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any random sample of his writings the entirety of his philosophy can almost be reconstructed.

There is a theory that our memory is stored in protein molecules, of which in each of us there is an immense number. These molecules have the remarkable property of idempotency – of exactly reproducing themselves. According to the theory, the same messages are stored in various places throughout the body, so that, should one part be destroyed, the possibility remains that our memory will stand intact and will persist. The prodigality and idempotency of the protein molecules might almost be taken as a providential piece of insurance against the destruction of the self. Nietzsche’s extravagantly numerous, yet oddly repetitive aphorisms, dealing with the same problems in much the same way, seem to me to have had much the same result. New writings may be found and old ones restored, but it is difficult to suppose that they will furnish us with a philosophy different in any essential respect from the one we may find by carefully examining what we have (Danto 2005, 11–12, my emphasis).

      Danto rejects the possibility that the discovery of a final masterpiece could prompt him to repudiate his account of the themes central to Nietzsche’s writing, arguing that just as the idempotency of protein molecules can be taken as a sort of providential guarantee – as a sort of insurance – against the destruction of the self, so too can the apparently endless repetition of the same message in the writings we presently possess be taken as a sort of providential guarantee against the possibility that any newly discovered text might express an essentially different message. Although providence, here, need not be divine, but simply the manifestation of good fortune, the effectively prophetic implication of Danto’s assured tone and diction is clear: we more or less know in advance the philosophical content of any newly discovered late writing, for that content is guaranteed, in advance, by Nietzsche’s “oddly repetitive aphorisms.” Danto denies that we can know how the plot of a novel will evolve before we finish reading it for the first time, and thus what meaning retrospectively to assign to earlier episodes, yet his idempotency argument suggests that we can confidently identify the basic philosophical content of a not yet discovered, not yet read late magnum opus, and thus know what significance retrospectively to assign, say, to Nietzsche’s middle period writings. Notice that, while the idempotency argument cuts against the proposition that the philosophical content of Nietzsche writings will vary with the temporal location of the interpreter, it is consistent with the thesis that the moment Nietzsche settled on a solution to some particular philosophical problem he committed himself to an unvarying philosophical content – a thesis Danto echoes when he writes “that from any random sample of his writings the entirety of his philosophy can almost be reconstructed.” Notice too that, contrary to his admission that retrospective interpretation altered his readings of Daybreak and Human, All Too Human, the idempotency argument implies that reading early or middle period writings in light of the late writings we presently possess can be no more illuminating than reading them in light of undiscovered, still to be read late writings whose content we presume, for the meaning we discover in any late writing in view of which we retrospectively interpret earlier work is destined to be but the reiterated, mirror image of what we had already found in earlier writings.

      I have suggested that Danto’s “idempotency” argument rules out the possibility that the discovery of a late masterpiece by Nietzsche could yield a retrospective account of the philosophical content of his writings that diverged from Danto’s account. Danto means to persuade us that Nietzsche’s thought has an unvarying philosophical content. But why? What motivates Danto to press this thesis?

My answer draws from the “Preface” to Nietzsche as Philosopher: Expanded Edition. Recalling a group of Pearl River youths who, drawing inspiration from Nietzsche, went on “a rampage of murder and brutality,” Danto characterizes Nietzsche as an “intemperate prophet” and a “dangerous” moral voice – figuratively, as a “Minotaur.” He adds that, by reading Nietzsche as a philosopher, he means to turn Nietzsche’s arguments “against themselves, to blunt his language,” thus, to construct a philosophical “labyrinth,” in effect, an “anti-Nietzschean philosophy from within Nietzsche’s philosophy itself” that would serve to confine and “disarm” the “rabid” Minotaur and to neutralize the “vivid frightening images that have inspired sociopaths for over a century” (Danto 2005, xiii–xviii).

      Danto’s containment strategy might work, but only if it is reasonable to regard Nietzsche’s writings as setting forth claims and arguments that have a fixed, unchanging, philosophical content that an interpreter can identify, target, and pen in without worrying that the animal he thinks he has trapped is to be found elsewhere, or, perhaps, in more than one place or time. If we suppose, however, that legitimate interpretations of Nietzsche’s writings can proceed by means of historical understanding, then the strategy makes no sense, for the philosophical content that historical understanding attributes to Nietzsche’s writing will vary with the topical interests and temporal location of the interpreter. Perhaps sensing this, and wanting to deny to Nietzsche the Ariadne’s thread that would lead his thought out of a constructed labyrinth of philosophical systematicity, Danto insists that Nietzsche’s writings must always be the same, bound to enact a recurrence of the same, in order to preclude the possibility of retrospective interpretations different than his own.⁵ Having adduced the idea of historical understanding to authorize his reading of Nietzsche, Danto implicitly concedes that, due to its variability, historical understanding is in principle a threat to the frozen picture of Nietzsche’s philosophical thought he wants to promote.

      Notes

      1 1 Thanks to Ed Casey, Dan Conway, Lydia Goehr and Jonathan Fine for comments.

      2 2 All references to Nietzsche as Philosopher are to the “Expanded Edition.”

      3 3 All references to the text of Analytical Philosophy of History are to the 2007 edition of Narration and Knowledge, which was originally published in 1985, and which includes the integral text of Analytical Philosophy of History.

      4 4 Danto’s effort to separate the philosophical analysis of Nietzsche’s writings from both author psychology and the study of the effects of those writings strongly echoes Monroe C. Beardsley’s and William K. Wimsatt’s famous effort to separate the critical analysis of poems from both author psychology and the study of a poem’s effects. See, in this connection, Beardsley’s and Wimsatt’s criticisms of the intentional and affective fallacies in Wimsatt 1954.

      5 5 In at least one place, Danto himself follows an Ariadne’s thread out of the labyrinth he otherwise constructs around Nietzsche’s writing, and that is when he reads Nietzsche not as a philosopher but as a therapist. There is an irony about this reading, however, for the Nietzsche who emerges is not a Minotaur-like monster, but a thinker who, like the philosopher, Danto, would turn his readers away from the temptations of prophecy and substantive philosophy of history (see Danto 2005, 251–67).

      References

      1 Abbey, Ruth. 2000. Nietzsche’s Middle Period. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

      2 Danto, Arthur C. 1964. “Nietzsche.” In A Critical History of Western Philosophy, edited by Daniel John O’Connor, 384–401. New York: Free Press.

      3 ———. 2005. Nietzsche as Philosopher: Expanded Edition. New York: Columbia University Press.

      4 ———. 2007. Narration and Knowledge, with a New Introduction by Lydia Goehr and a New Conclusion by Frank Ankersmit. New York: Columbia University Press.

      5 Goehr, Lydia. 2007. “Afterwords: An Introduction to Arthur Danto’s Narration and Knowledge.” In Arthur C. Danto, Narration and Knowledge, with a New Introduction by Lydia Goehr and Frank Ankersmit. New York: Columbia University Press, xix–lvii.

      6 Gooding-Williams, Robert. 2001. Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

      7 Wimsatt, William, Jr. 1954. The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky.

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