NIETZSCHE AND THE PRESENT
21
He himself corrected his ideas in new ideas, without explicitly
saying so. In altered states, he forgot conclusions formerly arrived
at. In defiance of all the dogmatisms to which he had succumbed
for the moment, he developed a perfect openness to other possibilities.
He was ready to overturn his most recent thought.
By interpretation it is possible to discern amid the fragments the
dialectic movements of thought and experience, into which he drew
every-and truly every-position and so transcended it. Only through
this real, though not methodically developed dialectic, do many of
his utterances, often so strange in themselves, take on meaning.
There remains to
be
sure a residue of insoluble absurdities, although
even his most unrestrained outbursts usually yield a meaning when
taken in context.
Nietzsche himself was aware of the condition of his work. He
disliked reading his own works because of their extreme character.
In a letter to Deussen, written not long before his madness, he
declared that for a number of years he wished only to be quiet and
forgotten, for the sake of "something that is striving to ripen." And
he calls this something "the belated sanction and justification of my
whole existence (an existence which for a hundred reasons will be
forever problematic!)." Shortly before the end he wrote: "I have
never gone beyond attempts and ventures, preludes and promises of
all
sorts."
A third difficulty arises from the nature of philosophical en–
deavor. Nietzsche undertook scientific inquiries into questions of
physics, cosmology, logic, for example. He sketched out systems of
thought. These discussions of scientific problems can be picked out
of his works. In this wayan analogy has been drawn between
Nietzsche's systematic doctrine of the will to power and older specula–
tive systems, that of Leibniz for example (by Baumler). This is not
without justification if these scientific discussions are considered en–
tirely
in
themselves, but without any justification whatsoever when
this view is applied to Nietzsche's philosophy. Nietzsche is utterly
lacking in that broad, clear, all-embracing flow of thought through
which we cannot only gain a practical orientation but also acquire the
long-range thinking which perseveringly examines and builds. To
this
kind of philosophical thought all scientific projects are perspec–
tives or implements for what it conceives as authentic philosophy.