogmatic, trivial, deceiving, and so on.

For science has revealed that the notion of a necessary connection between the rules of any game and the wider purposes of the wilderness is simply an ungrounded assertion. There is no way in which we can make the connections between the historically derived fictions in the rule book and the mysterious and ultimately unknowable directions of irrational nature. To conform of science, we have to believe in causes and effects, but there is no way we can prove that this is a true belief and there is a danger for us if we simply ignore that fact. Therefore, we cannot prove a link between the game and anything outside it. History has shown us, just as Darwin's natural history has proved, that all apparently eternal issues have a story, a line of development, a genealogy. Thus, notions, like species, have no reality-they are temporary fiction imposed for the sake of defending a particular arrangement.

So, God is dead. There is no eternal truth anymore, no rule book in the sky, no ultimate referee or international Olympic committee chair. Nietzsche did not kill God; History and the new science did. Nietzsche is only the most passionate and irritating messenger, announcing over the PA system to anyone who will listen that an appeal to a system can defend someone like Kant or Descartes or Newton who thinks that what he or she is doing grounded in the truth of nature has simply been mistaken.

This insight is obvious to Nietzsche, and he is troubled that no one is worried about it or even to have noticed it. So he's moved to call the matter to our attention as stridently as possible, because he thinks that this realization requires a fundamental shift in how we live our lives.

For Nietzsche Europe is in crisis. It has a growing power to make life comfortable and an enormous energy. However, people seem to want to channel that energy into arguing about what amounts to competing fictions and to force everyone to follow particular fictions.

Why is this insight so worrying? Well, one point is that dogmatists get aggressive. Soccer players and rugby players who forget what Nietzsche is pointing out can start killing each other over questions that admit of no answer, namely, question about which group has the true game, which ordering has a privileged accountability to the truth. Nietzsche senses that dogmatism is going to lead to warfare, and he predicts that the twentieth century will see an unparalleled extension of warfare in the name of competing dogmatic truths. Part of his project is to wake up the people who are intelligent enough to respond to what he is talking about so that they can recognize the stupidity of killing each other for an illusion that they misunderstand for some ‘truth.’

Besides that, Nietzsche, like Mill (although, in a very different way), is seriously concerned about the possibilities for human excellence in a culture where the herd mentality is taking over, where Europe is developing into competing herds -a situation that is either sweeping up the best and the brightest or stifling them entirely. Nietzsche, like Mill and the ancient pre-Socratic Greeks to whom he constantly refers, is an elitist. He wants the potential for individual human excellence to be liberated from the harnesses of conformity and group competition and conventional morality. Otherwise, human beings are going to become destructive, lazy, conforming herd animals, using technology to divert them from the greatest joys in life, which come only from individual striving and creativity, activities that require one to release one's instincts without keeping them eternally subjugated to controlling historical consciousness or a conventional morality of good and evil.

What makes this particularly a problem for Nietzsche is that he sees that a certain form of game is gaining popularity: Democratic volleyball. In this game, the rule book insists that all players be treated equally, that there be no natural authority given to the best players or to those who understand the nature of quality play. Therefore the mass of inferior players is taking over, the quality of the play is deteriorating, and there are fewer and fewer good volleyball players. This process is being encouraged both by the traditional ethic of ‘help your neighbour,’ now often in a socialist uniform and by modern science. As the mass of more many inferior players takes over the sport, the mindless violence of their desires to attack other players and take over their games increases, as does their hostility to those who are uniquely excellent (who may need a mask to prevent themselves being recognized).

The hopes for any change in this development are not good. In fact, things might be getting worse. For when Nietzsche looks at all these games going on he notices certain groups of people, and the prospect is not totally reassuring.

First there remain the overwhelming majority of people: the players and the spectators, those caught up in their particular sport. These people are, for the most part, continuing as before without reflecting or caring about what they do. They may be vaguely troubled about rumours they hear that their game is not the best, they may be bored with the endless repetition in the schedule, and they have essentially reconciled them that they are not the only game going on, but they had rather not thought about it. Or else, stupidly confident that what they are doing is what really matters about human life, is true, they preoccupy themselves with tinkering with the rules, using the new technology to get better balls, more comfortable seats, louder whistles, more brightly painted side lines, more trendy uniforms, tastier Gatorade-all in the name of progress.

Increasing numbers of people are moving into the stands or participating through the newspaper or the television sets. Most people are thus, in increasing numbers, losing touch with themselves and their potential as instinctual human beings. They are the herd, the last men, preoccupied with the trivial, unreflectingly conformist because they think, to the extent they think at all, that what they do will bring them something called ‘happiness.’ Yet they are not happy: They are in a permanent state of narcotized anxiety, seeking new ways to entertain themselves with the steady stream of marketed distractions that the forces of the market produce: Technological toys, popular entertainment, college education, Wagner's operas, academic jargon.

This group, of course, includes all the experts in the game, the cheerleaders whose job it is to keep us focussed on the seriousness of the activity, the sports commentators and pundits, whose life is bound up with interpreting, reporting, and classifying players and contests. These sportscasters are, in effect, the academics and government experts, the John Maddens and Larry Kings and Mike Wallaces of society, those demigods of the herd, whose authority derives from the false notion that what they are dealing with is something other than a social-fiction.

There is a second group of people, who have accepted the ultimate meaninglessness of the game in which they were. They have moved to the sidelines, not as spectators or fans, but as critics, as cynics or nihilists, dismissing out of hand all the pretensions of the players and fans, but not affirming anything themselves. These are the souls who, having nothing to will (because they have seen through the fiction of the game and have therefore no motive to play any more), prefer to will nothing in a state of paralysed skepticism. Nietzsche has a certain admiration for these people, but maintains that a life like this, the nihilist on the sidelines, is not a human life.

For, Nietzsche insists, to live as a human being, is to play a game. Only in playing a game can one affirm one's identity, can one create values, can one truly exist. Games are the expression of our instinctual human energies, our living drives, what Nietzsche calls our ‘will to power.’ So the nihilistic stance, though understandable and, in a sense, courageous, is sterile. For we are born to play, and if we do not, then we are not fulfilling a worthy human function. Also, we have to recognize that all games are equally fictions, invented human constructions without any connections to the reality of things.

So we arrive at the position of the need to affirm a belief (invent a rule book) which we know to have been invented, to be divorced from the truth of things. To play the best game is to live by rules that we invent for ourselves as an assertion of our instinctual drives and to accept that the rules are fictions: they matter, we accept them as binding, we judge ourselves and others by them, and yet we know they are artificial. Just as in real life a normal soccer player derives a sense of meaning during the game, affirms his or her value in the game, without ever once believing that the rules of soccer have organized the universe or that those rules have any universal validity, so we must commit ourselves to epistemological and moral rules that enable us to live our lives as players, while simultaneously recognizing that these rules have no universal validity.

To base one's life on the creative tensions of the artist engaged with creating a game that meets most eloquently and uncompromisingly the demand of one's own irrational nature-one's wish-is to be most fully free, most fully human.

This call to live the -created life, affirming one in a game of one's own devising, necessarily condemns the highest spirits to loneliness, doubt, insecurity, emotional suffering, because most people will mock the new game or be actively hostile to it or refuse to notice it, and so on; Alternatively, they will accept the challenge but misinterpret what it means and settle for some marketed easy game, like floating down the Mississippi smoking a pipe. Nevertheless, a -generated game also brings with-it the most intense joy, the most playful and creative affirmation of what is most important in our human nature.

Noting here that one’s freedom to create is important one's own game is limited. In that sense, Nietzsche is no existentialist maintaining that we have a duty and an unlimited freedom to be whatever we want to be. For the resources at our disposable parts of the field still available and the recreational material lying around in the club house-are determined by the present state of our culture. Furthermore, the rules I devise and the language for which I frame them in will ordinarily owes a good deal to the present state of the rules of other games and the state of the language in which those are expressed. Although in changing the rules for my game, my reference point, or the rules, I have existentially placed in change. It is, nonetheless, a given application that has been allotted to me by way of my moment in history, in that of creating something that will transcend the past. These, of existing diversions are ramifications that expose in the materials from which I have fashioned in a new, and, perhaps, more effectively of a dividing source of entertainment.

Thus, the new philosopher will transcend the limitations of the existing games and will extend the catalogue of games with the invention of new ones, but that new creative spirit faces certain historical limitations. If this is relativistic, it is not totally so.

The value of this endeavour is not to be measured by what other people think of the newly created game; Nor does its value lie in fame, material rewards, or service to the group. Its value comes from the way it enables the individual to manifest certain human qualities, especially the will to power. Nonetheless, it seems that whether or not the game attracts other people and becomes a permanent fixture on the sporting calendar, something later citizens can derive enjoyment from or even remember, that is irrelevant. For only the accidents of history determination of whether the game invented is for my-own attractions in other people, that is, becomes a source of value for them.

Nietzsche claims that the time is right for such a radically individualistic endeavour to create new games, new metaphors for my life. For, wrongheaded as many traditional games may have been, like Plato's metaphysical soccer or Kant's version of eight balls, or Marx's materialist chess tournament, or Christianity's stoical snakes and ladders, they have splendidly trained us for the much more difficult work of creating values in a spirit of radical uncertainty. The exertions have trained our imaginations and intelligence in useful ways. So, although those dogmatists were unsound, an immersion in their systems has done much to refine those capacities we most need to rise above the nihilists and the herd.

Now, In have put this analogy on the table to help clarify some central points about Nietzsche. However, the metaphor is not so arbitrary as it may appear, because this very notion of systems of meanings as invented games is a central metaphor of the twentieth century thought and those who insist upon it as often as not point to Nietzsche as their authority.

So, for example, when certain postmodernists insist that the major reason for engaging in artistic creativity or literary criticism or any form of cultural life be to awaken the spirit of creative play that is far more central than any traditional sense of meaning or rationality or even coherence, we can see the spirit of Nietzsche at work.

Earlier in this century, as we will see in the discussions of early modern art, a central concern was the possibility of recovering some sense of meaning or of recreating or discovering a sense of ‘truth’ of the sort we had in earlier centuries, or, as we will see in the poetry of Eliot, lamenting the collapse of traditional systems of value. Marxists were determined to assist history in producing the true meaning toward which we were inexorably heading. To the extent that we can characterize post-modernism simply at all, we might say that it marks a turning away from such responses to the modern condition and an embrace, for better or worse, of Nietzsche, joyful -affirmation in a spirit of the irrationality of the world and the fictive qualities of all that we create to deal with life.

After this rapid and, in hope, useful construction and description of an analogy, as only one final point that remains: So how have we responded and are we still responding to all of this? What of an impact has this powerful challenge to our most confident traditions had? Well, there is not time here to trace the complex influence of Nietzsche's thought in a wide range of areas. That influence has been immense and continues still. However, In would like to sketch a few points about what may be happening right now.

Here I must stress that in an offering a personal review, which comprehensively does not affect this question. Still, any general reading in modern studies of culture suggests that responses to Nietzsche are important and diverse. His stock has been very bullish for the past two decades, at least.

One group we can quickly identify is those who have embraced Nietzsche's critique, who appeal to his writing to endorse their view that the search to ground our knowledge and moral claims in Truth are futile, and that we must therefore recognize the imperative Nietzsche laid before us to -create our own lives, to come up with new -descriptions affirming the irrational basis of our individual humanity. This position has been loosely termed Antifoundationalism. Two of its most prominent and popular spokespersons in recent years have been Richard Rorty and Camille Paglia. Within Humanities departments the Deconstructionists (with Derrida as their guru) head the Nietzschean charge.

Antifoundationalists supportively link Nietzsche closely with Kuhn and with Dewey (whose essay on Darwin we read) and sometimes with Wittgenstein and take central aim at anyone who would claim that some form of enquiry, like science, rational ethics, Marxism, or traditional religion has any form of privileged access to reality or the truth. The political stance of the Antifoundationalists tends to be radically romantic or pragmatic. Since we cannot ground our faith in any public morality or political creed, politics becomes something far less important than personal development or else we have to conduct our political life simply on a pragmatic basis, following the rules we can agree on, without according those rules any universal status or grounding in eternal principles. If mechanistic science is something we find, for accidental reasons of history, something useful, then we will believe it for now. Thus, Galileo's system became adopted, not because it was true or closer to the truth that what it replaced, but simply because the vocabulary he introduced inside our descriptions was something we found agreeable and practically helpful. When it ceases to fulfill our pragmatic requirements, we will gradually change to another vocabulary, another metaphor, another version of a game. History shows that such a change will occur, but how and when it will take place or what the new vocabulary might be-these questions will be determined by the accidents of history.

Similarly, human rights are important, not because there is any rational non-circular proof that we ought to act according to these principles, but simply because we have agreed, for accidental historical reasons, that these principles are useful. Such pragmatic agreements are all we have for public life, because, as Nietzsche insists, we cannot justify any moral claims by appeals to the truth. So we can agree about a schedule for the various games and distributing the budget between them and we can, as a matter of convenience, set certain rules for our discussions, but only as a practical requirement of our historical situation, least of mention, not by any divine or rationality that of any system contributes of its distributive cause.

A second response is to reject the Antifoundationalist and Nietzschean claim that no language has privileged contact to the reality of things, to assert, that is, that Nietzsche is wrong in his critique of the Enlightenment. Plato's project is not dead, as Nietzsche claimed, but alive and well, especially in the scientific enterprise. We are discovering ever more about the nature of reality. There may still be a long way to go, and nature might be turning out to be much more complex than the early theories suggested, but we are making progress. By improving the rule book we will modify our games so that they more closely approximate the truth of the wilderness.

To many scientists, for example, the Antifoundationalist position is either irrelevant or just plain wrong, an indication that social scientists and humanity’s types do not understand the nature of science or are suffering a bad attack of sour grapes because of the prestige the scientific disciplines enjoy in the academy. The failure of the social scientists (after generations of trying) to come up with anything approaching a reliable law (like, say, Newton's laws of motion) has shown the pseudoscientific basis of the disciplines, and unmasks their turn to Nietzschean Antifoundationalism as a feeble attempt to justify their presence in the modern research university.

Similarly, Marxists would reject Antifoundationalism as a remnant of aristocratic bourgeois capitalism, an ideology designed to take intellectuals' minds off the realities of history, the truth of things. There is a truth grounded in a materialist view of history, renouncing that simply of diverting intellectuals away from social injustice. No wonder the most ardent Nietzscheans in the university have no trouble getting support from the big corporate interests to and their bureaucratic subordinates: The Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Within the universities and many humanities and legal journals, some liveliest debates go on between the Antifoundationalists allied and the Deconstructionists under the banner of Nietzsche and the historical materialists and many feminists under the banner of Marx.

Meanwhile, there has been a revival of interest in Aristotle. The neo-Aristotelians agree with Nietzsche's critique of the Enlightenment rational project-that we are never going to be able to derive a sense of human purpose from scientific reason-but assert that sources of value and knowledge are not simply a contingent but arise from communities and that what we need to sort out our moral confusion is a reassertion of Aristotle's emphasis on human beings, not as radically individual with an identity before their political and social environment, but moderate political animals, whose purpose and value are deeply and essentially rooted in their community. A leading representative for this position is Alisdair McIntyre.

Opposing such a communitarian emphasis, a good deal of the modern Liberal tradition points out that such a revival of traditions simply will not work. The break down of the traditional communities and the widespread perception of the endemic injustice of inherited ways is something that cannot be reversed (appeals to Hobbes here are common). So we need to place our faith in the rational liberal Enlightenment tradition, and look for universal rational principles, human rights, rules of international morality, justice based on an analysis of the social contract, and so on. An important recent example such a view is Rawls' famous book Social Justice.

Finally, there are those who again agree with Nietzsche's analysis of the Enlightenment and thus reject the optimistic hopes of rational progress, but who deny Nietzsche's proffered solution. To see life as irrational chaos that we must embrace and such joyous affirmation as the value-generating activity in our human lives, while at the same time recognizing its ultimate meaninglessness to the individual, too many people seem like a prescription for insanity. What we, as human beings, must have to live a fulfilled human life is an image of eternal meaning. This we can derive only from religion, which provides for us, as it always has, a transcendent sense of order, something that answers to our essential human nature far more deeply than either the Enlightenment faith in scientific rationality or Nietzsche's call to a life of constantly metaphorical -definition.

To read the modern debates over literary interpretation, legal theory, human rights issues, education curriculums, feminist issues, ethnic rights, communitarian politics, or a host of other similar issues is to come repeatedly across the clash of these different positions (and others). To use the analogy In started with, activities on the playing fields are going on more energetically than ever. Right in the middle of most of these debates and generously scattered throughout the footnotes and bibliographies, Nietzsche's writings are alive and well. To that extent, his ideas are still something to be reckoned with. He may have started by shouting over the intercom system in a way no to which one bothered to attend; now on many playing fields, the participants and fans are considering and reacting to his analysis of their activities. So Nietzsche today is, probably more than ever before in this century, right in the centre of some vital debates over cultural questions.

You may recall how, in Book Ten of the Republic, Plato talks about the ‘ancient war between poetry and philosophy.’ What this seems to mean from the argument is an ongoing antagonism between different uses of language, between language that seeks above all, denotative clarity the language of exact definitions and precise logical relationships and language whose major quality is its ambiguous emotional richness, between, that is, the language of geometry and the language of poetry (or, simply put, between Euclid and Homer)

Another way of characterizing this dichotomy is to describe it as the intensive force between a language appropriates and discovering the truth and one appropriate to creating it, between, that is, a language that sets it up as an exact description of a given order (or as exactly presently available) and a language that sets it up as an ambiguous poetic vision of or an analogy to a natural or cosmic order.

Plato, in much of what we studied, seems clearly committed to a language of the former sort. Central to his course of studies that will produce guardian rulers is mathematics, which is based upon the most exact denotative language we know. Therefore, the famous inscription over the door of the Academy: ‘Let no one enter here who has not studied geometry.’ Underlying Plato's remarkable suspicion of a great deal of poetry, and particularly of Homer, is this attitude to language: Poetic language is suspect because, being based on metaphors (figurative comparisons or word pictures), it is a third remove from the truth. In addition, it speaks too strongly to the emotions and thus may unbalance the often tense equilibrium needed to keep the soul in a healthy state.

One needs to remember, however, that Plato's attitude to language is very ambiguous, because, in spite of his obvious endorsement of the language of philosophy and mathematics, in his own style he is often a poet, a creator of metaphor. In other words, there is a conflict between his strictures on metaphor and his adoption of so many metaphors (the central one of some dramatic dialogues is only the most obvious). Many famous and influential passages from the Republic, for example, are not arguments but poetic images or fictional narratives: The Allegory of the Cave, the image of the Sun, the Myth of Er.

Plato, in fact, has always struck me as someone who was deeply suspicious about poetry and metaphor because he responded to it so strongly. Underlying his sometimes harsh treatment of Homer may be the imagination of someone who is all too responsive to it (conversely, and Aristotle’s more lenient view of poetry may stem from the fact that he did not really feel its effects so strongly). If we were inclined to adopt Nietzsche's interpretation of philosophy, we might be tempted to see in Plato's treatment of Homer and his stress on the dangers of poetic language his own ‘confession’ of weakness. His work is, in part, an attempt to fight his own strong inclinations to prefer metaphoric language.

If we accept this characterization of the ‘ancient war’ between two different uses of language, then we might want to ask ourselves why they cannot be reconciled. Why must there be a war? This has, in part, to do with the sorts of questions one wants to ask about the nature of things and about the sorts of answers that the enquiring mind requires. For traditionally there have been some important differences between the language of mathematics or geometry or a vocabulary that seeks to approximate the denotative clarity of these disciplines and the language of poetry. The central difference In would like to focus on is the matter of ambiguity.

The terminological convictions of mathematics and especially of Euclidean geometry, are characterized, above all, by denotative clarity and of precise definitions, clear axioms, firm logical links between statements all of which are designed to produce a rationally coherent structure that will compel agreement among those who take the time to work their way through the system. The intellectual and aesthetic pleasures of Euclid, In would maintain, arise, in large part, from this. People who want this sort of clarity in their understanding of the world will naturally be drawn to define as acceptable questions and answers which frame themselves in a language that seeks this sort of clarity.

Poetical language, by contrast, is inherently ironic, ambiguous, elusive. When I move from clear definition to metaphor, that is, to a comparison, or to a narrative that requires interpretation (like the Book of Exodus, for example, or the Iliad) then my statement requires interpretation, an understanding that an appeal to exact definitions and clear rules of logic cannot quickly satisfy. To agree about metaphor requires explanation and persuasion of a sort different from what is required to get people to accept the truths of Euclidean geometry.

For example, if I have trouble with the statement ‘The interior angles of a triangle add up to two right angles,’ In can find exact definitions of all the terms, In can review the step-by-step logical process that leads from -evident first principles to this statement, and In then understand exactly what this means. In am rationally compelled to agree, provided the initial assumptions and the logical adequacy of the process do not disturb me. In am able to explain the claim to someone else, so that he or she arrives at the same understanding of the original statement about the sum of the interior angles (the compelling logic of this form of language is, of course, the point of the central section of Plato's Memo, Socrates's education of Memo's slave in the Pythagorean Theorem)

Nonetheless, a claim like ‘My love is like a red, red rose’ is of a different order. In can check the dictionary definitions of all the words, but that by it will not be enough. How do In deal with the comparison? In can go out and check whether my love has thorns on her legs or her hair falls off after a few days standing in water, but that is not going to offer much help, because obviously In am not meant to interpret this statement literally: a comparison, a metaphor is involved. An understanding of the statement requires that In interpret the comparison: What is the range of association summoned up by the metaphor that compares my beloved or my feelings for my beloved to a common flower?

On this point, if we sit discussing the matter, we are likely to disagree or at least fail to reach the same common rational understanding that we derived from our study of the first statement concerning the interior angles of the triangle. If we want to agree on the metaphor, then we are going to have to persuade each other, and even then our separate understandings may not be congruent.

We have had direct experience of this in Liberal Studies. When we discussed Euclid, we had nothing to argue about. The discussions focussed on whether or not everyone understood the logical steps involved, the definitions and axioms, and possible alternative logical methods. Nevertheless, no one offered seriously as an interpretative opinion that the interior angles of a triangle might add up to three right angles or one and a half right angle. If someone had claimed that, then we would have maintained that he or she had failed in some fundamental way to follow the steps in the proofs. By contrast, when we discussed, say, King Lear or the Tempest or Jane Eyre or Red and Black, we spent most of our time considering alternative interpretations of particular episodes, and we did not reach any precisely defined shared conclusion. Nor could be that we, if we spent the entire if times debating the issue?

It looks of no doubt a vast oversimplification to present the issue of language solely about these two diametrically opposed ways, but for the sake of discussion it is a useful starting point. We might go on to observe that, again to make a vast oversimplification, people tend to prefer one use of language over another: Some like their verbal understandings of things clear, precise, logically sound, so that there is the possibility of a universally recognized meaning with minimum ambiguity, or as close as we can get to such a goal. Others prefer the ambiguity and emotional richness of metaphor, although (or because) the price of such a language is an inherent irony, a multiplicity of meanings, the suggestion of no simple, shared, precise, final meaning.

The question of the language appropriate to a proper understanding of things is particularly important for a comprehension of the history of Christianity, too, because, as we all know, Christianity takes as its central text a book full of poetry, narrative, imagery. Faith in what this book ‘means’ or what it ‘reveals’ about the nature of the divinity is a central part of being a Christian. Many, urgent and contumacious disputes in the history of Christianity have arisen out of the metaphorical nature of this holy text: Since metaphors and metaphorical narratives are inherently ambiguous, they need interpretation, whose interpretations are decisive in any disagreement becomes a vital concern.

Controlling the text and maintaining the authority to determine interpretations of the holy text were always a central imperative of the medieval Catholic Church, which recognized very clearly and correctly that to give people (even parish priests) access to the Bible would result in interpretative anarchy. So, the Catholic Church's strict control of the book, its refusal to distribute it widely or to translate it into the common language of the people, and its insistence that the basis for popular sermons should be, not the Bible it, but the clear and unambiguous official interpretations condoned by the Vatican.

The Church's suspicion of the anarchy that would follow upon any general access to the Bible revealed it as correct once Luther's Reformation made the holy text generally available in translation. Suddenly, the enforced interpretative consensus dissolved, and scores of competing sects arose, each claiming a correct version of the truth derived through an interpretation of the metaphorical constructions in the Bible. An extreme (but not altogether uncommon) example was the war between the followers of Zwingli and the followers of Muntzer, two Protestant leaders, over whether the communion wafer was the body of Christ or symbolized the body of Christ and over the interpretation of baptism. Many thousands died in the quarrel over these interpretative questions.

Today such issues that involve killing others over the ontological status of a biscuit or bathwater may seem ridiculous, but the issue is not. An authority that derives from a poetical metaphorical text must rest, not on that text, but on a particular interpretation of it. Whoever is the spokesperson for the official interpretation has official power. Thus, from this point of view, one can interpret the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as quarrelsome interpretation run amok.

Surely, the conclusion of the religious wars brought with it a demand to clean up language, to be wary of metaphors and especially of writing that was highly metaphorical, and to place our verbal understandings of the world and ourselves on a more rationally clear basis in a language more appropriate to such a requirement.

It is no accident that the period following the religious wars (the mid-seventeenth century) marks the beginning of an interest in dictionaries (whose major goal is to promote accuracy of shared denoted meanings), a revival of interest in Euclidean geometry, developing distrust of political and philosophical arguments based upon scripture, a rising criticism of extravagant rhetorical styles (like those of Shakespeare or John Donne or ‘enthusiastic’ preachers), the beginning of a concerted attempt to understand moral and judicial questions mathematically, and a rising demand for a language as empty of ambiguous metaphor as possible.

We witness this in several writers, above all in Hobbes. As we discussed, Hobbes' major concern in Leviathan is to recommend practices that will minimize a return to the civil chaos of the religious wars and the English Civil War. Hobbes is centrally concerned about language. Over half of Leviathan is concerned with religion, above all with the question of interpretation of scripture. For Hobbes is deeply suspicious of literary interpretation and has a clear preference for the language of geometry, the argumentative style of Euclid-not necessarily because that language provides a true description of the nature of the world (although many people claimed and still claim that it does) but only that a little deductive clarity-based on clear definitions and fundamental principles of deductive logic-can win wide agreement, can, that is, promote social harmony essential to political peace and ‘commodious living.’

The reason for this preference in Hobbes seems clear enough. Metaphorical language breeds arguments over interpretations; Such arguments breed civil quarrels, civil quarrels lead to a break down in public order and foster a return to a state of nature. A different language, one based on the precision of geometry, can foster agreement, because we all can occupy the same understanding if definitions are exact and the correct logic.

One attraction of the new science (although there was considerable argument about this) was that it offered an understanding of the world delivered in the most unambiguous way, in the language of mathematics rather than of scripture. Newton's equations, for those who could follow the mathematics, did not promote the sorts of arguments that arose from, say, the text about Ezekiel making the sun stands still or Moses parting the waters of the Red Sea or God's creating the world in a week. What disagreement or ambiguity’s Newton's explanation contained could be resolved, and was resolved, by a further application of the method he displayed (in the ‘normal science,’ as Kuhn calls it, which took place in the generations after Newton).

Throughout the nineteenth century, the rising success of the new science was delivering on the promise of an exact description of the world. The application of this spirit of empirical observation and precise, unambiguous description to an understanding of history and morality, of the sort offered by Karl Marx, set up the hope of a triumph of the language of philosophy (as defined earlier) over the language of poetry (in spite of the objections of the Romantics).

It was an alluring vision, because it promised to lead, as Hannah Arendt points out, to the end of traditional political argument. Since we would all have a full and shared understanding of the way a just state really does work, we wouldn't need to argue about it any more than we argue about the Pythagorean Theorem. Anyone could govern, since governing, traditionally the most challenging task in human affairs, would be simply a matter of applying known and agreed upon rules, something a technician could do. As Lenin observed, governing would be for cooks, because the truths of political life would be expressed in a language coherent to anyone, a language that did not require interpretation of any sort.

There was an enormously arrogant confidence or, if we think about classical tragedy, of hubris about this, especially between some scientists and social scientists, who firmly believed that there are various contentious moral, political, and scientific questions would soon be settled for all time. The future of physics, said.

A. Mitchelton in 1894, in so that it persists concisely of little more than ‘adding a few decimal places to results already known.’

Nietzsche, as we have already seen, sets his sights firmly against such a confidence that language, any language, can provide an accurate description of the Truth. That was, in the nature of things, impossible, because language is inherently metaphorical, it coincides to some invented fiction, with a history, a genealogy, a contingent character.

For Nietzsche, the belief that the sort of language developed by Euclid or the new science with its emphasis on precision and logical clarity-is somehow ‘true to nature’ is, like beliefs that any system is true, plainly incorrect. All language is essentially poetry, inherently metaphorical, inherently a fabrication. Those who, like so many scientists, make claims that their descriptions of the world are true or even more accurate than alternative languages are simply ignorant of the metaphorical nature of all language.

In other words, for Nietzsche there is no privileged access to a final definitive version of life, the world, or anything else, and thus no privileged language for achieving such knowledge. Truth is, in Nietzsche's pregnant phrase, ‘a mobile army of metaphors,’ a historical succession of fictions, which does not, as Kant and Marx claimed, reveal any emerging higher truth, like progress or the march to a final utopia or a growing insight into how reality really works. In Nietzsche's view of language there is no final text available to us; There is only interpretation, or, more accurately, an unending series of freshly created interpretations, fresh metaphors.

Thus, as Rorty has observed, Nietzsche is announcing the end of the ancient war between poetry and philosophy by indicating that all we have in language is metaphor. We were mistaken in believing that the language of Euclid was anything but of another than what appears as fiction. It is not. Therefore, it has no special preeminence as the language most appropriate to a description of reality.

Since there is no privileged language and since accepting as true any inherited system of metaphor is limiting one to a herd existence, our central purpose is the construction of new metaphors, the assertion of new values in a language we have made ourselves. Thus, central to Nietzsche's vision of how the best human beings must live their lives is the insistence that individuals must create for themselves a new language, fresh metaphors, original -descriptions. To escape the illusions of the past, to release the arrow in flight, these activities are linked to the creative ability to construct in one's life and language new metaphors.

Therefore, under the influence of this idea, a major part of the cultural imperative of the Twentieth Century artist has been a craze for originality, something that has produced a bewildering succession of styles, schools, experiments. When we explore Hughes', one of the first impressions is the almost overwhelming range of different subject matters, different styles, the pressure, even in the context of a single artist's life, constantly to invent new perspectives, new-descriptions, new ways of metaphorically presenting one's imaginative assertions, in Nietzsche's phrase, one's will to power.

The same is true in many aspects of art: in prose style, in poetry, in architecture, in music, and so on. The influence of Nietzsche on this point (which is, as it has been argued, as an extension of one stream of Romanticism) has been pervasive. This phenomenon has had some curious results.

First, the constant emphasis on individualist-assertion through new metaphors has made much art increasingly esoteric, experimental, and inaccessible to the public, for the Nietzschean imperative leaves no room for the artist's having to answer to the community values, styles, traditions, language, and so on. Thus, the strong tendency of much modern art, fiction, and music to have virtually no public following, to be met with large-scale incomprehension or derision.

This, in turn, has led to a widening split between many in the artistic community and the public. Whereas, in a great deal of traditional art, the chief aim was to hold up for public contemplation what the artist had to reveal about the nature of his vision (e.g., public statues, church paintings, public musical recitals, drama festivals), in the twentieth century the emphasis on avant garde originality has increasingly meant that much art is produced for a small coterie who thinks of them as advanced in the Nietzschean sense-emancipated from the herd because only the privileged can understand and produce such ‘cutting-edge ‘ metaphors. The strong connections between much ‘radical’ modern art and intellectual elitism characteristic of an extreme right wing anti-democratic ideologies owe much to Nietzsche's views, since the aristocratic elitism of Nietzsche's aesthetic links it easily enough to political systems seeking some defence of ‘aristocratic’ hierarchies (even if the understanding of Nietzsche is often skimpy at best).

Therefore, as Hughes points out, there has been a drastic decline in much high quality public art. To be popular, in fact, becomes a sign that one is not sufficiently original, a sign that one's language is still too much derived from the patois of the last people. There is still much public art, of course, especially in state architecture and market-driven television, but, as Hughes points out, the achievements in these fields are generally not impressive and may not be improving. Some, the art that commands the attention of many artists these days is increasingly private.

In the universities, Nietzsche has, rightly or wrongly, becomes the patron saint of those who believe that novelty is more important than coherence or commitment to anything outside a rhetorical display of the writer's own originality. To object that this ethos produces much irrational individualistic spouting is, its defenders point out, simply to miss the point. The creative joy of affirmation through new language is the only game in town, and traditional calls for scientific scholarship or social criticism on Marx's model are simply reassertions of dogmatism. There are some English departments now, for example, where in the job descriptions, the writing’s one has to produce for tenure can include confessional autobiography; in effect, to produce an aphoristic description, whether that is at all interesting or not, qualifies one as a serious academic scholar and teacher in some places.

Given that most of the society, including those who are maintaining the traditional scientific and economic endeavour launched in the Enlightenment, pays this sort of talk very little attention, finding most of it hard to grasp, there is thus a widening gap between much of what goes on in our society and many of its leading artists and intellectuals. The legacy of Nietzsche may cheer them up, and, in variously watered down versions, especially on this side of the Atlantic, he clearly gives them license to be strident while declaring their own superiority, but just what he offers by way of helping to cure this dichotomy (if it needs to be cured) is a question worth exploring.

The philosophical problem of reflective thought, the conditions of Mind reflecting it, of consciousness observing its own actions and processes. The dilemma of Goedel's theorem regarding referential systems, can be overcome by applying a transcendent thinking method. This higher thought provides complete knowledge of the system, but only if the individual mind is surpassed and merged with the universal mind that allows reflective thought to be perfectly legitimate. To reach true objectivity of mind means leaving the subjective mind behind, and with it, the object-subject dualism so inveterate in our ordinary thought.

How is it possible that consciousness can observe consciousness It? How is it possible to think reflectively at all? Can we take a stance outside consciousness to observe it? Can we think about thinking per se? Can we observe thought processes, which are generally performed unconsciously? Is it possible to examine consciousness or mind with consciousness or mind of it?

These questions have often influenced exaggerated skepticism or to a negative criticism concerning the limitation of our knowledge about our mind. Some even say, which because of the fact that we have no other means of investigating consciousness than consciousness it, this can never lead to a complete understanding of consciousness. Advocates of this view come mostly from the scientific field. Science tries to objectivise its subject matters, so that they can take a stance outside the object and look at it. The means of investigation within experimental sciences are always to mean independence of the object, although this situation must be restrained to the field of classical physics. In Quantum physics, however, experiments cannot be measured without the observer as a conscious living being. As a crucial point, it can be stated generally, that we can have completed knowledge of an object only when we are independent and outside it at the moment of observation.

The problem of completeness of knowledge is encountered when you leave the rigid field of natural sciences. Any attempts to apply the completeness theorem to social sciences, such as psychology and sociology are doomed inevitably, because in those sciences, the object of investigation is identical with the investigator. A psychologist, for example, cannot investigate the psychical processes of another individual in the way a natural scientist investigates physical processes.

First of all, psychic events are not describable as to physical properties and therefore seem evasive. Second, we deal here with a much more complex structure than we ever meet in the physical world. This complexity entails necessary incompleteness. The structure we deal here is not only more complex but also is what we call consciousness or mind. Here we have the identity of the object and its investigator, which was absent in natural sciences. So, are we human beings ever able to know what consciousness and mind really are or are we left forever in the dark and allowed only partial knowledge?

The answer to this question depends on our current understanding of what consciousness or mind is. If we reduce mind to a set of physical properties or equal it with emergent properties of the brain (materialistic and epiphenomenalistic view), we are held to believe, that it will one day is possible to know everything about consciousness. Ever more, however, scientists leave the terrain of a mere materialistic or reductionistic view of the mind and come to the conclusion, that mind is more than the sum of the brain's physical properties or more than a complex structure that emerged from the brain during the evolution of the human being. There are a lot of arguments against the reductionism of mind.