The Play of Masks: An Interpretation of Nietzsche’s ...



The Play of Masks: An Interpretation of Nietzsche’s Perspectivism

Imagine a mask. It is a seemingly false face that covers a face, but yet there are ears exposed to the world in this mask. Eyes, ears, and all sense exposed, masks are nonetheless imbued with a protective lens—as a concealing face from the other, masks frame the world as “this” or “that.” A mask is not the enframing scenario of thinking; it merely allows thinking to commence. Masks can figure, but cannot prefigure the image of thought. Thinking is the claim to new territory. Masks are either static or dynamic. They project thought into an infinite horizon (a conceptual plane) when they are figured by difference. Interpreting Nietzsche means interpreting the will to power through forces. All forces seek to fill the mask, but interpretations are neither good nor bad and they are certainly never neutral. Forces act, but do not interpret. They are either passive interpretations imbued with bad conscience, guilt, or ressentiment or they are active interpretations that are continually interpreting. Interpretation is the creative act of the self that acknowledges the mask underlying every interpretation and destroys the ego-centered self erected by science.

Nietzsche’s greatest concern is to conceive of science from the perspective of the artist and art from the vantage of life. Nietzsche’s interpretation means seeing art and oneself from beneath in an act of self-reflexivity (GM III.3-4), i.e., acquiring the ability to play—seriously. By playing I mean the disguising element of thought, where each character or every mask and costume are the work of difference itself. Disguising is thinking where the mask greets another mask. Every interpretation must turn towards the interpreter and towards the forces driving the interpretation. But forces do not interpret, the interpreter interprets forces. No great move is singular. All interpretation requires broaching upon many issues at once. The image of the dicethrow resounds this thought astutely. When the dice falls back in a favorable manner, is it love that Zarathustra speaks of when one asks, “Am I a cheat?” (Za. Prologue). To love the fate of the return of the dice is to interpret the return.[1] Thus Spoke Zarathustra clarifies, “If ever I played dice with Gods at the Gods’ table of the earth, so that the earth quaked and broke open and pushed up floods of fire:—for the earth is a Gods’ table and trembles with creative new words and dice-throws…” (Za. III.16.3) (Creative new words are not simply the destruction of grammar through genealogy, but it is the invention of new language). Here it would mean that the perspectival character has returned as the very returning and willing return.

Philosophy after Nietzsche is fundamentally a question of acquiring the strength to continually interpret (WP 852), not towards any thing or any “ground of being,” but only as a creative act of interpreting that is always becoming by transfiguring and transvaluating the self through the will to a creative act of becoming. For thinking to mobilize, it must no longer be a matter of the concept generalizing or representing thought as it has been under the reactive domain of knowledge.[2] Knowledge not only opposes life (because it is reactive it sees life as a means to knowledge), but it also limits life by confining thought to reason. However, even logic as a will to knowledge, is a kind of becoming, a becoming reactive of forces (WP 517). To send thought out, the classical question Greek question “ti esti…?” was figured by a “who” (Plato), and is now a matter of “which one?”[3] Quite simply, “There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’” (GM III.12). Logic creates the concept beforehand, of what always remains the Same and thus, Nietzsche’s contestation of Kant’s concepts is that the eternal return is not an a priori judgment of phūsis, but eternal return is something that wills thought as a projection of thought, an ontology of sense that wills beyond phūsis (by returning to phūsis?) (GS 39). There must be something higher that does not retreat back to phūsis. What he means is the übermensch, of course.[4] In a sense, we have encountered the same method of philosophizing from Parmenides to Hegel. Habit and memory as mediations merely re-present thought and can no longer account for ontological difference. When Nietzsche says, “The change in general taste is more profound than that of opinions,” (GS 39) he means thinking as difference from the perspective of the interpreter.

Whereas the Kantian deliberates that thought is a faculty of knowledge that is represented either through conformity or desire towards the object (i.e., they are both states of exterior judgment),[5] Nietzsche pronounces, “The philosopher seeks to hear within himself the echoes of the world symphony and to re-project them in the form of concepts” (PTG 3). And never could we say that we judge with désintéressement. It is not enough that the Kantian judges as the first spectator, but actually thinks that he is disinterested. But Kant himself is a taste; a taste that interprets art with great interest (GM III. 6).[6] It is no coincidence that the Greeks held the “sage” to be he who has the keenest taste (PTG 3), as not merely an affect of sense, but a projection of thought.

Returning to the concept of thinking as the dicethrow, we see it has two features. First, it must be said that thinking wills the dice to be thrown.[7] If it is thinking, it is necessary that thinking be mobile. There is no thought to be snared. Secondly, the dicethrow is absurd. The absurdity is figuring life through reason or logic.[8] All symbolic language that figures life through representation is not thinking. Willing states that are not poised to repeat eternally to power, i.e., to continually live through them, is absurd. The will to power is not the want of power, it is be “like the bee that has gathered to much honey” (Za.Pro.), the will to power does not want—it bestows; it gives back.[9] Those who are over-full of life welcome the return of the dice, of what comes back when thinking is sent out.

To test this absurdity, to try to play the game with “loaded dice” is to deny life (Za. II.16). The interpreter of “good conscience” stumbles upon error and is seized by this feeling because it marks the moment of a revaluation of the self (GS 297). Revaluation is to let the soul take flight. Falsity occurs when problems are tied-down, when “Truth” is erected. Nietzsche could not be more sanguine when he celebrates the arrival of a broken instinct. He writes, “It is a sign of a broken instinct when man sees the driving force and its “expression (“the mask”) as separate things—a sign of self-contradiction…” (WP 377) (This is not the same as a Platonic aporia that prefigures confusion as a will to knowledge). We should welcome this state of confusion as the friend or lover of eros, as Dostoevsky’s Idiot, as Nietzsche’s Dionysos, all psychical masks contesting a self fabricated from foreign materials.

Asking the question from the perspective of the mask further details the seduction of “truth” that we “think” a self finds lurking in the text. It means that one could errantly expect to tackle an aphorism of Nietzsche’s and totalize “Nietzschean” thought there within (Hegelian totality of consciousness will simply falter). One must acquire “long legs” to stretch out over many aphorisms (Za.I.7). From summit to summit, each compositional tone delivers not a single solution to understanding Nietzsche. Readers are nevertheless ensconced in the maelstrom of philosophical problems within one aphorism alone. Alone, to be alone, is how one tackles these texts (see Za. II.22). Problems of depth are to be handled like “cold baths,” he says. Exit them as quickly as they were entered (GS 381). Precipitous and dangerous, Nietzsche’s thought moves like a “nomad” defying any attempt at “codification.”[10] Supposing your self to be deep, which one interprets? Are you strong enough the fill the deepest mask? “Everything deep loves a mask,” he says, because “Every deep spirit needs a mask…around every deep spirit a mask is continually growing, thanks the to the constantly false…shallow interpretations of his every word…” (BGE 40). How can any reader, or which one, can seize thought within these texts? Nietzsche’s thought is a war-machine, a mobilizing juggernaut of meditations bypassing any will to knowledge.

Nietzsche is redefining sense. Zarathustra is not simply overturning all philosophy he is sharpening arrows because he has learned how to handle a bow well (EC IV.3). He, the warrior philosopher projects his arrows like dangerous children at play (Za.I.18). However, behind every maxim, underlying every opinion and conjecture lay another philosophy. He could not more direct when he writes, “Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hiding place, every word also a mask” (BGE 289). Every attempt to snare thought is feeble. Interpreting Nietzsche’s texts is to project thought into the distance, into the very distancing of distance itself. It would mean interpreting the metaphor with an acumen sense of that distance. As Derrida has observed, an interpretation not only distances the interpreter from Nietzsche, but this is a necessary distance because of the mobile language of the text.[11] Distancing the interpreter is the very act of the creative will to power destroying the ego. Distancing is becoming difference. In a sense, the mask is what the text shows the reader, of what gets refracted when thinking, feeling, interpreting, destroying, and creating occur. A mask provides the stage for viewing our self from a distance, as “simplified and transfigured,” a distance that surrounds a self with “eternal perspectives” (GS 78). Philosophy is thus distance, that is to say, thinking is difference, but difference demands embarking upon self-overcoming, a feat that is viable only by contesting the interpreter. Following the projection of thought is not merely longitudinal it is latitudinal along the plane of the concepts Nietzsche gathers, bestows, and evades from. Genealogy is the tide that brings interpretations forth. There is no truth to the text. Each interpreter wages war against the text and himself. This double sense of contestation is genealogy.

These summits are not meant to act as a form of mediation that would allow us to extract a representational meaning. Each aphorism is difference itself. The aphorisms are an atlas detailing the contours of your failures. “Yes! To look down upon myself and even my stars (thoughts): that alone I would call my summit; that is still left for me as my ultimate summit!” (Za III.1). Nietzsche cannot merely negate valuation. He must bypass any sense of reactive valuation by transfiguring the notion of force as something that is contesting the topos of valuation. Nietzsche bestows the figure of such a man:

“[He] needs to have been a critic and a sceptic and a dogmatist and an historian, and in addition a poet and collector and traveler and puzzle-solver and moralist and seer and ‘free spirit’ and nearly all things, so that he can traverse the range of human value-feelings and be able to look with many kinds of eyes and consciences form the heights into every distance…the task itself calls for something else—it calls for him to create values” (BGE 211).

Hence, all interpretations are not merely separated by degrees, but they are separated by the kind of force driving the interpretation. Revaluation contests the site of the metaphor. The genealogist revaluates all language and values hitherto as the symptoms of active and passive valuations.[12] In a positive sense it means the creation of new and active values, negatively, however, it is the self as a becoming reactive of forces. Nietzsche writes, “The lordly right of giving names extends so far that one would allow oneself to conceive the origin of language itself as an expression of power…[the genealogist] says ‘this is this and this,’ they seal every thing and…take possession of it” (GM 1.2).

If genealogy is Nietzsche’s method, he must acquire a second sense of interpreting the will to power as an active force. Having examined the origin of all values as distinctions of either base or noble values and distinctions of disparity,[13] the philosopher-physician stands all values on their head—or back on their feet? Indeed, the latter would suggest a revaluation of forces becoming active. In the passage “On the Great Yearning,” he tells us of the turning of need [Wende der Not]. He sings, “I myself gave you the ‘Turning of Need’ and ‘Fate’” (Za., III, 14). The turning of need is a song for Ariadne. It entreats listeners to the resonating chords of pathos that lay amid the sense of the aphorism, every tome means death of the self you know. To truly love the turning of need would mean that the created act of the will creates the future and the past in the act of interpreting. All of history flows through Zarathustra precisely for that reason. The historical self is a self in which all history flows as a willing return. In a sense, the misunderstanding of ressentiment, bad conscience, and the duality of good and evil has equally been the result of previous philosophers unable to think historically (GM I.1). To “think historically” is the perspective of those who are over-full from life. Thus, interpretation requires the breakthrough of an ego-centered self into the self of becoming.

Indeed, one of the many critiques Nietzsche offers in the self-criticism preface is that his voice was masked under the “scholar’s hood” and lacked the strength to interpret (BT Pref., 3). It lacked the strength to dig beneath the roots of Wagner’s Christian ethos or his Hegelian fervor—in short, Nietzsche required more than one psyche to create anew. What he required was the psychologist, the physician, a philologist, and even a dancer who equally expressed the compulsive elements of life. This transitioning of the self to compulsion—a move to self-overcoming—is the most elemental feature of life.[14] It is rhythm. A rhythmic compulsion featured in humans most astutely is in the form of dance. Dancing not because the gods compel, but because it is dancing that compels gods. As Nietzsche writes, “one tried to compel the gods by using rhythm and to force their hand: poetry was thrown at them like a magical snare” (GS 84). The dance is no mere scion. It does not represent a glorious age or some kind of affinity with fine arts. Dancing is the harmonic and rhythmic movement of interpretation (infinite movement). To dance one needs to interpret swiftly and relish the danger of such movement. “Movement is symbolism for the eye,” he says, “it indicates that something has been felt, willed, thought” (WP 492). Thinking is the soul’s movement (GS 280). Learning to take a walk within our self, philosophy has become infinite movement where the most exterior is held within the interior.[15] It is the supreme reign of immanence, of exteriority and alterity and also interiority and Selfsame cutting through the image of thought—not new territory proper, but that which dethrones and claims; territorializes and deterritorializes; it is a conceptual persona (thinking) that saves and destroys.[16] It requires a “warlike soul” with a desire to mobilize thought and transfigure the scene of every interpretation (GS 32). The cadence of the interpretative dance as metaphor is indicative of the dynamism inherent to the Dionysian life; continual death and return (the problem with the death of God is that he has merely died once). It is no surprise that Zarathustra “should only believe in a God who knew how to dance” (Za., I, 7). Do not mistake Zarathrusta for being facetious. Indeed, “Our first questions about the value of a book, of a human being, or a musical composition are…can they dance?” (GS 366).

Dancing is to interpret eternal return as an interpretation where one cannot wager or go beyond the act of interpreting. One cannot leap over this decision, but rather, dance gleefully through the moment as though it were eternal. Dancing is to send thinking out. As Zarathustra states, “Only in the dance can I tell the allegory of the highest things” (Za.II.11). It is a dicethrow to dance. It means one would play the game and affirm the dice thrown, regardless of the outcome.[17] Nietzsche’s affirmation is a dancing over the abyss. It is to throw the dice and not only will the fatal outcome, but to love the outcome. To love not the “willed combination, but the fatal combination.”[18] When the dice falls back, the bad player relies on causality and probability, which is rooted in the web of reason—it is the spirit of ressentiment. The dice falling back hurl the metaphor across the abyss creating the territory of interpretation. As interpreters you “shall seek your enemy, you shall wage your war—and for your own thoughts!” (Za.I.10). That the Persian wages war with morality as his self-overcoming testifies for his need to shoot arrows, to use the bow well. It is a matter of opposing forces against (moral) laws that Nietzsche goes to war. War means contesting grounds.

War means contesting the ego self with crisis. But krisis (Gr. Krisis) also implies an opportunity. It is an opportune arising of conflicting forces contesting the decision to affirm or negate.[19] Which one contests? As Foucault observes, “Contestation does not imply a generalized negation, but an affirmation that affirms nothing, a radical break of transitivity…the act which carries [values of existence] to their limits…to the Limit where an ontological decision achieves its end…”[20] The crisis in question is the question of the self, an existential crisis composed by the rhythmic tonalities of interpretation. The self does not merely have a mask; it has a mask that masks other masks. Infinite movement of thought is something like undressing, always becoming. Can you still hear out of this mask? The question asked of the interpreter is to simply listen to the aphorisms. Their brevity is their dexterity. When the friend (the one that is contesting) is moved to invite himself closer, some of us would prefer to place a chair in front of the door, to not let the mask expose itself to the mask that lay underneath (GS 365). It is the inattentive listener that broaches the scene with insincerity, always preferring the facile decorum of a retreating difficulty to the ardor of attuning one’s gaze towards the distance of the text (GS 80; 60). The prescriptive means for interpreting is to listen, that is to say, to ruminate (GM Preface, 8). The sonority Nietzsche breaches in the address of Zarathustra is the dissolution of the ego self. It requires one to not merely look, but to listen. Nancy has observed that listening is the very act of the question, i.e., of the question of the self as a crisis of the self.[21] Interpreting Zarathustra is to interpret the self.

This does not mean that interpretation is a great event. “The ears of men” are incapable of listening to the effects of great deeds (GS 125). Ears to listen, ears to ruminate, ears that service the self as an umbilicus to the world. Zarathustra writes, “Slow is experience for all deep wells: long must they wait before they know just what has fallen into their depths” (Za.I.12). Unlike the Hegelian who waits for history or God or some other kind of metaphysical absolute to signal a great event, Nietzsche prescribes to live dangerously to those “who are bent on seeking in all things for what in them must be overcome…” (GS 283). Listening is forgetting the ego self.[22] What must be overcome is the mask of the ego self. How poignantly Nietzsche iterates, “[the] feeling of intoxication, in fact corresponding to an increase in strength…is a consequence of enhanced strength” (WP, 800). Given strength marks a resonating tone in the eternal return (Zarathustra epitomizes each sentiment clearly, “I come eternally again to this self-same life” (Za. III.13.2). Indeed, Zarathustra states, “Courage is the best of killers, courage that attacks…for it says: ‘Was that life? Well then! One more time!’” (Za. III.2). Each aphorism delivers the strength or power to interpret life (to live through it) as opposed to the desire to cross over life. Life for Nietzsche is sheer drama, the world is the theatre,[23] and Nietzsche’s thought is the very mis-en-scène directing all interpretations through scores of theatric perspectives. Interpretation is not simply philosophy it is drama. Such is the reason why Nietzsche would write such good books; “Always presupposing that there are ears…One must be worthy of hearing…” (EC, I.4). Which one listens? As Nietzsche protests, “One hears only those questions for which one is able to find answers” (GS 196). It brings forth the mask and lets one listen, but which one listens?

Are there any ears left? It means interpreting through the torrent of masks underlying interpretations in the text. Every mask exposes ears. Every interpretation is driven by active or reactive force. The interpreter has to be a great rope-dancer (not a rope-maker), one that can go over and beyond himself by seeing his art beneath himself, by seeing the reactive forces of a self as adumbrations toward a self-overcoming.

Index of Abbreviations

BGE Beyond Good and Evil

BT The Birth of Tragedy

EC Ecce Homo

GM The Genealogy of Morals

GS The Gay Science

PTG Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

WP The Will to Power

Za. Thus Spoke Zarathrustra

References

Davis, Bret W. “Nishitani After Nietzsche” In Japanese and Continental

Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School. Edited by Bret W.

Davis, Brian Schroeder, and Jason Wirth. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2010.

Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson. New

York: Columbia University Press. 1983.

Deleuze, Gilles. “Nomad Thought” In The New Nietzsche. Ed. David B. Allison.

Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press. 1997.

Deleuze, Gilles. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham

Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. 1994.

Derrida, Jacques. “The Question of Style” In The New Nietzsche. Ed. David B.

Allison. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press. 1997.

Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Translated by Donald F.

Bouchard. New York: Cornell University Press. 1977.

Heidegger, Martin. Nietzsche. Vols.1-2. Translated by David Ferrell Krell. San

Francisco: Harper Collins. 1991.

Jones, David. “Empty Soul, Empty World” In Japanese and Continental

Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School. Edited by Bret W. Davis., Brian Schroeder, and Jason Wirth. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2010.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. Listening. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New

York: Fordham University Press. 2007.

Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Marion Faber. Oxford: Oxford

University Press. 1998.

_______. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. Translated, with an

Introduction by Marianne Cowan. Washington D.C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc. 1962.

_______. The Birth of Tragedy. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York:

Vintage Books. 1967.

_______. The Genealogy of Morals In Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Translated by

Walter Kaufmann. New York: The Modern Library. 2000.

_______. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann

New York: Vintage Books. 1974.

_______. The Will to Power. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J.

Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books. 1968.

_______. Thus Spoke Zarathrustra. Translated by Graham Parkes. Oxford:

Oxford University Press. 2005.

Nishitani, Keiji. The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism. Translated by Graham Parkes

with Setsuko Aihara. New York: SUNY Press. 1990.

Parkes, Graham. Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s Psychology.

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1994.

Ricoeur, Paul. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort

Worth: Texas University. Press. 1976.

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[1] Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson. (New York: Columbia University Press. 1983), 30-31.

[2] Ibid., 100-101.

[3] Ibid., 77.

[4] Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volumes I and II. Translated by David Farrell Krell. (San Francisco: Harper Collins. 1991)220. Heidegger’s interpretation regarding the “[perspective] of life” is one that he thinks will reopen the question of Being. He interprets the übermensch as a grounding horizon for Being (that is, being human). He writes, “Overman is the man who grounds Being anew—in the rigor of knowledge and in the grand style of creation.” See Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy, 169.

[5] Deleuze, Gilles. Kant’s Critical Philosophy. 3.

[6] Heidegger contradicts this claim and seeks to show that Nietzsche, through his readings of Schopenhauer, misunderstood Kant and that the two philosophies of art were likely very close. See “Kant’s Doctrine of the Beautiful. Its Misinterpretation by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche” In Heidegger, Nietzsche, 107-114.

[7] Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy., 32.

[8] Ibid., 33.

[9] Ibid., 84-85.

[10] Deleuze, Gilles. “Nomad Thought” In The New Nietzsche. Edited by David B. Allison. (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press. 1997), 143.

[11] Derrida, Jacques. “The Question of Style” In The New Nietzsche, 178-179.

[12] Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 74-75.

[13] Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Translated by Donald F. Bouchard (New York: Cornell University Press. 1977), 143.

[14] This sentiment is captured well in the following idiom: “It is only from particular perspectives that we see these interrelated events and their effects as not being a part of the greater self-same activity of this or-ganic process, which has already presupposed our interpretations of its flow-ing process where every event in the world is intimately connected to every other event. Hence, the will to power will always include interpretation as its fundamental modus operandi for understanding the world.” See,

Jones, David. “Empty Soul, Empty World” In Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School. Edited by Bret W. Davis., Brian Schroeder, and Jason Wirth. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2010), 113.

[15] Deleuze, Gilles. What Is Philosophy?, 59.

[16] Ibid., see chapter 3 “Conceptual Personae,” 61-83.

[17] Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 37.

[18] Ibid., 26-27.

[19] Davis, Bret W. “Nietzsche After Nishitani” In Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School. Edited by Bret W. Davis., Brian Schroeder, and Jason Wirth. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2010), 82.

[20] Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 36.

[21] Nancy, Jean-Luc. Listening. Translated by Charolotte Mandell. (New York: Fordham University Press. 2007), 9.

[22] Jones, David. “Empty Soul, Empty World,” 109. “This [ego] self has relinquished itself as a ‘narrative self’ for an enhanced narrative for which there is ultimately no listener, reader, or evaluator as a ‘world-self.’”

[23] Parkes, Graham. Composing the Soul, 343.

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