In his preface to Nietzsche as Philosopher, Arthur Danto writes, appropriately enough given Nietzsche's understanding of himself as a seafaring discoverer, a new Columbus setting sail for uncharted seas: "His language would have been less colorful had he known what he was trying to say, but then he would not have been the original thinker he was, working through a set of problems which had hardly been charted before. Small wonder his maps are illustrated, so to speak, with all sorts of monsters and fearful indications and boastful cartographic embellishments!" This suggests that the special color of Nietzsche's discourse is inseparable from his failure to know what he was trying to say, a failure Danto links to Nietzsche's originality as a thinker.

Writing from the perspective of contemporary analytical philosophy, Danto insists that "we know a great deal more philosophy today." The seas Nietzsche first explored and sought to chart have apparently become much more familiar. Danto also suggests that we have a better understanding of what a philosophical sea chart should look like: such charts have no room for "monsters and fearful indications and boastful cartographic embellishments." The color of Nietzsche's prose is here tied to what makes it nonphilosophical.

But do we in fact know our way by now in the seas Nietzsche was trying to chart? And do we know what makes a discourse philosophical? Danto admits that his way of reading Nietzsche from a contemporary perspective "may precipitate some anachronisms" but claims that the progress of philosophy places us in a position to understand what is philosophically important in Nietzsche better than he himself was able to do; that to read Nietzsche as a philosopher, we may have to do violence to his texts, where such violence would be the price we have to pay if we are to grasp what in Nietzsche's work remains philosophically alive. But what sort of life is this?

Nietzsche himself insisted on the untimeliness of his writings. "The time for me hasn't come yet: some are born posthumously… It would contradict my character entirely if I expected ears and hands for my truths today: that today one doesn't accept my ideas is not only understandable, it even seems right to me."

Do we now have ears and hands for Nietzsche's truths? Nietzsche remarks on the innocence of some professor in Berlin who "suggested very amiably that I ought to try another form: nobody read such things." Since then, taking up this professor's amiable challenge, countless interpreters have tried to recast what Nietzsche wrote into a more readily understood idiom, to make what he was trying to express more accessible. But, before we engage in such exercise in translation, we would do well to consider Nietzsche's insistence on the gap that separates the kind of reader he demanded from the readers available to him. Having understood six sentences of Zarathustra, Nietzsche claims, "would raise one to a higher level of existence than 'modern' man could attain." Nietzsche demands "postmodern" readers. Can we claim to be those readers? Should we even want to be such readers?

It is easy to reply that, when Nietzsche speaks of the untimeliness of his books, he is speaking in boastful hyperbole, especially in Ecce Homo, written on the edge of madness. And does he not go on to insist that he was speaking only of Germany? "Everywhere else I have readers—nothing but first-rate intellects and proven characters, trained in high positions and duties." He even mentions New York as one of the places where he has been discovered. Pain and irony are difficult to overhear.

But what kind of readers was Nietzsche looking for? His answer deserves our careful attention:

When I imagine a perfect reader, he always turns into a monster of courage and curiosity; moreover, supple, cunning, cautious; a born adventurer and discoverer. In the end, I could say no better to whom alone I am speaking at bottom than Zarathustra said it: to whom alone will he relate his riddle?

"To you, the bold searchers, researchers, and whoever embarks with cunning sails on terrible seas—to you, drunk with riddles, glad of the twilight, whose soul flutes lure astray to every whirlpool, because you do not want to grope along a thread with cowardly hand; and where you can guess, you hate to deduce.…"

Such reading is difficult to reconcile with the kind of exploration and cartography Danto has in mind. This seafarer's monstrous texts demand monstrous readers, fearless sailors.

It is of course possible and instructive to read Nietzsche very differently, for example, from the perspective of contemporary analytical philosophy. But its style cannot do justice to Nietzsche's style, which must call the analytical approach into question. Not that other approaches, say a neo-Kantian approach or one indebted to Heidegger's fundamental ontology, are more likely to prove adequate. The difficulty is bound up rather with the very attempt to domesticate Nietzsche's monstrous texts by translating them into a philosophical idiom with which we are more at home and therefore more comfortable. Such translation may well help us to appropriate what Nietzsche has written, but we should ask ourselves whether such appropriation is not also a defense against a style and a thinking that puts the philosophy guarded by professional philosophers into question.

Just this, I want to suggest, makes Nietzsche a philosopher. In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein remarks that philosophical problems have the form "I don't know my way about." To be sure, not all problems having this form are therefore philosophical—to have lost one's way in some unfamiliar city hardly suffices to make one a philosopher. But in such cases our disorientation is only superficial. To reorient ourselves, we can fall back on a deeper and unchallenged understanding of where we are and what is to be done. Philosophy cannot fall back on such an understanding. The fundamental question of philosophy is, Where is man's place? Philosophy is born of a sense of homelessness that is inseparable from the insistence that man act and think for himself. At the center of philosophy thus lies an ethical concern born of the demand that we assume responsibility for our actions and the consequent refusal to rest content with what has come to be established, accepted, and taken for granted. Man's claim to autonomy forces him to put into question the authority of history and the place it has assigned to him. Philosophy is thus a critical enterprise. Not that this critique can rely on firmly established criteria. Quite the contrary—philosophy remains alive only as long as the question, What is man's place, his ethos? continues to be asked, because that place remains questionable, because man's vocation remains ambiguous. Once this ground of philosophy in radical questioning is recognized, the "monsters" and "cartographic embellishments" that are so much part of Nietzsche's maps will no longer seem eliminable ornaments that, born of fear and narcissistic boasting, only obscure what is philosophically significant. They challenge not only all philosophers who feel confident of their place and way, but also, and more important, our common sense. Measured by that common sense, what Nietzsche has to tell us may often seem nonsense. But this is a risk someone who would challenge common sense has to run. We serve Nietzsche ill when, refusing his challenge, we try to show that there is a quite acceptable sense behind such apparent nonsense. His teaching of the eternal recurrence, whose first statement in Zarthusta the lines cited in Ecce Homo serve to introduce, provides a key example. Citing these lines as he does to describe his perfect reader, Nietzsche suggests that, like that questionable doctrine, in some sense all he has written is a riddle demanding to be read by sailors.

The following remarks examine only that brief introduction in the hope that such an examination will shed some light on the profoundly questionable and, just because of this, philosophical character of Nietzsche's texts and of the demands this places on his readers.

Hermeneutics has taught us that we cannot really understand the meaning of a part until we have grasped its place in the whole to which it belongs. As Heidegger insists, interpretation (Erliduterung) cannot be separated from consideration of the place of what is being interpreted (Erdrterung). Such consideration is especially important when we are seeking to understand a writer as preoccupied with the importance of setting and point of view, as fond of masks and self-dramatization, as aware of the importance of style and mood as Nietzsche. What then is the place of these introductory words?

The narrative of Zarathustra gives a first answer: the words are spoken by Zarathustra on a ship that is carrying him from the blessed isles back to the land of his mountain and his cave.

The words are spoken by Zarathustra. But who is Zarathustra? In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche tells his readers that to understand the Zarathustra type "one must first become clear about his physiological presupposition: this is what I call the great health." This suggests that the place from which these introductory words are spoken is defined by "the great health."

There is an obvious objection: the words are spoken, after all, not just by Zarathustra, but by Zarathustra at a particular stage of his development, a Zarathustra who is coming home, still sick, still struggling to cure himself of the spirit of revenge, of "the will's ill will against time and its 'it was,'" still troubled by the soothsayer's "all is empty, all is the same, all has been," still resisting the thought of the eternal recurrence that, while still unspoken, yet haunts him, not yet "The Convalescent" ready to affirm himself as its teacher—a Zarathustra, in short, who is not only literally but spiritually at sea, bearing "riddles and bitternesses in his heart," a voyager in search of himself.

How then are we to understand the suggestion that the place from which these words are spoken is "the great health"? In just what sense is this great health the presupposition of the Zarathustra type? Was that type born of such health? It would seem not, for, as Nietzsche tells us in the immediately preceding section, the Zarathustra type overtook him when he felt not at all well, in that cold and rainy winter of 1882-83 he spent in Rapallo, on walks he took whenever his frail health permitted. Like the words Zarathustra addresses to his sailors, all Zarathustra, and perhaps all Nietzsche's writings, are the work of a sick man. And yet, does this mean that their place may not also be that state of being Nietzsche calls "the great health"? "Health and sickliness: one should be careful! The standard remains the efflorescence of the body, the agility, courage, and cheerfulness of spirit—but also, of course, how much of the sickly it can take upon itself and overcome—how much it can make healthy. That of which more delicate men would perish belongs to the stimulants of the great health."

To explain this "great health," Ecce Homo quotes in its entirety the penultimate section of The Gay Science, which carries that phrase as its title. This section, too, is spoken by someone who needs and desires rather than possesses health: "Being new, nameless, difficult to understand, we premature births of an as yet unproven future, we need for a new goal also a new means—namely, a new health, stronger, more seasoned, tougher, more audacious, and gayer than any previous health." "Premature births of an as yet unproven future" once more suggests not health but a precarious state of being, precarious because that world in which it could thrive has yet to arrive, and may indeed never arrive. Presupposed is a dissatisfaction with the present age that is inseparable from a still worldless call to a different way of being issuing from beyond that age. He who heeds that call becomes "new, nameless, difficult to understand." Once again Nietzsche invokes the image of the sailor:

And now, after we have long been on our way in this manner, we argonauts of the ideal, with more daring perhaps than is prudent, and have suffered shipwreck and damage often enough, but are, to repeat it, healthier than one likes to permit us, dangerously healthy, ever again healthy—it will seem to us as if, as a reward, we now confronted an as yet undiscovered country, whose boundaries nobody has surveyed yet, something beyond all the lands and nooks of the ideal so far, a world overrich in what is beautiful, strange, questionable, terrible, and divine that our curiosity as well as our craving to possess it has got beside itself—alas, now nothing will sate us any more!

Nietzsche's great health is the health required of a Jason, an Odysseus, or a Columbus, of a seafarer who, for the sake of the promise of some not yet discovered country is eager to surrender the comfort and the security of the familiar, ready to risk pain and even death, and who will not be sated. This refusal of satisfaction, of the old ideal of being at one with oneself, whole, entire, helps to define the great health.

The above discussion of the great health ends with the words "the tragedy begins," referring the reader back to section 342 of The Gay Science, which is virtually identical with the opening paragraphs of "Zarathustra's Prologue." The beginning of Zarathustrs is the beginning of tragedy, where we should keep in mind the hopes associated with tragedy in The Birth of Tragedy, the place of this book, which sought to locate the roots of the ills of our age in Socrates' optimistic embrace of both reason and the ideal of satisfaction and looked both backward and forward to tragedy as to a cure. Nietzsche's great health does not exclude suffering, disease, and death. Just the opposite, it affirms and appropriates them.

We learn more about the state of being Nietzsche calls the great health in The Genealogy of Morals, where he opposes it to the "evil eye" man has had all too long for his natural inclinations, for life, for the world, aspiring instead "to the beyond, to that which runs counter to sense, instinct, nature, animal." If this evil eye has supported "all ideals hitherto, which are one and all hostile to life and ideals that slander the world," Nietzsche would have us reverse this millennia-old tradition of self-torture in the name of "higher" values.

The attainment of this goal would require a different kind of spirit from that likely to appear in the present age: spirits strengthened by war and victory, for whom conquest, adventure, danger, and even pain have become needs; it would require habituation to the keen air of the heights, to winter journeys, to ice and mountains in every sense [the image of the mountain climber replaces here that of the seafaring discoverer]; it would require even a kind of sublime wickedness, an ultimate, supremely confident mischievousness in knowledge that goes with great health; it would require, in brief and alas, precisely this great health!

Nietzsche goes on to call for the person with great health as a redeemer not only from the reigning ethics of satisfaction but also from what was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism, and identifies him with Zarathustra. Redemption here should be understood in the light of Zarathustra's understanding of redemption as an overcoming of the spirit of revenge. The great health is understood in opposition to the spirit of revenge, to "the will's ill will against time and its 'it was,'" in opposition to the evil eye that has determined the shape of our culture and alienated us from ourselves.

The power that the spirit of revenge has over us is rooted in the temporality that constitutes our being, shadowing it with sad thoughts of losing all that we can call our own, even ourselves. Cast into a world that we have not chosen, vulnerable, mortal, too weak to secure even our own being, we find it difficult to accept ourselves as we are, especially difficult to accept what most insistently reminds us of our temporality, our corporality, and what is most intimately tied to it, such as sexual desire, hunger, disease, death. Willing power, lacking power, we find it hard to forgive ourselves that lack. So we turn against the reality that denies us power and that means also against ourselves. Seeking to escape the tyranny of time, which denies us what we so deeply desire, the spirit of revenge gives birth to another reality, a reality over which time has no power. Here, if Nietzsche is right, we must locate the origin of most religion and most philosophy.

Consider how Schopenhauer, represented by the soothsayer, whose gloomy pronouncements cast Zarathustra into such profound despondency, speaks of time [in The World as Will and Representation]:

In time each moment is, only in so far as it has effaced its father, the preceding moment, to be again effaced just as quickly itself. Past and future (apart from the consequences of their content) are as empty and unreal as any dream; but present is only the boundary between the two, having neither extension nor duration. In just the same way, we shall also recognize the same emptiness in all the other forms of the principle of sufficient reason, and shall see that, like time, space also, and like this, everything that exists simultaneously in space and time, and hence everything that proceeds from causes and motives, has only a relative existence, is only through and for another like itself, i. e., only just as enduring.

Lack is constitutive of what we call reality. Reality knows no genuine plentitude. There is no presence we can really possess, no satisfaction that is not eroded and overtaken by time. What we so deeply want, to be at one with ourselves, is denied to us by what we are:

Essentially, it is all the same whether we pursue or flee, fear harm or aspire to enjoyment; care for the constantly demanding will, no matter in what form, continually fills and moves consciousness; but without peace and calm, true well-being is absolutely impossible. Thus the subject of willing is constantly lying on the revolving wheel of Ixion, is always drawing water in the sieve of the Danaids, and is the eternally thirsting Tantalus.

To slake this thirst, the spirit of revenge gives birth to another reality that invites dreams of superhuman happiness, constructs "afterworlds," realms of being beyond becoming that promise the plenitude and presence that this world denies, a security not subject to the terror of time, that allow for genuine satisfaction, be it only the satisfaction of really knowing something. But the ideal of a satisfaction that stills care and desire has to turn against the very condition of our being. On reflection, all such ideals turn out to be metaphors of death, directed against life. Here, we have the source of that sickness which the great health would overcome. The great health names a mode of existing that has renounced the ideal of satisfaction, a mode in which it is important to keep in mind the way this ideal has shaped not only religion but philosophy, and not only moral philosophy but metaphysics and the theory of knowledge, to the extent that these have thought being and truth to be against time.

The very language of philosophy is governed by the spirit of revenge. Consider once more Danto's suggestion that Nietzsche's language would have been less colorful had he known what he was trying to say. What do we mean when we say that someone knows what he is trying to say? Presupposed is a distinction between thought and its linguistic expression. To know something is to have grasped the truth of some thought. Inseparable from such knowledge is the knowledge that what I know does not need to be expressed in just this way. The special color of a discourse comes to be understood as an at best dispensable, more often distracting, ornament. Knowledge is best served by a discourse not so tied to the particular perspective of an individual or a group that, without it, it loses its meaning. So understood, knowledge demands objectivity, and objectivity demands translatability. Ideally, the medium of words should become totally transparent; language should be like clear glass so that it offers no resistance to the understanding as it appropriates what is to be understood. The "whiteness" of scientific discourse answers to this ideal.

Nietzsche could have replied that this ideal of a transparent language that does not contaminate the purity of our thoughts is just as much a chimera as the ideal of a transparent body that would not contaminate the chaste purity of our spirit. Both ideals prevent us from doing justice, to language in one case, to human being in the other. And in both cases the desire for purity presupposes that evil eye of which the great health is to cure us.

To say that the place from which Zarathustra tells his riddle is the great health is not to deny that the speaker is still fighting the poison left in him by the tarantula's bite, still struggling with the spirit of revenge, still trying to shake off the soothsayer's gloomy teaching; but it is to say that this struggle is illuminated by the possibility of a yes to time and all that is temporal, of a yes to the body, to hunger and disease, even to death. By choosing just this passage to describe his relationship to his perfect reader, Nietzsche invites us to understand him as someone still sick with revenge, still trying to renounce the ideal of satisfaction and the nihilism which is the unmasking of that ideal, but also haunted by another, still unnamed ideal as by a riddle, in love with life and full of hope.

As he likens himself to a seafaring explorer, Nietzsche likens his perfect reader to a sailor. Like his Zarathustra, he addresses his words to "bold searchers, researchers, and whoever embarks with cunning sails on terrible seas," who "drunk with riddles, glad of the twilight," are lured astray by flutes "to every whirlpool."

[Nietzsche translator Walter] Kaufmann's "searchers, researchers" fails to capture the challenge of the word play Sucher, Versucher, which calls attention to the prefix ver and helps to interpret the nature of the search Nietzsche would have his reader be engaged in. Versuchen means first of all "to attempt." To make a Versuch is to try something, uncertain of whether such trial will prove a success. A scientific experiment is a Versuch in this sense. We engage in experiments to test our conjectures; such testing presupposes a readiness to retract one's presuppositions and to rethink one's assumptions. Nietzsche's texts invite such hermeneutic experimentation.

But Versucher means first of all not a scientific researcher but a tempter. The devil, who tempted Adam and Eve with the promise that their eyes would be opened and they would be like God, knowing good and evil, is the Versucher. Nietzsche's sailors, it would seem, are of the devil's party, tempted by and tempting with the promise of truth. But the devil is only the mask in which Dionysus presents himself to Christians subject to the spirit of revenge, this "tempter god and born pied piper of consciences whose voice knows how to descend into the netherworld of every soul," this god of explorers and philosophers to whom Nietzsche offered his firstborn as "a sacrifice."

Called by Dionysus, Nietzsche's sailors, too, are possessed of "that sublime inclination of the seeker after knowledge who insists on profundity, multiplicity, and thoroughness, with a will which is a kind of cruelty of the intellectual conscience and taste" and which counters the "will to mere appearance, to simplification, to masks, to cloaks, in short to the surface." Better than perhaps any other philosopher, Nietzsche knows about the importance of being superficial: "Anyone who has looked deeply into the world may guess how much wisdom lies in the superficiality of men. The instinct that preserves them teaches them to be flighty, light, and false." But if there is a superficiality in the service of life, and our ordinary concern for truth is superficial in this sense, there is also a superficiality born of a fear of life, a pursuit of truth born of fear of a deeper truth.

Already in The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche had located in just such a fear the origin of our culture, a culture shaped by the "sublime metaphysical illusion" that "thought, using the thread of logic, can penetrate the deepest abysses of being, and that thought is capable not only of knowing being but even of correcting it." Man's will to power here blinds him to the lack of power constitutive of his being and thus alienates him from his own reality, from his life. Such a Socratic-Cartesian culture needs "to translate man back into nature; to become master over the many vain and overly enthusiastic interpretations and connotations that have so far been scrawled and painted over the eternal basic text of Homo natura; to see to it that man henceforth stands before man as even today, hardened in the discipline of science, he stands before the rest of nature, with intrepid Oedipus eyes and sealed Odysseus ears, deaf to the siren songs of old metaphysical bird catchers who have been piping at him all too long, 'you are more, you are higher, you are of different origin!'"

The basic text Nietzsche would have us interpret is Homo natura. His own texts serve such interpretation first of all as a restorer's solvents would, which help to "translate" a painting disfigured by what later generations have painted and scrawled over it back into its original state. Such "translation" is fraught with danger. Instead of allowing us to recover the original, it may only destroy it. And can we even be sure that there is an original to be recovered?

How are we to understand Nietzsche's expression "the eternal basic text of Homo natura" ? This suggests that in principle it is possible to read human nature as one reads a text, even if countless translations have so obscured the original that our interpretation has to be at the same time an archeological excavation. But will such excavation yield a Grundtext [original text] ? Has not Nietzsche himself taught us to be wary of any philosopher who would base his teaching on such a Grund [ground]?

Nietzsche knows that there is something profoundly unnatural about the refusal to remain with superficial appearance, about the insistence to descend to the Grund, the claim to a wisdom deeper than common sense. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche thus says of Oedipus that, precisely because he possessed such wisdom, because he was able to solve the riddle of the Sphinx, he had to fall into a whirlpool of unnatural deeds. Nietzsche knows that to want to solve the riddle of the Sphinx is already to have fallen out of the natural order. But just Oedipus's refusal to remain on the surface, a refusal that subverts the natural order and the moral world and lets Oedipus blind himself, issues in a more profound vision that prepares the foundation of a new world on the ruins of the old.

Nietzsche demands such courage of his readers. This courage requires us to be deaf to the siren song that places man's essence beyond nature and time. Nietzsche's reference to the seafaring Odysseus in this place would appear to involve a misreading, for Odysseus did not seal his own ears with wax but those of his fellow sailors. Lashed to the mast, he listened to the siren's songs, as Nietzsche himself listened all too eagerly to the siren song of eternity, as his teaching of the eternal recurrence demonstrates; and it is tempting to link the disaster that overtook him to the absence of those who would tie him to some mast. But, like Odysseus, Nietzsche would seal the ears of his fellow sailors to this siren song, as he would seal his own ears were he only able to do so. We should not forget that, when Nietzsche speaks of standing before the riddle that is man with intrepid Oedipus eyes and sealed Odysseus ears, he is stating a task. Thus, he would also want his readers open to what lies beneath the surface of his texts, its ambiguities, its multivalence, open to the absence of a single unspoken meaning that could gather this text into a whole, to a chaos of affects only superficially gathered into a whole.

Sich versuchen can also mean to lose one's way while searching, as the wise Oedipus, searching, loses his place in the natural and moral order—and Nietzsche liked to think of the genuine philosopher in the image of Oedipus. Wittgenstein, as we saw, understands the philosopher as someone who has lost his way; he is, we can say, einer, der sich versucht hat. The existence of a method that would provide us with a way of solving all philosophical problems would mean the end of philosophy. Nietzsche's sailors are philosophers precisely because they demand the questionable for their horizon. To open our eyes to this horizon, and this also means to recall us to life, is one goal of Nietzsche's reflections. This goal is quite the opposite of that of Wittgenstein, who tried to show that the philosopher is someone who has allowed himself to become bewitched by language: as the unity "of language and the activities into which it is woven" that organizes ordinary language is destroyed, language begins to "idle" or "go on a holiday." Wittgenstein, too, rejects the metaphysician's promise of a terra firma. The would be terra firma of philosophers is unmasked as no more than a castle in the clouds. But the point of such unmasking is to return us to the language games of the everyday as the only ground given to us: Wir legen den Grund der Sprachefrei (we are clearing up the ground of language).

If Wittgenstein would recall philosophers from their airy heights back to the earth, Nietzsche would set them afloat by shaking their confidence, not only in metaphysical construction but also in those language games to which Wittgenstein would have us turn as to a ground, not, however, to replace it with some other terra firma but to render the very idea of such a ground questionable. Nietzsche, too, calls words "the seducers of philosophers," who are likened to fish struggling in the nets of language. But instead of giving up this struggle. Nietzsche tears at this net to open us to what more immediately claims and moves us than all words, to open us to the sea, to life. Nietzsche's style is a tearing of language in the service of life. If Nietzsche's sailors are impatient with what is generally accepted and taken for granted, this is because they are haunted by the promise of a life richer than all common sense, richer also than philosophy, and haunted also by the possibility of a philosophy that, unlike all philosophy born of the spirit of revenge, would interpret and justify that life. Such a philosophy would not claim to have discovered a new terra firma. It would not be a philosophy for all times, nor would it be for everyone. It would be a necessarily precarious Versuch to answer the riddle of life with a discourse that would allow us to interpret it as a meaningful whole while yet aware that all such understanding must do violence to what it seeks to understand and that it therefore should not be dogmatic. Life overflows every interpretation. All the moral philosopher can furnish are precarious perspectives: "The moral earth, too, is round! The moral earth, too, has its antipodes! The antipodes, too, have their right to exist! There still is another world to be discovered—and more than one! Board the ships, you philosophers!"

Nietzsche knows that his call challenges the way philosophers have understood their task as one of securing human existence and more especially the project of knowledge by placing them on firm ground. Think of Hegel's famous suggestion that it is only with Descartes's establishment of the cogito as an unshakable foundation that "the education, the thinking of our age begins." "Here, we can say, we are at home and like the sailor, after long journeying about the raging sea, call 'land.'" Hegel describes Descartes as the thinker who marks the beginning of the end of philosophy's age of discovery, which, if philosophy requires the horizon of the questionable, heralds the end of philosophy. And, as a lover of truth, must the philosopher not welcome that end? Must he not be impatient with riddles and insist on clearly framed problems that leave no doubt as to what constitutes a satisfactory solution? Must he not be glad of a light that allows us to see things as they are, distrustful of a twilight that renders ambiguous, inviting us to mistake one thing for another, distrustful of that adventurism Nietzsche practices as a writer and demands of his readers? To Nietzsche, we can oppose Kant, who, in the Critique of Pure Reason, presents himself not as an adventurous seafarer but as a sober explorer on firm land:

We have now not merely explored the territory of pure understanding, and carefully surveyed every part of it, but have also measured its extent, and assigned to everything in it its rightful place. This domain is an island, enclosed by nature itself within unalterable limits. It is the land of truth—enchanting name!—surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank and many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with empty hopes, and engaging him in enterprises which he can never abandon and yet is unable to carry to completion.

The Critique of Pure Reason is written against such philosophical adventurism, and Kant was confident that his transcendental recasting of metaphysics heralded its imminent completion, which he expected to have been accomplished before the end of his century. Kant knows about the lure of the sea, about our dissatisfaction with the land given us to survey and cultivate, about a proud freedom that would have us seize what our finitude denies us; there is something in us that resists the completion he promises and insists on the sublimity of the questionable, even on the terrible. Kant, however, would have us resist the siren songs of the questionable.

But does this island to which Kant gives the "enchanting name" "the land of truth" deserve that title? Nietzsche might have asked whether Kant does not allow himself here to be enchanted by our natural tendency to transform that place where we happen to be, the way we happen to think, into a terra firma. Does Kant's "land of truth" even deserve to be called an island? Is it not rather a ship, perhaps even one whose timbers are beginning to rot and give way? And who is to say that such a shipwreck would be a disaster?

That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together again in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuitions rather than by concepts.

What Kant considers firm land is to Nietzsche a floating prison. To open philosophy to life, to the sea, Nietzsche's discourse challenges ossified and taken-for-granted ways of speaking; semantic oppositions and collisions deny us the security of what is expected and accepted, opening up the horizon of the questionable.

But is Kant not right to warn us against trying to journey beyond the land of truth? Truth demands the liberation from the rule of perspective and the all-too-subjective; it demands objectivity. Objectivity, again, demands a discourse as free as possible from the colors added to what is thought by care and desire. Forsaking so readily the part of the suitor of truth, does Nietzsche not become "only fool, only poet"? Nietzsche could reply that it is just because he remains a suitor of truth that he has to challenge Kant's claim to have put an end to speculative metaphysics with his Copernican revolution and to have charted the boundaries of the land of truth once and for all. Are Kant's transcendental subject and the correlative idea of a knowledge of objects, which is free from perspectival distortion, not fantastic constructions? Can human thinking free itself from its subjective point of view and inherited prejudice? Herder already had protested both the elision of the concrete person and of language in The Critique of Pure Reason, insisting that we are always bound by what happens to be our nature, that we think with words, not concepts, and that we cannot think in a language other than our own. Thought will never become pure or innocent. There is no language unburdened by past prejudice, no intuition free from the distortion of perspective, no presence not hopelessly entangled in what remains concealed, absent, mysterious. Does the pursuit of truth not demand that we open ourselves to this mystery which our understanding vainly seeks to master? Kant's revolution can be charged with having been insufficiently Copernican. The progress of transcendental reflection since Kant, which has sought to bring Kant's transcendental structures down to earth, can be understood as a response to Nietzsche's call: "Board the ships, you philosophers!"

In this connection, it is interesting to note that Copernicus himself, citing Virgil, relies on the metaphor of the seafarer who is oblivious to his ship's movement to explain and thereby disarm his reader's reluctance to acknowledge that it is the earth that moves and revolves around its axis, and not the firmament: "The relation is similar to that of which Virgil's Aeneas says, 'We sail out of the harbor, and the countries and cities recede.' For when a ship is sailing along quietly, everything which is outside of it will appear to those on board to have a motion corresponding to the movement of the ship; and the voyagers are of the erroneous opinion that they with all they have with them are at rest." Nietzsche's choppy discourse intends to make the reader's sailing less smooth and thus to let him become aware that our language and the conceptual frames we have raised on it are rather like a ship, that with our words and concepts we do not stand on firm land but are indeed at sea.

If Kant is enchanted by the name "land of truth," Zarathustra's sailors, "drunk with riddles, glad of the twilight," have experienced the very different enchantment of flutes that beckon them to every whirlpool. In The Gay Science, too, Nietzsche describes himself and those who are of his mind as "born guessers of riddles," who welcome the twilight of the setting of the sun of the old God. But this darkening of our world, with its ever deepening, ever more ominous shadows, does not fill him with dread but with a new cheerfulness. That cheerfulness lets him invert the traditional light metaphor: what to those still bound to the dead God must seem a sad and gloomy twilight will appear to those stretched out between present and future "like a new, scarcely describable kind of light, happiness, relief, exhilaration, encouragement, dawn":

We philosophers and "free spirits" feel as if a new dawn were shining on us when we receive the tidings that "the old god is dead"; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, anticipation, expectation. At last the horizon appears free again to us, even granted that it is not bright; at last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an "open sea."

Zarathustra tells his vision and riddle to sailors, who, "because they do not want to grope along a thread with cowardly hand" and would rather guess than deduce, are lured astray to every whirlpool. These sailors then are very different from the culture hero Theseus, who, having sailed to Crete and slain the Minotaur, finds his way out of the labyrinth with the help of Ariadne's thread. Theseus and those like him are here condemned as cowards. Zarathustra, of whom Nietzsche says that he is more courageous than all other thinkers taken together, demands a very different audience: "How much truth does a spirit endure, how much truth does it dare? More and more that became for me the real measure of value. Error (faith in the ideal) is not blindness, error is cowardice." Nietzsche links this cowardice to the desire to deduce: deduction is a defense against truth, masking itself by claiming to serve truth.

"Deduce" is Kaufmann's translation of erschliessen. Erschliessen, however, means not so much "to deduce," which better translates schliessen ("to lock"), as it does "to unlock," "to open up," for example, land for cultivation by cutting roads into what was wilderness so that what was remote and mysterious is made accessible. Erschliessen is a first step toward taking possession. Thinking, too, may have that function. Think of Descartes's promise that his method would lead us to "know the force and action of fire, water, air, the stars, heavens and all bodies that environ us, as distinctly as we know the different crafts of the artisans" and thus render us "the masters and possessors of nature." Descartes presents himself to his readers as the Theseus of a culture founded on technology.

Zarathustra's sailors have come to question this culture. Inseparable from their questioning is a longing for the sea, for the labyrinth. Just as Zarathustra's sailors are lured by the whirlpool's abyss, so Nietzsche, in an earlier draft of Ecce Homo, speaks of the fascinated curiosity that draws him to the labyrinth, a curiosity, he suggests, that not only delights in the friendship of Ariadne but is also not afraid to make the acquaintance of the Minotaur, presumably not to slay it, as the culture hero Theseus did. Another passage makes the opposition to Theseus even clearer: "There are cases where what is needed is an Ariadne's thread leading into the labyrinth. He who has the task to bring on the great war, the war against the virtuous (—the good and virtuous Zarathustra calls them, also 'last men,' also 'beginning of the end'—) has to be willing to buy some experiences almost at any price; the price could even be the danger of losing oneself." What makes it so difficult for us to endure the truth about reality is the desire to hold on to ourselves. To hold on to ourselves, we also have to hold on to the world in which we exist, to comprehend it. Nietzsche grounds the desire for knowledge as this has been traditionally understood in the need for security. Security demands stability and order. This demand has to turn against all that is fleeting and confusing. So understood, the demand for knowledge has its telos in the defeat of chaos and time, of labyrinth and Minotaur.

The question is whether there is a reality beyond chaos and time that answers to what is here demanded or whether all such "realities" are only fictions born of cowardice, of an inability to affirm reality as it is.

Just as Nietzsche inverts the traditional valuation implied by the metaphors of land and sea, so he reverses the direction traditionally associated with Ariadne's thread, which he would have us follow back into the labyrinth. The significance of this reversal becomes clear when we compare Nietzsche's use of this figure with that of Descartes, who in the Rules offers the reader his newfound method as an Ariadne's thread that would lead him out of the labyrinth of fleeting appearance, where appearance is thought relative to the point in space and even more in time that the knowing subject is assigned by the perceiving body. To find our way out of this labyrinth we have to free ourselves from the rule of perspective. Reflection serves such liberation. To gain a more adequate grasp of nature, we must withdraw from the world that usually claims and moves us; to gain a more certain ground, we have to be willing to surrender the "ground" offered by common sense. Cartesian doubt is such a surrender which brackets our ordinary ways of knowing the world only in order to gain a more complete mastery over it.

If we are to master the world, we must discover in the world's heterogeneous multiplicity homogeneity and simplicity. To reflect is already to take a first step in this direction. By transforming the world of everyday experience into a collection of objects for a thinking subject, we establish that subject as the common measure of all these objects. As the subject comes to resemble a pure, disembodied, and dispassionate eye, the world comes to be like a picture. As long as this picture is seen or sensed, it remains relative to the sensing body and subject to the accident of its location in space and time: no more than a superficial appearance. To penetrate beneath that surface and to ensure access to reality, Descartes insists on a second reduction of experience. Now the thinking subject, not the "eye," is made the measure of what is. Reality is now equated with what presents itself to thought. So understood, reality is essentially without colors or sounds, tastes or smells. These belong only to its appearance, to the surface. Even subjected to this twofold reduction, reality might still prove too complex to be mastered by us. The demand for mastery leads thus inevitably to the transformation of what is to be mastered into a kind of mosaic: the world is to be analyzed into simple parts and then to be reconstructed out of these parts. Science may be understood as such reconstruction.

Descartes's statement of his method is an attempt to lay down the conditions that must be met if such reconstruction is to be possible. It has a counterpart in Wittgenstein's Tractatus, which brings out one consequence of such reconstruction; subjected to the requirements of such cognitive mastery, the world turns out to have no room for value: "In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value—and if there were, it would be of no value." This loss of value has its foundation in the very first reduction I have sketched, in the transformation of the self engaged in the world by care and desire into a subject that stands before a world of now mute facts, as before a picture. We begin to understand what is at issue when Nietzsche challenges, both as thinker and as writer, the pursuit of truth and the commitment to objectivity that is inseparable from it, as is the "whiteness" of scientific discourse. At issue is the meaning of human existence. Nihilism and the pursuit of truth, understood as the correspondence of our thoughts or propositions to the objects themselves, that is, as they are thought to exist independent of the colors and values with which desire and love, distaste and hatred have endowed them, are inextricably intertwined. Both have their foundation in a will to power that, to secure itself, has to so master its world that it renders it mute and colorless.

It is easy to challenge Descartes's confidence in his method, his faith that human beings are capable of the truth and able to fashion themselves into the masters and possessors of nature. Descartes himself raised the question of whether even his simple natures or clear and distinct ideas might not prove deceptive, and he tried to defeat such doubts with his proofs of the existence of a God who is not a deceiver, proofs that were to establish once and for all that our understanding is indeed attuned to reality and thus were to secure the cognitive anthropocentrism presupposed by the new science. However, all such proofs are inescapably circular. Either we are already convinced of the understanding's ability to discipline itself so that there is no need for a God to shore up such conviction, or such conviction is lacking, and then no argument can be found that will make up for that lack. Nietzsche not only lacks such conviction and dismisses the truth Descartes would have us pursue as a fiction born of a cowardice that refuses to admit how profoundly we are at sea; more important, he also would not welcome such a truth, although, or perhaps precisely because, he knows about the very real power the Cartesian project has given us over nature, even our own nature. Descartes's promise of mastery was not an idle Ver-sprechen, an empty promise that sacrificed reality for a fantastic fiction. But just this forces us to share Nietzsche's concern about the price that has to be paid for the power gained: the very success of the attempt to secure human existence threatens to allow us to lose touch with the chaos we bear within ourselves, which is the source of our creativity and of our ability to love. Insisting on security, for lack of courage, we deny the labyrinth of Ariadne.

Who is Nietzsche's Ariadne? In keeping with Ariadne's labyrinthine character, different interpretations can be supported: Ariadne as Cosima Wagner; Ariadne as Arachne, the spider woman, the monster in the web of language; Ariadne as Jung's anima. The last interpretation can appeal to the fact that "On the Great Longing," Zarathustra's hymn to his soul, was originally called "Ariadne." Zarathustra there speaks of having freed his soul, of having nourished it, of having made it overfull, readying it for him who, still nameless, awaits the naming of future song, and of having bid his soul sing. Nietzsche's perfect reader should listen to this song beneath the surface of the words, just as the reader of Plato's dialogues should open himself to the unspoken words graven in his soul. Nietzsche, however, has a very different understanding of the soul. "Soul" is for him "only a word for something about the body." Thus, he speaks of the Leitfaden des Leibes, the guiding thread of the body. When Nietzsche calls on us to follow the thread of Ariadne back into the labyrinth, he is calling on us to return to our own corporeal soul, to its silent labyrinthine discourse, which finally supports all we care about and value. Nietzsche bids us descend into this labyrinth, even if such descent threatens destructions, bids us leave the terra firma of what has come to be expected and taken for granted for the open sea, even if such seafaring must end in shipwreck.

In the Inferno, Dante says of Ulysses that neither fondness for his son nor reverence for his father nor love of Penelope could keep him from sailing beyond the landlocked Mediterranean, through the warning markers Hercules had set up so that no man would pass beyond; longing to gain experience of the world, he sailed west with those few companions who had not deserted him, only to be shipwrecked before that dark, monstrous mountain which lies furthest from Jerusalem.

Nietzsche's description of the great health recalls this passage, although we are referred not to Dante's Ulysses but to the Argonauts. Nietzsche, too, describes himself and his companions as craving "to have experienced the whole range of values and desiderata to date," and, having "sailed around all the coasts of this ideal 'Mediterranean,'" still curious, still undeterred by shipwreck and suffering, eager to sail on, dreaming of "an as yet undiscovered country, whose boundaries nobody has surveyed yet, something beyond all the lands and the nooks of the ideal so far, a world overrich in what is beautiful, strange, questionable, terrible, and divine," daring, for the sake of that dream, a shipwreck from which there may be no return.

Nietzsche demands of those who would follow him courage in the face of the constant possibility and final inevitability of shipwreck. Those who evade that possibility, who think themselves secure on firm land of one sort or another and are unwilling to recognize that we are all at sea and that there is no ship not threatened by shipwreck, also have to refuse the abysmal depth of reality, that is to say, have to refuse life.

This has special significance for philosophy. If Nietzsche is right, almost always philosophy has been an evasion of life born of the spirit of revenge. The image of the dying Socrates presides over this evasion—as the image of "the human being whom knowledge and reason have liberated from the fear of death," it is "the emblem that, above the entrance gate of science, reminds all of its mission—namely, to make existence appear comprehensible and thus justified." The spirit of revenge bids us understand being against time, lets us oppose the illusory appearance of being to the sea of changing appearance as a terra firma. It teaches that the soul's true home lies beyond time, that we become most truly ourselves when we transcend ourselves as beings subject to time. This allows Socrates to interpret the true philosopher's death not as a shipwreck but as a homecoming of the self to itself.

Nietzsche, too, would have us come home to our soul, but he understands this homecoming not as an ascent to a timeless realm of pure forms but as a descent into the chaos each individual bears within himself, into his own labyrinth. As there is something inhuman about Socrates' ascent into the light of the forms, so there is something inhuman about Zarathustra's descent into himself: both threaten the destruction of the individual in his being with others. Both Socrates and Zarathustra therefore insist on a compensatory movement that lets the thinker whose pursuit of wisdom leads him beyond all community rejoin those whom he has left behind. In the myth of the cave, Socrates thus has the prisoner who has escaped its darkness return, and similarly Zarathustra must leave the privacy of his cave high upon his mountain—the joining of cave and mountain hints at what joins, but also separates, Zarathustran and Socratic wisdom—and return to those he has left behind in order to become human again. Thus descending, Zarathustra must do violence to his private wisdom, just as his attempts to give voice to this wisdom must do violence to ordinary language. As Zarathustra's going is not only his own Untergang, or "going under," but also a leaping over those who hesitate and lag behind, which is to be their Untergang, so his speaking is not only the Untergang of his own wisdom but also a leaping over of common sense that threatens the shipwreck of all sense.

Consider Zarathustra's teaching of the eternal recurrence. This is not the place to review the many attempts to domesticate that doctrine so that it no longer can offend common sense. Here, I only want to call attention to the explosive power of this forcing together of time and eternity, which represents a refusal to keep reason confined within the limits marked out by Kant's antinomies, warning philosophers not to pass beyond. Hans Blumenberg speaks of a Sprengmetapher, a metaphor that like dynamite explodes inherited sense to open up our saying to an unsayable depth, and points to the role such metaphors have played in the mystical tradition with its via negationis. Particularly suggestive are remarks that invite a comparison of Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal recurrence with Nicolaus Cusanus's rhetoric of the circle whose circumference becomes a straight line as its radius becomes infinite. Just as the fifteenth-century cardinal offers his readers the coincidence of opposites as a gate to God's infinity, so Nietzsche offers his readers the coincidence of time and eternity as a gate to a reality that is deeper than our reason. Intended in both cases is the shipwreck of common sense.

To be sure, Nietzsche links Untergang to Ubergang, "going under" to "going over," passing beyond the old to the new. The metaphor of the seafaring discoverer invites such a reading. But while the word "overman" gestures toward the new land that Nietzsche would have us discover, it names no more than an ill-defined hope that remains in the subjunctive. Nietzsche thus writes only as if he confronted that still undiscovered, overrich country that lures him. He knows that he is in no position to begin surveying its boundaries. He also knows that, like those of Dante's Ulysses, his curiosity and craving will not be sated by any discovery. In the end, what lures him is not so much the promise of a new land as the depth of the sea, the whirlpool that means shipwreck. Like his Zarathustra, Nietzsche wants to go zu Grunde, to perish.

To be sure, zu Grunde gehen in Zarathustra means not just to perish but to descend to the Grund, to the ground of human existence. Once again we are made to think of Plato's Socrates, especially of the Phaedo, whose ars moriendi similarly links perishing and recovery of what is essential. In wanting to return to the Grund, Nietzsche joins all those philosophers who have looked for the ground that would give our existence its measure, even if he looks for this ground not to some Platonic or Christian heaven but to the earth, to nature. Recall Nietzsche's determination of Homo natura as the terrifying ewige Grundtext, the eternal basic text that we have to free from layers of misinterpretation so that it will once again provide our texts, our interpretations of who we are and should be, with a measure. But what right does Nietzsche have to posit such an eternal ground, a ground furthermore that is also said to be a text—a text that has authority precisely because we are not its author? All too readily, Nietzsche's appeal to this Grundtext recalls the traditional understanding of the book of nature written by God. What justifies the thought that, once we remove all the misrepresentations of past thinking, something like a Grund-Text will appear? Is the very word Grundtext not an oxymoron that on reflection plunges us into an abyss. Grund and Text—how do these belong together? Is not a text necessarily a human product, a conjecture that falsely claims the authority of a Grund? Where can we find a Grund to speak to us as a text would, presenting our existence with a measure? When we try to descend beneath the surface created by our discourse, strip reality of our fictions, what remains? Something that deserves to be called a Grundtext? Will we not stare rather into an Abgrund, into an abyss?

There is, to be sure, much in Nietzsche that celebrates superficiality. But Nietzsche is also profoundly impatient with superficiality, especially with the shallowness that has shaped modernity, including its common sense, including especially also the edifices philosophers have raised on that common sense. Against all these, Nietzsche raises his hammer. But such destruction leaves us no place to stand. No longer another Columbus eager to discover a better Europe, another America, Nietzsche now appears as a mad discoverer who, dreaming of a lost continent beneath the waves, begins to break apart the planks of his ship. At this point, one should expect those few sailors who have followed the music of his words to revolt, to stay his hand, to assess the damage that has been done, and, once the ship has been saved, to rethink the goal of the voyage. But perhaps they, too, have become captive to the enchantment of the flutes that lured their captain.

Karsten Harries, "The Philosopher at Sea," in Nietzsche's New Seas: Explorations in Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Politics, edited by Michael Allen Gillespie and Tracy B. Strong, The University of Chicago Press, 1988, pp. 21-44.