36
PARTISAN REVIEW
In
January 1889, when he was interrogated at the Jena asylum,
Nietzsche said that he had infected himself twice in \866. We know that
he went to a brothel in 1865, but he claimed to have come away without
touching anything except a piano. He may have gone back later, as
Thomas Mann suggests, and if he did contract the disease, either there
or elsewhere, the experience may have helped to cause his subsequent
sexual reticence and the halfheartedness of his attempts to get married.
In
any event, the self-denial was not merely sexual. His first
reaction
to
Schopenhauer is revealing: he became so self-contemptuous
that he imposed penances on himself, allowing himself no more than
four hours of sleep each night for two successive weeks.
In
committing
himself to study classical philology at the university, he was con–
sciously frustrating his artistic impulses and submitting himself
to
a
discipline he expected to be stringent.
In
his undergraduate work on
Theognis of Megara, Suidas, Diogenes Laertius, and Democritus, he
distinguished himself by virtue of a skepticism that smacks of self–
denial. As he wrote later, "The belief in truth starts with doubt about
all truths in which one has previously believed." Research was a partly
destructive experience: he had to fight his way through previous
misconceptions. "One is no longer satisfied with one answer, but goes
on asking questions ... Doubt is now
de rigueur,
just as belief used to
be."
During this formative period, his self-confidence grew around this
negative pole. Unconsciously he was laying the foundations for the
linguistic skepticism he was to voice in his seminal essay on "Truth
and Falsehood in an Extra-moral Sense" (1873). Previously it had been
taken for granted that words could convey the objective truth about
external reality; Nietzsche saw that there can be no ques tion of
objectivity. Since we cannot help being defrauded, we have evolved
linguistic conventions to defraud ourselves reassuringly. Language is
like an umbrella we can hold up against awareness that the universe
was not created for our convenience, that far from being well disposed
to us it is hostile.
So what is truth?
A
mobile army of metaphors, metonyms ,
anthropomorphisms-in short an aggregate of human relationships
which, poetically and rhetorically heightened, became transposed
and elaborated, and which, after protracted popular usage, poses as
fixed, canonical, obligatory. Truths are illusions whose illusoriness
is overlooked.
He had previously arrived at the Kantian idea that Nature had thrown
