32
PARTISAN REVIEW
for objective truth - a word Nietzsche usually puts in quotation marks -
are guilty of Tartuffery, for they are really
only
enunciating their own
"truth." "Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philoso–
phy so far has been: namely the personal confession of its author and a kind
of involuntary and unconscious memoir. ..."
Nietzsche suggests that the philosophers of the future will be different
from those of the past in that they will not say that they are seeking the
truth. They will say, as Nietzsche himself says: "My judgment is
my
judg–
ment: no one else is easily entitled to it...." What the philosophers of the
future say will be "their truth"; it will not be a "truth for everyman."
Those who want their truth to be a truth for everyman, Nietzsche says, are
guilty of "dogmatic aspirations." Being dogmatic generally means saying
that something is true in the face of evidence to the contrary, or asserting
something
a priori,
but Nietzsche contends that anyone who even thinks he
is disinterestedly trying to persuade others of what he considers to be the
truth is guilty of being dogmatic.
If
there are
only
the personal "truths" of free spirits, what about
objective knowledge? Nietzsche speaks of "the objective person ... the
ideal scholar in whom the scientific instinct . .. for once blossoms and
blooms...." Yet this "objective man," though in some respects admirable,
is "for the most part a man without substance and content, a 'selfless'
man." He is a slave, "albeit the most sublime type of slave...." Such dis–
interested scholars lack the negative traits of those driven by bourgeois
self-interest, but they also lack the positive traits of noble souls; the latter
do not proffer objective knowledge but "great things," - i.e. personal
"truths" that can be grasped
only
by other noble souls.
Nietzsche's noble soul lives in a world elsewhere, a world beyond pol–
itics, a world of depth and solitude that he celebrates in this obscure
passage: "In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things
remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for
the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare." Yet at the same time
he suggests that bourgeois society has been very tough on the noble soul.
Liberal institutions, he says, "undermine the will to power ... make men
small, cowardly, and hedonistic. ..." He despises bourgeois society, yet he
is contemptuous of political reformers. His politics are the politics of a
profoundly unpolitical man.
What might be called Nietzsche's unpolitical politics has strongly in–
fluenced a number of postmodern thinkers, especially Michel Foucault,
who has been called "the most revolutionary - and deeply serious - of
postwar Nietzscheans." Foucault often proclaimed his debt to Nietzsche.
In
"Nietzsche, Genealogy and History ," Foucaul t discusses how important
Nietzsche's notion of genealogy is for his own work. For Foucault, geneal-
