The metaphor and the riddle

The euphemistic names that circulate among the humble come from metaphorical transfers of words. Euphemisms in general might begin as acronym (WC) or circumlocution.Where humil­ity is concerned, Nietzsche finds it acquiring its nicer name through resemblance, as metaphors do.The behavior of humility resembles the behavior of weakness and unimportance.

If we want to look to Aristotle for a sign of what the euphemizing might cost, his words on diction specify what metaphors do and overdo. On the one hand, language that uses only kurioi forms, literal language, is tapeine “flat, pedestrian, humble.”⁴³ Aristotle doesn't mean that the masters of a language have something lowly about them, although he might well agree with Nietzsche that personages with power speak direct unvarnished truths.

Foreign words and metaphors enliven the flat prose. On the other hand, excessive borrow­ing from other languages or dialects goes wrong, making your speech foreign. People who say “Cela m'est egal” in conversation have crossed over from the use of a French word to speaking French.Within a language, the clarity of literal prose is threatened by overdone metaphor. One substitution colors the diction.A string of them,Aristotle says, create an ainigma “puzzle, enigma, mystery.” Sometimes metaphor enhances learning; taken too far it obscures and perplexes.⁴⁴

Aristotle had the right instincts when he spoke as if humility were mystifying, and he pro­vided the tools for explaining why. To possess the virtue of humility, which means understanding yourself as possessing that virtue, is to report on yourself to yourself in metaphors that make you a riddle to yourself.The holders of certain other virtues might not need to represent themselves to themselves as having their virtue. Depending on your account of virtue, you might find true generosity, for instance, in a quite unselfconscious and unaware liberality of spirit.

In recognizing your actual humble condition and calling it humble, you had imagined your­self to attain moral and psychological transparency. In fact, you disguised the weak condition as a powerful achievement, deriving pleasure from what you might otherwise have seen as cowardice.That is the last temptation posed by slave morality, and nearly all its proponents have succumbed to it.

One danger in representing Nietzsche's point in terms of language and metaphor is that the debased morality he sets himself against comes to look like a mistake. We do not scream cor­recting the child who asks “What if the lightning didn't strike?” and Nietzsche should not make a fuss over modern morality. What is so bad about humility that he needs to mock and abuse it as he does?

Partly the answer can come from thinking about the obfuscation in metaphor as such, but more than that from the worldview implied by these metaphors.

That metaphor in general inspires Nietzsche’s tough talk comes out when he justifies his strong language “Ausschweifung des Gefuhls” — “excess of feeling” in Carol Diethe’s recent translation,“orgies of feeling” in Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdales more aggressive ren­dering.⁴⁵ Kaufmann and Hollingdales dramatic instinct is probably closer to the mood of the passage: “Ausschweifung” can mean debauchery and loose living, and Nietzsche’s digression acknowledges that there might be something to temper in the language, as one might not have to temper the word “excess.”“Obviously,” Nietzsche says,

it would sound more pleasant and sound better on the ears if I were to say “the ascetic priest has made use of the enthusiasm that lies in all strong affects.” But why caress the effeminate ears of our modern weaklings?

He rejects the available euphemism.This “verbal tartuffery” has gone on for too long already and it is past time for direct diction.⁴⁶ Metaphors about enthusiasm and energy will only continue to hide the sexual excitement behind asceticism, and above all they will hide that excitement from the ones who are sexually excited.

An aside in Beyond Good and Evil, written not long before GM, contains something close to the most overt joke in Nietzsche’s writings. “A curiosity like mine is still the most pleasant vice of all” — then he corrects himself “Sorry! I meant to say: the love of truth finds its reward in heaven and even on earth.”⁴⁷ First he gives the fact, then the metaphorical version so gussied up for piety’s sake that it wouldn’t even recognize itself in the mirror.

Elsewhere in Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche asks: “Do you have to salt your truth to the point where it doesn’t quench thirst anymore?”⁴⁸ That a few tough kernels of truth disrupt our sleep as much as they do proves that we have spent thousands of years padding the bed with soft metaphors.

But we need more to say than that about Nietzsche’s tone and aggressivity, which are the effects not only of the soft condition modern ears have gotten into but of the animus in him. Nietzsche is not just speaking frankly and happening to ruffle feathers. Often enough he has feather-ruffling on his mind. His words scream because he screams them.⁴⁹

The metaphor that lies behind the euphemisms “humility,”“patience,” and the others, which is the metaphor of choosing one’s own nature as if from a subject or soul’s standpoint, encour­ages a worse error than Christians’ complacent self-regard. Nietzsche has diagnosed the distorted self-representation of “the sick” as a manifestation of will to power.Their will to power hardly gushes, in fact is hardly a trickle, but Nietzsche gladly escapes the antinomies regarding inner conflict that have thus far bedeviled philosophers (and even find their way into GMs psycho­logical speculations).⁵⁰ The will to power drives the strong to overcome and dominate and motivates the weak to convince themselves they are the ones really on top.

When you call humility a virtue, thus a state that one achieves, you are distinguishing it from humbleness. As virtue and accomplishment humility calls for claiming and doing less on your own behalf than you would be normally inclined to claim or do.

Humility is therefore not only false here and there, as hypocrites’ virtues are, but false to nature. Humility qua virtue implies that the will to power can hold itself back, and that domina­tion can exist as an unexpressed capacity — unexpressed not for the moment in the interests of later domination, nor deferred in one sphere of activity for the purpose of achieving domination in another sphere, but unexpressed completely and forever, never moving from potential to act. The will to power stops itself; the judging soul chooses not to act out what it might act out.This riddling account of freedom and self-restraint speaks as if it were a new and truest-of-all theory of moral psychology.

Imagine the will to power as Nietzsche’s surrogate for Holy Spirit, which the Christian creed says is kurion “master, lord” and zoopoion “life-making,” and lalesan dia ton propheton “spoke through the prophets.”The will to power is master too. It accounts for mastery. If not life-produc­ing, it pertains to the essence of life. It speaks through everyone, but most of all finds voice in Nietzsche its great spokesman. In Christianity, blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is the unpar­donable sin: denying the goodness and efficacy of the Spirit.⁵² But it appears that Christianity has now bad-mouthed the will to power, and for that, for Nietzsche, there can be no forgiveness either.This disrespect for the will to power is what makes its prophet scream.

Notes

1 I am grateful for the comments I have received about this paper, from Mark Alfano who read an early draft, and from the members of a Nietzsche workshop at Fordham University (March 2019): Michael Begun, Preston Carter, Mateo Duque, Pedro Mauricio Garcia Dotto, Sara Pope, and Nicholas Smyth.

2 Ephesians 6.5-9.All translations from Greek are my own.

3 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, I.2, I.4, I.5. For example Nietzsche pictures “the origin of lan­guage itself as a manifestation of the power of the rulers: they say ‘this is so and so,’ they set their seal on everything and every occurrence with a sound” (I.2). Similarly:“in most cases [the nobles] might give themselves names which simply show superiority of power (such as ‘the mighty,’‘the masters,’ ‘the commanders’) or the most visible sign of this superiority” (I.5). See Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, translated by Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Unless otherwise indicated, references to GM will be to this translation.

4 Aristotle, Poetics, chapters 21-22 1457a31-1459a16.

5 Aristotle: literal language oikeion, Rhetoric 3.2 1404b35; the literal kurion, Rhetoric 3.2 1404b35, 33; 3.10 1410b12-13; Poetics 21 1457b1,3.

6 Aristotle, Politics: those in Sparta and elsewhere who command serfs are kurioi, 2.9 1269b10; in any state the supreme power is kurios, 3.6 1278b10-12; king as kurios, 3.15 1286b25; the majority in democracy is, 4.4 1292a5; the supreme authority generally, 6.8 1322b12-15; also see 2.11 1272b41; 4.4 1292a10.

7 G. E. R. Lloyd, more extensively than any other author I am aware of, has investigated the meta­phorical vocabulary with which Aristotle describes metaphor, despite Aristotle’s reluctance to credit metaphorical language with accuracy and precision. In this discussion Lloyd touches on the metaphors of metaphora and kurios. See “The Metaphors of Metaphora” in Aristotelian Explorations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 205-229; and p. 211 on the particular metaphors at work. Also see Paul Crittenden,“Philosophy and Metaphor:The Philosopher’s Ambivalence,” The Journal of the Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics 13.1 (2003): 27-42.As a rule I find that although commentators regularly remark on Aristotle’s use of metaphor to practice philosophy, as with the words kurios and metaphora, they don’t ask why ordinary talk should be branded master language.

8 Plato, Republic 1.337a. On the word as it appears in Plato see Gregory Vlastos,“Socratic Irony,” The Classical Quarterly 37.1 (1987): 79-96.

9 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics: the ironic type, 4.7; association with Socrates, 1127b25; contrast with truthfulness, 1127a31, b10; and Eudemian Ethics 3.7 1234a3. For some discussion see P.W. Gooch, “Socratic Irony and Aristotle’s Eiron: Some Puzzles,” Phoenix 41.2 (1987): 95-104. For the more typi­cally negative presentation of eironeia in Aristotle see Rhetoric 2.5 1382b21. Aristotle “almost always assesses it negatively,” says Gooch (98).

10 Thus The Wanderer and his Shadow section 86; for recent discussions and elaborations of the problem see Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 128-156; James I. Porter,“Nietzsche and ‘The Problem of Socrates,” in Sara Ahbel-Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar (eds.) A Companion to Socrates (Sussex: Blackwell Publishing, 2009), pp. 406-425.

Mark Alfano and Brian Robinson explicate the structural relationship between humblebragging and bragging in “Bragging,” Thought:A Journal of Philosophy 3.4 (2014): 263—272.

Plato, Apology: meals for life, 36e-37a; oracle, 21a; impossible,“for I am ignorant,” 21b; jury's noise, 20e, 21a.

Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, I.10.

Nietzsche, Genealogy of MoralsCso humble,” I.15;“humility and pomposity” III.22. Michael Begun has made the point to me that the German word “demuthig,” which is the one I am most often render­ing “humble” here, includes a deference toward others that is not necessarily implied by the English “humble.”And it is true that I will be emphasizing the individualized kind of humility:what you really are (are like, are worth), not where you stand relative to someone else. But I don't see that the dif­ference between the German and English words will affect my conclusions. Human worth is almost always relational: what you are worth compared to someone else, what recognition you demand from the other or else grant to the other.

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra II.4,“On the Priests.”

See Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, I.1.

It is often noted that the word hupokrites meant nothing more than “respondent” or “actor” before its transformation in Biblical Greek into “dissembler.”The first appearances of the word meaning “hypo­crite” are the Septuagint translation ofJob 34.30 and then the Greek text of Matthew 23.13.

Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, III.8. Note that in this passage Nietzsche cannot mean humility in rela­tional terms. This passage sees the faux humility of the philosopher as shyness and withdrawal, which do not imply or require deference toward others.

On humility and solitude see Mark Alfano, Nietzsche's Moral Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). In section 10.2 “Solitude in virtue theory and Nietzsche scholarship,” Alfano draws out the connection between solitude and humility: “it's worth noting that on the few occasions when Nietzsche speaks positively about humility, he does so in the context of solitude.” Alfano cites Daybreak 449, Gay Science 283.

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II.22 “The Quietest Hour.”

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 4.3: megalopsychia “greatness of soul,” 1123a36-1125a35; comparison to small people, 1123b5-7.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 4.3 1123b13.

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, IV. 13.3 “On the Higher HumansETranslation my own.

Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, III.13.Translation my own.

Plato, Gorgias: Callicles withdraws, 505c-d; Socrates asks and answers questions, 506c-e; on having more versus asking for big shoes, 490a-e.

Plato, Gorgias: Callicles on morality's shackles, 483b-484c; the natural force who can overcome law, 484a. E. R. Dodds, Plato: Gorgias (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), pp. 387-391.

Kristian Urstad spells out other similarities between Callicles and Nietzsche in “Nietzsche and Callicles on Happiness, Pleasure, and Power,” Kritike 4.2 (2010): 133-141. Given the purpose of that article it naturally seeks out the points of resemblance between their ethics; I find it notable that Urstad focuses on moral psychology and individual ethos, and observes distinct differences in the two men's social and political theories. Special thanks to Sara Pope for recommending this reading to me and pointing out where it touches my argument.

Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals: man who can promise, II.2; oppressors, II.17; beasts of prey, I.11.

I have argued for the continuity between Callicles and Raskolnikov in “Crime and Punishment Rereading and Rewriting Plato's Gorgias”Journal Mundo Eslavo 16 (2017): 192-198.

Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals III.14.

Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals I.10.

Heinrich Goebel and Ernest Antrim,“Friedrich Nietzsche's Uebermensch," The Monist 9.4 (1899): 563-571, at 570.

See e.g. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, I.7-I.9.

Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, I.13.

C. D. C. Reeve, Aristotle Physics (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2018), pp. 244-245. Reeve is explaining Physics 3.3 202b20-21, with reference to Nicomachean Ethics 3.8 1116a29-b2 and 6.13 1144b1-32.

See e.g. Genealogy of Morals I.6 on the more interesting quality of the human after the slave revolt. Nietzsche DaybreakThoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, edited by Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter; translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), section 38.

This might be a commonplace about the book but I haven't come across it. In II.13 Nietzsche resists the assumption that a noun like “punishment” means any single thing ahistorically, and in III.13 will unravel the preposition “against” in the phrase “life against life,” to show that it conceals a very different relationship. No longer is the word the beginning.

Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, I.13.

Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, I.14; compare I.13.

Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, III.14. Emphases in original.

Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals III.13.

Aristotle, Poetics 22 1458a20, 32.

Aristotle: too many foreign words, Poetics 22 1458a20-31; metaphors making ainigma, Poetics 22 l458a24-26; metaphor enhancing learning, Rhetoric 3.10 1410b8-14.

Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, III.19. See Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967).

See also Beyond Good and Evil, section 249:“Every people has its own tartufferies, and calls them its virtues.” Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 140.

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 44 (section 45). See my “Morality Gags,” The Monist 88 (2005): 52-71.

Ibid., p. 60, section 81.

I use the verb “scream” in recognition of Heidegger's acute description of Nietzsche — more psycho­logically sensitive than we might expect Heidegger to be — as shy yet forced to scream. See Was heisst Denken? [What is Called Thinking?], Lecture 5.

See GM II.16 on instincts' being turned back in the kind of inner conflict that Essay III will refuse. Self-punishment begins with a punishing self and one being punished, hence with the paradox of “life against life.”

Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, I.13.

Mark 3.28—30.