Chapter 9 Umwertung: Nietzsche’s ‘War-Praxis’ and the Problem of Yes-Saying and No- Saying in Ecce Homo

Abstract

Ecce Homo is a book of excesses, a book bursting to the point of incoherence. The text is saturated with the hyper-identity of an I inflated to world-historical, not to say cosmic proportions; yet One whose parts, whose claims collide or clash like a jigsaw puzzle that keeps going wrong. A self who is ‘wise’ and ‘healthy’ enough to have ‘always chosen [wählte] the right means’ of defence under bad conditions and the right company (books, people, landscapes) (EH weise 2, KSA 6.266 f.); but also a self who proclaims amor fati, that is: ‘not wanting anything otherwise’ (‘dass man Nichts anders haben will’, EH, klug 10, KSA 6.297) and accordingly ‘stuck to virtually intolerable situations, places, lodgings, company once I had chanced upon them’ (EH weise 6, KSA 6.273). These difficulties are exacerbated by the narrative structure of the book, which invites a continuous reading as the story of a life, yet continually disrupts such a reading with contradictions, discrepancies, incongruities and distortions that make us throw up our arms and exclaim, ‘How absurd!’ How absurd that Nietzsche should claim that the ‘no-saying, no-doing part’ of his task began with JGB (EH (JGB) 1, KSA 6.350). How absurd that he should invoke ‘the greatest of all tasks, the cultivation of higher humanity’ (EH Schicksal 4, KSA 6.313), but also claim that he has no memory of ‘“striving”’ or ‘“struggling”’, that ‘“willing”’ or ‘“wishing”’ anything at all are alien to him (EH klug 9, KSA 6.294 f.). Perhaps the most glaring discrepancies are those between Nietzsche’s self-descriptions in the book and what we know of his actual life. Yet, EH forces us to question the authority of biographical narratives, to recognise that however often the narratives intersect with what we know of Nietzsche’s life, this book is not about Herr Nietzsche: ‘What do we care about Herr Nietzsche?’ (to paraphrase FW Vorrede 2). Rather, we have to do with the construction of a fictional world, or more to the point: with fictional worlds, populated by fictional selves, and narrated from various positions. In this chapter, I will engage the feint of Nietzsche’s writing in EH by concentrating on some of the discrepancies and incongruities that are strictly internal to the book. They concern the term ‘Umwertung’, and the expression ‘Umwertung Aller Werte,’ which, while not unique to EH, do belong to it in a special way. As good Nietzsche scholars, we all think we know what this means. But if we consult EH,