In Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche puts forward a radical thesis concerning philosophy as such. It reveals Nietzsche’s critical conception of philosophy.
[§6] Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir; also that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constituted the real germ of life from which the whole plant had grown.
Nietzsche brings out three aspects of philsophizing, namely, confession, memoir, and moral/immoral intention.
This is a critique of philosophy; it’s technique involves a kind of Socratic questioning: what is confessed and what remembered and the intentions. So not only does it matter what is said, whether it is true, but rather who said it, when and where and why.
In this sort of criticism of the philosopher what is laid bear is the constitutive conditions, the presuppositions, the assumptions, the motiviations, and the deap-seated inclination(s) to theorizing.
As a result it’s been claimed: philosophy begins with a confession (Wittgenstein).
Indeed, if one would explain how the abstrusest metaphysical claims of a philosopher really came about, it is always well (and wise) to ask first: at what morality does all this (does he) aim? Accordingly, I do not believe that a “drive to knowledge” is the father of philosophy; but rather that another drive has, here as elsewhere, employed understanding (and misunderstanding) as a mere instrument….
Here the criticism is that sense in which philosophies are instrumentalist. Perhaps, a means to an end? That end justifies the means? As opposed to an end-in-itself.
So the critical question is concerning the reversal of the is/ought relationship. Does the metaphysical lead to the moral? What’s the moral of the metaphysics? Is the metaphysical morally motivated? The fallacy is that is doesn’t necessarily follow ought.
Additionally, here its a perspectival hermeneutics (or genealogy) that takes philosophy to task! The problems of philosophy are over understanding and misunderstanding: understanding the understanding.
In the philosopher [by contrast with the scientist] there is nothing whatsoever that is impersonal….
Hence, put another way, Nietzsche’s thesis: philosophy is totally personal.
Is not the history of philosophy but a multiplicity of personalities, of interpretations, of understandings of the world, and so a multiplicity of worlds?
[§43] ...”My judgment is my judgment”: no one else is easily entitled to it –that is what such a philosopher of the future may perhaps say of himself.
So what’s Nietzsche getting at?
The philosopher of the future looks back at the past. It is seen that:
There is a who behind the Theory of Forms. There’s a why to the Theory of Types. There’s a where and when to the Picture Theory of Propositions.
All but interpretation(s)! Judgment(s) all the way down.
The philosopher of the future owns it. This philosopher’s philosophizing bends back on itself. It’s hypercritical. Socratic. Always already reflexive. Even self-absorbed.
Therefore, the who, where and when, and why lay bear the what.
[§187] Even apart from the value of such claims as “there is a categorical imperative in us,” one can still always ask: what does such a claim tell us about the man who makes it?
But this is not a psychotherapy of the philosopher (although there is an analogy of therapy). Niether anthropology, nor mere history. Perhaps, a sort of diagnosis?
It’s deeper. It’s confessinal. It’s biography.
At once literary. Non-theoretical and yet theoretical? Fictional in contrast to non-fictional? Interpretation(s)?
The fictional is the background to the non-fictional. The foreground is based in the fantastic.
Above all critical. [Clue: Think metakritik]
In so questioning the person of the philosopher, the critique comes full circle. What is seen, what can be appraised, appreciated, or criticized, condemned, is the persona, the style, the idiosyncratic.
It’s a dirty sort of philosophizing that hits below-the-belt. The logical fallacy is it’s ruthless slogan:
ad hominem. Attack the person!
The goal is to force the confession, e.g. Augustine, Tolstoy, Rousseau, esp. Wittgenstein’s confession and Derrida’s circumfession. And thus to change oneself.
The question marks are put forward endlessly. Everywhere! Everyone! Everything! Nothing must remain unquestioned! Even that!
Interrogate!
Again, put another way, Nietzsche’s thesis is nonetheless radical:
To philosophize is always already autobiographical.
fragments of philosophy 