The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Friedrich Nietzsche · a book of prose in aphorism and essay: a preface, nine parts in 296 numbered sections, and a closing poem · published at Leipzig by C. G. Naumann in August 1886, at the author’s expense · scored on Nietzsche’s German as in the critical edition of Colli and Montinari, read from knowledge; no text in hand, German quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s plain English beneath, and Walter Kaufmann’s translation read alongside for sense
Mode
Philosophy written as literature: aphorism, essay section and lyric poem joined in one argued plan
Mythos
Truth as a woman courted clumsily; the free spirit and the philosophers of the dangerous perhaps; the mask, the abyss that looks back, the herd, the hermit’s cave; Dionysus, the god who tempts
Phase
From the prejudices of philosophers through the free spirit and the religious nature, a central interlude of sayings, then morals, scholars, virtues, peoples and fatherlands, to the question of what is noble, and a poem
Presentation
A preface; nine titled parts of numbered sections, from a single line to several pages; a closing poem, “Aus hohen Bergen. Nachgesang”
Register
German prose of the dialectical period that turns on itself in a “perhaps”, the one-line saying whose second clause undoes the first, the italic and the parenthesis made to speak; at the close, song
Scale
The knowing mind, the drives, religion, morals and their history, science, the state, the peoples of Europe and the rank of souls, read as the expressions of kinds of life
Governing Proposition
A philosopher asks what in us wants the truth, and why we should not rather want untruth, and answers in a book that will not be a system: three parts of essay that take apart the philosopher, the free spirit’s freedom and the religious nature, an interlude of a hundred and twenty-three sayings, five more parts on morals, scholars, virtues, peoples and rank, and a poem from high mountains to a friend who comes at midday. The wager of the book is that every valuation is the symptom of a kind of life, that even the value of truth has to be questioned, and that a thought of this kind can only be written as a sequence of attempts, each ending in a question or a mask, under a plan that puts last the question all the others served: what is noble?
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book begins with a supposition, not a definition: “Vorausgesetzt, dass die Wahrheit ein Weib ist”
“Supposing that truth is a woman”. The dogmatists, the preface goes on, have courted her clumsily. The joke is the method. A book that asks what in us wants the truth cannot open by claiming to hold it, and this one opens on an image, a courtship gone wrong. Every later part keeps that posture: the question asked before the answer, and the asker watched as closely as the thing asked about.
The work is the book as published in August 1886, under its full title, Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft, a prelude to a philosophy of the future: the preface, nine titled parts of numbered sections, 296 in all, and the closing poem, “Aus hohen Bergen. Nachgesang”. It is scored on the German, as a book of prose in aphorism and essay, and as written work: its thought is weighed through its form, its figures under The Archetypal Deep, its pressure on literature and on thought together under Pressure on Tradition. No publisher would take it on terms. C. G. Naumann printed it at Leipzig at the author’s expense, and almost no one read it at the time.
The plan is the first thing to see. Three parts of essay come first, on the prejudices of philosophers, on the free spirit and on the religious nature. Then the fourth part, “Sprüche und Zwischenspiele”, sayings and interludes: a hundred and twenty-three sections, forty-two in every hundred of the book’s numbers, most of them a line or two long, so that the part that holds the most sections fills the fewest pages. Then five more parts: the natural history of morals, the scholars, our virtues, peoples and fatherlands, and last, “Was ist vornehm?”, what is noble? The book is a frame of essay around a central interlude, and the poem stands outside the frame.
Movement II
The first part takes apart the philosopher. What in us wants truth, it asks, and why not untruth instead? The answer comes as a provocation: “Die Falschheit eines Urtheils ist uns noch kein Einwand gegen ein Urtheil” (§4)
“The falseness of a judgement is not yet, for us, an objection to it.” The question has moved from the truth of a judgement to the life that makes it. Two sections later the philosopher himself is placed under the same question: every great philosophy so far has been “das Selbstbekenntniss ihres Urhebers” (§6)
“the self-confession of its author”. The system is a portrait. The sentence is one nothing in the book could replace, and the rest of the book is its consequence.
Against the dogmatists the book sets the philosophers it awaits, the philosophers “des gefährlichen Vielleicht” (§2)
“of the dangerous perhaps”, and the free spirit of the second part. The form follows the figure. A section advances, qualifies itself, and ends on a question, a self-correction or a mask, and the next begins again from another side. In the second part, too, the will that Schopenhauer had made the ground of the world is read again as will to power (§36). The argument is written as a series of attempts because what it argues is that there are only attempts, and a treatise would have refuted it by its shape.
The second part names the mask: “Alles, was tief ist, liebt die Maske” (§40)
“Everything deep loves a mask.” The third part turns to the religious nature, the saint and the believer read for what kind of life they express, and there, in two words, the book gives the thought of eternal return: “da capo” (§56), from the beginning. It is said once and left. The figure will come back at the end, in the poem, and the book is built so that a reader who reaches the end finds the early sections changed.
Movement III
Then the book breaks its breath. The fourth part is a run of short sayings, a line or two each, many in the one-line form the book commands best: a first clause that sets a claim and a second that undoes it. In §68 memory yields to pride. The most famous stands here, §146: “Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.”
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster in the process. And if you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” The second sentence has gone wholly into common speech.
The interlude is where the subtractive test bites hardest. A good share of the sayings could go without loss, and the sallies on women and marriage, which repeat each other and anticipate the seventh part, are the clearest case. The part’s place in the plan is architectural: it stands between the essays that clear the ground and the essays that build on it, a pause and a change of pace. That is a real function, and the plan would be poorer without it, but the function does not require every one of its hundred and twenty-three numbers. The book’s necessity is the plan’s; within the interlude it is the necessity of a few sentences, not of the whole run.
The form of the saying is inherited, and the book knows its debts. It comes from the French moralists, La Rochefoucauld and Chamfort, and from Lichtenberg. Nietzsche had written whole books of aphorisms himself, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches and Die fröhliche Wissenschaft. What is new here is not the saying but its setting: a run of sayings placed at the centre of an argued plan, so that the book of aphorisms is also an argument, and the aphorism, set back inside the essay, carries a part of the argument no essay could carry.
Movement IV
The fifth part gives morality a natural history. Morals are read as the expressions and instruments of kinds of life, and the history the part tells turns on one event: the “Sklavenaufstand in der Moral” (§195)
“slave revolt in morality”. From there the part reads the morality of the modern democratic age as the instinct of the herd. Essay sections like §188 build to a single word, and the reader feels the weight of the landing because the argument cannot be paraphrased without losing its rank. Here the disclosure the book is built on is stated most plainly, and it has held: a valuation is a symptom.
The middle of the book loosens. The sixth part, on scholars, holds §211, which answers §6 at a distance, but much of it is flat country. The seventh, on our virtues, holds §229, on cruelty as a hidden root of higher culture, and §230, an essay section that runs a page and lands on a single word; it also holds the sections on woman, where a book that calls every judgement a symptom pronounces with a dogmatist’s confidence, and the prejudice it shows is its author’s, as §6 said it would be. Those sections the book could lose and be better.
The eighth part, peoples and fatherlands, sketches the English, the French and the Germans, takes up music and Wagner (§256), and carries much that is notice of the 1880s rather than argument. Its typology of peoples and races is the book’s other failure of disclosure. It also widens the book’s reach: the knowing mind, the drives, religion, morals, science, the state, democracy, the peoples of Europe, music and the sexes are all held by the one perspective, each read for the kind of life it serves. What is not held is the family, labour and the natural order except as metaphor, and the book holds no lives, only types.
Movement V
The last part asks the question all the others served: what is noble? It sets out “Herren-Moral und Sklaven-Moral” (§260), master morality and slave morality, and reads the soul for its rank. The figures gather. The hermit is imagined behind whose every cave lies a deeper one (§289), and the mask of §40 returns as the hermit’s condition. Then §295, a long period on the genius of the heart, a tempter, which turns out at its end to name Dionysus, a philosopher-god, the figure the whole book has been a prelude to. He is announced more than built: he arrives at the close and is not carried through the book.
The prose ends in a farewell, and it is one of the book’s warmest heights. §296 turns to “ihr meine geschriebenen und gemalten Gedanken”
“you my written and painted thoughts”, and mourns that a thought fades as soon as it is written. A book that has argued that every thought expresses a kind of life ends by grieving that the life goes out of a thought on the page. The height is real because the book has earned it: the attempts, the questions and the masks were the means of keeping the thought alive as long as the form allowed.
Then the poem, outside the frame. “Aus hohen Bergen”, from high mountains, is a midday song, a solitary’s waiting for a friend who comes: “Oh Lebens Mittag!”
“O midday of life!” It is the law of the book become lyric, the soul of rank waiting for its equal, and it answers the da capo of §56 across the whole book. It is weaker than the prose it closes. But it is where the book says in song what the prose has been approaching, and a book that began by supposing truth a woman, courted clumsily, ends in a song of waiting, with the courtship still open.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test splits the book. The essay parts pass it: the first takes apart the philosopher’s will to truth, and the free spirit, the religious nature and the natural history of morals are its consequences, each required by the one before; the ninth part’s question of rank is what the whole has been asking, and the poem answers it in another voice. What fails the test lies in the interlude and the eighth part. A good share of the hundred and twenty-three sayings could go without loss, the sallies on women and marriage above all, which repeat each other and the seventh part; and the sketches of the English, the French and the Germans carry much that is notice of the 1880s rather than argument. That removable tenth, in a mid-length book, is what holds the axis below eight.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: our valuations are symptoms of the kind of life that makes them, and the value of truth itself has to be questioned. “Die Falschheit eines Urtheils ist uns noch kein Einwand gegen ein Urtheil” (§4): the falseness of a judgement is not yet, for us, an objection to it. From there the book uncovers the philosopher’s system as autobiography (§6), the slave revolt in morality (§195), master morality and slave morality (§260), the herd instinct in the moral thought of the democratic age, cruelty as a hidden root of higher culture (§229), and the need of what is deep for a mask (§40). These are articulated conditions, not moods, and the hermeneutics of suspicion stands on them. The charge is what does not hold: the typology of peoples and races and the pages on women disclose the author’s prejudices as plainly as §6 says a philosophy will.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The register is mostly a cold height, the elevation of the sharp formulation. §146: “Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.” The warmer summits come late and are real: §295, the long period on the genius of the heart that turns out to name Dionysus; §296, the farewell to the written and painted thoughts that fade as soon as they are written; and the poem’s “Oh Lebens Mittag!” Frequency is high in the short form and height is rarely sustained across pages: the part on scholars and the part on peoples and fatherlands are flat country. The book rises more often than most philosophy and less often than the greatest poems.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The axis weighs the figures the book makes, and it makes several that have become load-bearing beyond it: truth supposed a woman whom the dogmatists courted clumsily; the free spirit and the philosophers of “des gefährlichen Vielleicht”, the dangerous perhaps (§2); the mask; the abyss that looks back; the herd; the hermit behind whose every cave lies a deeper one (§289); and at the close Dionysus, the philosopher-god who tempts, the figure the whole book is a prelude to. “Da capo” (§56) gives the eternal return in two words. This is construction rather than allusion, and the abyss has passed wholly into common speech. It is held below the gate because the figures are many and mostly local: none is carried through the book as Thus Spoke Zarathustra carries its speaker, and the Dionysus who arrives at §295 is announced more than built.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The turn: philosophy that questions its own will to truth, written not as a system but as a sequence of provisional attempts in the voice of a “perhaps”, against the German tradition of the treatise from Kant to Hegel, and against Schopenhauer, whose will it reads again as will to power (§36). The cost was real: a book no publisher would take on terms, printed at the author’s expense, and read by almost no one at the time. It is held below the top band because the aphoristic form was inherited, from the French moralists, La Rochefoucauld and Chamfort, and from Lichtenberg, and because Nietzsche had made the move to the book of aphorisms himself, in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (1878) and Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882). What is new is the return of the aphorism to the essay and the plan: a book of aphorisms that is also an argument.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge changes. A perspectivism argued in a treatise would refute itself by its form; here each section is an attempt, often ending in a question, a self-correction or a mask, so the book does what §2 asks of the philosophers of the dangerous perhaps. The plan is the second instrument: three parts of essay that clear the ground, an interlude that breaks the reader’s breath, five parts that build on the cleared ground, and “Was ist vornehm?” put last because it is the question all the others served. The poem then says in song what the prose has been approaching. Held below 9.0 because the middle of the book, the parts on scholars and on peoples, is loosely joined to the plan, and the interlude’s place in it is architectural more than necessary.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence, not promise: a hundred and forty years of re-examination without exhaustion. Heidegger’s lectures on Nietzsche, Derrida’s Spurs on the woman of the preface, Leo Strauss’s “Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil” (1973), Laurence Lampert’s book-length commentary, Nietzsche’s Task (2001), Deleuze, and the feminist readings that go back to the preface and the seventh part each find a different book in the same 296 sections, and the plan itself, which Strauss thought hidden, is still argued over. The book is built to be reread. Sections answer each other at a distance, §6 and §211, §40 and §289, §56 and the poem, and many of its formulations reverse their sense when the reader returns to them knowing what comes later.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The field is German prose and European philosophy of the late nineteenth century. The force: the book reorganised what philosophy could take as its object, the value of values and the philosopher’s psychology, and what form it could take, and it set a measure for German prose that Heine had begun. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: with the Genealogy of Morals it gave Freud’s psychology, Weber’s sociology of religion, Foucault’s genealogy and the whole of twentieth-century suspicion their first model. The reach is shared with Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the Genealogy, and part of it belongs to the misreading of the posthumous papers, not to this book; the figure is discounted for that. The reach came after 1890, not on publication, and is credited as delayed.
Score: 9.1 / 10
A span of a hundred and forty years. The text survives whole: published in the author’s lifetime under his own eye, and untouched by the editorial assembly that charges Der Wille zur Macht. Presence is continuous and wide: in print in German and in many translations since the 1890s, taught in every course on modern thought, read far outside the academy, and quoted daily, §146 above all. The figure is not the widest because much of the presence is in the academy and in anthologies of sayings rather than in the whole book read in order, and because its reputation passed through the years from 1933 to 1945, when it was read for what it was not.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on Nietzsche’s German, where it can be checked. The command is plain: the dialectical period that turns on itself in a “perhaps”; the italics and parentheses that make a printed page speak; the one-line saying built so that its second clause undoes the first, as in §146, or §68, where memory gives way to pride; the essay section, §188 or §230, that runs a page and lands on a single word. The prose is load-bearing: the argument cannot be paraphrased without losing its rank, which is the book’s own claim. Held at 9.0 because the poem is weaker than the prose, the interlude has slack sallies, and the manner, its dashes, exclamations and “we free spirits”, sometimes insists where it should show. The sound of the German beyond what is checked here is neither credited nor charged.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the first section’s question of what in us wants truth, and the closing poem’s midday song to a friend who comes. One law governs both: everything is read as the expression of a kind of life, and rank is its measure, and the poem is that law become lyric, the solitary waiting for his equal. The law holds from the theory of knowledge through religion and morals to peoples and nobility, which is a wide range. The cost: a perspectivism that calls every judgement a symptom pronounces, in the seventh and eighth parts, on women and nations with a dogmatist’s confidence, and the book does not always make that tension its subject. Narrowness is not the fault; the inconsistency of tone toward its own claims is, in places.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on what a book of prose without narrative holds, and the orders are many: the knowing mind, the body and its drives, religion and the saint, morality and its history, science and the scholar, the state and democracy, the peoples of Europe, music, with Wagner in §256, the sexes, and the rank of souls. They are held by one perspective and not listed: each is read for the kind of life it serves. What the book does not hold is the family, labour and the natural order except as metaphor, and it holds no lives, only types. The figure describes the form.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Bottomless Well at 9.2, then The Unconcealment, Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable at 9.1. A book reread for a hundred and forty years by readers who each find a different book in the same sections, with a plan still argued over; a disclosure that every valuation is the symptom of a kind of life, which the century of suspicion stood on; and a text whole as its author published it, in print and in use since the 1890s.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.9: the essay parts are required by each other and by the plan, but a good share of the interlude’s sayings and much of the eighth part’s sketches of peoples could go without loss. Above it, The Encompassed at 8.3, many orders held by one perspective with no lives, only types; and The Sublime and The Archetypal Deep at 8.4, height frequent in the short form but rarely sustained, and figures made in number but mostly local, with the Dionysus of the close announced more than built. The sound of Nietzsche’s German beyond the passages checked here is neither credited nor charged.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: Pressure on Tradition at 9.1, The Imperishable at 9.1, The Unconcealment at 9.1 and The Swerve at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 falls short by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 7.9, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. The aggregate, 8.7, stands below the summit in any case, so the gate is not what holds the book in the fourth tier.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Nietzsche’s Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft, as published at Leipzig by C. G. Naumann in August 1886, at the author’s expense, scored as one work on the German original in the critical edition of Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari: the preface, the nine parts in 296 numbered sections, and the closing poem “Aus hohen Bergen. Nachgesang”. The book is scored as written work, its thought weighed through its form. No text was in hand; the only measurement is of the plan, the count of sections in each part. German is quoted only where the words are certain, in the spelling of the critical edition, with the desk’s own plain English beneath; sections are cited by number, and everything else is paraphrase. Translation · Walter Kaufmann’s translation (1966) was read alongside the German for sense, with his notes for the places where the German plays on a word, and the translations of R. J. Hollingdale (1973) and Judith Norman (2002) as second sights. None is quoted, and nothing in them is charged to the book. Facts that could not be verified, among them the date and place under the preface, the number of stanzas in the poem, the book’s length in pages, the number of copies sold in its first year, and accounts of particular later writers who acknowledged it, are not given.